Judith Butler - Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Kmaguir1 (talk | contribs) at 01:59, 6 August 2006. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Revision as of 01:59, 6 August 2006 by Kmaguir1 (talk | contribs)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.
Find sources: "Judith Butler" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Judith Butler (b. February 24 1956) is a prominent post-structuralist philosopher and has made major contributions to feminism, queer theory, political philosophy and ethics. She is Maxine Elliot professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

Butler received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University in 1984, and her dissertation was subsequently published as Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France. In the late-1980s, between different teaching/research appointments (most notably at the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University), she was involved in "poststructuralist" efforts within Western feminist theory to question the "presuppositional terms" of feminism.

Works

Gender Trouble (1990)

Main article: Gender Trouble.

To question the very foundational presuppositions of Western feminism meant opening it up to what others would later name queer theory, and criticizing the imperialism of a Western feminist theory that purports to represent "all" women. In 1990, Butler's book Gender Trouble burst onto the scene, selling over 100,000 copies internationally and in different languages. The book critically discusses the works of Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, Monique Wittig, Jacques Derrida, and, most significantly, Michel Foucault. The book was popular enough that it even inspired an intellectual fanzine, Judy!, that poked fun at her academic celebrity status.

The crux of Butler’s argument in Gender Trouble is that the coherence of the categories of sex, gender, and sexuality—the natural-seeming coherence, for example, of masculine gender and heterosexual desire in male bodies—are culturally constructed through the repetition of stylized acts in time. These stylized bodily acts, in their repetition, establish the appearance of an essential, ontological "core" gender. This is the sense in which Butler famously theorizes gender, along with sex and sexuality, as performative. The performance of gender, sex, and sexuality, however, is not a voluntary choice for Butler, who locates the construction of the gendered, sexed, desiring subject within what she calls &mdash borrowing from Foucault’s Discipline and Punish &mdash "regulative discourses". These, also called "frameworks of intelligibility" or "disciplinary regimes," decide in advance what possibilities of sex, gender, and sexuality are socially permitted to appear as coherent or "natural". Regulative discourse includes within it disciplinary techniques which, by coercing subjects to perform specific stylized actions, maintain the appearance in those subjects of the "core" gender, sex and sexuality the discourse itself prescribes.

A significant yet sometimes overlooked part of Butler's argument concerns the role of sex in the construction of "natural" or coherent gender and sexuality. Butler explicitly challenges biological accounts of binary sex, reconceiving the sexed body as itself culturally constructed by regulative discourse. The supposed obviousness of sex as a natural biological fact attests to how deeply its production in discourse is concealed. The sexed body, once established as a “natural” and unquestioned “fact,” is the alibi for constructions of gender and sexuality, unavoidably more cultural in their appearance, which can purport to be the just-as-natural expressions or consequences of a more fundamental sex. On Butler’s account, it is only on the basis of the primary construction of natural binary sex that binary gender and heterosexuality can be constructed as natural too. In this way, Butler claims that without a critique of sex as produced by discourse, the sex/gender distinction as a feminist strategy for contesting constructions of binary asymmetric gender and compulsory heterosexuality will be ineffective.

The concept of performativity is at the core of Butler's work. It extends beyond the doing of gender and can be understood as a full-fledged theory of subjectivity. Indeed, if her most recent books have shifted focus away from gender, they still treat performativity as theoretically central.

Bodies That Matter (1993)

Butler's next book, Bodies That Matter, seeks to clear up confusions produced by both willful and inadvertent misreadings of both her work in Gender Trouble and poststructuralist feminism in general. To disrupt readings of the gender performative that simplistically view gender enactment as a daily "choice," Butler strengthens the performative theory of gender with a consideration of the status of repetition. Here she cites Derrida's theory of iterability, a form of citationality, and goes on to work out a theory of performativity as citationality.

Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997)

In Excitable Speech, Butler surveys the problems of hate speech and censorship. She argues that censorship is difficult to evaluate, and that in some cases it may be useful or even necessary, while in others it may be worse than tolerance. She develops a new conception of censorship’s complex workings, supplanting the myth of the independent subject who wields the power to censor with a theory of censorship as an effect of state power and, more primordially, as the condition of language and discourse itself.

Butler argues that hate speech exists retrospectively, only after being declared such by state authorities. In this way, the state reserves for itself the power to define hate speech and, conversely, the limits of acceptable discourse. In this connection, Butler criticizes feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon's argument against pornography for its unquestioning acceptance of the state’s power to censor. Butler warns that such appeals to state power may backfire on progressivists like MacKinnon who seek social change, in her case to end patriarchal oppression, through legal reforms.

Deploying Foucault’s argument from The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, Butler claims that any attempt at censorship, legal or otherwise, necessarily propagates the very language it seeks to forbid. As Foucault argues, for example, the strict sexual mores of 19th century Western Europe did nothing but amplify the discourse of sexuality it sought to control. Extending this argument using Derrida and Lacan, Butler claims that censorship is primitive to language, and that the linguistic “I” is a mere effect of an originary censorship. In this way, Butler questions the possibility of any genuinely oppositional discourse; "If discourse depends on censorship, then the principle to whom we would want to oppose ourselves is also the principle of production of the discourse of opposition".

Butler also questions the efficacy of censorship on the grounds that hate speech is context-dependent. Citing J.L. Austin's concept of the performative utterance, Butler notes that words’ ability to “do things” makes hate speech possible but also at the same time dependent on its specific embodied context. Austin’s claim that what a word “does,” its illocutionary force, varies with the context in which it is uttered implies that it is impossible to adequately define the performative meanings of words, including hate, abstractly. On this basis, Butler rejects arguments like Richard Delgado’s which justify the censorship of certain specific words by claiming the use of those words constitutes hate speech in any context. In this way, Butler underlines the difficulty inherent in efforts to systematically identify hate speech.

Giving an Account of Oneself (2005)

In Giving an Account of Oneself, Butler develops an ethics based on the opacity of the subject to itself, the limits of self-knowledge. Borrowing from Adorno, Foucault, Nietzsche, Laplanche and Levinas, among others, Butler develops a theory of the formation of the subject as a relation to the social – a community of others and their norms – which is beyond the control of the subject it forms as precisely the very condition of that subject’s formation, the resources by which the subject becomes recognizably human, a grammatical "I", in the first place. The subject is therefore dispossessed of itself by an other or others as the very condition of its being at all, and this process by which I become myself only in relation to others and therefore cannot own myself completely, this constitutive dispossession, is the opacity of the contemporary subject to itself, what I cannot know, possess, and master consciously about myself.

Butler then turns to the ethical question: If my narrative account of myself is necessarily incomplete, breaking down tellingly at the point precisely when "I" am called to elucidate the foundations of this "I", my genesis and ontology, what kind of ethical agent, or "I", am "I"? Butler rejects the claim that if the subject is opaque to itself it is necessarily free of ethical responsibility and obligations. Instead she argues for an ethics based precisely on the limits of self-knowledge as the limits of responsibility itself. Any concept of responsibility which demands the full transparency of the self to itself, an entirely accountable self, necessarily does violence to the opacity which marks the constitution of the self it addresses. The scene of address by which responsibility is enabled is always already a relation between subjects who are variably opaque to themselves and to each other. The ethics that Butler envisions is therefore one in which the responsible self knows the limits of its knowing, recognizes the limits of its capacity to give an account of itself to others, and respects those limits as symptomatically human. To take seriously one's opacity to oneself in ethical deliberation means then to critically interrogate the social world in which one comes to be human in the first place and which remains precisely that which one cannot know about oneself. In this way, Butler locates social and political critique at the core of ethical practice.

Style and politics

Butler's academic (though not her popular) writing is dense and theoretical. Butler has explained the density of her academic writing by reference to Theodor Adorno, who comments on the necessity to break from traditional language if one is to subvert the dominant cultural narrative.

In a London Review of Books article published in August 2003, Butler identifies herself as an anti-Zionist Jewish American who is concerned with the loss of academic freedom implicitly advocated by pro-Israeli groups. She expounds upon her views on Zionism in a section of Precarious Life examining a debacle surrounding Harvard President Lawrence Summers.

Criticism

In 1998, Philosophy and Literature admonished Butler with first prize in its Fourth Bad Writing Contest, for a sentence in the scholarly journal Diacritics. In their press release, however, they quoted Warren Hedges who praised her as "one of the ten smartest people on the planet." The runner-up that year was Homi K. Bhabha, and the prior year's winner was Fredric Jameson. Following controversy, and perceptions of mean-spiritedness, over the "Bad Writing" award Denis Dutton gave out under the auspices of his academic journal, Dutton stopped the award in 1999. Butler commented on the event in an interview.

Martha Nussbaum wrote an article in The New Republic entitled "The Professor of Parody" criticizing Judith Butler, charging her with willful obscurantism. She also claims Butler does not really practice in philosophy, but instead in sophistry and rhetoric, with absolutely no normative constraints remaining possible if we were to follow Butler's "system". Nussbaum claims vis-à-vis Butler that there is an "unfortunate tendency to regard the philosopher as a star who fascinates, and frequently by obscurity, rather than as an arguer among equals." She states that Butler uses the type of language she does merely as a means to make herself look important. Nussbaum states her stock in the literary world has been raised by the tag 'philosopher', and shows how Butler allegedly misreads J.L. Austin. She criticizes Butler’s dumping of the concept of the norm and the results, ethical and otherwise, which follow from it. She implies Butler has no notion of social justice with which to work, and that her projects constitute universal passivity. Excitable Speech is criticized for alleged misinterpretations of basic 1st Amendment law. Nussbaum in the end claims that Butler’s feminism "collaborates with evil".

Major works

2005: Giving An Account of Oneself
2004: Undoing Gender
2004: Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence
2000: Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (with Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek)
2000: Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death
1997: The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection
1997: Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative
1993: Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex"
1990: Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
1987: Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France

Notes

Judith Butler. "No, it's not anti-semitic". London Review of Books. Retrieved April 5. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)
Philosophy and Literature. "Winners of the Fourth Bad Writing Contest (1998)". Press Release. Retrieved April 13. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)
Dennis Loy Johnson. "Who Killed Lingua Franca?". Retrieved April 14. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)
JAC, vol. XX, no 4, reproduced in The Judith Butler Reader, Judith Butler and Sarah Salih (ed.), 2004
Nussbaum, Martha. "The Professor of Parody"

External links

Categories: