Category: butler

Lloyd iterability

The norms producing gender require repeating — reciting — in order to have effect. They are, in this sense, the condition of possibility for gendered subjectivity.  Without their repetition, gendered subjects would not exist. It is also the fact that they must be repeated, however, that creates the space from them to be repeated differently and thus is also the condition of possibility for action. The need to repeat thus allows for citations that contort or impair the very norms they are intended to fortify.  As such, gender is constitutively unstable and it is, as Butler puts it, ‘this instability [that] is the deconstituting possibility in the very process of repetition’ (BTM: 10).

Agency thus inheres in the regulatory repetition of the very norms that sustain the system —heteronormativity— that is being resisted and amended.  It is because such norms are not always efficacious, that is, they do not always succeed, that they can be exploited.  Such exploitation creates the possibility for, though it cannot assure the success of, subversion (65).

The merit of Butler’s revised account is that it explains more clearly why subversion is immanent and why performativity entails neither voluntarism nor determinism. In both cases, this is because of the citational structure of performativity, which means that subversion is always a form of ‘reinscription of existing contexts’.

Gender subversion involves … recontextualizing and reciting the elements constitutive of sex and gender so as to alter their meaning and significance.

Butler thus folds into her (Foucauldian) account of the regulatory effect of norms an explanation of how gender works both as a mechanism of constraint and as the locus of productive (agential) activity. In so doing, she is able to steer a course between free will and determinism, between acts and norms, and thus belatedly to refute some of the criticisms levelled at her. Moreover, this blending of Foucauldian and Derridean elements also allows her to lay the groundwork for the account of linguistic agency that she develops most fully in Excitable Speech … (Lloyd, 2007: 66).

Lloyd subversion

Ultimately, Wittig, Foucault, Lacan and Zizek are all accused of the same [Kristeva’s] error. By conceiving subversion as outside of culture, whether in teh imaginary (Lacan), the real (Zizek), pre-discursive libidinality (Wittig) or pre-discursive heterogeneous bodily pleasures (Foucault), all mask rather than illuminate the cultural operations of power, for, as Butler theorizes it, one of the ays in which discourse works is to construct an element as outside of — or prior to — culture. This element is then presented as natural or incontrovertible, when in actuality it is neither. It is an effect of discourse presented as if it were not. This raises an obvious question. If subversion cannot be located outside of culture, since the idea of the outside is the artificial construct of discourse within a specific ensemble of power relations, then were does it take place?  The answer is equally obvious. Effective subversion must be immanent to culture. It must be a form of cultural subversion (Lloyd, 2007: 53).

Agency, as Butler presents it … is intimately connect with signification. Signification, according to her, refers to the process that establishes the terms of intelligibility or meaning. Signification is thus a practice. Moreover, it is a practice based on repetition. It is precisely the repetition of acts, gestures and discourses that produces the effect of an identity at the moment of action. Agency, for Butler, might be thought of, then, as an effect of signification and resignification. The possibility of producing ‘alternative domains of cultural intelligibility’, in particular non-heteronormative domains, rests on this necessity to repeat and on the potential to repeat differently.  Indeed, for Butler, ‘it is only within the practices of repetitive signifying that a subversion of identity becomes possible’.  It is the only way to challenge the ‘rigid codes of hierarchical binarisms’ that sustain heteronormativity (GT: 185). What, therefore, might count as a subversive repetition capable of contesting the naturalization of heterosexuality?  The short answer is those ‘parodic styles’ (GT: 176), as Butler terms them, that are patently imitative; that denaturalize what they are performing by displaying explicitly the ways in which the natural is produced.  These are repetitions, in other words, that openly reveal their status as performative constructions (Lloyd, 2007: 54).

Subversion is made possible by the necessity to repeat that is essential to gender performativity.  Such a repetition is more likely to be subversive, according to Butler, when it exposes what is taken to be natural or authentic to a particular sex as simply an effect of the reproduction of particular norms, acts and gestures; in other words, when it compels us to question what is real.  At such a time, the norms that define gender are not simply resisted; they are also (potentially) reworked.  It is thus feminism’s critical undertaking, according to Butler, to identify strategies of subversive repetition’ (GT:188).  They have … to identify ‘local strategies for engaging the “unnatural”‘ in order to denaturalize the heteronormative gender order (GT: 190).  A subversive gender politics, for Butler, on my reading, thus consists in three inter-related phenomena:

1. agency understood as (re-)signification

2. denaturalization

3. the critical labour required to identify when and where gender norms might be challenged.

AIM: to create the space within which non-normative genders, sexes and sexualities might thrive (Lloyd, 2007: 56-7)

[Butler] develops Foucault’s insight that power relations not only limit but also enable possibilities of (political) action (GT:158). It is this argument that allows her to contend that, although there is no feature of the subject that is pre-discursive, agency still exists. The gendered subject, that is, may be constituted but it is not determined.

To be determined is to lack agency. It is to be programmed to behave in a a particular way without the space to improvise or to change that behaviour. Constitution, for Butler, is different. This is because performativity has a temporal dimension; it depends on the repetition of those acts constitutive of the subject. It is, in other words, an on-going and never-ending process grounded in ‘the compulsion to repeat’ (GT: 185). Constitution is distinguished from determination, therefore, by the need perpetually to reproduce the gestures and styles of the flesh that generate gender as an effect. Crucially, it is in this compulsion to repeat these gestures and styles that agency resides. Agency is not, therefore, a property of the subject (an innate quality it has); it is rather, an element of signification and repetition. What remains unclear at this point in Butler’s argument, however, is what it is about repetition per se that allows for variations in gender performance and thence social change. How, in other words, is it possible to navigate between norms and acts so as to subvert or transform heteronormativity: Since the account of performativity developed in Gender Trouble is clearly insufficient to answer these questions, Butler needs to amend it in some way.  This is why, I suggest, she borrows the idea of iterability from Derrida (61).

Lloyd agency between constraint and freedom

The primary political aim of Gender Trouble is to make life possible for those who, within the terms of the dominant heteronormative regime, are presently unintelligibile (36).

One of the merits of the idea of becoming a gender is that it suggests that gender is not to be thought of as imposed on subjects, as it is sometimes characterized within feminism (as when authors talk of women being ‘culturally constructed’) … the concept of gender as becoming introduces the idea that gendering, in part at least, is a ‘self-reflexive process’ (SG: 36) Moreover, if it is a self-reflexive process, this means that the courses of action open to us are never entirely constrained.

The difficulty with reading ‘becoming’ entirely in this way, according to Butler, is that it might appear to suggest that the subject (the ‘I’) somehow precedes its gender and that it orchestrates entirely its own becoming as a gender. … If, as it clearly is, agency is involved in becoming a gender, then it must be a form of agency that is embodied. And this means that it is one that is always in some way constrained by the historical discourses that invest our bodies with meaning. When we endeavour to become a particular gender we aim, by and large, to approximate the historical and cultural norms that define what that gender ought to be: how it should look, walk, talk,sit, and so forth. As such, our becoming is always constrained by cultural norms, taboos, conventions and even laws. This is why those who fail to approximate the gender ideal, either deliberately or unintentionally, may be severely punished for their failure. Does this mean, however, that no alteration in the norms of gender is possible? No, it does not (39-40).

… the difficulty in producing a version of agency capable of negotiating between constraint and freedom … (40).

gender produces sex

Gender does not describe something that IS (an essence), rather it refers to a process — a series of acts. In this sense, a gendered identity is made manifest only at the moment of its enactment.

There is no being behind doing, effecting, becoming: “the doer” is merely the fiction added to the deed — the deed is everything.

Gender is thus a doing, — an activity — but not one undertaken by a subject ‘that might be said to pre-exist the deed’ (GT:33) (42)

As a consequence, there is no such thing as a natural (gendered) body; the gendered body is a construct of the acts that generate ‘its reality’ (GT: 173) (42).

Drag is important to Butler’s argument not because she conceives of it as THE practice most likely to undermine heteronormativity, but because it is A practice that sheds light on how heteronormativity naturalizes the relation between sex, gender and desire. It is significant because of if its capacity to denaturalize all three constitutive elements (sex, gender and desire) of the law of heterosexual coherence’, as well as their relations to one another (GT 175). As a practice, therefore, it can be tide back to the question of cultural intelligibility. A gendered identity, as an effect of the heterosexual matrix, is generated only through the necessary and perpetual repetition of particular acts and gestures. Precisely because gender identity relies on repetition, however, it is inherently unstable. Drag exemplifies how this instability can be exploited. It symbolizes a way of resisting prevailing gender norms such that it exposes the work of fabrication that takes place in the production of any identity — coherent or not (44).

What political possibilities are the consequence of a radical critique of the categories of identity?

Developed out of her radical reading of Beauvoir, the idea that a gendered identity is produced only as it is enacted had a profound influence on both feminist and queer thought. Although, at first sight, it might appear that the theory of performativity resembles the sociological idea of sex-role socialization (adopted by several feminists in their explorations of gender), the two are in fact, quite distinct. The reason is that they are based on different assumptions. Socialization theory assumes that a gendered identity is acquired by sexed subjects learning certain gendered practices. This means, first, that sex is seen as prior to gender, a view that Butler rejects, and, second, that logically there must be a time when sexed subjects are un-gendered — the time before they learn the gendered practices in question. For Butler, however, to be a person is always already to be gendered. The declaration at a child’s birth of its sex is a gendered (and gendering) declaration. It constitutes them as male or female. (Indeed, with advances in ultrasound, this occurs BEFORE birth now.) The theory of performativity is distinct from socialization theory in a second way, in that the latter assumes the very presupposition that performativity contests: that there is a ‘doer behind the deed’. Gender is performative, for Butler, because it exists ONLY in the acts that constitute it. Or, to put it less obliquely, a gendered identity is produced through specific bodily gestures, practices, declarations, actions and movements. A gendered identity is thus an effect of doing gender. The theory of gender performance thus permits Butler to advance an innovative theory of subjectivity (48).

Lloyd cultural intelligibility

Cultural intelligibility: refers to the production of a normative framework that conditions who can be recognized as a legitimate subject. Butler uses it in her earlier writings as a way of think about how normative ideas of sex and gender circumscribe who can be conceived of as subject. She also draws on it in her later texts (particularly Undoing Gender and Precarious Life), to demonstrate how the human is normatively produced within particular racial and cultural frames. On both occasions, Butler ties the idea of cultural intelligibility to the possibility of a liveable life (that is, a life that is recognized as having value and legitimacy). Before any individual can live a ‘liveable’ life, she argues, they have first to be recognized as a viable subject. If they cannot be recognized in this way (because they deviate somehow from the norms determining viable subjectivity), then their lives will be ‘”impossible”, illegible, unreal, and illegitimate’ (GT: viii). They simply will not matter. Any regime of cultural intelligibility thus hinges on what she calls in the 1999 preface ‘normative violence’ (GT:xx): that is, the violence that is done by certain norms in the generation of liveable lives and in the constitution of subjectivity. It is this interest in how normative violence relates to cultural intelligibility and how both relate to liveable lives that drives her politics (33).

Heterosexual matrix: generates a series of ideal relations between sex, gender and desire such that gender is said to follow naturally from sex and where desire (or sexuality) is said to follow naturally from gender. ‘Sex’ in this sense can be thought of as a natural substance that is given expression in both femininity and masculinity, AND in specific ‘modalities of desire and pleasure’ (‘GB’:259). Consistent with the grid, maleness entails masculinity, and masculinity is expressed in sexual desire for a woman, whereas femaleness entails femininity and is expressed in sexual desire for a man. Gender and desire are thus seen as aspects of sex. As such, “intelligible” genders are those which in some sense institute and maintain relations of coherence and continuity among sex, gender, sexual practice, and desire’ (GT:23). These relations of coherence and continuity are not natural; they are the effect of the constitutive and violent work of certain gender norms. A coherent —and culturally intelligible— subject, therefore, is one in whom sex, gender and desire flow in the way just described. Where however, sex, gender and desire line up in a different way … the individual in question is regarded as culturally unintelligible and, as such, as not a viable subject. In terms of the matrix, he might be thought of, that is, as ‘unnatural’ or as not a ‘proper’ man. If therefore, according to the terms of heteronormativity, to be human is to be heterosexual, then consequently anyone who is not heterosexual (be they gay, lesbian or bisexual, for instance) is not (fully) human. As non-human or less-than-human, they lack social, legal and political validity. Exposing the regulatory and fictive nature of compulsory heterosexuality is thus central to a gender politics, such as Butler’s, that seeks legitimation for non-normative sexual minorities (34-35).

Lloyd sex/gender

Moya Lloyd. Judith Butler: From Norms to Politics Polity 2008

… both Beauvoir and Irigaray maintain that sexual difference is a natural aspect of human existence

When feminists first began to theorize the sex/genderrelation, the underlying assumption was that sex was both logically and chronologically prior to gender. Culturally determined gender norms, in other words, were conceptualized as secondary to natural sex. Gender was thus what was inscribed onto sex is some way. It is the priority of the relation between sex and gender that Bulter problematizes (32).

Crucially, sex as a regulative ideal thus also operates to exclude — or pathologize — those whose anatomy does not fit its normative parameters. It might be objected that Butler’s argument in this regard is unoriginal; after all, Foucault had already put into question the idea of naturalized ‘sex’ when he demonstrated in The History of Sexuality that sex is the effect of a historically sedimented regime of sexuality and that the so-called ‘truth’ of sex that every subject is supposed to exhibit is, in fact, manufactured bya constellation of regulatory and productive discourses of sexuality …

Butler is explicitly interested in gender and its relation to sex and sexuality. In this regard, Butler is not just content to argue that sex is a gendered effect and thus to re-theorize the sex/gender relation in this way. Instead, following Wittig, amongst others, her purpose is to demonstrate how sex and gender are deployed within a particular framework, namely, that of heteronormativity (where men are opposed to women, masculinity to femininity, and heterosexuality to homosexuality).

Butler’s relationship to Hegel

Moya Lloyd. Judith Butler: From Norms to Politics Polity 2007.

While thinkers prior to Hegel had examined the nature of desire, few, as Allan Megill notes, had thought that there might be ‘a constitutive relation between desire and subjectivity”, as Hegel did, and it is this constitutive relation that both interested his French critics and continues to interest Butler. Hegel’s Phenomenology, as stated, examines the way in which desire and self-consciousness emerge side by side (15).

ek-static subject, a subject outside itself, or to put it differently, a subject that is not self-identical. … it is the idea of ek-static subjectivity, derived, however loosely, from Hegel, continues to inspire Butler’s work to date, although the form it takes is one increasingly informed, in large part by psychoanalysis. For this reason, far from the comic subject of desire she attributes to Hegel, Butler’s subject is a melancholic figure (16).

… the subject is an ek-static subject; one that is always outside —or other to— itself. It is this understanding of the subject and its relation to the other … that underpins, amongst other things, Butler’s examination of the differential values placed on disparate lives and deaths; her treatment of what counts as a liveable life, her exploration of the constitutive role of mourning in the production of the psyche; and her discussion of the precariousness of all life (18).

heteronormativity: institutions, modes of understanding, norms and discourss that treat heterosexuality as naural to humanity

precarious ch. 3 new power

This new configuration of power requires a new theoretical framework, or, at least, a revision of the models for thinking power that we already have at our disposal. The fact of extra-legal power is not new, but the mechanism by which it achieves its goals under present circumstances is singular. Indeed, it may be that this singularity consists in the way the “present circumstance” is transformed in a reality indefinitely extended into the future, controlling not only the lives of prisoners and the fate of constitutional and international law, but also the very ways in which the future may or may not be thought (92).

How then finally are we to understand this extra-legal operation of power? (92)

What we have before us now is the deployment of sovereignty as a tactic, a tactic that produces its own effectivity as its aim. Sovereignty becomes that instrument of power by which law is either used tactically or suspended, populations are monitored, detained, regulated, inspected, interrogated, rendered uniform in their actions, fully ritualized and exposed to control and regulation in their daily lives. The prison presents the managerial tactics of governmentality in an extreme mode. And whereas we expect the prison to be tied to law—to trial, to punishment, to the rights of prisoners— we see presently an effort to produce a secondary judicial system and a sphere of non-legal detention that effectively produces the prison itself as an extra-legal sphere (97).

Finally it seems important to recognize the one way of “managing” a population is to constitute them as the less than human without entitlement to rights, as the humanly unrecognizable. This is different from producing a subject who is compliant with the law; and it is different from the production of the subject who takes the norm of humanness to be its constitutive principle.

The subject who is no subject is neither alive nor dead, neither fully constituted as a subject nor fully deconstituted in death. “Managing” a population is thus not only a process through which regulatory power produces a set of subjects. It is also the process of their de-subjectivation, one with enormous political and legal consequences (98).

… I am [interested] in the place of law in the articulation of an international conception of rights and oblligations that limit and condition claims of state sovereignty … I am further interested in elaborating an account of power that will produce effective sites of intervention in the dehumanizing effects of the new war prison…. I think that a new internationalism must nevertheless strive for the rights of the stateless, and for forms of self-determination that do not resolve into capricious and cynical forms of state sovereignty. There are advantages to coneiving power in such a way that it is not centred in the nation-state, but conceived, rather, to oeprate as well through non-state institutions and discourses, since the points of intervention have proliferated, and the aim of politics is not only or merely the overthrow of the state. A broader set of tactics are opened up by the field of governmentality, including those discourses that shape and deform what we mean by “the human.”

I am in favor of self-determination as long as we understand that no “self,” including no national subject, exists apart from an international socius. A mode of self-determination for any given people, regardless of current state status, is not the same as the extra-legal exercise of sovereignty for the purposes of suspending rights at random. As a result, there can be no legitimate exercise of self-determination that is not conditioned and limited by an international conception of human rights that provides the obligatory framework for state action. I am, for instance, in favor of Palestinian self-determination, and even Palestinian statehood, but that process would have to take place supported by, and limited by, international human rights (Precarious: 98-99).

… Even the US’s call for an international coalition after those events [Sept 11] was one that presumed that the US would set the terms, lead the way, determine the criterion for membership, and lead its allies. This is a form of sovereignty that seeks to absorb and instrumentalize an international coalition, rather than submit to a self-limiting practice by virtue of its international obligations. Similarly, Palestinian self-determination will be secured as a right only if there is an international consensus that there are rights to be enforced in the face of a bloated and violent exercise of sovereign prerogative on the part of Israel. My fear is that the indefinite detainment of prisoners on Guantanamo, for whom no rights of appeal will be possible within federal courts, will become a model for the branding and management of so-called terrorists in various global sites where no rights of appeal to international rights and to international courts will be presumed. If this extension of lawless and illegitimate power takes place, we will see the resurgence of a violent and self-aggrandizing state sovereignty at the expense of any commitment to global co-operation that might suport and radically redistribute rights of recognition governing who may be treated according to standards that ought to govern the treatment of humans. We have yet to become human, it seems, and now that prospect seems even more radically imperiled, if not, for the time being, indefinitely foreclosed (100).

precarious life ch. 3 to be human

When the very human status of those who are imprisoned is called into question, it is a sign that we have made use of a certain parochial frame for understanding the human, and failed to expand our conception of human rights to include those whose values may well test the limits of our own …

If we assume that everyone who is human goes to war like us, and that this is part of what makes them recognizably human, or that the violence we commit is violence that falls within the realm of the recognizably human, but the violence that others commit is unrecognizable as human activity, then we make use of a limited and limiting cultural frame to understand what it is to be human. This is no reason to dismiss the term “human,” but only a reason to ask how it works, what it forecloses, and what it sometimes opens up. To be human implies many things, one of which is that we are the kinds of beings who must live in a world where clashes of value do and will occur, and that these clashes are a sign of what a human community is. How we handle those conflicts will also be a sign of our humanness, one that is importantly, in the making. Whether or not we continue to enforce a universal conception of human rights at moments of outrage and incomprehension, precisely when we think that others have taken themselves ot of the human community as we know it, is a test of our very humanity.

We make a mistake, therefore, if we take a single definition of the human, or a single model of rationality, to be the defining feature of the human, and then extrapolate from that established understanding of the human to all of its various cultural forms.

That direction will lead us to wonder whether some humans who do not exemplify reason and violence in the way defined by our definition are still human, or whether they are unique (Hastert), or really bad people (Cheney) presenting us with a limit case of the human, one in relation to which we have so far failed.

To come up against what functions, for some, as a limit case of the human is a challenge to rethink the human. And the task to rethink the human is part of the democratic trajectory of an evolving human rights jurisprudence.

It should not be surprising to find that there are racial and ethnic frames by which the recognizably human is currently constituted. One critical operation of any democratic culture is to contest these frames, to allow a set of dissonant and overlapping frames to come into view, to take up the challenges of cultural translation, especially those that emerge when we find ourselves living in proximity with those whose beliefs and values challenge our own at very fundamental levels. More crucially, it is not that “we” have a common idea of what is human, for Americans are constituted by many traditions, including Islam in various forms, so any radically democratic self-understanding will have to come to terms with the heterogeneity of human values. This is not a relativism that undermines universal claims; it is the condition by which a concrete and expansive conception of the human will be articulated, the way in which parochial and implicitly racially and religiously bound conceptions of human will be made to yield to a wider conception of how we consider who we are as a global community.

We do not yet understand all these ways, and in this sense human rights law has yet to understand the full meaning of the human. It is, we might say, an ongoing task of human rights to reconceive the human when it finds that its putative universality does not have universal reach (Precarious: 89-91).

The question of who will be treated humanely presupposes that we have first settled the question of who does and does not count as a human. And this is where the debate about Western civilization and Islam is not merely or only an academic debate, a misbegotten pursuit of Orientalism by the likes of Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington who regularly produce monolithic accounts of the East, contrasting the values of Islam with the values of Western civilization. In this sense, civilization is a term that works against an expansive conception of the human, one that has no place in a internationalism that takes the universality of rights seriously. The term and the practice of civilization work to produce the human differentially by offering a culturally limited norm for what the human is supposed to be.

It is not just that some humans are treated as humans, and others are dehumanized; it is rather that dehumanization becomes the condition for the production of the human to the extent that a “Western” civilization defines itself over and against a population understood as, by definition, illegitimate, if not dubiously human (91).

A spurious notion of civilization proves the measure by which the human is defined at the same time that field of would-be humans, the spectrally human, the deconstituted, are maintained and detained, made to live and die within the extra-human and extra-juridical sphere of life.

precarious life ch. 3 indefinite detention

In the name of a security alert and national emergency, the law is effectively suspended in both its national and international forms. And with the suspension of law comes a new exercise of state sovereignty, one that not only takes place outside the law, but through an elaboration of administrative bureaucracies in which officials now not only decide who will be tried, and who will be detained, but also have ultimate say over whether someone may be detained indefinitely or not. With the publication of the new regulations, the US gov’t holds that a number of detainees at Guantanamo will not be given trials at all, but detained indefinitely. What sort of legal innovation is the notion of indefinite detention? (51)

  • And what does it say about the contemporary formation and extension of state power?

Indefinite detention not only carries implications for when and where law will be suspended but for determining the limit and scope of legal jurisdiction itself. Both of these, in turn, carry implications for the extension and self-justificatory procedures of state-sovereignty (Precarious 51).

I would like to suggest that the current configuration of state power, in relation both to the management of populations (the hallmark of governmentality) and the exercise of sovereignty in the acts that suspend and limit the jurisdiction of law itself, are reconfigured in terms of the new war prison (53).

I hope to show how procedures of governmentality, which are irreducible to law, are invoked to extend and fortify forms of sovereignty that are equally irreducible to law. Neither is necessarily grounded in law, and neither deploys legal tactics exclusively in the the field of their respective operations. The suspension of the rule of law allows for the convergence of governmentality and sovereignty; sovereignty is exercised in the act of suspension, but also in the self-allocation of legal prerogative; governmentality denotes an operation of administration power that is extra-legal, even as it can and does return to law as a field of tactical operations. The state is neither identified with the acts of sovereignty nor with the field of governmentality, and yet both act in the name of the state. Law itself is either suspended, or regarded as an instrument that the state may use in the service of constraining and monitoring a given population; the state is not subject to the rule of law, but law can be suspended or deployed tactically and partially to suit the requirements of a state that seeks more and more to allocate sovereign power to its executive and administrative powers. The law is suspended in the name of the “sovereignty” of the nation, where “sovereignty” denotes the task of any state to preserve and protect its own territoriality. By this act of suspending the law, the state is further disarticulated into a set of administrative powers that are, to some extent, outside the apparatus of the state itself; and the forms of sovereignty resurrected in its midst markthe persistence of forms of sovereign political power for the executive that precede the emergence of the state in its modern form (Precarious, 55-56).

It is of course, tempting to say that something called the “state”, imagined as a powerful unity, makes use of the field of governmentality to reintroduce and reinstate its own forms of sovereignty. This description doubtless misdescribes the situation, however, since governmentality designates a field of political power in which tactics and aims have become diffuse, and in which political power fails to take on a unitary and causal form. But my point is that precisely because our historical situation is marked by governmentality, and this implies, to a certain degree, a loss of sovereignty, that loss is compensated though the resurgence of sovereignty within the field of governmentality. Petty sovereigns abound, reigning in the midst of bureaucratic army institutions mobilized by aims and tactics of power they do not inaugurate or fully control. And yet such figures are delegated with the power to render unilateral decisions, accountable to no law and without any legitimate authority. The resurrected sovereignty is thus not the sovereignty of unified power under the conditions of legitimacy, the form of power that guarantees the representative status of political institutions. It is, rather, a lawless a prerogatory power, a “rogue” power par excellence (Precarious, 56).

The state in this sense, then, augments its own power in at least two ways. In the context of military tribunals … The executive branch in tandem with its military administration not only decides whether or not a detainee wills tand trial, but appoints the tribunal, reviews teh process, and maintains final say over matters of guilt, innocence, and punishment, i ncluding the death penalty. .. The decision to detain someone indefinitely is not made by executive review, but by a set of administrators who are given broad policy guidelines within which to act. Neither the decision to detain nor the decision to activate the military tribunal is grounded in law (58).

The one who makes this decision assumes a lawless and yet fully effective form of power with the consequence not only of depriving an incarcerated human being of the possibility of a trial, in clear defiance of international law, but of investing the governmental bureaucrat with an extraordinary power over life and death. Those who decide on whether someone will be detained, and continue to be detained, are government officials, not elected ones, and not members of the judiciary. They are, rather, part of the apparatus of governmentality; their decision, the power they wield to “deem” someone dangerous and constitute them effectively as such, is a sovereign power, a ghostly and forceful resurgence of sovereignty in the midst of governmentality (59).

My own view is that a contemporary version of sovereignty, animated by an aggressive nostaligia that seeks to do away with the separation of powers, is produced at the moment of this withdrawal, and we have to consider the act of suspending the law as a performative one which brings a contemporary configuration of sovereignty into being, or, more precisely, reanimates a spectral sovereignty within the field of governmentality. The states produces, through the act of withdrawal, a law that is no law, a court that is no court, a process that is no process (62).

Sovereignty consists now in the variable application, contortion, and suspension of the law; it is, in its current form, a relation to law: exploitative, instrumental, disdainful, preemptory, arbitrary (83).

One might conclude with a strong argument that gov’t policy ought to follow established law. And in a way, that is part of what I am calling for. But there is also a problem with the law, since it leaves open the possibility of its own retraction,and, in the case of the Geneva Convention, extends “universal” rights only to those imprisoned combatants who belong to “recognizable” nation-states, but not to all people. Recognizable nation-states are those that are already signatories to the convention itself. This means that stateless peoples or those who belong to states that are emergent or “rogue” or generally unrecognized lack all protections. The Geneva Convention is, in part, a civilizational discourse, and it nowhere asserts an entitlement to protection against degradation and violence and rights to a fair trial as universal rights. Other international covenants surely do, and many human rights organizations have argued that the GC can and ought to be read to apply universally. The notion of “universality” embeddd in that document (GC) is restrictive in its reach: it counts as subjects worthy of protection only those who belong already to nation-states recognizable within its terms. … By clearly privileging those prisoners from wars between recognizable states, it leaves the stateless unprotected, and it leaves those from non-recognized polities without recourse to its entitlements (87).

Precarious pt 2.

Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? And finally, What makes for a grievable life? Despite our differences in location and history, my guess is that it is possible to appeal to a “we,” for all of us have some notion of what it is to have lost somebody. Loss has made a tenuous “we” of us all.

To be ec-static; means, literally, to be outside oneself, and thus can have several meanings: to be transported beyond oneself by a passion, but also to be beside oneself with rage or grief. I think that if I can still address a “we,” or include myself within its terms, I am speaking to those of us who are living in certain ways beside ourselves, whether in sexual passion, or emotional grief, or political rage (Precarious: 24).

I am arguing, if I am “arguing” at all, that we have an interesting political predicament; most of the time when we hear about “rights,” we understand them as pertaining to individuals. When we argue for protection against discrimination, we argue as a group or a class. And in that language and in that context, we have to present ourselves as bounded beings — distinct, recognizable, delineated, subjects before the law, a community defined by some shared features. Indeed, we must be able to use that language to secure legal protections and entitlements. But perhaps we make a mistake if we take the definitions of who we are, legally, to be adequate descriptions of what we are about. Although this language may well establish our legitimacy within a legal framework ensconced in liberal versions of human ontology, it does not do justice to passion and grief and rage, all of which tear us from ourselves, bind us to others, transport us, undo us, implicate us in lives that are not are [sic] own, irreversibly, if not fatally (Precarious: 24-25).

Precarious Life pt 1

Our fear of understanding a point of view belies a deeper fear that we shall be taken up by it, find it is contagious, become infected in a morally perilous way by the thinking of the presumed enemy.

Thus we can say, and ought to, that US imperialism is a necessary condition for the attacks on the United States, that these attacks would be impossible without the horizon of imperialism within which they occur. But to understand how US imperialism figures here, we have to understand not only how it is experienced by those who understand themselves as its victims, but how it enters into their own formation as acting and deliberating subjects (Butler, Precarious 2004: 11).

What effect did the killing of an estimated 200,000 Iraqi citizens, including tens of thousands of children, and the subsequent starvation of Muslim populations, predicted by Concern, a hunger relief organization, to reach six million by the year’s end, have on Muslim views of the United States? Is a Muslim life as valuable as legibly First World lives? Are the Palestinians yet accorded the status of “human” in US policy and press coverage? Will those hundreds of thousands of Muslim lives lost in the last decades of strife ever receive the equivalent to the paragraph-long obituaries in the New York Times that seek to humanize — often through nationalist and familial framing devices — those Americans who have been violently killed? Is our capacity to mourn in global dimensions foreclosed precisely by the failure to conceive of Muslim and Arab lives as lives (12).

Those who commit acts of violence are surely responsible for them; they are not dupes or mechanisms of an impersonal social force, but agents with responsibility. On the other hand, these individuals are formed, and we would be making a mistake if we reduced their actions to purely self-generated acts of will or symptoms of individual pathology or “evil.” Both the discourse of individualism and of moralism (understood as the moment in which morality exhausts itself in public acts of denunciation) assume that the individual is the first link in a causal chain that forms the meaning of accountability. But to take the self-generated acts of the individual as our point of departure in moral reasoning is precisely to foreclose the possibility of questioning what kind of world gives rise to such individuals. And what is this process of “giving rise”? What social conditions help to form the very ways that choice and deliberation proceed? Where and how can such subject formations be contravened? How is it that radical violence becomes an option, comes to appear as the only viable option for some, under some global conditions? Against what conditions of violation do they respond? And with what resources?

To ask these questions is not to say that the conditions are at fault rather than the individual. It is, rather, to rethink the relation between conditions and acts. Our acts are not self-generated, but conditioned. We are at once acted upon and acting, and our “responsibility” lies in the juncture between the two. What can I do with the conditions that form me? What do they constrain me to do? What can I do to transform them? Being acted up on is not fully continuous with acting, and in this way the forces that act upon us are not finally responsible for what we do. In a certain way, and paradoxically, our responsibility is heightened once we have been subjected to the violence of others. We are acted upon, violently, and it appears that our capacity to set our own course at such instances is fully undermined. Only once we have suffered that violence are we compelled ethically, to ask how we will respond to violent injury. What role will we assume in the historical relay of violence, who will we become in the response, and will we be furthering or impeding violence by virtue of the response that we make? To respond to violence with violence may well seem “justified,” but is it finally a responsible solution? Similarly, moralistic denunciation provides immediate gratification, and even has the effect of temporarily cleansing the speaker of all proximity to guilt through the act of self-righteous denunciation itself. But is this the same as responsibility, understood as taking stock of our world, and participating in its social transformation in such a way that non-violent, cooperative, egalitarian international relations remain the guiding ideal (Precarious: 16-17).

Antigone pt. 3 promiscuous obedience

Butler, Judith. Antigone’s Claim. 2000 (Wellek lectures given in 1998). New York: Columbia University Press.

—The mother of Oedipus is his wife. Antigone’s father is her brother, since they share a mother in Jocasta.

Her brothers are her nephews, sons of her brother-father, Oedipus. As Butler notes

The terms of kinship become irreversibly equivocal. Is this part of her tragedy? Does this equivocation of kinship lead to fatality?

Antigone is caught within a web of relations that produce no coherent position within kinship. She is not, strictly speaking outside kinship or, indeed, unintelligible. her situation can be understood, but only with a certain amount of horror (Butler, Antigone’s Claim. 2000: 57)

The Curse of Kinship

And to the extent that the symbolic reiterates a “structural” necessity of kinship, does it relay or perform the curse of kinship itself? In other words, does the structuralist law report on the curse that is upon kinship or does it deliver that curse? Is structuralist kinship the curse that is upon contemporary critical theory as it tries to approach the question of sexual normativity, sociality, and the status of law? And moreover, if we are seized by this inheritance, is there a way to transmit that curse in aberrant form, exposing its fragility and fracture in the repetition and reinstitution of its terms?

Is this breaking from the law that takes place in the reinstituting of the law the condition for articulating a future kinship that exceeds structuralist totality, a poststructuralism of kinship?

From the presumption that one cannot —or ought not to— choose one’s closest family members as one’s lovers and marital partners, it does not follow that the bonds of kinship that ARE possible assume any particular form (66)