not-all Žižek
Butler, Judith. “On Cruelty.” Rev. of The Death Penalty: Vol. I, by Jacques Derrida, translated by Peggy Kamuf. London Review of Books 36.14 (2014): 31-33. 9 July 2014
‘Whence comes this bizarre, bizarre idea,’ Jacques Derrida asks, reading Nietzsche on debt in On the Genealogy of Morals, ‘this ancient, archaic idea, this so very deeply rooted, perhaps indestructible idea, of a possible equivalence between injury and pain? Continue reading “Butler Nietzsche morality punishment (1)”
“Burning Acts, Injurious Speech” Excitable Speech 1977
J.L Austin
Constative utterance: actions performed by virtue of words
Performative utterance: you have words, and then you have ‘actions’ as a consequence of using ‘words’
For Nietzsche the subject appears only as a consequence of a demand for accountability; a set of painful effects is taken up by a moral framework that seeks to isolate the “cause” of those effects in a singular and intentional agent, a moral framework that operates through a certain economy of paranoid fabrication and efficiency.
The question, then, of who is accountable for a given injury precedes and initiates the subject, and the subject itself is formed through being nominated to inhabit that grammatical and juridical site. 216
In a sense for Nietzsche, the subject comes to be only within the requirements of a moral discourse of accountability. The requirements of blame figure the subject as the “cause” of an act. In this sense, there can be no subject without a blameworthy act, and there can be no “act” apart from a discourse of accountability and, according to Nietzsche, without an institution of punishment. 216
from page 219 JB Reader “The doctor who receives the child and pronounces —It’s a girl— begins that long string of interpellations by which the girl is transitively girled: gender is ritualistically repeated, whereby the repetition occasions both the risk of failure and the congealed effect of sedimentation.
Butler, Judith. “Competing Universalities” The Judith Butler Reader. 2003. page 263.
This essay is also in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality
In the Kantian vein, “transcendental” can mean: the condition without which nothing can appear. But 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, 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 or an account of hegemony that seeks to sustain and promote a more radically democratic formulation of sex and sexual difference. 263
Psychoanalysis enters Foucauldian analysis precisely at the point where one wishes to understand the phantasmatic dimension of social norms. 264
Thus unconscious is also an ongoing psychic condition in which norms are registered in both normalizing and non-normalizing ways, the postulated site of their foritification, their undoing and their perversion, the