mirror theories

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Kristeva clearly takes heterosexuality to be prerequisite to kinship and culture. Consequently, she identifies lesbian experience as the psychotic alternative to the acceptance of paternally sanctioned laws. And yet why is lesbianism constituted as psychosis? From what cultural perspective is lesbianism constructed as a site of fusion, self-less, and psychosis?

By projecting the lesbian as ‘other’ to culture, and characterizing lesbian speech as the psychotic ‘whirl-of-words,’ Kristeva constructs lesbian sexuality as intrinsically unintelligible. This tactical dismissal and reduction of lesbian experience performed in the name of the law positions Kristeva within the orbit of paternal-heterosexual privilege. The paternal law which protects her form this radical incoherence is precisely the mechanism that produces the construct of lesbian experience as a site of irrationality. Significantly, this description of lesbianism is effected from the outside, and tells us more about the fantasies that a fearful heterosexual culture produces to defend against its own homosexual possibilities than about lesbian experience itself.

—

“The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva,” Judith Butler

#homoterror2k13

"This not owning of one’s words is there from the start…speaking is always in some ways the speaking of a stranger through and as oneself, the melancholic reiteration of a language that one never chose."

— Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter

"For if I am confounded by you, then you are already of me, and I am nowhere without you. I cannot muster the “we” except by finding the way in which I am tied to “you,” by trying to translate but finding that my own language must break up and yield if I am to know you. You are what I gain through this disorientation and loss. This is how the human comes into being, again and again, as that which we have yet to know."

— Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, Andreas, Self-Eaters, and the Failed Historicity of Post-Coloniality (via tabularasae)

(Source: empathies, via tabularasae)

"Those forms of co-habitation characterized by equality and minimized precarity become the goal to be achieved by any struggle against subjugation and exploitation, but also the goals that start to be achieved in the practices of alliance that assemble across distances to achieve those very goals. We struggle in, from, and against precarity. Thus, it is not from pervasive love for humanity or a pure desire for peace that we strive to live together. We live together because we have no choice, and yet we must struggle to affirm the ultimate value of that unchosen social world, and that struggle makes itself known and felt precisely when we exercise freedom in a way that is necessarily committed to the equal value of lives. We can be alive or dead to the suffering of others, they can be dead or alive to us, depending on how they appear and whether they appear at all; but only when we understand that what happens there also happens here, and that ‘here’ is already an elsewhere, and necessarily so, that we stand a chance of grasping at the difficult and shifting global connections in which we live, which make our lives possible—and sometimes, too often, impossible."

—

Judith Butler, Precarious Life and the Obligations of Cohabitation

Delivered at the Nobel Museum, Stockholk, May 2011. 

Dang I rly like this lecture.

"If I am bound only to those who are close to me, already familiar, then my ethics are invariably parochial, communitarian, and exclusionary. If I am only bound to those who are ‘human’ in the abstract, then I avert every effort to translate culturally between my own situation and that of others. If I am only bound to those who suffer at a distance, but never those who are close to me, then I evacuate my situation in an effort to secure the distance that allows me to entertain ethical feeling. But if ethical relations are mediated—and I use that word deliberately here—confounding questions of location such that what is happening ‘there’ also happens in some sense ‘here’ and if what is happening ‘there’ depends on the event being registered in several ‘elsewheres,’ then it would seem that the ethical claim of the event takes place always in a ‘here’ and ‘there’ that are fundamentally bound to one another. In one sense, the event is emphatically local, since it is precisely the people there whose bodies are on the line. But if those bodies on the line are not registered elsewhere, there is no global response, and also no global form of ethical recognition and connection, and so something of the reality of the event is lost."

—

Judith Butler, Precarious Life and the Obligations of Cohabitation

Delivered at the Nobel Museum, Stockholk, May 2011. 

"When we lose certain people, or when we are dispossessed from a place, or a community, we may simply feel as though we are undergoing something temporary, that mourning will be over and some restoration of prior order will be achieved. But maybe when we undergo what we do, something about who we are is revealed, something that delineates the ties we have to others, that shows us that these ties constitute what we are, ties or bonds that compose us.

It is not as if an “I” exists independently over here and then simply loses a “you” over there, especially if the attachment to “you” is part of what composes who “I” am. If I lose you, under these conditions, then I not only lose the lose, I become inscrutable to myself. Who “am” I, without you?"

— Judith Butler, Precarious Life (via hedgehoglife)