Judith Butler: Une Nouvelle Existentialiste?

Abstract

For indeed no one has yet determined what body can do. -Spinoza, Ethics, Part III, Proposition 2, Scholium is thinking: therefore there is something thinks: this is upshot of all Descartes' argumentation. But this means positing as true a priori our belief in concept of substance:-that when there is thought there has to be something that thinks is simply a formulation of our grammatical custom adds a doer to every deed. -Nietzsche, Will to Power, (secs)484 To be born is both to be born of world and to be born into world. The world is already constituted, but also never completely constituted; in first case we are acted upon, in second we are open to an infinite number of possibilities. But this analysis is still abstract, for we exist in both ways at once. There is, therefore, never determinism and never absolute choice, I am never a thing and never bare consciousness. -Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 453 Judith Butler ends her preface to Bodies Matter with following remark: This text is offered, then, in part as a rethinking of some parts of Gender Trouble have caused confusion, but also as an effort to think further about workings of heterosexual hegemony in crafting of matters sexual and political. As a critical rearticulation of various theoretical practices, including feminist and queer studies, this text is not intended to be programmatic. And yet, as an attempt to clarify my `intentions,' it appears destined to produce a new set of misapprehensions. I hope they prove, at least, to be productive ones.1 To date, Butler's work has been exceedingly productive for those working in both feminist and queer studies and, if my undergraduate students' enthusiasm for her work is any indication, it will continue to be productive for next generation or two of graduate students at least. But her work has yet to be as productive in more traditional philosophical venues as I believe it deserves to be. While not wanting to take anything away from positive reception her writings, and in particular Gender Trouble, have received from readers interested in feminist theory and in rapidly evolving field of queer theory, I want to suggest her work warrants serious consideration from philosophers and theorists working in more mainstream political philosophy as well as history of philosophy and, in particular, twentieth-century French philosophy. It is primarily from this perspective I read Gender Trouble, not for its account of gender identity and performance but for role several French theorists, and in particular Michel Foucault, play in her argument. While her account of subject as a performative is far more than simply an application of Foucaultian analytic, it can certainly be engaged as one of most interesting and innovative appropriations of Foucault, and in particular of account of subject, has appeared to date. I say Foucaultian-Nietzschean because while there are many different ways in which Foucault's work has been appropriated within contemporary theory, Butler has been at forefront of those who have made a case for relevance of Nietzsche to a critical project seeks to rethink gender (and) identity insofar as she has positioned Nietzsche's challenge to a metaphysics of substance at center of her articulation of a performative account of identity. Drawing upon Foucault and Nietzsche both, Butler challenges language of interiority, offering in its stead language of performativity in which the gendered body [as] performative suggests it has no ontological status apart from various acts which constitute its reality. While distancing herself from several of Foucault's positions on sexual difference and body, political dimension of Butler's conclusions identity is a practice and gender a performative remained profoundly Foucaultian as she articulated alternative gender possibilities produced within repressive and constraining practices of our compulsory heterosexist culture. …