What is it then, that is desired in subjection? Is it a simple love of the shackles, or is there a more complex scenario at work?\u00a0 How is survival to be maintained if the terms by which existence is guaranteed are precisely those that demand and institute subordination?\u00a0 On this understanding,<\/p>\n
subjection is the paradoxical effect of a regime of power in which the very “conditions of existence,” the possibility of continuing as a recognizable social being, requires the formation and maintenance of the subject in subordination. 27<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
:)Ok, this is the formulation that says all that Butler has been working on towards and which defines her work tout court<\/em>. She is quoting her favourite quote from Spinoza which is that “desire is always the desire to persist in one’s own being.”\u00a0 This desire to persist in one’s own being “can be brokered only with the risky terms of social life.”\u00a0 And what is this social life but and here we go:<\/p>\n
then to persist in ones’ own being requires submitting to a world of others that is fundamentally not one’s own<\/span> (a submission that does not take place at a later date, but which frames and makes possible the desire to be). Only by persisting in alterity does one persist in one’s “own” being<\/span>.<\/p>\n
Vulnerable to terms that one never made, one persists always, to some degree, through categories, names, terms, and classifications that mark a primary and inaugurative alienation in sociality. If such terms institute a primary subordination or, indeed, a primary violence, then a subject emerges against itself in order, paradoxically, to be for itself. 28<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
:)Now here is a great moment in Butler.\u00a0 What would it mean to go beyond the simple boundaries of social existence in order to seek change?\u00a0 Now get this:<\/p>\n
What would it mean for the subject to desire something other than its continued “social existence”?\u00a0 If such an existence cannot be undone without falling into some kind of death, can existence nevertheless be risked, death courted or pursued, in order to expose and open to transformation the hold of social power on the conditions of life’s persistence?\u00a0 The subject is compelled to repeat the norms by which it is produced, but that repetition establishes a domain of risk, for if one fails to reinstate the norm “in the right way,” one beomes subject to further sanction, one feels the prevailing conditions of existence threatened.\u00a0And yet, without a repetition that risks life \u2014in its current organization\u2014 how might we begin to imagine the contingency of that organization,and performatively reconfigure the contours of the conditions of life?<\/span><\/p>\n
A Critical Analysis of Subjection involves:
\n<\/span><\/p>\n1) an account of the way regulatory power maintains subjects in subordination by producing and exploiting the demand for continuity, visibility, and place;<\/p>\n
2) recognition that the subject produced as continuous, visible, and located is nevertheless haunted by an inassimilable remainder, a melancholia that marks the limits of subjectivation;<\/p>\n
3) an account of the iterability of the subject that shows how agency may well consist in opposing and transforming the social terms by which it is spawned.\u00a0 29<\/p>\n
The analysis of subjection is always double, tracing the conditions of subject formation and tracing the turn against those conditions for the subject \u2014and its perspective\u2014 to emerge.<\/p>\n
Is there a way to affirm complicity as the basis of political agency, yet insist that political agency may do more than reiterate the conditions of subordination?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What is it then, that is desired in subjection? Is it a simple love of the shackles, or is there a more complex scenario at work?\u00a0 How is survival to be maintained if the terms by which existence is guaranteed are precisely those that demand and institute subordination?\u00a0 On this understanding, subjection is the paradoxical … Continue reading “subjection alterity norms”<\/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":[78,112,85,15],"tags":[134,109],"class_list":["post-5499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-butler","category-foreclosure","category-melancholia","category-subjectivity","tag-psychiclife","tag-whoa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5499","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=5499"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5499\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5511,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5499\/revisions\/5511"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}