BODIES THAT MATTER
JUDITH BUTLER
Alyssa Duck
24 Feb 2015
PREEMPTORY NOTES
 Butler is hard. Stop me at any time if you want to clarify or discuss
a point. In this presentation, I will attempt to follow the trajector y
of Butler’s argument on her own logical ter ms.
 Fun Fact: Butler won Philosophy and Literature ’s “bad writing award”
for the 94-word opening sentence of her article “Further
Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time,” which appeared in
Diacritics in 1997. Yikes.
CATS EXPLAIN BUTLER
Figure 1 via www.binarythis.com
CATS ON BUTLER, CONTD.
Figure 2 via www.binarythis.com
GENDER TROUBLE
In her seminal work Gender Trouble, Butler argued that gender does
not emanate from a male or female essence, but is instead the
“stylized repetition of acts through time.” These acts, acts in
accordance with the social dicta surrounding one’s genital
composition, align one with the social and symbolic order, making
one socially legible and, therefore, socially acceptable. The absence
of a gender essence means, essentially, that we are all in drag – all
drag, all the time. The collective acceptance of these ‘drag -nor ms’ is
necessary to their perpetuation and to the social legibility of
individuals as “men” or as “women.” This system is inherently
binarizing, inherently patriarchal, and inherently heterosexist.
BODIES THAT MATTER
 Gender Trouble faced critique from the philosophical community for
its abstraction of the body into gendered rather than sexed
phenomena. Bodies That Matter is Butler’s response to these
critiques.
 The basis of her argument is that both gender and sex are constructed ,
that both gender and sex are semiotic, and that schema of gender
and sex perpetuate themselves through repetition and citation.
 ‘Sex’ is not reflective of a material reality but is, instead, an “ideal
constr uct which is forcibly materialized through time” (xii). It is a
fiction, although “one within whose necessities we live” (xv).
BODIES THAT MATTER
 Butler’s response to the critiques of Gender Trouble seems
particularly cogent to her arguments in Bodies That Matter: “What I
would propose […] is a return to the notion of matter, not as site
or surface, but as a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to
produce the ef fect of boundar y, fixity, and surface we call matter ” (xviii).
 Sexual difference is never, according to Butler, “simply a function
of material differences which are not in some way both marked and
for med by discursive practices… ‘sex’ not only functions as a
nor m, but is part of the regulator y practice that produces the
bodies it g overns” (xi) .
 The binarization of sex has a histor y as well as a material reality,
and both are imperative to understanding the categ or y of “sex.”
DO I GET A SAY IN MY
SUBJECTHOOD?
Are our sexed bodies predeter mined by our anatomy, or do we have
some say in our sexual subjecthood? This question is at the heart of
the essentialism v. constr uctivism debate. Butler argues that we
should “shift the ter ms of the debate from constr uctivism verses
essentialism to the more complex question of how ‘deep -seated’ or
constitutive constraints can be posed in ter ms of symbolic limits in
their intractability and contestability. What has been understood as
the perfor mativity of gender – far from the exercise of an
unconstrained voluntarism– will prove to be impossible apart from
notions of such political constraints registered psychically” (59).
DO I GET A SAY IN MY
SUBJECTHOOD?
 While, according to Butler, the body does not have a
predeter mining sexual essence, “sexuality cannot be summarily made
or unmade, and it would be a mistake to associate ‘constr uctivism’
with ‘the freedom of a subject to for m her/his sexuality as s/he
pleases.’ A constr uction is, after all, not the same as an artifice”
(59).
 Butler desires here to get away from a binar y system of
“essentialism” v. “constr uctivism” in which sex is either
predeter mined or an act of human will. She complicates the
possibility of human agency by pointing out the imbrication of the
symbolic with the life of the individual and that, while not
necessarily representing an essence, sexed symbolic systems are
inescapable factors in the decision-making and identity-for ming
processes of the individual.
DO I GET A SAY IN MY
SUBJECTHOOD?
 The perfor mance of sex, like that of gender, is not a “singular ‘act’
or event, but a ritualized production, a ritual reiterated under and
through constraint, under and through the force of prohibition and
taboo, with the threat of ostracism and death controlling and
compelling the shape of the production,” but not, according to
Butler, “deter mining it in advance” (60).
 The subject’s sexuality is neither deter mined by the material body
nor an act of “free will.” The subject’s sexual “agency” is always
caught up in, and can never escape, the tangles of sexual regulator y
nor ms through which it is brought into being.
SEX IS SEMIOTIC
 The binar y of sexed bodies is not inherent, but is a categ orical
schema produced through exclusionar y definitional means.
 i.e., the female body is female because it is not male. The male body
is male because it is not female.
 Legible sexed subjects are “constituted through the force of
exclusion and abjection… an abjected outside” (xiii ).
 This abjection produces, alongside the domain of intelligible
bodies, a domain of “ unthinkable, abject, unlivable bodies” (x ).
 These bodies are not inherently abject, but are registered as so only
in the context of binar y sexuality.
DOES MATTER MATTER?
 Matter has a histor y that matters, and cannot be situated as the
originar y site of the body: “ we may seek to return to matter as
prior to discourse to g round our claims about sexual difference
only to discover that matter is fully sedimented with discourses on
sex and sexuality that prefigure and constrain the uses to which
that ter m can be put” (5).
 Sex is regulator y, not descriptive. Once we understand ‘sex’ as a
regulator y process rather than descriptive phenomenon, we see that the
materiality of the body is unthinkable apart from the regulator y
nor ms that control it. Sex is not what one “is,” but a nor m “which
qualifies a body for life within the domain of cultural
intelligibility” (xii).
SO WHAT DOES SEX HAVE TO DO
WITH GENDER?
 “If gender consists of the social meanings that sex assumes,
then sex does not accrue social meanings as additive properties
but, rather, is replaced by the social meanings it takes on; sex is
relinquished in the course of that assumption, and gender
emerges, not as a ter m in a continued relationship of
opposition to sex, but as the ter m which absorbs and
displaces ‘sex’, the mark of its full substantiation into gender”
(xv).
 In other words, regulatory gender nor ms produce regulatory
sexual nor ms, and in so doing produce sexual categories.
 Sex is materialized through regulatory nor ms. The regulated
sexed body is the material for m of the symbolic order.
WHO DOES THIS “PRODUCING” OF
NORMS?
 “If gender is a constr uction, must there be an ‘I’ or a ‘we’ who
enacts or perfor ms that constr uction? …if gender is constr ucted, it
is not necessarily constr ucted by an ‘I’ or a ‘we’ who stands before
that constr uction in any spatial or temporal sense of ‘before.’
Indeed, it is unclear that there can be an ‘I’ or a ‘we’ who has not
been submitted, subjected to gender, where gendering is, among
other things, the differentiating relations by which speaking
subjects come into being. Subjected to gender, but subjectivated by
gender, the ‘I’ neither precedes nor follows the process of this
gendering, but emerges only within and as the matrix of gender
relations themselves” (xvi).
 Although the subject’s passage through the gender matrix sustains
the matrix through citing it, the r ules of the gender matrix exists
prior to the emergence of the human subject, and the human
subject is illegible without passing through the gender matrix.
Therefore one cannot posit a perfor mative ‘I’ outside the gender
matrix as the ‘I’ is produced through the gender matrix.
GENDERED SUBJECTS
 Butler uses the example of the baby shower to explain this
point. The baby’s acceptance and celebration into society and
kinship is marked by the declaration of its gender, and its
gendered name.
 The human infant is “boyed” or “girled” upon its arrival, most
cogently through the name. The infant enters subjecthood
through the imposition of its name (xvii).
 Question: What might this mean for any sort of
universalizing phenomenolog y? For phenomenolog y of a
universalizing “flesh”? Does the gender matrix preclude the
flesh?
BUT WHAT ABOUT MATTER?
 Some critics accuse Butler’s for mulation of the body of ignoring
the materiality of bodily anatomy. Essentially, this is the “yeah, but I
have lady parts and he doesn’t!” rebuttal. Butler responds:
 “To ‘concede’ the undeniability of ‘sex’ or its ‘materiality’ is always
to concede some version of ‘sex,’ some for mation of ‘materiality.’
Is the discourse in and through which that concession occurs…not
itself for mative of the ver y phenomenon that it concedes? To claim
that discourse is for mative is not to claim that it originates, causes,
or exhaustively composes that which it concedes; rather, it is to
claim that there is no reference to a pure body which is not at the
same time a further for mation of that body” (xix).
 In other words, it is the situation of anatomy at the center of the
debate that puts the spotlight on anatomy to begin with. This is
itself the type of discursive regulator y act that Butler exposes as
nor mativizing.
HOW DO THESE NORMS GET
ESTABLISHED, ANYWAY?: CITATIONALITY
 “The for ming, crafting, bearing, circulation, signification of the
sexed body will not be a set of actions perfor med in compliance
with the law; on the contrar y, they will be a set of actions
mobilized by the law, the citational accumulation and dissimulation
of the law that prouces material effects, the lived necessity of
those effects as well as the lived contestation of that necessity”
(xxi).
 In other words, the perfor mance of the sexed body is a speech act
that names the sexed body into being by virtue of its sexed
perfor mance. In the same way that the judeo-christian God said
“Let there be light,” and there was light, without a for mer concept
of light, the light that the speech brought into being producing the
regulator y schema of “light,” the perfor mance of the sexed body
brings sex into being and reinforces the regulator y schema of
“sex.” In Butler’s words, “the nor m of sex takes hold to the extent
that it is ‘cited’ as such a nor m” (xxii).
ENGAGING THE PHILOSOPHICAL
TRADITION: NOTES ON MATTER
 Matter has classically been associated with the feminine, the
maternal matrix or womb, and with generation/origination.
 In reproduction, women are said to contribute the “matter,”
and men the “for m.” We can thus interpolate that within this
system, for m > matter.
 Matter never appears without its for m or schema: “the
principle of its recognizability, its characteristic gesture or
usual dress, is indissoluble from what constitutes its matter”
(8).
FOUCAULT: POWER MATTERS
 According to Michel Foucault’s seminal work on power relations,
“power is that which for ms, maintains, sustains, and regulates
bodies at once” (9). We see now that if regulator y for m is
regulator y power, and regulator y for m is masculine, then regulator y
power is masculine.
 Foucault’s classical example of the prison may help us understand
what Butler means by casting the body as the materialization of
regulator y nor ms. The materiality of the prison “is established to
the extent that it is a vector and instr ument of power” (9). The
physical building of the prison, in other words, does not take on
the symbolic implications of the prison without the presence of
regulator y power. The prison is “ materialized to the extent that it is
invested with power… its materialization is coextensive with its
investiture with power relations, and materiality is the effect and
gauge of this investment” (9).
FOUCAULT: POWER MATTERS
 The prison is only a prison, rather than just another building,
because of its investiture with power. Similarly, the body is
not an independent materiality that is invested with an outside
source of power, but its existence as a body is its existence as
the site where materialization and the investiture of power
come together. It is this coming together that creates the
body.
FOUCAULT: POWER MATTERS
 “Materiality designates a certain effect of power, or, rather, is
power in its for mative or constituting effects. Insofar as power
operates successfully by constituting an object domain, a field of
intelligibility, as a taken -for-granted ontolog y, its material effects
are taken as material data or primar y givens. These material
positivities appear outside discourse and power, as its incontestable
referents, its transcendental signifieds. But this appearance is
precisely the moment in which the power/discourse regime is most
fully dissimulated and most insidiously effective” (9 -10).
 Power is the power to make systems invisible by their assumption as
the taken-for-g ranted point of departure from which
epistemological systems emerge.
IRIGARAY & THE RENEGADE FEMININE
 In Speculum de l’autre femme, Luce Irigaray argues that the idea
of the sexual binary is part of a phallogocentric economy that
“produces the ‘feminine’ as its constitutive outside” (10) .
 Phallogocentrism is the pervasive paradigm that situates the
phallus, and its preferred theoretical tool, Logos, at the center
of its worldview.
 In Irigaray’s for mulation, “matter” is the site at which the
feminine is excluded from philosophical binaries.
IRIGARAY & THE RENEGADE FEMININE
 Irigaray’s important question: “What must be excluded from
the domain of philosophy for philosophy itself to proceed,
and how is it that the excluded comes to constitute negatively
a philosophical enterprise that takes itself to be self grounding and self-constituting?” In other words, what does
philosophy need to ignore in order to work?
 Her answer: the feminine.
IRIGARAY & THE RENEGADE FEMININE
 Some feminist philosophers have argued that, as materiality, or antiLog os, the feminine, in contrast to the male Log os, is depreciated
in phallog ocentric economies. This depreciation of the feminine
assumes its representation, if in a skewed for m.
 Irigaray argues that, in fact, the sites at which the feminine is
represented in phallog ocentric economies are “precisely the sites
of their erasure” (12). It is not the feminine, but the
phallog ocentric scription or idealization of the feminine, purified of
femininity’s essential resistance to binaries, that appears at these
sites.
 “Woman neither is nor has an essence,” for woman is what is
excluded from the phallog ocentric metaphysical discourse that came
up with the concept of essence ( Irigaray, Amante Marine).
IRIGARAY & THE RENEGADE FEMININE
 Woman does not represent the “matter” half of the
“for m/matter” binary, because she played no role in the
creation of this binary. The masculine occupies both ter ms of
the binary, and the feminine “cannot be said to be an
intelligible ter m at all” (13).
 The “unthematizable materiality” of femininity is exactly what
phallogocentric systems need to exclude in order to situate the
logical phallus as epistemologically primary (13).
THE FEMINISTS TAKE ON PLATO
 In the Timaeus, Plato refers to three “natures”: the process of
generation, the location where the generation takes place , and the
originar y template that the generated thing resembles.
Mother
Receiving principle (matter)
Father
Source or spring (form)
Child
“Intermediate Nature”
 The mother is impregnated with the forms of the male, with the
template for his child, “and yet this receiving principle… has no
proper shape and is not a body,” for she has no for m herself (14).
She is bar red from “ assum[ing] a for m like those that enter her”
(15).
IS THE FEMALE BODY A HUMAN BODY?
 Butler rightly asks, “can this receptable, then, be likened to
any body?” (15). If the body belongs to the citizen, he who
has a for m, does the mother have a body in the
phallogocentric sense? The male reproduces himself, male
bodies, through her, but she cannot be said to have a body in
the sense of form. This forecloses the female body as a human
body.
 It is important to note that “the receptacle is not a woman,
but it is the figure that women become within the dream world of this metaphysical cosmogony” (26). It is male
scription of a woman.
UNTHEMATIZABLE WOMANHOOD
 Irigaray would locate the feminine outside this schema, for the
woman as receiving principle “is not a metaphor based on likeness
to a human for m, but a disfiguration that emerges at the
boundaries of the human both as its ver y condition and as the
isnsitent threat of its defor mation; it cannot take a from, a
morphe, and in that sense, cannot be a body” (15).
 The feminine “exceeds its figuration” in the phallogocentric
economy (15). The unthematizability of the feminine is the
“impossible yet necessar y foundation of what can be thematized
and figured” (15).
 One might think about woman living above and outside these
created boundaries in the same way that one thinks about God as
“outside of time.”
RELEVANT KITTEN THAT I FOUND ON
TWITTER
 Kitten-Irigaray wants no part of
your constricting binaries.
Figure 3 via @EmergencyKittens
IS THE FEMALE BODY A HUMAN BODY?,
PT 2: JULIA KRISTEVA
 In Revolution in Poetic Language , Kristeva accepts the conflation of
the feminine with the Greek “ chora,” postulating that the maternal
body is the site of mediation for symbolic law (15).
 The chora is the territory outside the polis boundaries (by which the
boundaries of the polis are defined). Neither being nor non -being, a
liminal space, a pre-signifying space.
 “Although the chora can be designated and regulated, it can never be
definitively posited; as a result, one can situate the chora, and, if
necessary, lend it a toplog y, but one can never give it axiomatic
for m.” –Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language
IS THE FEMALE BODY A HUMAN BODY?,
PT 2: JULIA KRISTEVA
Polis // Chora at right
Figure 4, Aphrodisias Wall
Gates & Towers, via
www.fokusfortifikation.de
IS THE FEMALE BODY A HUMAN BODY?,
PT 3: KRISTEVA // IRIGARAY
While Kristeva posits the maternal body as the binary chora to
the phallogocentric polis, Irigaray argues that the feminine exists
outside this male-constructed binary of inside/outside. The
feminine is an abject figure in her embodiment of liminality, or
unthematizableness. She is not a binary line but a geometric
plane. Butler notes that, in a sense, this installment of the
feminine outside the chora, as unthematizable, creates a binary
between thematizable/unthematizable and in a sense forces the
non-identical into ipseity. Oops.
IRIGARAY’S RENEGADE FEMININE
 In the phallog ocentric economy, the feminine must be subjected to
a male-created binar y of regulator y nor ms precisely because its
ontolog y is recognized as outside male nar rative str uctures.
 “Precisely because this receptacle can only occasion a radically
improper speech, that is, a speech in which all ontological claims
are suspended, the ter ms by which it is named must be consistently
applied, not in order to make the name fit the thing named but
precisely because that which is to be named can have no proper
name, bounds and threatens the sphere of linguistic propriety, and,
therefore, must be controlled by a forcibly imposed set of
nominative r ules” (17) .
 In Quand nos lèvres se parlent, Irigaray argues that “philosophical
systems are built on a break with material contiguity, and that the
concept of matter constitutes and conceals that r upture or cut”
between philosophy and matter (emphasis mine, 19).
THE BOUNDARIES OF THE POLIS; THE
BOUNDARIES OF THE SUBJECT
 The materialization of reason is possible only through the
dematerialization, through exclusion, of other possible bodies, for
the feminine, “strictly speaking, has no morphe, no morpholog y, no
contour, for it is that which contributes to the contouring of
things, but is itself undifferentiated, without boundar y” (22). The
feminine is excluded for what Irigaray might call her “two-ness,” or
her diffuse lack of for mal centralization.
 Butler notes that Irigaray’s situation of the feminine as the
constitutive “outside” to the phallocentric system in some ways
idealizes and appropriates the concept of “elsewhere,” or outsider,
as feminine. Butler notes that this is itself an exclusionary act,
foreclosing the metonymic intersection of the feminine with other
excluded identities (race, orientation, ability, etc.)
THE BOUNDARIES OF THE POLIS; THE
BOUNDARIES OF THE SUBJECT
“The domain of the less than rational human bounds the figure of
human reason, producing that ‘man’ as one who is without a
childhood; is not a primate and so is relieved of the necessity of
eating, defecating, living and dying; one who is not a slave, but
always a property holder; one whose language remains originar y and
untranslatable. This is a figure of disembodiment, but one which is
nevertheless a figure of a body, a bodying forth of a masculinized
rationality, the figure of a male body which is not a body, a figure in
crisis, a figure that enacts a crisis it cannot fully control” (21).
BOUNDARY PATROL: SUBJECTS AS
“INTELLIGIBLE BODIES”
 Butler argues the need to keep matter as a sign foremost in our
conception of bodies, a sign with an important histor y. This
histor y of matter is the histor y of boundar y patrol, the policing of
matter as an attempt to assuage this uncontrollable crisis. This
crisis is born from, and leads to, a series of psychical quandaries:
 In order to shore up his position of power, Man needs to
differentiate himself, penetrator, from woman, penetrated, in order to
avoid penetration himself. This is, according to Butler, the reason
for which classical thought imposed a strict distinction between
woman as matter and man as form, a distinction in which matter may
never resemble form, only give body to it. Form always penetrates
matter, which by definition cannot access or penetrate form.
BOUNDARY PATROL: SUBJECTS AS
“INTELLIGIBLE BODIES”
 The solidification of sexual binaries is the result of a masculine
panic at the possibility that he himself could be penetrated rather
than penetrate. The creation of the binar y, however, under mines its
originarity, for were it not original, there would be no need to
shore up the binar y.
 “He would not be different from her if it were not for this
prohibition on resemblance which establishes their positions as
mutually exclusive and yet complementar y. In fact, if she were to
penetrate in return, or penetrate elsewhere, it is unclear whether
she could remain a ‘she’ and whether ‘he’ could preser ve his own
differentially established identity […] without this heterosexual
matrix, as it were, it appears that the stability of these gendered
positions would be called into question” (23).
BOUNDARY PATROL: THE POWER OF
THE PHALLUS
 “If a resemblance is possible, it is because the ‘originality’ of the
masculine is contestable; in other words, the miming of the
masculine, which is never resorbed into it, can expose the
masculine’s claim to originality as suspect” (24).
 This is why what butler calls the “ phallicization of the lesbian,” or
the attempt of the lesbian to enter the male symbolic order, creates
panic in the heterosexual schema. We will return to this shortly, but
first, let’s move through the Freudian and Lacanian arguments that
get us to that point.
LET’S GET PSYCHOANALYTIC, PT 1:
FREUD’S PHENOMENOLOGY
 In a move prefiguring Lacan’s for mulation of the Mir ror Stage,
Sigmund Freud “connects the for mation of one’s eg o with the
externalized idea one for ms of one’s own body” (29).
 Freud connects libidinal pleasure with bodily pain, sug gesting that
the presence of bodily pleasure or pain is the way through which
we know the body. This is complicated by his theor y of
hypochondria, however, as we are not sure whether consciousness
imputes pain to the body, through which it knows itself
(hypochondria), or whether the consciousness only registers a pain
produced by the objective body (30).
LET’S GET PSYCHOANALYTIC, PT 1:
FREUD’S PHENOMENOLOGY
 Freud argues that “libidinal self -attention is precisely what
delineates a body part as a part,” (30) sug gesting that the body only
becomes aware of itself as a body through the experience of
libidinal self-attention
 The genitals, therefore –assumedly male in their “oneness” – are the
prototype of “that process whereby body parts become
epistemologically accessible through an imaginar y investiture,” or
whereby the body registers conceptually in the consciousness
through its entrance into the symbolic economy (31).
LET’S GET PSYCHOANALYTIC, PT 2:
LACAN’S PHENOMENOLOGY
 In Freud, the penis acts a libidinal center and therefore
substitution for other body parts in the diffusion of pleasure by
which the body registers itself in the conscious. In Lacan, the penis
is transfor med into the phallus, considered the “privileged” or
“transcendental” signifier “which originates or generates
significations, but is not itself the signifying effect of a prior
signifying chain” (31). The phallus is, in other words, the
abstraction of the male power invested in the penis into the
symbolic sphere. The “phallus” is the ability to impose meaning, to
originate symbols, and confer signification (31).
 Butler notes that while in Lacanian theor y the physical penis is
absent from discussions of the transcendental phallus, it is
impossible to “collapse the distinction between penis and phallus”
due to the male identification with for m and regulator y power (31).
LET’S GET PSYCHOANALYTIC, PT 2:
LACAN’S PHENOMENOLOGY
 “It is through this transfer, understood as the substitution of the
psychical for the physical or the metaphorizing logic of
hypochondria, that body parts become phenomenologically
accessible at all” (32). It is through their abstraction into the
symbolic or psychical world that the physical body can be
understood and take on meaning. The registration of the
phenomenon of the physical body in the consciousness is only
possible through the physical body’s inscription by the symbolic
order.
 This for mulation relates both to Freud’s hypochondriacal
phenomenolog y and to Butler’s theor y about the body, as we will
see presently.
LET’S GET PSYCHOANALYTIC, PT 2:
LACAN’S PHENOMENOLOGY
 “Hypochondria is an imaginar y investment which, according to the
early theor y, constitutes a libidinal projection of the body -surface
which in turn establishes its epistemological accessibility.
Hypochondria here denotes something like a theatrical delineation
or production of the body, one which gives imaginar y contours to
the eg o itself, projecting a body which becomes the occasion of an
identification which in its imaginar y or projected status is fully
tenuous” (33-4).
 In other words, the consciousness registers the physicality of the
body through the body’s performance of its symbolic investiture. The
consciousness projects the symbolic order onto the body, and this
projection registers the body in the consciousness.
LET’S GET PSYCHOANALYTIC, PT 3:
HYPOCHONDRIAC PHENOMENOLOGY
 “If, then, as Freud contends, pain has a delineating effect, i.e., may
be one way in which we come to have an idea of our body at all, it
may also be that gender-instituting prohibitions work through
suffusing the body with a pain that culminates in the projection of
a surface, that is, a sexed morpholog y which is at once a
compensator y fantasy and a fetishistic mask” (35).
 The symbolic policing of the body culminates in the
consciousness/eg o’s projection of a socially and symbolically
legible (and hence acceptable) body onto the physical body in order
to avoid pain, guilt, and shame.
LET’S GET PSYCHOANALYTIC, PT 3:
HYPOCHONDRIAC PHENOMENOLOGY
 “If this effort to rethink the physical and the psychical works well,
then it is no longer possible to take anatomy as a stable referent
that is somehow valorized or signified through being subjected to
an imaginar y schema. On the contrar y, the ver y accessibility of
anatomy is in some sense dependent on this schema and coincident
with it” (35).
 In other words, our ability, and the imperative, to conceive of
sexed anatomies is predicated on our inculcation into a sexed
symbolic.
WHAT DOES HYPOCHONDRIA MEAN
FOR A CONCEPT OF “FLESH”?
 Question: “Is there still something we might call the body itself
which escapes this thematization?” (36) or in other ter ms, a
“flesh”?
 “We might want to claim that what persists within these contested
domains is the ‘materiality’ of the body. But perhaps we will have
fulfilled the same function, and opened up some others, if we claim
that what persists her is a demand in and for language ” (37).
 In other words, equally pertinent to the persistent presence of the
body’s materiality is the persistent presence of the human need to
delineate and describe that materiality. Butler here sug gests that this
human desire to delineate and symbolize the body is as equally
pertinent to this debate as the physical materiality of the body.
 Thoughts?
LET’S GET PSYCHOANALYTIC, PT 4:
PHENOMENOLOGY & LANGUAGE
 The body is not only a discursive surface but a linguistic one. In
str ucturalist ter ms, the body is the referent or signified that is
ontologically caught up in, but not identical to, its signifier,
language.
 The referent of the body “persists only as a kind of absence or
loss, that which language does not capture, but, instead, that which
impels language repeatedly to attempt that capture, that
circumscription– and to fail. This loss takes its place in language as
an insistent call or demand that, while in language, is never fully of
language. To posit a materiality outside of language is still to posit
that materiality, and the materiality so posited will retain that
positing as its constitutive condition” (37).
LET’S GET PSYCHOANALYTIC, PT 4:
PHENOMENOLOGY & LANGUAGE
 Butler seems to position the body as a sort of objet A that is never fully
available to the subject who g rasps for it. Language about the body,
then, seems to appear as a sort of petit objet A, that is, the closest human
attempts to access and capture the meaning of the body. Materiality and
language are therefore mutually imbricated, dependent on each other in
the human psyche’s registration of the body. Ever y effort to refer to
materiality must pass through language. Butler notes however that
language, as phenomenon, is itself also material, and as such, “language
and materiality are not opposed, for language both is and refers to that
which is material, and what is material never fully escapes from the
process by which it is signified” (38).
 However, despite that the body can only be accessed through language,
the body cannot be reduced to language: “Although the referent cannot be
said to exist apart from the signified, it nevertheless cannot be reduced
to it. […] Language and materiality are fully embedded in each other,
chiasmic in their interdependency, but never fully collapsed into one
another” (38).
SO HOW DOES THE BODY
MATERIALIZE? ENTER LACAN.
The discursive relationship between material bodies and their
expression through linguistic phenomena is bound up in the process
by which bodies materialize, or “how they come to assume the
mor phe, the shape by which their material discreteness is marked”
(38). Butler posits that the materiality of the body is “not to be taken
for g ranted, for in some sense it is acquired, constituted, through the
development of morpholog y” (39). In other words, the materiality of
the body is constituted through its registration in the psyche, a
registration that is necessarily filtered through the sieves of the
symbolic. In Lacanian ter ms, the materialization of the body is in
part a function of the symbolic compulsion of the Real.
LACAN & THE MATERIALIZATION OF
THE BODY: THE MIRROR STAGE
In Lacanian psychoanalytic theor y, the mir ror stage is an early stage of
childhood psychical development in which the infant’s recognition of
his reflection in a mir ror as himself spurs the development of his
ipseity and his subject for mation. This subject for mation is
necessarily alienated, however, as the mir ror -child with whom the
infant identifies is not his material body but an idealized version of
his body, an “ideal-I” against whose apparent coherence he shores up
his own sense of vulnerability and fragmentation. In other words, the
mir ror baby looks as if he has it all together, a state which the
material baby desires, and the material baby spends the rest of his
life tr ying to get his stuff together to the same level as his mir rored
double.
YET ANOTHER RELEVANT CAT
ILLUSTRATION: “THE MEOWRER STAGE”
 It appears that the feline
“ideal-I” is Blake’s “Tyger.”
 Figure 5 via The New Yorker, 7
Januar y 1991.
LACAN & THE MATERIALIZATION OF
THE BODY: THE MIRROR STAGE
 Butler notes that the mir ror stage sug gests that the “process of psychic
projection or elaboration implies as well that the sense of one’s own body is
not (only) achieved through differentiating from another (the maternal
body), but that any sense of bodily contour, as projected, is articulated
through a necessar y self -division and self-estrangement” (40). For Lacan,
the body is an “imaginar y for mation,” and the body a product of “visual
production” (41). Lacan notes in later works that this visual production
must necessarily build upon the “nomination” of language and the marking
of sexual difference (41).
 Bodies only become legible, then, thr ough the specular image, the mir rored
ideal-I, which is built upon and sustained through one’s life by the mark of
sexual differentiation. The ideal -I, in other words, seems to be sexually
differentiated. To be named, and to be legible, is to be “positioned within
the Symbolic,” and to relate to others through one’s legibility through a “set
of relationships str uctured through sanction and taboo which is g overed by
the law of the father” (41). Both “objects and others” appear only through
“the mediating g rid” of this projected symbolic schema (42).
LACAN & THE MATERIALIZATION OF
THE BODY: THE MIRROR STAGE
The symbolic image, then, in Lacanian ter minolog y, not only precedes
the eg o, or the material body, but “the identificator y relation to the
image establishes the eg o” (43). The eg o, or the self, is not self identical, but dialectic with the image; it is not the physicality of the
material body but the externalized imago, or image, which “confers
and produces bodily contours” (43). In other words, it is through the
identification with the imago that the “spatial boundar y that
neg otiates ‘outside’ and ‘inside’” of the self, the contours of the body , is
established (43).
LACAN, CONTD: LET’S GET PHALLIC
“Although ‘The Mir ror Stage’ attempts to nar rate how a body comes
to have a sense of its own totality for the first time, the ver y
description of a body before the mir ror as being in parts or pieces
takes as its own precondition an already established sense of a whole
or integ rated morpholog y. If to be in pieces is to be without control,
then the body before the mir ror is without the phallus, symbolically
castrated; and by gaining specularized control through the eg o
constituted in the mir ror, that body ‘assumes’ or ‘comes to have’ the
phallus. But the phallus is, as it were, already in play in the ver y
description of the body in pieces before the mir ror; as a result, the
phallus g overns the description of its own genesis and, accordingly,
wards off a geneolog y that might confer on it a derivative or
projected character” (49). The phallus is, therefore, a problematic
“transcendental signifier.”
LACAN, CONTD: LET’S GET PHALLIC
 It is also problematic in its exclusionar y principle. Because it is an
idealization, which no body can adequately approximate, the phallus could,
theoretically, be appropriated by non -male subjects; but insofar as it is an
idealization of the male penis, its symbolic transcendent state, it produces
what Butler calls a “necessar y effect of inadequation,” in which shame
follows women who, despite lacking the penis, attempt to appropriate the
phallus.
 Despite the problems that women (Butler specifically refers to lesbians)
face when appropriating the phallus as transcendental signifier, the fact that
it is, in Butler’s ter ms, a “transfer rable phantasm,” not tied directly to the
penis, calls into question the “naturalized link” between penis and phallus,
male body and transcendental signifier, and, most importantly, between
body and its inscribed set of sexed symbols (52). It is important to note,
however, that despite the destabilization of body and its sexed symbolog y
effected by the lesbian appropriation of the phallus, this destabilization is
inherently phallog ocentric insofar as “the relation to the phallus is
constitutive” of the destabilization (54).
BODIES OF DELIRIUM, DELIRIOUS
BODIES
“The body in the mir ror does not represent a body that is, as it were,
before the mir ror: the mir ror, even as it is instigated by that
unrepresentable body ‘before’ the mir ror, produces that body as its
delirious effect– a delirium, by the way, which we are compelled to
live” (57).
A HOPEFUL CONCLUSION
“…there is always some critical distance between what the law
compels and the identification that the feminine body offers up as
the token of her loyalty to the law. The body marked as feminine
occupies or inhabits its mark at a critical distance, with radical
unease or with a phantasmatic and tenuous pleasure or with some
mixture of anxiety and desire. If she is marked as castrated, she must
nevertheless assume that mark… there is at the start some failure of
socialization here, some excessive occurence of that body outside
and beyond its mark, in relation to that mark. There is some body…
who is not yet or not ever a figure of strict compliance. Indeed, there
is a body which has failed to perfor m its castration in accord with
the symbolic law, some locus of resistance, some way in which the
desire to have the phallus has not been renounced and continues to
persist” (68).