> "I am led to embrace the terms
> that injure me because they constitute me socially. The
> self-colonizing trajectory of certain forms of identity politics are
> symptomatic of this paradoxical embrace of the injurious terms. As a
> further paradox, then, only by occupying -- being occupied by -- that
> injurious term can I resist and oppose it, recasting the power that
> constitutes me as the power I oppose...This is not the same as saying
> that such an identity will remain always and forever rooted in its
> injury as long as it remains an identity, but it does imply that the
> possibilities of resignification will rework and unsettle the
> passionate attachment to subjection without which subject formation
> -- and re-formation -- cannot succeed" (104). This is, in essence,
> the path toward a post-modern turn to secular religion (= a symbolic
> solution to an imaginary understanding of a real problem).
Not dialectical enough. It's a symbolic solution (which is fine, because symbols exert real power) to an imaginary understanding (all ideologies require the power of imagination, however feeble) to the *wrong* problem -- signification. Butler is arguing, along with Adorno, that "you have to have the tradition in oneself to hate it properly", but then instead of detailing how that happens, or showing how the traditions of liberal capitalism are liquidated by monopoly or global forms, it's off to the post-structuralist speculative market of the signifier. It's frustrating, how she gets so close to a diagnosis of postmodern class consciousness, and then glides away again. An informatic idealism, if you will, but what makes Butler worth reading is that there's this radical global Marxism churning away beneath the scenes, somewhere. This is the price the US Left is paying for not having a good translation of "Negative Dialectics" handy.
-- Dennis