Jacques-Alain Miller, “Obama: Métis or Hermaphrodite?”

Robert J.C. Young,‘Foucault on Race and Colonialism’

Scu’s new blog, Critical Animal, entries on Foucault’s ‘Society Must Be Defended’

Vicki Kirby’s presentation of Butler is, like Butler’s own critical reading, thoughtful and rigorous, generous yet insubordinate. The level of scholarship here is superior: our author glides skillfully from Hegel to Lacan, Freud to Derrida, Althusser to Foucault, in order to capture the sense and flow of Butler’s own arguments. In a slim volume, she succeeds in treating a wealth of complex material. This is partly because her writing is lucid and succinct, but also because she offers a well-structured and judicious selection of Butler’s key contributions. Kirby cuts quickly to the crux of Butler’s most interesting arguments and then unpacks them with care. Thankfully, hers is an engaged and engaging delivery of Butler’s oeuvre-to-date: the reader is witness to a stimulating dialogue between two talented scholars rather than simply presented with a summary of themes. In this spirit, Kirby offers many excellent criticisms of and questions about Butler’s ideas that warrant development elsewhere.

Link to the review

Part One

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Part Two:

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Part Three

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In the year after Butler’s award for bad writing, and in response to it, Martha Nussbaum wrote an article entitled “The Professor of Parody” for the American magazine, New Republic. In this article she made a sustained critique of Butler’s writing style along with what she perceived to be the intellectual milieu from which it comes. She summarised Butler’s position in two ways:

• Butler’s work is a new ‘symbolic feminism’ disconnected from materiality.

• In it, subjectivity is limited: there is no escape possible, only parody from within oppressive structures.

Here are her detailed criticisms as they relate to methodological issues.

Continue reading here

“Science” and “naturalness” are discursive constructs and, although it might seem strange to refute the authority of “science” after quoting apparently “scientific” data, the point Butler is making is clear: the body is not a “mute facticity” (GT: 129), i.e. a fact of nature, but like gender it is produced by discourses such as the ones Butler has been analyzing. As with gender, to suggest that there is no body prior to cultural inscription will lead Butler to argue that sex as well as gender can be performatively reinscribed in ways that accentuate its factitiousness (i.e. its constructedness) rather than its facticity (i.e. the fact of its existence). Such reinscriptions, or re-citations as Butler will call them in Bodies That Matter, constitute the subject’s agency within the law, in other words, the possibilities of subverting the law against itself. Agency is an important concept for Butler, since it signifies the opportunities for subverting the law against itself to radical, political ends.

The rest (pdf)

This volume contains twelve essays on early modern philosophers from Machiavelli to Mill, addressing their views on the passions from the perspective of intellectual and literary history. Its appearance is timely. Interest in 17th and 18th century theories of the emotions and their implications for social cohesion have been stimulated by recent historiographical studies such as Susan James's Passion and Action (Oxford 2001), as well as by contemporary psychological and philosophical theorizing about the personal and social emotions in Damasio, De Sousa, Griffiths, Prinz, and others. The reader of this collection quickly comes to realize how central to political life the emotions seemed to our predecessors; one of the rewarding aspects of the books is its revelation of this largely forgotten aspect of culture and civilization.

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Judith Butler discusses the drive to live and preserve one's being in Spinoza, noting how Spinoza's apparently egoistic premises are converted into the ethical perspective of the Ethics through generalization about the Other's equivalent ends. (As well as, one might add, the prospective evaporation of the individual into the substance of which it is a mere mode.) She courageously criticizes the conceptions of self-defense and self-determination that appear to underlie contemporary nationalistic policy in Israel at the expense of humanitarian values.

The rest

Alison Stone, University of Lancaster (UK) — Winner of Contemporary Political Theory Annual Prize (2005)

Judith Butler’s contribution to feminist political thought is usually approached in terms of her concept of performativity, according to which gender exists only insofar as it is ritualistically and repetitively performed, creating permanent possibilities for performing gender in new and transgressive ways. In this paper, I argue that Butler’s politics of performativity is more fundamentally grounded in the concept of genealogy, which she adapts from Foucault and, ultimately, Nietzsche. Butler understands women to have a genealogy: to be located within a history of overlapping practices and reinterpretations of femininity. This genealogical understanding of femininity allows Butler to propose a coalitional feminist politics, which requires no unity among women but only loosely overlapping connections. For Butler, feminist coalitions should aim to subvert, not consolidate, entrenched norms concerning femininity. Butler has been criticized, however, for failing to explain either how subversive agency is possible or why the subversion of gender norms is desirable. Reviewing these criticisms, I argue that Butler offers a convincing explanation of the possibility of subversive agency, but that the normative dimension of her political thought remains relatively underdeveloped. I explore how the normative aspect of Butler’s thought could be strengthened by recasting her notion of genealogy along more thoroughly Nietzschean and materialist lines, in terms of an idea of active and multiple bodily forces.
Contemporary Political Theory (2005) 4, 4–24.

Here the article.