Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative by Judith Butler; The Psychic Life of Power:

Theories in Subjection by Judith Butler

Review by: Stephen K. White
The Journal of Politics, Vol. 60, No. 3 (Aug., 1998), pp. 881-884
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Southern Political Science
Association
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 Book Reviews 881

direct primaries,and the initiative, referendum,and recall weakened the parties

during this era. Yet it isn't altogether evident what kind of measurements
Clemens had in mind when she discusses the decline of political parties. Her
conclusion that there was an "unraveling"of the party system during this time
(64) seems overstated,and there is little acknowledgmentof the adaptabilityof
parties or of the ways in which alliances between lobbies and parties can work
to the advantageof both.
Thereis little else to quibblewith in this exceptionalbook. Clemens'sresearch
sets a standardfor future historical work on interest groups, and hopefully, she
will continue to write on the evolution of lobbies and associations of all types.
What she has accomplishedin ThePeople s Lobbyis to give us the definitiveac-
count of how the modem interest group was born.
JeffreyM. Berry, TuftsUniversity

Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative.By Judith Butler. (New York

and London:Routledge, 1997. Pp. x, 185. $50.00 cloth, $16.99 paper.)
The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection.By JudithButler. (Stanford:
StanfordUniversity Press, 1997. Pp. 218. $39.50 cloth, $14.95 paper.)
Judith Butler emerged as a provocative voice in political theory with Gender
Trouble(1990), followed shortly thereafterby Bodies That Matter (1993). The
two new books deepen the theoreticalbite of her projectand furtherelaborateits
political implications.
One of the intentionsof all of Butler'swork is to think furtherFoucault'sun-
derstandingof power and subjection,especially the way in which power is both
restrictiveand productiveof subjectivity.She has wrestled with how exactly this
process works, focusing particularlyon the question, How does discourse "ma-
terialize"a set of effects in the social field, includingthe "effects"of subjectivity
and gender, and the associated notions of normal and abnormal,speakableand
unspeakable? In this regard, she has been fascinated by the image Louis
Althusser used to illustrate the constitution of social subjection: a policeman
calls "Hey, you!" and one turns to answer that call, thus becoming "interpel-
lated"by the law, and therebyconstitutingoneself as a subject of power. Butler
is not only interestedin language and power in this sense, but also in how their
mutualimplicationcreates the possibility of resistanceto power.Power,however
ubiquitous it appears in a Foucauldianworld, is also vulnerable, because its
norms are never solidified once and for all, but rather are continually in the
process of discursive reproduction.Power is sustained by reiteration,but it can
also be subverted;"chainsof iteration"can be deflected,parodied,turnedagainst
dominantnorms. In her two earlierbooks, Butler urgedthat feminists, as well as
gays and lesbians, adopt such a perspective on oppositional political activity,
ratherthan one rooted in claims about some essential identity. In Butler'sview,

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882 Book Reviews

there simply is no gem of identity to be discoveredat the bottom of the ontolog-

ical well.
In Excitable Speech, Butler brings her theory to bear upon the issues of "hate
speech" and pornography.Given her sensitivity to the force of injuriousspeech,
one might expect Butlerto side with those who find the effect of such expression
to be so immediateand harmfulthat it should be legally prohibited.On this view
(reflected,for example, in the work of Mari Matsudaor KatherineMacKinnon),
"speechenacts domination"(18)-of whites over blacks or men over women. In-
terestingly, however, Butler strongly rejects this view. Like many mainstream
free speech advocates, she sees political dangers in such a closing down of the
gap between speech and conduct. But the dangers she sees are at least partially
novel ones, and the analysis she provides of the theoretical failings of the op-
posing position are quite distinctive.Besides Butler'sgeneral concerns about the
dangersof enhancingstate power, she also suggests that proponentsof legal pro-
hibition may be providing unintentional aid and comfort to policies with
radicallydifferentaims, in particularthe recent proposedinnovationsto military
policy regardinghomosexuals, wherein "the verbal reference to or depiction of
sexuality is consideredtantamountto a sexual act" that is punishable(76).
At the root of such dangers lies a faulty model of "the performativityof
political discourse"(40). The view that some speech necessarily enacts domina-
tion she calls the "illocutionarymodel"; that is, to say something inevitably
causes certain intended effects (23). On this model, injurious speech can only
be "felicitous,"in J. L. Austin's sense, never "infelicitous."Such a model por-
trays language as an instrumentat the full disposal of sovereign actors. This
"fantasy"(78) of a speakerin full control and an injuredhearerwho loses a sov-
ereignty that must then be restoredby the state simply does not do justice to the
complexity and uncertaintyof performativity.Butler proposes instead a "per-
locutionary"model, according to which speech "worksits injuriouseffect only
to the extent that it producesa set of non-necessaryeffects" (17, 39). To say that
they are non-necessaryimplies a social world in which there is always the pos-
sibility that the injurious force of language can be defused, subverted, and
deflected from achieving its intended effects. Here resistance to injury is best
fought at the street level, as it were, not at the level of legal prohibition.Butler
does not overidealizethis strategy of resistance by "resignification."It does not
promise categoricallyto eliminate the pain, as does the strategyof legal prohibi-
tion. But, Butler suggests, "[t]here is no purifying language of its traumatic
residue, and no way to work throughtraumaexcept throughthe arduouseffort to
direct the course of its repetition"(38).
If Excitable Speech is largely an attemptby Butler to rearticulateher theoret-
ical perspectiveto illuminatea contemporarypublic policy problem,ThePsychic
Life of Power is an effort to reformulatethat perspective in a more fundamental
way. In Foucault's own analysis of power, the domain of the psyche is left
relatively unexplored. This has allowed psychoanalytic critics to suggest that

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 Book Reviews 883

Foucauldianstend to absorb all psychic phenomenainto the dynamics of social

power, whereas they would argue that the unconscious is precisely what power
cannot reach. Butler feels the force of this critique,for she understandsher task
to be "thinking the theory of power together with a theory of the psyche"
(3); but, at the same time, she is resistantto any wholesale appealto a domain of
the utterly prediscursive:in this case, the ontological rock of some eternalized
account of the psyche (her reluctance here parallels that expressed in earlier
work towardappeals to a prediscursivebody in gender politics).
Butlerbroachesthis whole topic with a question she poses to the Althusserian
image of subjection. When power "calls,"why does the subject turn to accept
that solicitation of submission? Moreover,if power in some sense produces the
subject, how can we speak of a subject that performs the turn; does the turn
itself not constitute that subject in some crucial way? Butler's analysis of
these questions is fascinating and provocative, proceeding from themes in
Hegel's portrayal of "The Unhappy Consciousness" in The Phenomenology,
throughNietzsche on conscience, to Freudon libidinal investment.The figure of
the submissive-productiveturn becomes explicable as the enactmentof a "self-
negating attachment"(34). A human being is vulnerableto the "call" of power
because one seeks attachmentto something-even that which thwartsone's de-
sire-rather than to nothing. This "desire to desire is a willingness to desire
precisely that which would foreclose desire, if only for the possibility of contin-
uing to desire" (61). The turningthat occurs within the force field between this
desire and poweris what spawnsboth the submissionto terms of social existence
that are "notone's own" (28) and the phenomenonof conscience, the appearance
of which constitutes that reflective form of human being we associate with
subjectivity.
At this point, one might object that this "desireto desire" seems like just the
sort of ontologically separatepsychological reality that Butler said she wantedto
avoid. But actuallythis "desire"is not any specific, substantivedesire-say, sex-
ual-that is the usual raw stuff of psychoanalytictheory. Rather,it is a curious
sort of unspecific, insistent clinging to existence; its role in Butler'sworld is per-
haps more like that of "will" in Nietzsche's. And yet, is this not a sort of
ontology? It may not have the deleterious consequences for ethics and politics
Butler finds in more familiar "substantive"ontologies, but it certainlyhas some
consequences.These could be drawnout more explicitly.
The later chaptersof the book undertakean inquiry into the phenomenon of
melancholy,taking off from Freud'sinterpretation.Although there is much that
is interestinghere, from the point of view of political theory,it is Butler'sclaim
that contemporaryAmerican culture exhibits a "pervasivemelancholia" (138)
that is most striking.Unfortunately,this claim is not sufficientlydiscussed to al-
low one to assess it very well.
Surveying the book from the perspective of Butler's overall project, one can
see that her engagement with the psyche has created new obstacles for the

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884 Book Reviews

account of resistanceto power.Her own interpretationof humanbeings' vulner-

ability and consequent "stubbornattachment"to norms of power makes the
outlook for resistance more problematicthan it appearedto be in Gender Trou-
ble. (It is certainly a measure of Butler's theoretical boldness that she so
meticulously creates her own problems.) But Butler still insists on the possibil-
ity of resistance;the desire to desire is ultimately,if painfully,detachablefrom
any particularobject. And the risky, uncertainmedium of linguistic reiteration
always alreadycreates opportunityfor "a differentkind of turn"(130). Thus, al-
though we deeply embody power, there remains continually the possibility of
beginning to exert a little body English.
StephenK. White, VirginiaPolytechnicInstituteand State University

Justice Antonin Scalia and the ConservativeRevival. By RichardA. Brisbin Jr.

(Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Pp. xi, 474. $39.95.)
In this volume RichardA. Brisbin Jr. examines the political and jurisprudential
views that distinguish Justice Scalia's decision making and links these views
with the disciplinarybiases of post-EnlightenmentWesternlaw. The attemptto
blend familiardoctrinalanalysis with critical theories of state power may be ex-
perienced by some readersas jarring and discordant,but in both areas Brisbin's
work is comprehensive,thoughtful,and provocative.
Brisbin establishes his first break from the more familiar attitudinalistap-
proach to judicial decision making by arguing that Scalia's worldview is
constituted both by his political conservatism and by his association with the
jurisprudentialschool of Reasoned Elaboration.This school of thought arose
as a response to the PragmaticLiberalismof the post-CaroleneProducts Court,
and in the writings of Felix Frankfurter,Henry M. Hart Jr., Albert M. Sacks,
Herbert Wechsler, and Alexander Bickel (among others) it attempted to use
rules, judicial procedures,precedent,and passivity to conserve democratictradi-
tions and majoritypreferences from assaults by emerging pluralistfactions and
interests(84).
After reviewing data on Scalia's voting behavior while on the Court of Ap-
peals and the Supreme Court, Brisbin carefully (almost painstakingly)explores
how Scalia's decisions and opinions reflect an attempt to express his political
conservatismin ways that are mostly faithful to the professional norms associ-
ated with Reasoned Elaboration.For example, we are told that his formalistic
approachto separation-of-powersquestions reflects a concern about limitingju-
dicial discretion by anchoringinterpretationin relatively clear principles rather
than a balancing of competing considerations.His civil rights opinions exhibit a
commitmentto ostensibly neutralstandardsof equal treatmentand the use of or-
dinary language to discern legislative meaning in the statutorycivil rights cases
(179). Scalia is willing to allow governmentinterferencewith speech when the

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