Si en Gender Trouble Butler presentaba una propuesta de la teoría de la performatividad de los actos de habla aplicada a la construcción del género, en su último libro, Notes towards a Performative Theory of Assembly, articula una teoría de la performatividad aplicada a la acción colectiva de minorías o poblaciones que son estimadas como “desechables”. El interés de la propuesta que presentamos es analizar cómo la teoría de la performatividad de género se ha ido ampliando a las formas de (...) acción democrática; pasando así de ser una explicación centrada en las posibilidades identitarias de género a explicar las posibilidades para una vida vivible. Es lo que aquí llamamos la ampliación de la performatividad, del caso especial de género al caso general de una vida vivible. (shrink)

Across contexts and time, subjects marked by racial difference have expressed public accounts of the multiple injuries of race. From the vantage point of critical race and black theory, this paper sheds light on both the heuristic and critical political values of such accounts. The first part critically reassesses conceptualizations of vulnerability as an ambivalent ontological condition within critical approaches to liberalism. A close reading of Fanon's account of injury in Black Skin, White Masks specifies how race exploits bodily and (...) enunciative vulnerability and materializes subjects into a state of suspension and suspicion. The second part addresses the political promise of accounts of racialized injury. Departing from sceptical readings of “wounded attachment,” critical race and black analyses associate accounts of injury with citational practices that pertain to historically entrenched conventions of resistance to racial and colonial abusive power. Such accounts can be read as misappropriations of race which expand the horizon of the human. (shrink)

This article considers Foucault’s analysis of ordoliberal and neoliberal governmental reason and its reorganization of social relations around a notion of enterprise. I focus on the particular idea that the generalization of the enterprise form to social relations was conceptualized in such exhaustive terms that it encompassed subjectivity itself. Self as enterprise highlights, inter alia, dynamics of control in neoliberal regimes which operate through the organized proliferation of individual difference in an economized matrix. It also throws into question conceptions of (...) individual autonomy that underpin much political thought and upon which ideas about political resistance are based. Self as enterprise also problematizes the viability of Foucault’s later work on ethics of the self as a practice of resistance. I go on to argue that Foucault’s discussion of an unresolved clash in civil society between monarchical and governmental power, between law and norm, offers an elliptical but more promising account of opposition to normalizing bio-power. (shrink)

Queer critics talk more and more about a normalization process whereby early lesbian and gay struggles against traditional values and institutions are being replaced by the pursuit of inclusion within mainstream society. The ‘assimilation’ of same-sex practices, critics contend, lowers the critical potential of homosexuals’ claims and marginalizes other less acceptable forms of sexualities. The present article contributes to this literature by tracing the roots and dynamics of normalization. It makes the claim that heteronormative categories infiltrated homosexual culture well before (...) the spread of neoconservative gay movements and produced inner distinctions intended to exclude those who did not fit intergroup classifications. It then maintains that this analysis casts some interesting light on the current quest for gay rights, and in particular for same-sex marriage. By doing so, this article aims to tackle the broader question of how to produce societal changes able to circumvent rearguard reactions from the dominant culture. (shrink)

This article deals with the issue of resignification to advance a hypothesis on the way in which social practices are transformed with recourse to the language of institutions. It first discusses the transition from gay liberation to same-sex marriage equality by exploring the trajectory of homosexuals’ rights claims. The article continues by providing a theoretical interpretation of what brought this shift about, that is, what the author calls a movement ‘from the street to the court’: in both civil law and (...) common law jurisdictions, legal means are increasingly being used by individuals and groups to make their claims audible to political institutions and to society at large. Then, an analysis is offered of the shape that social struggles take when socio-political claims are articulated with recourse to the legal language. The conclusion is that reliance on the law as a device to achieve political goals and construct same-sex group identity risks producing but a feeble resignification of the conventional heterosexual matrix. In light of that, a more effective way to defy this matrix is to create awareness of what is gained and what gets lost in becoming legally visible. (shrink)

Dans ce texte, je réponds aux commentaires et aux critiques qui ont été adressées à mon texte de 2007 qui mettait en rapport l’action directe et la démocratie délibérative. Je concède que j’ai fait preuve d’un peu trop d’optimisme, en particulier dans un cadre politique libéral, à vouloir chercher dans ce face-à-face une voie permettant de déboucher sur un dialogue. Je reprends certains des commentaires qui me permettent de distinguer plusieurs formes de débats publics et de les pluraliser, pour faire (...) place à des publics et des voix discordantes, dont un public anarchiste, qui par des actions directes revendique une voix égale aux autres publics. (shrink)