Performativity and Becoming

Abstract

In her recent work, Deleuzian feminist critic Rosi Braidotti suggests that, because of a reduction of flesh to discourse and psy chic foreclosure to social repression (Metamorphoses, 42), Judith But ler's work not only loses sight of the embodied nature of (43) but also, more important, is unable to theorize kinds of radical metamorphoses that Braidotti seeks to think. Such inability to con ceptualize transformation is noteworthy in a project whose central concern, according to Braidotti, is to identify how effective change can be achieved (42). While affirming differences in their intel lectual trajectories, Butler, in a brief response to Braidotti in Undoing Gender (2004), also carefully notes their compatibilities: I am also looking new, she reminds her colleague, for possibilities that emerge from failed dialectics and that exceed itself (198).1 With this argument?that newness can be conceptualized through a reworked or resignified dialectic?Butler exhibits her theoretical and political project's remarkable consistency. It returns us to culmi nation of narrative of her first book, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (1987), where she discovers in Foucauldian understanding of power and production a dialectic gone awry, unmoored from both subject and its teleological con clusion (222). Instead of leading to sublated whole of a synthesis, in Foucault ... tend to create effects that are thor oughly unforeseen, to multiply and proliferate into new forms of power that cannot be adequately explained within terms of binary oppositions (224). Butler's subsequent work can be seen as an effort to trace such unforeseeable futural imaginings (Bodies, 228). For her, a at once operative and derailed allows this unknown future to emerge (Undoing Gender, 180). Butler's project thus seems to approximate Braidotti's, which seeks