Category: performativity

Feldner

Vighi, Fabio and Heiko Feldner. Žižek Beyond Foucault. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.  Print.

act proper (radical agency)

performative activity within a hegemonic structure

What qualifies a free act, according to Žižek, is an intervention whereby “I do not merely choose between two or more options WITHIN a pre-given set of coordinates, but I choose to change this set of coordinates itself’ (Žižek, On Belief 2001c, 121).

For Lacan, there is no ethical act proper without taking the risk of … a momentary ‘suspension of the big Other’, of the socio-symbolic network that guarantees the subject’s identity: an authentic act occurs only when the subject risks a gesture that is no longer ‘covered up’ by the big Other (Žižek, 1993, Tarrying with the Negative 262-4).

Here is a crucial quote that pretty much sums up their (Butler and Žižek) respective differences, (okay its pretty condensed)

… only the Real allows us to truly resignify the Symbolic. (110)

Žižek maintains that for all Butler’s radicality, she remains caught up in a resistance at the level of the symbolic, that is, at the level of signification. Judy Butler’s work doesn’t touch the Real.

A quote by Žižek from the book:

we cannot go directly from capitalist to revolutionary subjectivity: the abstraction, the foreclosure of others, the blindness to the other’s suffering and pain, has first to be broken in a gesture of taking the risk and reaching directly out to the suffering other — a gesture which, since it shatters the very kernel of our identity, cannot fail to appear extremely violent. (Žižek, Revolotion at the Gates 2002a, 252)

pluth on butler her lack of act

Pluth, Ed. Signifers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007.

Blog post originally published on May 14, 2009 at 15:16

Even attempts to avoid alienation by coming up with our own identities (say, in a project of aesthetic self-creation, or … in a Butlerian politics that affirms the openness of identity) are still always going to be geared toward getting recognition from the Other.

If we are interested in identity, in determining or asserting what we are (or even what we want to be), then we are interested in being objects of the Other’s desire.  This interest relies upon an Other construed as a subject-supposed-to-know.  No pursuit of the self, no matter how apparently subversive it may be, can avoid making an implicit appeal to this kind of Other. Both Butler and Lacan pursue the implications of this impasse, yet despite these similarities, there is an important difference in their results. (140)

Žižek points out (CHU: 124), that the dimension of the act is missing from Butler’s work … and that this is the real flaw … While Butler argues that the subject has no core, unchangeable identity, she does argue that the subject has an unchangeable fixation to identity as such. Her characterization of this fixation leads me to claim that despite her attempts to include a notion of agency in her work, her theory possesses a deterministic streak.  The inclusion of a consideration of how acts use signifiers in a way THAT IS NOT BOUND UP WITH IDENTIFICATION AND RECOGNITION would remedy this. (141)

Butler’s accounts of agency and the subject do not require any notion of something external to or other than discourse. She can account for subjects and agents as well as transformations within the “matrix of intelligibility” from a perspective that only considers the discursively constructed nature of identity.   Nevertheless Butler wants to avoid giving the impression that she adheres to an extreme “linguisticism.” … Butler wants to include some notion of the body in her account of identification while avoiding two things:

– On the one hand, she wants avoid making the body into a purely linguistic construct

– she also wants to avoid making the body into something simply outside of discourse. 144

In the Psychic Life of Power, the paradox of having to be subjected to power in order to be a subject comes under further scrutiny: “If the terms by which we gain social recognition for ourselves are those by which we are regulated and gain social existence then to affirm one’s existence is to capitulate to one’s subordination a sorry bind” (Butler Psychic 79, quoted in Pluth 147).

Butler reiterates here that it is only by being subjected to a signifier that identifies us that we can be subjects capable of resisting that identification, resisting a reduction to that signifier, and acting as agents. Once again, the preservation of some kind of relation to identity is absolutely crucial for Butler. Without a relation to an alienating identification, the kind of subversive activity she wants to affirm would not be possible. In fact, there would be no “subject” at all, and thus no chance for agency, without both an identity and the preservation of a frustrated relationship to this identity. 147

Because of being wed to the real in a different fashion, an act involves the realization that there is no Other of the Other, nothing behind the Other, as it were, acting as a ground.

Consequently an act transforms the subject (of fantasy) and consists of a signifying practice that does not rely on the Other as a guarantee of meaning and recognition.  As … the Fort-Da game .. showed, an act is not for the Other.

Is Lacan’s idea of a desiring Other just like Butler’s idea of identity as a conflicted cultural field?  They sound alike insofar as both involve a rejection of the fiction of an Other who is a subject-supposed-to-know.  But the resemblance does not go much father. Butler’s “matrix of intelligibility,” out of which identity is forged, contains a multiplicity of signifiers whose interrelations can lead to unpredictable possibilities for identity.

But in Lacan’s work, an encounter with the Other’s desire is not an encounter with a multiplicity of signifiers offering various possibilities for identity. Rather, an encounter with the Other’s desire is an encounter with the absence of any signifier offering a support, guarantee, and recognition point for identity. It is such an absence that makes an encounter with the Other’s desire into an encounter with an impasse in symbolization, which is the mode in which the real appears in an act.  Thus the encounter with the Other’s desire can be thought of as an encounter with the real. (148)

The difference between Lacan’s notion of a split, desiring Other and Butler’s notion of a multiple, conflicted social order is the difference between not having a signifier and having a cornucopia of signifiers, which is one way to figure the difference between a theory that includes the real in the symbolic, and a theory that overemphasizes the symbolic (although Butler would not use this term to describe her theory). While her discussion of the body as an impasse is an attempt to resolve this issue, it does not lead Butler to focus on how the subject may have a relation to something other than identity, and how the subject may be doing something other than performing identity —at least sometimes (148).

pluth for butler is the subject anything other than language

Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: New York, 2007.

Butler does not, as far as I am aware, ever say anything like “the subject is language,” and I do not believe her theory ever suggests such an equation. In fact, at some points Butler seems to suggest that a subject is not identical to its identity. If identity is discursively constructed, then this might lead one to think that the subject is also something other than discourse. One could have an identity constituted by language and a subject who is not entirely absorbed by this identity (142).

I have been arguing that when Lacan makes the subject something separate from identity, he also means that  the subject is not reducible to language or discourse. This is because he also takes the event of sexuality into account when describing the subject’s genesis. Lacan’s theory is an example of a nontranscendental view of the subject that does not reduce the subject to language or any other of its elements (the real, or jouissance). Neither transcendental to the field that constitutes it, nor immanent in that field, the subject according to Lacan is a function that results from language’s effects on the body.

Instead of understanding the subject in terms of a function or effect, Butler opts for an immanent view of the subject. 142

But equally essential to Lacan’s theory is the idea that the subject is neither reducible to nor immanent in language.  This means that an outside of discourse, an outside found in the body, the real, or jouissance, is a necessary component of Lacan’s theory of the subject (143).

butler 2008 italy

Excerpt from “Antigone’s Claim: A Conversation With Judith Butler”
Theory & Event Volume 12, Issue 1, 2009

This conversation was held in Pordenone, Italy, in September 2008, during a major cultural event that takes place every year. What follows is an expanded version of our conversation, including a few questions she received from the public and a few more questions that Judith Butler kindly took from us after the event.

Your work has attracted much attention both in America and outside of America, and your books are translated in many languages. What kind of audience do you have in mind when you write philosophy (We are still thinking of Giving an Account of Oneself)? Who is your implied reader?

Judy Butler: Let me say two things in response. I’m not sure I set out to write philosophy. I think sometimes I write philosophically. But those might be different things, to write philosophically and to write philosophy. When one writes philosophy one usually tries to stay within a genre that will be regarded as philosophical, or in accord with a protocol that has been accepted as part of philosophy. In either case, one writes in relation to the norm that governs philosophical thought at a given time. I consider philosophy as a resource, and it remains true that some of the questions I pose are derived from philosophical traditions. But it is very rarely the case that I actually write for a philosophy audience. Who, then, is my reader? When I write, I’m asking that question. Are you there? Who are you? I don’t have an image of the reader in mind; writing is more like an open petition, trying to find out whether there is someone there, opening up the place of the other within one’s own writing.

Maybe it would be worthwhile for me to go back for a moment to talk about what the questions are, because sometimes when I write I’m posing a set of questions to a reader, but that presupposes that the reader and I share some set of cultural predicaments. For instance, consider Simon De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex: do we call that philosophy or not? Is it a philosophical work? I would say yes. Does it stay within the boundaries of philosophy? No. She is asking relevant questions: what is a woman? Is a woman a person? Can she become a person? What does it mean to become a woman? In her work I saw that someone could take a philosophical question and bring it to bear on a concrete cultural and political problem. Consider Antigone. As we know, she buried her brother in spite of Creon’s order, and then, when she is asked to deny that she has done this, she enters a very interesting and particular position. Because she is not a citizen, she is not allowed to speak; she is prohibited from speaking, and yet she is compelled by the sovereign law to speak. So, when she does speak, she defies that law, and her speech exceeds the law that governs acceptable speech. To what extent, then, can Antigone figure for us in the position of the speaker who is outside of the accepted discourse, who nevertheless speaks, sometimes intelligently, sometimes critically, within and against that discourse? Perhaps the norms that govern philosophy work that way, producing a mimetic excess that questions the legitimacy of those norms. More broadly, these questions may have larger appeal and prove relevant to any number of people who are in minority positions or understand themselves as excluded from official public discourse – but somehow are still talking.

We read with great interest an unpublished paper in which you address a point that keeps coming up in your work, at least since the early 1990s. It is the question “who is the subject of responsibility?” In our post-Kantian world, the individual, by definition is subject of responsibility, while it seems that you question this standard assumption, criticizing its premises.

Judy Butler: Perhaps we might rephrase the question by asking, who qualifies as the subject of responsibility today? I know that under the Bush regime, the government promoted a very strong discourse about responsibility: the moral rationale for the devastation of the social welfare state was that individuals should take responsibility for themselves; the moral rationale for unilateral military incursions into sovereign nations has been that the US is understood to be responsible for the free world (I’m not sure, though, that the US will take its fair share of responsibility for the current economic crisis as a result of the deregulation of the stock market). The word is used in political ways that are quite interesting. In France and in Italy there is the term called ‘responsabilization’, which is the process of making citizens responsible for themselves – a process which would seem to contradict the very idea of selflegislation and self-formation that follows from Kantian notions of moral autonomy. “Responsibilization” is a way of describing a government procedure for the making of moral subjects. Not only is the government’s agency occluded by this term, but moralization in general seeks to ground behaviour and action in individual agents and so to deflect from the power of government in the regulated making of such subjects. It deflects as well from nongovernmental powers, including NGOs, that regulate who may become a subject of responsibility and who may not. In the US, we assume responsibility for the lives of those who are like us (and here “responsibility” means “compelled to make an intervention on behalf of”); we assume responsibility for the lives of Americans, but we don’t always recognize as a life those whose cultural backgrounds do not transparently conform to prevalent images of “our own,” especially when it is a question of racial difference and religious alterity.

The questions,’to whom am I responsible?’, ‘for whom am I responsible?’, seem, in these cases, to be limited in advance by the question, ‘with whom can I identify?’. And implicitly, if not forcibly, identification within the national frame assumes the kind of subject already recognizable to me, a subject, in other words, who poses no challenge to the norms of recognizability with which I operate. I confess that when I first started to think about responsibility I was worried primarily about forms of moralism, especially on the Left, where individuals with certain “subject positions” were held responsible for the entire history of social domination. I wanted then to think about a different idea of responsibility, one surely influenced by Levinas, but perhaps also by Arendt, that would not make responsibility into a purely individual matter. What interested me most was the idea that when I’m asked to take responsibility for my actions, I’m asked by someone, and this is also true when I pose such a question to myself. Derrida surely makes this clear in bringing out the sense of “response” in “responsibility”: I’m asked to respond to another human being, so I am already in a social situation. And if I am the one who asks myself to assume responsibility, I have become, through my own doubling, a social creature at the moment in which I pose the question. It is not just the fact of alterity, however, that makes the exchange a social one, but the fact that I am asked in a specific language or through a specific medium, and so am compelled to take responsibility in a language or medium that is understandable to the person who asks this of me; in that sense my efforts to take responsibility for myself are socially prompted and mediated, if not socially constructed, in a specific sense. Within such frameworks, we can situate moral theory within social theory essentially – and not contingently. I would suggest that the same holds for politics and political theory as well, since we have to ask about the political context in which the notion of responsibility emerges – and be able to parse the various meanings of “responsibility”. This is not, however, in my view, an effort to relativize and vanquish the use of the term, but to understand the concrete changes in political conditions that are necessary to establish responsibility on non-cynical grounds. The changing of those conditions is itself a responsibility, but it also leads to a realization of responsibility as part of the very process of instituting a more egalitarian and just organization of social life. This allows us to distinguish between spurious and non-spurious uses, even though the “spurious” is a risk to which any operative notion of responsibility is subject.

We see this most starkly when “responsibility” becomes one of the instruments for sustaining the condition of global irresponsibility, i.e., when under the Bush regime the US actively distinguishes between those populations worthy of protection and grief and those who are not. Let us hope that this modality changes substantially under the Obama administration.

We understand that the notion of “precarious life” is critical to your attempt at identifying the subject of responsibility. In fact, my life is precarious so long as I, as a subject, “am already in the hands of the other.” Could you elaborate on this point? If I, as a subject, am already in the hands of others, it means that I’ve lost a fundamental normative prerogative, meaning to consider my actions as consititutionally mine.

Judy Butler: (yay go judy!)

In the last two wars that the US has been fighting in Iraq and in Afghanistan, it has become very clear that the lives of US citizens, who were killed in 9/11, or the lives of US soldiers, are considered to be precious, are considered invaluable, grievable, openly grievable in public, and therefore made into heroic lives. But the lives that were taken in Iraq — and right now we can see it very clearly, when US army bombed a village in Pakistan, our ally, and it continues to disavow responsibility for this — are not considered lives at all, they are already dead before we killed them, they are already non-living before we deprive them of life. This is kind of schism that characterizes US foreign policy, but also public discourse in a number of venues, including the popular media. If we offer an alternative to this schism between lives that are grievable and lives that are ungrievable, it seems to me that we start with the presumption that human life is precarious life — I could also say that non-human life is also precarious life and that maybe precariousness links human and non-human life in ethically significant ways. When we start understanding our lives as precarious, we understand that we are linked to one another, but how can I take responsibility, how can I assume responsibility if I do not recognize that link?

When I say that we are already in the hands of others, or others are already in our hands, I’m saying that there is a link and that link is precariousness and it is by virtue of that link that we must assume responsibility for shared life.

You ask about what is properly “my own” – I think we can only lay claim to what is “my own” if there is someone before whom the claim is made and/or a language through which the claim is made legible. In this sense, “mineness” is made possible by sociality, and it is only secured through social and political arrangements; otherwise, it becomes a kind of madness.

Question:

You are wary of invocations of “global responsibility” since it is on the basis of such invocations that some countries seek to bring or install democracy in other countries. Carl Schmitt famously argued that “whoever invokes humanity is trying to cheat”… You see a moral puzzle in the ways people invoke global responsibility, and you point to a difficulty in determining whether such invocations are “responsible.” Is this talk of precarious life a way to go about the notion of “human rights” by possibly avoiding some of the difficulties (moral and theoretical) that such a notion (inevitably) involves?

Since I am, in general, less sure than Schmitt about who is cheating or how the cheat takes place, I would suggest that invoking humanity is ambivalent. For instance, when we (any of us) respond with horror when we witness the destruction of human life, is it because we recognize our common or shared “humanity” with those destroyed? Or is it that we become “humane” (and so give evidence to our own humanity) in reacting with a moral sentiment such as horror? What is less evident, but everywhere pressing, is the tacit framework presupposed by this burst of fierce and sudden sentiment. To the degree that certain scenes of destruction compel our horror more than others (equally destructive), it makes sense to ask, who is, without question, included and who is excluded from that humanity? In other words, which lives emblematize humanity, and which ones cannot so easily wield that signifying power?

So, one has to be critical about how and when the notion of humanity is invoked, but I am not convinced that it is always a lie or, indeed, a way of cheating. It is important to ask what it occludes, and how whatever it illuminates presupposes a consequential occlusion – one that turns the idea of “humanity” against the universality by which it is supported and seems, invariably, to reinstitute a certain anthropocentrism. As a result, I think it might be more helpful to consider instead a term such as ‘precarious life’ which, though it has strong resonances with the idea of humanity, functions very differently. There are at least two differences: the first is that

precarious life is a life that is shared in a specific sense: “shared life” is not simply a “life” that functions as a common element in which individuals participate on the order of a mathesis. Rather, it is common in the sense that we are reciprocally exposed and invariably dependent, not only on others, but on a sustained and sustainable environment.

Humanity seems to be a kind of defining ontological attribute, who I am, or who we are, that properly belongs to us as persons, and in that sense, it keeps the human within the humanistic frame. But what if our ontology has to be thought otherwise? If humans actually share a condition of precariousness, not only just with one another, but also with animals, and with the environment, then this constitutive feature of who we “are” undoes the very conceit of anthropocentrism. In this sense, I want to propose ‘precarious life’ as a non-anthropocentric framework for considering what makes life valuable.

Even when we ask the question, who is the human in human rights? In an effort to ground human rights in the conception of the human, we fail to ask what the human “is” such that it requires certain kinds of protections and entitlements. The “human” is not so much the presupposition of such a discourse, but a continually contested and rearticulated term. As a result, you find political organizations that at once expose the limits of the concept of the human and call for its reformulation: women’s human rights, the human rights of gays and lesbians, or the human rights of the physically challenged or the sans-papiers. Such populations are not only outside some conception of the “human” and requesting inclusions, but they are also establishing that precarious “outside” as the site from which certain kinds of claims can and should be made. If there is a language in which the claim is made, and if it is made before someone, then it establishes a social domain that exceeds the idea of the social presupposed by an historically contingent notion of human rights. Antigone, again, to be sure.

Question:
In your recent work, the focus on the “national subject” or the subject of violence or, for that matter, the subject of responsibility, has eclipsed the notion of a gendered subject, that had been a quite dominant issue in your work for almost twenty years. Here in Italy many people still think of Judith Butler as a feminist philosopher. Do you think this definition is still a valid one?

I am quite sure that I am a feminist thinker of some kind. Sometimes I am a feminist philosopher. I continue to work in feminism, and I will always work in feminism, there is no question about that. And maybe I am not always thinking in feminist terms, but if I am thinking that is probably a feminist achievement (laughs). I continue to work on transgender issues, on questions of violence on women, on sexual minorities; I work with clinical psychoanalysts to rethink the explanatory frameworks and categories that tend to pathologize sexual and gender minorities. That’s surely part of my ongoing work, and it will always be.

I would add that the idea of precarious life also emerges from a certain kind of feminist perspective, a critique of a certain presumptively masculine idea, embedded in classical liberal political forms, of the subject who is selfsufficient and a-social. Surely the critique of the idea that any of us can exist outside a condition of dependency is an important, enduring contribution of feminist theory and politics.

Perhaps what links my work on gender and my more recent work on war has to do with how social ontologies are regulated. I have been interested in how certain kinds of heterosexual frames and normative gender schemes make certain kinds of lives unliveable and ungrievable. That was an important dimension of AIDS activism, and remains one now, especially in light of the sufferings and losses on the African continent: it is very often a struggle to make certain kinds of lost life publicly grievable. The deaths by AIDS were not shameful deaths, but horrible deaths that deserved and deserve a public mourning. In a way, that point brought me to consider Antigone, her insistence on burying her brother even when the open public burial and grieving was against the law. The politics of mourning within war is clearly linked to that question of the distribution and regulation of grievable lives. How do we think about who is grievable and who is not, who is allowed to grieve openly and who is not? And what kind of public speech, parrhesia, is needed to call attention to the horrifying way that our capacity to feel horror is differentially distributed and naturalized?

As we titled this conversation “Antigone’s Claim”, so we may ask what would Antigone’s claim be for the present and how we understand her claim in the present. It seems to me that in insisting on the public grievability of lives, Antigone becomes for us a war critic who opposes the arbitrary and violent force of sovereignty. In a way, she stands in advance for precarious lives, including new immigrants, the sans-papiers, those who are without health insurance, those who are differentially affected by the global economy, questions of poverty, of illiteracy, religious minorities, and the physically challenged. That she, in some sense, becomes a figure through whom we can think what it means to understand certain lives as more precarious than others, who live out a precariousness so that others can engage in the fantasy of their impermeability and omnipotence.

Question:

Would it be possible to define your concept of “precarious life” as a new form of “humanism”?

Currently, I do not want a new humanism. If we ask what the human could be beyond humanism, then it seems we resituate the human within the non-human, not as a contingent fact of existence, but as a necessary ontology, an ontology that articulates certain constitutive bonds and binds. So I am struggling toward a non-anthropocentric conception of the human, if that is possible – even a non-anthropocentric philosophical anthropology. The other way of saying this is that wherever the human is, it is always outside of itself in the non-human, or it is always distributed among beings, among human and non-human beings, chiasmically related through the idea of precarious life. So we can neither lodge the human in the self, nor ground the self in the human, but find instead the relations of exposure and responsibility that constitute the “being” of the human in a sociality outside itself, even outside its human-ness.

Question:

You are defining the human in its frailty and at the limits of its capacity to make sense of the world. It’s a weak subject (although not in the sense of Vattimo’s). Do you see a form of universalism (perhaps the only one) in this idea? The universality of frailty, of mourning and loss? Are we relapsing though in a form of essentialism? Moreover, does this frailty entail a negative counterpart: the universality of violence, oppression, subjugation?

I am amused by this idea of a “relapse”! What is at stake is a way of thinking about what is ‘essential’ that implies a dispossession of the self. What strikes me as much more problematic is the idea of a self-aggrandizing subject, the kind that gets nationally instituted at times of war. But I am not just working with grief and frailty, but also with aggression and the various forms it takes. The point is to think about the frailty, the necessity, and the demands of the ties by which we are bound

In your book, you comment on Adriana Cavarero’s work, as much as she borrows from you in her Orrorismo, for instance regarding the vulnerability of the subject or the ethics of self-narrative. In spite of the transatlantic divide between European essentialism and Anglo-American postmodernism (or non-foundational post-structuralism), there are several points of convergence for the definition of an ethical and political (feminist) agenda. Which one do you think is the more prominent and relevant, but also do you see any major point of disagreement between you and Cavarero?

Cavarero is the one who has read Arendt and Levinas quite effectively to show that the singularity of the “you” requires a certain story. I am most interested in this move, and I have been led to rethink my own relation to these figures by virtue of her compelling analyses. Perhaps my own work tried to think more about the social and political conditions under which horror and grief are regulated, and this might be a bit different from hers, which tries to establish an ethical framework for moral sentiments. But yes, as you can imagine, the link between our work is an important one.

When you talk about war and conflict, you seem to adopt a language that has religious rather than simple ethical undertones. When you talk about non-violence, to break the cycle of revenge, for instance in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which implies forgiveness, you seem to open up your discourse to an ethical ground that resonates with a broad Judeo-Christian frame of reference. How do you stand in relation to religion and the new centrality of religious in contemporary thought, considering that it has become a central issue and concern for many intellectuals like Habermas, Zizek, Vattimo and others?

I don’t see a term like “forgiveness” as necessarily implicated in a religious framework. Maybe that seems odd, but it seems to me that the term, whatever its religious background, has and does travel outside of explicitly religious circles and can operate within ostensibly secular contexts. There will be those for whom the resonance exists, but I think we have to consider more closely, for instance, how reparation works in the theory of Melanie Klein, or how “forgiveness” operates in various international human rights commissions. What interests me most are modes of operating within conflict that find ways of expressing rage without retribution. This problematic is articulated in the Oresteia and, if I am right, marks a certain distinction between matters of justice and ideas of religious authority.

That said, I think it is important that we take note of the ways in which religious discourse informs many of our secular understandings of politics, and to see how such terms become resignified over time and through the shifting of contextual frames. I have been interested in Walter Benjamin’s appropriation of ‘forgiveness’ in some of his early writings on aesthetics. There, it is actually linked with the eradication of traces of guilt and the inauguration of a new temporal modality. Perhaps there continues to be ways of thinking revolution in such terms.

In recent years you have been writing and speaking about Israeli politics, and the problem of the ‘anti-Semitic’ charge to quell public criticism of Israel that it is almost inevitably advocated in many quarters. Anti-Semitism is indeed an oversensitive issue in the collective Western consciousness. How do you place yourself, being Jewish but anti-Zionist, in reference to this? And do you see the danger of a ‘culture of victimhood’ in the critical political discourse?

I want to suggest that public criticisms against gratuitous state violence form an important, if underappreciated, dimension of Jewish values, and that ideals of co-habitation with the non-Jew are also central to early strains of Zionist thought and to contemporary dissenting positions within Jewish intellectual life. I understand that my position is difficult to defend, since it would be important to know what is meant by “Jewish” here. But I want to suggest that the term refers to both secular and religious positions, but also to historical situations that are agnostic both in relation to secularism and religious belief. Within this broad domain, public criticism of gratuitous state violence has been crucial to a number of Jewish intellectual positions. I wish to underscore both the risks and obligations of public criticism, since whatever the motivations are for levelling criticisms against certain forms of state violence, it remains true that the criticism of Israeli state violence, for instance, can be construed in any number of anti-Semitic ways. This situation became acute, for instance, for Primo Levi, whose criticisms of Israel were exploited by those who covered the walls of Turin, his home town, with anti-Semitic slogans. How, then, does one unequivocally oppose anti-Semitism at the same time that one revives and furthers that Jewish tradition of public criticism that is formulated as a critique of state violence, an opposition to the forcible dispossession of minority populations? It is clearly impossible to accept anti-Semitism, just as it is to jettison key values furnished by this internally complicated Jewish tradition of public criticism. Much depends on our ability to distinguish between forms of public criticism that are part of democratic deliberation and those that propose violent and non-democratic means to achieve political ends. So perhaps my hope is that active and internal dissension among Jews on the topic of Israel can work in tandem with other political efforts to oppose the occupation and the radical disenfranchisements of 1948.  In a way, this is to shift the “moral” discourse from persecution\victimization to an affirmative responsibility for cohabitation that links not only with precarious life as a social ontology, but also with a new fathoming of global responsibility for this time.

Pierpaolo Antonello is Senior Lecturer in Italian at the University of Cambridge, England, and Fellow of St John’s College.

Roberto Farneti is an Assistant Professor of Politics at the Free University of Bozen/Bolzano, in northern Ital

Butler Bodies that Matter

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter New York: Routledge, 1993.

Performativity definition

… that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains (2)

Sex is no longer construed as a bodily given on which the construct of gender is artificially imposed, but as a cultural norm which governs the materialization of bodies (3)

Abject definition

JHeterosexual imperative, is an “exclusionary matrix by which subjects are formed” thus requiring “a simultaneous production of a domain of abject beings, those who are not yet “subjects,” but who form the constitutive outside to the domain of the subject” 3

The abject designates here precisely those “unlivable” and “unthinkable” zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of the subject, but whose living under the sing of the “unlivable” is required to circumscribe the domain of the subject.  This zone of uninhabitability will constitute the defining limit of the subject’s domain; it will constitute that site of dreaded identification against which – and by virtue of which – the domain of the subject will circumscribe its own claim to autonomy and to life. In this sense, then, the subject is constituted through the force of exclusion and abjection, one which produces a constitutive outside to the subject, an abjected outside, which is, after all “inside” the subject as its own founding repudiation (3).

The forming of a subject requires an identification with the normative phantasm of “sex,” and this identification takes place through a repudiation which produces a domain of abjection, a repudiation without which the subject cannot emerge.  This is a repudiation which creates the valence of “abjection” and its status for the subject as a threatening spectre.  Further, the materialization of a given sex will centrally concern the regulation of identifcatory practices such that the identification with the abjection of sex will be persistently disavowed.  And yet, this disavowed abjection will threaten to expose the self-grounding presumptions of the sexed subject, grounded as that subject is in a repudiation whose consequences it cannot fully control.

The task will be to consider this threat and disruption not as a permanent contestation of social norms condemned to the pathos of perpetual failure, but rather as a critical resource in the struggle to rearticulate the very terms of symbolic legitimacy and intelligibility.

Indeed, it may be precisely through practices which underscore disidentification with those regulatory norms by which sexual difference is materialized that both feminist and queer politics are mobilized.  Such collective disidentification can facilitate a reconceptualization of which bodies matter, and which bodies are yet to emerge as critical matters of concern.

Crucially then, construction is neither a single act nor a causal process initiated by a subject and culminating in a set of fixed effects. Construction not only takes place in time, but is itself a temporal process which operates through the reiteration of norms, sex is both produced and destabilized in the course of this reiteration.*  As a sedimented effect of a reiterative or ritual practice, sex acquires its naturalized effect, and, yet, it is also by virtue of this reiteration that gaps and fissures are opened up as the constitutive instabilities in such constructions, as that which escapes or exceeds the norm, as that which cannot be wholly defined or fixed by the repetitive labor of that norm. This instability is the deconstituting possibility in the very process of repetition, the power that undoes the very effects by which “sex” is stabilized, the possibility to put the consolidation of the norms of “sex” in a potentially productive crisis (10).

*Note 7 page 244

It is not simply a matter of construing performativity as a repetition of acts, as if “acts” remain intact and self-identical as they are repeated in terms, and where “time” is understood as external to the “acts” themselves.  On the contrary, an act is itself a repetition, a sedimentation, and congealment of the past which is precisely foreclosed in its act-like status. In this sense an “act” is always a provisional failure of memory.  In what follows, I make use of the Lacanian notion that every act is to be construed as a repetition, the repetition of what cannot be recollected, of the irrecoverable, and is thus the haunting spectre of the subject’s deconstitution.

One might read this prohibition that secures the impenetrability of the masculine as a kind of panic, a panic over becoming “like” her, effeminized, or a panic over what might happen if a masculine penetration of the masculine were authorized, or a feminine penetration of the feminine, or a feminine penetration of the masculine or a reversibility of those positions – not to mention a full-scale confusion over what qualifies as “penetration” anyway.  Would the terms “masculine” and “feminine” still signify in stable ways, or would the relaxing of the taboos against stray penetration destabilize these gendered positions in serious ways? (51)

And whereas this can appear as the necessary and founding violence of any truth regime (construction of a constitutive outside) … it is important to resist that theoretical gesture of pathos in which exclusions are simply affirmed as sad necessities of signification. The task is to reconfigure this necessary “outside” as a future horizon, one in which the violence of exclusion is perpetually in the process of being overcome.  But of equal importance is the preservation of the outside, the site where discourse meets its limits, where the opacity of what is not included in a given regime of truth acts as a disruptive site of linguistic impropriety and unrepresentability, illuminating the violent and contingent boundaries of the normative regime precisely through the inability of that regime to represent that which might pose a fundamental threat to its continuity.  In this sense, radical and inclusive representability is not precisely the goal: to include, to speak as, to bring in every marginal and excluded position within a given discourse is to claim that a singular discourse meets its limits nowhere, that it can and will domesticate all signs of difference.  If there is a violence necessary to the language of politics, then the risk of that violation might well be followed by another in which we begin, without ending, without mastering, to own-and yet never fully to own-the exclusions by which we proceed (53).

Judy Butler “Arguing with the Real” Bodies That Matter New York: Routledge 1993.

🙂 Abject definition

The normative force of performativity – its power to establish what qualifies as “being” – works not only though reiteration, but through exclusion as well. And in the case of bodies, those exclusions haunt signification as its abject borders or as that which is strictly foreclosed: the unlivable, the nonnarrativizable, the traumatic (188).

🙂 Here are JB’s guiding questions, and they are good.

1.      How might those ostensibly constitutive exclusions be rendered less permanent, more dynamic?

2.      How might the excluded return, not as psychosis or the figure of the psychotic within politics, but as that which has been rendered mute, foreclosed from the domain of political signification?

3.      How and where is social content attributed to the site of the “real,” and then positioned as the unspeakable?

4.      Is there not a difference between a theory that asserts that, in principle, every discourse operates through exclusion and a theory that attributes to that “outside” specific social and sexual positions?

5.      To the extent that a specific use of psychoanalysis works to foreclose certain social and sexual positions from the domain of intelligibility – and for all time – psychoanalysis appears to work in the service of the normativizing law that it interrogates.

6.      How might such socially saturated domains of exclusion be recast from their status as “constitutive” to beings who might be said to matter? (189)

🙂  And JB comes out swinging right away

The production of the unsymbolizable, the unspeakable, the illegible is also always a strategy of social abjection (190).

Paradoxically, the failure of such signifiers -“women” is the one that comes to mind -fully to describe the constituency they name is precisely what constitutes these signifiers as sites of phantasmatic investment and discursive rearticulation.  It is what opens the signifier to new meanings and new possibilities for political resignification. It is this open-ended and performative function of the signifier that seems to me to be crucial to a radical democratic notion of futurity (191).

If the “outside” is, as Laclau insists, linked to the Derridean logic of the supplement (Laclau NRRT, 84 n.5), then it is unclear what moves must be taken to make it compatible with the Lacanian notion of the “lack”, indeed … I will attempt to read the Lacanian “lack” within Žižek’s text according to the logic of the supplement, one which also entails a rethinking of the social specificity of taboo, loss, and sexuality (194).

The “Law of the Father” induces trauma and foreclosure through the threat of castration, thereby producing the “lack” against which all symbolization occurs. And yet, this very symbolization of the law as the law of castration is not taken as a contingent ideological formulation.

🙂 And here’s my favourite line:

As the fixing of contingency in relation to the law of castration, the trauma and “substantial identity” of the real, Žižeks theory thus evacuates the “contingency” of contingency.

If symbolization is itself circumscribed through the exclusion and/or abjection of the feminine, and if this exclusion and/or abjection is secured through Žižek’s specific appropriation f the Lacanian doctrine of the real, then how is it that what qualifies as “symbolizable” is itself constituted through the desymbolization of the feminine as originary trauma?

What limits are placed on “women” as a political signifier by a theory that installs its version of signification through the abjection/exclusion of the feminine?  And what is the ideological status of a theory that identifies the contingency in all ideological formulations as the “lack” produced by the threat of castration, where the threat and the sexual differential that it institutes are not subject ot the discursive rearticulation proper to hegemony?

If this law is a necessity, and it is that which secures all contingency in discursive and ideological formulations, then that contingency is legislated in advance as a nonideological necessity and is, therefore, no contingency at all.  Indeed, the insistence on the preideological status of the symbolic law constitutes a foreclosure of a contingency in the name of that law, one which, if admitted into discourse and the domain of the symbolizable, might call into question or, at least, occasion a rearticulation of the oedipal scenario and the status of castration (196).

Can Žižekian psychoanalysis respond to the pressure to theorize the historical specificity of trauma, to provide texture for the specific exclusions, annihilations, and unthinkable losses that structure the social phenomena mentioned above [family, concentration camps, the Gulag]?

(202).

Michael Walsh [in] “Reading the Real,” … the process of … foreclosure that institutes the real is described as a matter of “the exclusion of fundamental signifiers from the Symbolic order of the subject”  In other words, these are signifiers that have been part of symbolization and could be again, but have been separated off from symbolization to avert the trauma with which they are invested.  … These are not signifiers that are merely repressed but could be worked through, they are signifiers whose re-entry into symbolization would unravel the subject itself.

The notion of foreclosure offered here implies that what is foreclosed is a signifier, namely, that which has been symbolized, and that the mechanism of that repudiation takes place within the symbolic order as a policing of the borders of intelligibility. What signifiers qualify to unravel the subject and to threaten psychosis remains unfixed in this analysis, suggesting that what constitutes the domain of what the subject can never speak or know and still remain a subject remains variable, that is, remains a domain variably structured by contingent relations of power (204-205).

Žižek’s rendition of the real presupposes that there is an invariant law that operates uniformly in all discursive regimes to produce through prohibition this “lack” that is the trauma induced by the threat of castration, the threat itself.   But if we concur that every discursive formation proceeds through constituting an “outside,” we are not thereby committed to the invariant production of that outside as the trauma of castration (nor the generalization of castration as the model for all historical trauma). … (a) there may be several mechanisms of foreclosure that work to produce the unsymbolizable in any given discursive regime, and (b) the mechanisms of that production are – however inevitable -still and always the historical workings of specific modalities of discourse and power (205).

To claim that there is an “outside” to the socially intelligible and that this “outside” will always be that which negatively defines the social is, I think, a point on which we can concur. To delimit that outside through the invocation of a preideological “law” that works invariantly throughout all history, and further, to make that law function to secure a sexual differential that ontologizes subordination, is an “ideological” move in a more ancient sense, one that might only by understood through a rethinking of ideology as “reification.”  That there is always an “outside” and, indeed, a “constitutive antagonism” seems right, but to supply the character and content to a law that secures the borders between the “inside” and the “outside” of symbolic intelligibility is to pre-empt the specific social and historical analysis that is required, to conflate into “one” law the effect of a convergence of many, and to preclude the very possibility of a future rearticulation that boundary which is central to the democratic project that Žižek, Laclau, and Mouffe promote (206-207).

As resistance to symbolization, the “real” functions in an exterior relation to language, as the inverse of mimetic representationalism, that is, as the site where all efforts to represent must founder.  The problem here is that there is no way within this framework to politicize the relation between language and the real. What counts as the “real,” in the sense of the unsymbolizable, is always relative to a linguistic domain that authorizes and produces the foreclosure and achieves that effect through producing and policing a set of constitutive exclusions. Even, if every discursive formation is produced through exclusion, that is not to claim that all exclusions are equivalent: what is needed is a way to assess politically how the production of cultural unintelligibility is mobilized variably to regulate the political field, i.e., who will count as a “subject,” who will be required not to count.  To freeze the real as the impossible “outside” to discourse is to institute a permanently unsatisfiable desire for an ever elusive referent: sublime object of ideology. The fixity and universality of this relation between language and the real produces, however, a prepolitical pathos that precludes the kind of analysis that would take the real/reality distinction as the instrument and effect of contingent relations of power (207).

Is not the defilement of sovereignty, divine and paternal, performed by calling the aardvark “Napoleon” precisely the catachresis by which hegemony ought to proceed? (214)

If referentiality is itself the effect of a policing of the linguistic constraints on proper usage, then the possibility of referentiality is contested by the catachrestic use of speech that insists on using proper names improperly, that expands or defiles the very domain of the proper by calling the aardvark ‘Napoleon’ (218).

If “women” within political discourse can never fully describe that which it names, that is neither because the category simply refers without describing nor because “women” are the lost referent, that which “does not exist,” but because the term marks a dense intersection of social relations that cannot be summarized through the terms of identity.  The term will gain and lose its stability to the extent that it remains differentiated and that differentiation serves political goals.  To the degree that that differentiation produces the effect of a radical essentialism of gender, the term will work to sever its constitutive connections with other discursive sites of political investment and undercut its own capacity to compel and produce the constituency it names. The constitutive instability of the term, its incapacity every fully to describe what it names, is produced precisely by what is excluded in order for the determination to take place.  That there are always constitutive exclusions that condition the possibility of provisionally fixing a name does not entail a necessary collapse of that constitutive outside with a notion of a lost referent, that “bar” which is the law of castration, emblematized by the woman who does not exist. Such a view not only reifies women as the lost referent, that which cannot exist, and feminism, as the vain effort to resist that particular proclamation of the law (a form of psychosis in speech, a resistance to penis envy).  To call into question women as the privileged figure for “the lost referent,” however, is precisely to recast that description as a possible signification, and to open the term as a site for a more expansive rearticulation (218).

Paradoxically, the assertion of the real as the constitutive outside to symbolization is meant to support anti-essentialism, for if all symbolization is predicated on a lack, then there can be no complete or self-identical articulation of a given social identity.  And yet, if women are positioned as that which cannot exist, as that which is barred from existence by the law of the father, then there is a conflation of women with that foreclosed existence, that lost referent, that is surely as pernicious as any form of ontological essentialism (218-219).

Žižek persuasively describes how once the political signifier has termporarity constituted the unity that it promises, that promise proves impossible to fulfill and a disidentification ensues, one that can produce factionalization to the point of political immobilization. But does politicization always need to overcome disidentification? What are the possibilities of politicizing disidentification, this experience of misrecognition, this uneasy sense of standing under a sign to which one does and does not belong?  And how are to to interpret this disidentification produced by and through the very signifier that holds out the promise of solidarity?

Lauren Berlant writes that “feminists must embrace a policy of female disidentification at the level of female essence.”  … But if the term cannot offer ultimate recognition -and here Žižek is very right to claim that all such terms rest on a necessary méconnaisance-it may be that the affirmation of that slippage, that failure of identification is itself the point of departure for a more democratizing affirmation of internal difference (219).

To take up the political signifier (which is always a matter of taking up a signifier by which one is oneself already taken up, constituted, initiated) is to be taken into a chain of prior usages, to be installed in the midst of signification that cannot be situated in terms of clear origins or ultimate goals. This means that what is called agency can never be understood as a controlling or original authorship over that signifying chain, and it cannot be the power, once installed and constituted in and by that chain, to set a sure course for its future.  But what is here called a “chain” of signification operates through a certain insistent citing of the signifier, an iterable practice whereby the political signifier is perpetually resignified, a repetition compulsion at the level of signification, indeed, an iterable practice that shows that what one takes to be a political signifier is itself the sedimentation of prior signifiers, the effect of their reworking, such that a signifier is political to the extent that it implicitly cites the prior instances of itself, drawing the phantasmatic promise of those prior signifiers, reworking them into the production and promise of “the new,” a “new” that is itself only established through recourse to those embedded conventions, past conventions, that have conventionally been invested with the political power to signify the future.

It is in this sense, then, that political signifiers might be avowed as performative, but that performativity might be rethought as the force of citationality.  “Agency” would then be the double-movement of being constituted in and by a signifier, where “to be constituted” means “to be compelled to cite or repeat or mime” the signifier itself.  Enabled by the very signifier that depends for its continuation on the future of that citational chain, agency is the hiatus in iterability, the compulsion to install an identity through repetition, which requires the very contingency, the undetermined interval, that identity insistently seeks to foreclose.  The more insistent the foreclosure, the more exacerbated the temporal non-identity of that which is heralded by the signifier of identity.  And yet, the future of the signifier of identity can only be secured through a repetition that fails to repeat loyally, a reciting of the signifier that must commit a disloyalty against identity -a catachresis- in order to secure its future, a disloyalty that works the iterabilty of the signifier for what remains non-self-identical in any invocation of identity, namely the iterable or temporal condition of its own possibility (220).

For the purposes of political solidarity, however provisional, Žižek calls for a political performative that will halt the disunity and discontinuity of the signified and produce a temporary linguistic unity. The failure of every such unity can be reduced to a “lack” with no historicity, the consequence of a transhistorical “law,” but such a reduction will miss the failure and discontinuities produced by social relations that invariably exceed the signifier and whose exclusions are necessary for the stabilization of the signifier.  The “failure” of the signifier to produce the unity it appears to name is not the result of an existential void, but the result of that term’s incapacity to include the social relations that it provisionally stabilizes through a set of contingent exclusions. This incompleteness will be the result of a specific set of social exclusions that return to haunt the claims of identity defined through negation: these exclusions need to be read and used in the reformulation and expansion of a democratizing reiteration of the term.  That there can be no final or complete inclusivity is thus a function of the complexity and historicity of a social field that can never by summarized by any given description, and that, for democratic reasons, ought never to be (220-221).

To understand “women” as a permanent site of content, or as a feminist site of agonistic struggle, is to presume that there can be no closure on the category and that, for politically significant reasons, there ought never to be. That the category can never be descriptive is the very condition of its political efficacy.

Here the numerous refusals on the part of “women” to accept the descriptions offered in the name of “women” not only attest to the specific violences that a partial concept enforces, but to the constitutive impossibility of an impartial or comprehensive concept or category.  …. To ameliorate and rework this violence, it is necessary to learn a double movement: to invoke the category and, hence, provisionally to institute an identity and at the same time to open the category as a site of permanent political contest. That the term is questionable does not mean that we ought not to use it, but neither does the necessity to use it mean that we ought not perpetually to interrogate the exclusions by which it proceeds, and to do this precisely in order to learn how to live the contingency of the political signifier in a culture of democratic contestation (222).

Butler 1997 definition of performativity

Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997.

… gender is performative, by which I meant that no gender is “expressed” by actions, gestures, or speech, but that the performance of gender produces retroactively the illusion that there is an inner gender core. That is, the performance of gender retroactively produces the effect of some true or abiding feminine essence or disposition, so that one cannot use an expressive model for thinking about gender. Moreover, I argued that gender is produced as a ritualized repetition of conventions, and that this ritual is socially compelled in part by the force of a compulsory heterosexuality. 144

butler interview february 2008

Italian interview Feb 2008 in Monthy Review Magazine (wow, times are a changin)

This interview took place in February 2008 on the occasion of talk by Judith Butler at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB).

F.B.: Could you explain your conception of critical thought and its relation with Foucault’s famous words: I do not know if today it is necessary to say that critical work still implies faith in the Enlightenment; I consider that it must always work on our limits, that is, a patient labour that forms the impatience for freedom”? In one of your latest texts you refer to this; perhaps you could relate the task of critical thought and its connection with feminism.

J.B.: The critical task demands a preoccupation with limits, and Foucault was particularly interested in the problem of how this delimited field shapes the subject.  Thus, if we are formed as obedient subjects, if the state or some other regulated form of power imposes itself on us and we accept it, we become obedient subjects. But in the moment we begin to ask ourselves about the legitimacy of this power we become critical, we adopt a point of view that is not completely shaped by the state and we question ourselves about the limits of the demands that can be placed on us. Foucault is very clear in this respect: questioning the demand for obedience made of us by the state means questioning our ontology as subjects.

And if I am not wholly formed by this power of the state, in what way am I, or might I be, formed?  Asking yourself this question means you are already beginning to form yourself in another way, outside this relation with the state, so critical thought distances you to some extent.  When someone says “no” to power, they are saying “no” to a particular way of being formed by power.  They are saying: I am not going to be subjected in this way or by these means through which the state establishes its legitimacy.  The critical position implies a certain “no”, a saying “no” as an “I”, and this, then, is a step in the formation of this “I”.

Many people ask about the basis on which Foucault establishes this resistance to power. What he is saying to us is that in the practice of critical thought we are forming ourselves as subjects, through resistance and questioning. Foucault does not presuppose a pre-existing subject that can say “no” and criticise authority. Rather that the subject forms him or herself through the practice of criticism.

And, in my view, some forms of criticism involve a questioning of the intelligibility of the norms that constitute us as people. If the powers that be address me as a citizen or as a non-citizen, in terms of a gender or a racial category, I must fight against this social determination. The norms establish my social intelligibility, the categories through which I understand myself and other people. If, from the very outset, a gender is attributed to me, if I am called a “girl”, then I actively am a girl; the “I” that emerges through this gender is intelligible, in part, as a social being: the gender attributed to me guarantees my intelligibility and my legibility as a person, and if I question this gender, I risk a certain unintelligibility, risk losing my place and my social legibility as a particular person.

However, the “I” could say “no” or could ask “why?” With what means, for what end have I been generated, with what right has this medical establishment attributed a particular gender to me, or with what right has the law attributed this gender to me?  The “I” steps back from these gender norms, even if such norms are the conditions that have determined its formation; that is, it does not abandon or destroy them, but it does wrestle with them. Is it possible to reconstruct gender? And if so, can this be understood as a practice of freedom?

Can it be understood as a way of becoming? And if so, what other formations are possible? In my opinion, feminism implies thinking about the practices of freedom: when we object to discriminatory practices at work, to forced reclusion within the private domain, when we protest about violence against women. . . , it is not only because we want women to achieve equality, to be treated justly. Equality and justice are very important norms, but there are more: we want certain freedoms for women so they are not totally limited to the established ideas of femininity or even of masculinity. We want them to be capable of innovating and creating new positions. Insofar as feminism has been, at least in part, a kind of philosophy, it is crucial that it develops new notions of gender. If feminism suggests that we cannot question our sexual positions or affirm that we have no need of the category of gender, then it would be saying, in some sense, that I should accept a particular positionality or a particular structure — restrictive for me and for others — and that I am not free to make and remake the form, or the terms in which I have been made. And it is true that I cannot change these terms radically, and even if I decide to resist the category of woman, I will have to battle with this category throughout my whole life. In this way, whenever we question our gender we run the risk of losing our intelligibility, of being labelled ‘monsters’. My struggle with gender would be precisely that, a struggle, and that has something to do with the patient labour that forms the impatience for freedom. Thus, gender perfomativity can be understood: the slow and difficult practice of producing new possibilities of experiencing gender in the light of history, and in the context of very powerful norms that restrict our intelligibility as human beings. They are complex struggles, political in nature, since they insist on new forms of recognition. In fact, from my experience of feminism, these political struggles have been being waged for the last hundred years, at the very least. I only offer a radical language for these struggles.

F.B.: Speaking about performativity and the possibility of new forms of being, the question arises of how to evaluate the diverse innovative forms of agency, because not everything that is novel is necessarily ‘good’.  In your Undoing Gender you speak a little about this, but is there any single criterion that will allow us to make this distinction?  Is it pertinent here to speak of universality?

J.B.: If we are referring to the various ways in which gender is understood as a form or a cultural interpretation of the body, I believe it is not appropriate to speak of good or bad genders: gender is extra-moral.  Those who wish to establish the distinction between normal genders and pathological genders, or who set out to regulate gender are making a mistake.  They are absolutely and universally wrong.  There are illegitimate operations of power that attempt to restrict our idea of what gender might be, for example in the areas of medicine, law, psychiatry, social policy, immigration policy, or the policies against violence.

My commitment involves opposition to all restrictive and violent measures that are used to regulate and restrict the life of gender.  There are certain types of freedoms and practices that are very important for human flourishing.  Any excessive restriction of gender limits, or undermines, the capacity of humans to flourish.  And, what is more, I would add that this human flourishing is a good thing.  I am aware that there I am taking a moral standpoint here; I know that I have a strong normative structure, but this has nothing to do with saying “this kind of gender is good and this one is bad”.  To do so would constitute a dangerous use of morality; rather, I am trying to shift the moral structure towards another framework in which we can ask ourselves: how does a body survive?  What is a flourishing body?  What does it need to flourish in the world?  And it needs various things: it needs to be nourished, to be touched, to be in social settings of interdependence, to have certain expressive and creative capacities, to be protected from violence, and to have its life sustained in a material sense.

Today there are many people with modalities of gender that are considered unacceptable — the sexual or gender minorities — and who are discriminated against, considered abnormal, by the discourses of psychiatry or psychology, or who are the object of physical violence.  These people are not being given the opportunity of having their lives recognised as worthy of being protected or helped, not even as lives that deserve to be mourned.  I question the norms of gender that prevent us or make us incapable of recognising certain lives as being worth living, and which stop us providing the material conditions necessary for these lives to be lived, to flourish.  For these lives to be publicly recognised also means their being understood as lives whose disappearance would be felt as a loss.

The same thing happens in war: certain lives are deemed worthy of being protected, while others are considered expendable, of negligible importance, radically dispensable.

One could say that all my work revolves around this question: what is it that counts as a life?  And in what way do certain restrictive norms of gender decide for us?  What kind of life is worth protecting and what kind of life is not?

F.B.: In recent years important changes have taken place in many aspects of the lives of gays, lesbians and even transsexuals.  For example, in our country same-sex marriages have been made legal.  In the light of your reflections about the way in which a broader context of intelligibility has ontological consequences, it might be useful to ask to what extent this recognition could end up leading to new forms of restriction, other forms of normality.

J.B.: Of course, if marriage exists, then homosexual marriage should also exist; marriage should be extended to all couples irrespective of their sexual orientation; if sexual orientation is an impediment, then marriage is discriminatory.  For my part, I don’t understand why it should be limited to two people, this appears arbitrary to me and might potentially be discriminatory; but I know this point of view is not very popular.  However, there are forms of sexual organisation that do not imply monogamy, and types of relationship that do not imply marriage or the desire for legal recognition — even if they do seek cultural acceptance.  There are also communities made up of lovers, ex-lovers and friends who look after the children, communities that constitute complex kinship networks that do not fit the conjugal pattern.

I agree that the right to homosexual marriage runs the risk of producing a conservative effect, of making marriage an act of normalisation, and thereby presenting other very important forms of intimacy and kinship as abnormal or even pathological.  But the question is: politically, what do we do with this?  I would say that every campaign in favour of homosexual marriage ought also to be in favour of alternative families, the alternative systems of kinship and personal association.  We need a movement that does not win rights for some people at the expense of others.  And imagining this movement is not easy.

The demand for recognition by the state should go hand in hand with a critical questioning: what do we need the state for?  Although there are times that we need it for some kinds of protection (immigration, property, or children), should we allow it to define our relationships?  There are forms of relation that we value and that cannot be recognised by the state, where the recognition of civil society or the community is enough.  We need a movement that remains critical, that formulates these questions and keeps them open.

F.B.: I would like to bring up a thinker I have been working on in the last few years, Hannah Arendt.  I believe there are aspects of her thought that interest you.  Where would you situate Arendt’s distinction between liberation and liberty in your work?  Similarly, how does the concept of responsibility fit into your reflections about the importance of performativity and resignification as political practices?

J.B.: It is true that, in general, I do not think of freedom in terms of liberation.  I continue to be very strongly influenced by Foucault’s History of Sexuality, in which he warns us against imagining a complete liberation from power.  There can never be a total liberation from power, especially in relation to the politics of sexuality.  Foucault says two things at the same time: we can never totally liberate ourselves from power (there is no space from which to say “no” to power) and, on the other hand, we are never completely determined by power.  Thus, despite the impossibility of transcending power, a space of liberty opens up, and both determinism and radical voluntarism are refuted. What is this space of freedom that opens up once we have understood this?  Here freedom is a kind of practice, a struggle, a continuous process with neither a beginning nor an end.  When this practice is systematically attacked we cannot function as political subjects, our political capacities have been undermined.

When referring to freedom, I am not alluding to the idea of an individual subject, alone, since a subject is free to the extent that s/he is conditioned by conventions, norms and cultural possibilities that make freedom possible, though they do not determine it.  They are the conditions of possibility of freedom.  Who we are as subjects of freedom depends on non-voluntary forms of connection with others; I was not only born within a series of rules or conventions that form me, but also within a series of relationships on which I depend for my survival and which constitute me as an interdependent creature in this world.  The questions of responsibility emerge in the context of this sociality, this interdependence.

On the matter of responsibility I am interested in the productive formulations made by Levinas.  For Levinas, I am not responsible for my actions — though in fact I also am — but rather responsible for the Other, for the demands of the Other.  And any demand made by the Other is prior to any possibility of social contract: whatever the demand the Other puts before me, it affects me, it involves me in a relation of responsibility.

Legal contracts cannot adequately describe this situation of primary responsibility.  That means that I am responsible even for those who are not in any form of contractual relationship with me, or who do not form part of my community, or my nation, or who are not covered by the same legal framework as me.  This helps to understand, for example, how I can be responsible for those who live at a distance from me, who are under a different form of political organisation, or those who are stateless.  In Levinas’ framework, even those we never meet, those whose names and faces we do not know, present us with a demand.  It is, then, a question of accepting our global interdependence and even our obligation to protect the lives of those we do not know. For Levinas, this primary obligation is expressed through what we commonly call commandments, “Thou shall not kill”: a requirement to preserve life.  This does not mean that I can or should preserve the life of every individual (of course I cannot do so, and to imagine I could would be unhealthy, it would imply some sort of narcissism, a certain messianism), but rather that I should think about what kind of political structures we need to sustain life and minimise those forms of violence that extinguish it. This does not mean I am capable of making these structures come into existence — responsibility is not the same as efficacy — but rather that I can fight for a world that maximises the possibility of preserving and sustaining life and minimises the possibility of those forms of violence that, illegitimately, take life, or at least reduce the conditions that make it possible for this to happen.  This is part of what I am thinking about at the moment.  And I have to say that it is not easy to situate Arendt in this context.

Despite the fact that Levinas himself was not a pacifist, I believe that, taking his ideas as a starting point, it is possible to develop a philosophy of non-violence and even a conception of a trans-national political community that holds these values to be fundamental.  We have to take Levinas’ framework and develop a kind of trans-national ethics based on non-violence, and thus it is necessary to disagree with him with respect to the difference between ethics and politics, to his stand on pacifism, and on Israel.

F.B.: Certainly, we are not only responsible for what we have done; responsibility points towards the interplay of autonomy and limit.  To the extent that we always live and survive through some sort of consent that can hardly be considered voluntary, political responsibility also has to do with the idea that we are aware of, that we hope will continue, that we want to innovate or conserve.  In this sense, unless our attitude towards the world is one of indifference, we can talk about a kind of political responsibility in the maintenance of structures and habits or values that, in many spheres, impede the possibility of feminine freedom.

J.B.: Let me start with a criticism Derrida made of Levinas: if it is necessary to respond to all demands, that means an infinite number of demands, and how should we decide which group of demands to respond to?  Perhaps responsibility is only made possible by circumscribing a group of demands, that is, by becoming irresponsible in relation to all other demands.  In a way that is characteristic of him, Derrida affirms that responsibility, in Levinas’ sense, leads to a necessary irresponsibility.  Yet this is to continue to misunderstand the singularity of the demands made on us.  It’s not enough to deal with them case by case.  Let’s think, for example, about violence against women: it is true that we can consider a rapist or an aggressor to be responsible before the law; in a legal framework, he will have to pay for his acts, will have to be punished, once evidence of his guilt has been provided.  No doubt we need a punitive legal institution, but the question is whether, once legal responsibility has been assumed, this means that full responsibility has now been apportioned.  Legal responsibility is not an adequate model for conceptualising the whole range of responsibilities we have, because there remains a fundamental question to resolve: rape and domestic violence continue.  Why do these social practices reproduce themselves time and again in a culture?  A broader kind of intervention seems to me to be necessary, a kind of outcry about violence against women, and against sexual minorities; I believe it is very important to relate them: violence against transsexuals, for example, against sex workers, against illegal immigrants who can have no recourse to law, and violence against many groups who have been dispossessed of all their rights.  I consider that we need a strong policy that connects all these forms of violence, and also demands the production, through the mass media, of an education, an ethos, that would act as a counterweight to these forms of violence.  If you examining all this, case by case, you lose sight of the horizon: these forms of violence form part of a social practice — are even socially acceptable amongst certain types of men — of a social model.  But how can we intervene at the level of social practices?  By using the law, certainly, but not only in this way, given that we have a responsibility to remake the world, and to institute certain standards of non-violence on a more general level.  Political responsibility must go hand in hand with legal responsibility.

F.B.: In your latest books you deal with the issue of the place occupied by passions and emotions, like pain and vulnerability in politics.  Similarly, you point to the urgency of asking ourselves: “what does it mean to be human?”  Isn’t it a little surprising that all this should be written by an author who appears to form part of the anti-humanist tradition, part of the tradition that is known in the USA as French Theory?

J.B.: It is necessary to be careful when we talk about ‘humanism’.  We only have to look at the various legacies of humanism to see that there is not just one kind of humanism: the forms that emerge in Italy are very distinct from those that emerge in France.  There is also a humanism based in classical liberal political philosophy that can not be assimilated into literary humanism.  In any case, if we agree that philosophical anthropology is a form of humanism that supposes that there is just one single idea of what it is to be human, and that it is possible to attribute defining traits to this human subject, then we are taking that which is human as something given, something that already exists.

What I want to suggest is the following: for humanness to become possible — in specific times and places — depends on certain types of social norms that are involved in the exercise of producing and ‘de-producing’ humanness.  In other words, for that which is human to be human, it must be in relationship with that which is inhuman or non-human, and this is a differential operation of power.  Humanness is produced and sustained in one form and is ‘de-produced’ and not sustained in other forms: the human being is a differentiating effect of power.

In the USA, for example, at present there is a very powerful discourse that sets out to define humanness as being a product of the Judeo-Christian tradition.  Similarly, we have some morphological policies that define humanness in terms of certain ideas about what a human body should be like.  And this produces a population with disabilities, or of disabled individuals whose bodies do not match the morphological idea.  Remember that any regulatory ideal of humanness always produces exclusions, ‘outsiders’, and creates a problem: how should we refer to these beings that appear human but are not?  We only have to think of the history of slavery, something which survives in the USA, where it remains unclear if all the black men who are imprisoned are human or not.

Humanness is not something given, it is a differentiating effect of power, but we need the term because without it we cannot understand what is happening.  I am worried by those positions that say: “that which is human belongs to humanism, so we can never talk any more about humanness”; “choice belongs to voluntarism, we have to stop talking about choice”; “the Enlightenment belongs to that which we have dismantled, so we can no longer speak of Enlightenment”.  But they don’t ask themselves what the Enlightenment was.  Why go back to that which was?  Why go back to humanness?  Well, because these concepts, these really important ideals, have not left us, they continue to form us.  And there is a new way of understanding them that starts with the idea that they do not have a single form and that, in fact, their regulation operates politically to produce exclusions that we must challenge.  For someone to say that a person who is considered non-human is, in fact, human means a resignification of humanness and emphasises that humanness can work in another form.  On occasions it is important to use the term precisely in the way that the Human Rights discourse sometimes does: taking someone to whom the defining characteristics of humanness are not attributed and affirming that person is human is a performative act that redefines humanness in terms of liberation, as emancipation. It is not a question of searching for what was already there, but of making it happen.

F.B.: In your recent reflections, when you talk about ‘that which is human’ you connect it with the question of which lives deserve to be recognised as being worthy of being protected or helped.  When you speak about ‘life’, are you taking as your starting point the distinction between bios and zoe?

J.B.: The question of life is difficult; I have my doubts about the way in which the distinction that Arendt establishes in The Human Condition has been popularised by Giorgio Agamben.  Despite the fact that bios and zoe are analytically distinguishable, each is always implied in the other.  I have problems when Arendt affirms that the point of life cannot be life itself.  For her it is a terrible idea, since she only understands life as something that is bound up with very important principles and values.  Arendt wanted to distinguish between life that was not worth living and life itself, and in this she was following Socrates: an unexamined life was not worth living.  That is why, for her, thinking, judging and responsibility were so important, because she understood that these human activities make life worth living, and if these are not possible, then neither is life.  But this does not help us to understand why it is necessary to preserve the life of sensate beings, including human beings.

Arendt distinguishes between the public and private spheres.  The public domain is where we think, judge act; the private domain means that someone looks after the home, the food, the reproduction of the material conditions of life.  It seems to me to be worth remembering that there is a politics of this sphere, a politics of the domestic, there is a politics of private life.  Who does the work of cleaning the house, of keeping it all together?  The questions about relationships, about the family, about work, are political questions.

I would like to go back and ask about the conditions of survival: what do we need to survive?  We depend on our surroundings and on food; the food should be well distributed and eating habits healthy.  We depend on justice and the distribution of economic resources.  I believe there could be a politics of this sphere that looked on life as simply that, life, bare life; a politics that allowed us to see that life is never just naked life, that it is always politically saturated.  Hence my disagreement with Agamben’s characterisation of ‘naked life’, for example when he refers to the Palestinians in Gaza, stripped of their rights, exposed to brutality without any defence, reduced to mere life; it is not a question of ‘mere life’, these lives are politically saturated: there is a battle taking place to cross the border, to find food, to rebuild the house destroyed by bombs, or to get medicine.  All these actions are struggles, even, I would say, practices of freedom.  The practices of survival are extremely important; if we say they are simple mere organic life, we cannot recognise them as political struggles.

F.B.: In your latest books you deal with the idea of thinking the community in terms of relatability.  This perspective seems to me very interesting, since it allows us to establish a nexus between the misnamed ‘domestic’ violence and the violence of war.  Do you believe that this would allow us to rethink global international politics?

J.B.: When the USA was attacked in September 2001, the government set out to quickly construct an idea of the country as sovereign, impermeable, invulnerable, because it was unacceptable that its frontiers had been breached.  The system involved creating very powerful images, normally of men: men of the government, men fighting to save people inside the World Trade Center.  There was a kind of resurgence of the idea of a strong, efficacious, militarised man, a man whose body will never be destroyed nor affected by anyone, who will be pure action and pure aggression.  A certain idea of the subject was produced: who is the American subject?  Who is America?  A very aggressive affirmation was made about masculine sovereignty, a certain idea of what the body is — of the masculine body, a certain idea of masculine subjectivity, which also amounts to a national self-comprehension — and then naturally they annihilated the sovereignty of Iraq, of Afghanistan, they resorted to Guantanamo because it is not under Cuban sovereignty and is also outside the borders of US sovereignty, in such a way that they could do what they wanted.  They play with sovereignty; they take a certain kind of sovereignty as a prerogative, but do not respect sovereignty as a principle.

Another possibility would have been to say: we have been attacked, we accept the fact that we live in a global community, our frontiers are porous, people can cross them, we have to decide how we want to live this.  Instead of defending ourselves, what we need are new international agreements and also to show the USA as being committed to international law, because we should remember that since 2001, and even before, Bush has refused to sign almost any international treaties: the anti-missile treaty, that establishing the International Court; anything to do with international cooperation, including the UN.  He exercised his sovereignty over them and against them.

Perhaps because international cooperation is an ethos: we are dependent on a global world, we are all vulnerable, there can be accusations and agreements.  How do we live together?  What kind of agreements do we accept?  But it is the nation-states that establish agreements between themselves and the real question is that of the stateless peoples: insurgent populations, people who live within political organisations that are not permitted to participate in international agreements.  What kind of connection can be established here?  This implies another kind of politics, a global politics, one that does not restrict itself to the nation-states. I am referring to other ways of thinking our vulnerability as nations, our limits as nations, and that include the conception of the subject as being fundamentally dependent or fundamentally social, as well as the forms of political organisation that seek to structure global politics in such a way as to gain recognition of our interdependence.

F.B.: To round off our conversation, I would like to formulate some of the questions that ideas of sexual difference have raised: how do you explain, from your conception of gender, the historical asymmetry between the sexes?  How do you explain that lack of recognition of our first origins, of having been given birth to by a woman?

J.B.: I am always surprised that, in Europe, these great divisions are made between Irigaray and the philosophers of sexual difference, on one side, and Butler, on the other, because in the USA we work in both lines.  For me, this supposed contrast does not exist; in my classes I teach Irigaray.  In my opinion, when we study the significances that have been conferred on sexual reproduction and how it has been organised, we find important convergences between Irigaray’s work and mine, because the question is: how does the scene of reproduction come to be the defining moment of sexual difference?  And what do we do with this?  And, in this respect, we find various points of view: that of psychoanalysis, which underlines masculine dependence on the mother and at the same time its rejection; that which emphasises the importance of the maternal as a feminine value, as the basis for the feminist critique; and we can also find another perspective that raises questions like: why has sexuality been thought of in a restrictive form within the framework of sexual reproduction?  What does it mean to think of non-reproductive sexuality in relation to this burdensome symbolic scene of reproduction? Every nation-state, every national religious unit, wants to control reproduction, everybody is very uneasy about reproduction: the Spanish conservatives want to control reproduction, they say “no” to abortion.  Why?  Because it is through the control of women’s bodies that reproduction of the population is achieved and it becomes possible to reproduce the nation, the race, masculinity.

We are all trying to change these values and work on them, trying to find other spaces and possibilities for femininity, for masculinity, for that which is neither feminine nor masculine.  We have distinct conceptions about how to think this difference, but, for sure, we are all interested in exploring this difference.  Given that we cannot assume a hard and fast division between these positions, I think there could be a dialogue between them: none of us want to accept the conception of sexual reproduction that transforms woman into a non-being that makes possible the being of man.  We all start here, though we all have different strategies about how to move on.

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)

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.

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 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.