Author: startind

Performativity

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Judith Butler

“Performativity” Butler says “is construed of that power of discourse to produced effects through re-iteration, to produce what it declares.” Performativity however, is only possible within the constraints of  “iterability.” We are spoken more than we speak, done more than we do; therefore we are “constrained by what remains radically unthinkable” and, in the area of sexuality “by the radical unthinkability of desiring otherwise”. Inhabiting a sexed position then always engages citational practices, “citing the law under and through the force of prohibition and taboo, with the threat of ostracism and even death compelling and controlling the shape of production but without fully pre-determining it.” “Agency” then, according to Butler’s reconfiguration, is always “on drugs”. It is always under the influence of language and can only take place within our reiteration of the reiterable. Continue reading →

Three Steps, Three Steps, Three Steps

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Hélène Cixous , écrivain – chez elle à paris 10/2004

“Following the opening strategy on Cixous’s part in Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing and its accompanying, secret avowal of the autobiogrammy, there takes place what seems the opening onto admission, confession once more, of love, for writers, and, from this, to the confessions of “autobiography”, starting with childhood, Except, we must note, that the childhood, though singular is shared; it is a writing that reiterates the gesture of the loved ones – a gesture at once singular and shared by analogy with the Derrida of the “Circumfession”, in his autobiogrammatical response to St.Augustine. Cixous (re)turns to writers who begin (with writing, with living) as the inaugural gambit, so that autobiography finds itself haunted by autobiogrammy. Continue reading →