From Judith Butler: Live Theory by Vicki Kirby

I have little to no desire to read Gender Trouble again, so this summary is making my life!

"Citing Michel Haar on this point, Butler nots that '[t]he subject, the self, the individual, are just so many false concepts, since they transform into substances fictitious unities having at the start only a linguistic reality' (1990b, 21)" (Kirby 27)

"Butler is clearly committed to a notion that language possesses a constitutive and regulatory force which causally implicates sex/gender and sexuality. And Irigaray's explication of masculinism and Wittig's analysis of heteronormativity illuminate this causal configuration and the repressive regimes within language which naturalize and enforce it. Given this, a question arises about the nature of subversion: how can these prohibitive regimes in linguistic and cultural practice be challenged if there is no escaping them?...If power inhabits the very spatial and temporal metaphorics that its overthrow requires...if power is coextensive with all of the strategies and transgressive tactic that we might use to free ourselves from it, then how are we to proceed?...In the next two chapters Butler will argue that the identity of power itself is inherently ambiguous for its apparent unity of purpose and causal intention are always vulnerable to perverse calculations and energies" (Kirby 27-28).

"Importantly, there is no mother, no self before the child learns to identify, or differentiate itself from (m)otherness. According to Lacan, the origins of life remain blurred and entangled until the acquisition of language, which allows the subject to assume an autonomy and self-possession through linguistic markers, such as the personal pronoun, 'I'. Thus, language comes to 're-present' this originary plenitude (the Real, or 'lack of lack') as a world of social significations within those binary valuations, ordered meanings, prescriptions and prohibitions the child must find its place" (Kirby 30).

I can't imagine that Judith Butler is a very happy person.

"For if the alien status and make-up of 'the other' cannot be contested because its ontological difference is naturally abject, in other words, if 'the other' is beyond or before the very power of cultural practice to makes a difference, then any attempt at subversion will be futile. Given this, Butler asks how those natural energies of the body which purportedly prefigure signification and culture can be comprehended and comparatively evaluated if the semiotic is truly outside signification" (39).

"'What cultural configuration of language, indeed, of discourse, generates the trope of a pre-discursive libidinal multiplicity, and for what purposes?' (1990b, 91)" (39).

"If power is constitutive and ubiquitous such that even the resistance to power is actually the (re)articulation of power, then the conventional identity of 'power' is significantly reconfigured. For what can it be measured against? And how do we think about justice, agency, and responsibility if individuals and their behaviours are animated by forces which they haven't authored?" (Kirby 41)

"For Butler, sexism and heterosexism operate as regulatory norms to organize the pluralities of bodies/desires into fictional coherence, a coherence which assumes factual status" (43-44).

Any iteration of the self is a construction of the self.

Need to find these passages in Gender Trouble itself(!):

"...to understand identity as a practice, and as a signifying practice,is to understand culturally intelligible subjects as the resulting effect of a rule-bound discourse that inserts itself in the pervasive and mundane signifying acts of linguistic life. Abstractly considered, language refers to an open system of signs by which intelligibility is insistently created and contested" (Butler ?)

"Butler's insistence that the subject doesn't pre-exist these cultural regimes of identity formation is not meant to deny the subject's existence as the embodied expression of these converging and competing demands. Butler's understanding of the subject, identity and agency is therefore and implicated one which locates the possibility of contestation and change in the very structures through which subject formation and it corollaries are generated" (Kirby 45).

Oy. Devin will be here in a few hours, unexpectedly. Judith Butler makes me feel simultaneously depressed and artistically charged. Therefore, I am going to go read in the bath, shower, and then work on the physical body of my project (and hope that I do not get to the point where I need to visit my friend Judith.)