>which you appear to have missed in your eagerness to miscite Derrida.....
>What you are doing here is using a vague understanding of left-academic
>pomophonix to avoid the issue, or to allow others to do so.
I got always already from Judith Butler and I think my understanding of the way she uses it is better than vague. Here's something from an interview with her that fits this discussion I think : ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It's actually about being, as it were, always already lost to or always already expropriated by a past of discourse that I do not control, and a future of discourse that I do not control; that the time of discourse exceeds the time of my life doesn't memorialize my agency. It's actually a certain principle of humility and a certain principle of historicity, of being installed in a historicity that is not my own, but which is the condition of my own. In that sense it's a historicity that exposes the limits of my autonomy but which I would also say is the condition of my autonomy, oddly enough.
But a politics, you want me to move to the politics. . . [police car siren sounds] . . . there's politics . . . a state of emergency! . . . I want to say that there's a different notion of responsibility. I think in the US we go around trying to target people who say racist things, and indeed there are good reasons to do that, targeting people who say homophobic things, holding them responsible for their speech. I think there are all kinds of reasons to stop a person when they speak such things and say, for example, `look, that's a racist act'. I think that's important. But I think a politics that begins and ends with that policing function is a mistake, because for me the question is how is that person, as it were, renewing and reinvigorating racist rituals of speech, and how do we think about those particular rituals and how do we exploit their ritual function in order to undermine it in a more thorough-going way, rather than just stopping it as it's spoken. What would it mean to restage it, take it, do something else with the ritual so that its revivability as a speech act is really seriously called into question.
http://awayward.com/library/Philosophy/JudithButler/Judith%20Butler%20Interview.pdf