Recitations: The Critical Foundations of Judith Butler's Rhetoric

Abstract

<p> "Recitations: The Critical Foundations of Judith Butler's Rhetoric" explores the textures and patterns in the writing of Judith Butler. Notoriously difficult, Butler's rhetoric has garnered much scholarly and journalistic literature, and yet, to date, there remains no book-length study on this topic. At the same time, Butler scholars have tended to theorize her style as "subversive." Such a defense readily connects with Butler's general effort to contour and challenge the lines of social and cultural intelligibility, lines that deem some identities, especially sexual and racial ones, unacceptable. However, I argue that the framework of "subversion" ultimately reduces some of the generative tensions central to Butler's ideas, which I draw out by focusing on the ambiguity of "recitation."</p> <p> Drawing on cultural and literary theory, particularly at the intersections between poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, feminism, queer theory, and semiology, I reframe Butler's writing through the questions of inheritance, paradigms, and critical alliances. Focused on three major works, I identify and research the thought of her key sources, and so the dissertation doubles as a study of G.W.F. Hegel (Butler's Subjects of Desire (1987), Sigmund Freud and Michel Foucault (The Psychic Life of Power (1987), and Emmanuel Levinas (Giving an Account of Oneself(2005). Focusing on the ways that Butler re-articulates and revises the language of these influential writers, I develop a theory of Butler's style of critique that seeks to move discussions of her writing past the notions of "subversion" and "liberation." More broadly, I interpret the ambivalent scenes of identification and disavowal that Butler's writing stages to shed light on problems of modern critical subjectivity, marked by the inheritance of intellectual, social, and cultural structures that may trouble us, but that also form our identities and our relations to others.</p>