Butler's intro

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Doug wrote:
>I think this also bears on the exchange over nationalism. Does something
>like black nationalism - and I'm framing this as a question not out of
>coyness but out of real uncertainty - suffer from using the tools of the
>power one opposes? Does it reproduce the same tendencies to exclude and
>hierarchicalize? Of course, since it's a stance of resistance to oppressive
>power, it's not an identical reproduction, but does this affinity harm the
>project from the start? Can you say the same of the various "Third World"
>nationalisms that ended by reproducing many of the political and economic
>structures of the colonizers? Ditto the USSR, in reproducing the czar's
>secret police and Germany's trusts and class society? Certainly there were
>exogenous factors at work too, like the IMF and the Pentagon (or
>domestically, the FBI), but were there endogenous factors at work too?

The idea that one might end up becoming the very image of what one opposes
is a psychoanalytically compelling one, and it may be useful in explaining,
for instance, why many forms of insurgent nationalisms have had a "recovery
of wounded manhood" component, unfortunately reproducing, with some
difference, the gender norms of the regime that insurgent nationalists
sought to overthrow. (The reproduction of this gender ideology is
facilitated by making an analogy between family and nation--a very common
rhetorical move.)

However, the psychoanalytic formulae of mirroring + doubling seem to be
used by Butler and others to discourage people from even conceiving any
hope of major structural transformation. Hence their "post-liberatory
micro-politics" of evading the "ruse of power." In my view, a
dehistoricizing tendency of psychoanalysis helps Butler, et al. to elevate
a locally applicable insight to the status of Truth without making clear
arguments about why it has to be always the case. (In this regard, Butler,
et al. are not opponents of the politics of Truth, pace Sokal and his
likes. They merely play the same game without appearing to do so.)

Yoshie