As the world turns: Ontology and politics in Judith Butler

Polity

Volumn 32, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 155-177

  White, Stephen K ^a  

^a VIRGINIA POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE AND STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 23044518342     PISSN: 00323497     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3235281     Document Type: Article

References (77)

1. Judith Butler, "The Force of Fantasy: Feminism, Mapplethorpe, and Discursive Excess," differences 2 (1990): 105-06.
2. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex' (New York: Routledge, 1993).
3. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997).
4. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).
5. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1997.
6. GT, 16, 20; BTM, 219.
7. See my "Weak Ontology and Liberal Political Reflection," Political Theory 25 (August 1997);
8. and the "Introduction" to Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory (Princeton University Press, forthcoming, 2000).
9. The term "disengaged self comes from Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 21.
10. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 21.
11. Butler, "For a Careful Reading," in Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange, S. Benhabib, J. Butler, D. Cornell, and N. Fraser, eds., introduction by Linda Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1995). 133.
12. I use the adjective "felicitous" to draw attention to the fact that the aptness of a weak ontology is not captured by the notion of truth, at least in the sense of a strong ontology's claim to represent the true structure of being. J. L. Austin used "felicitous" to describe speech acts that were apt or performed successfully by meeting a variety of conventional expectations. In a vaguely analogous way, I take a weak ontology to be more felicitous the more it meets the expectations I have just delineated.
13. GT, 136, 143, 147.
14. See, for example, Seyla Benhabib, "Feminism and Postmodernism," 20-21;
15. Nancy Fraser, "False Antitheses," 67-69, in Feminist Contentions;
16. and Peter Digeser, Our Politics, Our Selves: Liberalism, Identity and Harm (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), ch. four.
17. Butler, "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory," Performing Feminisms, ed. Sue-Ellen Case (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 272.
18. ES, 26.
19. Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)," in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971).
20. BTM, 121-24; ES, Ch. One; and PLP, Ch. One.
21. GT, 145; ES, 34, 49, 155; PLP, 107; and "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution," 271.
22. ES, 33.
23. ES, 26; PLP, 28.
24. BTM, 9.
25. Butler, "Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of 'Postmodernism,'" in feminist Contentions, 47; and BTM, 15.
26. See Nancy Fraser's criticism of this expression in "False Antitheses," Feminist Contentions, 67.
27. Cf. Butler's definition of agency, PLP, 15.
28. See Digeser, Our Politics, Our Selves, 153-56;
29. and Kathleen Jones, Compassionate Authority: Democracy and the Representation of Women (New York: Routledge, 1993), 79, 218.
30. BTM, 10-11.
31. BTM, 67.
32. BTM, 67.
33. PLP, 3.
34. PLP, 127-29.
35. PLP, 27-28, 61-62, 102, 130.
36. PLP, 55, 60-62, 101
37. PLP, 62.
38. PLP, 60, 64.
39. ES, 125; BTM, 67.
40. PLP, 130-31.
41. PLP, 2; ES, 26, 30.
42. "For a Careful Reading," 133;
43. "Contingent Foundations," 49, both in Feminist Contentions;
44. and "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution," 280.
45. "For a Careful Reading," 140.
46. ES, 161. For criticism, see Thomas McCarthy, Ideals and Illusions: On Reconstruction and Deconstruction in Contemporary Political Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), ch. 4;
47. and my Political Theory and Postmodernism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 51-53, 75-84.
48. ES, 17-19.
49. ES, 17, 158.
50. ES, 16, 39-40.
51. PLP, 131.
52. "Force of Fantasy," 121, GT, 16.
53. Fraser, "False Antitheses," 71.
54. "For a Careful Reading," Feminist Contentions, 140; and ES, 161.
55. Heidegger, "Zeit und Sein," in Zur Sache des Denkens (Tubingen: Max Niemayer, 1969), 5ff.
56. One might usefully compare Butler's connection of ontology and ethical-political orientation with the better elaborated one of William Connolly in The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).
57. See also my "'Critical Responsiveness' and Justice," Philosophy and Social Criticism 24 (January 1998), 73-81.
58. "Force of Fantasy," 121.
59. GT, x, 93.
60. BTM, 66-67.
61. ES, 30, emphasis added.
62. Cf. the related concern of Kathleen Jones, Compassionate Authority, 218.
63. The statement about living "in a kaleidescope of cultures" is from Jeremy Waldron. He is quoted and criticized by Will Kymlicka in Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 84-85.
64. "For a Careful Reading," Feminist Contentions, 140;
65. and Boston Review (1995).
66. Sigmund Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology (New York: Collier, 1963), 164-79.
67. PLP, 169, 187.
68. PLP, 170-71, 174, 178.
69. PLP, 168, 174.
70. PLP, 23, 29, 162.
71. PLP, 23, 27. Butler also analyzes the issue of "gay melancholy," 147-50.
72. PLP, 138.
73. PLP, 138, 140.
74. PLP, 149-150.
75. PLP, 194, emphasis added. Cf. Adam Phillips, "Keep it Moving: Commentary on Judith Butler's 'Melancholy Gender/Refused Identification.'" Commending the new direction in Butler, he writes: "If the idea of performance frees identity into states of ... possibility, mourning refers those same identities back to ... parameters that seemingly thwart our options;" PLP, 156.
76. PLP, 139, 195-96.
77. PLP, 183-94.