{"id":2859,"date":"2009-04-12T15:10:56","date_gmt":"2009-04-12T20:10:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=2859"},"modified":"2010-03-22T20:38:02","modified_gmt":"2010-03-23T00:38:02","slug":"lloyd-criticism-of-desire-for-existence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2009\/04\/12\/lloyd-criticism-of-desire-for-existence\/","title":{"rendered":"lloyd criticism of desire for existence"},"content":{"rendered":"

For while the terms by which persistence \u2014or survival\u2014 is made possible are social<\/em> terms, that is, norms that are the contingent effects of specific power relations, the desire for existence<\/strong> itself, as she deploys it, appears not to be.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is clear from her characterisation of it. The desire for existence, she notes, is a desire that is ‘exploited by regulatory power’ (Psychic 19), a desire with the ‘capacity’ to ‘be withdrawn and to reattach’ under different modes of subjection (psychic 62), a ‘desire to survive, “to be”‘, which is a ‘pervasively exploitable desire’ (psychic 7).<\/p>\n

For desire to be exploited \u2014or exploitable\u2014 by power implies, of course, that it pre-exists power and is thus not one of its effects. Likewise, the notion that desire can withdraw and reattach suggests also that it is a substance with capacities independent of power… desire for existence appears to operate as an a priori<\/em> universal that transcends and\/or precedes culture and society(99-100).<\/p>\n

… attributing to the desire to exist certain qualities prior<\/em> to its imbrication in power relations … For here what interests Butler is the way that social norms of recognition are configured such that the desire ‘to persist in one’s own being’ is denied to certain individuals (undoing 31). In other words it is the norms of recognition that she subjects to critical scrutiny, NOT the desire for existence as such<\/strong> (100).<\/p>\n

When Butler deploys the term ‘social’, whether in relation to norms, culture, or language, it signals a contingent effect circumscribed by power. What she does not do, however, is pay sufficient attention to the historical<\/em> conditions of emergence of these particular effects. She does not, that is, examine the historical practices that themselves generate the social.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For while the terms by which persistence \u2014or survival\u2014 is made possible are social terms, that is, norms that are the contingent effects of specific power relations, the desire for existence itself, as she deploys it, appears not to be. This is clear from her characterisation of it. The desire for existence, she notes, is … Continue reading “lloyd criticism of desire for existence”<\/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":[78,55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2859","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-butler","category-normative"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2859","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=2859"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2859\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5329,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2859\/revisions\/5329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}