'''[[Judith]] Butler''' (b. February 241956) is a prominent post-[[structuralist]] [[philosopher]] and has made major contributions to [[feminism]], 46queer [[theory]], 75 Conversations[[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''' (b. [[February 24]] [[1956]]) is a prominent [[post-structuralist]] an American philosopher and has made major contributions to political theorist well known for her early [[feminismrole]], in shaping the field of [[queer theory]], and for defining the anti-identitarian turn in [[political philosophyfeminist]] and [[ethicsthought]]. She is Maxine Eliot professor in the Departments of Butler and Žižek’s [[Rhetoricintellectual]] conversation spans nearly two decades, and includes their collaboration with Ernesto [[Comparative LiteratureLaclau]] at the on ''[[University of CaliforniaContingency, Hegemony, BerkeleyUniversality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left]]''. She also has a professorial appointment Butler teaches rhetoric and comparative literature at the [[European Graduate School]]University of California, Berkeley.
Butler received her Ph.DButler’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 [[Philosophysexual]] from and [[gender]] identities are either [[Yale Universitybiologically]]or [[symbolically] in 1984] given. Instead, Butler posits the [[notion]] that sex and her dissertation was subsequently published as ''Subjects gender are [[performative]] – that is, the effect of the repeated citation of a set of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France''[[symbolic]] norms. In Drawing on Foucault’s assertion that [[power]] produces its own [[resistances]], Butler stresses the latesubversive potential of those performances that exceed their disciplinary production, including parodic and non-1980s[[normative]] gender and sexual [[acts]] such as drag and lesbian sex. For her, between different teaching/research appointments (most notably at the Humanities Center at political [[Johns Hopkins Universityrevolt]]), she was involved inheres in "poststructuralist" efforts within Western feminist theory to question attaining [[social]] [[recognition]] for this proliferation of subjectivities that always exceed the "presuppositional terms" of [[feminismsymbolic 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”]]'' (19901993) ==, and Žižek’s ''[[The Ticklish Subject:The Absent Centre of Political Ontology]]'' (1999), and their collaborative ''Main article: [[Gender TroubleContingency, Hegemony, Universality]].''To question . The debate centres upon how each understands “the negativity at the very foundational presuppositions heart of Western feminism meant opening it up to what others would later name identity” and the [[queer theoryrelationship]]of this negativity, or gap, and criticizing the to [[imperialismhegemony]] of a Western feminist theory that purports to represent "all" women. In 1990, Butlerand political contestation (''s book CHU'': 2). While Butler and Žižek both draw on [[Gender Troublepsychoanalytic]]'' burst onto conceptions of the scene, selling over 100,000 copies internationally and in different languages. The book critically discusses the works of [[Simone de Beauvoirsubject]], as rendered incomplete by an [[Julia Kristevainternal]], [[Sigmund Freudlimit]], where their [[Jacques Lacanantagonism]], ultimately lies is in the [[Luce Irigaraymeaning]]of this inherent limit, defined by Žižek as the [[Jacques DerridaLacanian]], and, most significantly, [[Michel FoucaultReal]]. (At Th is [[difference]] underlies the specific disagreements the two have engaged in over the same time, like most status of Butler's work, it is regarded by some readers the subject’s attachment to be written in an unnecessarily complexsymbolic norms, dense style). The book was popular enough that it even inspired an intellectual fanzine, ''[[Judy!sexual difference]] and political [[action]]'', that poked fun at her academic celebrity status.
The most widely read and misread move in ''Gender Trouble'' is Butler accounts for the redeployment radical [[contingency]] of [[Derridahistory]] through recourse to the [[Freudian]]'s reading of [[J. L. Austinunconscious]] and a [[model]]'s theory of the "gendered and sexualized subject who, like the Foucauldian subject, is produced under the pressure of restrictive [[Performative|performative statementsocial norms]]," and but, like the [[Franz KafkaHegelian]]'s storysubject, "Before is profoundly attached to their subjection. She suggests that the Law"; both in convergence with Butler's readings of [[Michel Foucault|Foucault'sOedipal]] [[threat]] ''of [[Discipline and Punishcastration]]'' produces a sexualized subject whose identities and ''desires can never live up to the ideals set out by their [[History of Sexualityculture]], vol. 1: and who therefore assumes their sexed [[The Will to Knowledgeposition]]''always as an iterative failure, but who is nevertheless attached to that failure. This convergence is Butler reduces the crucible symbolic law to a series of Butler's famous "performative theory of gender“performative [[speech]] acts” or “hegemonic norms”," in which "gender" is a kind of repeated, largely forced are subject to subversive re-inscription (Foucault's "discipline"Butler 1993: 106) enactment or "performance" that produces the imaginary fiction of a "core gender. For Butler, then," as well as the distinction between possibility for political [[intervention]] lies neither in [[the surface/exterior of "Real]] nor in [[the body" and the "interior core." Paradoxically, it is a kind of forcedSymbolic]], repetitive "doing" of gender that itself produces the ''fiction'' that an individual has a stable "gender" which they are just "expressing" but in their actions. And this imaginary fiction crucially produces an equally fictive distinction between the "interior" [[Imaginary]] – wherein periodic performative iterations of "symbolic norms have the body" and its "exterior"effect of displacing these norms themselves.
In ''[[The Ticklish Subject: The concept Absent Centre of performativity Political Ontology|The Ticklish Subject]]'', Žižek attacks Butler on precisely this point, claiming that Butler is at “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 core unpicking of Butlerthe [[quilting point]] effected by [[The Act|the ethical act]] (''ibid.''s work). It extends beyond Žižek critiques Butler’s imaginarization of the doing of gender Real and can be understood the Symbolic because it presents a subject who is always already trapped – free only in so far as a full-fledged theory of subjectivity. Indeed, if her most recent books have shifted focus away they maintain some ironic distance from gender, they still rely on performativity as a theoretical matrixtheir own passionate attachment to subjection.
== ''Bodies That Matter'' (1993) ==Butler's next bookTo this [[impasse]], Žižek counters with the Lacanian Real. Žižek has consistently argued, ''following [[Bodies That MatterLacan]]'', seeks that it is only by [[understanding]] the symbolic law to clear up confusions produced be rendered incomplete by both willful an internally constitutive limit – the Real – that we can [[understand]] that law as ultimately [[contingent]] and inadvertent misreadings 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 both her work in the Real to critique Butler’s understanding of the subject’s unconscious attachments to subjection. In ''Gender Trouble[[The Psychic Life of Power]]'' (1997), Butler posits the unconscious as the site of “passionate attachments” to the very laws that pathologize [[desire]] and poststructuralist feminism in generalrestrict its forms. To disrupt readings this model of the gender performative unconscious, Žižek opposes Lacan’s assertion that simplistically view gender enactment as “[[the fundamental fantasy]] (the stuff ‘primordial attachments’ are made of) is already a filler, a [[formation]] which covers up a daily voluntaristic "choicecertain gap/void” (''TS'': 265). In [[other]] [[words]]," Butler strengthens the performative theory Real of gender with the subject’s desire is not constituted by a consideration of the status passionate attachment to some set of repetition. Here she cites [[Derridarepressed]]'s theory of iterability or citationality[[foreclosed]] desires prohibited by the symbolic law, and goes on to work out but is constituted by a theory of [[performativityfantasy]] as citationalitythat covers over the impossibility at the heart of all desires.
== ''Excitable Speech: A Politics This differential understanding of [[The Subject|the Performative'' (1997) ==subject]] also grounds Butler’s disagreement with Žižek over [[Sexual Difference|sexual difference]]. In ''Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative[[Bodies that Matter]]'', Judith Butler began to address critiques Žižek for suggesting that the Real is produced through the issue of "[[hate speechforeclosure]]", language and [[censorship]]. Warning induced by the threat of castration on the basis that she was not totally opposed to juridical limitation “Žižek’s theory thus evacuates the ‘contingency’ of its contingency” because it relies upon a fixed notion of hate speech in some circumstances, she then argued that hate speech exists only retrospectively; castration that is, when it has been declared such always already gendered by juridical authorities. As such, the state appropriates to itself the possibility of defining hate speech and the ''limits of acceptable discourse'' [[Oedipus complex]] (Butler 1993: 196). She goes on to [[suggest]] that what is drawing here on Foucault's ''[[epistemelacking]]'' concept or theory in Žižek’s formulation of the [[discoursetraumatic]]), declaring, for example, that burning a cross in front kernel of a house in a Black neighborhood the Real is not a form the very social and historical specificity of each one of his examples of "hate speech" [[trauma]] (even though it is a common including the [[Ku Klux Klan|KKKfamily]] warning of impending action), but that "the camps and the [[pornographyGulag]]" constitutes such "hate speech") (ibid.: 202). Put simply, on Butler’s real problem with the sole grounds Real is that US courts have decided so. Judith Butler thus discusses it is a [[Catharine MacKinnonconcept]]'s anti-pornography stance, not so much for being against pornography but for conferring on the state the power of censorship to condemn itthat she believes evades history and thus political appropriation. Butler warns As she writes: “The problem here is that there is no way within this tactic of appealing framework to politicize the state may backfire on relation between [[progressivism|progressivistslanguage]]and the real” (ibid.: 207). As a feminist philosopher and political theorist, Butler is invested in an argument which is reminiscent of Foucault's description the field of the usage political, and because of the ''this [[lettre de cachet|lettres de cachetchoice]]'' to align herself with history, she refuses, by families referring definition, to accept a concept that she understands to be [[outside]] of history. By applying the sovereign 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 condemn members preclude the possibility of their own familyher resignification (ibid.: 218).
Moreover, quoting FoucaultIn 's first volume of the ''History [[The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of SexualityPolitical Ontology|The Ticklish Subject]]'', she argues Žižek responds by reiterating his point that any attempt of sexual difference and symbolic castration and the “[[censorshipWoman]], by justice or otherwise, is forced to duplicate the forbidden language.<ref>Judith Butler was drawing here on Foucault's concept of ''” have no positive [[epistemeexistence]]'', or but are the conditions traumatic residues of possibility the failure of discourse before the subject even attempts Symbolic fully to speak - see also Butler's use of [[Jacques Lacan|Lacancapture]]or define us. As he puts it in 's concept of '[[Contingency, Hegemony, Universality]]'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 “Every [[Dadaist|Dada movementtranslation]] 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 sexual difference into a set of symbolic opposition(or the more that it is censoreds).</ref>) Indeed, Butler argues that censorship is primitive doomed to languagefail, and it is this very ‘impossibility’ that opens up the "subject" is only an effect terrain of this original censorship (in the same way as Foucault argues that the "hegemonic [[subject (philosophy)|subjectstruggle]]" is an ''effect'' of power, instead of power being a property of individual subjects; see also for what ‘[[AlthusserSexual Difference|sexual difference]]’ will mean” ('s concept of ''[[interpellation]]CHU'': 111). Butler appeals to The fact that sexual difference is Real means that all [[Jacques Lacan|Lacansignifiers]]'s ''"of [[forclusionsexual identity]]"'' concept or [[Jacques Derrida|Derrida]]'s "constitutive limit" to explain this original sense of censorship. "If discourse depends on censorshipare precisely not transhistorical norms, then the principle but are fully historically and culturally specific and may therefore be subject 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 discoursereconfiguration.
A part Žižek posits that Laclau’s concept of hegemony as constituted by an inherent antagonism bridges the problem gap between Butler’s [[insistence]] on the historical production of the duplication [[sexed subject]] and his own neo-Lacanian notion of "hate speech" in the juridical discourse that outlaws itsubject rendered incomplete by the Real (''ibid.''). In this conception, lies in hegemony is the issues unavoidable consequence of signification: if the [[J.L. Austinsplitting]]'s concept of "performability" is correct, the subject by language and subsequent [[structuring]] of the symbolic [[universe]] by a [[master-signifier]] given by culture. The radical [[absence]] that it is possible to "do things with words" Lacan posits as the [[universal]] core of [[subjectivity]] (hence the problem of hate speechReal), 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, condition both for whom it is possible to identify hate speech on the use necessary functioning of certain keythe [[master-words: "Words such as 'nigger' signifier]] to quilt the subject’s desires to the social will and 'spick' are badges the ultimate contingency of degradation even when used between friends: these this quilting. In other words have no other connotation." Therefore, according to Delgado, the act [[apparent]] [[necessity]] of calling someone a name should be censored if our [[cultural]] forms of [[sexuality]] is rendered contingent on the name used belongs to a previously-identified hate speech. However, Butler points out basis that "this very statement, whether written in his text or cited here, has another connotation; he has just used it is [[the word in a significantly different way." Judith Butler thus underlines phallic signifier]] that serves to quilt the difficulty of identifying a hate-speech. Ultimately, the state itself defines subject’s desire to the limits of acceptable discourse, according to hersocial link. HoweverIt follows from this, Judith Butler takes the precaution to explicitly deny being against all forms of limitation of discourseas Laclau asserts, that the object hegemony of her book being only to point out the different issues at stake when one address [[master-signifier]] “defines the problem of hate speech and censorshipvery 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 necessaryFor Žižek, 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]]then, which can be protected in the US under Real constitutes the First Amendment, but forbidden in European countries as dangerous forms of hate speech. Most important, Butler shows that our conception internal limit of the workings of censorship must be renewedpolitical field itself, as must be rendering power and our [[ideology]] of an independent subject attachments to whom the power of censorship could be attributed: censorship ultimately relies on the state always incomplete and, even before, is the condition of discourse itselfsubject to re-inscription. == Style and politics == Butler's academic (though not her popular) writing is very dense and theoretical. 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]], 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 OnlineIt is no surprise, 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. In 1998then, ''Philosophy and Literature'' admonished that Butler with first prize in its Fourth Bad Writing Contest, for a sentence in ultimately refuses Lacanian theory because of her political insistence that the scholarly journal ''Diacritics''. In their press release, however, they quoted “Real” of sexual difference must be [[Warren Hedgesunderstood]] 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 always subject to history so that year was both [[Homi K. Bhabhauniversality]]; the prior year's winner was [[Fredric Jameson]]. Following controversy, and perceptions of mean-spiritedness, over difference might be considered the "Bad Writing" award [[Denis Dutton]] gave out under the auspices effects 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}})hegemony.</ref> In a [[London Review of Books]] article, Butler identifies as an anti-Zionist Jewish American who is concerned with By 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=Nosame token, 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 remains immune to Butler’s accusations 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 heteronormative foundations of Power: Theories in Subjection''* 1997: ''Excitable Speech: A Politics Lacan’s account of the Performative''* 1993: ''[[Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits sexual difference because he can evacuate all social forms of "Sex"]]''* 1990: ''[[Gender Trouble]]'': ''Feminism and their historical specificity by recourse to the Subversion of Identity''* 1987: ''Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France'' == Notes ==<references /> ==External links=={{wikiquote}}*Real as internal limit or [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 Butlerexcess]*[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 birthsPeople|Butler, Judith]][[Category:20th century philosophersIndex|Butler, Judith]][[Category:21st century philosophersTarrying with the Negative|Butler, Judith]][[Category:Feminist scholarsSexuality|Butler, Judith]][[Category:Gender studies|Butler, Judith]][[Category:Jewish American writers|Butler, Judith]][[Category:Lesbian writersPeople|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:PeopleZizek Dictionary]]
