Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex

In Chapter 7, Butler challenges the common understanding of performativity as a performance or expression of human agency. Instead, Butler considers performativity to be shaped by discourse, independent of human will. Discourse, in turn, is the product of power in society and develops over time through the repetition of norms and exclusion. The exclusion applies to those who do not conform to society’s dictated norms. Performativity produces the identity of subjects within society. However, identity is an unstable category, shifting over time.

Butler then introduces Slavoj Žižek’s book, Sublime Objects of Ideology, in which he challenges poststructuralism, feminism, and other theories that focus on discourse as an umbrella category. Žižek argues that the reach of discourse is limited because it does not fully explain how subjects are formed in society. Instead, Žižek posits that it is important to include the Lacanian concept of foreclosure to explain the formation of the subject in society. Foreclosure represents the process of excluding one or multiple elements from symbolic discourse. According to Žižek, the subject retains an element of symbolic incoherence and is continuously defined by it. As a result, the process of subject formation is never complete, and the subject is never coherent. However, without the external element, subject formation is not possible. This mechanism is repeated at the level of society and ideological discourse. Žižek also links the articulation of certain political concepts, such as “women” or “freedom,” with the process of foreclosure. He argues that such terms grant intelligibility to ideology but that they remain empty signifiers, invested with the hopes and phantasms of ideological representation. This means that the political term “women” does not mean what people think it means. Rather, it only creates the illusion of representing the members of society who identify as “women” in political terms while actually having a life of its own, determined by discourse on the one hand and its fundamental lack of content on the other (since the political term rarely relates to actual women in society).

Drawing on the works of Louis Althusser, Ernesto Laclau, and Chantal Mouffe, Butler analyzes how Žižek incorporates the Lacanian concept of the real into his argument that the formation of discourse in society is prone to failure. “The real” represents that which resists symbolization as the element that is left outside of signification by the process of foreclosure. For Žižek, the analysis of discourse must include an understanding of the real. This perspective aligns with Laclau and Mouffe’s idea of constitutive antagonism, which argues that every ideology is an effort to cover over the elements that cannot be incorporated into it.

Butler discusses the implications of Žižek’s theories of foreclosure, the real, and ideology as they apply to Butler’s concept of performativity. First, Butler questions Žižek’s articulation of the feminine as a political signifier defined by the emptiness of the real and the implications of phantasmatic investment. Butler considers that foreclosure is not universal but variable and structured by changing power relations and discourses within society. Butler also considers the implications of Lacanian psychoanalysis as applied to the feminine, arguing that Lacan keeps the masculine and feminine separate while articulating the feminine in an exterior, unintelligible position. Butler disagrees with Žižek’s all-encompassing rejection of feminism and poststructuralism, arguing that feminists and poststructuralists are justified in representing the multiplicity and variability of identities in society through discourse. Butler also critiques Žižek’s use of “the real” as an umbrella term for what cannot be represented by political discourse. Instead, they advocate for a nuanced understanding of the relationship between language and the unrepresentable in society.

Further on, Butler explores how political signifiers can be mobilized in constructing and maintaining political realities. As an example, they use the political signifier “women,” arguing that such a term does not accurately represent a group of people but rather works performatively in articulating and maintaining a site for political engagement. Such terms are crucial in shaping new identities and generating political interests.

Butler addresses the patriarchal tradition of naming in relation to Žižek’s theory of the political signifier. They argue that Žižek retains the referential aspect of naming, which implies that the term is fixed. Contrary to this, Butler argues that the inability of a name or term to fully describe what it names arises not from a lack of reference or the idea that women are a lost referent; rather it represents multiple social positions and relations that cannot be easily reduced to one term. The term, Butler contends, also varies in meaning over time as it applies to different political situations. Butler states that Žižek’s theory of women as an empty signifier or lost referent is problematic as it closes the possibility for political resistance or rearticulation (redefinition).

The chapter concludes with Butler’s discussion of the political signifier as determined by a series of uses in the past that determine its future. They argue that the performative aspects of the constitution of political terms leave open the possibility of reconfiguring such terms by creating new series of signification. Butler proposes strategies of political solidarity and democratic articulation of political goals to express the possibility of political intervention in society.