ontology – Page 4

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to Lacan is thus, rather , that he is not ‘FORMALIST’ enough: his ‘bar’ is too obviously branded by the particular historical content — in an illegitimate short circuit, he elevates into a quasi-transcendental a priori a certain ‘bar’ that emerged only within specific ultimately contingent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.

Butler ontological commitments

Eliz Grosz: … you buy into ontological commitments whenever you make certain political commitments.

D Cornell: You inevitably buy into ontological commitments when you advocate programs of reform. I don’t think you can avoid it, which is why anytime you use an aesthetic idea to make sense to reason, you paradoxically try to show that what reason has made sense of is not fully adequate to its promise. I was very influenced by Reiner Schurmann in seeing the paradox in my representation of political ideals, even as aesthetic ideas. But buying into them and knowing that you buy into them and knowing that any representational device you use in this sense of aesthetic idea carries
within it that buying into them is very different from actually thinking that you are doing something more philosophical by turning gender, engendering, or sexual difference into a way of thinking about the truth of Being in a particular historical era.

JB: Indeed, I would want to know from Liz and Pheng if it’s the case that the institutionalization of one’s feminist goals involves making ontological commitments about what women are or what the feminine is and how, at the same time, the perspective of the future anterior is maintained.

Antigone

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

My view is that the distinction between symbolic and social law cannot finally hold, that not only is the symbolic itself the sedimentation of social practices but that radical alterations in kinship demand a rearticulation of the structuralist presuppositions of psychoanalysis and, hence, of contemporary gender and sexual theory (Butler, Antigone 2000: 19).

Those who disagree with me then claim, with some exasperation, “but it is the law!” but what is the status of such an utterance?

“It is the law!” becomes the utterance that performatively attributes the very force to the law that the law itself is said to exercise. “It is the law” is thus a sign of allegiance to the law, a sign of the desire for the law to be the indisputable law, a theological impulse within the theory of psychoanalysis that seeks to put out of play any criticism of the symbolic father, the law of psychoanalysis itself.

Thus the status given to the law is precisely the status given to the phallus, the symbolic place of the father, the indisputable and incontestable. The theory exposes its own tautological defense. The law beyond laws will finally put an end to the anxiety produced by a critical relation to final authority that clearly does not know when to stop: a limit to the social, the subversive, the possibility of agency and change, a limit that we cling to, symptomatically, as the final defeat of our own power. Its defenders claim that to be without such a law is pure voluntarism or radical anarchy! Or is it? And to accept such a law as a final arbiter of kinship life? Is that not to resolve by theological means the concrete dilemmas of human sexual arrangements that have no ultimate normative form? (Butler, Antigone: 21)

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?

lesbian phallus

… in order to secure a coherent heterosexual identity, a primary homosexual desire must be overcome (Salih 2002. p 81).

The dictionary definition of ‘morphology’ is ‘the science of form’, and in the psychoanalytic accounts under discussion, ‘morphological’ refers to the form assumed by the body in the course of ego formation. ‘Imaginary’ in this context does not simply mean ‘imagination’ or ‘imagined’, but is part of Lacan’s three-fold distinction between the imaginary, the symbolic and the real:

the imaginary is the realm of conscious and unconscious images and fantasies;
the symbolic order refers to language, the system into which the infant is compelled to enter on leaving the imaginary;
the real is what lies outside the symbolic and the limits of speech (Salih 2002. p 83).

(Salih 2002. p 84-85).
‘Although Freud’s language engages a causal temporality that has the body part precede its “idea”, he nevertheless confirms the indissolubility of a body part and the phantasmatic partitioning that brings it into psychic experience’, Butler claims (BTM: 59). In other words, a body part and the imagining of that body part (the ‘phantasmatic partitioning’ of the body) are inseparable, so that the ‘phenomenologically accessible body’ (i.e. the body that is knowable by being perceived) and the material body are one and the same entity.

Lacan moves from Freud’s body as known through experience (specifically, the experience of pain) to an analysis of the body as it is signified in language. Butler sees this as a ‘rewriting’ of Freud, whereby Lacan theorizes the morphology of the body as a psychically invested projection and idealization (BTM: 73). One’s morphology or bodily form is fantasized by an ego that doesn’t exactly precede the body since ‘the ego is that projection [and] . . . it is invariably a bodily ego’ (BTM: 73). In other words, the body and the ego cannot be theorized separately, since they are simultaneous projections of one another. Certain body parts are given significance in this fantasized body, and Butler uncovers the masculinism of Lacan’s positioning of the phallus as the privileged bodily signifier, arguing that it is possible to appropriate and recirculate the phallus so that it is no longer necessarily or intrinsically connected to the penis. Butler focuses on two important essays by Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’ (1949) and ‘The Signification of the Phallus’ (1958).

In ‘The Mirror Stage’, Lacan claims that an infant acquires a notion of its bodily integrity when it perceives its reflection in the mirror. Up until that point, the infant’s bodily self-perception has been chaotic, scrambled, in pieces, what Lacan calls a ‘homelette’, but when it sees its reflection it gains a sense of its bodily contours and its physical differentiation from others. Butler argues that, in the Lacanian account of the body, it is not experiences such as pleasure and pain that constitute the body, but language. This is because the mirror stage coincides with the infant’s entry into language or the symbolic order. Language does not simply name a pre-existing body, but in the act of naming it constitutes the body; at this stage it would be useful to recall the definition of performativity as that aspect of discourse having the power to produce what it names, even though Butler is not specifically talking in terms of performativity here. She mentions ‘the performativity of the phallus’ only in passing (‘briefly’, as she herself acknowledges), but in her discussion of the lesbian phallus it becomes clear that both penis and phallus are retroactively constructed by, and in, discourse – in other words, they are performative. Butler and Lacan part theoretical company over the issue of the phallus (although they largely seem to have been in agreement up until this point):

whereas Lacan installs the phallus as a privileged signifier that confers meaning on other bodily signifiers, Butler regards the phallus as ‘the effect of a signifying chain summarily suppressed’ – in other words, it does not have a privileged or inaugural status on a signifying chain that does not make itself evident (BTM: 81). However, Lacan and Butler concur on one point: for both of them, penis and phallus are not synonymous, since the phallus is what Butler calls ‘the phantasmatic rewriting of an organ or body part’ (BTM: 81). More simply put, the phallus is the symbol of the penis, it is not the penis itself. Butler and Lacan’s theorizations of the phallus may be seen as a struggle between the two theorists over the signification and symbolization of both penis and phallus: whereas Lacan asserts the primacy of the phallic signifier, Butler topples the phallus from the privileged position Lacan gives it. The disconnection of phallus and penis is crucial for Butler, since, if the phallus is no more than a symbol, then it could just as well symbolize any other body part,

and those who neither ‘have’ nor ‘are’ the phallus (an important distinction for both Butler and Lacan) may ‘reterritorialize’ this symbol in subversive ways (BTM: 86). The disjunction between signifier (phallus) and referent (penis) allows Butler to remove the phallus from an exclusively male domain and to collapse the distinction between ‘being’ and ‘having’: in fact, no one ‘has’ the phallus, since it is a symbol, and disconnecting phallus from penis means that it may be redeployed by those who don’t have penises (Salih 2002. p 84-85).

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).

sexual difference braidotti

French oriented “sexual difference” theories versus American based “gender theories”.

Gender theorists understand the construction of masculinity and femininity as more determined by cultural and social processes

Sexual difference theorists also understand it as determined by unconscious processes such as identification and internalization.

The sexual difference approach … dislodges the belief in the “natural” foundations of socially coded and enforced differences and of the systems of values and representation which they support. Moreover this approach emphasizes the need to historicize the notions and concepts it analyzes, first and foremost among them the notion of difference. This emphasis on the historical embeddedness of concepts however, also means that the thinker needs some humility before the multilayered and complex structure of language.

[…] In the poststucturalist framework, language is not to be understood as a tool of communication, following the humanistic tradition. It is rather defined as the site or location where subject positions are constructed. In order to get access to language at all, however, one has to take up a position on either side of the great masculine/feminine divide. The subject is sexed or s/he is not at all.

Against the tendency of Freudian psychoanalysis to fix psychic structures through biological references, Irigaray … problematizes the question of the connection of morphological men and women to culturally coded roles of masculinity and femininity. Morphology replaces biological deterministic readings of the body with a psychosexual version of social constructivism. Morphologies refer to enfleshed, experiential understandings of the bodily self. As Elizabeth Grosz points out (1989), these experiences are mediated through discursive practices (biological, psychological, psychoanalytic discourses) which construct social representations. Embodied subjects are expected to adhere to these representations by internalizing them. Thus, although language is posited as a structure that is prior to and constitutive of subjectivity, the sexed subject positions that structure identity (M/F) are neither stable nor essentialistic. A fundamental instabililty in the subject’s attachment to either masculine or feminine positions is proposed instead as the site of resistance to fixed or stable identities of any kind. The subject is both sexed and split, both resting on one of the poles of the sexual dichotomy and unfastened to it. The “linguistic turn” thus defined therefore provides sexual difference philosophy with a materially grounded historicized and yet ubiquitous structure on which to base its vision of subjectivity.

what is critique

JB. “What is Critique” The Raymond Williams Lecture at Cambridge University, May 2000. published in The Judith Butler Reader 2003. Sara Salih editor.
online version

For the question, “what are we to do?” presupposes that the “we” has been formed and that it is known, that its action is possible, and the field in which it might act is delimited. But if those very formations and delimitations have normative consequences, then it will be necessary to ask after the values that set the stage for action, and this will be an important dimension of any critical inquiry into normative matters.

One does not drive to the limits for a thrill experience, or because limits are dangerous and sexy, or because it brings us into a titillating proximity with evil. One asks about the limits of ways of knowing because one has already run up against a crisis within the epistemological field in which one lives. The categories by which social life are ordered produce a certain incoherence or entire realms of unspeakability. And it is from this condition, the tear in the fabric of our epistemological web, that the practice of critique emerges, with the awareness that no discourse is adequate here or that our reigning discourses have produced an impasse.

To be critical of an authority that poses as absolute requires a critical practice that has self-transformation at its core.

In Foucault’s view, following Kant in an attenuated sense, the act of consent is a reflexive movement by which validity is attributed to or withdrawn from authority. But this reflexivity does not take place internal to a subject. For Foucault, this is an act which poses some risk, for the point will not only be to object to this or that governmental demand, but to ask about the order in which such a demand becomes legible and possible. And if what one objects to are the epistemological orderings that have established the rules of governmental validity, then saying “no” to the demand will require departing from the established grounds of its validity, marking the limit of that validity, which is something different and far more risky than finding a given demand invalid. In this difference, we might say, one begins to enter a critical relation to such orderings and the ethical precepts to which they give rise. The problem with those grounds that Foucault calls “illegitimate” is not that they are partial or self-contradictory or that they lead to hypocritical moral stands. The problem is precisely that they seek to foreclose the critical relation, that is, to extend their own power to order the entire field of moral and political judgment. They orchestrate and exhaust the field of certainty itself. How does one call into question the exhaustive hold that such rules of ordering have upon certainty without risking uncertainty, without inhabiting that place of wavering which exposes one to the charge of immorality, evil, aestheticism. The critical attitude is not moral according to the rules whose limits that very critical relation seeks to interrogate. But how else can critique do its job without risking the denunciations of those who naturalize and render hegemonic the very moral terms put into question by critique itself?

“Critique,” he writes, “will be the art of voluntary insubordination, that of reflected intractability [l’indocilité réfléchie].” If it is an “art” in his sense, then critique will not be a single act, nor will it belong exclusively to a subjective domain, for it will be the stylized relation to the demand upon it. And the style will be critical to the extent that, as style, it is not fully determined in advance, it incorporates a contingency over time that marks the limits to the ordering capacity of the field in question. So the stylization of this “will” will produce a subject who is not readily knowable under the established rubric of truth. More radically, Foucault pronounces:

“Critique would essentially insure the desubjugation [désassujetiisement] of the subject in the context [le jeu] of what we could call, in a word, the politics of truth.” (32, 39)

The politics of truth pertains to those relations of power that circumscribe in advance what will and will not count as truth, which order the world in certain regular and regulatable ways, and which we come to accept as the given field of knowledge. We can understand the salience of this point when we begin to ask: What counts as a person? What counts as a coherent gender? What qualifies as a citizen? Whose world is legitimated as real? Subjectively, we ask: Who can I become in such a world where the meanings and limits of the subject are set out in advance for me? By what norms am I constrained as I begin to ask what I may become? And what happens when I begin to become that for which there is no place within the given regime of truth? Is this not precisely what is meant by “the desubjugation of the subject in the play of…the politics of truth”(my translation)?

At stake here is the relation between the limits of ontology and epistemology, the link between the limits of what I might become and the limits of what I might risk knowing. Deriving a sense of critique from Kant, Foucault poses the question that is the question of critique itself: “Do you know up to what point you can know?” “Our liberty is at stake.” Thus, liberty emerges at the limits of what one can know, at the very moment in which the desubjugation of the subject within the politics of truth takes place, the moment where a certain questioning practice begins that takes the following form: “‘What, therefore, am I’, I who belong to this humanity, perhaps to this piece of it, at this point in time, at this instant of humanity which is subjected to the power of truth in general and truths in particular?”(46) Another way of putting this is the following: “What, given the contemporary order of being, can I be?” If, in posing this question, liberty is at stake, it may be that staking liberty has something to do with what Foucault calls virtue, with a certain risk that is put into play through thought and, indeed, through language where the contemporary ordering of being is brought to its limit.

The critic thus has a double task, to show how knowledge and power work to constitute a more or less systematic way of ordering the world with its own “conditions of acceptability of a system,” but also “to follow the breaking points which indicate its emergence.” So not only is it necessary to isolate and identify the peculiar nexus of power and knowledge that gives rise to the field of intelligible things, but also to track the way in which that field meets its breaking point, the moments of its discontinuities, the sites where it fails to constitute the intelligibility for which it stands. What this means is that one looks both for the conditions by which the object field is constituted, but also for the limits of those conditions, the moments where they point up their contingency and their transformability. In Foucault’s terms, “schematically speaking, we have perpetual mobility, essential fragility or rather the complex interplay between what replicates the same process and what transforms it.” (58)

Indeed, another way to talk about this dynamic within critique is to say that rationalization meets its limits in desubjugation. If the desubjugation of the subject emerges at the moment in which the episteme constituted through rationalization exposes its limit, then desubjugation marks precisely the fragility and transformability of the epistemics of power.

How would this particular use of fiction relate to Foucault’s notion of critique? Consider that Foucault is trying to understand the possibility of desubjugation within rationalization without assuming that there is a source for resistance that is housed in the subject or maintained in some foundational mode. Where does resistance come from? Can it be said to be the upsurge of some human freedom shackled by the powers of rationalization? If he speaks, as he does, of a will not to be governed, how are we to understand the status of that will?

[…] he has shown us that there can be no ethics, and no politics, without recourse to this singular sense of poiesis. The subject who is formed by the principles furnished by the discourse of truth is not yet the subject who endeavors to form itself. Engaged in “arts of existence,” this subject is both crafted and crafting, and the line between how it is formed, and how it becomes a kind of forming, is not easily, if ever drawn. For it is not the case that a subject is formed and then turns around and begins suddenly to form itself. On the contrary, the formation of the subject is the institution of the very reflexivity that indistinguishably assumes the burden of formation. The “indistinguishability” of this line is precisely the juncture where social norms intersect with ethical demands, and where both are produced in the context of a self-making which is never fully self-inaugurated.

We have moved quietly from the discursive notion of the subject to a more psychologically resonant notion of “self,” and it may be that for Foucault the latter term carries more agency than the former. 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 operation and underway. Or, one might say, it is compelled to form itself within practices that are more or less in place. But if that self-forming is done in disobedience to the principles by which one is formed, then virtue becomes the practice by which the self forms itself in desubjugation, which is to say that it risks its deformation as a subject, occupying that ontologically insecure position which poses the question anew: who will be a subject here, and what will count as a life, a moment of ethical questioning which requires that we break the habits of judgment in favor of a riskier practice that seeks to yield artistry from constraint.

salih interview 2: conscience

From “Changing the Subject”, J. Butler interview that originally appeared in JAC 20:4 (2000), pp. 731-65, reprinted in The Judith Butler Reader ed. Sara Salih. Blackwell 2004. pp. 325-356.

Question: Extending Althusser’s notion of interpellation, you posit that conscience is central to subject formation, in that the hailed individual inevitably turns around to encounter the interpellating force. In The Psychic Life of Power, you write:

‘Submission’ to the rules of the dominant ideology might then be understood as a submission to the necessity to prove innocence in the face of accusation, a submission to the demand for proof, an execution of that proof, and acquisition of the status of subject in and through compliance with the terms of the interrogative law. To become a ‘subject’ is thus to have been presumed guilty, then tried and declared innocent. Because this declaration is not a single act, but a status incessantly reproduced, to become ‘subject’ is to be continuously in the process of acquitting oneself of the accusation of guilt.

Although you draw primarily on Freud and Nietzsche to construct this theory, it seems also to allude to Judeo-Christian notions of guilt, conscience, and “the law of the father.” Would you clarify why you think a theory of conscience is necessary to explain subject formation?

Butler: The basic presupposition of the argument that you’re citing—there are other arguments that I have for this, too—is that part of what it means to be a subject is to be born into a world in which norms are already acting on you from the very beginning. What are those norms? There’s a certain regulation of the subject from the outset: you’re born in a hospital (or somewhere else), you’re given a name, you’re ordered in that particular way; you’re assigned a gender, and very often a race; you’re inculcated quite quickly into a name and therefore a lineage (if you stay with the biological mother or both biological mother and father); you’re immediately submitted to a calculative logic—weight and height—which becomes the cause of trauma for the rest of your life. And there are a set of fantasies that are immediately imposed: what this will be if it is a boy, what it will be if it is a girl, what it will be, how it will relate to the family, how it will or will not be the same as others.

Very often—at least in Judaism, which is my context—you are given a name that recalls someone who is dead, so already you are the site of a mourning; and you cannot anticipate what the effects of that will be. And as the subject is reared, certain civilizing norms are imposed: how to eat; how to defecate; how to speak; how to do all these things correctly and in the right time and place; how distinctions between public and private are established; how sexuality is managed, controlled, structured, sequestered. There is a set of legitimating norms, and they all come with their punishments or their costs, so that as the child emerges into subjecthood, it emerges in relationship to a set of norms that give it its place, its legitimacy, its lovability, its promise of security; and it risks all of these things when it abdicates those norms. What is punishment for the child but the perceived withdrawal of love?

And that’s great, that’s terrific, that’s how it works. The child learns how to do that which will somehow bring forth love (or perhaps learns how to instigate the withdrawal of love for another reason); there is some negotiation with love at the level of learning norms, and this is inevitable to the extent that a child will, of necessity, despite its best judgment, be passionately attached to whoever is bringing it up. That is, of course, the humiliation of all humans: that we love these beings who happen to be our parents or who happen to be our caregivers, and it’s terrible to find that we have absolutely no choice but to love them and that the love is absolute. It’s a deep humiliation, I think, for any thinking human. This is not just the relationship of the child to an external norm or to a norm that is imposed by someone or to a relationship to an Other who comes to stand for normativity in some way. To the extent that the child develops the capacity to take itself as an object, to regulate itself, to think about itself, to make a decision for itself, it develops a reflexivity that has already taken that norm in in some way. So, it’s not always in consultation with the external exemplification of the norm.

So, how does the norm become internalized, and internalized as a feature of the self? I would suggest that to become a subject is precisely to be one who has internalized the regulatory principles and who regulates one’s self. There is no subject who does not have this capacity for reflexivity, and this reflexivity does not exist without the internalization of that norm. But what do I mean by the “internalization of the norm”? A lot of behavioral psychology assumes that norms are more or less mechanically internalized, but I think that they can in fact take all kinds of forms, that they enter into the fantasy life of an individual and, as part of fantasy, take on shapes and forms and meanings and intensities that are in no sense mimetically related to how they’re existing in the outside world. It would be a mistake, for example, to say that if there is a severe parent there will be a severe superego. I’m not sure that this is at all true; in fact, sometimes the most severe superegos are those that are formed in relationship to radically absent parents as a way of producing a proximity in compensation for what was in fact not there. So, I think there is, as it were, a psychic life of power which is not the same as a social life of power, but the two are radically implicated in one another.

When you ask why a theory of conscience is necessary to explain subject formation, let me say that conscience is the relation to oneself that is formed in a way as a substitute and as a transfiguration of primary relations to others, and it is the moment when reflexivity emerges as a structure of the subject that is relatively independent of its relation to concrete existing social others. Nietzsche says it more strongly. He says that I only begin to think about myself as an object when I am asked to be accountable for something I have done, that the question of accountability is actually what inaugurates reflexivity. It’s a very, very strong claim, and there are many people who totally disagree with him and with me. Object relations theorists take me aside and say, “Judy, you’ve got to get out of this.” And it is theological, and it probably comes from my own Judaism, but I do find it interesting that I become an object to myself at the moment in which I am accountable to an Other.

The relation to myself that takes place is psychic and is complicated and does not necessarily replicate my relation to the Other; the I who takes myself to task is not the same as the Other who takes me to task. I may do it more severely; I may do it in ways the Other never would. And that incommensurability is crucial, but there is no subject yet without the specificity of that reflexivity. You might even say that the subject becomes inaugurated at the moment when the social power that acts on it, that interpellates it, that brings it into being through these norms is successfully implanted within the subject itself and when the subject becomes the site of the reiteration of those norms, even through its own psychic apparatus. I suppose that this would be why conscience is essential to the inception of the subject.

Q. Sounds like the voice of the Other within yourself.
A. Yes, which, of course, is and is not the Other.

prior desire for social existence

JB. The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford UP. 1997 pp. 18-19

If power works not merely to dominate or oppress existing subjects, but also to form subjects, what is this formation?

… and account of subjection, it seems, must be traced in the turns of psychic life … in the peculiar turning of a subject against itself that takes place in acts of self-reproach, conscience, and melancholia that work in tandem with processes of social regulation 18-19

🙂 Remember! The formation of the subject takes place through the incorporation of norms.

How does the subjection of desire require and institute the desire for subjection? … how are we to account for the desire for the norm and for subjection more generally in terms of a prior desire for social existence, a desire exploited by regulatory power?

a) the formation of the subject involves the regulatory formation of the psyche, including how might we rejoin the discourse of power with the discourse of psychoanalysis: and

b) make such a conception of the subject work as a notion of political agency in postliberatory times.

Incorporation? page 19, she says:

And yet, if we refuse the ontological dualism that posits the separation of the political and the psychic, it seems crucial to offer a critical account of psychic subjection in terms of the regulatory and productive effects of power. If forms of regulatory power are sustained in part through the formation of a subject, and if that formation takes place according to the requirements of power, specifically, as the incorporation of norms, then a theory of subject formation must give an account of this process of incorporation, and the notion of incorporation must be interrogated to ascertain the psychic topography it assumes. How does the subjection of desire require and institute the desire for subjection?

In claiming that social norms are internalized, we have not yet explained what incorporation or, more generally, internalization is, what it means for a norm to become internalized or what happens to the norm in the process of internalization (19).

The prior desire for social existence

Where social categories guarantee a recognizable and enduring social existence, the embrace of such categories, even as they work in the service of subjection, is often preferred to no social existence at all (20).

But if the very production of the subject and the ofrmation of that wil are the consequences of a primary subordination, then the vulnerability of the subject to a power not of its own making is unavoidable. That vulnerability qualifies the subject as an exploitable kind of being.

sex/gender distinction

On page 7 of Gender Trouble 1990.

If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called “sex” is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.

It would make no sense, then, to define gender as the cultural interpretation of sex, if sex itself is a gendered category. Gender ought not to be conceived merely as the cultural inscription of meaning on a pregiven sex (a juridical conception); gender must also designate the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established. As a result, gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which “sexed nature” or “a natural sex” is produced and established as “prediscursive,” prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts. … At this juncture it is already clear that one way the internal stability and binary frame for sex is effectively secured is by casting the duality of sex in a prediscursive domain.

This production of sex as the prediscursive ought to be understood as the effect of the apparatus of cultural construction designated by gender. How, then, does gender need to be reformulated to encompass the power relations that produce the effect of a prediscursive sex and so conceal that very operation of discursive production?

ontologically incomplete structures

So instead of prioritizing totalised and determining social structures on the one hand, or fully constituted subjects on the other, we begin by accepting that social agents always find themselves ’thrown’ into a system of meaningful practices. an immersion that both shapes their identity and structures their practices. However, we also add the critical rider that these structures are ontologically incomplete. Indeed, it is in the ’space’ or ‘gap’ of social structures, as they are rendered visible in moments of crisis and dislocation, that a political subject can emerge through particular ‘acts of identification’. Moreover, as these identifications are understood to take place across a range of possible ideologies or discourses – some of which are excluded or repressed – and as these are always incomplete, then any form of identification is doomed to fall short of its promise

In sum, social structures and forms of life are not only composed of relations of hierarchy and domination; even more pertinently, they are marked by gaps and fissures, and forged by political exclusions. And the making visible of these gaps in the structures through dislocatory experiences makes it possible for subjects to identify anew, and thus to act differently (79).

free decisions and actions are likened to miracles, which are characterized as an ability ‘to begin something new’, that is, to set in motion events and practices that cannot be controlled and whose consequences cannot be foretold. Indeed, echoing her once-mentor Heidegger, freedom involves the ‘abyss of nothingness that opens up before any deed than cannot be accounted for by a reliable chain of cause and effect and is inexplicable in Aristotelian categories of potentiality and actuality’ (Arendt cited in Zizek 2001:113) (79).

In short, following Heidegger, subjects are ‘thrown’ into a world not of their choosing, but have the capacity under certain conditions to act differently. But more than this we need also to be able to explain the constitution and reproduction of the social relations into which they have been thrown, and we need also to account for the way in which subjects are gripped by certain discourses and ideologies. Our poststructuralist approach strives to unfold a social ontology adequate to these tasks.