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'''[[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 Eliot professor in the Departments of [[Rhetoric]] and Comparative [[Literature]] at the [[University]] of California, Berkeley. She also has a professorial appointment at the European Graduate [[School]].
  
'''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 Eliot professor in the Departments of [[Rhetoric]] and [[Comparative Literature]] at the [[University of California, Berkeley]]. She also has a professorial appointment at the [[European Graduate School]].
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==In the work of Slavoj Žižek==
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Judith Butler is an American philosopher and political theorist well known for her early [[role]] in shaping the field of [[queer theory]] and for defining the anti-identitarian turn in [[feminist]] [[thought]]. Butler and Žižek’s [[intellectual]] conversation spans nearly two decades, and includes their collaboration with Ernesto [[Laclau]] on ''[[Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left]]''. Butler teaches 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]].
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Butler’s ''[[Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity]]'' (1990) is frequently cited as one of the most influential books of the 1990s. There she proposed the theory of performativity to intervene in the ongoing feminist debate over whether [[sexual]] and [[gender]] identities are either [[biologically]] or [[symbolically]] given. Instead, Butler posits the [[notion]] that sex and gender are [[performative]] – that is, the effect of the repeated citation of a set of [[symbolic]] norms. Drawing on Foucault’s assertion that [[power]] produces its own [[resistances]], Butler stresses the subversive potential of those performances that exceed their disciplinary production, including parodic and non-[[normative]] gender and sexual [[acts]] such as drag and lesbian sex. For her, political [[revolt]] inheres in attaining [[social]] [[recognition]] for this proliferation of subjectivities that always exceed the [[symbolic law]] of which they are the by-product.
  
== ''Gender Trouble'' (1990) ==
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It is on the question of the failure of [[the symbolic]] law fully to define the subject’s [[identity]] that Butler and Žižek have entered into a collegial debate, evidence of which has appeared in chapters of Butler’s follow-up to ''[[Gender Trouble]]'', ''[[Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”]]'' (1993), and Žižek’s ''[[The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology]]'' (1999), and their collaborative ''[[Contingency, Hegemony, Universality]]''. The debate centres upon how each understands “the negativity at the heart of identity” and the [[relationship]] of this negativity, or gap, to [[hegemony]] and political contestation (''CHU'': 2). While Butler and Žižek both draw on [[psychoanalytic]] conceptions of the [[subject]] as rendered incomplete by an [[internal]] [[limit]], where their [[antagonism]] ultimately lies is in the [[meaning]] of this inherent limit, defined by Žižek as the [[Lacanian]] [[Real]]. Th is [[difference]] underlies the specific disagreements the two have engaged in over the status of the subject’s attachment to symbolic norms, [[sexual difference]] and political [[action]].
:''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]], [[Jacques Derrida]], and, most significantly, [[Michel Foucault]]. (At the same time, like most of Butler's work, it is regarded by some readers to be written in an unnecessarily complex, dense style).  The book was popular enough that it even inspired an intellectual fanzine, ''[[Judy!]]'', that poked fun at her academic celebrity status.
 
  
The most widely read and misread move in ''Gender Trouble'' is the redeployment of [[Derrida]]'s reading of [[J. L. Austin]]'s theory of the "[[Performative|performative statement]]," and [[Franz Kafka]]'s story, "Before the Law"; both in convergence with Butler's readings of [[Michel Foucault|Foucault's]] ''[[Discipline and Punish]]'' and ''[[History of Sexuality]], vol. 1: [[The Will to Knowledge]]''. This convergence is the crucible of Butler's famous "performative theory of gender," in which "gender" is a kind of repeated, largely forced (Foucault's "discipline") enactment or "performance" that produces the imaginary fiction of a "core gender," as well as the distinction between the surface/exterior of "the body" and the "interior core."  Paradoxically, it is a kind of forced, repetitive "doing" of gender that itself produces the ''fiction'' that an individual has a stable "gender" which they are just "expressing" in their actions.  And this imaginary fiction crucially produces an equally fictive distinction between the "interior" of "the body" and its "exterior".
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Butler accounts for the radical [[contingency]] of [[history]] through recourse to the [[Freudian]] [[unconscious]] and a [[model]] of the gendered and sexualized subject who, like the Foucauldian subject, is produced under the pressure of restrictive [[social norms]], but, like the [[Hegelian]] subject, is profoundly attached to their subjection. She suggests that the [[Oedipal]] [[threat]] of [[castration]] produces a sexualized subject whose identities and desires can never live up to the ideals set out by their [[culture]], and who therefore assumes their sexed [[position]] always as an iterative failure, but who is nevertheless attached to that failure. Butler reduces the symbolic law to a series of “performative [[speech]] acts” or “hegemonic norms”, which are subject to subversive re-inscription (Butler 1993: 106). For Butler, then, the possibility for political [[intervention]] lies neither in [[the Real]] nor in [[the Symbolic]], but in the [[Imaginary]] – wherein periodic performative iterations of symbolic norms have the effect of displacing these norms themselves.
  
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 rely on performativity as a theoretical matrix.
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In ''[[The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology|The Ticklish Subject]]'', Žižek attacks Butler on precisely this point, claiming that Butler is “simultaneously too optimistic and too pessimistic” (TS: 264). She is too optimistic because she posits that performative practices have the power to displace oppressive socio-symbolic norms, without [[seeing]] that each iteration, parodic or not, remains within the field defined by [[the big Other]]. And she is too [[pessimistic]] because, by limiting her critique to this fild, she fails to see the possibility of the overhaul of the [[whole]] [[system]] through the unpicking of the [[quilting point]] effected by [[The Act|the ethical act]] (''ibid.''). Žižek critiques Butler’s imaginarization of the Real and the Symbolic because it presents a subject who is always already trapped – free only in so far as they maintain some ironic distance from their own passionate attachment to subjection.
  
== ''Bodies That Matter'' (1993) ==
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To this [[impasse]], Žižek counters with the Lacanian Real. Žižek has consistently argued, following [[Lacan]], that it is only by [[understanding]] the symbolic law to be rendered incomplete by an internally constitutive limit – the Real – that we can [[understand]] that law as ultimately [[contingent]] and subject to historical transformation. He argues not that the law excludes some set of acts or identities, but that the constitutive [[exclusion]] of the law is its own [[impossibility]] or gap. Žižek uses the [[logic]] of the Real to critique Butler’s understanding of the subject’s unconscious attachments to subjection. In ''[[The Psychic Life of Power]]'' (1997), Butler posits the unconscious as the site of “passionate attachments” to the very laws that pathologize [[desire]] and restrict its forms. To this model of the unconscious, Žižek opposes Lacan’s assertion that “[[the fundamental fantasy]] (the stuff ‘primordial attachments’ are made of) is already a filler, a [[formation]] which covers up a certain gap/void” (''TS'': 265). In [[other]] [[words]], the Real of the subject’s desire is not constituted by a passionate attachment to some set of [[repressed]] or [[foreclosed]] desires prohibited by the symbolic law, but is constituted by a [[fantasy]] that covers over the impossibility at the heart of all desires.
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 voluntaristic "choice," Butler strengthens the performative theory of gender with a consideration of the status of repetition.  Here she cites [[Derrida]]'s theory of iterability or citationality, and goes on to work out a theory of [[performativity]] as citationality.
 
  
== ''Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative'' (1997) ==
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This differential understanding of [[The Subject|the subject]] also grounds Butler’s disagreement with Žižek over [[Sexual Difference|sexual difference]]. In ''[[Bodies that Matter]]'', Butler critiques Žižek for suggesting that the Real is produced through the [[foreclosure]] induced by the threat of castration on the basis that “Žižek’s theory thus evacuates the ‘contingency’ of its contingency” because it relies upon a fixed notion of castration that is always already gendered by the [[Oedipus complex]] (Butler 1993: 196). She goes on to [[suggest]] that what is [[lacking]] in Žižek’s formulation of the [[traumatic]] kernel of the Real is the very social and historical specificity of each one of his examples of [[trauma]] (including the [[family]], the camps and the [[Gulag]]) (ibid.: 202). Put simply, Butler’s real problem with the Real is that it is a [[concept]] that she believes evades history and thus political appropriation. As she writes: “The problem here is that there is no way within this framework to politicize the relation between [[language]] and the real” (ibid.: 207). As a feminist philosopher and political theorist, Butler is invested in the field of the political, and because of this [[choice]] to align herself with history, she refuses, by definition, to accept a concept that she understands to be [[outside]] of history. By applying the same logic, Butler takes on Lacan’s assertion that “[[the Woman does not exist]]”, arguing that positioning the Woman as the always already “lost referent” is to preclude the possibility of her resignification (ibid.: 218).
In ''Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative'', Judith Butler began to address the issue of "[[hate speech]]", language and [[censorship]]. Warning that she was not totally opposed to juridical limitation of hate speech in some circumstances, she then argued that hate speech exists only retrospectively; that is, when it has been declared such by juridical authorities. As such, the state appropriates to itself the possibility of defining hate speech and the ''limits of acceptable discourse'' (Butler is drawing here on  Foucault's ''[[episteme]]'' concept or theory of [[discourse]]), declaring, for example, that burning a cross in front of a house in a Black neighborhood is not a form of "hate speech" (even though it is a common [[Ku Klux Klan|KKK]] warning of impending action), but that "[[pornography]]" constitutes such "hate speech", on the sole grounds that US courts have decided so. Judith Butler thus discusses [[Catharine MacKinnon]]'s anti-pornography stance, not so much for being against pornography but for conferring on the state the power of censorship to condemn it. Butler warns that this tactic of appealing to the state may backfire on [[progressivism|progressivists]], in an argument which is reminiscent of Foucault's description of the usage of the ''[[lettre de cachet|lettres de cachet]]'' by families referring to the sovereign to condemn members of their own family.
 
  
Moreover, quoting Foucault's first volume of the ''History of Sexuality'', she argues that any attempt of [[censorship]], by justice or otherwise, is forced to duplicate the forbidden language.<ref>Judith Butler was drawing here on Foucault's concept of ''[[episteme]]'', or the conditions of possibility of discourse before the subject even attempts to speak - see also Butler's use of [[Jacques Lacan|Lacan]]'s concept of ''forclusion''.</ref> Censorship produces its own discourse, and the discourse on sexuality has never been as great as when it was completely censored. This repetition of words now declared forbidden (by the state) spread those hate words in the very attempt of stopping them. This is the paradoxical problem of censorship. The [[Dadaist|Dada movement]] had already declared, at the beginning of the 20th century: "if you don't like Dada, you're already talking about Dada; if you like Dada, you talk about Dada; both ways you're talking about Dada".<ref>This last Dada example is not given by Butler in her book, but explains how discourse can proliferate even if censored (or the more that it is censored).</ref>) Indeed, Butler argues that censorship is primitive to language, and that the "subject" is only an effect of this original censorship (in the same way as Foucault argues that the "[[subject (philosophy)|subject]]" is an ''effect'' of power, instead of power being a property of individual subjects; see also [[Althusser]]'s concept of ''[[interpellation]]''). Butler appeals to [[Jacques Lacan|Lacan]]'s ''"[[forclusion]]"'' concept or [[Jacques Derrida|Derrida]]'s "constitutive limit" to explain this original sense of censorship. "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". "Silence is the performative effect of a certain type of discourse, the discourse which address itself to someone to delegitimate his discourse". State power is presupposed by the one who carries this type of repressing discourse.
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In ''[[The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology|The Ticklish Subject]]'', Žižek responds by reiterating his point that sexual difference and symbolic castration and the “[[Woman]]” have no positive [[existence]], but are the traumatic residues of the failure of the Symbolic fully to [[capture]] or define us. As he puts it in ''[[Contingency, Hegemony, Universality]]'', “Every [[translation]] of sexual difference into a set of symbolic opposition(s) is doomed to fail, and it is this very ‘impossibility’ that opens up the terrain of the hegemonic [[struggle]] for what ‘[[Sexual Difference|sexual difference]]’ will mean” (''CHU'': 111). The fact that sexual difference is Real means that all [[signifiers]] of [[sexual identity]] are precisely not transhistorical norms, but are fully historically and culturally specific and may therefore be subject to reconfiguration.
  
A part of the problem of the duplication of "hate speech" in the juridical discourse that outlaws it, lies in the issues of signification: if [[J.L. Austin]]'s concept of "performability" is correct, and that it is possible to "do things with words" (hence the problem of hate speech), words themselves do not have one absolute signification, but various meanings depending on the context. Language is a mix of words and body, and bodies can alter the meaning of a spoken word. Butler cites Richard Delgado, for whom it is possible to identify hate speech on the use of certain key-words: "Words such as 'nigger' and 'spick' are badges of degradation even when used between friends: these words have no other connotation." Therefore, according to Delgado, the act of calling someone a name should be censored if the name used belongs to a previously-identified hate speech. However, Butler points out that "this very statement, whether written in his text or cited here, has another connotation; he has just used the word in a significantly different way." Judith Butler thus underlines the difficulty of identifying a hate-speech. Ultimately, the state itself defines the limits of acceptable discourse, according to her. However, Judith Butler takes the precaution to explicitly deny being against all forms of limitation of discourse, the object of her book being only to point out the different issues at stake when one address the problem of hate speech and censorship.
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Žižek posits that Laclau’s concept of hegemony as constituted by an inherent antagonism bridges the gap between Butler’s [[insistence]] on the historical production of the [[sexed subject]] and his own neo-Lacanian notion of the subject rendered incomplete by the Real (''ibid.''). In this conception, hegemony is the unavoidable consequence of the [[splitting]] of the subject by language and subsequent [[structuring]] of the symbolic [[universe]] by a [[master-signifier]] given by culture. The radical [[absence]] that Lacan posits as the [[universal]] core of [[subjectivity]] (the Real) is the condition both for the necessary functioning of the [[master-signifier]] to quilt the subject’s desires to the social will and the ultimate contingency of this quilting. In other words, the [[apparent]] [[necessity]] of our [[cultural]] forms of [[sexuality]] is rendered contingent on the basis that it is [[the phallic signifier]] that serves to quilt the subject’s desire to the social link. It follows from this, as Laclau asserts, that the hegemony of the [[master-signifier]] “defines the very terrain in which a political relation is actually constituted” (''CHU'': 44).
  
Judith Butler's complex demonstration shows that it is not possible to easily judge censorship: in some cases it is useful and necessary, in others it may be worse than [[tolerance]]. This debate is also cultural, as shown by the different legislation concerning [[historical revisionism (political)|historical revisionism]], which can be protected in the US under the First Amendment, but forbidden in European countries as dangerous forms of hate speech. Most important, Butler shows that our conception of the workings of censorship must be renewed, as must be our [[ideology]] of an independent subject to whom the power of censorship could be attributed: censorship ultimately relies on the state and, even before, is the condition of discourse itself.
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For Žižek, then, the Real constitutes the internal limit of the political field itself, rendering power and our attachments to power always incomplete and subject to re-inscription. Butler’s feminist [[politics]] engage in what Laclau stresses as the “hegemonic struggle” over the social meaning of the Real of [[Sexual Difference|sexual difference]]. It is no surprise, then, that Butler ultimately refuses Lacanian theory because of her political insistence that the “Real” of sexual difference must be [[understood]] as always subject to history so that both [[universality]] and difference might be considered the effects of hegemony. By the same token, Žižek remains immune to Butler’s accusations of the heteronormative foundations of Lacan’s account of sexual difference because he can evacuate all social forms of their historical specificity by recourse to the Real as internal limit or [[excess]]. 
 
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[[Category:People|Butler, Judith]]
== Style and politics ==
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[[Category:Index|Butler, Judith]]
 
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[[Category:Tarrying with the Negative|Butler, Judith]]
Butler's academic (though not her popular) writing is very dense and theoretical.  [[Martha Nussbaum]] in a review in the [[The New Republic|New Republic]], accused Butler of willful obscurantism.<ref>{{cite web | url=http://www.qwik.ch/the_professor_of_parody | author=Martha Nussbaum | title=The Professor of Parody | work=The New Republic Online, 22.2.1999 | accessdate=April 14 | accessyear=2006}}.</ref>  Butler has responded to these charges by citing ideas from [[Theodor Adorno]] on the necessity to break from traditional language if one is to subvert the dominant cultural narrative.
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[[Category:Sexuality|Butler, Judith]]
 
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[[Category:People|Butler, Judith]]
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."<ref>{{cite web | url=http://aldaily.com/bwc.htm | title=Winners of the Fourth Bad Writing Contest (1998) | author=Philosophy and Literature | work=Press Release | accessdate=April 13 | accessyear=2006}}.  The runner-up that year was [[Homi K. Bhabha]]; 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 ({{cite web | url=http://www.mobylives.com/LF_part_two.html | author=Dennis Loy Johnson | title=Who Killed Lingua Franca? | accessdate=April 14 | accessyear=2006}}).</ref>
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[[Category:Zizek Dictionary]]
 
 
In a [[London Review of Books]] article, Butler identifies as an anti-Zionist Jewish American who is concerned with the loss of academic freedom implicitly advocated by pro-Israeli groups.<ref>{{cite web | url=http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n16/butl02_.html | title=No, it's not anti-semitic | author=Judith Butler | work=London Review of Books | accessdate=April 5 | accessyear=2006}}</ref>
 
 
 
==Eternity==
 
 
 
<blockquote>
 
 
 
<ref>Žižek, S. (2000) [[The Fragile Absolute]], or Why the Christian Legacy is Worth Fighting For, London and New York: Verso. p.94</ref></blockquote>
 
 
 
==Lacan's hegemonic imaginary==
 
<blockquote>
 
 
 
<ref>Žižek, S. (2000) [[The Fragile Absolute]], or Why the Christian Legacy is Worth Fighting For, London and New York: Verso. p.105</ref></blockquote>
 
 
 
==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 ==
 
<references />
 
 
 
==External links==
 
{{wikiquote}}
 
*[http://rhetoric.berkeley.edu/faculty_bios/judith_butler.html Berkeley Faculty Biography - Judith Butler]
 
*[http://www.egs.edu/faculty/judithbutler.html European Graduate School Faculty Website - Judith Butler]
 
*[http://www.theory.org.uk/ctr-butl.htm theory.org.uk - Judith Butler Resources]
 
*[http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/indiv/scctr/Wellek/butler/ A comprehensive Judith Butler bibliography]
 
 
 
[[Category:1956 births|Butler, Judith]]
 
[[Category:20th century philosophers|Butler, Judith]]
 
[[Category:21st century philosophers|Butler, Judith]]
 
[[Category:Feminist scholars|Butler, Judith]]
 
[[Category:Gender studies|Butler, Judith]]
 
[[Category:Jewish American writers|Butler, Judith]]
 
[[Category:Lesbian writers|Butler, Judith]]
 
[[Category:LGBT philosophers|Butler, Judith]]
 
[[Category:Living people|Butler, Judith]]
 
[[Category:Marxist theorists|Butler, Judith]]
 
[[Category:Philosophers|Butler, Judith]]
 
[[Category:Philosophy of sexuality|Butler, Judith]]
 
[[Category:Queer theory|Butler, Judith]]
 
[[Category:Queer writers|Butler, Judith]]
 
[[Category:People]]
 

Latest revision as of 23:24, 25 May 2019

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 Eliot professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She also has a professorial appointment at the European Graduate School.

In the work of Slavoj Žižek

Judith Butler is an American philosopher and political theorist well known for her early role in shaping the field of queer theory and for defining the anti-identitarian turn in feminist thought. Butler and Žižek’s intellectual conversation spans nearly two decades, and includes their collaboration with Ernesto Laclau on Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. Butler teaches rhetoric and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) is frequently cited as one of the most influential books of the 1990s. There she proposed the theory of performativity to intervene in the ongoing feminist debate over whether sexual and gender identities are either biologically or symbolically given. Instead, Butler posits the notion that sex and gender are performative – that is, the effect of the repeated citation of a set of symbolic norms. Drawing on Foucault’s assertion that power produces its own resistances, Butler stresses the subversive potential of those performances that exceed their disciplinary production, including parodic and non-normative gender and sexual acts such as drag and lesbian sex. For her, political revolt inheres in attaining social recognition for this proliferation of subjectivities that always exceed the symbolic law of which they are the by-product.

It is on the question of the failure of the symbolic law fully to define the subject’s identity that Butler and Žižek have entered into a collegial debate, evidence of which has appeared in chapters of Butler’s follow-up to Gender Trouble, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993), and Žižek’s The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (1999), and their collaborative Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. The debate centres upon how each understands “the negativity at the heart of identity” and the relationship of this negativity, or gap, to hegemony and political contestation (CHU: 2). While Butler and Žižek both draw on psychoanalytic conceptions of the subject as rendered incomplete by an internal limit, where their antagonism ultimately lies is in the meaning of this inherent limit, defined by Žižek as the Lacanian Real. Th is difference underlies the specific disagreements the two have engaged in over the status of the subject’s attachment to symbolic norms, sexual difference and political action.

Butler accounts for the radical contingency of history through recourse to the Freudian unconscious and a model of the gendered and sexualized subject who, like the Foucauldian subject, is produced under the pressure of restrictive social norms, but, like the Hegelian subject, is profoundly attached to their subjection. She suggests that the Oedipal threat of castration produces a sexualized subject whose identities and desires can never live up to the ideals set out by their culture, and who therefore assumes their sexed position always as an iterative failure, but who is nevertheless attached to that failure. Butler reduces the symbolic law to a series of “performative speech acts” or “hegemonic norms”, which are subject to subversive re-inscription (Butler 1993: 106). For Butler, then, the possibility for political intervention lies neither in the Real nor in the Symbolic, but in the Imaginary – wherein periodic performative iterations of symbolic norms have the effect of displacing these norms themselves.

In The Ticklish Subject, Žižek attacks Butler on precisely this point, claiming that Butler is “simultaneously too optimistic and too pessimistic” (TS: 264). She is too optimistic because she posits that performative practices have the power to displace oppressive socio-symbolic norms, without seeing that each iteration, parodic or not, remains within the field defined by the big Other. And she is too pessimistic because, by limiting her critique to this fild, she fails to see the possibility of the overhaul of the whole system through the unpicking of the quilting point effected by the ethical act (ibid.). Žižek critiques Butler’s imaginarization of the Real and the Symbolic because it presents a subject who is always already trapped – free only in so far as they maintain some ironic distance from their own passionate attachment to subjection.

To this impasse, Žižek counters with the Lacanian Real. Žižek has consistently argued, following Lacan, that it is only by understanding the symbolic law to be rendered incomplete by an internally constitutive limit – the Real – that we can understand that law as ultimately contingent and subject to historical transformation. He argues not that the law excludes some set of acts or identities, but that the constitutive exclusion of the law is its own impossibility or gap. Žižek uses the logic of the Real to critique Butler’s understanding of the subject’s unconscious attachments to subjection. In The Psychic Life of Power (1997), Butler posits the unconscious as the site of “passionate attachments” to the very laws that pathologize desire and restrict its forms. To this model of the unconscious, Žižek opposes Lacan’s assertion that “the fundamental fantasy (the stuff ‘primordial attachments’ are made of) is already a filler, a formation which covers up a certain gap/void” (TS: 265). In other words, the Real of the subject’s desire is not constituted by a passionate attachment to some set of repressed or foreclosed desires prohibited by the symbolic law, but is constituted by a fantasy that covers over the impossibility at the heart of all desires.

This differential understanding of the subject also grounds Butler’s disagreement with Žižek over sexual difference. In Bodies that Matter, Butler critiques Žižek for suggesting that the Real is produced through the foreclosure induced by the threat of castration on the basis that “Žižek’s theory thus evacuates the ‘contingency’ of its contingency” because it relies upon a fixed notion of castration that is always already gendered by the Oedipus complex (Butler 1993: 196). She goes on to suggest that what is lacking in Žižek’s formulation of the traumatic kernel of the Real is the very social and historical specificity of each one of his examples of trauma (including the family, the camps and the Gulag) (ibid.: 202). Put simply, Butler’s real problem with the Real is that it is a concept that she believes evades history and thus political appropriation. As she writes: “The problem here is that there is no way within this framework to politicize the relation between language and the real” (ibid.: 207). As a feminist philosopher and political theorist, Butler is invested in the field of the political, and because of this choice to align herself with history, she refuses, by definition, to accept a concept that she understands to be outside of history. By applying the same logic, Butler takes on Lacan’s assertion that “the Woman does not exist”, arguing that positioning the Woman as the always already “lost referent” is to preclude the possibility of her resignification (ibid.: 218).

In The Ticklish Subject, Žižek responds by reiterating his point that sexual difference and symbolic castration and the “Woman” have no positive existence, but are the traumatic residues of the failure of the Symbolic fully to capture or define us. As he puts it in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, “Every translation of sexual difference into a set of symbolic opposition(s) is doomed to fail, and it is this very ‘impossibility’ that opens up the terrain of the hegemonic struggle for what ‘sexual difference’ will mean” (CHU: 111). The fact that sexual difference is Real means that all signifiers of sexual identity are precisely not transhistorical norms, but are fully historically and culturally specific and may therefore be subject to reconfiguration.

Žižek posits that Laclau’s concept of hegemony as constituted by an inherent antagonism bridges the gap between Butler’s insistence on the historical production of the sexed subject and his own neo-Lacanian notion of the subject rendered incomplete by the Real (ibid.). In this conception, hegemony is the unavoidable consequence of the splitting of the subject by language and subsequent structuring of the symbolic universe by a master-signifier given by culture. The radical absence that Lacan posits as the universal core of subjectivity (the Real) is the condition both for the necessary functioning of the master-signifier to quilt the subject’s desires to the social will and the ultimate contingency of this quilting. In other words, the apparent necessity of our cultural forms of sexuality is rendered contingent on the basis that it is the phallic signifier that serves to quilt the subject’s desire to the social link. It follows from this, as Laclau asserts, that the hegemony of the master-signifier “defines the very terrain in which a political relation is actually constituted” (CHU: 44).

For Žižek, then, the Real constitutes the internal limit of the political field itself, rendering power and our attachments to power always incomplete and subject to re-inscription. Butler’s feminist politics engage in what Laclau stresses as the “hegemonic struggle” over the social meaning of the Real of sexual difference. It is no surprise, then, that Butler ultimately refuses Lacanian theory because of her political insistence that the “Real” of sexual difference must be understood as always subject to history so that both universality and difference might be considered the effects of hegemony. By the same token, Žižek remains immune to Butler’s accusations of the heteronormative foundations of Lacan’s account of sexual difference because he can evacuate all social forms of their historical specificity by recourse to the Real as internal limit or excess