'''[[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 received is an American philosopher and political theorist well known for her Ph.D. early [[role]] in Philosophy from Yale University shaping the field of [[queer theory]] and for defining the anti-identitarian turn in 1984[[feminist]] [[thought]]. Butler and Žižek’s [[intellectual]] conversation spans nearly two decades, and her dissertation was subsequently published as Subjects of Desireincludes their collaboration with Ernesto [[Laclau]] on ''[[Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century FranceContemporary Dialogues on the Left]]''. In the late-1980s, between different teaching/research appointments (most notably Butler teaches rhetoric and comparative literature at the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University)of California, she was involved in "poststructuralist" efforts within Western feminist theory to question the "presuppositional terms" of feminismBerkeley.
== Butler’s ''[[Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity]]'' (1990) ==:''Main article: [[Gender Trouble]]is frequently cited as one of the most influential books of the 1990s.''To question There she proposed the very foundational presuppositions theory of Western feminism meant opening it up performativity to what others would later name intervene in the ongoing feminist debate over whether [[queer theorysexual]], and criticizing the [[imperialismgender]] identities are either [[biologically]] or [[symbolically]] of a Western feminist theory that purports to represent "all" womengiven. In 1990Instead, Butler's book ''posits the [[notion]] that sex and gender are [[Gender Troubleperformative]]'' burst onto – that is, the scene, selling over 100,000 copies internationally and in different languages. The book critically discusses effect of the works repeated citation of a set of [[Simone de Beauvoirsymbolic]] norms. Drawing on Foucault’s assertion that [[power]], produces its own [[Julia Kristevaresistances]], Butler stresses the subversive potential of those performances that exceed their disciplinary production, including parodic and non-[[Sigmund Freudnormative]], gender and sexual [[Jacques Lacanacts]]such as drag and lesbian sex. For her, political [[Luce Irigarayrevolt]], inheres in attaining [[Jacques Derridasocial]], and, most significantly, [[Michel Foucaultrecognition]]. (At the same time, like most for this proliferation of Butler's work, it is regarded by some readers to be written in an unnecessarily complex, dense style). The book was popular enough subjectivities that it even inspired an intellectual fanzine, ''always exceed the [[Judy!symbolic law]]'', that poked fun at her academic celebrity statusof which they are the by-product.
The most widely read It is on the question of the failure of [[the symbolic]] law fully to define the subject’s [[identity]] that Butler and misread move Žižek have entered into a collegial debate, evidence of which has appeared in chapters of Butler’s follow-up to ''[[Gender Trouble]]'', '' is [[Bodies That Matter: On the redeployment Discursive Limits of “Sex”]]'' (1993), and Žižek’s ''[[DerridaThe Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology]]'s reading of ' (1999), and their collaborative ''[[J. L. AustinContingency, Hegemony, Universality]]'s theory '. The debate centres upon how each understands “the negativity at the heart of identity” and the "[[Performative|performative statementrelationship]]of this negativity, or gap," and to [[Franz Kafkahegemony]]and political contestation (''CHU''s story, "Before the Law"; : 2). While Butler and Žižek both in convergence with Butler's readings draw on [[psychoanalytic]] conceptions of the [[Michel Foucault|Foucault'ssubject]] ''as rendered incomplete by an [[Discipline and Punishinternal]]'' and ''[[History of Sexualitylimit]], vol. 1: where their [[The Will to Knowledgeantagonism]]''. This convergence ultimately lies 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 [[meaning]] of a "core genderthis inherent limit," as well defined by Žižek as the distinction between the surface/exterior of "the body" and the "interior core[[Lacanian]] [[Real]]." Paradoxically, it Th is a kind of forced, repetitive "doing" of gender that itself produces [[difference]] underlies the specific disagreements the ''fiction'' that an individual has a stable "gender" which they are just "expressing" two have engaged in their actions. And this imaginary fiction crucially produces an equally fictive distinction between over the "interior" status of "the body" subject’s attachment to symbolic norms, [[sexual difference]] and its "exterior"political [[action]].
The concept Butler accounts for the radical [[contingency]] of [[history]] through recourse to the [[Freudian]] [[unconscious]] and a [[model]] of performativity the gendered and sexualized subject who, like the Foucauldian subject, is at produced under the core pressure of Butler's workrestrictive [[social norms]], but, like the [[Hegelian]] subject, is profoundly attached to their subjection. It extends beyond She suggests that the doing [[Oedipal]] [[threat]] of gender [[castration]] produces a sexualized subject whose identities and desires can be understood 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 fullseries of “performative [[speech]] acts” or “hegemonic norms”, which are subject to subversive re-fledged theory of subjectivityinscription (Butler 1993: 106). IndeedFor Butler, if her most recent books 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 shifted focus away from gender, they still rely on performativity as a theoretical matrixthe effect of displacing these norms themselves.
== ''Bodies That Matter'' (1993) ==Butler's next book, In ''[[Bodies That MatterThe Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology|The Ticklish Subject]]'', seeks to clear up confusions produced by both willful Žižek attacks Butler on precisely this point, claiming that Butler is “simultaneously too optimistic and inadvertent misreadings of both her work in ''Gender Trouble'' and poststructuralist feminism in generaltoo pessimistic” (TS: 264). To disrupt readings of She is too optimistic because she posits that performative practices have the gender performative power to displace oppressive socio-symbolic norms, without [[seeing]] that simplistically view gender enactment as a daily voluntaristic "choiceeach iteration, parodic or not," Butler strengthens remains within the performative theory of gender with a consideration of field defined by [[the status of repetitionbig Other]]. Here And she cites is too [[Derridapessimistic]]'s theory of iterability or citationalitybecause, by limiting her critique to this fild, and goes on she fails to work out a theory see the possibility of the overhaul of the [[whole]] [[system]] through the unpicking of the [[performativityquilting 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 citationalitythey maintain some ironic distance from their own passionate attachment to subjection.
== ''Excitable Speech: A Politics of To this [[impasse]], Žižek counters with the Performative'' (1997) ==In ''Excitable Speech: A Politics of Lacanian Real. Žižek has consistently argued, following [[Lacan]], that it is only by [[understanding]] the Performative'', Judith Butler began symbolic law to address be rendered incomplete by an internally constitutive limit – the issue of "Real – that we can [[hate speechunderstand]]", language and that law as ultimately [[censorshipcontingent]]and subject to historical transformation. Warning He argues not that she was not totally opposed to juridical limitation the law excludes some set of hate speech in some circumstancesacts or identities, she then argued that hate speech exists only retrospectively; but that the constitutive [[exclusion]] of the law is, when it has been declared such by juridical authoritiesits own [[impossibility]] or gap. As such, Žižek uses the [[logic]] of the state appropriates Real to itself the possibility critique Butler’s understanding of defining hate speech and the subject’s unconscious attachments to subjection. In ''limits [[The Psychic Life of acceptable discoursePower]]'' (1997), Butler is drawing here on Foucault's ''posits the unconscious as the site of “passionate attachments” to the very laws that pathologize [[epistemedesire]]'' concept or theory and restrict its forms. To this model of the unconscious, Žižek opposes Lacan’s assertion that “[[discoursethe fundamental fantasy]](the stuff ‘primordial attachments’ are made of), declaring, for example, that burning a cross in front of a house in a Black neighborhood is not already a form of "hate speech" (even though it is filler, a common [[Ku Klux Klan|KKKformation]] warning of impending actionwhich covers up a certain gap/void” (''TS'': 265), but that ". In [[pornographyother]]" constitutes such "hate speech", on the sole grounds that US courts have decided so. Judith Butler thus discusses [[Catharine MacKinnonwords]]'s anti-pornography stance, not so much for being against pornography but for conferring on the state Real of the power of censorship subject’s desire is not constituted by a passionate attachment to condemn it. Butler warns that this tactic some set of appealing to the state may backfire on [[progressivism|progressivistsrepressed]] or [[foreclosed]]desires prohibited by the symbolic law, in an argument which but is reminiscent of Foucault's description of the usage of the ''constituted by a [[lettre de cachet|lettres de cachetfantasy]]'' by families referring to that covers over the impossibility at the sovereign to condemn members heart of their own familyall desires.
Moreover, quoting Foucault's first volume This differential understanding of [[The Subject|the ''History of Sexuality'', she argues that any attempt of subject]] also grounds Butler’s disagreement with Žižek over [[censorshipSexual Difference|sexual difference]], by justice or otherwise, is forced to duplicate the forbidden language.<ref>Judith Butler was drawing here on Foucault's concept of In ''[[epistemeBodies that Matter]]'', or Butler critiques Žižek for suggesting that the conditions of possibility of discourse before Real is produced through the subject even attempts to speak - see also Butler's use of [[Jacques Lacan|Lacanforeclosure]]'s concept induced by the threat of castration on the basis that “Žižek’s theory thus evacuates the ‘contingency’ of ''forclusion''.</ref> Censorship produces its own discourse, and the discourse on sexuality has never been as great as when contingency” because it was completely censored. This repetition relies upon a fixed notion of words now declared forbidden (castration that is always already gendered by the state[[Oedipus complex]] (Butler 1993: 196) spread those hate words . She goes on to [[suggest]] that what is [[lacking]] in Žižek’s formulation of the very attempt [[traumatic]] kernel of stopping them. This the Real is the paradoxical problem very social and historical specificity of each one of his examples of censorship. The [[Dadaist|Dada movementtrauma]] (including the [[family]] had already declared, at the beginning of camps and the 20th century[[Gulag]]) (ibid.: "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"202).<ref>This last Dada example is not given by Butler in her bookPut simply, but explains how discourse can proliferate even if censored (or Butler’s real problem with the more Real is that it is censored)a [[concept]] that she believes evades history and thus political appropriation.</ref>) Indeed, Butler argues that censorship As she writes: “The problem here is primitive to language, and that the "subject" there is only an effect of no way within this original censorship (in framework to politicize the same way as Foucault argues that the "relation between [[subject language]] and the real” (philosophyibid.: 207)|subject]]" . As a feminist philosopher and political theorist, Butler is an ''effect'' invested in the field of powerthe political, instead and because of power being a property of individual subjects; see also this [[Althusserchoice]]'s to align herself with history, she refuses, by definition, to accept a concept of ''that she understands to be [[interpellationoutside]]'')of history. By applying the same logic, Butler appeals to takes on Lacan’s assertion that “[[Jacques Lacan|Lacan]]'s ''"[[forclusionthe Woman does not exist]]"'' concept or [[Jacques Derrida|Derrida]]'s "constitutive limit" to explain this original sense of censorship. "If discourse depends on censorship”, then arguing that positioning the principle to whom we would want to oppose ourselves is also Woman as the principle of production of the discourse of opposition". "Silence always already “lost referent” is to preclude the performative effect possibility of a certain type of discourse, the discourse which address itself to someone to delegitimate his discourse"her resignification (ibid. State power is presupposed by the one who carries this type of repressing discourse: 218).
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 In ''[[J.L. AustinThe Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology|The Ticklish Subject]]'s concept of "performability" is correct', Žižek responds by reiterating his point that sexual difference and symbolic castration and that it is possible to "do things with words" (hence the problem of hate speech), words themselves do not “[[Woman]]” have one absolute significationno positive [[existence]], but various meanings depending on are the context. Language is a mix traumatic residues of words and body, and bodies can alter the meaning failure of a spoken wordthe Symbolic fully to [[capture]] or define us. Butler cites Richard Delgado, for whom As he puts it is possible to identify hate speech on the use of certain key-words: "Words such as in 'nigger' and [[Contingency, Hegemony, Universality]]'spick' are badges of degradation even when used between friends: these words have no other connotation." Therefore, according to Delgado, the act “Every [[translation]] of calling someone sexual difference into a name should be censored if the name used belongs set of symbolic opposition(s) is doomed to a previously-identified hate speech. Howeverfail, Butler points out that "and it is this very statement, whether written in his text or cited here, has another connotation; he has just used ‘impossibility’ that opens up the word in a significantly different way." Judith Butler thus underlines the difficulty terrain of identifying a hate-speech. Ultimately, the state itself defines the limits of acceptable discourse, according to herhegemonic [[struggle]] for what ‘[[Sexual Difference|sexual difference]]’ will mean” (''CHU'': 111). However, Judith Butler takes the precaution to explicitly deny being against The fact that sexual difference is Real means that all forms [[signifiers]] of limitation of discourse[[sexual identity]] are precisely not transhistorical norms, the object of her book being only but are fully historically and culturally specific and may therefore be subject to point out the different issues at stake when one address the problem of hate speech and censorshipreconfiguration.
Judith ButlerŽižek 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 ('s complex demonstration shows that it 'ibid.''). In this conception, hegemony is not possible to easily judge censorship: in some cases it is useful the unavoidable consequence of the [[splitting]] of the subject by language and necessary, in others it may be worse than subsequent [[structuring]] of the symbolic [[universe]] by a [[tolerancemaster-signifier]]given by culture. This debate is also cultural, The radical [[absence]] that Lacan posits as shown by the different legislation concerning [[historical revisionism universal]] core of [[subjectivity]] (politicalthe Real)|historical revisionismis the condition both for the necessary functioning of the [[master-signifier]], which can be protected in to quilt the subject’s desires to the US under social will and the First Amendment, but forbidden in European countries as dangerous forms ultimate contingency of hate speechthis quilting. Most importantIn other words, Butler shows that our conception of the workings [[apparent]] [[necessity]] of censorship must be renewed, as must be our [[ideologycultural]] forms of an independent subject [[sexuality]] is rendered contingent on the basis that it is [[the phallic signifier]] that serves to whom quilt the power of censorship could be attributed: censorship ultimately relies on subject’s desire to the state andsocial link. It follows from this, even beforeas Laclau asserts, is that the condition hegemony of discourse itselfthe [[master-signifier]] “defines the very terrain in which a political relation is actually constituted” (''CHU'': 44).
== Style For Žižek, then, the Real constitutes the internal limit of the political field itself, rendering power and politics == Butler's academic (though not her popular) writing is very dense our attachments to power always incomplete and theoreticalsubject to re-inscription. Butler’s feminist [[Martha Nussbaumpolitics]] engage in a review in what Laclau stresses as the “hegemonic struggle” over the social meaning of the Real of [[The New RepublicSexual Difference|New Republicsexual difference]]. It is no surprise, then, accused that Butler ultimately refuses Lacanian theory because of willful obscurantism.<ref>{{cite web | url=http://www.qwik.ch/the_professor_of_parody | author=Martha Nussbaum | title=The Professor her political insistence that the “Real” 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 sexual difference must be [[Theodor Adornounderstood]] on the necessity as always subject to break from traditional language if one is to subvert the dominant cultural narrative. 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 history so that both [[Warren Hedgesuniversality]] who praised her as "one of the ten smartest people on and difference might be considered the planet."<ref>{{cite web | url=http://aldaily.com/bwc.htm | title=Winners effects 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 Khegemony. Bhabha]]; By the prior year's winner was [[Fredric Jameson]]. Following controversysame token, and perceptions 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 mean-spiritedness, over their historical specificity by recourse to the "Bad Writing" award Real as internal limit or [[Denis Duttonexcess]] 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> 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=httpCategory://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n16/butl02_.html People| title=NoButler, it's not anti-semitic | author=Judith Butler | work=London Review of Books | accessdate=April 5 | accessyear=2006}}</ref> <blockquote>]]<ref>Žižek, S. (2000) [[The Fragile Absolute]], or Why the Christian Legacy is Worth Fighting For, London and New YorkCategory: Verso. p.94</ref></blockquote> ==Lacan's hegemonic imaginary===TICK=Index|Butler, Judith 3on decision 19Hegel and Foucault 253melancholy mechanism and homosexuality 269-73, 279passionate attachments 265-9, 282, 288-9queer struggle 225resistance 260-64sexual difference 274-5subjectivity and sexuality 257-9 <blockquote>]]<ref>Žižek, S. (2000) [[The Fragile AbsoluteCategory:Tarrying with the Negative|Butler, Judith]], or Why the Christian Legacy is Worth Fighting For, London and New York: Verso. p.105</ref></blockquote> == Notes ==<references /> [[Category:Sexuality|Butler, Judith]][[Category:Queer theoryPeople|Butler, Judith]][[Category:PeopleZizek Dictionary]] 24, 46, 75 Conversations.
