Category: butler

butler desire recognition

The norms by which I seek to make myself recognizable are not fully mine (35).

To revise recognition as an ethical project, we will need to see it as, in principle, unsatisfiable (43).

🙂 Butler maintains that going back to some of her earliest debates over the perils of seeking to come establish common principles on the identity of political subjects in order to engage in political action.  At that time Butler discouraged attempts to discipline the feminist subject around a core set of features.  But the debate has matured greatly since those early days.  Now the political salience of fluid identities has been displaced by Butler who rejects the ontological moorings that would even lay claim to any claim of an ‘identity’ as an ontology of ‘identity’ is rejected.  For Butler, it isn’t that identities are bad, or not useful, of course we have identities to a certain degree to function every day, however, in the realm of politics, of being addressed, of having to give an account in various state and other social institutional frames, immigration hearing, marriage ceremony, citizenship hearing, child adoption, job application, and other social arrangements and institutional settings that require one to give an account and stand in judgement of that account.  Butler’s ethico-political project is to overturn and open up the the normative frames within which these institution function.  The formation of the subject relies on a social ontology and for Butler this means that she underscores the importance of relations that humans depend upon in order for a human life to flourish.  Relations with primary caregivers at the start of life, relations with other sentient life forms and the environment, all figure in to Butler’s project of a non-anthropocentric conception of the human

even a non-anthropocentric philosophical anthropology. The other way of saying this is that wherever the human is, it is always outside of itself in the non-human, or it is always distributed among beings, among human and non-human beings, chiasmically related through the idea of precarious life. So we can neither lodge the human in the self, nor ground the self in the human, but find instead the relations of exposure and responsibility that constitute the “being” of the human in a sociality outside itself, even outside its human-ness. (interview in 2009 Theory and Event)

… desire sets the limits and the conditions for the operation of recognition itself. Indeed, a certain desire to persist, we might say, following Spinoza, underwrites recognition, so that forms of recognition or, indeed, forms of judgment that seek to relinquish or destroy the desire to persist, the desire for life itself, undercut the very preconditions of recognition (44).

This failure to narrate fully may well indicate the way in which we are, from the start, ethically implicated in the lives of others. Although some would say that to be a split subject, or a subject whose access to itself is forever opaque, incapable of self-grounding, is precisely not to have the grounds for agency and the conditions for accountability, the way in which we are, from the start, interrupted by alterity may render us incapable of offering narrative closure for our lives.  The purpose here is not to celebrate a certain notion of incoherence, but only to point out that our “incoherence” establishes the way in which we are constituted in relationality: implicated, beholden, derived, sustaind by a social world that is beyond us and before us (64).

butler post-hegelian

Butler, Judith. Giving An Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham UP, 2005.  Print.

On Recognition: Hegel says I see you, you see me, we’re the same, you and me, looking at each other. For Hegel, the other is at first outside itself, before the subject realizes that “hey, this other is actually alot like me.”  In fact this other is constitutive of the subject.  Some say this makes Hegel into an imperialist, going around appropriating the other as part of the subject itself.  However, others, like Butler, see in Hegel, a more ecstatic subject:

the “I” repeatedly finds itself outside itself, and that nothing can put an end to the repeated upsurge of this exteriority that is, paradoxically, my own. I am, as it were, always other to myself, and there is no final moment in which my return to myself takes place. In fact, if we are to follow The Phenomenology of Spirit, I am invariably transformed by the encounters I undergo; recognition becomes the process by which I become other than what I was and so cease to be able to return to what I was.  There is, then, a constitutive loss in the process of recognition, since the “I” is transformed through the act of recognition. Not all of its past is gathered and known in the act of recognition; the act alters the organization of that past and its meaning at the same time that it transforms the present of the one who receives recognition.  Recognition is an act in which the “return to self” becomes impossible for another reason as well. An encounter with an other effects a transformation of the self from which there is no return. What is recognized about a self in the course of the exchange is that the self is the sort of being for whom staying inside itself proves impossible. One is compelled and comported outside oneself; one finds that the only way to know oneself is through a mediation that takes place outside of oneself, exterior to oneself, by virtue of a convention or a norm that one did not make, in which one cannot discern oneself as an author or an agent of one’s own making.  In this sense, then, the Hegelian subject of recognition is one for whom a vacillation between loss and ecstasy is inevitable.  The possibility of the “I,” of speaking and knowing the “I,” resides in a perspective that dislocates the first-person perspective it conditions (27-28).

rothenberg butler foreclosure

Again Rothenberg casts Butler’s theory as promoting a subject that is intentional, volitional and when this subject speaks, is transparent, perhaps even self-identical.  In other words, R. is criticizing Butler that in Butler’s haste to show how agency happens, especially the agency of the excluded, the marginalized, she theorizes a liberal rational actor.

… arguing that the political act of appropriating the “unspeakable” can lead to the political inclusion of dispossessed or marginalized people. Here she explicitly proposes that the subject can access the realm excluded by foreclosure by “speaking impossibly” or by “redrawing the distinction” … From her perspective, the politically motivated subject has to take the “risk” of accessing this realm, even at the cost of being seen as something other than a subject (109).

Butler’s argument is nothing less than the claim that the subject can transform the very conditions of (its own and others’) subject formation through special speech acts that control their own reception.  What has been excluded can be included …(109)

rothenberg butler abject

Having accepted the reasonable proposition that subjects are formed through language, she makes her theoretical missteps when she tries to figure out how to confer power on marginalized subjects by imagining that they can control the surplus attending all utterances … relying continually on a belief that somehow, the excess attending signification can be eradicated.  In this persistent gesture, Butler reveals that she does not understand the subject as itself a site of excess (107).

🙂 R.’s argument is thus: Butler like Foucault, claims that power is productive and produces resistance, but Butler is aware that Foucault theory of power doesn’t leave enough for the subject, that it is too productive in fact, that discourse only produces positivity and hence no room for contingency, as R. quotes Butler, “any effort of discursive interpellation or constitution is subject to failure, haunted by contingency, to the extent that discourse invariably fails to totalize the social field (Bodies That Matter 191-192)” (108).  Rothenberg likes this last quote very much.   For a brief shining moment, both seem to be on the same page.  That is until …

Butler uses psychoanalysis to pry open Foucaultian immanence.  As R. points out, for Butler, psychoanalysis is too ahistorical, “a charge she bases on her belief that psychoanalysis presents castration as a universal form of lack (Bodies That Matter 202 quoted in R).  So, in order to benefit from the psychoanalytic model of subjectification, she proposes in Excitable Speech that subjects are formed by the installation of a lack that can be historicized.  … She conceives of this lack …. in terms of exclusion, an exclusion that produces a realm of “unspeakability” as the condition of the emergence and sustenance of the subject proper, but the “contents” of which are determined historically” (108).  Oh oh.

🙂 Rothenberg pounces on this last gesture by Butler.  Remember, the title of R’s book is The Excessive Subject.  My point being that R. doesn’t have much time for a theory that presents subject formation in terms of lack.

rothenberg why speech acts exceed speaker’s intentions

Rothenberg speaks:

… speech acts exceed the intentions of the speaker because other people interpret them according to their own lights in ways that are not predictable or governable in advance (106).

Now here R. tells us that because Butler does not understand the concept of “excess” she doesn’t have in her theory of meaning, space for discussion of the social dimension.  Here is how R. explains it:

In essence, by failing to recognize the true status of the “excess” in signification, Butler elides the very dimension of meaning which any theory with political ambitions must engage —the social dimension.  That is, in her efforts to eliminate excess, Butler throws out any conception of the social field as a product of signification and responsiveness to the Möbius condition of the subject.  In effect, she leaves herself with no theory of the social whatsoever (106).

Butler employs iterability to acknowledge the limits to intentionality, but she mislocates these limits, finding them not in the audience’s reception but rather in the body, which she misdescribes as being capable of its own sovereign speech … In this way, she can use iterability to argue for the re-appropriation of a speech act, as we have seen, in a  “repetition that forces change,” as though the person appropriating the speech —thanks to iterability— has the capacity to close off her auditor’s ability to make that speech meaningful according to his own lights and as though the audience can somehow be prevented from making use of iterability …

In order for the repetition to force change, that is, in order for iterability to cease to operate, speaker and auditor must either have the same mind already, or the one must be capable of dominanting the other’s mental processes in some mysterious way.  (Butler) covertly relies on this invariance between the speaker’s intentions and the audience’s construals for the performative force she needs in her account of political agency. The perfect match between intender and auditor disposes of any excess and with it the social dimension of language.

rothenberg butler embodied performative

The embodied political performative

R. argues that Butler is giving intentionality to the body, that is, the body knows what it is the speaker intends, while the speaker herself may be unawares.  Butler thus according to R. “reinstates intentionality at the level of the body” (104).

There is a tug of war over Shoshana Felman’s psychoanalytical interpretation of the body and intentionality.  R. fully endorses this idea that “speech is not fully governed by intentions,” but R. remains vexed that Butler reads in Felman support for her idea of “the picture of the body as expressing its own intentions in a readily available way” (104).

“… the body (for Butler) ceases to stand for the exceeding or disrupting of intentionalized meaning, as Felman theorizes, to serve instead (for Butler) as the vehicle and guarantor of intentionality.”

Just as importantly, Butler’s “excess” is not Felman’s. For Felman (and psychoanalysts), every signification (whether in articulated speech, written text, or bodily gesture) produces and leans on an excess inherent to signification itself, an excess that makes it impossible for the subject’s intentions to govern the reader’s interpretation. Yet for Butler, the failure of intentionalized meaning only applies to spoken articulations, while the body escapes that stricture.  If in her model the body is outside or “excessive” to speech, still its intentionalized meanings have no excessive dimension, for they are readable and recoverable. In Felman, excess is irreducible; in Butler, it is not (105).

rothenberg on butler iterablity linguistic performative

Rothenberg, Molly Anne. The Excessive Subject. Cambridge UK: Polity Press, 2010.  Print.

The theretical import of iterability precludes precisely the type of politics for which Butler has become famous. (100)

R. runs Judith Butler up against Joan Copjec.  R argues that Butler has slid back to a Foucaultian “immanentist position on the reduction of subjects to their determinants.” (94)  Butler adds a Althusserian interpellative twist to the proceedings, and by interpellation R. understands the subject qua subject to be product of “internalized discourse.”

She argues that Butler’s theory of subject formation revolves around the censorship of speech, that the subject comes to be through “implict and explicit norms” that govern the speech of a subject.

But R. points out, this notion directly contradicts Foucault’s concerns about the repressive hypothesis, “which abjures such a notion of the constitutive role of repression.

So, even as she (Butler) is invoking Foucault in her reference to his model of power and to his notion of the discursive constitution of subjects, she is importing a non-Foucaultian — and equally non-psychoanalytic element — into her theory, that is, the constitution of subjects by way of exclusion. (94)

R. lauds the fact that Butler recognizes the theoretical importance of the “disjuncture between utterance and meaning.”  But the crucial dig occurs when R. argues that Butler correctly identifies the fantasy working in the belief that the speaker’s intention can be realized “univocally in the effect on the addressee.  This relies on a phantasy of sovereign action … one that immediately does what it says”.  But even having made this criticism about a sovereign speaker, “Butler goes on to garner support for this very “phantasy” in her own theory of subject formation (97).

R. cites as an example Butler’s argument for the resignificatory possibilities of the term “queer.”  But R. isn’t buying this, and catches B. in a bind.  “… Butler treats this “resignification” as though it can have predictable effects, re-describing the contingent contextual appropriation of the spech act as if it had all the intentionalist force of an illocutionary act, a move which is strictly precluded by the theory of iterability.”

“… iterability ceases to operate in the special case of performers who intend to appropriate the speech act for subversive purposes.  Significantly, Butler reserves the power of such insurrectionary speech for those who have been the objects of injurious speech, the marginalized or abjected …”

“What Butler fails to respect in these formulations is that all signification is iterable, working by simultaneously and unpredictably repeating and breaking with prior contexts. Iterability (as she sometimes acknowledges in her more tempered moments) does not confer on the speaker the sovereign power of opening or closing contexts, legitimating or de-legitimating meanings” (99).

And finally, R. cites Butler’s use of the ‘agency’ of Rosa Parks.  “For all her temperate reasoning about the impossibility of governing speech, then, Butler repeatedly returns to the more politically useful, if less theoretically valid, formulation of special performative agency.” (99)

OK enough, R. makes a strong case for viewing Butler’s appropriation of Austin-Derridean iterability as caught in contradictions.

rothenberg subject* is not about lack but excess

Rothenberg’s subject of excess is about EXCESS, “We are accustomed to hearing a great deal about the “subject of lack” in contemporary theory, yet the argument I have been exploring suggests that the subject of lack should be understood as a subject of excess, that is, as a subject to which excess ineradicably adheres.

The fact that one has become meaningful to others —i.e. been registered in the Symbolic— does not mean that one actually knows what one means to others (43).

You have only two choices: either subjectivity with loss of immediacy, or non-subjecthood.  Again, the loss of immediacy does not result in a lack: it generates an excess, an excess of meaningfulness that is not in the control of the subject (44).

rothenberg extimate cause

The { } empty set persists after it is added to the thing to become the object, but there is a minimal difference that adheres to the object, otherwise without this “minimal self-difference” it would just be a being-object.

The minimal difference — the empty set — persists after the object is precipitated from the thing. It persists as the object’s minimal difference from itself … In effect, the object is generated from the conjunction of being and minimal difference or being and the addition of a negation. (35)

Ok, once the object “is precipitated from the thing” it contains this minimal difference, and this minimal difference can also be called the “addition of a negation” or as we’ve seen the empty set {}

Now in order to get our heads around extimate causality, we have to keep in mind these two important functions of the { } empty set: as a cut necessary “to bring an object into our world from sheer being” acts as the external cause and as the minimal difference “that makes an object non-self-coincident (and therefore not a sheer “being-thing”) adheres to the object as an internal cause. Taken together, (as they must be, because they are the same function), they form the extimate cause” (36)

I have to quote at length again here, because there’s just no way around this explanation that R provides: “The extimate cause functioning by way of the specific mechanism of the formal negation, engenders a structured field or system (with its concomitant objects, properties, and relationships) out of what would otherwise be a state of undifferentiation or monadic unrelatedness.”  This is back to her dimly lit garage example.  So the formal negation is responsible for engendering a system of objects out of sheer being.

“At the same time, it inevitably gives rise to an element of nondeterminacy, surplus, or excess. Speaking in terms of the social arena, we could put it this way: the operation that bestows identities, properties, and relationships also leaves a residue, so that every subject bears some excess. At every point in the social field, then, an irreducible excess attends social relations. In fact, although it seems paradoxical, this excess is what makes the social field itself possible and makes its structure potentially analyzable (36).

Is this what other poststructuralist thinkers allude to as the slippage of signified under signifier, that signifiers refer to other signifiers and not to some constant empirical object etc?  Does R. mean by this “excess” simply the poststructuralist “surplus” of meaning, or of Laclau’s surplus that allows for the hegemonic struggles, of the surplus that Butler alludes to in her work?  Interestingly in her most difficult chapters, R. addresses this issue head on, by locating in Butler and Laclau specifically, their notion of surplus and the ways in which they seek to tame it.

rothenberg molly anne

Molly Anne Rothenberg’s book Excessive Subjects is the book Žižek always wanted to write but can’t, either because he is unable to grasp what he continually was circling around, which Rothenberg saw and rectified in her book, or Žižek can’t bring himself to criticize Butler in the devastating manner with which Rothenberg accomplishes this task. The chapter on Butler is a devastating critique of what Rothenberg views as Butler’s totally mistaken, misunderstanding and gross misuse of psychoanalytic theory. Rothenberg’s pseudo-Lacanian approach in this book argues that what is key in subject formation is the notion of ‘excess’ or the ‘addition of negation’. Things start to really happen around page 30 when Rothenberg adeptly interprets Badiou using the analogy of a dimly lit garage. You have to read this part a couple of times it’s fascinating, but once the distinction between being and objects is understood, then you are only a hop, skip, jump away from understanding Rothenberg’s general thesis. I have just read the chapter on Butler, and I feel that although Rothenberg makes some good points, she nevertheless limits her treatment of Butler to one work, Excitable Speech (which is my least favourite work btw). In this work, Butler is still agonizingly trying to articulate a conception of agency that is, I feel, better laid out in The Psychic Life of Power. Rothenberg’s two critical points being centred on a criticism of Butler’s interpretation of Austin’s speech act theory and what is quickly becoming the achilles heel of Butler’s theory of agency, her interpretation of psychoanalytic theory. Rothenberg’s criticism of Butler’s take on Lacan is unrelenting. The rumblings began a few years ago regarding Butler’s uptake of the term “foreclosure” and it hits a crescendo pitch in Rothenberg’s chapter. However Butler could really take issue with Rothernberg’s curt dismissal of Butler regarding that latter’s take on Foucault. I believe Butler is a more complex Foucaultian, and as she argues in The Psychic Life of Power her understanding and use of Foucault is complex and attentive to the shortcomings of his theory of agency. I am eager to get into the chapter on Laclau.

Note: the binding job on this book by Polity Press is horrible. This book is falling apart after only 2 days of very polite and gentle handling. Buyer beware!

rothenberg molly excessive subjects

I am reading a book that is interfering with my work on Butler, however it doesn’t seem too tangential. It’s by Molly Anne Rothenberg, Excessive Subjects.  It’s a re-thinking of social theory from the perspective of a retelling of the Žižekian tale only this time exposing the critical Lacanian insights in more detail, and talking way slower than Žižek.  Plus Rothenberg includes some nice chapters on Butler and Laclau, so I’m dying to read the rest of the book.

butler new preface to paperback edition of subjects of desire (1987) August 1998

In a sense all my work remains within the oribit of a certain set of Hegelian questions:

What is the relation between desire and recognition and how is it that the constitution of the subject entails a radical and constitutive relation to alterity?

… I am as much concerned with the way in which Antigone is consistently misread by Hegel as with his provocative way of understanding her criminal act as an eruption of an alternate legality within the sphere of public law.  Whether Antigone functions as a subject for Hegel remains a compelling question for me, and raises the question of the political limit of the subject, that is, both the limitations imposed upon subjecthood (who qualifies as one), and the limits of the subject as the point of departure for politics.  Hegel remains important here for his subject does not stay in its place displaying a critical mobility that may well be useful for further appropriations of Hegel to come.  The emergent subject of Hegel’s phenomenology is an ek-static one, a subject who constantly finds itself outside itself, and whose periodic expropriations do not lead to a return to a former self. Indeed, the self who comes outside of itself, for whom ek-statis is a condition of existence, is one for whom no return to self is possible, for whom there is no final recovery from self-loss. The notion of “difference” is similarly misunderstood, I would suggest, when it is understood as contained within or by the subject: the Hegelian subject’s encounter with difference is not resolved into identity.  Rather, the moment of its “resolutions” is finally indistinguishable from the moment of its dispersion; the thinking of this cross-vectored temporality ushers in the Hegelian understanding of infinity and offers a notion of the subject that cannot remain bounded in the face of the world. Misrecognition does not arrive as a distinctively Lacanian corrective to the Hegelian subject, for it is precisely by misrecognition that the Hegelian subject repeatedly suffers its self-loss.  Indeed, this is a self constitutively at risk of self-loss.  This subject neither has nor suffers its desire, but is the very action of desire as it perpetually displaces the subject. Thus, it is neither precisely a new theory of the subject nor a definitive displacement of the subject that Hegel provides but rather a definition in displacement, for which there is no final restoration. August 1998