Category: resignify

butler injurious interpellations

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

We cannot simply throw off the identities we have become … can we reformulate psychic resistance in terms of the social without that reformulation becoming a domestication or normalization? (Must the social always be equated with the given and the normalizable?) 103

If Foucault could argue that a sign could be taken up, used for purposes counter to those for which it was designed, then he understood that even the most noxious terms could be owned, that the most injurious interpellations could also be the site of radical reoccupation and resignification.

But what lets us occupy the discursive site of injury? How are we animated and mobilized by that discursive site and its injury, such that our very attachment to it becomes the condition for our resignification of it?

Called by an injurious name, I come into social being, and because I have a certain inevitable attachment to my existence, because a certain narcissism takes hold of any term that confers existence, I am led to embrace the terms that injure me because they constitute me socially. 104

🙂 I think Butler veers off into taking up the argument of Wendy Brown’s book States of Injury.

Interpellation is “barred” from success not by a structurally permanent form of prohibition (or foreclosre), but by its inability to determine the constitutive field of the human. 129

butler breakdown of subjectivation

This temporal gap between usages produces the possibility of a reversal of signification, but also opens the way for an inauguration of signifying possibilities that exceed those to which the term has been previously bound. (Psychic 94)

The Foucaultian subject is never fully constituted in subjection, then; it is repeatedly constituted in subjection, and it is in the possibility of a repetition that repeats against its origin that subjection might be understood to draw its inadvertently enabling power. 94

How does the process of subjectivation, the disciplinary production of the subject, break down, if it does, in both Foucaultian and psychoanalytic theory? Whence does that failure emerge, and where are its consequences? (Psychic 1997, 95)

🙂 Butler then looks at Althusser

Policeman in street: “Hey you there!” The scene is clearly a disciplinary one; the policeman’s call is an effort to bring someone back in line … As Althusser himself insists, the peformative effort of naming can only attempt to bring its addressee into being; there is always the risk of a certain misrecognition … The one who is hailed may fail to hear, misread the call, turn the other way, answer to another name, insist on not being addressed in that way. … The name is called, and I am sure it is my name, but it isn’t. The name is called, and I am sure that a name is being called, my name, but it is in someone’s incomprehensible speech, or worse, it is someone coughing, or worse a radiator which for a moment approximates a human voice.

Consider the force of this dynamic of interpellation and misrecognition when the name is not a proper name but a social category, and hence a signifier capable of being interpreted in a number of divergent and conflictual ways. To be hailed as a “woman” or “Jew” or “queer” or “Black” or “Chicana” may be heard or interpreted as an affirmation or an insult, depending on the context in which the hailing occurs … If that name is called, there is more often than not some hesitation about whether or how to respond, for what is at stake is whether the temporary totalization performed by the name is politically enabling or paralyzing, whether the foreclosure, indeed the violence, of the totalizing reduction of identity performed by that particular hailing is politically strategic or regressive or, if paralyzing and regresive, also enabling in some way. (96)

… In this sense disciplinary discourse does not unilaterally constitute a subject in Foucault, or rather, if it does, it simultaneously constitutes the condition for the subject’s de-constitution . What is brought into being through the performative effect of the interpellating demand is much more than a “subject,” for the “subject” created is not for that reason fixed in place: it becomes the occasion for a further making.

Indeed, I would add, a subject only remains a subject through a reiteration or rearticulation of itself as a subject, and this dependency of the subject on repetition for coherence may constitute that subject’s incoherence, its incomplete character. This repetition or, better, iterability thus becomes the non-place of subversion, the possibility of a re-embodying of the subjectivating norm that can redirect its normativity. (99)

butler antigone

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

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.

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.

fink

Lack or Loss of something is required to set the symbolic in motion.

The Phallus is the signifier of lack

A woman’s sexual identity can, in fact, involve many different possible combinations, for unlike masculine and feminine structure, which in Lacan’s view constitute an either/or, there being no middle ground between them, ego identification can include elements from many different persons, both male and female. In other words, the imaginary level of sexual identity can, in and of itself, be extremely self-contradictory.

The very existence of sexual identity (sexuation, to use Lacan’s term) at a level other than that of the ego, at the level of subjectivity, should dispel the mistaken notion so prevalent in the English-speaking world that a woman is not considered to be a subject at all in Lacanian theory.  Feminine structure means feminine subjectivity. Insofar as a woman forms a relationship with a man, she is likely to be reduced to an object —object (a)— in his fantasy; and insofar as she is viewed from the perspective of masculine culture, she is likely to be reduced to nothing more than a collection of male fantasy object dressed up in culturally stereotypical clothes: i(a), that is, an image contains yet disguises object (a).  That may very well imply a loss of subjectivity in the common, everyday sense of the word —”being in control of one’s life,” “being an agent to be reckoned with,” and so on— but it in no way implies a loss of subjectivity in the Lacanian sense of the term.  The very adoption of a position or stance with respect to (an experience of) jouissance involves and implies subjectivity.  Once adopted, a feminine subject will have come into being. The extent to which that particular subject subjectivizes her or his world is another question.

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 hate speech is not illocutionary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

mills on butler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

mills reviews thiem butler

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

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

December 2008.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

thiem subject formation

Thiem, Annika. Unbecoming Subjects: Judith Butler, Moral Philosophy and Critical Responsibility. New York: Fordham UP, 2008.

On of the key achievements of Butler’s theoretical interventions is that they take what might be assumed to be ontological questions and make them legible as ethical, political, and social problematics, because, as she demonstrates, ontologies are conditioned by histories of power embodied in social and cultural institutions (74).

Moreover her work importantly offers a language and conceptual framework for lucidly demonstrating how this exclusion of the abnormal is part of what guarantees the normal its status. Butler demonstrates how the stabilities of gendered and sexed identities are attained through repressing what calls them into question and what attests to the ambivalence of gender and sex, of bodies and desires and their potentials and vulnerability (76).

Against understanding subjectivity as an achievement of self-consciousness and autonomous agency, Butler’s work argues for thinking of subjectivity as an unending process of formation that never culminates in full independence or self-sufficiency. Instead becoming a subject means to be formed and undone in relations to others and norms in ways that one can never fully reflectively grasp (78).

Despite the important role that Butler attributes to social norms in subject formation, individuals are not the marionettes of those norms.

Rather, Butler accounts for subject formation in subjection to norms as being irreducible to either a deterministic or an arbitrary relation to these norms. One key concept of these debates as well as of Butler’s attempts to explain her account of subject formation has been the notion of performativity.(78)

… the key insight from Butler’s concept of performativity is that acts cannot simply be traced back to agents and the intentions that preceded them. There is no original or authentic self or individual that only later enters into relations with others and comes to act on a social scene. Rather, Butler’s account offers a rigorous way of considering how social norms, practices, and institutions need to be taken into account as co-constitutive of subjects as well as of their acts.

… norms and their repetition are at the heart of how we come to be conscious and deliberating subjects. To understand subject formation as orchestrated by norms, normalization, and subjection, … does not mean to argue that subjects are fully determined by these norms. … performativity is the reiteration of norms by which one becomes intelligible as a subject (see BTM 94-95).

The performatively emerging subject is the product of the repetition of the social norms that confer intelligibility. It would be to mistake the core idea of performativity to understand this subject as one of PERFORMING the repetition of norms, as if in a theatrical performance …

Instead, the repetition of norms is “what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal condition for the subject” (BTM 95), and this repetition occurs in a ritualized form, constituting the subject over time.

As Butler has repeatedly argued, this mode of subjection does not make subjects into puppets determined by norms; instead, subjection brings about unruly subjects because of the excess of indeterminacyof meaning, power, and agency as norms work by producing their own failures.

The points of resistances that these failures produce are not the conscious acts of subjects, but these gaps and breakages are the condition of possibility for directed action and transformation. (80)

Political action and concerted efforts to change our circumstances are not necessary outcomes of being at odds with the norms, as Butler indicates when she asks, “what are the possibilities of politicizing DISidentifiction, this experience of MISRECOGNITION, this uneasy sense of standing under a sign to which one does and does not belong?” (BTM 219) (84-85).

constitutive outside

Ziarek, Ewa Ponowska. “From Euthanasia to the Other of Reason: Performativity and the Deconstruction of Sexual Difference” in Derrida and Feminism. eds. Feder, Ellen K. et al. New York: Routledge. 1997, 115-140.

In Butler’s interpretation, what is thus foreclosed from the symbolic is not the prediscursive “empty” kernel but those possibilities of signification that threaten the purity and permanence of the law instituting sexual difference.

With such a concept of the outside, Butler articulates the main task of her inquiry in a very different way from Žižek’s. She does not intend ot affirm the exclusion of the Real as a guarantee of social contingency but questions the stability and ahistorical character of this exclusion: “How might those ostensibly constitutive exclusions be rendered less permanent, more dynamic? 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.” (Butler Bodies 189) (130)

By rethinking the historicity and contingency of the law as the sedimentation of subjective approximations through time, Butler can argue that the mechanisms of exclusion are also, “however inevitable — still and always the historical workings of specific modalities of discourse and power” (Butler Bodies 205) (130).

performativity

Ziarek, Ewa Ponowska. “From Euthanasia to the Other of Reason: Performativity and the Deconstruction of Sexual Difference” in Derrida and Feminism. eds. Feder, Ellen K. et al. New York: Routledge. 1997, 115-140.

What is the nature of such performative identification? Performativity for Butler, as for Derrida, consist neither in voluntary decisions of the self nor in involuntary acts governed by the law that is external to them. To avoid impasses of social constructivism that sees the subject as merely an effect of social conditions, Butler stresses the fact that the reiteration of the norm (code) constitutes not only the subject but also the meaning of the symbolic law. Not a simple cause of the subject, the law itself is produced by the repetition of subjective approximations in time. Because it does not have a fixed form apart from its approximations through subjective acts, the law, despite its compulsory force, is marked by the “infelicities” and the infidelities characteristic of performative utterances.  The repetition of acts understood as the citation of the law stabilizes the form of the law, and, at the same time, produces a “dissonance” and inconsistency within it.  Indissociable from “irruptive violence,” reiteration sustains and undercuts both the permanence of the law and the identity of the subject: “the law is no longer given in a fixed form .. but is produced through citation as that which proceeds and exceeds the mortal approximations enacted by the subject.” (Butler Bodies, 14)  For Butler, like for Derrida, the possibility of failure and impurity afflicting the repetition of sexual norms is not only an unfortunate predicament or “trauma”, but also a positive condition of possibility.  By opening the possibility of intervention and redescription of sexual norms, reiteration not only stresses the historicity of the law but also open an “incalcuable” future, no longer submitted to its jurisdiction.