Abstract

This project focuses on how Judith Butler's theory of personal identity, with its attendant account of agency, affects political practice. My basic criticism is that her theory sets up the subversion of identity as the political practice par excellence and in so doing delegitimizes more conventional forms of activism. The source of this problem lies in failing to theorize the relation between epistemology and ontology adequately. This results in a discursive account of agency. Central to Butler's account, hence to my dissertation project, are four concepts: materialization, citationality, identity, and agency. Thus, a large part of this project consists in problematizing these concepts. ;I begin with a critical exegesis of Butler's critique of identity politics and the radical democracy that she advocates in its stead. Butler grounds her critique and its alternative in a performative theory of personal identity. In her view, agency is a function of identity and identity is first and foremost linguistic. As she provides few details about either agency or political practices, I use the next two chapters to construct a Butlerian model of agency and to draw out the implications for political activism, respectively. ;In Chapter 2, I argue that, within the framework of her poststructuralist theory of language, agency operates in two ways: synchronically and diachronically. Synchronic agency is the set of opportunities and actions implicit to a subject position at some particular moment in time. Diachronic agency is the ability to change this set over time. The political practices that I explicate in Chapter 3 derive from the relations among and between signifiers and signifieds. In evaluating these practices I find that they can have little affect on race- and class-based aspects of identity. ;My central claim in the fourth and final chapter is that Butler mistakenly privileges linguistic aspects of identity over material and practical aspects. I locate the cause of this problem in the privileging of epistemology over ontology and the resulting linguistification of concepts that are usually defined in opposition to language