interpellation

stavrakakis yes men 6

Stavrakakis, Yannis. Subjectivity and the Organized Other: Between Symbolic Authority and Fantasmatic Enjoyment Organization Studies 2008 29: 1037

Very often, however, experiencing such alienation is not enough to effect a lessening of the bonds attaching us to the socio-symbolic Other. In other words, subjects are willing to do whatever may be necessary in order to repress or disavow the lack in the Other.

This insight is crucial in understanding power relations. Moving beyond the banal level of raw coercion, which (although not unimportant) cannot form the basis of sustainable hegemony, everyone seeking to understand how certain power structures manage to institute themselves as objects of long-term identification and how people get attached to them is sooner or later led to a variety of phenomena associated with what, since de la Boetie, has been called ‘voluntary servitude’. The central question here is simple:

Why are people so willing and often enthusiastic — or at least relieved — to submit themselves to conditions of subordination, to the forces of hierarchical order? Why are they so keen to comply with the commands of authority often irrespective of their content?

The famous words of Rousseau from the second chapter of The Social Contract are heard echoing here: ‘A slave in fetters loses everything — even the desire to be freed from them. He grows to love his slavery …’ Obviously, the Oedipal structure implicit in the social ordering of our societies, the role of what Lacan calls ‘the Name-of-the-Father’ in structuring reality through the (castrating) imposition of the Law, predisposes social subjects to accept and obey what seems to be emanating from the big Other, from socially sedimented points of reference invested with the gloss of authority and presented as embodying and sustaining the symbolic order, organizing (subjective and objective) reality. This central Freudian-Lacanian insight can indeed explain a lot. And this can be very well demonstrated through some empirical examples.

Consider, for instance, the story of The Yes Men, two anti-corporate activistpranksters who have set up a fake ‘World Trade Organisation’ website. Believing that the site is the official WTO site, many visitors have sent them speaking invitations addressed to the real WTO. Mike and Andy decided to accept some of the invitations and soon started attending business meetings and conferences throughout the world as WTO representatives. Although intending to shock and ridicule they soon discovered that their ludicrous interventions generated other types of reaction. This is how they describe their experience themselves:

Neither Andy nor Mike studied economics at school. We know very little about the subject, and we won’t attempt to convince you otherwise; if you are of sound mind, you would see through us immediately. Yet, to our surprise, at every meeting we addressed, we found we had absolutely no trouble fooling the experts — those same experts who are ramming the panaceas of ‘free trade’ and ‘globalization’ down the throats of the world’s population. Worse: we couldn’t get them to disbelieve us.

Some of our presentations were based on official theories and policies, but presented with far more candour than usual, making them look like the absurdities that they actually are. At other times we simply ranted nonsensically. Each time, we expected to be jailed, kicked out, silenced, or at the very least interrupted. But no one batted an eye. In fact, they applauded. (The Yes Men 2005)

Simply put, people seem to be ready to accept anything insofar as it is perceived to be transmitted from a source invested with authority: for businessmen and many academics the WTO is obviously such a source. In other words, the content of a message is not as important as the source from which it emanates. Likewise, the subject’s autonomy in filtering and consciously managing its beliefs seems to be undermined by a dependence on symbolic authority per se.

We saw in the activities staged by the Yes Men how easily people are prepared to accept whatever is perceived as coming from an authority. Obviously, what is at stake here is not only acceptance but also compliance and obedience.

Most people, as is shown in their activities, are indeed prepared to accept and obey anything coming from a source of authority irrespective of the actual content of the command. In fact, this structure of authority seems to be a frame presupposed in every social experience.

As Milgram points out, already before the experiment starts, ‘the subject enters the situation with the expectation that someone will be in charge’. Now, and this is the most crucial point, the role of this someone is structurally necessary, without him the identity of the subject itself remains suspended and no functional social interaction can take place: ‘the experimenter, upon first presenting himself, fills a gap experienced by the subject’. This quasi-Lacanian formulation reveals something essential. First of all, it lends support to the Lacanian understanding of the Name-of-the-Father, the signifier representing authority and order, as instituting the reality of the subject. In his brief Lacanian analysis of the Milgram experiment, David Corfield is right to point out that it ‘reveals something of the super-egoical consequences of the establishment of the paternal metaphor in a clear, albeit brutal fashion’ (Corfield 2002: 200).

The founding moment of subjectivity proper, the moment linguistic/social subjects come to being, has to be associated with symbolic castration, with the prohibition of incest that resolves imaginary alienation and permits our functional insertion into the social world of language.

In other words, the command embodied in the Name-of-the-Father offers the prototype of symbolic power that structures our social reality in patriarchal societies. This is a power both negative and positive, both prohibitive and productive (à la Foucault). The performative prohibition of the paternal function is exactly what makes possible the development of (sexual) desire. Furthermore, it is a power that presupposes our complicity or rather our acceptance; only this acceptance is ‘forced’ since without it no social subject can emerge and psychosis seems to be the only alternative.

And this is a dialectic which is bound to affect our whole life: ‘A power exerted on a subject, subjection is nevertheless a power assumed by the subject, an assumption that constitutes the instrument of that subject’s becoming’ (Butler 1997b: 11).

Without the assumption of castration no desire can emerge. In that sense, if Giorgio Agamben links biopolitics (a characteristically modern phenomenon according to Foucault) with sovereignty per se (Agamben 1998), Lacan seems to be highlighting the inextricable bond between repressive and productive (symbolic) power. Hence, symbolic castration marks a point of no return for the subject.

It is the command of prohibition and our subjection to it that institutes our social world as a structured meaningful order. Without someone in command reality disintegrates.

What Lacan, in his ‘Agency of the Letter’, describes as the ‘elementary structures of culture’ (Lacan 1977: 148), meaning a linguistically determined sense of ordering, are now also revealed as elementary structures of obedience and symbolic power. The intersubjective effects of this logic are immense: ‘It is not only the subject, but the subjects, caught in their intersubjectivity, who line up … and who, more docile than sheep, model their very being on the moment of the signifying chain that runs through them’ (Lacan 2006: 21).

Without such an elementary structure of obedience — instituted and reproduced in what Milgram calls ‘antecedent conditions’: the individual’s familial experience, the general societal setting built on impersonal relations of authority — the experiment would collapse. And these antecedent conditions have to be understood in their proper Lacanian perspective: they refer primarily to the whole symbolic structure within which the subject is born: ‘the subject … if he can appear to be the slave of language is all the more so of a discourse in the universal movement of which his place is already inscribed at birth, if only by virtue of his proper name’ (Lacan 1977: 63–4).

stavrakakis lack in the Other 4

Stavrakakis, Yannis. Subjectivity and the Organized Other: Between Symbolic Authority and Fantasmatic Enjoyment Organization Studies 2008 29: 1037

Indeed, as Laclau and Mouffe have put it, objectivism and subjectivism are symmetrical expressions of the desire for a fullness that is ultimately impossible. In Lacanian theory, moving beyond the Scylla of objectivism and the Charybdis of subjectivism entails the formulation of a novel conception of subjectivity; in fact, it is this new subject, the subject as lack that, through its continuous dialectic with the (equally lacking) Other, symbolic reality, signifies the collapse of subjectivism and objectivism.

Already from his Rome Discourse Lacan formulates his strong objection towards any reference to a closed totality both at the collective and the individual level. And he concludes: ‘it is the subject who introduces division into the individual, as well as into the collectivity that is his equivalent. Psychoanalysis is properly that which reveals both the one and the other to be no more than mirages’. Cederstrom and Willmott are correct to point out that this way in which Lacan intervenes in the agency/structure debate ‘holds out the promise of allowing us to deal with issues of desire and de-centring without falling prey to determinism’. And this applies both to subjective determinism and objective determinism: ‘By advancing a notion of the agent that is predicated on a negative ontology, we challenge the common assumption that the agent either is a free and self-reflexive entity or is a constrained and fully pre-determined category’.

Lacan’s theory of the subject emphasizes thus the notions of ‘desire’ and ‘lack’, the constitutive dialectic between lack and desire. This helps theorists avoid the usual traps of reductionism and essentialism when trying to consider the relationship between subjectivity, society and politics. This relationship is theorized as a function of political identification, leading to a picture of the socio-political field characterized by a complex play of (ultimately failed) identifications, disidentifications and renewed identifications.

Isn’t Ernesto Laclau pointing to the same necessary/impossible dialectic when he highlights the fact that the obstacle limiting my identity and showing its ultimate impossibility is also its condition of possibility insofar as there is no identity without difference and no desire without lack (Laclau 1990: 39)? True, ideological/discursive determination is unavoidable, even necessary. No social reality and subjective identity can emerge without it; and no management of subjective lack. At the same time it is ultimately impossible.

No ideological determination is ever complete. Social construction is always an imperfect exercise, and the social subject cannot transcend the ontological horizon of lack. Something always escapes from both orders — Lacan reserves a special name for that: the Real, an excessive quantum of enjoyment (jouissance) resisting representation and control. Something that the subject has been forced to sacrifice upon entering organized society, and which, although lost and inaccessible/unrepresentable for ever, does not stop causing all our attempts to encounter it through our identification acts.

Subjectivism posits a source of power external to the subject, immanentism posits a source of power internal, intimate to the subject, while what is needed is to conceptually grasp a form of external intimacy, what Lacan calls extimité. This is the realm of the real as extimate kernel of the subject, as the lost/impossible enjoyment that, through its constitutive lack, kicks off a whole socio-political dialectic of identifications aiming to recapture it.

In other words, the administration of this constitutive lack of enjoyment takes place in a field transcending simplistic dichotomies (individual vs. collective). How can we access this field? And what can Lacanian theory contribute to our understanding of its constitution and functioning? Of how subjects are constituted, human lives lived and social orders and institutions organized and sustained?

Where is power and authority exactly located in this play? And how are their symbolic and fantasmatic dimensions, language and enjoyment, interimplicated?

interpellation subjective destitution

2010 – Vighi – On Zizek’s Dialectics DOWNLOAD HERE

Vighi, Fabio. On Žižek’s Dialectics. New York: Continuum, 2010.

Žižek’s “subject” re-appropriates the utopian urge inherent in what Lacan called ‘subjective destitution‘: the traumatic “fall of knowledge”, the assumption of the non-existence of the big Other and consequent evacuation of all subject ideals references and points of identification. 101

note 3 page 174: Apropos Lacan’s subjective desitution, Žižek claims that ‘at the end of the psychoanalytic cure, the analysand has to suspend the urge to symbolize/internalize, to interpret, to search for a “deeper meaning”; he has to accept that the traumatic encounters which traced out the itinerary of his life were utterly contingent and indifferent, that they bear no “deeper message”‘

note 4: … the subject qua site of antagonistic substance is the opposite of the subject of interpellation: ‘far from emerging as the outcome of interpellation, the subject emerges only when and in so far as interpellation liminally fails. Not only does the subjectg never fully recognize itself int eh interpellative call: its resistance to interpellation (to the symbolic identity provided by interpellation) is the subject’ (Žižek in CHU 2000, 115).

rothenberg butler foreclosure

Again Rothenberg casts Butler’s theory as promoting a subject that is intentional, volitional and when this subject speaks, is transparent, perhaps even self-identical. In other words, R. is criticizing Butler that in Butler’s haste to show how agency happens, especially the agency of the excluded, the marginalized, she theorizes a liberal rational actor.

… arguing that the political act of appropriating the “unspeakable” can lead to the political inclusion of dispossessed or marginalized people. Here she explicitly proposes that the subject can access the realm excluded by foreclosure by “speaking impossibly” or by “redrawing the distinction” … From her perspective, the politically motivated subject has to take the “risk” of accessing this realm, even at the cost of being seen as something other than a subject (109).

Butler’s argument is nothing less than the claim that the subject can transform the very conditions of (its own and others’) subject formation through special speech acts that control their own reception. What has been excluded can be included …(109)

Laclau subject formation

if the subject were a mere subject position within the structure, the latter would be fully closed and there would be no contingency at all … [Radical contingency is possible only] if the structure is not fully reconciled with itself, if it is inhabited by an original lack, by a radical undecidability that needs to be constantly superseded by acts of decision. There acts are, precisely, what constitute the subject, who can only exist as a will transcending the structure. Because this will has no place of constitution external to the structure but is the result of the failure of the structure to constitute itself, it can be formed only through acts of identification. If I need to identify with something it is because I do not have a full identity in the first place. These acts of identification are thinkable only as a result of the lack within the structure and have the permanent trace of the latter. Contingency is shown in this way: as the inherent distance of the structure from itself.

Laclau, Emancipation(s) 1996: 92.

Taken from: Jason Glynos and David Howarth,
Logics of Critical Explanation in Social and Political Theory.

Routledge, 2007 pp. 128-129.

social fictions symbolic

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004. p 119.

Social fictions are culturally dominant representations of how to be a subject and how to exist as a subject in relation to other subjects.

… Lacan links what he describes as the dominant discourse of our age – the Discourse of the Master – to the rise of capitalism and the modern ego (S17: 207), indicating that discourses are historically and culturally specific. Accordingly, social fictions can be understood as historically and culturally specific forms of the Symbolic order, which articulate particular historical and cultural discourses.

Judith Butler offers a useful reading of the Symbolic order as ‘a register of regulatory ideality’, which includes not only sexualized but racialized interpellations (1993b: 18). For Butler, the Symbolic produces ‘regulatory norms’ which demarcate and delimit forms of family, identity and love (1997b: 66). It represents ‘reigning epistemes of cultural intelligibility’ (1997b: 24), suggesting that it is a set of cultural rules which constitute social norms.

However, in this formulation, the Symbolic remains a closed and monolithic structure that produces a single normative subject. Such a conception of the Symbolic does not explain the many discourses of identity, or their historical specificity – which are precisely the grounds of Butler’s critique of the Lacanian notion of the Symbolic.

‘Social fictions’ help us to understand the ‘register of regulatory ideality’ as a discursive register of social fictions, as discourses of identity that produce it through the identification with master signifiers of sexualized and racialized subjectivity. The Symbolic order also produces racialized and sexualized relations between subjects, operating as a register of regulatory relations. While the Symbolic order structures discourses in terms of the production of sexualized and racialized subjects and intersubjective relations, the ‘content’ of those identities and social relations will be historically and culturally articulated as social fictions. Social fictions are therefore specific to a historical moment of that social order. In this way, social fictions are contingent in the sense that they represent particular cultural and historical forms of the discursive production of identity. If social fictions are contingent and mobile, then they are open to political contestation and change.

sharpe regimes of enjoyment

Sharpe, Matthew. Slavoj Žižek: a little piece of the real. Burlington Vt: Ashgate, 2004.

Žižek as Theorist of Ideology: Two Transpositions

Žižek argues primary site of subjective inscription for an ideology is not the consciousness of ideological subjects, but the Freudian unconscious.
Ideology today doesn’t claim to structure the horizons of meaning of its subjects, … than how its ‘terms and conditions’ enable and structure … ‘regimes of enjoyment.’ (31)

There is no identity that is not a relational identity. Every identity is formed in differentiation from an other, or grounded through reference to an other that guarantees its own consistency, at least as a regulative ideal to be strived towards. (32)

… there is no identity that is not grounded in a reference to some guaranteeing Other (42).

🙂 We need to question the “strength of argumentation as a factor motivating individual and collective action. … — between subjects’ conscious self-evaluations, and the beliefs that inform what they actually do (40).

The key thing about Lacan, for Žižek, is that this scepticism about the modern Cartesian subject, evidenced as early as the first essay in the Ecrits, did not commit him to a total dismissal of the relevance of the category of the subject. To call into question the sovereignty of individuals’ conscious self-perceptions, according to Lacan, does not mean that one can immediately pass into a reflection that centres itself on ‘the body’, the ‘text’ or some trans-subjective ‘will’ or ‘power’. … What is passed over … is that possibility which Freud opened up: namely, that the ‘mind’ is not reducible to consciousness, and that — as such — the consciousness-body opposition might not exhaust the field proper to subjectivity (40).

Lacan’s unconscious subject REMAINS a subject. … At any given moment, that is to say, I might be playing out my neuroses, largely unaware of the true nature of my desire, etc. Yet this does not mean that at some future time, I might not be brought to a heightened self-awareness. This is precisely the possibility that psychoanalysis qua ‘talking cure’ affords, and without which it would be simple perversity (40-41).

Žižek sees in psychoanalytic theory per se a means of uncovering how the most powerful structures of subjective motivation capable of being harnessed for social reproduction are importantly beneath subjects’ conscious control. An account of the unconscious, Žižek believes, will thus significantly sophisticate existing political theories (44).

Žižek’s position is that, from around the time of the mirror stage (six to eighteen months), human needs are irrevocably caught up in the dialectics of the subject’s exchanges with others, and its demand to be loved by them. The child thus, as it were, needs to be taught how to desire, he stresses. Its first question is not ‘what do I want’, but ‘what do the others want from me?’ or: ‘what am I for them?” (45).

butler injurious interpellations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

lloyd interpellation subjection assujettisement

Psychic subjectivity is formed in dependence

subjection (assujetissement) in order to continue as a subject, individuals have to submit to the very power that subordinates them. Their evident willingness to do so suggests … a ‘passionate attachment’ to their subjection.

The policeman in the street calls out, “Hey you there!” and the individual recognizing that it is being spoken to, turns towards the policeman’s voice. At that moment the individual is transformed into a subject, or in Althusserian terms, a subject of ideology.

The turn to the voice of the law is the action that constitutes the individual’s subjection by power. Subjection, as Butler summarizes it, is best thought of, through the rhetorical idea of the trope, or turn (Psychic 3, Lloyd 98).

This turn is figurative since it cannot be made by an actual subject —the subject only comes into existence through the turn. In Althusser’s case, prior to the turn there is only the individual; after the turn there is a subject. What intrigues Butler however, is why the individual turns in the first place; why, that is, does it respond to the voice of the law? Althusser, according to Butler, offers no explanation for this. So she provides one.

The individual responds to the voice of the law because it assumes that it is guilty of some infraction —otherwise why would the policeman be calling out to it? It responds, that is, because its conscience tell it to. But if the individual has a conscience prior to its subjection by the law, then … The individual has already been subjected to a prior psychic operation of power, in which it has become both self-conscious and self subjugating (Psychic 106-131 Lloyd 98-99)

On its own, therefore, the theory of interpellation cannot explain subjection. What is needed here is a theory of the formation of the psyche.

mills butler inconsistant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(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?

Butler politics what makes a life livable

What moves me politically, and that for which I want to make room is the moment in which a subject — a person, a collective — asserts a right or entitlement to a livable life when no such prior authorization exists, when no clearly enabling convention is in place. (Undoing Gender 2004, (2002) 224).

When we ask what makes a life livable, we are asking about certain normative conditions that must be fulfilled for life to become life. And so there are at least two senses of life, the one, which refers to the minimum biological form of living, and another, which intervenes at the start, which establishes the minimum conditions for a livable life with regard to human life. And this does not imply that we can disregard the merely living in favor of the “livable life,” but that we must ask, as we asked about gender violence, what humans require in order to maintain and reproduce the conditions of their own livability. And what are our politics such that we are in whatever way possible, both conceptualizing the possiblity of the livable life and arranging for its institutional support. There will always be disagreement about what this means, and those who claim that a single political direction is necessitated by virtue of this commitment will be mistaken. But this is only because to live it to live a life politically, in relation to power, in relation to others, in the act of assuming responsibility for a collective future … Democracy does not speak in unison; its tunes are dissonant, and necessarily so (226).

One could say that for her (Anzaldua), the subject is “multiple” rather than unitary, and that would be to get the point in a way. But I think her point is more radical. She is asking us to stay at the edge of what we know, to put our own epistemological certainties into question, and through that risk and openness to another way of knowing and of living in the world to expand our capacity to imagine the human. She is asking us to be able to work in coalitions across differences that will make a more inclusive movement. What she is arguing, then, is that it is only through existing in the mode of translation, constant translation, that we stand a chance of producing a multicultural understanding of women or, indeed, of society. The unitary subject is the one who knows already what it is, who enters the conversation the same way as it exits, who fails to put its own epistemological certainties at risk in the encounter with the other, and so stays in place, guards its place, and becomes an emblem for property and territory, refusing self-transformation, ironically, in the name of the subject (228).

There is the possibility of appearing impermeable, of repudiating vulnerability itself. There is the possibility of becoming violent. But perhaps there is some other way to live in such a way that one is neither fearing death, becoming socially dead from fear of being killed, or becoming violent, and killing others, or subjecting them to live a life of social death predicated upon the fear of literal death. Perhaps this other way to live requires a world in which collective means are found to protect bodily vulnerability without precisely eradicating it. Surely some norms will be useful for building such a world, but they will be norms that no one will own, norms that will have to work not through normalization or racial and ethnic assimilation, but through becoming collective sites of continuous political labor (231).