tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2549088046875609394.post5702762755793413687..comments2023-03-24T16:07:35.617-07:00Comments on Sounding Rhetoric: Is Performativity the Feminine Not-All?Paul Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841372871906932597noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2549088046875609394.post-11802505191362335112009-10-28T17:29:36.239-07:002009-10-28T17:29:36.239-07:00I think Copjec's critique of Butler is centere...I think Copjec's critique of Butler is centered a bit differently. Performativity is *exactly where* Copjec says Butler has a problem. Performativity is the field against which both sex and gender, as well as both masculine and feminine (in Butler's terms) play. It functions as a single point to which both are, in effect, reducible. Performativity is the place where sex and gender, masculine and feminine, as historic discursive constructs collapse into their coupled one-ness. Copjec wants to get at difference as such, the structural irreducibility of difference which cannot be collapsed. She is operating a a different register than Butler. Butler is operating at the materiality - the body as the field of inscription. Copjec is operating at the level of a logic - "references" to masculine or feminine and even to sexuality are perhaps homological to the body, but they are hyper-symbolic. Masculine and feminine for Copjec are ways of naming two irreducibly dissimilar logics - argumentative positions (hence all the stuff on Kant). Masculine is a not-all of being, perhaps just as much as the feminine is a not-all of being. But their not-all-ness is unique from each other, and NOT complementary (i.e. they don't fit together to make a single whole, there "is no sexual relation"). Their non-complementarity in their difference is *absolutely crucial* to Copjec's point.Merylhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00214125482445678151noreply@blogger.com