[lbo-talk] Butler

[Miles Jackson]

Angelus Novus wrote:
> Miles Jackson:
>
>   
>> Well, I agree that the notion of performativity
>>     
> helps 
>   
>> us to understand sexual identity; does Butler really
>>     
>
>   
>> disagree with that?  I've read most of her stuff,
>>     
> and > I don't remember her making the claim AN
> attributes 
>   
>> above.
>>     
>
> "We cannot simply throw off the identities we have
> become, and Foucault's call to 'refuse' these
> identities will certainly be met with resistance."
> [...]
> "Called by an injurious name, I come into social
> being, and because I have a certain inevitable
> attachment to my existence, because a certain
> narcissism takes hold of any term that confers
> existence, 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 term.  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."
>
> - _The Psychic Life of Power_, pages 102 and 104
>   
Umm--these quotes support what shag and I are saying, yes?

Miles