From: "Samuel A. Chambers" <Samuel.A.Chambers-1-AT-tc.umn.edu> Subject: Re: Power and Foucault (was Rape) Date: Sat, 13 Jul 96 16:51:29 -0500 Here's that previously-promised and long-overdue passage from Butler. I actually chose something from "Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of Postmodernism," because in this article she attempts to respond to the type of questions that many have raised here. "I would like to turn to a...question...that emerges from the concern that a feminist theory cannot proceed without presuming the materiality of women's bodies, the materiality of sex. The chant of antipostmodernism runs, if everything is discourse, then is there no reality to bodies? ...In responding to this criticism, I would like to suggest that the very formulation misconstrues the critical point. I don't know what postmodernism is, but I do have some sense of what it might mean to subject notions of the body and materiality to a deconstructive critique. To deconstruct the concept of matter or that of bodies is NOT to negate or refuse either term. To deconstruct these terms means, rather, to continue to use them, to repeat them, to repeat them subversively, and to displace them from the contexts in which they have been deployed as instruments of oppressive power. Here it is of course necessary to state quite plainly that the options for theory are not exhausted by *presuming* materiality, on the one hand, and *negating* materiality, on the other. It is my purpose to do precisely neither of these. To call a presupposition into question is not the same as doing away with it: rather, it is to free it up from its metaphysical lodgings in order to occupy and to serve very different political aims. To problematize the matter of bodies entails in the first instance a loss of epistemological certainty, but this loss of certainty does not necessarily entail political nihilism as its result.[footnote follows] The body posited as prior to the sign, is always *posited* or *signified as prior*. This signification works through producing an *effect* of its own procedure, the body that it nevertheless and simultaneously claims to discover as that which *precedes* signification. If the body signified as prior to signification is an effect of signification, then the mimetic or representational status of language, which claims that signs follow bodies as their necessary mirrors, is not mimetic at all; on the contrary, it is productive, constitutive, one might even argue *performative*, inasmuch as this signifying act produces the body that it then claims to find prior to any and all signification."
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