{"id":2032,"date":"2009-02-21T21:06:18","date_gmt":"2009-02-22T02:06:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=2032"},"modified":"2011-09-27T18:15:08","modified_gmt":"2011-09-27T23:15:08","slug":"butlers-question","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2009\/02\/21\/butlers-question\/","title":{"rendered":"Butler’s question"},"content":{"rendered":"

Is the incompleteness of subject-formation that hegemony requires one in which the subject-in-process is incomplete precisely because it is constituted through exclusions that are politically salient, not structurally static or foundational? And if this distinction is wrong-headed, how are we to think those constituting exclusions that are structural and foundational together with those we take to be politically salient to the movement of hegemony? … 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-formation and, hence, as fundamentally indifferent to the political field it is said to condition? (JB. BuLaZi. 12-13)<\/p>\n

Laclau’s response<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

I have just said that the sleight of hand on which Butler’s argument is based consists in a hypostasis by which a purely negative condition is turned into a positive one \u2014 only at that price can one assert the non-historicity of the structural limit (184).<\/p>\n

First, Butler introduces her usual war machines \u2014 the ‘cultural’ and the ‘social’\u2014 without the slightest attempt at defining their meanings, so it is impossible to understand what she is talking about except through some conjecture. My own guess is that if she is opposing the ‘cultural’ and the ‘social’ to something which is on the one hand ‘universal’ and on the other ‘structural’, one has to conclude that structural determinations are universal, and that they are incommensurable with social and culture specificity. From this it is not difficult to conclude that Butler is advocating, form the point of view of theoretical analysis, some sort of sociological nihilism. Taken at face value, her assertions would mean that the use of ANY social category describing forms of structural effectivity would be a betrayal of cultural and social specificity. If that were so, the only game in town would be journalistic descriptivism.<\/span> Of course, she can say that this was not her intention, and that she wanted only to speak out against essentialist, aprioristic notions of structural determination. In that case case however, she would have to answer two questions:<\/p>\n

1. where is her own approach to a more differentiated analysis of levels of structural limitation and determination<\/span> to be found.<\/p>\n

2. where does she find that I have EVER advocated in my work a theory of ahistorical aprioristic structural determination?<\/p>\n

On the second point there can be NO ANSWER.<\/p>\n