subjectivity – Page 33

copjec ethics of psychoanalysis

The Ethics of Psychoanalysis

44:”Do not give way on your desire.” … In short the ethics of psychoanalysis filiates itself with Kant’s argument that ethical progress has nothing to do with that form of progress promoted by modern industry, or the “service of good,” but is rather a matter of personal conversion, of the subjective necessity of going beyond oneself.

GAP BETWEEN INDIVIDUAL AND SPECIES: Freud argues that this gap can never be reabsorbed; moreover, it is the very maintenance of this gap that permits the individual subject from being annihilated by the history she inherits.

46: Creon is driven by his superego, which is that psychic agency which fosters in the subject a distaste for mundane, compromised pleasures and maintains us in a state of dissatisfaction. Creon’s fixation on the lost object causes him to be relatively indfferent to all others available to him. He remains glued to an ideal he will never attain, since it is derived from his nostalgia for something he never possessed.

47: When she covers the exposed body of her brother, Antigone raises herself out of the conditions of naked existence to which Creon remains bound.

copjec singularity immortality sublimation

23: Someone dies and leaves behind his place, which outlives him and is unfillable by anyone else. This idea constructs a specific notion of the social, wherein it is conceived to consist not only OF particular individuals and their relations to each other, but also AS a relation to these unoccupiable places. The social is composed, then not just of those things that will pass, but also of relations to empty places that will not. This gives society an existence, a durability, despite the rapid and relentless alterations modernity institutes. If, with the collapse of eternity, the modern world is not decimated by historical time, it is because this unoccupiable place, this sense of singularity, somehow knots it together in time. Singularity itself, that which appears most to disperse society, is here posited as essential rather than antagonistic to a certain modern social bond.

Singularity

This notion of singularity which is tied to the act of a subject is defined as modern because it depends on the denigration of any notion of a prior or superior instance that might prescribe or guarantee the act. ”Soul”, ”eternity”, ”absolute”, patriarchal power, all these notions ”have to be destroyed” before an act can be viewed as unique and as capable of stamping itself with its own necessity.
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One calls singular that which “once it has come into being, bears the strange hallmark of something that must be,” and therefore cannot die (Lacan cited in Copjec Antigone)
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24: For it is through the psychoanalytic concept of sublimation that we will be able to clarify exactly how singularity is able to figure and not be effaced by the social bond. … However incomplete the notion of sublimation remains at this point, it is nevertheless clear that it is meant to bridge the gap between singularity and sociality.

Immortality and Sublimation

25: dogma: bare life is sacred [code for Butler’s essential vulnerability, wow I get it now, Copject is arguing that Butler’s emphasis on abject, bare life is well … ]

26: Agamben faults Foucault for failing to demonstrate how political techniques and technologies of the self (by which processes of subjectivization bring the individual to bind himself to his own identity and consciousness and, at the same time, to an external power) converge to produce that form of involuntary servitude” which characterizes the modern subject, we recognize a need to know more about the biological definition of life if we are ever going to be able to explain how modern power is able to sink its roots so thoroughly —so inexhaustibly— into bare life. What is it about this definition of life that allows power to assume such an extensive, even capillary hold over it?

29: [on the pessimism and bleakness of Agamben] For, by focusing, however productively, on historical continuities, Agamben is led to downplay the rupture the nineteenth century "life sciences" represented, and it is precisely the notion of rupture, of a thought or act that would be able to break from its immanent condition, that is needed to restore power to life. The most insidious difficulty confronting us, however, is the fact that we ourselves remain dupes of the dogma that death is imbedded in life; that is, we remain victims of the theme of bodily finitude, or of bare life

The real romantic heritage —which is still with us today— is the theme of finitude. The idea that an apprehension of the human condition occurs primordially in the understanding of its finitude maintains infinity at a distance that’s both evanescent and sacred … the only really contemporary requirement for philosophy since Nietzsche is the secularization of infinity. (Badiou)

This statement strikes one as a long overdue correction of certain contemporary commonplaces. Yet its judgment will remain incomprehensible to cultural theorists [Copjec attacks here the cultural theorists and Butler no doubt] who continue to misrecognize bodily finitude as the sobering fact that confounds our Romantic pretentions. For these theorists —for whom limits are almost always celebrated, insofar as they are supposed to restrict the expansionism of political modernism and its notions of universalism and will— the body is the limit, par excellence, that which puts an end to any claim to transcendence.

What Badiou is here proposing is that our idea of bodily finitude assumes a point of transcendence. Like Agamben, Badiou argues that death becomes immanentized in the body only on condition that we presuppose a beyond. [As opposed to those postmodernists who reject any notion of transcendence as well… plain wierd. (RT)]

how thought escapes being a mere symptom of its historical conditions

What is needed, in this case, is a rethinking of the body. where the body is conceived not as the seat of death but, rather as the seat of sex. Contrary to what Foucault has claimed, the sexualization of the body by psychoanalysis does not participate in the regime of biopolitics; it opposes it. 29

What is needed is not an abandonment of current interest in the body, but a rethinking of it… for in truth another notion of the body has already been proposed, precisely as a challenge to the one offered by the (bare) life sciences… the one suggested by psychoanalysis, where the body is conceived not as the seat of death but, rather, as the seat of sex...

Borrowing Badiou’s phrase … through its definition of the sexualized body, psychoanalysis provided the world with a secularized notion of infinity. Or the concept of an immortal individual body, which Kant could not quite bring himself to articulate, is finally thinkable in Freud.

copjec antigone gives herself own law

31: Hegel – Polynices is forever entombed in his own “imperishable individuality,” his own imperishable finitude. In this way bare, bestial life has been dignified, rendered sacred.

32: Lacan’s interpretation turns on his recognition that the body is the site of a different obscenity, a jouissance that opens a new dimension of infinity, immortality. Thus will Lacan be led to describe Antigone’s deed not as a bestowal of “imperishable individuality” on her brother, but as an “immortalization of the family Até.”

But what does this difference signify in regard to Antigone’s relation to the dead, to her familial past, or to the city?
And what does it signify … in regard to the relation between the “individual organism,” which may be looked at, as Freud put it, “as a transitory and perishable appendage to the quasi-immortal germ plasm bequeathed to him by his race,” and the species?
How can our argument —that Lacan reconnects body and act, the very terms Hegel’s analysis sunders— be reconciled with Freud’s contention that sublimation pries the act, whether it be a physical act or the act of thinking, from the body’s grip?

Death and only death is the aim of every drive

32: There is no drive impelling the subject toward any sort of fusion with others … we must then definitively reject the “benevolent illusion” that there is among men a drive toward perfection or progress. Drive pushes away from or against the stabilization of unities or the dumb progress of developments.

… death drives are described by Freud as … working instead toward winning for the subject what we can only regard as potential immortality. How so?

33: Directed not outward toward the constituted world, but away from it, the death drive aims at the past, at a time before the subject found itself where it is now, embedded in time and moving toward death. What if anything does this backward trajectory, this flight from the constituted world and biological death discover? … drive discovers along its path something positive, certain “necessary forms of thought’ … that time does not change … in any way and [to which] the idea of time cannot be applied” Freud does conceive his notion of drive as an intervention in Kant’s philosophy, but the drive does not lend credence to the “Kantian theorem that time and space are … ‘necessary forms of thought'” … rather it significantly revises that theorem. … Freud replaces the transcendental forms with empty, nonobjectifiable objects, the objects of drive.

The aim of the drive is death, “the restoration to an earlier state of things” a stat of inanimation or inertia. Now this state exists only as an illusion … Psychoanalysis rewrites this mythical state as the primordial mother-child dyad, which supposedly contained all things and every happiness and to which the subject strives throughout his life to return.

34: the drive inhibits as part of its very activity, the achievement of its aim, some inherent obstacle —the OBJECT of the drive— simultaneously BRAKES the drive and BREAKS IT UP, curbs it, thus preventing it from reaching its aim, and divides it into partial drives … the now partial drives content themselves with these small nothings, these objects that satisfy them. Lacan gives to them the name objects a: they are, as it were, simulacra of the lost (maternal) object, or as Freud and Lacan both refer to it, of das Ding. Object a is, however, the general term, Lacan designates several specific objects: gaze, voice, breast, phallus. In other words he gives them the names of bodily organs. Why are the objects given these names? How do they displace Kant’s “necessary forms of thought”.

35-36: The various aspects of the mother, what she was like, will be captured by Vorstellungen, the system of representations or signifiers that form the relatively stable and familiar wold we share in common with our “fellow human-beings” or neighbors. But some aspects of the primoridial mother cannot be translated into these representations, since they are, Freud says, “new and non-comparable” to any experience the child has of himself.” A hole thus opens in the system of signifiers since those that would enable us to recall these new and noncomparable or singular aspects of the mother are simply unavailable, they simply do not exist.

… At the core of this matter of the unforgettable but forever lost Thing, we find not just an impossibility of thought, but of a void of Being.

The problems is not simply that I cannot think the primordial mother, but that her loss opens up a hole in being. Or, it is not that the mother escapes representation or thought, but that the jouissance that attached me to her has been lost and this loss depletes the whole of my being.

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.

lloyd melancholia

Lloyd, Moya. Judith Butler: From Norms to Politics. Cambridge MA: Polity Press, 2007.

Mourning: takes place when an object (such as a loved one, an ideal or a country) is lost. In such cases, the libido (mental energy) that was once invested in that object gradually detaches from it and is cathected onto (invested in) another object. The subject thus comes to terms with its loss and is able to form a new emotional attachment —to fall in love for instance. At this point, ‘the ego becomes free and uninhibited again’ and the work of mourning is completed.

Melancholia: The individual in this case is unable to get over its loss in the usual way. Instead it incorporates the lost object into its ego. It identifies with it, taking on certain of its characteristics. As a consequence, ‘a new structure of identity’ is created in which certain qualities of the lost other are permanently internalized in the ego. Diana Fuss captures this process nicely when she notes that ‘by incorporating, the spectral remains of the dearly departed love-object, the subject vampiristically comes to life’. Where mourning is the ‘normal’ reaction to loss, melancholia is a pathological response (since the melancholic subject is unable to accept its loss).

“the character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes and … it contains the history of those object-choices.” To rephrase, the ego is formed melancholically. It is an effect of its identifications. It is this idea that Butler takes over and applies to the question of gender identity.

When Butler talks about the gender identity being structured melancholically she writes that ‘the process of internalizing and sustaining lost loves is crucial to the formation of the ego “and its object-choice”‘ (Gender T. 74 cited in Lloyd 84). It is not only the ego that is formed melancholically, it is also the subject’s sexual orientation — their object choice. That is, whether they choose an object (person) of the opposite sex to or of the same sex as themselves.

According to Butler, when the child reaches the Oedipal phase, they have already been ‘subjected to prohibitions which “dispose” them in distinct sexual directions’ (GT 82, Lloyd 84). They have already acquired heterosexual desires, albeit incestuous ones.

The fact that at the resolution of the Oedipal phase the boy identifies with his father, following the logic of melancholia, must mean that he has lost his father as an object of desire and has not been able to let go of —or grieve— that loss. Ego formation, after all, requires the internalization of —or identification with— the lost object. Similarly the fact that the girl identifies ultimately with her mother must again mean that she has lost her as a love object and has been unable to grieve that loss.

In both cases the lost desire for the parent of the same sex is installed melancholically in the ego. Heterosexual desire is bought at the price of denying —or, in psychoanalytic language, disavowing or foreclosing (what we might think of as negating or repressing)— prior homosexual desire. Heterosexuality thus has a melancholic structure. (85)

When Freud tells the story of the Oedipus complex he narrates it in terms of the taboo against incest, a taboo which he, like Lévi-Strauss … saw as foundational to culture and society. When Butler re-tells the story, she does so in order to uncover what is hidden in Freud’s narrative: that the Oedipus complex relies upon a prior taboo against homosexuality.

The psychoanalytic story of desire, as told by Freud, is thus incomplete: it does not, perhaps cannot, tell of the loss of same-sex desire that exists prior to the Oedipal scene where the incestuous heterosexual love object is renounced and where the subject is initiated into both their sexual identity and the moral order (85).

lloyd oedipal

Lloyd, Moya. Judith Butler: From Norms to Politics. Cambridge MA: Polity Press, 2007.

According to Lévi-Strauss there is a universal law that regulates the exchange of women in all kinship systems: this is the incest taboo, which ensures that women are exchanged between clans of men not related by blood. The incest taboo is crucial in two ways

1. it generates a non-incestuous heterosexuality

2. the taboo represents the crucial step in the transition from nature to culture. It inaugurates society. … the taboo leads to compulsory heterosexuality. How?

It divides the universe of sexual choice into categories of permitted and prohibited sexual partners and it presupposes a prior less articulate taboo on homosexuality. Incest taboo = invariant transcultural symbolic law

Because Rubin believes all humans are sexually polymorphous, she adheres to an idea of ‘sexuality “before the law”‘ rather than as Butler would have it, sexuality as an effect of the law (81).

… it is clear that much of the conceptual apparatus Butler deploys in her own analysis of Lévi-Strauss, Freud and Lacan is borrowed from Rubin’s earlier text: her assumption of a prior prohibition on homosexuality, an understanding of heterosexuality as compulsory and a concern with the intractability of symbolic law (81).

In Freud’s estimation, all infants experience incestuous desires for their parents. How these desires are resolved determines not only the subject’s future sexual orientation but also how its ego and superego (conscience) develop.

Key to Freud’s account, according to Butler, is the idea of primary bisexuality. Freud assumes, that is, that all babies are born with both feminine and masculine dispositions… A masculine disposition, he suggests, is expressed in the child’s desire for its mother, while a feminine disposition is expressed in the child’s desire for its father. The sex of the child in question is irrelevant.

For Butler this can mean only one thing. Freud understands primary bisexuality heteronormatively: as ‘the coincidence of two heterosexual desires within a single psyche’ (Butler Gender Trouble 77 cited in Lloyd 83).

Why is Freud unable to imagine the possibility of pre-oedipal homosexuality? Butler’s supposition (echoing Rubin) is that the reason for this is that the Oedipus complex, and thus Freud’s theory of psycho-sexual development, presumes a prior prohibition on homosexuality.

In order to expose this prior prohibition, Butler set about demonstrating that far from masculinity and femininity being dispositions that naturally inhere in persons, they are, in fact, effects of identification.

Identification refers to the process whereby the individual acquires its identity, or aspects thereof, from someone (or something) else. One of the ways in which this occurs is through … introjection.

Introjection: is when the subject takes into its ego —into him or herself— objects from the outside world in order to preserve them. Introjection is a response to loss.

stephen white desire our own submission

White, Stephen K. Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 2000.

Why does desire cooperate with its own submission?

Butler’s answer rests on her postulation of a “desire to be” or “to persist” that characterizes human beings. This is not a desire for mere physical survival or to align with some metaphysical essence; it is rather the desire for social existence, linguistic survival. Moreover, this desire has as its “final aim” not some particular model of existence, but rather merely “the continuation of itself”; it is thus “a desire to desire.”

And this desire will cooperate with the prohibition of any particular desire that endangers its continued access to the terms of social existence … “the desire to desire is a willingness to desire precisely that which would foreclose desire, if only for the possibility of continuing to desire.”

One attaches to what is painful rather than not attach at all (86).

“If desire has as its final aim the continuation of itself — and here one might link Hegel, Freud, and Foucault all back to Spinoza’s conatus— then the capacity of desire to be withdrawn and to reattach will constitute something like the vulnerability of every strategy of subjection. (Butler Psychic 55, 60-62, 101. Cited in White 87).

Teradacto: White breaks down Butler’s theory of subject into 3 components or “ontological forces”: 1. power, 2. materialization, 3. the desire to desire.

Within such an ontology, critical agency emerges not with the possibility of escaping from the turning, but rather with the possibility of continuing that turning in a somewhat different way, a way in which one redirects how the three forces continue to press upon and partially constitute one another.

colebrook on subject

Colebrook, Claire. “Feminism and Autonomy: The Crisis of the Self-Authoring Subject.” Body and Society, 1997. Vol. 3(2): 21-41.

While the failure of autonomy in Romanticism took many forms, the short-circuiting of Enlightenment self-legitimation was always marked by the return of a repressed exteriority; the intrusion of Nature, others, the past, memory, spirit, divinity or embodiment all represented the subject’s inability to exhaustively account for its own being. … Freud’s theory of the death drive, in which all difference is overcome in a return to a state of quiescence, can be read as the epitome of this strain in Romanticism, in whch the desire to overcome all exteriority or otherness results in the self’s extinction. … Against this Romantic desire for self-authorship (and its lamented failure), Shelley’s novel, and the later interventions of Emannuel Levinas and Luce Irigaray, argue that it is separation, belatedness and facticity of one’s being which constitute ethics (23).

Autonomy in Kant

Because the finate self can only experience the phenomenal, or apparent, world there can be no experiencable ground for ethics.

Reason cannot know any foundation which lies outside its phenomenal finitude. The attempt to posit such a foundation (such as the Platonic Idea of the good) can only lead reason astray, for such a foundation could, in essence, never be known by experience. … Reason can only know that which is given to experience, and experience offers not ethical laws. … reson cannot provide any normative or concrete ethical goals … Reason is regulative.

Deleuze and Irigaray

What Irigaray’s reading of the philosophical tradition reveals is that the ideal of rational autonomy is not a general metaphysical premise but the way of being a specifically embodied subject.

mills genealogy

Hence the overwhelming impulse of Excitable Speech is to provide a theoretical argument that makes legal redress illegitimate. This indicates a significant divergence from Foucault’s approach to the question of theoretical engagement
with political problems.

This point becomes clearer if Butler’s theoretical position is contrasted with a genealogical approach, for the aim of the latter would be to trace relations of force in order to bring to the fore the points of weakness and possible intervention. As such, these points of weakness cannot be designated a priori, but this is precisely what Butler does in presuming that the structural instability of language qua power should be the privileged point of intervention in combating hate speech.

In short, while resignification might well be a logically possible mode of redress against the speech of hate, this does not ensure that it is necessarily the most efficacious one, since this could only be decided in loco, not a priori, if even then.

Furthermore, such a presumption of the efficacy of resignification as a strategy of resistance is precisely what her considered arguments against the sovereign force of the speaker warns us against. For just as the efficacy of hate speech cannot be assured through recourse to a notion of the sovereign subject, neither can the efficacy of reappropriation and resignification. The effectiveness of resignification will necessarily be conditioned, not only by the ‘‘condensed historicity’’ of the term, but also by the circumstances in which the attempt at resignification takes place, what might be called the conditions of felicity.

This has the consequence that, while resignification might be logically possible with all terms or utterances, the historical and discursive circumstances in which resignification is attempted will more or less severely limit the actual realizability or efficacy of a strategy of resignification. Contrary to what some of her critics have suggested, Butler is not unaware that resignification is itself both subject to discursive limits and open to the possibility of failure. As she states, ‘‘neither the radically new nor the subversive repetition can be logically guaranteed; there will be a necessary difference between what is shown to be logically possible and what in any given nexus of discourse and power is possible to realize’’.68

Thus she does recognize that, as a strategy of resistance to the interpellative force of hate speech, the success of resignification will vary. However, in developing her arguments against the legal regulation of hate speech, Butler
seems to resile from this recognition and overemphasizes the progressive potential of resignification as a political strategy.

If this is the case, Butler is (to use her words) ‘‘postulating a logic to which social practices are subject but which is itself subject to no social practice’’.69

However, this directly contradicts her stated political allegiance to Foucault’s pragmatics. Instead, it suggests that the Derridean influence within her later work introduces commitments that are not yet reconciled with attention to local
contingencies in considering questions of political practice.

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).

mills hate speech is not illocutionary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

mills on butler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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