Performativity, agency and language
Judith Butler's psychoanalysis as overwhelming excess
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24215/2422572Xe059Keywords:
Judith Butler, Psychoanalysis, Agency, Lenguage, BodyAbstract
Judith Butler’s queer theory acknowledges as its central piece the notion of performativity, particularly linked to Austin’s speech-acts theory. Its theoretical relevance, that destroys an entire modern tradition of thinking, finds political difficulties when its linguistic constructionism erases any possibility to conceive a strong notion of political agency. In the context of this theoretical-political problem, Butler’s attempts at reconciling the recognition and affirmation of a limit in language’s absolute power of constituting subjects, with her post-structuralist rejection to admit the existence of an extradiscursive realm. When Butler turns to psychoanalysis to point out that very dimension of excess, able to decomplete the dimension of meaning, she tackles an irreconcilable theoretical framework regarding the foucaultian assumptions that sustain her thinking.
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