Butler: Gender Trouble Part 3

1. The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva

Butler focuses this section on deconstructing Julia Kristeva’s theory of the “semiotic dimension of language” which is based off of Lacan’s “Symbolic” theory. The two main terms that Butler uses in this section is “symbolic” and “semiotic”.

“Symbolic” (according to Lacan) is “the paternal law structures all linguistic signification” which has become a “universal organizing principle of culture itself”. Butler further explains: “this (paternal) law creates the possibility of meaningful language and, hence, meaningful experience, through the repression of primary libidinal drives, including the radical dependency of the child on the maternal body” (107).

Kristeva’s purpose is not to refute Lacan’s primary premise but “serves as a perpetual source of subversion within the Symbolic” (108). She suggests using poetic language for her “semiotic” argument. “Poetic language is the recovery of the maternal body within the terms of language, one that has the potential to disrupt, subvert, and displace the paternal law”. Maybe I completely missed this, but what exactly does she mean by ‘poetic language’? I still don’t have a good grasp of this.

I think Butler makes a really good point when she states “Her (Kristeva) theory appears to depend upon the stability and reproduction of precisely the paternal law that she seeks to displace”. Also because Kristeva doesn’t admit that the semiotic is always subordinate to the Symbolic. But Kristeva’s strategic task is “neither to replace the Symbolic possibility, but rather to validate those experiences within the Symbolic that permit a manifestation of the borders which divide the Symbolic from the semiotic” (115).

Butler continues to discuss Kristeva’s second point which is the maternal body. She states that for Kristeva, “poetry and maternity represent privileged practices within paternally sanctioned culture which permit a nonpyschotic experience of that heterogeneity and dependency characteristic of the maternal terrain” (116). But Butler criticizes Kristeva for not challenging the structuralist assumption that the paternal law is foundation to culture itself and that change must com from within (117).

Butler than goes on to talk about Kristeva’s point on homosexuality and how “both maternity and poetry constitute melancholic experiences for women appropriately acculturated into heterosexuality” (117). I’m not quite sure where Butler and Kristeva were going with the argument of lesbianism

2. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity

In this section Butler discusses Foucault’s theory of sexuality offered in his book “The History of Sexuality, Volume 1” and how his theory contradicts with what he wrote about Herculine Barbin, a nineteenth-century French hermaphrodite who was born a girl but showed male sex characteristics and physical features. Butler states “Foucault understands sexuality as saturated with power and offers a critical view of theories that lay claim to a sexuality before or after the law” (127).