Category: subjectivity

universality

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

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

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

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

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

status and formation of the subject

Butler, Judith. “Restaging the Universal: Hegemony and the Limits of Formalism.” Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek. New York: Verso, 2000. 11-43.

[S]hould not the incompletion of subject-formation be linked to the democratic contestation over signifiers? Can the ahistorical recourse to the Lacanian bar be reconciled with the strategic question that hegemony poses, or does it stand as a quasi-transcendental limitation on all possible subject-formations and strategies and, hence, as fundamentally indifferent to the political field it is said to condition (12-13).

Moreover, if we accept the notion that all historical struggle is nothing other than a vain effort to displace a founding limit that is structural in status …

If hegemony denotes the historical possibilities for articulation that emerge within a given political horizon, then it will make a significant difference whether we understand that field as historically revisable and transformable, or whether it is given as a field whose integrity is secured by certain structurally identifiable limits and exclusions (13).

Power is not stable or static, but is remade at various junctures within everyday life; it constitutes our tenuous sense of common sense, and is ensconced as the prevailing epistemes of a culture. Morevover, social transformation occurs not merely by rallying mass numbers in favour of a cause, but precisely through the ways in which daily social relations are rearticulated, and new conceptual horizons opened up by anomalous or subversive practices (13).

In the Greater Logic, Hegel gives the example of the person who thinks that he might learn how to swim by learning what is required before entering the water. The person does not realize tht one learns to swim only by entering the water and practising one’s strokes in the midst of the activity itself. Hegel implicitly likens the Kantian to one who seeks to know how to swim before actually swimming, and he counters this model of a self-possessed cognition with one that gives itself over to the activity itself, a form of knowing that is given over to the world it seeks to know. Although Hegel is often dubbed a philospher of ‘mastery’, we can see here … that the ek-static disposition of the self towards its world undoes cognitive mastery. Hegel’s own persistent references to ‘losing oneself’ and ‘giving oneself over’ only confirm the point that the knowing subject cannot be understood as one who imposes ready-made categories on a pre-given world. The categories are shaped by the world it seeks to know, just as the world is not known without the prior action of those categories. And just as Hegel insists on revising serveral times his very definition of ‘universality’, so he makes plain that the categories by which the world becomes available to us are continually remade by the encounter with the world that they facilitate.

We do not remain the same, and neither do our cognitive categories, as we enter into a knowing encounter with the world. Both the knowing subject and the world are undone and redone by the act of knowledge (19-20).

Butler’s relationship to Hegel

Moya Lloyd. Judith Butler: From Norms to Politics Polity 2007.

While thinkers prior to Hegel had examined the nature of desire, few, as Allan Megill notes, had thought that there might be ‘a constitutive relation between desire and subjectivity”, as Hegel did, and it is this constitutive relation that both interested his French critics and continues to interest Butler. Hegel’s Phenomenology, as stated, examines the way in which desire and self-consciousness emerge side by side (15).

ek-static subject, a subject outside itself, or to put it differently, a subject that is not self-identical. … it is the idea of ek-static subjectivity, derived, however loosely, from Hegel, continues to inspire Butler’s work to date, although the form it takes is one increasingly informed, in large part by psychoanalysis. For this reason, far from the comic subject of desire she attributes to Hegel, Butler’s subject is a melancholic figure (16).

… the subject is an ek-static subject; one that is always outside —or other to— itself. It is this understanding of the subject and its relation to the other … that underpins, amongst other things, Butler’s examination of the differential values placed on disparate lives and deaths; her treatment of what counts as a liveable life, her exploration of the constitutive role of mourning in the production of the psyche; and her discussion of the precariousness of all life (18).

heteronormativity: institutions, modes of understanding, norms and discourss that treat heterosexuality as naural to humanity

Antigone ch. 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Antigone ch. 2 Lacan kinship

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

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

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

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

kinship as symbolic

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

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

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

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

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

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

prounce it like this

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)

melancholy

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

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

(Salih 2002. p 133-4)
AFFIRMATIVE MELANCHOLIA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Salih 2002. p 131-4).

Resistance psyche

This line of causation is important, since, if the subject were merely the effect of power, it would be hard to see how it could subvert existing power structures. Butler insists on the subject’s agency as ‘the assumption of a purpose unintended by power, one that could not have been derived logically or historically, that operates in a relation of contingency and reversal to the power that makes it possible, to which it nevertheless belongs’ (PLP: 15). The subject’s relationship to power is ambivalent: it depends on power for its existence, and yet it also wields power in unexpected, potentially subversive ways. We will return to ambivalence and agency in due course (Salih 2002. p 121).

The ‘possibility of resistance’ is crucial to Butler’s account of the subject, and she asks how Foucault can account for the psychic resistance to power if the psyche/soul as he formulates it is no more than an imprisoning effect. Conversely, by training a Foucauldian lens on psychoanalytic theory, Butler raises the question as to whether psychic resistance is an effect of power, a discursive production rather than a means of undermining power. Resistance takes place within discourse or the law, but what Butler calls a ‘psychic remainder’ – the element of the psyche that is ‘left over’, so to speak, when discursive operations have done their work – signifies the limits of normalization even while it is also clear that the unconscious does not escape the power relations by which it is structured. Butler also raises the question of what she calls ‘the problem of bodies in Foucault’. If the soul is the prison of the body as Foucault claims it is, then does this mean that a pre-existing body is acted upon by disciplinary structures? In her early article, ‘Foucault and the Paradox of Bodily Inscriptions’, Butler sets out the following ‘paradox’ in Foucault’s theorizations of bodies and discourses: although Foucault asserts that bodies are discursively constructed, his descriptions of the mechanisms of legal inscription seem to presuppose that they pre-exist the law (FPBI: 603). Departing from (or perhaps developing) this paradox in Psychic, Butler argues that body and soul are discursive formations that emerge simultaneously through the sublimation of body into soul. ‘Sublimation’ is a psychoanalytic term describing the transformation or diversion of sexual drives into ‘cultural’ or ‘moral’ activities, and Butler uses it to describe the process whereby the body is subordinated and partly destroyed as what she calls ‘the dissociated Self’ emerges. (This definition of sublimation is taken from Wright 1992: 416– 17.) However, Butler argues that the sublimation of body into soul or psyche leaves behind a ‘bodily remainder’, which exceeds the processes of normalization and survives as what Butler calls ‘a kind of constitutive loss’ (PLP: 92). ‘The body is not a site on which a construction takes place’, Butler argues; ‘it is a destruction on the occasion of which a subject is formed’ (PLP: 92). Once again we and ourselves in the realm of Butlerian paradox, but this is an elaboration of the paradox that is central to Psychic: the subject comes into being when her body is acted upon and destroyed (presumably by discourse?), which means that this is a productive destruction or, perhaps, a sublation or Aufhebung, since both the body and the psyche are simultaneously formed and destroyed within discursive structures. The contrast between psychoanalytic and Foucauldian formulations of the subject should be clear: whereas in the former the psyche and possibly also the body, are sites of excess and possible resistance, for Foucault all resistance takes place within the terms of the law – indeed, resistance is an effect of the law. ‘[R]esistance appears as the effect of power’, Butler writes, paraphrasing Foucault, ‘as a part of power, its self-subversion’ (PLP: 93). Even so, within the Foucauldian model of myriad and pervasive power structures, the law may be subversively reiterated and repeated in order to destabilize existing norms, and Butler asks how and in what direction it is possible to work the power relations by which subjects are worked (PLP: 100). Since the Foucauldian subject is always in the process of construction, these processes are vulnerable to repetition, and, by implication, subversion, yet Butler notes the risk of renormalization within this model of identity, and she wonders how resistance may be derived from discourse itself (PLP: 93, 94). Once again reading Foucauldian theory through a psychoanalytic lens, Butler argues that, whereas Foucault claims that psychoanalysis sees the law as separate from desire, there can be no desire without the law that produces and sustains it. We have returned to the Freudian notion of libidinally-invested law and a prohibition that is in itself a form of desire, so that, rather than claiming that the unconscious is located outside power structures, Butler argues that power itself possesses an unconscious that provides the conditions for radical reiteration. It is because the injurious terms of the law by which subjects are socially constituted are vulnerable to repetition and reiteration that subjects accept and occupy these terms. ‘Called by an injurious name, I come into social being and because I have a certain inevitable attachment to my existence, because a certain narcissism takes hold of any term that confers existence, I am led to embrace the terms that injure me because they constitute me socially’, Butler asserts (PLP: 104). The operations of name-calling, or interpellation, and the passionate pursuit of the law complement Butler’s Foucauldian and psychoanalytic formulations, and they will be considered in the next section (Salih 2002. p 126-8).

whereas Butler argues that power simultaneously acts on and activates the subject by naming it. ‘To the extent that naming is an address, there is an addressee prior to the address’, Butler argues, ‘but given that the address is a name which creates what it names, there appears to be no “Peter” without the name “Peter” ’ (PLP: 111). Again, this might sound paradoxical, but in fact Butler’s formulation is structurally identical to her previous reversals of cause and effect in Gender Trouble, Bodies That Matter and Excitable Speech where, as you will recall, there is no doer behind the deed but the ‘doing’ itself is everything. As in her previous discussions of interpellation, Butler casts doubt on who or what exactly is interpellated by a law that confers social identity in subjection, and she also questions the performative efficacy of the law. The call of the law is not a divine performative, since there are ways of turning around that indicate what Butler calls ‘a willingness not to be – a critical desubjectivation – in order to expose the law as less powerful than it seems’ (PLP: 130). Anticipating her essay, ‘What Is Critique?’,

which also insists on the subversive potential of giving up the claim to a coherent identity, Butler asks how it is possible to understand the desire to be as a constitutive desire, and how laws exploit subjects that allow themselves to be subordinated in order to take up their positions in society. Rather than obediently responding to the terms by which one is interpellated, a more ethical and subversive mode of being is, paradoxically, failing to be by not recognizing oneself in the call of the law (PLP: 131).

The subject cannot ‘be’ in any coherent sense anyway, since we know from Butler’s previous accounts that it is haunted by its abjected and socially unacceptable desires. Indeed, like Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, Psychic continues to insist on the melancholia of gendered and sexed identities that will always and inevitably exceed the terms by which they are socially constituted (Salih 2002. p 130).

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 pt 2

(Salih, 2002. p 86).

‘The question, of course, is why it is assumed that the phallus requires that particular body part to symbolize, and why it could not operate through symbolizing other body parts’, writes Butler, and she argues that the ‘displaceability’ of the phallus, its ability to symbolize body parts or body-like things other than the penis is what makes the lesbian phallus possible (BTM: 84).

Women can both ‘have’ and ‘be’ the phallus, which means that they can suffer from penis envy and a castration complex at the same time; moreover, since ‘the anatomical part is never commensurable with the phallus itself’, men may be driven by both castration anxiety and penis envy, or rather, ‘phallus envy’ (BTM: 85). The phallus is ‘a transferable phantasm’ (BTM: 86), ‘an imaginary effect’ (BTM: 88), part of an imagined morphology (or a ‘morphological imaginary’) that can be appropriated and made to signify/ symbolize differently.

Such ‘aggressive reterritorializations’ (BTM: 86) deprivilege the phallus as both symbol and signifier, as well as revealing its status within a bodily schema, which, like language, is a resignifiable signifying chain with no ‘transcendental signified’ at its origin. Butler makes the most of this resignifiability in her ascription of the phallus to other body parts:

‘Consider that “having” the phallus can be symbolized by an arm, a tongue, a hand (or two), a knee, a pelvic bone, an array of purposefully instrumentalized body-like things’, she writes. ‘[T]he simultaneous acts of deprivileging the phallus and removing it from the normative heterosexual form of exchange, and recirculating and reprivileging it between women deploys the phallus to break the signifying chain in which it conventionally operates’ (BTM: 88). Butler claims that the phallus is a ‘plastic’ signifier that may ‘suddenly’ be made to stand for any number of body parts, discursive performatives or alternative fetishes (BTM: 89).

And yet it would appear that the phallus remains somewhat elusive, since Butler does not specify exactly how such resignifications can ‘suddenly’ happen, or why women would want to make their arms, tongues, hands, pelvic bones, etc. into phallic signifiers. The subversive potential of the resignifiable phallus resides in Butler’s insistence that you do not need to have a penis in order to have or be a phallus, and that having a penis does not mean that you will have or be a phallus. ‘[T]he lesbian phallus offers the occasion (a set of occasions) for the phallus to signify differently, and in so signifying, to resignify, unwittingly, its own masculinist and heterosexist privilege’, she writes (BTM: 90).

Again we return to the idea that anatomy is discourse or signification rather than destiny, which means that the body can be resignified in ways that challenge rather than confirm heterosexual hegemony. In her conclusion to the second chapter of Bodies, Butler states that she is not suggesting that a new body part is required, since she has not been talking about the penis as such; instead she calls for the displacement of the symbolic heterosexual hegemony of sexual difference and the release of alternative imaginary schemas of erotogenic pleasure (BTM: 91). It would indeed appear that Butler has wrested this hitherto privileged signifier from Lacan’s discursive control (BTM: 82– 3), and yet the lesbian phallus she ‘offers’ in her description of alternative bodily schemas (BTM: 90) will be equally open to appropriation and resignification by those who do not identify as ‘lesbians’. Indeed, we might well wonder who can ‘have’ and ‘be’ a lesbian phallus that is presumably vulnerable to subversive reterritorialization by men who, among other complexes, may also suffer from ‘lesbian phallus envy’ (Salih, 2002. p 86).

WIELDING THE LESBIAN PHALLUS

The lesbian phallus is not a dildo and it is not something one keeps in one’s desk drawer (see GP: 37). The morphological imaginary is the morph or form the body takes on through imagined or fantasized projections, and Butler’s rewriting of Lacan’s morphological imaginary displaces the phallus from its privileged significatory position. Asserting that penis and phallus are not synonymous, Butler shows how the phallus may be ‘reterritorialized’ by people who do not have penises. This is because the phallus is a symbol of a body part whose absence or ‘vanishing’ it signifies. To disconnect sign (phallus) from referent (penis) in this way allows Butler to displace the privilege Lacan accords this phallic signifier. ‘Of course there’s also a joke in “The Lesbian Phallus” because to have the phallus in Lacan is also to control the signifier’, Butler states in an interview. ‘It is to write and to name, to authorize and to designate. So in some sense I’m wielding the lesbian phallus in offering my critique of the Lacanian framework. It’s a certain model for lesbian authorship. It’s parody’ (GP: 37) (Salih 2002. p 87).

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).

Excitable Speech

Vicki Kirby. JB: Live Theory. 2006. Continuum

Language is not a mere instrument or tool in this account, a technology used to different effects by a sovereign subject who controls it. The complication here is that if we ourselves are an effect of language then the complexity of its ontology resonates with our own constitution (88).

There is a life a discourse that exceeds the subject’s own temporality (92).

In Excitable Speech Butler specifically interrogates the act of hate speech because although great suffering can be attributed to these injurious acts she disputes the juridical model of power which informs campaigns to stop it. … Butler’s point here is that ‘the sovereign conceit’ which installs a causal equivalence between the speaker’s intention to wound, the actual representation of hate and the impact felt by the victim shows little appreciation of the problematic nature of communication. Further to this, this style of analysis inadvertently constitutes the victim of hate speech as a powerless object of the act, a passive recipient of injury whose incapacity renders them totally vulnerable. Lacking agency, the subject’s only hope of protection is that the state will exercise its power to prohibit and police such acts (94).

From Butler’s 1999 interview with Vicki Bell:

I think there are all kinds of reasons to stop a person when they speak such things [racist and homophobic speech]… I think that’s important. But I think a politics that begins and ends with that policing function is a mistake, because for me the question is how is that person, as it were, renewing and reinvigorating racist rituals of speech, and how do we think about those particular rituals and how do we exploit their ritual function in order to undermine it in a more thorough-going way, rather than just stopping it as it’s spoken. What would it mean to restage it, take it, do something else with the ritual so that its revivability as a speech act is really seriously called into question? (Butler and Bell 1999, 166)

… her intention is to destabilize correspondence theories of language and to complicate what is actually meant by this notion of ‘discursive constitution’.

An important consideration for Butler is that the outcome of language is always threatened by incoherence, contingency and ambiguity, for it involves an intricate web of dispersed causality where the presumed integrity of authorship and authority, meaning and intention, are ‘spoken through’ by convention. This means that discursive convention is not a static structure but one which ‘suffer[s] destructuration through being reiterated, repeated, and rearticulated’. With this in mind, Butler asks, ‘[m]ight the speech act of hate speech be understood as less efficacious, more prone to innovation and subversion, if we were to take into account the temporal life of the “structure” it is said to enunciate? (Butler from Excitable, quoted in Kirby 2006, 95)

illocutionary act (performative utterance) language that performs an action as it is said.
“speech acts that in saying do what they say, and do it in the moment of that saying”. The illocutionary speech act is itself the deed that it effects

“I bet” when said to a casino employee, or “I do” when said in a marriage ceremony to a future spouse, respectively constitute the fact of bettting and marrying. The actual practice of language can here be described as truth producing.

… if I am a heterosexual man standing in front of a registrar in a Register Office and I utter the words ‘I do’ in answer to the question, ‘Do you take this woman to be your wife?’, then I am actually performing the action by making the utterance: statements like these are called performative utterances or illocutionary acts. ‘To name the ship is to say (in the appropriate circumstances) the words “I name &c.” When I say, before the registrar or altar &c., “I do”, I am not reporting on a marriage, I am indulging in it’ (Austin 1955: 6) (Salih 2002. p 88).

perlocutionary act (constative utterance) language that describes the world
“speech acts that produce certain effects as their consequence; by saying something, a certain effect follows.” The perlocutionary merely leads to certain effects that are not the same as the speech act itself.

In Bodies That Matter Butler once again draws from these lectures on linguistics, How To Do Things With Words. Austin distinguishes between two types of utterances, those that describe or report on something, and those that, in saying, actually perform what is being said.

Austin calls constative utterances, might be the statement, ‘It’s a sunny day’, or ‘I went shopping’ (Austin also calls these perlocutionary acts); by saying ‘I went shopping’, I am not doing it, I am merely reporting an occurrence.