You're right, that's not what I meant. What I should have said was: "Does Butler's view extend to things whose extra-discursive reality she thinks is important?"
> One could apply Butler's questions about the discursive constitution of
> materiality to the holocaust; people have probably done so, although I'm
> not aware of the particular works. Saidiya Hartman's _Scenes of
> Subjection_ uses some of Butler's ideas in relation to slavery in the
> US; but it would be incredibly stupid to read her work as denying the
> existence of slavery,
I just read the first few pages where Hartman lays out her project. From her language, it's clear she has no qualms about "conceding" the "materiality" of slavery and of the physical suffering of slaves (which is the subject of the book). Whereas Butler, in the extract Doug posted, goes to great lengths to pointedly avoid conceding the materiality of sex, since doing so would fall into the trap of performatively constituting sex as some particular set of pre-given things (I'm tryng to paraphrase more clearly than her writing, so I may have gotten this wrong).
Quite a difference.
Seth