Category: butler

stephen white desire our own submission

White, Stephen K. Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 2000.

Why does desire cooperate with its own submission?

Butler’s answer rests on her postulation of a “desire to be” or “to persist” that characterizes human beings. This is not a desire for mere physical survival or to align with some metaphysical essence; it is rather the desire for social existence, linguistic survival.  Moreover, this desire has as its “final aim” not some particular model of existence, but rather merely “the continuation of itself”; it is thus “a desire to desire.”

And this desire will cooperate with the prohibition of any particular desire that endangers its continued access to the terms of social existence … “the desire to desire is a willingness to desire precisely that which would foreclose desire, if only for the possibility of continuing to desire.”

One attaches to what is painful rather than not attach at all (86).

“If desire has as its final aim the continuation of itself — and here one might link Hegel, Freud, and Foucault all back to Spinoza’s conatus— then the capacity of desire to be withdrawn and to reattach will constitute something like the vulnerability of every strategy of subjection. (Butler Psychic 55, 60-62, 101. Cited in White 87).

Teradacto: White breaks down Butler’s theory of subject into 3 components or “ontological forces”:  1. power, 2. materialization, 3. the desire to desire.

Within such an  ontology, critical agency emerges not with the possibility of escaping from the turning, but rather with the possibility of continuing that turning in a somewhat different way, a way in which one redirects how the three forces continue to press upon and partially constitute one another.

lloyd on butler psychic subjectivity

loyd, Moya. “Towards a cultural politics of vulnerability” Judith Butler’s Precarious Politics. eds. Terrell Carver and Samuel Chambers, New York: Routledge, 2008.

Butler’s articulation of a pychoanalytically informed theory of subjectivity. There are 3 elements to this theory.

1. But begins by considering primary human dependency. Her argument is very simple: in infancy all subjects develop a ‘passionate attachment’ to those on whom they depend for life: If ‘the child is to persist in a psychic and social sense’, Butler notes, “there must be dependency and the formation of attachment: there is no possibility of not loving, where love is bound up with the requirements for life’ (Butler Psychic 8). Out of a ‘desire to survive’ subjects are perpetually willing to submit to their own subordination.

2. She highlights the role of foreclosure in the formation of the subject, specifically the foreclosure of certain kinds of passionate attachment or ‘impossible’ loves. ‘If the subject is produced through foreclosure’, she notes, ‘then the subject is produced by a condition from which it is, by definition, separated and differentiated’. Far from being an autonomous subject, the psychic subject is thus a dependent subject, a subject that is produced in subordination and whose continued subordination is essential to its continued existence. While primary attachments are essential to the survival of the child, if the subject is to emerge fully then they must ultimately be disavowed. [Primary attachments are attachments that the subject ‘can never afford fully to see’] That is, the subject must disavow its dependency on the Other in order to become a subject (even though the impossible loves that it disavows continue to haunt it, threatening it with its own unravelling). And so, some aspects of who we ‘are’ are pre-conscious: they are both unknown and unknowable to us.

3. Finally Butler returns to the topic of melancholia. Here, here given her concern with the formation of conscience and guilt she deploys the idea to demonstrate how the subject’s capacity for reflexivity is an effect of the foreclosure and installation of the other within its ego (Lloyd, Norms 98)

It is at this point in her argument that Butler sets out to reveal just exactly how power impinges on psychic formation. Where Freudian theory focuses on the psychic, Foucauldian theory concentrates on the social or political, Butler’s aim is to weave the two together.

She wants to challenge the idea that the unconscious is unaffected by the power relations that structure society. Her goal is thus to advance a ‘critical account of psychic subjection in terms of the regulatory and productive effects of power.’ (psychic 19)

Butler has already shown in Gender Trouble and elsewhere how the subject depends ofr its existence on the operations of particular regulatory norms. Here interest in Psychic Life is to demonstrate how the subject internalizes these norms. This is where melancholia fits.

Melancholia is the way that the internal world of the psyche is produced; it determines both its interiority and exteriority and the boundary between social and psychic. According to Butler, it operates in this way because the psychic sphere is, in fact, organized according to the prevailing ‘norms of social regulation.’ (psychic 171, Lloyd Norms 100). Because it is configured by social norm, the topography of the psyche is, thus, configured according to the operations of power. (Lloyd Norms 100)

colebrook on subject

Colebrook, Claire. “Feminism and Autonomy: The Crisis of the Self-Authoring Subject.” Body and Society, 1997. Vol. 3(2): 21-41.

While the failure of autonomy in Romanticism took many forms, the short-circuiting of Enlightenment self-legitimation was always marked by the return of a repressed exteriority; the intrusion of Nature, others, the past, memory, spirit, divinity or embodiment all represented the subject’s inability to exhaustively account for its own being. … Freud’s theory of the death drive, in which all difference is overcome in a return to a state of quiescence, can be read as the epitome of this strain in Romanticism, in whch the desire to overcome all exteriority or otherness results in the self’s extinction. … Against this Romantic desire for self-authorship (and its lamented failure), Shelley’s novel, and the later interventions of Emannuel Levinas and Luce Irigaray, argue that it is separation, belatedness and facticity of one’s being which constitute ethics (23).

Autonomy in Kant

Because the finate self can only experience the phenomenal, or apparent, world there can be no experiencable ground for ethics.

Reason cannot know any foundation which lies outside its phenomenal finitude. The attempt to posit such a foundation (such as the Platonic Idea of the good) can only lead reason astray, for such a foundation could, in essence, never be known by experience. … Reason can only know that which is given to experience, and experience offers not ethical laws. … reson cannot provide any normative or concrete ethical goals … Reason is regulative.

Deleuze and Irigaray

What Irigaray’s reading of the philosophical tradition reveals is that the ideal of rational autonomy is not a general metaphysical premise but the way of being a specifically embodied subject.

JB LSE talk

Butler, Judith. “Sexual politics, torture and secular time.” The British Journal of Sociology 2008 Volume 59 Issue 1

Thesis: hegemonic conceptions of progress define themselves over and against a premodern temporality that they produce for the purposes of their own self-legitimation.

Who has arrived in modernity and who has not?

[V]ery often claims to new or radical sexual freedoms are appropriated precisely by that point of view – usually enunciated from within state power – that would try to define Europe and the sphere of modernity as the privileged site where sexual radicalism can and does take place. Often, but not always, the further claim is made that such a privileged site of radical freedom must be protected against the putative orthodoxies associated with new immigrant communities.

The presumption is that if a child has no father, that child will not come to understand masculinity in the culture, and, if it is a boy child, that child will have no way to embody or incorporate his own masculinity. This argument assumes many things, but chief among them is the idea that the institution of fatherhood is the sole or major cultural instrument for the reproduction of masculinity. Even if we were to accept the problematic normative claim that a boy child ought to be reproducing masculinity (and there are very good reasons to question this assumption), any child has access to a range of masculinities that are embodied and transmitted through a variety of cultural means. The ‘adult world’, as Jean Laplanche puts it in an effort to formulate a psychoanalytic alternative to the Oedipal triad, impresses its cultural markers on the child from any number of directions, and the child, whether boy or girl, must fathom and reckon with those norms.

This link between freedom and temporal progress is often what is being indexed when pundits and public policy representatives refer to concepts like modernity or, indeed, secularism. … that a certain conception of freedom is invoked precisely as a rationale and instrument for certain practices of coercion, and this places those of us who have conventionally understood ourselves as advocating a progressive sexual politics in a rather serious bind

… certain ideas of the progress of ‘freedom’ facilitate a political division between progressive sexual politics and the struggle against racism and the discrimination against religious minorities. … a certain version and deployment of ‘freedom’ can be used as an instrument of bigotry and coercion. This happens most frightfully when women’s sexual freedom or the freedom of expression and association for lesbian and gay people is invoked instrumentally to wage cultural assaults on Islam that reaffirm US sovereign violence (3).

In the Netherlands, for instance, new applicants for immigration are asked to look at photos of two men kissing, and asked to report whether those photos are offensive, whether they are understood to express personal liberties, and whether the viewers are willing to live in a democracy that values the rights of gay people to open and free expression. Those who are in favour of the new policy claim that acceptance of homosexuality is the same as embracing modernity.

We can see in such an instance how modernity is being defined as sexual freedom, and the particular sexual freedom of gay people is understood to exemplify a culturally advanced position as opposed to one that would be deemed pre-modern. (3)

Of course, I am in favour of such freedoms, but it seems that I must also ask whether such freedoms for which I have struggled, and continue to struggle, are being instrumentalized to establish a specific cultural grounding, secular in a particular sense, that functions as a prerequisite for admission into the polity as an acceptable immigrant. In what follows, I will hope to elaborate further what this cultural grounding is, how it functions as both transcendental condition and teleological aim, and how it complicates any firm distinctions we might have between the secular and the religious. In this instance, a set of cultural norms are being articulated that are considered preconditions of citizenship. We might accept the view that there are always such norms, and even accept that full civic and cultural participation for anyone, regardless of gender or sexual orientation, be included among such norms. But are such norms not only articulated differentially, but also instrumentally, in order to shore up particular religious and cultural preconditions that affect other sorts of exclusions? One is not free to reject this cultural grounding since it is the basis, even the presumptive prerequisite, of the operative notion of freedom, and freedom is articulated through a set of graphic images, figures that come to stand for what freedom can and must be.

And so a certain paradox ensues in which the coerced adoption of certain cultural norms becomes a requisite for entry into a polity that defines itself as the avatar of freedom.

the question raised is: does the exam become the means for testing tolerance or does it carry out an assault against religious minorities, part of a broader effort on the part of the state to demand coercively that they rid themselves of their traditional religious beliefs and practices in order to gain entry into the Netherlands? Is this a liberal defense of my freedom for which I should be pleased, or is my ‘freedom’ freedom, or is my freedom being used as an instrument of coercion, one that seeks to keep Europe white, pure, and ‘secular’ in ways that do not interrogate the violence that underwrites that very project?

Certainly, I want to be able to kiss in public – don’t get me wrong. But do I want to require that everyone watch and approve before they acquire rights of citizenship? I think not (5).

Within this framework the freedom of personal expression, broadly construed, relies upon the suppression of a mobile and contestatory understanding of cultural difference, and that the issue makes clear how state violence invests in cultural homogeneity as it applies its exclusionary policies to rationalize state policies towards Islamic immigrants.

It makes sense to trace the discursive uses of modernity – which is something other than supplying a theory. In this regard, it seems to function neither as a signifier of cultural multiplicity nor of normative schemes that are dynamically or critically in flux, and certainly not as a model of cultural contact, translation, convergence or divergence. To the extent that both artistic expression and sexual freedom are understood as ultimate signs of this developmental version of modernity, and are conceived as rights that are supported by a particular formation of secularism, we are asked to disarticulate struggles for sexual freedom from struggles against racism and anti-Islamic sentiment. There is presumably no solidarity among such efforts within a framework such as the one I have just outlined, though we could, of course, point to existing coalitions that defy this logic. Indeed, according to this view, the struggles for sexual expression depend upon the restriction and foreclosure of rights of religious expression (if we are to stay within the liberal framework), and so we can see something of an antinomy within the discourse of liberal rights itself. But it seems to me that something more fundamental is occurring, namely, that:

liberal freedoms are understood to rely upon a hegemonic culture, one that is called ‘modernity’ and relies on a certain progressive account of increasing freedoms.This uncritical domain of ‘culture’ that functions as a precondition for liberal freedom in turn becomes the cultural basis for sanctioning forms of cultural and religious hatred and abjection.

My point is not to trade sexual freedoms for religious ones, but, rather, to question the framework that assumes that there can be no political analysis that tries to analyse homophobia and racism in ways that move beyond this antinomy of liberalism.  At stake is whether or not there can be a convergence or alliance between such struggles or whether the struggle against homophobia must contradict the struggle against cultural and religious racisms. If that framework of mutual exclusion holds – one that is derived, I would suggest, from a restrictive idea of personal liberty that is bound up with a restrictive conception of progress – then it would appear that there are no points of cultural contact between sexual progressives and religious minorities that are not encounters of violence and exclusion. But if, in the place of a liberal conception of personal freedom, we focus on the critique of state violence and the elaboration of its coercive mechanisms, we may well arrive at an alternative political framework, one that implies not only another sense of modernity, but also of the time, the ‘now’, in which we live. (5-6)

But in France, as you may know, the notion of a ‘framework of orientation’ – called ‘le repère’ – is understood to be uniquely transmitted by the father. And this symbolic function is ostensibly threatened or even destroyed by the presence of two fathers, of an intermittent father, or of no father at all. One has to struggle not to get lured into this fight on these terms, since the fight misconstrues the issue at stake. But if one were to get lured into the fight, one could, of course, make the rejoinder that masculinity can certainly be embodied and communicated by a parent of another gender. However, if I argue that way, I concede the premise that the parent is and must be the unique cultural site for the communication and reproduction of gender, and that would be a foolish point to concede. After all, why accept the idea that without a single embodied referent for masculinity, there can be no cultural orientation as such? Such a position makes the singular masculinity of the father into the transcendental condition of culture rather than rethinks masculinity and fatherhood as a set of disarticulated, variable and variably significant cultural practices. To understand this debate, it is important to remember that lines of patrilineality in France are secured in the civil code through rights of filiation. To the extent that heterosexual marriage maintains its monopoly on reproduction, it does so precisely through privileging the biological father as the representative of national culture.5

Thus, the debates on sexual politics invariably become bound up with the politics of new immigrant communities, since both rely on foundational ideas of culture that precondition the allocation of basic legal entitlements. If we understand these ideas of culture as secular, then it seems to me that we may well not have a sufficient vocabulary for understanding the traditions from which these ideas of culture are formed – and by which they continue to be informed – or for the force by which they are maintained. It here becomes clear that the theories of psychological development that produce the patrilineal conditions of national culture constitute the ‘norms of adulthood’ that precondition the substantive rights of citizenship. Thus, Ségolène Royal, the 2006 Socialist party presidential nominee of France, can join Nicolas Sarkozy, the successful candidate, in arguing that les émeutes, the 2005 riots, in the banlieue were the direct consequence of a deterioration in family structures, represented by new immigrant communities.6

Thus, we might conclude that at a basic level, the entitlement to a notion of freedom that is based on contract is limited by those freedoms that might extend the contract too far, that is, to the point of disrupting the cultural preconditions of contract itself. In other words, disruptions in family formation or in kinship arrangements that do not support the lines of patrilineality and the corollary norms of citizenship rationalize state prohibitions and regulations that augment state power in the image of the father, that missing adult, that cultural fetish which signifies a maturity that is based upon violence.

new immigrant communities lack a strong paternal figure, and that full rights of citizenship require subjection to an embodiment of paternal law. For some French politicians, this analysis leads to the conclusion that the state must enter into the regulation of the family where it is perceived that strong fathers do not exist.

The debate on whether girls should be prohibited from wearing the veil in public schools seemed to bring this paradox into relief. The ideas of the secular were invoked to consolidate ignorant and hateful views of Islamic religious practice (i.e. the veil is nothing other than the communication of the idea that women are inferior to men, or the veil communicates an alliance with ‘fundamentalism’), at which point laïcité becomes a way not of negotiating or permitting cultural difference, but a way of consolidating a set of cultural presumptions that effect the exclusion and abjection of cultural difference.

The problem is, of course, not progress per se, nor surely the future, but specific developmental narratives in which certain exclusionary and ever persecutory norms become at once the precondition and teleology of culture. Thus, framed both as transcendental condition and as teleology, culture in such instances can only produce a monstrous spectre of what lies outside its own framework of temporal thinkability. Outside of its own teleology exists a ruinous and foreboding sense of the future, and what lies before its transcendental condition lurks an aberrant anachronism, threatening, and intruding upon, the political present that becomes the grounds for general alarm within the secular frame.

The civilizational mission, as it has been described by Samuel Huntington, is itself a self-avowed mix of religious and secular ideals. The notion that the USA, representing what he calls, somewhat wildly, ‘theWest’, is considered to have undergone modernization, to have arrived at secular principles that transcend and accommodate religious position, that are more advanced and finally more rational and, hence, more capable of democratic deliberation and self-governance.14 And yet the ideals of democracy that Huntington espouses are also those that express the values of a Judaeo-Christian tradition, a view that suggests that all other religious traditions are outside the trajectory of modernization that constitutes civilization and its ‘missionary’ claim to the future.

If the Islamic populations destroyed in the recent and current war are considered less then human or ‘outside’ the cultural conditions for the emergence of the human, then they belong either to a time of cultural infancy or to a time that is outside time as we know it. In both cases, they are regarded as not yet having arrived at the idea of the rational human. It follows from such a viewpoint that the destruction of such populations, their infrastructures, their
housing and their religious and community institutions, constitutes the destruction of what threatens the human, but not the human itself. It is also precisely this particular conceit of a progressive history that positions the ‘West’ as articulating the paradigmatic principles of the human – humans worth valuing, whose lives are worth safeguarding, protecting, whose lives are precarious, and worth public grieving as well.

its efforts to seize absolute control over the construction of the subject of torture. If we ask what is at stake in producing the Arab subject as a distinctive locus of sexual and social vulnerability,we have to find out what subject position is being staked not only by the US military, but by the war effort more generally. If we want to speak about ‘specific cultures’, then it would make sense to begin with the specific culture of the US army, its emphatic masculinism and homophobia, and ask why it must, for its own purposes, cast the predominantly Islamic population against which it wages war as the site of primitive taboo and shame. I want to suggest that a civilizational war is at work in this context that casts the army as the more sexually progressive culture. The army considers itself more sexually ‘advanced’ because they read pornography or impose it upon their prisoners, because they

Rather, I understand the coercive nature of these acts of humiliation and torture as making explicit a coercion that is already at work in the civilizational mission and, most particularly, in the forced instatement of a cultural order that figures Islam as abject, backward, foreboding ruination and, as a consequence, requiring subordination within and exclusion from the culture of the human itself. This logic is not far from the disavowal and displacement that marked the Pope’s rhetoric on Islam. If Islam is figured as definitionally violent, yet encumbered by inhibiting rules, to the extent it is violent, it requires new disciplinary rules; to the extent that it is rule-bound, it requires an emancipation that only modernity can bring.

Without a critique of state violence and the power it wields to construct the subject of cultural difference, our claims to freedom risk an appropriation by the state that can make us lose sight of all our other commitments. And only with such a critique of state violence do we stand a chance of finding and acknowledging the already existing alliances and sites of contact, however antagonistic, with other minorities in order to consider systemically how coercion seeks to divide us and to keep attention deflected from the critique of violence itself. It is only by coming to terms with the epistemic shifts among critical perspectives, both secular and religious, that any of us will be able to take stock of the time and place of politics. If freedom is one of the ideals we hope for, perhaps it will be important to start by remembering how easily freedom can become deployed in the name of a state self-legitimation whose coercive force gives the lie to its claim to safeguard humanity. Maybe then we can rethink freedom, even freedom from coercion, as a condition of solidarity among minorities, and how necessary it is to formulate sexual politics in the context of a pervasive critique of this war.

stephen white interpellation

White, Stephen K. Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 2000.

Don’t just think in terms of isolated scenes. Imagine rther a lifetime of being hailed into discourse, beginning with the doctor who announces: “It’s a girl!” Keeping in mind the earlier analysis of gender as performative, Butler would have us reconstrue this familiar speech act as the beginning of a lifelong chain of “girling” utterances that enact certain scripts as normal and others as abnormal. With this expansion of the temporal horizon and application of the notion of performativity, the relatively sovereign subjectivity of the passerby begins to dissolve. It is replaced by the image of a subjectiviy produced or constituted by the insistent, interpellating “demand” of “discursive power”. (82)

The policeman who hails the person in the street is enabled to make that call through the force of reiterated convention.  This is one of the speech acts that police perform, and the temporality of the act exceeds the time of the utterance in question. In a sense, the police cite the convention of hailing, participate in an utterance that is indifferent to the one who speaks it. The act “works” in part because of the citational dimension of the speech act, the historicity of convention that exceeds and enables the moment of its enunciation. (Butler Excite 33 cited in White 82)

Thus it is the reiterating function of language that is primarily carrying and reproducing dominant norms and crating the effect of sovereign, disengaged subjects by the continual process of calling them into social existence. We are, in short,“interpellated kinds of beings” continually being called into linguistic life, being “given over to social terms that are never fully [our] own.”

Butler’s ontology is one in which the basic “things” are persistent forces or processes. We must be careful not to imagine these as having qualities of subjectivy. Thus, power is not an anonymous subject that initiates discrete acts of constitution or construction. There is rather only “a process of reiteration by which both ‘subjects’ and ‘acts’ come to appear at all. There is no power that acts, only a reiterated acting that is power in its persistence. (83)

But none of this … implies a notion that subjexts are dopes of discursive power. Reiterating is always potentially open to resignifying in ways that may contest the smooth reproduction of the dominant terms of discourse. Butler has described this subversive potential as “power’s own possibility of being reworked.”

What is not yet clear in Butler’s account is why or how this imperfection mightever be taken advantage of intentionally by an actor (83).

Thinking power together with a theory of the psyche

Why does the passerby turn to answer the policeman?  Power “hails,” but why does one submit to its call?

The violence of the prohibition, the frustrated desire, self-beratement, self-denial, desire turns back upon itself in the form of a will in the service of the regulating regime, that is of terms not one’s own.  There is an investment of erotic libidinal energy in this turning back, in this prohibitive activity of the emergent entity of conscience.  The conscience can never be an adequate site for thinking critical agency, since it is, in its very constitution, in complicity with the violent appropriation of desire by power.

stephen white weak ontology

White, Stephen K. Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 2000.

Weak Ontologies don not proceed by categorical positings of, say, human nature or telos, accompanied by a crystalline conviction of the truth of that positing.  Rather, what they offer are figurations of human being in terms of certain existential realities, most notably language, mortality or finitude, natality, and the articulation of “sources of the self.”  These figurations are accounts of what it is to be a certain sort of creature:

1. one entangled in language

2. one with a consciousness that it will die: finitude

3. one that, despite its entanglement and limitedness, has the capacity for radical newness: natality

4. one that gives definition to itself against some ultimate background or “source,” to which we find ourselves already attached, and which evokes something like awe, wonder, or reverence.

Melancholia, Mourning

Both Freud explained were reactions to the trauma of the loss of an object of love or desire. Mourning is, in short, thehealthy resolution of this situation; the person comes to accept the loss and go on with his/her life.  Melancholia, on the contrary, is Freud’s description of a syndrome of symptoms associated with a failure to accept the loss.  In stead of giving up the object, the person internalizes it in such a way that the ego becomes a substitute for that object.  And yet, since theego is ultimately an unsatisfying substitute, it becomes not just the site of love but also hate and aggression. Above all, it is this “ambivalence that distinguishes melancholia.”

Performativity

words, acts, gestures, and desire produce the effect of an internal core or substance, but produce this on the surface of the body, through the play of signifying absences that suggest, but never reveal, the organizing principle of idenity as a cause. Such acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means. That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality. Gender Trouble 136

mills genealogy

Hence the overwhelming impulse of Excitable Speech is to provide a theoretical argument that makes legal redress illegitimate. This indicates a significant divergence from Foucault’s approach to the question of theoretical engagement
with political problems.

This point becomes clearer if Butler’s theoretical position is contrasted with a genealogical approach, for the aim of the latter would be to trace relations of force in order to bring to the fore the points of weakness and possible intervention. As such, these points of weakness cannot be designated a priori, but this is precisely what Butler does in presuming that the structural instability of language qua power should be the privileged point of intervention in combating hate speech.

In short, while resignification might well be a logically possible mode of redress against the speech of hate, this does not ensure that it is necessarily the most efficacious one, since this could only be decided in loco, not a priori, if even then.

Furthermore, such a presumption of the efficacy of resignification as a strategy of resistance is precisely what her considered arguments against the sovereign force of the speaker warns us against. For just as the efficacy of hate speech cannot be assured through recourse to a notion of the sovereign subject, neither can the efficacy of reappropriation and resignification. The effectiveness of resignification will necessarily be conditioned, not only by the ‘‘condensed historicity’’ of the term, but also by the circumstances in which the attempt at resignification takes place, what might be called the conditions of felicity.

This has the consequence that, while resignification might be logically possible with all terms or utterances, the historical and discursive circumstances in which resignification is attempted will more or less severely limit the actual realizability or efficacy of a strategy of resignification. Contrary to what some of her critics have suggested, Butler is not unaware that resignification is itself both subject to discursive limits and open to the possibility of failure. As she states, ‘‘neither the radically new nor the subversive repetition can be logically guaranteed; there will be a necessary difference between what is shown to be logically possible and what in any given nexus of discourse and power is possible to realize’’.68

Thus she does recognize that, as a strategy of resistance to the interpellative force of hate speech, the success of resignification will vary. However, in developing her arguments against the legal regulation of hate speech, Butler
seems to resile from this recognition and overemphasizes the progressive potential of resignification as a political strategy.

If this is the case, Butler is (to use her words) ‘‘postulating a logic to which social practices are subject but which is itself subject to no social practice’’.69

However, this directly contradicts her stated political allegiance to Foucault’s pragmatics. Instead, it suggests that the Derridean influence within her later work introduces commitments that are not yet reconciled with attention to local
contingencies in considering questions of political practice.

mills butler inconsistant

But I do want to make two further critical points about the ‘‘politics of the performative’’ that Butler elaborates, both of which relate to her analysis of sovereignty and itseffects within the hate speech debate.

In a second argument against recourse to legal regulation of speech, she notes that calls for such recourse typically rely on an illocutionary model of hatespeech, wherein the speech act brings into being what it says in the very saying of it. This means that there is no temporal distinction between the speech act and its consequences or effects—the speaking is the doing. But, she claims, such arguments for legal regulation of speech wrongly attribute a sovereign efficacy to speech acts, or more precisely to the subject that performs such acts. Such arguments presume that speech acts necessarily do what they say they will do, and thereby elide both the conditions necessary for such felicity and the potential for failure that conditions the speech act. This seems to be the case particularly with regard to hate speech, where the power to injure is located in the speaker of hate, thereby detracting from the recognition of a ‘‘condensed historicity’’ that conditions the terms they use.

This dimension of the speech act ensures that in fact their interpellative force is citational or iterative, deriving from the prior uses or conventionality of terms. As she states, ‘‘the iterability of hate speech is effectively dissimulated by the ‘subject’ who speaks the speech of hate’’.

In contesting this presumption of efficacy, Butler argues that this wrongful attribution of sovereign efficacy also operates within the law, since it relies on the location of the origin of hate speech in an individual subject in order to maintain the legal requirement of culpability. For Butler, the attribution of sovereignty that characterizes illocutionary
models of hate speech is a compensating fantasy that arises from an anxiety over the demise of sovereignty such that power is no longer constrained by its parameters.

This fantasy returns in language, figuring the performative as necessarily efficacious and the subject who speaks hate as the origin of that speech. Thus, the constraints of legal language permit the attribution of responsibility for the injurious effects of speech to an individual who can be held culpable, thereby bringing speech and its effects within a controllable field of operation.

She states, ‘‘by locating the cause of injury in a speaking subject and the power of that injury in the power of speech, we set ourselves free, as it were, to seek recourse to the law—now set against power and imagined as neutral—in order to control that onslaught of hateful words’’.

Against this position, Butler argues that the necessary counter-strategy is to insist on the gap between speech and conduct, to ‘‘lend support for the role of non-juridical forms of opposition, ways of restaging and resignifying speech in contexts that exceed those determined by the courts’’. Hate speech is more appropriately construed as perlocutionary, thus maintaining a distinction between speech and conduct and reopening the temporal disjuncture between the speech act and its effects (267-268).

This opens the possibilities for non-juridical forms of opposition to hate speech in several ways. First, because it challenges the presumption of sovereign efficacy of speech acts, allowing for the failure of terms to do what they say. This also has the consequence that terms are thus available for resignification, and the transformation of their interpellative force that this allows. Second, the failure of the performative is for Butler precisely the site of the political agency of subjects; in other words, the constraints on the efficacy of the performative to do what it says not only signal a failure of action but also generate the opportunity for political action.59 Hence the insistence on resignification as the appropriate strategy of non-juridical opposition is directly related to her commitment to the notion that political potential arises precisely from the structural instability of language and the necessary failure of the signifier to describe that which it purports to name (268).

Given this critique of sovereignty, Butler casts Excitable Speech as an attempt to rethink questions of linguistic agency and responsibility; as she states ‘‘[u]ntethering the speech act from the sovereign subject founds an alternative notion of agency and, ultimately, of responsibility’’. This alternative account addresses the subject’s constitution in language, a position which Butler concedes may well ‘‘intensify our sense of responsibility’’ for linguistic utterance, since ‘‘the one who utters hate speech is responsible for the manner in which such speech is repeated, for reinvigorating such speech, for reestablishing contexts of hate and injury’’.

There appears to be a certain amount of tension, however, between the suggestion that responsibility might be heightened by the citationality of language, and the opposition to legal regulation that Butler maintains. The question to be asked here is how the responsibility that is heightened by citationality differs from and undermines legal responsibility; and it seems that the crucial point of difference is a matter of sovereignty, since for Butler the law is mistaken in its casting of the subject as the origin and sovereign agent of hate speech.

But here, her characterization of the attribution of responsibility in law unnecessarily assumes that legal culpability requires a sovereign subject. For surely it could be the case that the speaker of hate can still be held legally culpable even if the philosophical recognition that the individual is not the origin of such speech is maintained. Cannot the individual be held legally responsible for their citing of a term that carries with it considerable historical and cultural weight as racist or homophobic?

Certainly the determination and attribution of culpability is complicated by this recognition, but it may not yet be undermined completely. In any case, further explication of an alternative account of responsibility and its relation to legal culpability would seem to be required.

Furthermore, there is a sense in which Butler herself fantasizes a certain sovereignty of the law in suggesting that the legal regulation of speech closes down or limits opportunities for extra-juridical opposition in the form of misappropriation and resignification. If legal regulation of speech has such an effect, it would be necessary that the law actually do what it says it will do, that is, demarcate the line of the speakable and the unspeakable and rigorously maintain that demarcation. In other words, to imagine the law as sovereign is not to close down such opportunities but to suggest that such opportunities are foreclosed by legal regulation is to imagine that the state and law is sovereign.

Perhaps what underlies these points of tension within Butler’s argument is a crucial conceptual slippage between the terms of ‘‘conduct’’ and ‘‘efficacy’’. For Butler’s argument is on the one hand an argument against the characterization of hate speech as illocutionary, and thus she insists that a gap between speech and conduct must be maintained. On the other hand though, her arguments against the attribution of sovereignty to the speaker of hate rely on a presumption of efficacy, not precisely on whether or not the speech act is illocutionary.

For it is possible to have an illocutionary speech act which fails to do what it says it will do. In other words, illocutionary speech acts are not always or necessarily efficacious, or felicitious to be more precise—and thus do not presuppose a sovereign speaker—but they nevertheless remain illocutionary utterances. If we uncouple the critiques of sovereignty and illocution in this way, then it seems that these two dimensions of Butler’s argument are in fact at cross-purposes, giving rise to further tensions between the critique of sovereignty that she offers and the suggested consequences or effects of this critique for responding to hate speech.

Returning to the question of Butler’s position vis-a`-vis Foucault’s political pragmatism, so far we have seen that Butler conflates the citational logic of language with the operative logic of power and, further, that her political claims are based on the inevitable instability of political performatives. From these claims, Butler goes on to advocate a strategy of resignification as a ‘‘necessary response’’ to hate speech.64

My contention, then, is that Butler forgoes a contextually contingent pragmatics and instead posits a logic of political action that precedes the conditions which it addresses. Her opposition to the legal regulation of hate speech and the correlative reliance on discursive resignification to contest the interpellative violence that hate speech enacts posits resignification as an a priori response, regardless of the contingent conditions of its realization (270).

mills hate speech is not illocutionary

Butler argues against the characterization of hate speech as illocutionary, doing what it says in the saying of it, evident in the work of Catharine Mackinnon, Rae Langton and Mari Matsuda among others.

It is, she claims, necessary to understand such speech as perlocutionary and thus maintain a distinction between speech and conduct. On the basis of this theoretical explication, Butler makes the political claim that state power should not be extended to include legal regulation of pornography, and further, that the state cannot be relied upon for protection against hate speech. In fact, the appropriate response to hate speech for Butler is the adoption of a strategy of the misappropriation of hateful appellations and the restaging of them within different contexts in such a way that these terms necessarily take on different meanings. In other words, the best response to hate speech is more speech (264).

Butler’s characterization of the state is posed in opposition to the portrayal of the state as a neutral arbiter of civil conflict that theorists who call for legal regulation tend to rely on and this corrective is surely important. But there is a sense in which Butler’s characterization of the state runs the risk of reproducing the logic of the argument she opposes (265-266).

The point that is elided here, then, is that a priori designations of state intervention as reactionary, neutral, or even necessary, miss the vagaries of the state’s position within relations of power and political contestation.

Insofar as this is true, Butler’s position on the state is distinctly un- Foucauldian, despite her commitment to his critique of understanding power as sovereign and centralized in the state. This divergence is further evinced by her suggestion that her concern is ‘‘not only with the protection of civil liberties against the incursions of the state, but with the discursive power given over to the state through the process of legal redress’’.

To put it simply, a more strictly Foucauldian intervention in the debates concerning legal regulation of speech would trace the historical problematization of speech within liberalism with the aim of bringing to light the techniques through which speech is able to be governed, the way in which it contributes to the governing of political subjects and the possible points of intervention that raise the possibility of being governed differently (266-267).

This kind of genealogical analysis seeks to bring to light the historical particularity of forms of government and rationalization that present themselves as universal, ahistorical and given.  In doing so, it methodologically brackets the truth claims made by those forms of government and rationalization in order to trace the lines of force that constitute the conditions of their emergence and consolidation. Butler’s methodological approach though is a rhetorical and theoretical questioning, which while attempting to challenge the claims of liberal political institutions on the one hand, is nevertheless bound by the truth claims and problematics of liberalism.

The shift to an Austinian theoretical articulationof the relation between violence and speech, whether one sees that relation as illocutionary or perlocutionary, is, after all, still a matter of trying to establish the extent to which speech causes harm, and is thus played out on theoretical and political ground established by J. S. Mill.

My point here though is not to criticize Butler for not being more strictly Foucauldian.

– My point is to highlight the way in which her work diverges from this theoretical and political lineage against those critics who elide the differences between Butler and Foucault as well as Butler’s own attempt to place herself within that political tradition.

See especially, Michel Foucault, ‘‘Governmentality’’, Ideology and Consciousness, 6 (1979), 5–
21; reprinted in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, eds. G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P.
Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 87–104.

For further elaboration of the relation of civil society to the state and law within a liberal rationality of government, see C. Gordon,‘‘Governmental rationality: an introduction’’ (pp. 1–52) and G. Burchell, ‘‘Peculiar interests: civil
society and governing ‘the system of natural liberties’ ’’ (pp. 119–50) in the same volume.

mills on butler

Butler variously describes the process by which the subject comes into being as a matter of performative constitution or of interpellation. Whatever the differences between these conceptions of the process of
subjectivation—and it is unclear how Butler understands them to differ at all— both figure this process as primarily discursive or linguistic. In other words, the power that produces subjects is cast as a question of the efficacy of speech to call the subject into being, or alternatively, of the subject’s identification with and reiteration of the terms and names given by a discourse which both precedes and exceeds it. Hence the descriptive reference points for an explication of the productive operation of power shifts from social practices and technologies to speech and language. The medium of the production and social existence of subjects is ‘‘linguistic practice’’, where ‘‘linguistic practice’’ encompasses the activities of speaking and writing, both in their immediate forms of intersubjective address and in discourses, utterances and signs that have no obvious subjective origin.

Thus the subject is condemned to ‘‘seek recognition of its own existence . . . in a discourse that is at once dominant and indifferent’’.24 Hence, these social categories through which the subject comes to exist signify subordination and existence simultaneously, such that ‘‘within subjection, the price of existence is subordination’’.25 The disturbing consequence of this primary submission to power in order to exist is that the subject comes to desire the conditions of its own subordination in order to persist as a social being since one would rather exist in subordination than not exist at all (259).

Furthermore, in order to maintain one’s existence as a subject, one is forced to continually re-enact the conditions of existence given by the operation of power. This re-enactment takes the form of citationality or the continuous reiteration of the norms and conditions of power. The status of being a subject is only assured through the repetition of the conditions of power that inaugurate that status, such that these conditions themselves are re-enacted or reproduced through their continued citation (259).

Hence the performativity of sexual identity should be ‘‘understood not as a singular or deliberate ‘act’ but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects it names’’. Or in other words, performativity is ‘‘always a reiteration of a norm or set of norms, and to the extent that it acquires an act-like status in the present, it conceals or dissimulates the conventions of which it is a repetition’’. This means that the site of the subject—which Butler sees primarily as a ‘‘linguistic category, a place holder, a structure in formation’’—is not only the occasion by which the individual comes to acquire a level of social intelligibility without which they cannot survive, but is also the occasion for the reproduction of conditions of power. As Butler states ‘‘if conditions of power are to persist, they must be reiterated; the subject is precisely the site of such reiteration’’ (259).

In Excitable Speech, Butler argues that resistance is made possible by the inevitably polysemic nature of language and the inability of the speaker to irrevocably fix the meaning and efficacy of their speech acts.35 In her discussion of hate speech she claims that while language has the power to constitute subjects as certain recognizable social beings, through the interpellative effects of naming, the names one is called always carry with them a certain ‘‘vulnerability’’ to reappropriation and resignification.

The efficacy of injurious speech acts is destabilised by both the contextual dependence of the meaning of the accusatory term and the lack of power that the speaker’s intentions or original deployments have to determine the way in which the name will be heard and appropriated by those it names. For example, while the term ‘‘queer’’ may be used with an intent to injure and derogate, its reappropriation and revaluation by gays suggest that terms may be ‘‘returned’’ to
the speaker in a transmogrified form.

Thus, the term ‘‘queer’’ no longer interpellates an abject social other, but indicates a positive identification and recognition of oneself that undercuts and transforms the power relations that marginalize and derogate homosexuals. This view of reiteration as resistance is essentially the same as that offered in Bodies that Matter, although it could be
said that in some sense the political scope and field of operation of Excitable Speech is much more specifically linguistic.

Hence, while Butler explicitly calls upon Foucault’s recognition that resistance is not simply opposed to power, but instead derives from it and reinstates its conditions in the very moment of subversion, her account of resistance is limited to the linguistic field, since for her that [the linguistic field] is coextensive with the operations of power. Foucault on the other hand maintains a deliberate focus on the specificity or heterogeneity of technologies of power and thereby maintains a much wider scope for possible modes of resistance to them (261).

FOUCALUT: What is required to understand the operation of such technologies, then, is not a counter-theory of the subject, but rather, local analyses of the operation of the concrete assemblages of power. Such analyses are directed toward the fabrication of opportunities for resistance, insofar as they have as their aim the identification of points of weakness in these assemblages, and the possibilities of using force against force in order to change them.

This is perhaps one of the reasons why Foucault maintained a political interest in those modes of resistance aimed at material technologies of power such as the prison, of which he claims that ‘‘all these movements . . . have been about the body and material things . . . they were revolts, at the level of the body, against the very body of the prison. What was at issue was not whether the prison environment was too harsh or too aseptic, too primitive or too efficient, but its very materiality as an instrument and vector of power’’ (262-263).

mills reviews thiem butler

Mills, Catherine. Review of Annika Thiem’s Unbecoming Subjects: Judith Butler, Moral Philosophy and Critical Responsibility. New York: Fordham UP, 2008.

Mills, C. ‘Contesting the Political: Foucault and Butler on Power and Resistance’. The Journal of Political Philosophy, 2003, 11(3): 253-272

December 2008.

“Accountability” refers to the capacity to give an account of or to reckon or count something, or indicates that someone can be called to give such an account or reckoning, that something is explicable and someone is answerable for that thing. “Responsibility” likewise suggests that someone is answerable to something or accountable for something; it also means being capable of fulfilling an obligation or trust. Clearly, the terms are closely related, but theories of responsibility that distinguish it from accountability — which is calculable in some way or another — emphasize the weight of the (incalculable) obligation to others indicated in responsibility that is not evident in accountability. Recent criticisms of theories of ethics as obligation for their juridicism notwithstanding,

responsibility thus seems to offer resources for thinking ethics beyond calculability and individual intentionality and will, and emphasizes instead the socially embedded, embodied and constitutively relational aspects of ethical subjectivity.

Power must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization; as the process which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations,transforms, strengthens, or reverses them; as the support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or a system, or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another; and lastly as the strategies in which they take effect whose general design or institutional crystallization is embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies. (Foucault cited in Mills Contesting 2003, 254)

Butler’s theory of performativity draws on J. L Austin’s coining of the term ‘‘performative’’ to describe a category of speech acts that do things, as opposed to constative utterances, which describe states of affairs. See J. L. Austin, How to do Things with Words (1962) and ‘‘Performative utterances’’, Philosophical Papers, (1979).

Austin also distinguishes between illocutionary and perlocutionary speech acts; the former of these identifies the ‘‘performing of an act in saying something’’ (How to, 99–100) while the latter identifies speech acts that ‘‘produce certain consequential effects’’ . . . ‘‘by saying something’’ (101, 109).

Louis Althusser ‘‘Ideology and ideological state apparatuses (notes toward an investigation)’’, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971);

That the notion of linguistic practice designates more than speech is evident in Butler’s critique of Althusser’s  mise-en-scene of interpellation on the basis that it presumes a more or less sovereign voice that hails the subject into being; (The Psychic 5–6, 106-31). Interestingly though, Butler also claims to want to privilege speech in order to ‘‘struggle free of a narrow version of textualism’’ (Butler in Bell, ‘‘Speech, Race and Melancholia’’, p. 169), by which she means the theoretical positing of the primacy of writing, by emphasizing the constitutive role of speech over that of writing. Thus, her argument in Excitable Speech is especially concerned with the borders of what speech is. While I will not develop this point here, this privileging of speech may engender a certain difficulty for Butler’s emphasis on resignification as a strategy of resistance to hate speech, since it is then difficult to imagine the scene of speaking back to anonymous graffiti, policy documents and other such discursive elements. In other words, as modalities of invective and hate, do speech and writing permit or necessitate the same response?