resignify – Page 3

performative

Black people are not included in certain representations of ‘america’ (sic) or, indeed, in political theoretical discussion of ‘citizenship’ can take place precisely because the exclusion has happened at the level of presumption, as an epistemological condition of political judgement.

Performativity takes on a new meaning against such a backdrop, since what happens when the less than human nevertheless assumes its place within the human, producing a paradox and a tension for the norm? It exposes the norm as exclusionary and its ideality as normative. But it also produces an aberration with the power to redefine the norm. What is important, of course, is to keep the ‘redefining of the norm’ from being ‘an assimilation to the norm’ (which is what gay marriage is doing). The redefinition has to take aim at normativity itself, establishing the progressive an irreversible dissonance of human life, its radical non unity, as the only viable definition (20-21).

The Nightingale’s Song at Midnight and the Morning Rain 1940

Joan Miró

butler and connolly

“Politics, Power and Ethics: A Discussion between Judith Butler and William Connolly” Theory and Event 4:2. 2000.

William Connolly: One impressive thing about Gender Trouble was its creative and detailed elaboration of the Foucauldian idea that the demand to secure a “true identity” or “a core” identity is entangled with ugly processes that close off the development of a plurality of identities on the same social field. That which was thought by many to provide the basis and guide to ethics was, therefore, itself said to be entangled in the politics and power of ethics. One way of putting the point in Gender Trouble (1990) was to say that “the displacement of a political and discursive origin of gender identity onto a psychological ‘core’ precludes an analysis of the political constitution of the gendered subject and its fabricated notions about the ineffable interiority of its sex or of its true identity” (p.136). This book opened up important issues that had been closed down, including the possibility of pursuing a new plurality of sexual and gender practices. It also played a crucial role in helping to mobilize and energize an entire political movement. But it is has nonetheless been taken by some of its critics, even by some who support gay and lesbian rights, to have deleterious consequences. They sometimes assert that it treats all identity as if it were oppressive, or that it does not sufficiently appreciate the pleasures and attachments to identity we find ourselves implicated in, or that it diminishes the capacity to evaluate different claims to identity ethically, or that it makes it difficult to identify the political energies from which to proceed in pushing for a pluralization of identities, or that it makes it difficult to see how to mobilize such energies in dominant constituencies who are asked to respond to new pressures for pluralization.

There may be misunderstandings behind some of these criticisms, or they may reflect more basic disagreements about how power operates, how ethical responsiveness proceeds, to what extent an ethical orientation must be grounded in something fixed, authoritative or final to be informed, and how diverse a contemporary culture should strive to become. I hope you will take the opportunity as we proceed to respond to some of those questions. For example, would you now modify the idea that a challenge to the idea of truth in identity also necessarily involves a challenge to the idea of a “core” identity? Could one emphasize the contingent elements in the formation of identity and probe the fugitive possibilities of mobility that may inhabit it even while saying that identity often enough acquires a certain core?

One way to proceed, perhaps, is to consider an arresting moment in The Psychic Life of Power (1997). You have been examining the role that melancholy plays in consolidating heterosexuality out of a larger field of possibilities. There is unavowed grieving involved here, and this condition seems both to entrench the attachment to identity and to complicate the possible political relations between constituencies. A poignant formulation occurs:

This raises the political question of the cost of articulating a coherent identity position by producing, excluding, and repudiating a domain of abjected specters that threatens the arbitrarily closed domain of subject positions. Perhaps only by risking the incoherence of identity is connection possible (p. 149).

I interpret this formulation to mean that people often become profoundly attached to the identities that inhabit them, that the abjection of some other identity possibilities often becomes tempting as a means to secure the self assurance of your own, and that an ethos of plurality is apt to be both fragile and uneven in part because people often refuse to run identity risks to cultivate connections across difference. This formulation, to me, addresses simultaneously the importance and difficulty of a generous ethos of public life, and it discloses the element of fragility that may persist in such achievements if and when they are achieved. The risks are more palpable than those acknowledged by many self-proclaimed proponents of public virtue. One thinks of liberal communitarians and neo-Kantians here. The theme also may also help to explain why some non-Kantian, cultural conservatives are so eager to bond the identities they profess to the truth of identity itself. Nietzsche calls this an instance of the “immorality of morality,” meaning in this context the immoral demand to treat the identity you profess as if it were commanded by the dictates of morality itself so that it can never become incumbent upon you to make adjustments in its hegemony to create more room for diversity. One thinks of the Christian Right in this context, though there are many Christians who oppose those tendencies in the name of Christian love. And one thinks as well of those academics who identify same-sex marriage and families with the demise of western civilization itself.

Let me ask you, then, to use these two formulations, one published in 1990 and another in 1997, to respond to one or two of the issues posed above and, particularly, to address the relation between political ethics and the risks to identity posed by negotiation of a generous ethic of plurality. It may be that you will not find my use of the terms “ethics” or “ethos” helpful in this context. That too would be interesting. It will get us started if you say something about your current thinking concerning 1) risks to identity posed by formation of generous connections across opaque lines of difference and 2) what within the asymmetrical play of power that might foment a call to such negotiations.

Judith Butler: There are several interesting points that you raise, and I think I may be able to answer them best by proceeding more or less chronologically. You ask whether I might be willing to rethink the critique of core identity now that Gender Trouble is ten years old. And my answer to this question is two-fold: first, it seems important to realize that GT made an argument against the notion of core gender identity, especially the view of Robert Stoller, an ego-psychologist who claims that one might find the truth of gender in an ostensibly interior ‘core’ gender identity. The second is that identity itself may become experienced as a ‘core,’ but that is only to say that a certain discourse of the core conditions our self-understanding, sometimes even essentially.

The reason I opposed Stoller’s view is that it set up a very speculative, even metaphysical postulate as the criterion by which the truth of gender might be known, and assumed that this non-phenomenal core somehow structured all that emerged as gender in the realm of appearances. This struck me, and continues to strike me, as a needlessly and dangerously regulatory view which sets up the ‘expert’ as the one who has special knowledge about one’s ‘core,’ a core that is only known through its appearance, but is said to be not only distinct from the appearances by which it is evidenced, but is said to act causally to produce such appearances. My view was, and remains, that sometimes gender does come to feel like a ‘core,’ or it becomes available to us through the discourse of the ‘core’ or, as you yourself say, it is “acquired.” So I don’t dispute that it can, for some people, come to really feel like a core, and even, through the metaphor of the core, come to structure their self-understanding essentially. But that is, of course, different from saying that it “is” one, and I don’t think we have any way to actually say the latter and know it to be true. The regulatory dimension of the doctrine to which I am opposed has to do with the truth-claim it makes, a truth-claim that seems to be made precisely by the psychologist who devises and institutes the theory. So I suppose my complaint is not unlike Foucault’s in the first volume of The History of Sexuality where he wonders how and why sex became the innermost secret that we are compelled to expose to the psychological establishment. But more than that, it seems important to acknowledge that if a core gender contains the criterial truth of gender, then it is possible to announce about another person that the truth of their gender is manifested by their acts or their appearances. This can be used to say that the truth of a masculine-looking woman is her core femininity — which she denies — or that the truth of a feminine-looking woman is her core femininity — which she affirms. And it may be that the genders which inhabit persons and which they simultaneously inhabit, don’t quite fit into established conventions of masculine and feminine, and that the discourse of truth which assumes the stability of those terms, and relates them as though they were mutually exclusive, is itself an idealization of gender under the norms of a certain (uninhabitable) heterosexuality, and so not to be embraced without qualification. This is not to say that the idealized norms of heterosexuality are not conditions of pleasure. They most surely are. But what becomes interesting is when these pleasures are not exactly manifested by the bodies and genders that one expects, or where certain reversals make clear that heterosexuality does not belong exclusively to heterosexuals. I think this point has been made about homosexuality most emphatically by Eve Sedgwick: homosexuality is not the property of homosexuals.

I certainly don’t mean to treat all identity as oppressive, but I do mean to underscore that forms of regulation operate through available notions of identity, and that this produces them as sites of ambivalence. As ambivalent, they are the sites of both pleasure and pain, and I am suspect both of the desire to eradicate identity (and its pain) and to install it as foundational (which very often seeks to forestall the ‘anxiety’ that the tenuousness of identity implies). Probably The Psychic Life of Power makes these latter claims a bit more evenly than Gender Trouble. I think we all have investments in identity, those which give us pleasure, even take us to certain heights of exhilaration, but that both that pleasure and exhilaration of ‘being’ such and so are also haunted by a certain anxiety, a knowingness about the contingency of what we ‘are.’ We can, of course, seek to legislate that contingency and anxiety away and make claims to the effect that our identities are foundational or that they are to be found in enduring ‘cores,’ but here the very insistence belies its own instability. I believe that you have brought out this double dimension of identity in a different, but parallel way, when you claim, for instance, that the contingency of identity is its relationality, and that the latter is the basis of our openness toward others. If I parallel you here, it is probably because I am citing you in the way that one cites another whose thought has become so formative of one’s own that it no longer quite stands out as distinct from one’s own thinking.

I think some of the misunderstandings that attend my early work may arise when on moves too quickly from the theory of gender identity put forth there to a more generalized theory of identity. For instance, you cite for me one popular criticism of GT which worries that my view diminishes our capacity to make ethically relevant distinctions between kinds of identities. This view usually arrives at my door in the following form: Butler makes room for new possibilities of gender, but she fails to give us a criterion by which to distinguish between good and bad possibilities. Surely, Butler does not mean to condone or support the proliferation of all such possibilities, regardless of their ethical content. I think that the only way to answer this question is to take a few steps back and ask the following: under what political conditions does possibility itself emerge as a political good? And the answer to that is: under conditions in which gender has been constrained, in which certain sexual and gender minorities have felt their lives to be “impossible,” unviable, unlivable, then “becoming possible” is a most certain political achievement. GT is, of course, about desiring subjects who either fall outside the heterosexual norm, or operate within it as one set of norms among others, but in “perverse” or illegitimate ways. We are talking about sexual practices and modes of gendering that are deemed unlivable precisely because they defy the tacit and violent presumption that human life only appears as livable under the description of heterosexuality. I worry that those who too quickly abstract from this analysis lose sight of the specific ways that compulsory heterosexuality works the power of foreclosure. And it is only once this is no longer seen that the political valorization of ‘possibility’ becomes confusing or seems in need of an ethical supplement. That lives foreclosed now take themselves to be ‘possible’ strikes me as a political good under conditions in which a certain heightened norm of compulsory heterosexuality works to make non-compliant lives into those which are impossible.

This leads me to your last set of very interesting questions, pertaining to ethics and to ethos. I confess to worrying about the turn to ethics, and have recently written a small essay that voices my ambivalence about this sphere. I tend to think that ethics displaces from politics, and I suppose for me the use of power as a point of departure for a critical analysis is substantially different from an ethical framework. But I do know the use to which you put this term, and I understand that your question is asking me to think about our bearing towards others and ourselves, and how that can take place in a way that fosters generosity, especially within a differentiated field of power.

I do believe that a certain ability to affirm what is contingent and incoherent in identity allows one to affirm others who may or may not ‘mirror’ one’s own constitution, or that the recognition that one is, at every turn, not quite the same as what one thinks that one is, implies in turn a certain patience for others which does not demand that they be who they claim to be at every moment. Suspending the demand for self-identity or, more particularly, for complete coherence, seems to me to counter a certain ethical violence which demands that we manifest self-identity and require that others do the same. For subjects who live in time this will be a hard norm to satisfy. And for subjects who are multiply constituted, and sometimes constituted in ways that are not quite known or knowable, this will be an ethical norm before which one can only fail.

But then the question — we might say ‘post-Kafka’ — is whether a new sense of ethics emerges from that inevitable ethical failure. And I suppose that it does, and that it would center perhaps on a certain willingness to acknowledge the limits of acknowledgment itself, that when we claim to know and present ourselves, we will fail in some ways that are nevertheless essential to who we are, and that we cannot expect anything different from others. This involves, perhaps paradoxically, both a persisting in one’s being (Spinoza) and a certain humility, or a recognition that persistence requires humility, and that humility, when offered to others, becomes generosity. For me, though, an essential part of that generosity involves the suspension of the regime of truth that governs the elaboration and totalization of identities. If the identity we say we are cannot possibly capture us, and marks immediately an excess and opacity which falls outside the terms of identity itself, then

any effort we make ‘to give an account of oneself’ will have to fail in order to approach being true. And as we ask to know the other, or ask that the other say, finally, who he or she is, it will be important that we do not expect an answer that will ever satisfy. And by not pursuing satisfaction, we let the other live, offering a recognition that is not based on knowledge, but on its limits.

William Connolly: Your ambivalent orientation to ethics is moving. It shows us how some traditional models of morality, when folded into a system of differential power, are readily pulled into the service of domination; and it then counters that tendency with an ethical generosity fueled by the paradoxical energies of self-modesty. It indeed fleshes out things articulated perhaps more briefly or indirectly in your recent texts.

I would like to turn now to the nexus between performativity and corporeality. In Excitable Speech: The Politics of the Performative, you show how discursive practices help to constitute selves and the operative norms governing them even as they also provide openings for the creative modification of those selves and norms. You also show how theorists who emphasize the first of these possibilities often tend to overlook the political significance of the second. When you then engage Pierre Bourdieu you criticize his tendency to ignore the transformative potential of discourse, but you also seem to affirm some of his insights.

If one accepts your critique of Bourdieu’s tendency to depreciate the elements of ambiguity and possibility in established contexts, it is intriguing to probe further what it is in his thinking that informs you. Bourdieu wants to show, through the discussion of habitus, how linguistic practices intersect with other dimensions to constitute habitual norms operating below the threshold of intellectual articulation. The result, I take it, is a set of dispositions incorporated into demeanor, gesture, movement and mood that help to set the stage for linguistically mediated performances even as they are marked by them. Here is a statement in which you take issue with Bourdieu after appreciating how habitus operates. You are resisting, or so it could seem, the idea that there are extralinguistic elements at work here as well as linguistic ones:

[I]f one argues that language itself can only act to the extent that it is ‘backed’ by existing social power, then one needs to supply a theory of how it is that social power ‘backs’ language in this way. If language only represents the larger, institutional conditions that give it its force, then what is that relationship of ‘representation’ that accounts for institutions being represented in language? It seems that such a relationship can only be explained through a further theory of language and signification (p. 158).

You are persuasive in objecting to the sufficiency of a representational model of language. And it seems true that there is to date no compelling theory available of how such ‘backing’ occurs. But there is a side of Foucault that may speak to the latter issue without falling into the situational one-dimensionalism of Bourdieu. In “On The Genealogy of Ethics,” Foucault concurs with you on the ambivalence of discursive iteration and reiteration. He then says,

It is not enough to say that the subject is constituted in a symbolic system. It is not just in the play of symbols that the subject is constituted. It is constituted in real practices — historically analyzable practices. There is a technology of the constitution of the self which cuts across symbolic systems while using them.

I don’t like Foucault’s choice of terms here. But I take “real practices” to be things like a cop spreading you out for a search after he has hailed you; an architectural/behavioral regime of prison surveillance that folds the sense of paranoia and self-watchfulness deeply into the brains, muscles and visceral feelings of those under observation; or habits of gesture, posture and walking sometimes ingrained in us by others in similar gender, ethnic, age or class positions. Such disciplines do seem to “cut across symbolic systems while using them.” They install their effects in somatic dispositions and habits of performance. Do you think these effects, as Foucault reads them, close in on the connection between institutional practice and habitus that Bourdieu addresses, while still appreciating the ambiguity and creative possibilities residing in these crossings? To what extent does the linguistic dimension require such supports and supplements to do its work? (I bracket the more judicious phrase “linguistic practice” here to focus on what the other elements in those practices are.) Put another way, what, if anything, does the idea of the performative draw from Bourdieu on habitus and Foucault on technologies that “cut across symbolic systems while using them”? This is a fascinating and, perhaps, treacherous terrain. Your appreciation of Foucault and your theory of performativity make you an excellent person to negotiate it.

The last issue, for this second round, speaks to the same question from another side. It involves Foucault’s exploration of “arts” or “tactics of the self.” It may be that his intense interest in the formation of “disciplinary society” (“the middle Foucault”) eventually called him to explore arts of the self as one way to respond to those disciplines by strategic means (“the later Foucault”). It surely would not be a sufficient way politically, but perhaps a pertinent one. Gilles Deleuze may address a more robust intersubjective version of such arts through his explorations of micropolitics. An art of the self, one might say, involves strategic mixings of word, image, movement, posture, touch and sound to try to alter something in your previous sensibility. Micropolitics applies such strategic mixtures to the ethos of larger constituencies.

What do you make of Foucault’s arts of the self? And, by extension, the micropolitics of Deleuze? How are they bound up with, or differentiated from, the ambiguous power of the performative?

Judith Butler: As always, I appreciate your extremely provocative and generative questions. I’ll try to do my best with them, but I think they lead us, perhaps collectively, to the brink of a problem that we don’t yet know how to think. Let me begin by trying to restate the objection to Bourdieu that I make in Excitable Speech so that we can be clear that I don’t mean to give further support to a representational view of language. What interests me there is that precisely at the moment at which Bourdieu seeks to establish a difference between linguistic and non-linguistic practices, he posits a relationship between them. The latter work to support the former, and so we are prompted to ask: in what does that ‘backing’ or ‘supporting’ consist? That he understands the difference between the two to take place as a relation implies that he knows what this relation is and, further, that the relation is describable. If language registers and represents non-linguistic movements of power, then a relation of representation is set up between language and non-language. And what this means is that a new venue for language, understood as representation, has been established. Rather then diminish the notion of language through counterposing it to its other, he enhances the representational model of language by asserting a relation of representation between language and its other.

The problem with this move is two-fold: in the first instance, the representational model of language and, in this instance, the representational relation between language and its opposite, fails to appreciate the ways in which language forms the object it claims to represent. Thus, the constructive dimension of language is overridden in favor of one that assumes that language remains anterior to the object it represents. Of course, the theory of construction immediately raises the fear of a complete linguisticism, i.e. that the object is nothing but the language by which it is construed. But this kind of linguistic reduction must be resisted. The second problem with the claim that language represents power relations which, in turn, back or support linguistic practice, is that we fail to understand the way that power works through discourse, especially discourses that naturalize and occlude power itself. Again, this is not to claim that power is nothing but discourse, but it is to claim that the one cannot be thought without the other. Indeed, they are not the same, and this very difference conditions the question: what are the ways they are mapped onto one another, and how do they become the vehicle for one another?

Foucault does not help much here when he merely asserts that it is necessary to add to symbolic systems the sphere of practices and of institutions. For now we simply have a list of things to keep in mind, but we do not yet understand the relation among the items on the list: language, discourse, practice, institution. He does, of course, give us several different kinds of formulations for understanding this relation, and I will review some of them below. But first I would like to emphasize that the problem I am thinking about is not simply this: how do we take account of the important workings of power that take place in the form of non-discursive practices and institutional domains, in forms of asceticism or in the panoptical prism. Surely this is important and necessary. But to focus on linguistic practice here and non-linguistic practice there, and to claim that both are important is still not to focus on the relation between them. It is that relation that I think we still do not know how to think. Most of the neo-Marxian models for thinking the relation rely on mimetic notions of representation that fail to account for the constructivist challenge, and some of the constructivist positions fall into a linguisticism that closes the gap which calls to be thought. It will not be easy to say that power backs language when one form that power takes is language. Similarly, it will not be possible to look at non-discursive practices when it turns out that our very way of delimiting and conceptualizing the practice depends on the formative power of a certain conceptual discourse. We are in each of these cases caught in a chiasmic relation, one in which the terms to be related also partake of one another, but do not collapse into one another.

As for the second part of your question, I think that Foucault gives us a way to think power in relation to the arts of self, but that this artistry is not precisely self-generated. It is a complex artistry that cannot happen without the prior operation of norms as they work to condition and form subjects. Indeed, I think that whereas discourse is perhaps the site in the earlier Foucault where the ‘formative’ power is to be found, in the middle to late Foucault, a certain formative power belongs jointly to the operation of the norm and the arts of the self. I think it is important to remember that even here, when the subject of discourse becomes replaced in part by a self (soi) with a more subjective sense, we are not free of power, and the self in question does not simply juggle its own possibilities in a protean way. There is a limitation on the subject enforced by operative norms that becomes the condition of its artistry. And what this means is that the aesthetic and the ethical are not finally dissociable in this domain.

In the introduction to Volume II of The History of Sexuality, we learn that the self forms itself, but it forms itself within a set of formative practices that are characterized as modes of subjectivations. That the range of its possible forms is delimited in advance by such modes of subjectivation does not mean that the self fails to form itself, that the self is fully formed. On the contrary, it is compelled to form itself, but to form itself within forms that are already more or less in place. Or, one might say, it is compelled to form itself within practices that are more or less in place.

Thus, for Foucault, it is not possible to study this moral experience without understanding both the codes and the shifts that happen between and among them, and the modes of subjectivation and the shifts that happen between and among them. Foucault concedes that some kinds of morality are very code-focused, and we might actually read Discipline and Punish as such a morality. In the 13th century, he argues, European morality underwent a strong ‘juridification’ of the code, a form in which the moral code appeared as highly prescriptive. One reason he returns to the Greek and Roman context is to reemphasize the meaning of ethics as a practice of the self.

In conducting this history, he makes clear it is important not to assume a given prescription as a constant, but to ask how, “given the continuity, transfer, or modification of codes, the forms of self-relationship (and the practices of the self that were associated with them) were defined, modified, recast, and diversified” (pp. 31-32). The norm does not dictate the form of artistry that will emerge as a response to the norm, and here there is a contingent, even free, moment. The individual is “urged” to develop an ethical relation to self. And again, the individual is “summoned” to recognize himself as an ethical subject of sexual conduct. But what form will it take?

A subject does not exist who then confronts an ethical law and seeks to make itself compliant with that law. The law enters into the practices of subjectivation that form the context, the modes of possible subjectification, which in turn establish some region of the self as that to be acted on, transformed, and cultivated as the subject becomes an ethical subject. The ethical subject is not presumed, but is itself cultivated by the norm which summons the subject to recognize itself according to the norm. The norm thus makes the subject possible, and it is also the means by which the subject comes to recognize itself as an ethical subject. It is in other words both that toward which I strive and that which gives my striving the particular form that it has.

It would not be quite right to say that Foucault assumes that the subject is reflexive, that it has a specific relation to itself, and that this relation to itself is elaborated in reference to the moral precepts furnished by moral codes. The subject develops this relation to itself only in response to the ‘summons’ delivered to it by an ethical code or norm.

The subject is bound to have some relation to itself, a reflexive relation, but the form that this relation takes will depend fundamentally on the practices of subjectivation within which it is formed.

And that we will not be able to understand the ethical experience if we are not ready to ask what kinds of self-production are made possible by a given set of codes, and how those very codes only achieve a certain kind of meaning once they are understood as embedded in and actualized by these practices of the self.

What becomes interesting here is how discourse reemerges in the midst of this ethical and artistic practice of the self. For it will be the case that the subject seeks to recognize itself in terms of the norms that condition and constrain subjectivation. It comes to interpret itself in light of this norm, and to measure itself against that ideal. And this ideal and norm will be, invariably, discursively elaborated: here is the term, the sign which you must approximate, the one that will allow you to be known, the one that will allow you to know and, indeed, experience yourself as a self. You will be nothing without this sign of the subject that allows you to be, but it would be a mistake to think that therefore you are nothing without this sign. That the code must be approximated and negotiated presumes that it is not fixed or determining, but it does remain the necessary condition for the formation of the subject that follows.

I am sorry not to be able to answer your question about Deleuze. I worry that a certain metaphysical hopefulness takes the place of the analysis of power. So perhaps I will stay here, worrying the relation between power and discourse a bit longer.

William Connolly: In For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, Martha Nussbaum presents (what I would call) a single-entry model of universalism to address cross-cultural relations. She advances a thick conception of the universal to guide judgments and actions across cultures. In that book you respond both by refusing to eschew the universal and by engaging it in a more complex and ambivalent way. Too confident a deployment of universalism can inadvertently devalue, exclude or discipline differences that have not yet been placed on the register of the universal, while a refusal to invoke the universal altogether forfeits a resource minority constituencies need to press ethico-political claims upon dominant constituencies. There are good historical reasons for concern here. Kant’s portrayal of non-Christian cultures in the context of his universalism provides one example of how universalism can foster imperialism in the name of compassion and inclusion. There are numerous others. Nussbaum, however, passed by an opportunity to define the issues and sharpen the options on that occasion. In this section I will pursue the opportunity she forfeited.

Let me review the argument in “Universality in Culture.” You begin by conceding it would be a “great consolation” to “return to a ready-made universal perspective.” But the problem is that “‘the universal’ proves to be culturally variable, and the specific cultural articulations of the universal work against its claim to a transcultural status.” In response to this dilemma you call upon us to appreciate the value of the universal as “a contested term.” For to accept a particular consolidation of the universal as final is to run the risk of further entrenching (as universal) cultural particularities that impose unnecessary suffering upon particular constituencies or upon features of all of us. Conceptions of race, sexuality, gender, morality or religious truth culturally coded into the operative universal at a particular historical moment have often turned out at later moments to appear unjust. What is to be done?

The general idea is to appreciate the possibility that new political movements might seize the language of the universal, put themselves inside it, and through insistent and creative action modify the terms of the universal in surprising ways. The insurgents “set into motion a ‘performative contradiction’: claiming to be covered by that universal, they thereby expose the contradictory character of previous conventional formulations of the universal.” There is a temporal gap between the received reading of the universal prior to insurgency and that reading adopted after an insurgent movement has extended its frontier. So you might be said to adopt a double-entry orientation to the universal to improve upon the single-entry approach adopted by so many moralists. But this double-entry model might be read in two distinct ways. One might say, according to one reading, that the insurgents actually do identify a performative contradiction in the conventional enactment of the operative universal and, partly by the pressure of that exposure, promote the possibility of an expanded futural universal. The language I used in the first paragraph is most consonant with such a reading. Or you might say that they act as if there were such a performative contradiction and through the creativity of their action (and the responsiveness of strategic figures in the majority) eventually add a new element to the operative universal. Let us call the first reading “dialectical” and the second “enactive.” The enactive account is suggested when you speak of a “universality that has not yet arrived, one for which we have no ready concept, one whose articulations will only follow, if they do, from a contestation of universality at its already imagined borders.” But even here, one could try to press the interpretation into a temporal dialectic, by treating the modification of the universal as enactive when the event is taking place and a dialectical logic of historical advance after it has become consolidated.

Do you resist placing your complex thinking about the universal within a dialectical logic? Is there something in your double-entry orientation to the universal that must eschew any conception of logic as sufficient to it? On the other hand, if you do adopt an enactive account, or something close to it, is there something like a “regulative idea” or a protean orientation to be invoked whenever we are actually “in” that indeterminate situation where a constitutive universal is under challenge but a new dimension of the universal has not yet crossed the magical threshold of cultural consolidation? It may be that it is precisely in this open, uncertain moment you identify so effectively that the supplements offered by thinkers such as Nietzsche, Foucault and Arendt are most appropriate and timely. Foucault, for instance, cultivates a “care for that which exists and might exist”; Arendt invokes “love of the world”; and Nietzsche affirms “the abundance of life” over the actual organization of being. You might say that each of these figures bestows a certain respect upon the entitlements enabled by an operative universal — though they differ significantly in their emphases here — but that each also draws creative sustenance from another fugitive resource when they are “in” that uncertain moment in which an aspect of the operative universal is under challenge but the response to the challenge is still in question. One way of reading them is to say that they refuse the comforts of one-dimensional universalism through concern for the unnecessary injuries it may impose below the register of contemporary attentiveness, and that they turn back the (contemporary) charges of “relativism” and “strategic universalism” made against those who adopt such a refusal through appeals to such diffuse, affirmative energies. Two of these figures — Nietzsche and Foucault — may even try to cultivate a distinctive sensibility to increase the probability of a generous and exploratory response when such uncertain moments arise. Anyway, it seems to me that you too resist the reduction of your perspective to the options many single-entry universalists have prescripted for it, such as relativism, nihilism and strategic universalism. Such dismissive representations enable them to defend a simple model of the universal by negation. That is why I am tempted to call them “unconscious strategic universalists.”

Still, the terms of your resistance might be clarified further. Does your presumptive receptivity to new possibilities solicit something beyond the consolidated universal that, nonetheless, does not conform exactly to those solicitations commonly pursued within several religious and dialectical traditions? Does it provide some resources or critical assurance to those who worry that “anything goes” as soon as anyone complicates the universal? If so, is there anything to be said about it? Are Nietzsche, Arendt and Foucault unwise (or superfluous) in invoking dispositional supplements, even in the diffuse ways they do? Are Levinas and Derrida unwise in doing so in their different ways? I read you as the thinker who refines our appreciation of the paradoxical circumstances in which such dispositions become most pertinent.

My pleasure in these exchanges has been enhanced by the fact that they allow me to pose questions to you that perplex me. Let me, then, close with a final quotation from the essay in question, one that speaks to the issues addressed above:

[T]he extension of universality through the act of translation takes place when one is excluded from the universal, and yet belongs to it nevertheless…That translation is not the simple entry of the deauthorized into the authorized, whereby the former term simply alters its status and the latter domain simply makes room for what it has unwittingly failed to accommodate…The kind of translation that exposes the alterity within the norm (an alterity without which the norm would not assume its borders and ‘know’ its limits), exposes the failure of the norm to effect the universal reach for which it stands, exposes what we might underscore as the promising ambivalence of the norm.

Judith Buter: This is a very wide-ranging and important question, and there is no way that I can do justice to its complexity in my response. In fact, its very complexity suggests a number of impasses into which the discourse on universality has fallen. Although I do not believe these impasses are final or even “structural,” I do think they constitute serious sites of intransigence, and I am not sure that I know how best to try and move them.

In the first part of your question, you ask which of two readings of my position I would accept. According to the first, a performative contradicted is identified at the core of the convention of universality. According to the second, the performative contradiction is enacted by those who conjecture a form in which the universal might be rewrought to include them. Perhaps this is an Hegelian impulse, but I would like to take a moment to consider what matters might look like if both readings were true. According to the first, a given conventional formulation of universality is exclusionary: it acts as if it were universal, but the very limits to universality that it presumes and posits give the lie to its substantive claim. Thus, we might say that the conventional formulation of universality in this instance is a conjecture, takes place in the mode of as if, but proves to be substantially false by virtue of the kinds of positions it fails to include within its purview. This insurgent who seeks to identify the performative contradiction or, indeed, to bring it into being identifies precisely this moment in which two forms of spectrality can occur: first, the universality that claims the status of truth turns out to be both conjectural and limited, and so becomes a spectral instance of its own claim. Second, those who fail to be included by the universal are still “subjects,” but they exist in a spectral zone, an ontologically suspended zone, to the extent that they lack authorization as human by the conventions of universality that set limits on that term. What proves promising for critique is that, depending on the perspective by which this situation is viewed, one of the other terms appears as irreal, and so no stability is achieved. One might say that this very vacillation between spectral attributions (universality is irreal or the ‘subjects’ excluded by its terms are irreal) shows the differential distribution of ontologizing effects, and provides a space, an interval, for an intervention that seeks to show the unstable truth at issue in the scene. Those who enact the performative contradiction, weighing in on the side of the excluded, positing their ontological effects, not only deepen the impression of the exclusionary universality’s spectrality, but enact an allegory, as it were, of those performative acts by which ontological effects are achieved within the field of politics.

So, I would answer your very thought-provoking question by suggesting that the performative contradiction is ‘in and of’ the convention of universality at issue, but that it is brought into the fore, even driven into crisis, by the acts which exploit the vacillating ontological effects of the convention and build the ontology of the excluded in the process.

I think it would not make sense for me to say that I resist the dialectics. I do resist the claim that dialectics leads to teleological closure. I believe that much of the French reception of Hegel opened up the possibility of a Hegel without closure. I believe we see this version most eloquently presented in Jean-Luc Nancy’s work, but it can be traced to Hyppolite’s reading of the Logic as well. I suppose I resist as well the notion that the dialectic can only and always rehabilitate binary oppositions. It is necessary to understand how certain oppositions spawn a field of possibilities. But to the extent that field has its limit, and there is an ‘outside’ to that limit, there is a new dialectical problem brewing.

Whatever new dimension of universality emerges from the exposure of the limits of the old will not be a dimension built into universality, part of its inherent plan which is simply waiting for those conditions of crisis that provoke its further unfolding. I think that the forms of what waits ahead are unknowable, and cannot be derived, even retrospectively, from an already established plan. So, in this sense I would insist that what comes of certain dialectical crises is ‘the new,’ a field of possibility which is not the same as an order of possibility. I think many people recoil from this possibility, fearing that the new which is not predictable will lead to a full-scale nihilism. And it is, in a way, a risky moment in politics. What the new form of universality brings will not be necessarily good or desirable, and the politics of judgment will be brought to bear on what arrives. But it is equally true that nothing good or desirable will arrive without the new. The distinction seems to me to be very important.

So how does one live in that risk? You describe the ‘dispositional supplements’ of Nietzsche, Arendt, and Foucault. These are no doubt useful in establishing an orientation toward the universality yet to come. And this orientation is no doubt related to what Foucault called “critique,” which is an art and an attitude that interrogates the limits of what is knowable. I would add: it is an art which interrogates the limits of what is knowable now. Critique, Foucault claims, derives from the Enlightenment and poses the question, “do you know up to what point you can know? Reason as much as you want, but do you really know up to what point you can reason without it becoming dangerous?” And is there any way to think the limits without undergoing that danger? And for a political reflection on the future of universality, is there any way for this question that I have just posed to be anything other than open?

zizek the real is the limit to resignification

how Z. understands JB’s concept of resignification:

… her notion is that since ideological universality (the space of interpellation), in order to reproduce itself and retain its hold, has to rely on its repeated assumption by the subject, this repetition is not only the passive assuming of the same mandate, but opens up the space of re-formation, resignification, displacement — it is possible to resignify/displace the ‘symbolic substance’ which redetermines my identity, but not totally to overhaul it, since a total exit would involve the psychotic loss of my symbolic identity. This resignification can work even in the extreme case of injurious interpellations: they determine me, I cannot get rid of them, they are the condition of my symbolic being/identity; rejecting them tout court would bring about psychosis; but what I can do is resignify/displace them, mockingly assume them: the possibilities of resignification will rework and unsettle the passionate attachment to subjection without which subject-formation — and re-formation — cannot succeed’ (222).

There is however, a limit to this process of resignification, and the Lacanian name for this limit, of course, is precisely the Real. How does this Real operate in language? … this collapse of the distinction between pretending and being is the unmistakable signal that my speech act has touched some Real … hate speech, aggressive humiliation … In such cases, no amount of disguising it with the semblance of a joke or irony can prevent it from having a hurtful effect — we touch the Real when the efficiency of such symbolic markers of distance is suspended.

[I]n so far as we conceive of the politico-ideological resignification in the terms of struggle for hegemony, today’s Real which sets a limit to resignification is Capital: the smooth functioning of Capital is that which remains the same, that which ‘always returns to its place’, in the unconstrained struggle for hegemony.

Is this not demonstrated by the fact that Butler, as well as Laclau, in their criticism of the old ‘essentialist’ Marxism, none the less silently accept a set of premisses: they never question the fundamentals of the capitalist market economy and the liberal-democratic political regime; they never envisage the possiblity of a completely different economico-political regime. In this way, they fully participate in the abandonment of these questions by the ‘postmodern’ Left: all the changes they propose are changes within this economico-political regime (223).

Butler responds:

I think this is a peculiar way to use the notion of the ‘Real’, unless of course he is claiming that ‘Capital’ has become unspeakable within the discourses that Laclau and I use. But if he is saying that ‘Capital’ represents the limit of our discourse: then he is —forgive the ‘logical’ point here — confirming my very theory about the absences that structure discourse, that they are defined in relation to the discourse itself, and that they are not derivable in every instance from an ahistorical ‘bar’ that gives us every historicized field. Setting his use of the Butlerian ‘Real’ aside, however, Zizek makes a good point: that a critique of the market economy is not found in these pages. But he himself does not provide one. Why is this? (277).

My sense is that our work is commonly motivated by a desire for a more radically restructured world, one which would have economic equality and political enfranchisement imagined in much more radical ways than they currently are. The question, though, that remains to be posed for us, I believe, is how we will make the translations between the philosophical commentary on the field of politics and the reimagining of political life.

This is surely the kind of question which will render productive and dynamic the opposition between formalism and historicism, between the ostensibly a priori and the a posteriori. One might reply that any notion of economic equality will rely on a more generalized understanding of equality, and that that is part of what is interrogated by this kind of work. … For what happens to the notion of equality when it becomes economic equality? And what happens to the notion of the future when it becomes an economic future? we ought not simply to ‘plug in’ the economic as the particular field whose conditions of possiblity can be thought out on an a priori level. It my also be that the very sphere of the economic needs to be rethought genealogically. Its separation from the cultural, for instance, by structuralist legacies within anthropology might need to be rethought against those who claim that the very separation of those spheres is a consequence of capital itself (277-278).

Laclau responds:

According to Zizek, capitalism is the Real of present-day societies for it is that which always returns. Now, he knows as well as I do what the Lacanian Real is; so he should also be aware that capitalism cannot be the Lacanian Real. The Lacanian Real is that which resists symbolization, and shows itself only through its disruptive effects. [:) Ž would disagree] But capitalism as a set of institutions, practices, and so on can operate only in so far as it is part of the symbolic order. And if, on top of that one thinks —as Ž does — that capitalism is a self-generated framework proceeding out of an elementary conceptual matrix, it has to be — conceptually — fully graspable and, as a result, a symbolic totality without holes. (The fact that it can cause, like any area of the symbolic, distortitive — and so Real — effects over other areas — does not mean that it is as such, the Real.) But, as Zizek knows, there are no symbolic totalities without holes. In that case, capitalism as such is dislocated by the Real, and it is open to contingent hegemonic retotalizations.
Ergo, it cannot be the fundamentum inconcussum, the framework within which hegemonic struggles take place, because — as a totality — it is itself only the result of partial hegemonic stabilizations. So the totality can never be internally generated, for the interior will be essentially contaminated by an ineradicable exteriority. This means that the Hegelian retroactive reversal of contingency into necessity is a totally inadequate conceptual tool to think the logic of a hegemonic retotalization (291-292).

Žižek Butler 2000 CHU historicism sexual difference

Žižek

[According to Butler] Lacan gets stuck in a negative-transcendental gesture. That is to say: while Butler acknowledges that, for Lacan, the subject never achieves full identity, that the process of subject-formation is always incomplete, condemned to ultimate failure, her criticism is that Lacan elevates the very obstacle that prevents the subject’s complete realization into a transcendental a priori ‘bar’ (of symbolic castration’). So, instead of acknowledging the thorough contingency and openness of the historical process, Lacan posits it under the sign of a fundamental, ahistorical Bar or Prohibition. 108-109

Underlying Butler’s criticism, therefore, is the thesis that Lacanian theory, at least in its predominant ‘orthodox’ form, limits radical historical contingency: it underpins the historical process by evoking some quasi-transcendental limitation, some quasi-transcendental a priori that is not itself caught in the contingent historical process. Lacanian theory thus ultimately leads to the Kantian distinction between some formal a priori framework and its contingent shifting historical examples. She evokes the Lacanian notion of the ‘barred subject’: while she recognizes that this notion implies the constitutive, necessary, unavoidable incompletion and ultimate failure of every process of interpellation, identification, subject-constitution, she none the less claims that Lacan elevates the bar into an ahistorical a priori Prohibition or Limitation which circumscribes every political struggle in advance.

My first, almost automatic reaction to this is: is Butler herself relying here on a silent proto-Kantian distinction between form and content? In so far as she claims that ‘the subject-in-process is incomplete precisely because it is constituted through exclusions that are politically salient, not structurally static’, is not her criticism of Lacan that Lacan ultimately confounds the FORM of exclusion (there will always be exclusions; some form of exclusion is the necessary condition of subjective identity …) with some specific particular specific CONTENT that is excluded? Butler’s reproach to Lacan is thus, rather , that he is not ‘FORMALIST’ enough: his ‘bar’ is too obviously branded by the particular historical content — in an illegitimate short circuit, he elevates into a quasi-transcendental a priori a certain ‘bar’ that emerged only within specific ultimately contingent historical conditions (the Oedipus complex, sexual difference). This is especially clear apropos of sexual difference: Butler reads Lacan’s thesis that sexual difference is ‘real’ as the assertion that it is an ahistorical frozen opposition, fixed as a non-negotiable framework that has no place in hegemonic struggles (109)

I claim that this criticism of Lacan involves a misrepresentation of his position, which here is much closer to Hegel. That is to say the crucial point is that the very FORM, in its universality, is always rooted, like an umbilical cord, in a particular content — not only in the sense of hegemony (universality is never empty; it is always coloured by some particular content), but in the more radical sense that the very FORM of universality emerges through a radical dislocation, through some more radical impossibility or ‘primordial repression’.

The ultimate question is not which particular content hegemonizes the empty universality (and thus, in the struggle for hegemony, excludes other particular contents); the ultimate question is: which specific content has to be excluded so that the very empty form of universality emerges as the ‘battlefield’ for hegemony? (110)

Let us take the notion of ‘democracy’: of course the content of this notion is not predetermined — what ‘democracy’ will mean, what this term will include and what it will exclude (that is, the extent to which and the way women, gays, minorities, non-white races, etc., are included/excluded), is always the result of contingent hegemonic struggle. However, this very open struggle presupposes not some fixed content as its ultimate referent, but ITS VERY TERRAIN, delimited by the ’empty signifiers’ that designates it (‘democracy’ in this case). Of course, in the democratic struggle for hegemony, each position accuses the other of being ‘not really democratic’: for a conservative liberal, social democratic interventionism is already potentially ‘totalitarian’; for a social democrat, the traditional liberal’s neglect of social solidarity is nondemocratic … so each position tries to impose its own logic of inclusion/exclusion, and all these exclusions are ‘politically salient, not structurally static’; in order for this very struggle to take place, however, its TERRAIN must constitute itself by means of a more fundamental exclusion (‘primordial repression’) that is not simply historical-contingent, a stake in the present constellation of the hegemonic struggle, since it SUSTAINS THE VERY TERRAIN OF HISTORICITY. 110

Take the case of sexual difference itself: Lacan’s claim that sexual difference is ‘real-impossible’ is strictly synonymous with his claim that ‘there is no such thing as a sexual relationship’. For Lacan, sexual difference is not a firm set of ‘static’ symbolic oppositions and inclusions/exclusions (heterosexual normativity which relegates homosexuality and other ‘perversions’ to some secondary role), but the name of a deadloc, of a trauma, of an open question, of something that RESISTS every attempt at its symbolization. Every translation of sexual difference into a set of symbolic opposition(s) is doomed to fail, and it is this very ‘impossibility’ that opens up the terrain of the hegemonic struggle for what ‘sexual difference’ will mean. What is barred is NOT what is excluded under the present hegemonic regime.

The political struggle for hegemony whose outcome is contingent, and the ‘non-historical’ bar or impossibility are thus strictly correlative: there is a struggle for hegemony precisely because some preceding ‘bar’ of impossibility sustains the void at stake in the hegemonic struggle. So Lacan is the very opposite of Kantian formalism (if by this we understand the imposition of some formal frame that serves as the a priori of its contingent content): Lacan forces us to make thematic the exclusion of some traumatic ‘content’ that is constitutive of the empty universal form. There is historical space only in so far as this space is sustained by some more radical exclusion (or as Lacan would have it forclusion).

So one should distinguish between two levels

1. the hegemonic struggle for which particular content will hegemonize the empty universal notion;

2. and the more fundamental impossibility that renders the Universal empty, and thus a terrain for hegemonic struggle.

So with regard to the criticism of Kantianism, my answer is that it is Butler and Laclau who are secret Kantians: they both propose an abstract a priori formal model (of hegemony, of gender performativity …) which allows, within its frame, for the full contingency (no guarantee of what the outcome of the fight for hegemony will be, no last reference to the sexual constitution …) they both involve a logic of ‘spurious infinity’: no final resolution, just the endless process of complex partial displacements. Is not Laclau’s theory of hegemony ‘formalist’ in the sense of proffering a certain a priori formal matrix of social space? There will always be some hegemonic empty signifier; it is only its content that shifts … My ultimate point is thus that Kantian formalism and radical historicism are not really opposites, but two sides of the same coin: every version of historicism relies on a minimal ‘ahistorical’ formal framework defining the terrain within which the open and endless game of contingent inclusions/exclusions, substitutions, renegotiations, displacements, and so on, takes place. The truly radical assertion of historical contingency has to include the dialectical tension between the domain of historical change itself and its traumatic ‘ahistorical’ kernel qua its condition of (im)possibility. Here we have the difference between historicity proper and historicism: historicism deals with the endless play of substitutions within the same fundamental field of (im)possibility, while historicity proper makes thematic different structural principles of this very (im)possibility. In other words, the historicist theme of the endless open play of substitutions is the very form of ahistorical ideological closure: by focusing on the simply dyad essentialism-contingency, on the passage from the one to the other, it obfuscates concrete historicity qua the change of the very gloval structuring principle of the Social. 112

Butler Replies:

If Žižek can writes as he does: “the ultimate question is: which specific content has to be excluded so that the very empty form of universality emerges as the “battlefield” for hegemony?” (110), then he can certainly entertain the question: ‘which specific content has to be excluded so that the very empty form of sexual difference emerges as a battlefield for hegemony?”

… who posits the original and final ineffability of sexual difference, and what aims does such a positing achieve? This most unverifiable of concepts is offered as the condition of verifiability itself, and we are faced with a choice between an uncritical theological affirmation or a critical social inquiry: do we accept this description of the fundamental ground of intelligibility, or do we begin to ask what kinds of foreclosures such a positing achieves, and at what expense? (145)

It is supposed to be (quasi-)transcendental, belonging to a ‘level’ other than the social and symbolizable, yet if it grounds and sustains the historical and social formulations of sexual difference, it is their very condition and part of their very definition. Indeed, it is the non-symbolizable condition of symbolizability, according to those who accept this view.

My point, however, is that to be the transcendental condition of possibility for any given formulation of sexual difference is also to be, precisely, the sine qua non of all those formulations, the condition without which they cannot come into intelligibility. The ‘quasi-‘ that precedes the transcendental is meant to ameliorate the harshness of this effect, but it also sidesteps the question: what sense of transcendental is in use here? … it can also mean: the regulatory and constitutive conditions of the appearance of any given object. The latter sense is the one in which the condition is not external to the object it occasions, but is its constitutive condition and the principle of its development and appearance. The transcendental thus offers the criterial conditions that constrain the emergence of the thematizable.

And if this transcendental field is not considered to have a historicity — that is, is not considered to be a shifting episteme which might be altered and revised over time — it is unclear to me what place it can fruitfully have for an account of hegemony that seeks to sustain and promote a more radically democratic formulation of sex and sexual difference (147).

If sexual difference enjoys this quasi-transcendental status, then all the concrete formulations of sexual difference (second-order forms of sexual difference) not only implicitly refer back to the more originary formulation but are, in their very expression, constrained by this non-thematizable normative condition. Thus, sexual difference in the more originary sense operates as a radically incontestable principle or criterion that establishes intelligibility through foreclosure or, indeed, through pathologization or indeed, through active political disenfranchisement. As non-thematizable, it is immune from critical examination, yet it is necessary and essential: a truly felicitous instrument of power. If it is a condition of intelligibility, then there will be certain forms that threaten intelligibility, threaten the possibility of a viable life within the social historical world. Sexual difference thus functions not merely as a ground but as a defining condition that must be instituted and safeguarded against attempts to undermine it (intersexuality, transexuality, lesbian and gay partnership, to name but a few) (148-9).

Precisely because the transcendental does not and cannot keep its separate place as a more fundamental ‘level’, precisely because sexual difference as a transcendental ground must not only take shape within the horizon of intelligibility but structure and limit that horizon as well, it functions actively and normatively to constrain what will and will not count as an intelligible alternative within culture. Thus, as a transcendental claim, sexual difference, should be rigorously opposed by anyone who wants to guard against a theory that would prescribe in advance what kinds of sexual arrangements will and will not be permitted in intelligible culture. The inevitable vacillation between the transcendental and social functioning of the term makes its prescriptive function inevitable (148).

Žižek responds 309

Butler is, of course, aware how Lacan’s il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel means that, precisely, any ‘actual’ sexual relationship is always tainted by failure; however, she interprets this failure as the failure of the contingent historical reality of sexual life fully to actualize the symbolic norm.

Butler says that for Lacanians: sexual difference has a transcendental status even when sexed bodies emerge that do not fit squarely within ideal gender dimorphism.

Žižek alters her statement: sexual difference has a transcendental status because sexed bodies emerge that do not fit squarely within ideal gender dimorphism.

That is to say: far from serving as an implicit symbolic norm that reality can never reach, sexual difference as real/impossible means precisely that there is no such norm: sexual difference is that ‘rock of impossibility’ on which every ‘formalization’ of sexual difference founders.

… This notion of Real also enable me to answer Butler’s criticism that Lacan hypostasizes the ‘big Other’ into a kind of pre-historical transcendental a priori: when Lacan emphatically asserts that ‘there is no big Other [il n’y a pas de grand Autre]’, his point is precisely that there is no a priori formal structural schema exempt from historical contingencies — there are only contingent, fragile, inconsistent configurations. (Furthermore, far from clinging to paternal symbolic authority, the ‘Name-of-the-Father’ is for Lacan a fake, a semblance which conceals this structural inconsistency.)

In other words, the claim that the Real is inherent to the Symbolic is strictly equal to the claim that ‘there is no big Other’: the Lacanian Real is that traumatic ‘bone in the throat’ that contaminates every ideality of the symbolic, rendering it contingent and inconsistent. For this reason, far from being opposed to historicity, the Real is its very ‘ahistorical’ ground, the a priori of historicity itself.

We can thus see how the entire topology changes from Butler’s description of the Real and the ‘big Other’ as the pre-historical a priori to their actual functioning in Lacan’s edifice: in her critical portrait, Butler describes an ideal ‘big Other’ which persists as a norm, although it is never fully actualized, although the contingencies of history thwart its full imposition; while Lacan’s edifice is, rather, centred on the tension between some traumatic ‘particular absolute’, some kernel which resists symbolization, and the ‘competing universalities’ (to use Butler’s appropriate term) that endeavour in vain to symbolize/normalize it.

universality

Butler, Judith. “Restaging the Universal: Hegemony and the Limits of Formalism.” Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. JB, EL and SZ. New York: Verso, 2000. 11-43.

A recent resurgence of Anglo-feminism in the academy has sought to restate the importance of making universal claims about the conditions and rights of women (Okin, Nussbaum) without regard to the prevailing norms in local cultures, and without taking up the task of cultural translation. This effort to override the problem that local cultures pose for international feminism does not understand the parochial character of its own norms, and does not consider the way in which feminism works in full complicity with US colonial aims in imposing its norms of civility through an effacement and a decimation of local Second and Third World cultures. Of course, translation by itself can also working full complicity with the logic of colonial expansion, when translation becomes the instrument through which dominant values are transposed into the language of the subordinated, and the subordinated run the risk of coming to know and understand them as tokens of their “liberation” (35).

The universal announces, as it were, its ‘non-place’, its fundamentally temporal modality, precisely when challenges to its EXISTING formulation emerge from those who are not covered by it, who have no entitlement to occupy the place of the ‘who’, but nevertheless demand that the universal as such ought to be inclusive of them. At stake here is the exclusionary function of certain NORMS of universality which, in a way, transcend the cultural locations from which they emerge. Although they often appear as transcultural or formal criteria by which existing cultural conventions are to be judged, they are precisely cultural conventions which have, through a process of abstraction, come to appear as post-conventional principles. The task, then, is to refer these formal conceptions of universality back to the contaminating trace of their ‘content’, to eschew the form/content distinction as it furthers that ideological obfuscation, and to consider the cultural form that this struggle over the meaning and scope of norms takes (39).

When one has no right to speak under the auspicies of the universal, and speaks none the less, laying claim to universal rights, and doing so in a way that preserves the particularity of one’s struggle, one speaks in a way that may be readily dismissed as nonsensical or impossible. When we hear about ‘lesbian and gay human rights’, or even ‘women’s human rights’, we are confronted with a strange neighbouring of the universal and the particular which neither synthesizes the two, nor keeps them apart. The nouns function adjectivally, and although they are identities and grammatical ‘substances’, they are also in the act of qualifying and being qualified by one another. Clearly, however, the ‘human’ as previously defined has not readily included lesbians, gays and women, and the current mobilization seeks to expose the conventional limitations of the human, the terms that sets the limits on the universal reach of international law. But the exclusionary character of those conventional norms of universality does not preclude further recourse to the term, although it does mean entering into that situation in which the conventional meaning becomes unconventional (or catachrestic). This does not mean that we have a priori recourse to a truer criterion of universality.

It does suggest, however, that conventional and exclusionary norms of universality can, through perverse reiterations, produce unconventional formulations of universality that expose the limited and exclusionary features of the former one at the same time that they mobilize a new set of demands (40).

Antigone pt. 3 promiscuous obedience

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

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

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

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

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

The Curse of Kinship

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

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

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

Antigone ch. 3

JB. “Promiscuous Obedience” (1998) The Judith Butler Reader 2003, pp. 278-301. originally appeared as Chapter 3 in Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death. 2000 (This blog post was originally published Jan 23/09)

Is structuralist kinship the curse that is upon contemporary critical theory as it tries to approach the question of sexual normativity, sociality, and the status of law? And, moreover, if we are seized by this inheritance, is there a way to transmit that curse in aberrant form, exposing its fragility and fracture in the repetition and reinstitution of its terms? Is this breaking from the law that takes place in the reinstituting of the law the condition for articulating a future kinship that exceeds structuralist totality, a poststructuralism of kinship.

Incest taboo: prohibit sexual exchange among kin relations or rather, to establish kin relations precisely on the basis of those taboos.

The Antigonean revision of psychoanalytic theory might put into question the assumption that the incest taboo legitimates and normalizes kinship based in biological reproduction and the heterosexualization of the family (286).

From the presumption that one cannot — or ought not to — choose one’s closest family members as one’s lovers and marital partners, it does not follow that the bonds of kinship that are possible assume any particular form (286).

Tada: Now here is what drives me nuts about JB, trying to disentangle phrases like the following, yet I know, this is also her absolute, impeccable genius:

To the extent that the incest taboo contains its infraction within itself, it does not simply prohibit incest but rather sustains and cultivates incest as a necessary specter of social dissolution, a specter without which social bonds cannot emerge … one that works precisely through proliferating through displacement the very crime that it bars. The taboo, and its threatening figuration of incest, delineates lines of kinship that harbor incest as their ownmost possibility, establishing “aberration” at the heart of the norm. Indeed, my question is whether it can also become the basis for a socially survivable aberration of kinship in which the norms that govern legitimate and illegitimate modes of kin association might be more radically redrawn (286) (Antigone’s Claim: 67).

[…] other forms of social life, inadvertent possibilities produced by the prohibition that come to undermine the conclusion that an invariant social organization of sexuality follows of necessity from the prohibitive law. What happens when the perverse or the impossible emerges in the language of the law and makes its claim precisely there in the sphere of legitimate kinship that depends on its exclusion or pathologization?

For a woman who is a single mother and has her child without a man, is the father still there, a spectral “position” or “place” that remains unfilled, or is there no such “place” or “position”? Is the father absent, or does this child have no father, no position, and no inhabitant. Is this a loss, which assumes the unfulfilled norm, or is it another configuration of primary attachment whose primary loss is not to have a language in which to articulate its terms? And when there are two men or two women who parent, are we to assume that some primary division of gendered roles organizes their psychic places within the scene, so that the empirical contingency of two same gendered parents is nevertheless straightened out by the presocial psychic place of the Mother and Father into which they enter? Does it make sense on these occasions to insist that there are symbolic positions of Mother and Father that every psyche must accept regardless of the social form that kinship takes? Or is that a way of reinstating a heterosexual organization of parenting at the psychic level that can accommodate all manner of gender variation at the social level? Here it seems that the very division between the psychic or symbolic, on the one hand, and the social, on the other, occasions this preemptory normalization of the social field (288) (AC: 69)

The question, however, is whether the incest taboo has also been mobilized to establish certain forms of kinship as the only intelligible and livable ones (288).

Consider the horror of incest, the moral revulsion it compels in some, is not that far afield from the same horror and revulsion felt toward lesbian and gay sex, and is not unrelated to the intense moral condemnation of voluntary single parenting, or gay parenting, or parenting arrangements with more than two adults involved (practices that can be used as evidence to support a claim to remove a child from the custody of the parent in several states in the United States).

These various modes in which the oedipal mandate fails to produce normative family all risk entering into the metonymy of that moralized sexual horror that is perhaps most fundamentally associated with incest (289).

What in her [Antigone’s] act is fatal for heterosexuality in its normative sense? And to what other ways of organizing sexuality might a consideration of that fatality give rise? (290)

In the 1970s socialist feminists sought to make use of the unwaveringly social analysis of kinship to show that there is no ultimate basis for normative heterosexual monogamous family structure in nature, and we might now add that it has no similar basis in language (290).

Lacanian Formalists: insist on fundamental notions of sexual difference, which are based on rules that prohibit and regulate sexual exchange, rules we can break only to find ourselves ordered by them anew.

The subsequent turn to Lacan seemed to be a turn away from a highly constructivist and malleable account of social law informing matters of sexual regulation to one that posits a presocial law, what Juliet Mitchell once called a “primordial law” (something she no longer does), the law of the Father, which sets limits upon the the variability of social forms and which in its most conservative form, mandates an exogamic, heterosexual conclusion to the oedipal drama. That this constraint is understood to be beyond social alteration, indeed, to constitute the condition and limit of all social alterations, indicates something of the theological status it has assumed. And though this position often is quick to claim that although there is a normative conclusion for the oedipal drama, the norm cannot exist without perversion, and only through perversion can the norm be established. We are all supposed to be satisfied with this apparently generous gesture by which the perverse is announced to be essential to the norm. The problem as I see it is that the perverse remains entombed precisely there, as the essential and negative feature of the norm, and the relation between the two remains static, giving way to no rearticulation of the norm itself (Butler, AC: 75).

[…] Antigone, who concludes the oedipal drama, fails to produce heterosexual closure for that drama, and that this may intimate the direction for a psychoanalytic theory that takes Antigone as its point of departure. Certainly, she does not achieve another sexuality, one that is NOT heterosexuality, but she does seem to deinstitute heterosexuality by refusing to do what is necessary to stay alive for Haemon, by refusing to become a mother and a wife, by scandalizing the public with her wavering gender, by embracing death as her bridal chamber and identifying her tomb as a “deep dug home”. If the love toward which she moves as she moves toward death is a love for her brother and thus, ambiguously, her father, it is also a love that can only be consummated by its obliteration, which is no consummation at all.

When the incest taboo works in this sense to foreclose a love that is not incestuous, what is produced is a shadowy realm of love, a love that persists in spite of its foreclosure in an ontologically suspended mode. What emerges is a melancholia that attends living and loving outside the livable and outside the field of love, where the lack of institutional sanction forces language into perpetual catachresis, showing not only how a term can continue to signify outside its conventional constraints but also how that shadowy form of signification takes its toll on a life by depriving it of its sense of ontological certainty and durability within a publicly constitute political sphere (294).

To accept those norms as coextensive with cultural intelligibility is to accept a doctrine that becomes the very instrument by which this melancholia is produced and reproduced at a cultural level. And it is overcome, in part, precisely through the repeated scandal by which the unspeakable nevertheless makes itself heard through borrowing and exploiting the very terms that are meant to enforce its silence (294-5).

If she is human, then the human has entered into catachresis: we no longer know its proper usage. And to the extent that she occupies the language that can never belong to her, she functions as a chiasm [crossing over] within the vocabulary of political norms. If kinship is the precondition of the human, then Antigone is the occasion for a new field of the human, achieved through political catachresis, the one that happens when the less than human speaks as human, when gender is displaced, and kinship founders on its own founding laws (297).

Antigone ch. 2 Lacan kinship

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

Does Antigone’s death signal a necessary lesson about the limits of cultural intelligibility, the limits of intelligible kinship, one that restores us to our proper sense of limit and constraint? Does Antigone’s death signal the supersession of kinship by the state, the necessary subordination of the former to the latter? Or is her death precisely a limit that requires to be read as that operation of political power that forecloses what forms of kinship will be intelligible, what kinds of lives can be countenanced as living?

In Lacan, kinship, as a function of the symbolic, becomes rigorously dissociated from the sphere of the social, and yet it constitutes the structural field of intelligibility within which the social emerges. My reading of Antigone, in brief, will attempt to compel these distinctions into productive crisis.

Antigone represents neither kinship nor its radical outside but becomes the occasion for a reading of a structurally constrained notion of kinship in terms of its social iterability, the aberrant temporality of the norm (Butler, Antigone: 29).

kinship as symbolic

To recast positions of kinship as “symbolic” is precisely to posit them as preconditions of linguistic communicability and to suggest that these “positions” bear an intractability that does not apply to contingent social norms. It is, however, not enough to trace the effects of social norms on the thinking of kinship, a move that would return the discourse on kinship to a sociologism devoid of psychic significance. Norms do not unilaterally act upon the psyche; rather, they become condensed as the figure of the law to which the psyche returns.

The psychic relation to social norms can, under certain conditions, posit those norms as intractable, punitive, and eternal, but that figuration of norms already takes place within what Freud called “the culture of the death drive.”

In other words, the very description of the symbolic as intractable law takes place within a fantasy of law as insurpassable authority. In my view, Lacan at once analyzes and symptomizes this fantasy. I hope to suggest that the notion of the symbolic is limited by the description of its own transcendentalizing function, that it can acknowledge the contingency of its own structure only by disavowing the possibility of any substantial alteration in its field of operation. My suggestion will be that the relation between symbolic position and social norm needs to be rethought, and in my final chapter, I hope to show how one might reapproach the kinship-founding function of the incest taboo within psychoanalysis with a conception of a contingent social norm at work (Butler Antigone: 30).

Here I am less interested in what the taboo constrains than the forms of kinship to which it gives rise and how their legitimacy is established precisely as the normalized solutions to the oedipal crisis.

The point, then, is not to unleash incest from its constraints but to ask what forms of normative kinship are understood to proceed as structural necessities from that taboo.

sub specie aeternitatis: In its essential or universal form or nature

prounce it like this

melancholy

(Salih 2002. p 131-3).
Like Gender Trouble, Bodies That Matter, and Excitable Speech, The Psychic Life of Power argues that prohibition and repression are constitutive of identity, and Butler specifies that what is being repressed is not just desire in general but homosexual desire (or homosexual cathexis) in particular. As in Gender Trouble, Butler asserts that gender is not a given but a process, masculinity and femininity are ‘accomplishments’, while heterosexuality is an ‘achievement’ (PLP: 132, 135). Now Butler asks how these processes, accomplishments and achievements come about, at what cost to the subject and to other subjects who may be oppressed and negated in the process.

In order to achieve a coherent heterosexual identity something has to be given up and, as before, what is relinquished is the primary homosexual cathexis that characterizes the pre-oedipal id (see Chapter 2, pp. 54– 6). Prohibition, repudiation and loss form the basis of heterosexual ego formation, and both heterosexuals and homosexuals live in a heterosexual culture of gender melancholy where the loss of primary homosexual attachments may not be grieved (PLP: 139). Grief is not just a metaphor in Psychic and Butler draws out the parallels between Freud’s descriptions of psychic loss in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ and a contemporary heterosexual culture in which lost homosexual attachments may only be mourned with difficulty (PLP: 138). Butler regards this cultural inability as symptomatic of the lack of a public forum and language with which to mourn ‘the seemingly endless number of deaths’ from ‘the ravages of AIDS’ (PLP: 138). Although this is a poignant argument, the elision of metaphorical and real mourning might be taken to imply that the heterosexual subject is aware of what she or he has ‘lost’ but is unable or unwilling to acknowledge and declare it. All the same, Butler is developing one of Gender Trouble’s most powerful contentions – that heterosexuality emerges from a repudiated homosexuality that is preserved in the very structure of that repudiation. Abjected homosexual cathexes do not simply disappear, and both Excitable Speech and earlier chapters of The Psychic Life of Power have prepared the ground for Butler’s assertion that repudiation and prohibition actually require homosexuality in order to constitute themselves. Far from obliterating homosexuality, it is sustained by the very structures that prohibit it. ‘[H]omosexuality is not abolished but preserved, though preserved precisely in the prohibition on homosexuality’, Butler insists (PLP: 142). [R]enunciation requires the very homosexuality that it condemns, not as its external object, but as its own most treasured source of sustenance. The act of renouncing homosexuality thus paradoxically strengthens homosexuality, but it strengthens homosexuality precisely as the power of renunciation. (PLP: 143) Butler’s situating of homosexuality at the heart of a homophobic and ‘homosexually panicked’ culture is of obvious political significance, as what is considered abject and unacceptable is posited as the source of heterosexual identity (although of course Butler does not formulate the idea in terms of ‘sources’). Gender identity is ‘acquired’ through the repudiation of homosexual attachments, and the abjected same-sex object of desire is installed in the ego as a melancholic identification, so that I can only be a woman to the extent that I have desired a woman, and I can only be a man to the extent that I have desired a man. Because heterosexual identity is founded on prohibited desire for members of the same sex, to desire a member of the same sex as an adult is to ‘panic’ gender or, in other words, to place an apparently coherent and stable heterosexual identity at risk by revealing that it is in fact far from stable or coherent (PLP: 136). The heterosexual subject’s homosexual desire is sublimated rather than destroyed, while disavowal and repudiation structure the ‘performance’ of gender. Performative gender was discussed in Chapter 3, and in Psychic Butler seems to conflate performativity, performance and psychotherapy as she argues that what is ‘acted out’ in these ‘gender performances’ is the unresolved grief of repudiated homosexuality (PLP: 146). As in Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, Butler focuses on ‘cross-gendered identification’, or drag, as a paradigm for thinking about homosexuality, since drag is an allegory of heterosexual melancholy in which the (male) drag performer takes on the feminine gender he has repudiated as a possible object of love. Extending this paradigm to gender identity in general, Butler asserts that ‘the “truest” lesbian melancholic is the strictly straight woman, and the “truest” gay male melancholic is the strictly straight man’ (PLP: 146– 7). In other words, heightened or exaggerated ‘straight’ identity is symptomatic of repudiated homosexual desire in a culture of heterosexual melancholy, where repudiated desires ‘return’ as what Butler calls ‘hyperbolic identifications’ (PLP: 147). The homosexual melancholic may be characterized by a different kind of loss, this time not a psychic one, but the real loss of people who have died from Aids and who remain ungrieved in a heterosexist, anti-gay culture that does not permit the mourning of these deaths. Homosexual identities may also be founded on a refused heterosexual cathexis that resembles heterosexual melancholia, but, although Butler asserts the political promise of what she calls ‘gay melancholia’ (PLP: 147), she also argues that refused heterosexual cathexis may leave heterosexuality intact by missing the opportunity to expose its weaknesses and fissures (PLP: 148). Butler accordingly affirms the political potential of acknowledging melancholy and loss by giving up all claims to ontological coherence and embracing, rather than repudiating, sexed and gendered ‘alterity’

(Salih 2002. p 133-4)
AFFIRMATIVE MELANCHOLIA

Previous chapters have emphasized the importance of melancholia to Butler’s theories, and the idea is similarly central to Psychic, where it is argued that melancholia initiates representation as well as constituting a means of representation in itself. Without loss and the resulting melancholia there would be no need for the metaphorical description of the ego in psychoanalytic theory, since it is melancholia that both necessitates and facilitates that description. Moreover, melancholia and, for that matter, the ego, are tropes that are rendered in topographical terms – in other words, the metaphors used by psychoanalysts to represent the ego and melancholia are spatial. The most prominent among these tropes is that of the the ego turning against itself, and Butler argues that the turn precipitated by loss and the ensuing melancholia are constitutive of an an ego that does not exist prior to the turn (PLP: 171).

It is loss that necessitates the description of the psychic ‘landscape’, since, if the ego were not ‘impaired’ in this way, there would be no need for psychoanalytic theory and its metaphorical renditions of psychic life.

Melancholia initiates psychic life and, by exceeding the power structures in which subjects are formed, it presents the possibility for subversion and agency. At least part of this ‘excess’ is ontological, since the melancholic subject is neither self-identical nor singular. In ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ the ego takes itself as an object and directs its violent anger against itself, an action that has characterized the accounts of the ego Butler has discussed. Now Butler argues that melancholia is cultivated by the state and internalized by citizens who are not aware of their relationship to an authority that conceals itself. And yet, even though it would seem that melancholia is an effect of power, there are ways of deploying the subject’s self-violence and constitutive melancholia to subversive ends.

‘Bhabha argues that melancholia is not a form of passivity, but a form of revolt that takes place through repetition and metonymy’, Butler states, referring to the postcolonial critic Homi Bhabha. Following Bhabha’s insight she asserts that aggressive melancholia can be ‘marshalled’ in the service of mourning and of life by killing off the critical agency or superego and turning the ego’s ‘turned back’ aggression outwards (PLP: 190– 1). There are forms of melancholia that do not involve the violent self-beratement described by Hegel, Nietzsche and so on, and Butler argues that acknowledging the trace of loss that inaugurates the subject’s emergence will lead to its psychic survival.

Following Derrida, Butler insists that recognizing one’s constitutive melancholia will involve accepting one’s Otherness, since melancholia is a process in which the other is installed as an identification in the ego (PLP: 195– 6). The notion of ontological autonomy must therefore be given up as a fiction. ‘To claim life . . . is to contest the righteous psyche, not by an act of will, but by submission to a sociality and linguistic life that makes such acts possible, one that exceeds the bounds of the ego and its “autonomy”’, writes Butler; ‘to persist in one’s being means to be given over from the start to social terms that are never fully one’s own’ (PLP: 197).

This echoes Butler’s contention in Excitable Speech that the subject is constituted by interpellatives it did not choose, and in the concluding pages of Psychic Butler reiterates her point that interpellation works by failing, since it never fully constitutes the subject it ‘hails’. All the same, the subject’s relationship to interpellation and power remains ambivalent, since the ‘call’ of the law brings the subject into being by subjecting it. The ambivalent Self marked by loss is tenuous at best, but agency lies in giving up any claim to coherence or self-identity by submitting to interpellation and subversively misrecognizing the terms by which we are hailed. Such refusals and misrecognitions take place within the power structures that subject and control us, and this might lead us to question how far submission is a means of agency and whether it is possible to recognize it as such. Butler has returned to these questions in recent discussions of mourning, melancholia and the ontological risks of self-incoherence in her two lectures, ‘What Is Critique?’ and Antigone’s Claim, along with the co-authored book Contingency, Hegemony, Universality.

SUMMARY
In The Psychic Life of Power Butler deploys psychoanalytic, Foucauldian and Althusserian theoretical paradigms (among others) to discuss the subject’s relation to power. The subject is passionately attached to the law that both subjects and constitutes it, and it exists in an ambivalent relation to power structures that it desires rather than not desiring at all. Butler criticizes Foucault for leaving the psyche out of his accounts of power, the soul and the body, and she asserts that there is potential for subversive excess in a psyche that is never fully determined by the laws that subject it. Furthermore, the interpellative ‘calls’ of the law described by Althusser need not be sovereign or effective, and Butler discerns further potential for subversion in the failure of these performatives. If it is acknowledged, melancholia itself may be the occasion for affirmation and subversion and, although Butler once again characterizes sexed/gendered identities as arising from primary loss or foreclosure, she argues that acknowledging the trace of the Other is the only way the subject will become anything at all. Agency lies in giving up any claim to self coherence, while risking one’s ontological status may constitute a means of successful revolt (Salih 2002. p 135).

(Salih 2002. p 131-4).

resignifications

(Salih 2002. p 114).
… can a single speaker wrest a term such as ‘lesbian’ from its prior contexts in order to make it signify in unexpectedly ‘innocent’ ways? If there is no doer behind the deed, then what sort of an agent will effect such a recontextualization, and must resignifications be recognized as such? Furthermore, if resignifications take place within discourse and the law, then how do we know that they are not themselves the products of the law? (Salih 2002. p 114).

If there is no prior subject, no doer behind the deed, then who or what is it that effects the kind of linguistic and semantic reallocations that Butler exemplifies in the interview quoted above? Would it be possible for me as a ‘subject-effect’ to make the autonomous and unilateral decision that ‘lesbian’ is now an affirmative term, particularly if my interlocutor is not in agreement with me? It is entirely possible that the ‘kid’ left her or his brief encounter with Butler with an unaltered view of the term ‘lesbian’ and those who identify as lesbians, and it could be argued that how we judge the efficacy of Butler’s appropriative strategy depends at least in part on the kid’s response. In that case, it would seem that, even if contexts are not binding, semantic consensus is still important in the successful redeployment of performatives.

We may accept with Derrida and Butler that sign and referent are not intrinsically connected, but in spite of this arbitrary link it is still not clear how it is possible to rematch signs with alternative referents. Just as Austin’s man on the waterfront cannot come along and name a ship Mr Stalin once it has been named something else, speakers cannot single-handedly alter the meaning of signs.

If Butler uses the term ‘lesbian’ in one way, and the Berkeley kid still understands it in another, what exactly has been achieved? According to Butler’s own reading of Althusser, the Berkeley kid might continue to ‘call’ Butler a lesbian in a way that is wounding and insulting, and even though Butler may not choose to recognize herself in the interpellation, the call of the kid will still have the performative force to subject and subjectivate Butler (Salih. 2002. p 115).

Excitable Speech does not provide a clear idea of how interpellatives may be replayed or their meanings altered. Butler accepts that words cannot be metaphorically purified of their historicity, even though she celebrates what she calls ‘the vulnerability of sullied terms to unexpected innocence’. However, she gives little sense of exactly how sullied terms may be made ‘innocent’ again, and indeed she herself seems reluctant to deploy such terms in Excitable Speech: whereas the word ‘queer’ has been widely appropriated so that in many contexts it is no longer a term of abuse, there is a question mark over ‘nigger’, which is still a verbal insult when used in certain contexts by certain speakers. Butler’s reluctance to resignify this term (which is used only once in Excitable Speech) may be symptomatic of her hesitation as to whether words do wound and her uncertainty as to how radical resignifications are effected. In that case, it would be possible to describe Excitable Speech itself as a failed performative since ultimately it does not enact the theory it describes. A further question, already raised, is whether we want to effect the appropriations and resignifications Butler advocates, since these acts, which might look subversive on the surface, may be no more than the effects of power. Why should we retain or remain attached to the terms that subordinate us, and how will it be possible to distinguish subversive repetitions from repetitions that merely strengthen existing power structures? The question of the subject’s attachment to subjection is the focus of The Psychic Life of Power, published in the same year as Excitable Speech, in which Butler returns to the issues of subjection, subjectivation and self-subjection in response to the call of the law (Salih 2002. p 116).

Does language enact what it names? Do words wound? Is threatening someone or talking about hitting them the same as actually doing so? Should representing sex or talking about sex/sexuality be construed as ‘sexual conduct’? Who decides whether representations are ‘obscene’ or ‘pornographic’, and should such representations be censored? These are some of the questions posed in Excitable Speech, where once again Foucault, Althusser, Austin and Derrida provide the theoretical frameworks for Butler’s analyses of language and the subject. In Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter the subject was characterized as a performative entity, but in Excitable Speech Butler argues that language is not necessarily (or indeed ever) an effective performative; in other words, it does not always enact what it names. Moreover, if we accept that the subject comes after rather than before the deed (an argument put forward in Gender Trouble and Bodies and reiterated here), then it will be difficult to ascertain who or what to prosecute in cases of hate speech or ‘obscenity’/‘pornography’. Butler is also concerned by the extent to which legal institutions are implicated in producing and circulating the ‘violent’/‘obscene’/‘pornographic’ representations they apparently aim to censor. If we accept Nietzsche’s formulation that there is no doer behind the deed, it may be difficult to see what agent or subject will bring about the semantic and linguistic changes Butler describes as necessary to the linguistic future of certain marginalized or oppressed communities. Furthermore, the idea that sullied terms are vulnerable to innocence is paradoxical, and Butler herself concedes that prior histories are significant in determining the meaning of signs. It is also not always clear as to why sullied terms should be appropriated, since such a practice may engage the subject in acts of self-subjection that effectively strengthen discourse and the law: self-subjection and the subject’s attachment to the law are dealt with in The Psychic Life of Power (Salih 2002. p 117).

interpellation

(Salih 2002. p 88-89)

To claim, as Butler does, that sex is always (‘to some degree’) performative is to claim that bodies are never merely described, they are always constituted in the act of description. When the doctor or nurse declares ‘It’s a girl/boy!’, they are not simply reporting on what they see (this would be a constative utterance), they are actually assigning a sex and a gender to a body that can have no existence outside discourse. In other words, the statement ‘It’s a girl/boy!’ is performative. Butler returns to the birth/ultrasound scene in the final chapter of Bodies, ‘Critically Queer’, where, as before, she argues that discourse precedes and constitutes the ‘I’, i.e. the subject: To the extent that the naming of the ‘girl’ is transitive, that is, initiates the process by which a certain ‘girling’ is compelled, the term or, rather, its symbolic power, governs the formation of a corporeally enacted femininity that never fully approximates the norm. This is a ‘girl’, however, who is compelled to ‘cite’ the norm in order to qualify and remain a viable subject. Femininity is thus not the product of a choice, but the forcible citation of a norm, one whose complex historicity is indissociable from relations of discipline, regulation, punishment. (BTM: 232) ‘It’s a girl!’ is not a statement of fact but an interpellation that initiates the process of ‘girling’, a process based on perceived and imposed differences between men and women, differences that are far from ‘natural’. To demonstrate the performative operations of interpellation, Butler cites a cartoon strip in which an infant is assigned its place in the sex– gender system with the exclamation ‘It’s a lesbian!’. ‘Far from an essentialist joke, the queer appropriation of the performative mimes and exposes both the binding power of the heterosexualizing law and its expropriability’, writes Butler (BTM: 232; her emphasis). We will return to expropriability and citation shortly; here the point to note is that, since sexual and gendered differences are performatively installed by and in discourse, it would be possible to designate or confer identity on the basis of an alternative set of discursively constituted attributes.

Clearly, to announce that an infant is a lesbian is not a neutral act of description but a performative statement that interpellates the infant as such. ‘It’s a girl!’ functions in exactly the same way: it is a performative utterance that henceforth compels the ‘girl’ to cite both sexual and gendered norms in order to qualify for subjecthood within the heterosexual matrix that ‘hails’ her (Salih 2002. p 88-89).

8) “It’s a girl!” and “It’s a lesbian” Are these really equivalent?

implicated yet enabled

(Salih 2002. p 79)
To theorize sex in terms of interpellation as Butler does is to imply that one’s body parts (particularly penis and vagina) are not simply and naturally ‘there’ from birth onwards, but that one’s sex is performatively constituted when one’s body is categorized as either ‘male’ or ‘female’ … Butler spends some time considering how subject positions are assumed in response to what she calls the ‘reprimand’ of the law – i.e. the policeman’s call. Unlike Althusser, who regards this hailing as ‘a unilateral act’, Butler argues that interpellation is not ‘a simple performative’, in other words, it does not always effectively enact what it names, and it is possible for the subject to respond to the law in ways that undermine it. Indeed, the law itself provides the conditions for its own subversion (BTM: 122). Butler recognizes that acts of disobedience must always take place within the law using the terms that constitute us: we have to respond to the policeman’s call otherwise we would have no subject status, but the subject status we necessarily embrace constitutes what Butler (borrowing from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak) calls ‘an enabling violation’. The subject or ‘I’ who opposes its construction draws from that construction and derives agency by being implicated in the very power structures it seeks to oppose. Subjects are always implicated in the relations of power but, since they are also enabled by them, they are not merely subordinated to the law (BTM: 122– 3) (Salih 2002. p 79).

If one is ‘hailed’ into sex rather than simply born a ‘woman’, then it must be possible to take up one’s sex in ways which undermine heterosexual hegemony, where hegemony refers to the power structures within which subjects are constituted through ideological, rather than physical, coercion … A girl is not born a girl, but she is ‘girled’, to use Butler’s coinage, at or before birth on the basis of whether she possesses a penis or a vagina. This is an arbitrary distinction, and Butler will argue that sexed body parts are invested with significance, so it would follow that infants could just as well be differentiated from each other on the basis of other parts – the size of their ear lobes, the colour of their eyes, the flexibility of their tongues. Far from being neutral, the perception and description of the body (‘It’s a girl!’, etc.) is an interpellative performative statement, and the language that seems merely to describe the body actually constitutes it. Again, Butler is not refuting the ‘existence’ of matter, but she insists that matter can have no status outside a discourse that is always constitutive, always interpellative, always performative. We will return to the perceived body – what you could call a phenomenology of body parts – later when we consider Butler’s discussions of the psychoanalyst, Lacan (Salih 2002. p 80).