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A critical reading of Judith Butler's interpretation of "The Question of the Body" in Foucault's Discipline and Punish

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Laure Bastiaans

Student number 6347622 MA Thesis in Philosophy University of Amssterdam January 2017

First reader: dr. Aukje van Rooden Second reader: dr. Michiel Leezenberg

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To move beyond the human condition,

such is the meaning of philosophy.

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS In this thesis we will use the following abbreviations: Works by Judith Butler:

BM Bodies that Matter (1993)

BPR Bodies and Power Revisited (2002) GT Gender Trouble (1990)

PP The Psychic Life of Power (1997)

PBI The Paradox of Bodily Inscriptions (1989)

Works by Michel Foucault:

DP Discipline and Punish (1975) OT The Order of Things (1966)

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CONTENTS

introduction v

PART I: Butler’s interpretation — and usage — of Foucault’s theory

§1 the problem of bodies in Foucault 3

§2 temporality, materialisation and sedimentation 11

§3 epistemology and ontology 19

PART II: An alternative to Butler’s reading of Foucault

§4 the body, the political technology of the body, the prison 33

§5 micro-physics of power, dispositif, nominalism 39

§6 ontology, history, power 47

conclusion 53

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INTRODUCTION

The critical question of Judith Butler’s interpretation and usage of Michel Foucault’s notion of the body, as well as his theory of productive and regulatory power, is often unattended in philosophical, political or feminist theory. And perhaps with good reason: Butler’s notoriously difficult and elusive language, in combination with her many syntheses of, among others, Derrida, Nietzsche, Hegel, Lacan, Marx, Austin, Adorno, Althusser, and of course Foucault, makes her theory interesting, but also challenging. In this thesis I do not aim to unravel her thoughts, nor to give a comprehensive reading of her theory of the body. What I do intend to present is a global overview of how she interprets Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, and how this reading affects her own theory of the materialization of the body. As we will see in Part I, this discussion is not so much about the body an sich, nor is it about Foucault’s theory of productive and regulatory power, but should rather be understood as Butler’s effort to provide an answer to the problem of constructivism that takes place in the essentialism/ idealism debate. The philosophical stakes are therefore high, as is Butler’s answer to this question. Butler’s answer will be problematized in Part II, where I present a different reading of Foucault’s theory of productive and regulatory power as it is presented by Butler, and see whether we can answer some questions that Butler’s theory of materialization left unanswered.

In Part I, we will start by setting out how Butler interprets Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, and discuss how she deals with notions such as assujetissement in relation the body. In the second paragraph we will turn our attention to Butler’s theory of materialization and show how Butler introduces Derrida’s concept of iterability into this theory. The third paragraph will place this discussion in the essentialism/idealism debate that will quickly be translated as a problem of the anthropological binary oppositions between matter and form, or nature and history-culture, in any theory of constructivism. In Part II, we will analyze Butler’s interpretation of “the problem of the body in Foucault” and show how Butler conflates Foucauldian terms that have different meanings. The fifth paragraph deals some crucial (and related) concepts in Foucault’s thinking, namely that of micro-physics of power and the

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dispositif, in relation to his nominalism. In the last paragraph we will interpret the former notions in a broader philosophical context in order to respond to Butler’s interpretation of Foucault’s theory of productive and regulatory power, and we will argue that Butler’s misrepresentation of Foucault’s theory of assujetissement results in the fact that she misses some crucial hints that could solve some of the problems that haunt her own theory of materialization.

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PART I

Butler’s interpretation


— and usage — 


of Foucault’s theory

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§1 


THE PROBLEM OF BODIES IN FOUCAULT

Judith Butler’s critical assessment of the ontological status of ‘the body’ in Michel Foucault’s work on power started as early as 1989 when she wrote her 1

essay ‘Foucault and the Paradox of Bodily Inscription’. In this essay, Butler draws attention to an apparent inconsistency with respect to his understanding of the body: she argues that whereas Foucault’s theory that “bodies are constituted within the specific nexus of culture or discourse/power regimes” (PBI 602) commits him to the claim that “there is no materiality or ontological independence of the body outside of any one of these specific regimes” (PBI 602), his understanding of this process of construction on the model of inscription relies on a notion of the body as a “site” or “surface” where regimes of discourse and power inscribe themselves, which commits Foucault also to the opposite claim that “there is a body that is in some sense there, pregiven, existentially available to become the site of its own ostensible construction” (PBI 601).

Referring primarily to Foucault’s essay ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ (1971) in which Foucault presents the body in Nietzschean terms as “the surface of the inscription of events” (NZH 375), in Bodies that Matter (1993) and The Psychic Life of Power (1997) Butler develops her thesis and argues that Foucault’s apparent paradoxical account of the body is due to the fact that his configuration of the relationship between investment (of power relations and discourse) and materiality (of the body) appears incoherent: although Foucault wants to refute the existence of a preexisting body by arguing that the investment of power relations constitute the very materiality of the body, Foucault’s explanations of this investment presume an ontologically prior materiality of the body that regards it as a “site” of investment (see PLP 88-89). The problem, Butler argues, is that Foucault does not elaborate on what it is that circumscribes this site called ‘the body’ in relation to the investment of power, resulting thereby in the appearance of the body that refers to an ontologically prior materiality of the body (see PLP 89). However, as Butler sets out, if we have a closer look at Discipline and Punish, we see that Foucault gives us a different configuration of the relationship between materiality and investment than laid out above (see PLP 89). Instead of giving a linear explanation of their

Which include ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, Discipline and Punish and The History

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formation, Butler argues that Foucault, in fact, explains the configuration of the relationship between materiality and investment as being coextensive. In this sense, as we will see, it follows that Foucault’s notion of the body as a “site” does not refer to some prior materiality of the body, but rather aims to refute such an ontological status of the body by explaining this “site” as the process of materialization in which the body is that for which materialization and investiture are coextensive (see PLP 91).

Crucial in this respect is that Butler argues that Foucault’s dual explanation of the body is implicated in his account of assujetissement (translated into English as subjectivation). That is, she argues, for Foucault, the process of subjectivation denotes at once the process of “subjection” or “subordination” as well as the “becoming of the subject.” (PLP 83) As such, she contends in ‘Bodies and Power Revisited’ that “[if] the word subjection (assujetissement) has two meanings, to subordinate someone to power and to become a subject, it presupposes the subject in its first meaning, and induces the subject in its second” (BPR 17). Relating this dual explanation of the process of subjectivation to Foucault’s account of juridical power — “power acting on, subordinating a pregiven subject” (PLP 84) — and productive power — “the capacity of power to form subject” (PLP 84) — Butler argues that we should understand subjectivation on the single model of juridical regulation in which juridical power and productive power are one and the same operation. She contends that although “Foucault occasionally tries to argue that historically juridical power … precedes productive power … with the prisoner it is clear that the subject produced and the subject regulated or subordinated are one, and the compulsory production is its own form of regulation” (PLP 84).

While arguing that Foucault conceptualizes the subjectivation of the body in general through the metaphor of the prison (see PLP 85), Butler refers to Foucault’s account of the subjectivation of the prisoner to support her thesis that subjection or subordination and the making of the subject are actually one and the same operation. She points out that in Discipline and Punish, Foucault not merely describes how the prison forces the body “to approximate an ideal, a norm of behavior, a model of obedience” (PLP 85) by acting upon the prisoner’s body, but that he also describes how the prisoner is, in this very process, “formed”, or rather, “formulated through his discursively constituted ‘identity’ as prisoner.” (PLP 84, my italics) The prison, at this instance, not merely acts on the prisoner’s body, but also constitutes and forms the prisoner by discursively constituting and “inculcating” into the prisoner the normative and regulatory

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ideal that comes to manifest itself as the very sign of the prisoner’s essence, his “psychic identity”, or what Foucault calls ‘a soul’” (PLP 85). As such, Butler argues,“discourse produces identity by supplying and enforcing a regulatory principle which thoroughly invades, totalizes, and renders coherent the individual” (PLP 85-86). She continues her argument by stating that in this sense, Foucault suggests that the prisoner is not regulated by an “exterior relation of power, whereby an institution takes a pregiven individual as the target of its subordinating aims” but rather that “[subjection] is, literally, the making of a subject, the principle of regulation according to which a subject is formulated or produced” (PLP 84).

However, while it may seem that Foucault makes a distinction between the body (as that on which power is said to act upon) and the soul or psychic identity (as the very ‘product’ of the body’s subjection to the prison), Butler states that these two notions are actually related in the formation of the prisoner’s body. Crucial in this respect, she argues, is that the soul is not merely the effect of the body’s subjection to the prison, but also its very instrument, functioning as a kind of “spatial captivity” (PLP 85) or “imprisoning frame” (PLP 86) that provides the “exterior form or regulatory principle of the prisoner’s body” (PLP 85). Using the word “inculcating” to denote this process, Butler aims to emphasize that the normative and regulatory ideal is not literally internalized into some prior psychic ‘space,’ but rather ‘implemented’, as it were, into the prisoner’s body, initiating thereby an interiority that was not there before. Ascribing the individual’s psychic life thereby entirely to the normative and regulatory norms of disciplinary power, Butler argues that the prisoner — citing Foucault: — “becomes the principle of his own subjection” (PLP 85, quoting DP 203). As such, the soul not merely functions as a “normalizing ideal” (PLP 90), but also as a “model of obedience” (PLP 85) that frames and forms the body “through the discursive matrix of a juridical subject” (PLP 84). In other words, she puts more strongly, “the soul is taken to be an instrument of power through which the body is cultivated and formed. In a sense, it acts as a power-laden schema that produces and actualizes the body” (PLP 89). Butler calls attention to the following passage of Foucault to support her claim:

“The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection [assujettissement] much more profound than himself. A ‘soul’ inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is

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itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body.” (BTM 33-34, quoting DP 30, emphasis added)

It becomes clear, Butler continues, that the soul, for Foucault, not merely functions as a normative and regulatory ideal according to which the body is “trained, shaped, cultivated, and invested” (PLP 89), but that the soul is also “a historically specific imaginary ideal (ideal speculatif) under which the body is materialized” (PLP 89).

In the introduction of her thesis that the soul, for Foucault, is the very principle of investment in the body, and the body as a process of materialization, Butler suggests that we may understand Foucault’s reference to the soul as “an implicit reworking of the Aristotelian formulation in which the soul is understood the be the form and principle of the body’s matter” (PLP 89). As she elaborates in Bodies that Matter, we may understand Foucault’s figure of the soul in Aristotelian terms as a schema that ‘supplies’ matter with forms and a principle of recognizability. Referring to a quote of Aristotle indicating that the soul is “the first grade of actuality of a naturally organized body” (BTM 32) and as such, “indissoluble form what constitutes its matter” (BTM 33), Butler contends that the soul, for Foucault, functions in the same way to the extent that it also signifies the actualization of matter: “[the] ‘soul brings [the prisoner] to existence’; not unlike Aristotle, the soul, as an instrument of power, forms and frames the body, stamps it, and in stamping it, brings it into being” (PLP 91). However, while Butler stresses that we ought to interpret the Aristotelian notion of schema in historical rather than natural terms “in order to arrive at something similar that Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish as the ‘materialization’ of the prisoner’s body” (BTM 33), she argues that the underlying rationale is nevertheless the same: whereas for Aristotle, the schema functions as the natural principle of form and intelligibility that comes to activate matter, for Foucault, the soul functions as the historical and culturally variable principle of form and intelligibility that comes to materialize the body (see BTM 33).

To Butler, the Aristotelian notion of schema seems “provocative” — not only, as Peng Cheah argues in his critical reassessment of Butler’s theory of the body, “because of its indissociability from matter” (Cheah 1996: 112), but also, as she states herself, because “in this formulation, there is no body outside language, for the materiality of the body — indeed, materiality itself — is produced by and in direct relation to the investment of power” (PLP 91). In

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other words, it shows that “the materialization of the body is coextensive with the investiture of power relations” (BTM 34). As such, she continues, “the body is not an independent materiality that is invested by power relations external to it, but is that for which materialization and investiture are coextensive.” (BTM 34) We may link this analysis with Butler’s thesis that the double movement of subjectivation belongs to one and the same operation: since we must understand subjectivation on the single model of juridical regulation in which juridical power and productive power are explained as one and the same operation internal (and not historical) to the operation of power itself, there is no “temporal lag”, as Ennis (2008: 33) puts it, “between regulation and production, they occur together; the object regulated never precedes the process of regulation, neither does regulation precedes the object”. As such, Butler argues, we must interpret the relationship between the soul (as the very principle of the investment of power relations and discourse) and the body (in its very materiality) in the same manner that Aristotle conceptualizes the relationship between wax and the shape that is given to it by its stamp (see BTM 32): they depend upon each other, neither the materiality of the body nor power relation and discourse are prior or anterior to each other, rather, they emerge coextensively in the very principle of subjectivation: “power is that which forms, maintains, sustains, and regulates bodies at once, so that, strictly speaking, power is not a subject who acts on bodies as its distinct object. The grammar which compels us to speak that way enforces a metaphysics of external relations, whereby power acts on bodies but is not understood to form them. This is a view of power as an external relation that Foucault himself calls into question” (BTM 34).

The fact that Foucault indeed aims to argue that “power” operates in the constitution of the materiality of the body is, according to Butler, affirmed by Foucault himself when he refers not only to the materiality of the body, but also to the materiality of the prison. While discussing different movements against incarceration in the nineteenth century in France, Butler calls attention to Foucault’s claim that “[what] was at issue was not whether the prison environment was too harsh or too aseptic, too primitive or too efficient, but its very materiality as an instrument and vector of power” (BTM 34, quoting DP 30). Butler argues that since Foucault uses the term “dans la mesure où ” to 2 He writes: “Ce qui était en jeu, ce n'était pas le cadre trop fruste ou trop aseptique, trop

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rudimentaîre ou trop perfectionné de la prison, c'était sa matérialité dans la mesure où elle est instrument et vecteur de pouvoir” p. 35.

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describe the materiality of the prison in relation to being a vector and instrument of power, it becomes clear that he argues at this instance that the materiality of the prison “is established to the extent that it is a vector and instrument of power” (BTM 34, also see PLP 91). Hence, Butler concludes, “the prison is materialized to the extent that it is invested with power, or, to be grammatically accurate, there is no prison prior to its materialization. Its materialization is coextensive with its investiture with power relations, and materiality is the effect and gauge of this investment. The prison comes to be only within the field of power relations, but more specifically, only to the extent that it is invested or saturated with such relations, in which the saturation is itself formative of its very being. Here the body is not an independent materiality that is invested with power relations external to it, but is that for which materialization and investiture are coextensive.” (BTM 34).

While elaborating on the question how the materiality of the prison and the materiality of the body are related to each other in the process of subjection, in ‘Bodies and Power Revisited’ Butler stresses that we must understand the materiality of the former “in terms of its strategic action upon and with the body; it is defined in relation to the body” (BPR 14). Referring to Foucault’s characterization of the functioning of power as a strategy, by which he aims to highlight, Butler argues, that power relations are always “productive, diffuse [and] various in its form” (BPR 14) and, moreover, that we must “detect” in these relations a “‘network of relations, constantly in tension, in activity’” (BPR 15, quoting DP 26), Butler suggests that the investiture of power relations and the process of materialization is also characterized by contestations, battles and tension that are productive. As such, Butler suggests that the process of materialization is never fixed or determined, but must rather be seen as a continual movement that is ‘effectuated’ and characterized by this “embattled investiture”. Correspondingly, Butler argues that Foucault’s introduction of the body as a ‘site’ serves “to offer a spatial metaphor for a temporal process, and so to derail the explanation from its point, but it would be equally wrong to eclipse the spatial through recourse to a purely temporal explanation.” (BPR 15) In other words, Foucault’s description of the body as a “site” aims to denote both the temporal process of materialization and investment and, moreover, the ‘spatial domain’ in which power relations — with their points of confrontations and transformations — are “mapped” in the very process of materialization: “the Foucaultian emphasis on convergent relations of power … implies a mapping of power relation that in the course of a genealogical process form a

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constructed effect.” (see BTM 10, n. 8) Drawing on Foucault’s emphasis on the convergent relations of power and her characterization of this movement or process in terms of mapping, Butler argues that the “strategical activation” of the materiality of the prison on the materiality of the body therefore results in the fact that “[materiality] might be said … to diverge from itself, to redouble itself, to be at once institution and body, and to denote the process by which the one passes over into the other (or, indeed, the process by which both ‘institution’ and ‘body’ come into separate existence in and through this prior and conditioning divergence). And the distinction between the two is the site where the one makes a transition into the other” (BPR 15).

We will come back at Butler’s interpretation of temporality in Foucault in the next paragraph. For now, however, it is important to set out that Butler argues that at this point, “a site [or] scene” (BPR 15) not only denotes, as we have seen, “a certain kind of undergoing” (BPR 15), but also shows that at the disjuncture between institution and body, at the very “passage between them … [is] where agency is to be found” (BPR 15). That is, based on Butler’s observation that power relations function as a strategy — which means, as we have seen, that the process of construction is characterized by points of confrontations and transformations — this “site” provides the very condition for power to become “redirected, proliferated, altered [and] transvaluated” (BPR 15). Hence, Butler concludes, Foucault’s reference to the body as a “site” does not refer to a “substance, not a thing, not a set of drives, not a cauldron of resistant impulse, but precisely to the site of transfer for power itself” (BPR 15). As such, Butler suggests, the process of materialization is, in fact, a functioning of power understood in terms of a strategy. Crucial in this respect in that we are thus not faced with two conflicting accounts of the body in which one exists prior to the investment of power relation and the other as the effect of this investment. Instead, materiality emerges simultaneously with this very investment. As such, referring to Butler’s earlier observations, we ought to understand materiality as “a site of transfer between power relations” in which this transfer “is the subjection/subjectivation of the body, [and] the principle of this assujettissement is ‘the soul’” (BTM, 35, n. 12). Moreover, Foucault’s notion of ‘the body’ therefore not only denotes “the movement, the passage between subjection and productivity … [but it is also] the name given to the nexus of transvaluation understood as an undergoing … [by which] the body becomes the nexus for the redirection of power” (BPR 15, 17).

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§2

TEMPORALITY, MATERIALIZATION AND SEDIMENTATION As we have seen in the previous paragraph, Butler stresses that Foucault’s introduction of the body as a “site” aims to denote a spatial metaphor for a temporal process — even though it would be wrong, Butler suggested, to eclipse — or, in other words, to overshadow — the spatial domain altogether by explaining it as a temporal process. Obviously, Butler’s characterization of the process of materialization in Foucault in terms of “mapping” (thereby emphasizing the convergent relations of power) and her attention to the single “moment, site or scene” in which this very process is said to take place aims to highlight the spatialized view or approach of Foucault. However, we have seen that Butler at the same time also characterizes the process of materialization as “a certain kind of undergoing” in which the investment of power relations “passes over” or “redoubles itself” into the materiality of the body, thereby offering a temporal explanation of this process. This became especially clear when Butler argued that Foucault’s emphasis on “convergent relations of power” and the corresponding moment in which these relations are “mapped” form, in fact, a “constructed effect” only in the course of a genealogical process.

Butler acknowledges that Foucault “[favors] an account of genealogy over a philosophical account of temporality” because he “[wants] his account of genealogical effects to be historically specific ” (BTM 10, n. 8) , however, she 3 4

critiques Foucault for not explicitly theorizing the temporal domain that his “language of construction” implies. Foucault’s notion of “convergence” not only presupposes space, Butler argued, but also a temporal domain in which construction takes place, she continues by commenting that this notion lacks an explanation of the “movement” by which power and discourse are converged. In this sense, she concludes, “the ‘mapping’ of power does not fully theorize temporality.” (BTM 10, n. 8)

Nevertheless, even though Foucault does not explicitly theorize the temporal domain due to his genealogical method and his corresponding commitment to be historically specific, Butler argues that his demonstration of the subjection/subjectivation of the prisoner in Discipline and Punish clearly implies that a philosophical account of temporality is in fact present in his theory. While drawing on her thesis that Foucault theorizes ‘the soul’ as a

We will elaborate on this point in greater detail in what follows.

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We will elaborate on this point in greater detail in §5

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normative and normalizing ideal that functions “as the formative and regulatory principle of the material body [and] the proximate instrumentality of its subordination,” Butler argues that:

[T]he soul renders the body uniform; disciplinary regimes train the body through a sustained repetition of rituals of cruelty that produce over time the gestural stylistics of the imprisoned body … It is in this sense that materialization can be described as the sedimenting effect of a regulated iterability.” (BTM 35, n. 12, emphasis added) 5

Before we turn to Butler’s interpretation of the temporal domain in Foucault’s theory of subjection/subjectivation, we should first start analyzing the emphasized terms of “repetition,” “materialization”, “sedimentation,” and “iterability” in order to understand what exactly Butler attributes to Foucault’s theory and how these concepts are related to her own account of temporality in relation to her central concept of performativity.

First of all, as we have seen in the above quote, Butler argues that the process of subjection/subjectivation in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish may be described as the sedimented effect of a regulated iterability. Referring thereby to Derrida’s theory of iterability, Butler aims to suggests that the production or constitution of the “the gestural stylistics of the imprisoned body” always happens through a “regularized and constrained repetition of norms.” (BTM 95) However, as we will see in greater detail in §3, whereas Derrida’s theory of iterability focusses on the practices of citation and recitation of signs, Butler explains the process of iterability in Foucault in terms of “a sustained repetition of rituals of cruelty.” As such, even though Butler ascribes to Foucault’s theory of assujetissement a process of iterability, she does not align him with Derrida’s linguistic theory. Moreover, also her own appropriation distinguishes itself from his strict theoretical framework by explaining the theory of iterability in her own work not in linguistic, but discursive terms. According to Butler, the constative use of language is performative in the sense that it is the “reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names.” (BTM 2) Performativity, in this sense, is not a single “act” of description, but rather consists of a forcible citation and reiteration of

Suspicious similar to her own claim that “Gender is the repeated stylization of the body,

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a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being” (GT 45)

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discursive norms or conventions that produce, through this reiterative power of discourse, “the phenomena that it regulates and constrains.” (BTM 2, see also 12) As such, the power that “regulates and constrains” is not merely located in the content of discursive norms and conventions, but also — and perhaps foremost — in the discursive practice of citation and recitation itself.

Crucial in respect is that Butler links her concept of “material effect” to genealogical power relations that constitute these “object effects”:

Insofar as power operates successfully by constituting an object domain, a field of intelligibility, as a taken-for-granted ontology, its material effects are taken as material data or primary givens. These material positives appear outside discourse and power, as its incontestable referents, its transcendental signifieds. But this appearance is precisely the moment in which the power/discourse regime is most fully dissimulated and most insidiously effective. When this material effect is taken as an epistemological point of departure, a sine qua non of some political argumentation, this is a move of empiricist foundationalism that, in accepting this constituted effect as a primary given, successfully buries and masks the genealogy of power relations by which it is constituted. (BTM 34-35)

Materiality — or, to be more precise: “material effects” — Butler argues, are constituted by this form of power that produces an “object domain” by virtue of the “dissimulating” effects of power. While the dissimulating effects of power are said to conceal the true ‘nature’ of these apparent “positivities” as being constituted by regimes of power/discourse, Butler argues that they are therefore taken as prediscursive “givens”. Hence, power and discourse not only constitute material positivities, but also the formation of an epistemic field and its “knowers” that take these material effects as an “epistemological point of departure” (see BTM 35, n. 12)

We will come back to the question of epistemology in the next paragraph. For now however it is important to emphasize that Butler links her analysis of the constitution of material effects also to her theory of performativity. That is, according to Butler, “materiality” is not only the effect of the dissimulating effects of genealogical power relations, but also of the specific repetition of the “taken-for-granted ontology” that, in turn, reifies that this ontology is distinct or independent of discursive construction. Denoting this process as the sedimentation of specific discursive practices and signifiers,

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Butler contends that “what we might call materialization [is] a kind of citationality, the acquisition of being through the citing of power” (BTM 15) The process of sedimentation is, therefore, itself a repetition that “will be the accumulation and [congealment of the past] … to the point of their indistinguishability.” (BTM 10, n. 8)

As we will see in greater detail in the next paragraph, the process of iterability therefore entails a specific narration of the temporal domain in which the past, present and future citations and recitations play a crucial role. Since our present and future citations repeat, so to speak, the past, we keep taking these “positivities” as an epistemological point of departure and continue to pose these so-called incontestable “facts” as primary givens that disclose a natural configuration. This, in turn, not only results in the sedimentation of these specific discursive practices, but also constricts the future possibilities of these very practices in advance. In this sense, the process of iterability is not only related to the past and the present, but also to the future since it produces specific expectations and anticipation with respect to the “positivities” that are formulated in the past and are taken as pre-discursive “facts,” which are, in turn, confirmed by the signifying act one recites.

It is important to note that Butler emphasizes that even though she argues on different occasions that “materiality”, in this sense, designates a certain effect of power, she actually aims to argue that “‘materiality’ … is power in its formative or constituting effects.” (BTM 35, emphasis added) The distinction between the explanations of “materiality as the effect of power” and “materiality as power” is a relevant one, since the former suggest a linear explanation between investment and materiality, by which it contradicts Butler’s central thesis that materiality and investment emerge coextensively. Instead, Butler argues, to say that materiality is the ‘effect’ of power is to “displace the causal relation through a reworking of the notion of ‘effect.” (BTM 35, n. 12). That is, she continuous, we ought to understand power as being established “in and through its effects, where these effects are the dissimulated workings of power itself.” (BTM 35, n. 12) 6

Following, as Teresa Ebert (1996: 212) points out, Nietzsche’s deconstruction of causality in which the cause “is itself the effect of its own

In ‘Bodies and Power Revisited’ Butler writes, “…the ‘effect’ in Foucault is not the

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simple and unilateral consequence of a prior cause. ‘Effects’ do not stop being effected: they are incessant activities, in a Spinozistic sense, They do not, in this sense, presuppose power as a ‘cause’: on the contrary, they recast power as an activity of effectuation with no origin and no end.”

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dissimulated causality; the effect is itself the causality of its own dissimulated effects”, Butler not only aims to establish an account of “materiality” in which materialization and investment are coextensive (and not linear), but also that there is no ‘original’ initiator or “source” of power that effectuates these material “effects”. In this sense, Butler argues, the dissimulating workings of power are not exactly the effect of power since this would take power as “a substantive, that has dissimulation as one of its attributes or modes.” (BTM 35, n. 12) Instead, by arguing that power is established “in and through its effects, where these effects are the dissimulated workings of power itself”, Butler aims to emphasize that every “effect” effectuates, so to speak, its effects and that every ‘instance’ in this interplay is already an effect of the dissimulated working of power — which is therefore not taken as an origin. In other words: according to Butler we ought to rewrite causality such that the production of material “effects” cannot be construed “as a unilateral movement from cause to effect” (BTM, 35, n. 12), but instead, we must think of investment and materiality as occurring simultaneously.

In relation to Butler’s theory of performativity, this means that the repetition, citation or recitation of certain discursive practices is not performed by a preexisting individual, nor by power “construed as a subject”— iterability, she continues, is not an effect of power but rather “a reiterated acting that is power.” (BTM 95) In other words, the practice of citation is not “performed” by an initial or prediscursive subject, but this subject is itself enabled by this very practice. In this sense, as Butler remarks using a quote from Nietzsche: “there is no ‘I’ who stands behind discourse and executes its abolition or will through discourse. On the contrary, the ‘I’ only comes into being through being called, named (…) and this discursive constitution takes place prior to the ‘I’” (BTM 225). Correspondingly, as we have seen, the very “materiality” of the body ought to be understood as the “effect” of the practice of iterability as well. There is therefore no prior or preexisting materiality of the body, but the very practice of iterability itself constitutes the body’s materiality.

In redefining the notion of “materiality”, Butler argues that we should understand the process of materialization and the constitutive “effects” of power in Foucaultian terms:

What I would propose in place of these conceptions of construction is a return to the notion of matter, not as a site or surface, but as a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary,

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fixity, and surface we call matter. That matter is always materialized has, I think, to be thought in relation to the productive and, indeed, materialization effects of regulatory power in the Foucaultian sense. (BTM 10)

As we have seen in the previous paragraph, Butler argued that this materializing “effect” of power is implicated in his account of subjection/subjectivation — or, in other words; in his theory of juridical and productive models of power which, according to Butler, belong, to one and the same operation — and that this process not only entails a spatial domain in which power relations are “mapped” at the “site” of the body, but also a temporal domain in the sense that this very process of construction or materialization has to be seen as a continual “movement” or, as Butler formulated, a certain kind of “undergoing” that may be explained in terms of a process of iterability.

The fact that Butler argues that Foucault’s “language of construction” adheres to Derrida’s theory of iterability to the extent that we can find the same type of repetition in his explanation of the subjection/subjectivation of the prisoner, is motivated by her effort to ascribe to Foucault a temporal explanation for the process of materialization that relates past, present and future practices, as opposed to Foucault’s emphasis on spatialized metaphors in his account of subjection/subjectivation:

“[t]he notion of temporality ought not to be construed as a simple succession of distinct ‘moments’ all of which are equally distant from one another … [since] such a spatialized mapping of time substitutes a certain mathematical model for the kind of duration which resists such spatialized metaphors … Hence, it is important to underscore the effect of sedimentation that the temporality of construction implies. Here what are called ‘moments’ are not distinct and equivalent units of time, for the ‘past’ will be the accumulation and congealing of such ‘moments’ to the point of their indistinguishability … To the extent that such a theory requires a spatialization of time through the postulation of discrete and bounded moments, this temporal account of construction presupposes a spatialization of temporality itself, what one might, following Heidegger, understand as the education of temporality to time.” (BTM 10, n. 8)

While we have seen that Butler already argued that Foucault’s notion of the convergent relations of power both entails a temporal and spatial explanation of

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the “moment” of construction — by which Foucault seems to elude, as Butler puts is, “the paradox noted above in which the very account of temporality requires the spatialization of the ‘moment.’” (BTM 10, n. 8) — she nevertheless aims to theorize Foucault’s “implicit” account of temporality not only to amplify his unattended position of temporality, but also to support her theory that materiality, for Foucault, is always materialized. That is, in order to account for materiality as being “in no sense static, spatial, or given,” but instead, Butler continues, as being “constituted in and as [a] transformative activity,” (chapter one, n. 5) a notion of temporality — as outlined by Butler herself — is needed, for it could otherwise not explain the process of materialization. This temporality, Butler suggests, can not be explained by Foucault’s genealogy for it provides no theory of temporality — but, instead, an account of historical causality.

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§3


EPISTEMOLOGY AND ONTOLOGY

In the previous paragraph we have seen that Butler argued that we should redefine materiality “not as a site or surface, but as a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter.” (BTM 10) Relating this process of materialization to Foucault’s theory of productive and regulatory power that includes an account of iterability, Butler suggested that we can explain Foucault’s theory of materialization as a temporal “movement” that relates past, present and future discursive practices. In Part Two we will continue with our discussion of Foucault and Butler’s interpretation of Foucault’s genealogical historical-causality theory. In this section we will focus on Butler’s own theory of materialization and we will place this discussion in a broader philosophical context.

While we have seen that Butler’s theory materialization is build on her interpretation of Foucault’s model of productive and regulatory power, in Bodies that Matter Butler also critiques Foucault when she elaborates on the question how it is that the economies of discourse and materiality function as a “self-sustaining” system:

Insofar as Foucault traces the process of materialization as an investiture of discourse and power, he focuses on that dimension of power that is productive and formative. But we need to ask what constrains the domain of what is materializable, and whether there are modalities of materialization … To what extent is materialization governed by principles of intelligibility that require and institute a domain of radical unintelligibility that resists materialization altogether or that remains radically dematerialized? Does Foucault’s effort to work the notions of discourse and materiality through one another fail to account for not only what is excluded from the economies of discursive intelligibility that he describes, but what has to be excluded for these economies to function as self-sustaining systems?” (BTM 35, emphasis added)

In other words: Butler argues that the fact that Foucault is primarily concerned with the questions how discourse and power relations “produces ontological effects” or how it “operates through the circulation of ontological moves” (Butler in Meijer and Prins, 1998, 279), makes that he cannot account for that which is

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excluded from these “economies” and, consequently, that he fails to provide a satisfactory answer to the question of how these economies function as self-sustaining systems. In order to account for these questions, Butler proposes that we should we should understand the process of materialization and sedimentation not merely as the accumulation, congealment and the repetition of citations to the point of their indistinguishability, but also as a process that determines what is excluded from construction and, correspondingly, as that which “exteriorizes” the boundary of that what is included (see BTM 10, n. 8).

Crucial in this respect is that Butler’s points out that the “outside” of that what is “included” in these economies plays an important role in the process of materiality. According to Butler, the process of materialization requires that which it cannot abide in order to circumscribe that which it can abide (see BTM 3). Incorporating thereby a Hegel’s dialectics into her theory of the “constitutive outside ,” Butler argues that the materiality of the body is not 7

merely the “construction” of the productive, regulatory and materializing effects of power relations and discourse, but it is circumscribed through exclusionary means that require that which is deprived from construction. In this sense, we may speak of a “constitutive outside” since it not only provides the necessary support for bodies that are materialized and that qualify as “bodies that matter,” (BTM 16) but also because it regulates the “ontological domain” (as Butler put it in Meijer and Prins 1998: 279) by setting boundaries, making it thereby a self-sustaining system of inclusion and exclusion.

However, Butler stresses, this “constitutive outside” must not be interpreted as an “ontological thereness that exceeds or counters the boundaries of discourse” (BTM 8). Rather, this “outside” is inherent to the “inside” since“it can only be thought — when it can — in relation to discourse, at and as its most tenuous borders.” (BTM 8) In other words, the “constitutive outside” does not denote an ontologically distinct realm or independent entity, but only exists in function and by virtue of the “inside”: the “constitutive or relative outside … [is] nevertheless internal to that system as its own nonthematizable necessity” (BTM 39). Being located at the “tenuous borders,” the “constitutive outside” defines, so to speak, “those ‘unlivable’ and ‘uninhabitable’ zones of social life” (BTM 3). As such, Butler critiques Foucault not only for neglecting the exclusionary principles and measures that are constitutive for the “inside”, but also for failing to recognize that construction and exclusion work together in the process of materialization. Whereas construction materializes these

Based on his theory of the relationship of the “Lord” and “Bondsman”. (See PLP 31-53)

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bodies that are “included,” the exclusionary processes operate by dematerializing these “others” — that is, “abject bodies” — that, in turn, constitute and circumscribe the domain of materialized bodies, and so forth. Butler’s explanation of the “constitutive outside” as being internal to the “inside” suggests that she eludes any reference to a prediscursive, prior, or external notion of the body and its very materiality: the “constitutive outside,” Butler reminds us, does not refer to an independent and prediscursive ontology, but rather, to “the site where discourse meets its limits, [providing] the opacity of what is not included … [and acting thereby] as a disruptive site of linguistic impropriety and unrepresentability” (BTM (check!) 53).

However, while we have seen that Butler repeatedly insists that there is no prediscursive, prior or external materiality of the body, a difficulty in her theory emerges when we consider that Butler does, in fact, seems to acknowledge that there are certain primary and irrefutable experiences of the body. For instance, she writes that “surely bodies live and die; eat and sleep; feel pain, pleasure … [and surely] there must be some kind of necessity that accompanies these primary and irrefutable experiences.” (BTM xi) Instead of refuting such primary experiences, Butler argues that the problem with any claim that refers to such a prior notion of the body, is that they “in no way [imply] what it might mean to affirm them and through what discursive means [this might happen]” (BTM xi). Like Butler puts is elsewhere — as we have already seen in our analysis of Butler’s effort to rewrite cause and effect — “to say that discourse is formative is not to claim that it originates, causes, or exhaustively composes that which it concedes; rather, it is to claim that there is no reference to a pure body which is not at the same time a further formation of that body …[in this sense] the very meaning ‘referentiality’ is altered” (BTM 10-11, emphasis added). As such, Butler agues that:

“[T]he materiality of the body ought not to be conceptualized as a unilateral or causal effect of the psyche in any sense that would reduce that materiality to the psyche or make of the psyche the monistic stuff out of which that materiality is produced and/or derived. This latter alternative would constitute a clearly untenable form of idealism. It must be possible to concede and affirm an array of ‘materialities’ that pertain to the body that which is signified by the domains of biology, anatomy, physiology, hormonal and chemical composition, illness, weight, metabolism, life and death. None of this can be denied.” (BTM 66).

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Butler’s ‘nuance’ with respect to her understanding of the materiality of the body is absolutely decisive. First of all, we see that Butler mentions that she aims to avoid any form of idealism. Crucial in this respect is that Butler places her discussion in the essentialism/idealism debate from which she starts her critical assessment if constructivism. Central to this discussion is her objective to elude the anthropological binaries of matter and form, or, nature and history-culture in her theory of materialization. In Part Two we will come back at this objective in greater detail when we continue with our discussion of Foucault. For now, we should start by pointing out that Butler characterizes the problem of the essentialism/idealism debate and its corresponding anthropological binaries as being centered on typically modern distinction between nature as the “blank and lifeless page” and a model of construction “whereby the social unilaterally acts on the natural and invests it with its parameters and its meanings” (BTM 4). Butler argues that nature is often conceived of as nothing more than a valueless “site” of inscription that only comes to assume value by means of social investment (see BTM 5). As Peng Cheah (1996: 109) puts it: whereas social constructivism stresses the primacy of the social as being the constructive form over preexisting matter of which the latter is said to be “presignificant" or “non-intelligible”, Butler adds that this distinction also results in “the cancellation of the natural by the social” (BTM 5). As such, it is perceived that nature (or “sex”) merely consist of the social significance of social construction (or “gender”) and that nature therefore does not “accrue social meanings as additive properties but rather is replaced by the social meanings it takes on” (BTM 5).

In this context, Butler argues that the problem with social or linguistic constructivism is that it has the tendency “to produce the premise that both refutes and confirms its own enterprise” (BTM 6). That is, if it conceives nature merely as a social or linguistic construction, it cannot avoid but conceiving the natural as something like a fiction. Such an account would thus amount to social or linguistic monism whereby everything is only and always “social” or “language”. However, Butler stresses that if one wants to account for the natural — which, as we we saw, was implied when Butler argued that she wants to "return to matter” — constructivism should be able to take the natural as the “site” on which it acts, by which it unavoidably presupposes nature as the “unconstructed” (see BTM 6). As Cheah summarizes, the problem with the first scenario of constructivism is that it “cannot explain how the bodily materiality [of, for instance, sex] can be produced by language/discourse” (Cheah 1996:

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110). That is, it cannot account for nature, the body and sex at all. Moreover, Butler adds, by claiming that nature is a social or linguistic construct, it cannot avoid but having to answer the question “who is doing the constructing?” and, correspondingly, the question who constructs the constructer (BTM 6). But the problem with the second scenario is that the opposite presumption assumes the natural as the unconstructed, by which it concedes, as Butlers puts it, “the limits of linguistic constructivism, [thereby] inadvertently circumscribing that which remains unaccountable within the terms of construction” (BTM 6). As such, Cheah argues that nature “cannot be accounted for and political contestation is confined to the level [of the social/linguistic construct,] [which is] conceived as the interpretation or meaning of [nature]” (Cheah 1996: 110-111). In other words: whereas the first scenario leads to an undesirable account of (linguistic) idealism that cannot explain the nature and, correspondingly, the very materiality of the body, the second scenario presupposes a linear explanation of nature and the materiality of the body and construction an sich. This, in turn, not only leads to the conclusion that we cannot avoid but to interpret the unconstructed in terms of the constructed — resulting thereby in the conception of nature as the radical non-intelligible — and, correspondingly, also to the conclusion that nature or the materiality of the body has to be conceived as being prediscursive and ontologically prior to construction — a conclusion, we have seen, that Butler’s theory precisely aims to refute.

Now, in the light of this discussion and in line with the passage quoted above , it appears that the fact that Butler seems to deny as well as affirm some primary and irrefutable experiences of the body contradicts her initial critical argument against Foucault (as outlined in the first paragraph). The affirmation of some primary experiences of the body not only implies that Butler does in fact assume some unconstructed ‘nature’ of the body and, consequently, that Butler cannot avoid but to assume a linear explanation of the configuration of the relationship between materiality and investment — a conclusion that Butler aims to avoid by redefining, but at the same time also returning to, “matter” as being “a process of materialization that stabilizes over time” (BTM 10) — but also opens up the questionwhether we ought to interpret Butler’s theory as making the ontological claim that the very materiality of the body (“indeed”, she argued, “materiality itself” (PLP 91)) is materialized by the productive effects of power relations and discourse, or that she merely makes an epistemological claim that we can only understand or know matter through this construction — which

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would, again, contradict her thesis that materiality and investment emerge simultaneously.

In order to shed some light on this difficulty in Butler’s theory, we should answer the question whether Butler’s thesis of the materiality of the body aims to make an ontological, or an epistemological claim. Let us begin with the latter option. Following Veronica Vasterling’s analysis of this problem, we could explain Butler’s theory as making an “epistemological post linguistic turn Kantian claim. As such, we ought to interpret Butler’s theory as arguing that power and discourse constitute the linguistically constructed appearance of the body and hence, that we have no access to the “body-in-itself.””(Vasterling 1999: 22) According to Vasterling, Butler’s mentioning of the notion of ‘appearance’ is crucial in this respect. While calling attention to Butler’s claim (which we have already encountered in the previous paragraph) that:

“Materiality” appears only when its status as contingently constituted through discourse is erased, concealed, covered over. Materiality is the dissimulated effect of power. (Vasterling 1999: 20, quoting BTM 35, n.12)

Vasterling argues that the quotation marks around the fist notion of materiality indicate that Butler refers to the “common, everyday notion of materiality as a given, extra-linguistic reality.” Correspondingly, Vasterling argues, we have to conclude that Butler aims to argue that “[the] long-established discourse on the naturalness and givenness of material entities and bodies conceal the fact that language constructs material reality” (Vasterling 1999: 20-21, my italics). That is, she adds, it indicates that Butler contends that “language conditions [merely] the appearance of materiality” in this extra-linguistic sense (Vasterling 1999: 20-21) — and, therefore, not the actual materiality of the body itself.

Referring to Immanuel Kant’s transcendental-idealist thesis that our knowledge of reality is restricted to appearances (phenomena) and that we cannot know what things are in of by themselves — as Ding an sich — (see Vasterling 1999: 21), Vasterling argues that in this context, Butler’s claim that language conditions the appearance of materiality would mean that language, “as the epistemological condition of accessibility, determines the way in which reality appears to us” (Vasterling 1999: 21). She argues that where in Kant’s case “it is the transcendental subject, in Butler’s case it is language which enables and at the same time contains access to and understanding of reality” (Vasterling 2010: 208). Vasterling (1999: 21-22) consequently writes that reality, as far it is

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not reducible to the discursive effects or construction of language, is ontologically independent of language (see Vasterling 1999: 21-22). That is: language, in this sense, does not “capture reality as it is in itself; on the contrary, what is captured is only linguistically constructed reality … [and] we can have no access to or any understanding of reality outside the signifying effects of language” (Vasterling 2010: 208).

Now, according to Vasterling, the fact that we must, interpret Butler’s position as a “post linguistic turn Kantian position” (Vasterling 1999: 22) is affirmed by Butler herself when she contends in a Dutch interview that she wants to argue that:

…the ontological claim can never fully capture its object, and this view makes me somewhat different from Foucault and aligns me temporarily with the Kantian tradition as it has been taken up by Derrida. The “there is” gestures towards a referent it cannot capture, because the referent is not fully built up in language, is not the same as the linguistic effect. There is no access to it outside of the linguistic effect, but the linguistic effect is not the same as the referent that it fails to capture. This is what allows for a variety of ways of making reference to something, none of which can claim to be that to which reference is made. (Meijer and Prins 1998: 279)

According to Vasterling, we can see in this statement that Butler indeed agrees with the view that there are some primary experiences of the body, but that there is no reference to such a “pure body” without further constituting or forming this body. This “post linguistic turn Kantian” interpretation of Butler’s position implies that we ought to interpret Butler’s claim as affirming that we cannot know these primary experiences of the body — which are conceived, therefore, as being ontologically independent of power and discourse — “in-itself”, but that we can only know the discursively constructed body as it appears to us.

However, it seems that the crux of Butler’s proclaimed alignment with the Kantian tradition lies in the ‘disclaimer’ “as it has been taken up by Derrida”. Crucial is that this disclaimer actually leads us back to Derrida’s theory of iterability. While Derrida, as Leonard Lawlor sets out, indeed affirmed in his Rogues to be a “responsible guardian” of the heritage of transcendental idealism (Lawlor 2014, quoting Derrida 2004: 134), Lawlor suggests that it would be a mistake to conclude too quickly that Derrida therefore “aligns” with the

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Kantian tradition. Lawlor supports this claim by pointing out that Derrida’s professed appreciation of Kant’s transcendental idealism primarily amounts to “the specific way of philosophizing” that Kant’s transcendental idealism made possible: namely to argue back “from the givenness of experience to the conditions that are necessarily required for the way experience is given” (Lawlor, 2014).

While we may therefore cautiously state that Derrida “takes up” the Kantian tradition by adopting Kant’s procedure in the search for the necessary conditions for experience, Derrida’s theory of iterability also has significant — and indeed critical — implications for Kant’s transcendental idealism. In order to understand how Derrida’s theory of iterability challenges the Kantian tradition, it is important to point out that Derrida's theory actually directly opposes Kant’s famous thesis that the necessary and foundational conditions of experience and knowledge consist of the pure or a priori intuitions and concepts that are set up in the faculties of the human mind (see Michael, 2016). Whereas Kant’s transcendental idealism results in the anthropological subject/ object dichotomy in the sense that the subject enjoys the primacy of being the meaning-giving and structuring agent, Derrida’s theory aims to refute precisely the implied linear model between foundational conditions and experience by arguing, as Lawlor sets out, that “repeatability” and the “irreplaceable singularity” of “the event” are the foundational conditions of experience, which have to occur at the same time. In other words: whereas Kant holds that we can only have experiences of the world when this world “conforms to our structuring conditions”, Derrida aims to challenge this linear founding of experience by arguing that the empirical event is, in fact, a “non-separable part of the foundational conditions” (Lawlor, 2014).

Lawlor correspondingly argues that since Derrida explains the relationship between “the event” and “repeatability” as being “internal yet heterogeneous”, it follows that Derrida refuses the idea of a “first principle” or origin that is self-identical. This becomes clear when we consider that his thesis of iterability is bound up with his theory of différance. Without going into great detail, it suffices to say that Derrida’s theory of différance draws on his explanation of the present experience as being always temporally mediated and, therefore, as Lawlor explains, always slightly different from past and future experiences. Repetition, in this sense, must be more or less the same as that what it repeats — it is however never identical. Crucial then, as Gary

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Aylesworth suggests, is that Derrida argues that there is always a “distance” 8

and, therefore, “difference” between “the event” and “repetition”. In this sense, Aylesworth argues, différance is precisely “the spacing of difference” which is, in turn, a “productive space” in the sense that it enables different repetitions, ‘unchaining’ thereby an endless succession of repetitions which all supplement more “signifying structures”. Whereas Aylesworth (ibid) argues that Derrida thereby implies that there is always something “unsignified” that allows, in turn, for new repetitions and “supplements” to emerge, Lawlor sets out that this also results in the fact that “the origin”, for Derrida, is always “immediately divided … into division, accidents, and empirical events [that have] always already taken place” (Lawlor, 2014). From there it follows, he continues, that according to Derrida, “nothing is ever given as such in certainty” and that every experience always contains, so to speak, “an aspect of lateness” whereby it seems that ‘the origin’ has always and already disappeared (Lawlor, 2014).

The central point of this argument is that we cannot capture the referent of “there is” because there is no ‘final origin’ or ‘end’, so to speak, in this chain of repetition and differance because “every reference [and] all reality has the structure of a differential trance” (Aylesworth 2015, quoting Derrida 1988, 148). Returning to Vasterling’s analysis we may conclude that — as opposed to her “post linguistic Kantian” interpretation of Butler — there is, in fact, no ontologically independent materiality of nature or materiality of the body that is, as her analysis implies, self-identical. In this sense, Vasterling’s explanation of the quotation marks around “materiality” does not hold any ground: “materiality” does not refer to the “common sense extra-linguistic reality”, but rather to the practice of citation and the “immediately divided,” non-identical ‘nature’ of reality or the materiality of the body.

In his essay ‘Mattering’, Cheah takes up this discussion and points out that Butler is indeed aware of the fact that her notion of the body carries a trace of Kantianism. In Butler’s view, he argues, “a Kantian formulation of the body conceives the material body as noumenal, a pregiven ontological Ding an Sich, and the psyche as an epistemological grid that establishes the body’s mode of appearance as an object for cognition.” (Cheah 1996: 114) However, Cheah stresses that Butler — even though she contemplates some pediscursive or prior materiality of body, and takes discourse and power as being formative — aims to avoid such a Kantian interpretation of her theory of the body — or, in other words, the anthropological binaries between matter and form, or, nature

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and history-culture — by introducing the notion of “the morphology” of the body.

Crucial then is that Butler, at this point, also distances herself from Derrida’s theory of iterability. As we will discuss in greater detail in Part Two, the reason for this is because Butler wants her theory of materialization to be historical specific (something that Derrida’s theoretical linguistic framework, she suggests, cannot offer). For now, however, we should set out that Butler incorporates the notion of morphology in order to give an account of the formative power of discourse on the actual body without falling pray to the anthropological binaries. Cheah explains that this notion — which finds its origin in psychoanalytical theory — ought to be understood as “a projected body schema which delineated and produced the human body through identification, [which] indicates the phantasmic nature of human body.” (Cheah 1996: 114) Cheah claims that for Butler, this notion of morphology is connected to the “psychic projection” of discourse that has a formative power over the materiality of the body. That is, he argues, “Butler suggest[s] … that one could also see psychic projection as having a formative power since it is the body schema which delineates the boundaries of a bodily ego by uniting disconnected sensations which do not yet make up a body.” (Cheah 1996: 114) Defining the body’s morphology as a ‘connective name’ for “disconnected sensations” and, in turn, the “psychic projection” as having a formative power that “delineates the boundaries of bodily ego,” Cheah argues that Butler suggests that this formative power defines “[t]he contours of the body or morphology, understood as ‘the mode by which the body is given, the condition and contour of its givenness’” (Cheah 1996: 114, quoting BTM 66). As such, Cheah concludes, the contours of the body’s morphology “would here be an intermediary term, a site of vacillation between psyche and matter” (ibid.) — trying to avoid thereby the “epistemological grid” while giving power and discourse a truly formative force over the body.

However, Cheah points out that while Butler is on the one hand,“careful to stress that the body cannot just be a causal effect of the psyche … [since] this would be an absurd form of idealism which denies the existence of intelligibility and materiality as two different orders of being by reducing materiality to a psychical effect,” she has on the other hand, “insist on the productive power of psychical forms or images in order to distance her position from one where the body preexists its cognition, she has to ascribe a causality of sorts to the psyche.” (Cheah 1996: 114) To resolve this problem, Butler restricts this

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