{"id":5661,"date":"2010-07-21T12:49:49","date_gmt":"2010-07-21T16:49:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=5661"},"modified":"2010-07-21T14:01:20","modified_gmt":"2010-07-21T18:01:20","slug":"5661","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2010\/07\/21\/5661\/","title":{"rendered":"tuhkanen critique of butler"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tuhkanen, Mikko. “Performativity and Becoming” Cultural Critique<\/em>. 72, Spring (2009): 1-35.<\/p>\n

For example, her description of Antigone as \u201cthe limit without which the symbolic cannot be thought\u201d or the \u201cunthinkable within the symbolic\u201d might seem to be referring to the real, yet she goes on to identify Antigone\u2019s position as possibly embodying an \u201calternative symbolic or imaginary\u201d (Antigone\u2019s Claim, 40) and, immediately afterward, turns to Lacan\u2019s second seminar to criticize his totalizing theory of the symbolic law (41\u201342; see also 47). Arguably, this conflation of different stages in Lacan\u2019s work forces (or allows) her to ignore Lacan\u2019s divergence from a structuralist understanding of a system (see also Penney, 19).<\/p>\n

Relevant here is Shepherdson\u2019s suggestion that \u201cthe \u2018real\u2019 can be understood as a concept that was developed in order to define in a clear way how there is always an element that \u2018does not belong\u2019 within the structure, an \u2018excluded\u2019 element which escapes the law, but which can nevertheless be approached in a precise theoretical fashion.\u201d Consequently, \u201cpsychoanalysis is not in fact committed to the \u2018law\u2019 in the manner of classical structuralist thought\u201d (\u201cIntimate Alterity,\u201d paras. 13, 24).<\/p>\n

In No Future, Lee Edelman argues that, rather than making good on its claim to conjure up from the tragic heroine\u2019s tomb a radical challenge to the protocols of symbolic legitimation, Butler\u2019s rendering of Antigone \u201creturns us, instead, to familiar forms of a durable liberal humanism whose rallying cry has always been, and here remains,\u2018the future\u2019\u201d (105\u20136). For Edelman, such seamless domestication of the real to symbolic meaning is symptomatic of the inherent failure of futurity to be evoked in terms of anything but what he calls \u201creproductive futurism\u201d (2 and passim). In the figure of the Child, politics premised on futurism \u201cgenerates generational succession, temporality, and narrative sequence, not toward the end of enabling change, but, instead, of perpetuating sameness, of turning back time to assure repetition\u201d (60). In this schema of enabling the future to unfold as a reassuringly recognizable continuation of the present, queers are \u201cstigmatized as threatening an end to the future itself\u201d (113). Given the unquestioned reflex of seeing \u201cevery political vision as a vision of futurity\u201d (13), Edelman\u2019s exhilaratingly counterintuitive argument that queer respond to its stigmatization with a kind of an answer of the real, with an embrace of its status as an embodiment of \u201cthe arbitrary, future-negating force of a brutal and mindless drive\u201d (127), has a strong appeal. If there are reasons to resist this appeal, they must come from the fact that queer theory may not yet have come to grips with the specificity of the consequences of its paradigmatic groundings.<\/p>\n

I would propose that, because of the Butlerian paradigm on which much of queer theory has developed, the question of becoming, of futurity\u2019s claim on our thinking, may not yet have been adequately posed.<\/p>\n

With Deleuze, for example, we must ask whether futurity as becoming is reducible to breeding, in the sense in which fag slang uses the term to signal the mindless, mechanic, and (in Foucault\u2019s terms) docile reproduction of the same. Edelman writes:<\/p>\n

\u201cthe true oppositional politics implicit in the practice of queer sexualities lies not in the liberal discourse and patient negotiation of tolerances and rights, important as these undoubtedly are to all of us still denied them, but in the capacity of queer sexualities to figure the radical dissolution of the contract, in every sense social and Symbolic, on which the future as putative assurance against the jouissance of the Real depends\u201d (16).<\/p>\n

While not precisely disagreeing with Edelman, I would ask whether we have quite exhausted the question of futurity before we abandon it. To do this, we may want to shift our paradigmatic perspective such that our grounding assumptions are defamiliarized and our concepts\u2014here the question of becoming\u2014are necessarily rethought.\u00a0 Such a shift, I propose, would allow us to see that the futurity of performative politics may constitute only a partial understanding of what Deleuze, for example, sees as becoming.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tuhkanen, Mikko. “Performativity and Becoming” Cultural Critique. 72, Spring (2009): 1-35. For example, her description of Antigone as \u201cthe limit without which the symbolic cannot be thought\u201d or the \u201cunthinkable within the symbolic\u201d might seem to be referring to the real, yet she goes on to identify Antigone\u2019s position as possibly embodying an \u201calternative symbolic … Continue reading “tuhkanen critique of butler”<\/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":[78,126,111,38,12,112,32,86,100,24,16,90,15,118,106],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-butler","category-deleuze","category-desire","category-ethics","category-fantasy","category-foreclosure","category-foucault","category-gender","category-hegel","category-lacan","category-ontology","category-resistance","category-subjectivity","category-symbolic","category-the-act"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5661","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=5661"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5661\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5676,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5661\/revisions\/5676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}