When All That Is Solid Melts Into Language: Judith Butler and the Question of Matter

Abstract

Judith Butler's analysis of “corporeal matters” offers an exemplary account of the hidden political agenda within the very grain of representation and discourse. This essay, however, argues that “language” and its political implications are even more complex and curious than Butler concedes. The author contests the conflation of “writing” with Culture, as if Culture is the constitutive and enclosed space of productivity and transformation. She argues that the question of Nature has not been provoked in Butler's analysis but answered and dismissed much too quickly. The author extends the problematic of “writing” to biology and suggests that Nature is literate.