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 →

Jaques Derrida

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Jacques Derrida once put the question: ‘What if we were to approach…the area of a relationship to the other where the code of sexual marks would no longer be discriminating? [Choreographies, 76] I would like to end with his response, which, like may utopian utterances, is at once sibylline and suggestive:

The relationship [to the other] would not be a-sexual, far from it, but would be sexual otherwise: beyond the binary difference that governs the decorum of all codes, beyond the opposition feminine/masculine, beyond homosexuality and heterosexuality which come to the same thing.       As I dream of saving the chance this question offers, I would like to believe in the multiplicity of sexually marked voices. I would like to believe in the masses, this interminable number of blended voices, this mobile of non-identified sexual marks whose choreography can carry, divide, multiply the body of each ‘individual, whether he be classified as ‘man’ or ‘woman’ according to the criteria of usage.

Text reproduced from T Moi, Sexual Textual Politics, 1985:pp173

Image reproduced from http://www.pyke-eye.com/view/phil_I_12.html