{"id":3252,"date":"2009-10-15T23:20:53","date_gmt":"2009-10-16T03:20:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=3252"},"modified":"2011-10-25T23:05:57","modified_gmt":"2011-10-26T04:05:57","slug":"pluth-on-butler","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2009\/10\/15\/pluth-on-butler\/","title":{"rendered":"pluth on butler her lack of act"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pluth, Ed. Signifers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan\u2019s Theory of the Subject<\/span>. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007.<\/p>\n

Blog post originally published on May 14, 2009 at 15:16<\/em><\/p>\n

Even attempts to avoid alienation by coming up with our own identities (say, in a project of aesthetic self-creation, or … in a Butlerian politics that affirms the openness of identity) are still always going to be geared toward getting recognition from the Other<\/strong>. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/strong>If we are interested in identity, in determining or asserting what we are (or even what we want to be), then we are interested in being objects of the Other’s desire.\u00a0 This interest relies upon an Other construed as a subject-supposed-to-know.\u00a0 No pursuit of the self, no matter how apparently subversive it may be, can avoid making an implicit appeal to this kind of Other. <\/strong>Both Butler and Lacan pursue the implications of this impasse, yet despite these similarities, there is an important difference in their results. (140)<\/p>\n

\u017di\u017eek points out (CHU: 124), that the dimension of the act is missing from Butler’s work … and that this is the real flaw … While Butler argues that the subject has no core, unchangeable identity, she does argue that the subject has an unchangeable fixation to identity as such. <\/strong>Her characterization of this fixation leads me to claim that despite her attempts to include a notion of agency in her work, her theory possesses a deterministic streak.\u00a0 The inclusion of a consideration of how acts use signifiers in a way THAT IS NOT BOUND UP WITH IDENTIFICATION AND RECOGNITION would remedy this.<\/strong> (141)<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Butler’s accounts of agency and the subject do not require any notion of something external to or other than discourse.<\/strong> She can account for subjects and agents as well as transformations within the “matrix of intelligibility” from a perspective that only considers the discursively constructed nature of identity.\u00a0\u00a0 Nevertheless Butler wants to avoid giving the impression that she adheres to an extreme “linguisticism.” … Butler wants to include some notion of the body in her account of identification while avoiding two things:<\/p>\n

– On the one hand, she wants avoid making the body into a purely linguistic construct<\/p>\n

– she also wants to avoid making the body into something simply outside of discourse. 144<\/p>\n

In the Psychic Life of Power<\/em>, the paradox of having to be subjected to power in order to be a subject comes under further scrutiny: “If the terms by which we gain social recognition for ourselves are those by which we are regulated and<\/em> gain social existence then to affirm one’s existence is to capitulate to one’s subordination a sorry bind” (Butler Psychic 79, quoted in Pluth 147).<\/p>\n

Butler reiterates here that it is only by being subjected to a signifier that identifies us that we can be subjects capable of resisting that identification, resisting a reduction to that signifier, and acting as agents. <\/strong>Once again, the preservation of some kind of relation to identity is absolutely crucial for Butler. <\/strong>Without a relation to an alienating identification, the kind of subversive activity she wants to affirm would not be possible. In fact, there would be no “subject” at all, and thus no chance for agency, without both an identity and the preservation of a frustrated relationship<\/em> to this identity. 147<\/p>\n

Because of being wed to the real<\/span> in a different fashion, an act<\/strong> involves the realization that there is no Other of the Other<\/span>, nothing behind the Other, as it were, acting as a ground.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Consequently an act transforms the subject (of fantasy) and consists of a signifying practice that does not rely on the Other as a guarantee of meaning and recognition.\u00a0 As … the Fort-Da<\/em> game .. showed, an act is not for the Other.<\/span><\/p>\n

Is Lacan’s idea of a desiring Other just like Butler’s idea of identity as a conflicted cultural field?\u00a0 They sound alike insofar as both involve a rejection of the fiction of an Other who is a subject-supposed-to-know.\u00a0 But the resemblance does not go much father. Butler’s “matrix of intelligibility,” out of which identity is forged, contains a multiplicity of signifiers whose interrelations can lead to unpredictable possibilities for identity.<\/p>\n

But in Lacan’s work, an encounter with the Other’s desire is not an encounter with a multiplicity of signifiers offering various possibilities for identity. Rather, an encounter with the Other’s desire is an encounter with the absence of any signifier offering a support, guarantee, and recognition point for identity<\/span>. It is such an absence that makes an encounter with the Other’s desire into an encounter with an impasse in symbolization, which is the mode in which the real appears in an act.\u00a0 Thus the encounter with the Other’s desire can be thought of as an encounter with the real<\/span><\/em>. (148)<\/strong><\/p>\n

The difference between Lacan’s notion of a split, desiring Other and Butler’s notion of a multiple, conflicted social order is the difference between not having a signifier and having a cornucopia of signifiers, which is one way to figure the difference between a theory that includes the real in the symbolic, and a theory that overemphasizes the symbolic (although Butler would not use this term to describe her theory). While her discussion of the body as an impasse is an attempt to resolve this issue, it does not lead Butler to focus on how the subject may have a relation to something other than identity, and how the subject may be doing something other than performing identity \u2014at least sometimes (148).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pluth, Ed. Signifers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan\u2019s Theory of the Subject. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. Blog post originally published on May 14, 2009 at 15:16 Even attempts to avoid alienation by coming up with our own identities (say, in a project of aesthetic self-creation, or … in a Butlerian politics … Continue reading “pluth on butler her lack of act”<\/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":[78,21,24,40,119,82,98,15,106,20],"tags":[109],"class_list":["post-3252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-butler","category-jouissance","category-lacan","category-lack","category-language","category-performativity","category-resignify","category-subjectivity","category-the-act","category-zizek","tag-whoa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3252","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=3252"}],"version-history":[{"count":27,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3252\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3255,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3252\/revisions\/3255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}