{"id":1680,"date":"2009-01-27T19:40:29","date_gmt":"2009-01-28T00:40:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=1680"},"modified":"2009-04-20T20:49:14","modified_gmt":"2009-04-21T01:49:14","slug":"butler-discourse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2009\/01\/27\/butler-discourse\/","title":{"rendered":"butler discourse"},"content":{"rendered":"

In sum, then, Butler’s desire to engage the structured movement of differentiation within<\/strong><\/em> language does not preclude the existence of an outside language that truly does exceed our perceptions and representations; it’s just that the human condition bars access to it. Accordingly, the perception and representation of this outside, despite its convincing transparency and our sense of its immediate accessibility, will always be a language effect \u2014 a cultural production. Butler’s reliance on the overarching term ‘culture’ as the explanatory category that contains<\/em><\/strong> this shifting process surely makes the point. In other words, language and culture and mutually implicated \u2014 indeed, some would say they are one and the same (68).<\/p>\n

No signifier can be radically representative, for every signifier is the site of a perpetual m\u00e9connaisance<\/strong><\/em>; it produces the expectation of a unity, a full and final recognition that can never be achieved. Paradoxically, the failure of such signifiers … fully to describe the constituency they name is precisely what constitutes these signifiers as sites of phantasmatic investment and discursive rearticulation. It is what opens the signifier to new meanings and new possibilities for political resignification.<\/span> It is this open-ended and performative function of the signifier that seems to me to be crucial to a radical democratic notion of futurity (Butler in Bodies That Matter<\/span>, 191. cited in Kirby JB: Live Theory<\/span>, 73).<\/p>\n

If women and other socially abjected subjects are themselves subjected to\/through these same significatory transformations then their existence and its significance must be determined within<\/em><\/strong> the Symbolic order. Unfortunately, \u017di\u017eek’s reading of the bar as an absolute prohibition, as if the cut of castration is a definitive fact, reaffirms an ‘outside discourse’ in derelict terms of trauma and castration. Thus, by appropriating Lacan’s notion of the Real to explain this foreclosure, \u017di\u017eek actually endorses the inevitability, the indisputable necessity, of this violent inheritance of abject subject formation.<\/p>\n

In view of this, Butler’s intervention is important because it illustrates that the bar is not an absolute, fixed barrier, but a process of demarcation, an ongoing attempt<\/strong><\/em> to bar or draw a line that is never finished. The installation of the bar as an absolute frame achieves the effect<\/strong><\/em> of both discovering and repudiating that outside as inherently deficient and naturally<\/strong><\/em> base (Kirby, 2006: 73).<\/p>\n

By interrogating the foundation, or what is supposedly ‘given’ as the indifferent ground of valuation, and by discovering that it is forged from the same political determinations as other significatory practices, Butler is able to dispense with the foreclosure of the Real entirely<\/strong> (73).<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In sum, then, Butler’s desire to engage the structured movement of differentiation within language does not preclude the existence of an outside language that truly does exceed our perceptions and representations; it’s just that the human condition bars access to it. Accordingly, the perception and representation of this outside, despite its convincing transparency and our … Continue reading “butler discourse”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,78,80,8,102,82,98,15,41,20],"tags":[109],"class_list":["post-1680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-abject","category-butler","category-citationality","category-discourse","category-iterability","category-performativity","category-resignify","category-subjectivity","category-the-real","category-zizek","tag-whoa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1680"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1680\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2925,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1680\/revisions\/2925"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}