>"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."
For me, and as much as I like Butler, this is just vular Marxism, automatic Hegelian Marxism, writ small: the demand to occupy a preordained subject position, to seek recognition, to overcome that position into a higher order. She can't conceive of subjective escape or of codes and flows that miss their target or are imperfectly received. Or, as Lauren Berlant put it recently:
What we are talking about here is the hardest problem, of understanding the difficulty of unlearning attachments to regimes of injustice. Justice itself is a technology of deferral or patience that keeps people engrossed politically, when they are, in the ongoing drama of optimism and disappointment.33 Yet Butler's theoretical stance about "power" in relation to the law, normative authority, values normativity, and structural privilege underdescribes the number of internally contradictory promises (of acknowledgment, amelioration, protection, retribution, balancing, delegation, discipline, and enabling to thrive) that its activity represents. It also forgets [...] that recognition and reciprocity can take many forms, some of which mime equality as collaboration, some of which produce contexts of trust in interdependency, some of which are coerced or tactical, and all of which are deeply ambiguous, compromised, and unstable.