No More Learning

I see the history of democracy as divided by one fundamental cleavage. On the one hand, we have democracy as the attempt to construct the people as one, a homogeneous social actor opposed either to "power" or to an external enemy--or to a combination of both. This is the Jacobin con- ception of democracy, with its concomitant ideal of a transparent com- munity unified--if necessary--by terror. This is the tradition that runs, with very analogous structural features, from Robespierre to Pol Pot. The discourses around which this democratic ideal is constructed are, obviously, predominantly metaphoric--although, for reasons previ- ously mentioned, they cannot conceal their metonymic foundations. On the other hand, we have democracy as respect of difference, as shown, for instance, in multiculturalism or in the new pluralism asso- ciated with contemporary social movements. Here we have discourses that are predominantly metonymic, for although--given the impos- sibility of a pure differential, nontropological closure--some effect of metaphoric aggregation is inevitable, it will be an aggregation that always keeps the traces of its own contingency and incompleteness visible. Within this basic polarity there are, obviously, all kinds of pos- sible intermediate combinations that we can start exploring through the variety of tropoi to be found in classical rhetoric.
Paul de Man's main contribution to this task lies not in anything that he had to say about politics--something his untimely death pre- vented him from doing--but rather, in two main accomplishments. The first is to have extended the field of rhetoric--or, rather, of rhetoricity-- to the ensemble of language, to have made it a constitutive dimension of language as such. The second is to have deconstructed the dominant tropoi of the Romantic tradition--such as symbol and metaphor-- showing the contingent infrastructure of more humble tropoi on which any totalizing effect is grounded. I have attempted in this essay to show the potential importance of both accomplishments for the elaboration of a theory of hegemony.
NOTES
A preliminary version of this essay was presented at the "Culture and Materiality" conference that took place at the University of California, Davis, on April 23-25, 1998. It was also discussed in the seminar on Ideology and Discourse Analysis, University of Essex, a month later. I want to thank those whose commentaries led me to introduce precisions in my text and, in some cases, partial reformulations of the argument: at Davis, Jacques Derrida, Fredrick Jameson, J. Hillis Miller, and Andrzej Warminski; at Essex, David Howarth and Aletta Norval.
1. Stefano Rosso, "An Interview with Paul de Man," in Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 121.
2. Paul de Man, "Pascal's Allegory of Persuasion," in Aesthetic Ideology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 51-69. Subsequent page refer- ences are given in the text.
3. For the full development of this argument, see my Emancipations(s) (London: Verso, 1996), especially the essay "Why Do Empty Signifiers Matter to Politics? " 36-46.
4. Cf. the disagreement between de Man and Louis Maris, as presented by de Man in "Pascal's Allegory of Persuasion," 60.
5. What is important is to realize that these retotalizations do not operate through a simple and retrievable negation. As de Man asserts: "What is here called, for lack of a better term, a rupture or a disjunction is not to be thought of as a negation, however tragic it may be. Negation, in a mind as resilient as Pascal's, is always susceptible of being reinscribed in a system of intelligibility. . . . It is possible to find, in the terminology of rhetoric, terms that come close to designating such disruptions (e. g. , parabasis or anacoluthon), which designate the interruption of a semantic continuum in a manner that lies beyond the power of reintegration" (ibid. , p. 61). But the very fact that there are tropoi which make describable that which is beyond the power of reintegration clearly shows that we are not dealing with a simple collapse of the system but, rather, with an orderly drifting away from what would have otherwise been the conditions of its full closure. It is in the field of this drifting away that the hegemonic logics operate.
6. Paul de Man, "Reading (Proust)," in Allegories of Reading Figural Language
The Politics of Rhetoric 251
252 Ernesto Laclau
in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 57-58.
7. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contempor- ary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 284.
8. Ge? rard Genette, "Me? tonymie chez Proust," in Figures III (Paris, E? ditions du Seuil, 1972), 41-43. Paul de Man finds the use by Genette of the category of diegetic metaphor limited as far as Proust is concerned. Both, however, agree in privileging the metonymic transitions in Proust's text.
9. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985).
10. I thank J. Hillis Miller for having called my attention to the need for elabo- rating more the distinction between catachresis and metonymy--a distinction that, as will be seen, is crucial for my analysis.
11. Pierre Fontanier, Les figures du discours (Paris: Flammarion, 1968), 213. "Generally speaking there is catachresis when a sign already linked to a first idea is also linked to a new idea which itself does not have or no longer has a literal mean- ing in language. It is, as a result, any trope whose use is forced and necessary, any trope from which a purely extended meaning is derived; this literal meaning of sec- ond origin, mediating between the original literal meaning and the figurative mean- ing, but which by its own nature is closer to the first than to the second, even though it might have been figurative in the beginning. "
12. With this, of course, the tropological movement would come to an end.
13. Georges Sorel, Re? flexions sur la violence (Paris: E? ditions du Seuil, 1990), 77. "In a society so enfevered by the passion of competitive success, all the actors march straight ahead like true automatons, unconcerned with the great ideas of the sociologists, and none of them considers extricating himself from that condi- tion. It is only then that the development of capitalism is pursued with that rigor which so struck Marx and which seemed to him comparable to a natural law. If, on the contrary, the bourgeois, diverted by the jokes of moral or sociological preachers, return to the ideal of conservative mediocrity, seek to correct the abuses of the economy, and wish to break with the barbarity of their ancestors, then a part of the forces which should produce the dynamic of capitalism are employed in checking it, chance is introduced, and the future of the world becomes completely indeterminate.
"This indeterminacy further increases if the proletariat is converted to social peace at the same time as their masters--or even simply that it considers everything from a corporative perspective--while socialism gives to all economic struggles a general and revolutionary character. "
14. Genette, "Me? tonymie chez Proust," 63. "Without metaphor, says Proust (more or less), there are no true memories; we can add for him (and for everybody): without metonymy, no linkage of memories, no history, no novel. Because it is metaphor that recovers lost Time, which reanimates and sets it in motion: which re- turns it to itself and its true 'essence,' which is in its own flight and its own Search. So here, here alone--through metaphor but within metonymy--Narration begins. "
15. Leon Trotsky, 1905 (London: Allen Lane, 1971), 328. Subsequent page ref- erences are given in the text.
16. Palmiro Togliatti, On Gramsci and Other Writings (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1979), 157-59.
17. David Howarth and Aletta Norval, "Subjectivity and Strategy in South African Resistance Politics: Prospects for a New Imaginary," Essex Papers in Politics and Government, Department of Government, University of Essex (May 1992): 9.
The Politics of Rhetoric 253
254
How Can I Deny That These Hands and This Body Are Mine?
Judith Butler
I remember a sleepless night last year when I came into my living room and turned on the television set to discover that C-Span was offering a special session on feminist topics, and that the historian Elizabeth Fox- Genovese was making clear why she thought women's studies had con- tinuing relevance, and why she opposed certain radical strains in femi- nist thinking. Among those positions she most disliked she included the feminist view that no stable distinction between the sexes could be drawn or known, a view that suggests that the difference between the sexes is itself culturally variable or, worse, discursively fabricated, as if it is all a matter of language. Of course, this did not help my project of falling asleep, and I became aware of being, as it were, a sleepless body in the world accused, at least obliquely, with having made the body less rather than more relevant. Indeed, I was not altogether sure that the bad dream from which I had awoken some hours earlier was not in some sense being further played out on the screen. Was I waking or was I dreaming? After all, it was no doubt the persecutory dimension of paranoia that hounded me from the bed. Was it still paranoia to think that she was talking about me, and was there really any way to know? If it was me, then how would I know that I am the one to whom she refers?
I relate this incident to you here today not only because it fore- shadows the Cartesian dilemmas with which I will be preoccupied in the following paper, and not because I propose to answer the question of whether sexual difference is only produced in language. I will, for the moment, leave the question of sexual difference to be returned to another time. 1 The problem I do propose to address emerges every
time we try to describe the kind of action that language exercises on the body or, indeed, in the production or maintenance of bodies. And we do tend to describe language as actively producing or crafting a body every time we use, implicitly or explicitly, the language of discur- sive construction.
In the consideration of Descartes's Meditations that follows, I pro- pose to ask whether the way in which Descartes posits the irreality of his own body does not allegorize a more general problem of positing that is to be found in various forms of constructivism and various criti- cal rejoinders to a constructivism that is sometimes less well under- stood than it ought to be. The name of this paper that I have already begun, but not yet begun, is: "How Can I Deny That These Hands and This Body Are Mine? " These are, of course, Descartes's words, but they could be ours or, indeed, mine, given the dilemmas posed by contem- porary constructivism.
The language of discursive construction takes various forms in con- temporary scholarship and sometimes it does seem as if the body is cre- ated ex nihilo from the resources of discourse. To claim, for instance, that the body is fabricated in discourse is not only to figure discourse as a fabricating kind of activity, but to sidestep the important questions of "in what way" and "to what extent. " To say that the line between the sexes, for instance, must be drawn, and must be drawable, is to concede that at some level the stability of the distinction depends on a line being drawn. But to say that we must be able to draw a line in order to stabilize the distinction between the sexes may simply mean that we must first grasp this distinction in a way that allows us then to draw the line, and the drawing of the line confirms a distinction that is somehow already at hand. But it may mean, conversely, that there are certain conventions that govern how and where the line ought or ought not to be drawn, and that these conventions, as conventions, change through time, and produce a sense of anxiety and of unknow- ingness precisely at the moment in which we are compelled to draw a line in reference to the sexes. The line then lets us know what will and will not qualify as "sex"; the line works as a regulatory ideal, in Foucault's sense, or a normative criterion that permits and controls the appearance and knowability of sex. Then the question, which is not easily settled, becomes: do the conventions that demarcate sexual dif- ference determine in part what we "see" and "comprehend" as sexual difference? It is, you might surmise, not a large leap from this claim to the notion that sexual difference is fabricated in language. But I think
How Can I Deny . . . ? 255
256 Judith Butler
that we may need to look more carefully before either championing or reviling this conclusion.
The language of construction risks a certain form of linguisticism, the assumption that what is constructed by language is therefore also language, that the object of linguistic construction is nothing other than language itself. Moreover, the action of this construction is con- veyed through verbal expressions that sometimes imply a simple and unilateral creation at work.
Language is said to fabricate or to figure the body, to produce or construct it, to constitute or to make it. Thus, language is said to act, which involves a tropological understanding of language as perform- ing and performative. There is, of course, something quite scandalous involved in the strong version of construction that is sometimes at work when, for instance, the doctrine of construction implies that the body is not only made by language, but made of language, or that the body is somehow reducible to the linguistic coordinates by which it is identified and identifiable, as if there is no nonlinguistic stuff at issue. The result is not only an ontological realm understood as so many ef- fects of linguistic monism, but the tropological functioning of language as action becomes strangely literalized in the description of what it does, and how it does what it does. And though de Man often argued that the tropological dimension of discourse works against the perfor- mative, it seems here that we see, as I believe we do in de Man's discus- sion of Nietzsche, the literalization of the trope of performativity.
I want to suggest another way of approaching this question that re- fuses the reduction of linguistic construction to linguistic monism, and which calls into question the figure of language acting unilaterally and unequivocally on the object of construction. It may be that the very term construction no longer makes sense in this context, that the term deconstruction is better suited to what I propose to describe, but I con- fess to not really caring about how or whether these terms are stabilized in relation to each other or, indeed, in relation to me. My concerns are of another order, perhaps in the very tension that emerges as the prob- lem of discursive construction comes into tension with deconstruction.
For my purposes, I think it must be possible to claim that the body is not known or identifiable apart from the linguistic coordinates that establish the boundaries of the body without thereby claiming that the body is nothing other than the language by which it is known. This last claim seeks to make the body an ontological effect of the language that governs its knowability. But this view fails to note the incommensura-
bility between the two domains, an incommensurability that is not pre- cisely an opposition. Although one might accept the proposition that the body is only knowable through language, that the body is given through language, it is never fully given in that way, and to say that it is given partially can only be understood if we also acknowledge that it is given, when it is given, in parts; it is, as it were, given and withheld at the same time, and language might be said to perform both of these operations. Although the body depends on language to be known, the body also exceeds every possible linguistic effort of capture. It would be tempting to conclude that this means that the body exists outside of language, that it has an ontology separable from any linguistic one, and that we might be able to describe this separable ontology. But this is where I would hesitate, perhaps permanently, for as we begin that description of what is outside of language, the chiasm reappears: we have already contaminated, though not contained, the very body we seek to establish in its ontological purity. The body escapes its linguistic grasp, but so too does it escape the subsequent effort to determine on- tologically that very escape. The very description of the extralinguistic body allegorizes the problem of the chiasmic relation between language and body and so fails to supply the distinction it seeks to articulate.
To say that the body is figured chiasmically is to say that the follow- ing logical relations hold simultaneously: the body is given through language but is not, for that reason, reducible to language. The lan- guage through which the body emerges helps to form and establish that body in its knowability, but the language that forms the body does not fully or exclusively form it. Indeed, the movement of language that appears to create what it names, its operation as a seamless perfor- mative of the illocutionary persuasion, covers over or dissimulates the substitution, the trope, by which language appears as transitive act, that is, by which language is mobilized as a performative that simulta- neously does what it says. If language acts on the body in some way, if we want to speak, for instance, of a bodily inscription, as so much cul- tural theory does, it might be worth considering whether language lit- erally acts on a body, and whether that body is an exterior surface for such action, or whether these are figures that we mobilize when we seek to establish the efficacy of language.
This leads to a converse problem, namely, the case in which lan- guage attempts to deny its own implication in the body, in which the case for the radical disembodiment of the soul is made within language. Here it is a question of the way in which the body emerges in the very
How Can I Deny . . . ? 257
258 Judith Butler
language that seeks to deny it, which suggests that no operation of lan- guage can fully separate itself from the operation of the body.
Language itself cannot proceed without positing the body, and when it tries to proceed as if the body were not essential to its own op- eration, figures of the body reappear in spectral and partial form with- in the very language that seeks to perform their denial. Thus, language cannot escape the way in which it is implicated in bodily life, and when it attempts such an escape, the body returns in the form of spectral figures whose semantic implications undermine the explicit claims of disembodiment made within language itself. Thus, just as the effort to determine the body linguistically fails to grasp what it names, so the ef- fort to establish that failure as definitive is undermined by the figural persistence of the body.
The way in which I propose to show this chiasmic relation is through a reconsideration of the opening Meditations of Descartes, the ones in which he seeks to bring the reality of the body into question. Descartes seeks to know whether he can deny the reality of his own body and, in particular, the reality of his limbs. Suspended and inscrutable limbs reemerge in de Man's essay "Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant" in ways that suggest a metonymic relation to the problem that Descartes poses. For de Man, the body within the third Critique is understood, if we can use that word, as prior to figuration and cognition. In Descartes, it emerges as a particular kind of figure, one that suspends the ontologi- cal status of the term, and this raises the question of any absolute sepa- rability between materiality and figuration, a distinction that de Man on some occasions tries to make as absolutely as possible. I hope to make this chiasmic relation between those two texts clear toward the end of my remarks.
For the moment, though, I want to suggest that Descartes's ability to doubt the body appears to prefigure the skeptical stance toward bodily reality that is often associated with contemporary construction- ist positions. What happens in the course of Descartes's fabulous tra- jectory of doubt is that the very language through which he calls the body into question ends up reasserting the body as a condition of his own writing. Thus, the body that comes into question as an "object" that may be doubted surfaces in the text as a figural precondition of his writing.
But what is the status of Cartesian doubt understood as something that takes place in writing, in a writing that we read and that, in reading, we are compelled to reperform? Derrida raises the question of whether
the Cartesian "I" is compatible with the method of doubt, if that method is understood as transposable, one that anyone might perform. A method must be repeatable or iterable: intuition (or self-inspection) requires the singularity of the mind under inspection. How can a method be made compatible with the requirements of introspection? Although Descartes's meditative method is an introspective one in which he seeks in an unmediated fashion to know himself, it is also one that is written, and that is apparently performed in the very tem- porality of writing. Significantly, he does not report in language the various introspective acts that he has performed prior to the writing: the writing appears as contemporaneous with this introspection, im- plying, contrary to his explicit claims, that meditation is not an un- mediated relation at all, but one that must and does take place through language.
As I presume my readership knows, Descartes begins his Meditations by seeking to eradicate doubt. Indeed, he begins in an autobiographical mode, asking how long it has been that he sensed that many of his be- liefs were false, these beliefs that he held in the past, that appeared to be part of his youth, that were part of his history; he then seeks to "rid himself" (de? faire) of his former beliefs. 2 First, he claims, "I have deliv- ered my mind from every care," and that he is, apparently luckily, "agi- tated by no passions," free to "address myself to the upheaval (destruc- tion) of all my former opinions" (F:26).
His task is the dispassionate destruction of his own opinion, but also of his own past, and so we might understand the onset of The Meditations to require performing a destruction of one's own past, of memory. Thus, an "I" emerges, narratively, at a distance from its for- mer opinions, shearing off its historicity, and inspecting and adjudicat- ing its beliefs from a carefree position. Whatever the "I" is, it is from the start not the same as the beliefs that it holds and that it scrutinizes, or rather, the "I" appears to be able to maintain itself, at the level of grammar, while it calls such beliefs into question. To call such beliefs into question is apparently not to call the "I" into question. The one, the "I," is manifestly distinct from the beliefs that this "I" has held.
We must then, as readers, in order to follow this text, imagine an "I" who is detachable from the history of its beliefs. And the grammar asks us to do this prior to the official beginning of the method of doubt. Moreover, the very term that is generally translated as "belief" is "opinions" and so implies a kind of groundless knowing from the start, a form of knowing whose groundlessness will be exposed.
How Can I Deny . . . ? 259
260 Judith Butler
Descartes seeks the principles of those former beliefs, and finds that relying on the senses produces deception, and argues that nothing that once produced deception ought to be trusted again to furnish anything other than deception in the future. And yet, sometimes the senses fur- nish a certain indubitability, as when the narrator relays the following famous scene: "there is the fact that leads Descartes to say, I am here, seated by the fire, attired in a dressing gown, having this paper in my hands and other similar matters"(145/27). Let me call attention to the fact that the "I" is "here," "ici," because this term in this sentence is a deictic one, and it is a shifter, pointing to a "here" that could be any here, but that seems to be the term that helps to anchor the spatial co- ordinates of the scene and so to ground, at least, the spatial ground of its indubitability. When Descartes writes "here," he appears to refer to the place where he is, but this is a term that could refer to any "here" and so fails to anchor Descartes to his place in the way that we might expect it to. What does the writing of his place do to the indubitable referentiality of that "here"? Clearly, it is not here; the "here" works as an indexical that refers only by remaining indifferent to its occasion. Thus the word, precisely because it can refer promiscuously, intro- duces an equivocalness and, indeed, a dubitability that makes it quite impossible to say whether or not his being "here" is a fact as he claims that it is. Indeed, the very use of such an equivocal term makes it seem possibly untrue.
What I seek to underscore "here," as it were, is that Descartes's very language exceeds the perspective it seeks to affirm, permitting a narra- tion of himself and a reflexive referentiality that distances the one who narrates from the "I" who is narrated by that one. The emergence of a narrative "I" in The Meditations has consequences for the philosophi- cal argument Descartes seeks to make. The written status of the "I" splits the narrator from the very self he seeks to know and not to doubt. The "I" has, as it were, gotten out of his control by virtue of be- coming written. Philosophically, we are asked to accept an "I" who is not the same as the history of its opinions, who can "undo" and "de- stroy" such opinions and still remain intact. Narratively, we have an "I" that is a textual phenomenon, exceeding the place and time in which it seeks to ground itself, whose very written character depends on this transposability from context to context.
But things have already become strange, for we were to have start- ed, as Descartes maintains in the "preface," with reasons, ones that persuade, and that give us a clear and distinct idea of what cannot be
doubted. We were about to distrust the senses, but instead we are drawn into the certainties that they provide, the fact that I sit here, am clothed, hold the paper that I do by the fire that is also here.
From this scene in which indubitability is asserted and withdrawn at once emerges the question of the body. Descartes asks, "how could I deny that these hands and this body here belong to me? " (F:27). Consider the very way in which he poses the question, the way in which the question becomes posable within language. The question takes, I believe, a strange grammar, one that affirms the separability of what it seeks to establish as necessarily joined. If one can pose the question whether one's hands and one's body are not one's own, then what has happened such that the question has become posable? In other words, how is it that my hands and my body became something other than me, or at least appeared to be other than me, such that the question could even be posed whether or not they belong to me? What is the status of the question, such that it can postulate a distinction be- tween the I who asks and the bodily me, as it were, that it interrogates, and so performs grammatically precisely what it seeks to show cannot be performed?
Indeed, Descartes begins to ask a set of questions that perform what they claim cannot be performed: "how can I deny that these hands and this body are mine? " is one of them, and it is a strange, paraliptical question because he does give us the graphic contours of such a doubt, and so shows that such a doubt is possible. This is, of course, not to say that the doubt is finally sustainable, or that no indubitability emerges to put an end to such doubt. For Descartes to claim that the body is the basis of indubitability, as he does, is a strange consequence, if only because it appears to appeal to an empiricism that sustains an uneasy compatibility with the theological project at hand. These ex- amples also seem to relate to the problem of clothing, knowing that one is clothed, for he claims to be sure that he was clothed in his night- gown next to the fire.
The surety of this claim is followed by a series of speculations, how- ever, ones that he imagines others might make, but that, in his imagin- ing, he himself makes: indeed, the writing becomes the occasion to posit and adopt narrative perspectives on himself that he claims not to be his own, but that, in adopting, are his own in the very mode of their projection and displacement. The other who appears is thus the "I" who, in paranoia, is circuited and deflected through alterity: what of those who think they are clothed in purple, but are really without
How Can I Deny . . . ? 261
262 Judith Butler
covering, those others who are like me who think they are clothed, but whose thinking turns out to be an ungrounded imagining. Descartes, after all, is the one who is actively imagining others as nude, implying but not pursuing the implication that they might well think of him as nude as well. But why? Of course, he wants to get beneath the layers that cover the body, but this very occasion of radical exposure toward which The Meditations move is precisely what threatens him with a hallucinatory loss of self-certainty.
Indeed, it appears that the certainty he seeks of the body leads him into a proliferation of doubts. He is sure that he sits there clothed: his perspective, as sense perception and not pure intellection, is in that sense clothed or cloaked; thus this certainty depends on a certain dis- simulation. The nudity he attributes to the hallucinatory certainty of others constantly threatens to return to him, to become his own hallu- cinatory certainty. Indeed, precisely as a sign of radical certainty, that nudity undermines his certainty. If he is clothed, he is certain of what is true, but if he is not, then the truth has been exposed, the body without dissimulation, which leads to the paradoxical conclusion that only if he is deluded about being clothed can his own utterances be taken as indubitable, in which case hallucination and certainty are no longer radically distinguishable from one another.
This is not any nude body, but one that belongs to someone who is deluded about his own nudity, one whom others see in his nudity and his delusion. And this is not simply any "one" with some charactero- logical singularity, but a "one" who is produced precisely by the heuris- tic of doubt. This is one who calls the reality of his body into question only to suffer the hallucinatory spectrality of his act. When he sees oth- ers in such a state, nude and thinking themselves clothed, he knows them to be deluded, and so if others were to see him in such a state, they would know him to be deluded as well; thus, the exposure of his body would be the occasion for a loss of self-certainty. Thus, the insis- tence on the exposed body as an ultimate and indubitable fact in turn exposes the hallucinations of the one who is nude, nude and hallu- cinating that he or she is fully clothed. This figure of the indubitable body, one that only the mad might doubt, is made to represent the limit case of the res extensa, a body that cannot be doubted but that, com- prised of the senses, will be held to be detachable from the soul and its quest for certainty.
If one were to imagine the body instead as an earthenware head or made of glass, as Descartes puts it, one would be doubting what is
true. But notice that here the very act of doubting seems bound up with the possibility of figural substitutions, ones in which the living body is made synonomous with its artifactual simulation or, indeed, with glass, a figure for transparency itself. If the body is certain as res exten- sa, what is to distinguish the human body as res extensa from other such instances of substance? If it must, by definition, be separable from the soul, what is to guarantee its humanity? Apparently, nothing can or does.
After all, Descartes not only reports that others perform such hallu- cinations, the report constitutes the textualization of the hallucination; his writings perform them for us, through an alienation of perspective that is and is not exclusively his own. Thus, he conjures such possibili- ties precisely at the moment in which he also renounces such possibili- ties as mad, raising the question, is there a difference between the kind of conjuring that is a constitutive part of the meditative method, and those hallucinations that the method is supposed to refute? He re- marks: "I should not be any the less insane were I to follow examples so extravagant [si je me reglais sur leurs exemples]. " But what if he has already just ruled himself on these examples, followed these examples, asked us to follow them, in the sense that to write them is to follow them, and we are clearly following them as well in reading him as we do. The doubt he wants to overcome can only be reenacted within the treatise, which produces the textual occasion for an identification with those from whom he seeks to differentiate himself. These are his hands, no? but where are the hands that write the text itself, and is it not the case that they never actually show themselves as we read the marks that they leave? Can the text ever furnish a certain sense of the hands that write the text, or does the writing eclipse the hands that make it possible, such that the marks on the page erase the bodily ori- gins from which they apparently emerge, and to emerge as tattered and ontologically suspended remains? Is this not the predicament of all writing in relation to its bodily origins? There is no writing without the body, but no body fully appears along with the writing that it pro- duces. Where is the trace of Descartes's body in the text? Does it not resurface precisely as the figure of its own dubitability, a writing that must, as it were, make the body strange, if not hallucinatory, whose condition is an alienation of bodily perspective in a textual circuitry from which it cannot be delivered or returned? After all, the text quite literally leaves the authorial body behind, and yet there one is, on the page, strange to oneself.
How Can I Deny . . . ? 263
264 Judith Butler
At the end of Meditation I, he resolves to suppose that God is not good nor the fountain of truth, but some evil genius, that external things are illusions and dreams and, accordingly, he writes, "I shall consider myself as having no hands, no eyes, nor any senses, yet falsely believing myself to possess all these things. " It would seem, then, that the task of the Meditation is to overcome this doubt in his own body, but it is that doubt that he also seeks to radicalize. After all, it is Descartes's ultimate project to understand himself as a soul, as a res cogitans and not as a body; in this way, he seeks to establish the ulti- mate dubitability of the body and so to ally himself with those who dream and hallucinate when they take the body to be the basis of cer- tain knowledge. Thus, his effort to establish radical self-certainty as a rational being leads within the text to an identification with the irra- tional. Indeed, such dreams and hallucinations must be illimitable if he is to understand that certainty of himself as a thinking being will never be furnished by the body.
He writes that "the knowledge of myself does not depend on things not yet known to me. " And it does not depend on "things that are feigned or imagined by my imagination [celles qui sont feintes et inven- te? es par l'imagination]" (42). 3 The Latin term--effingo--can mean, ambiguously, "to form an image," but also, "to make a fact," which means that the knowledge of himself does not depend on forming an image or making a fact. Inadvertently, Descartes introduces an equivo- cation between an imagining of what is not a fact and an imagining or making of what is a fact. Has the same imagining wandered across the divide between delusion and reality such that it is at once what Descartes must exclude as the basis of self-knowledge and what he also must accommodate?
If knowledge does not depend on things that are feigned or imag- ined or facts that are made, then on what does it depend? And does his dismissal of imagining, invention, and factual making not undermine the very procedure of doubt that he uses to gauge the falsifiability of his theses? Indeed, at another moment in the text, he insists that imagi- nation, even invention, serves a cognitive function, and that it can be used as the basis for making inferences about the indubitability of sub- stance itself: "I would invent, in effect, when I am imagining some- thing, since imagining is nothing other than contemplating the figure or image of a corporeal thing. "4
The imagination is nothing other than the contemplation of the fig- ure or image of a corporeal thing. The proposition foreshadows the
claims that Husserl will make about the intentionality of the act of imagining, suggesting that objects appear to the imagination in some specific modality of their essence. If this is so, then the imagination does not merely invent bodies, but its inventiveness is also a form of referentiality, that is, of contemplating the figure or image of bodies in their essential possibility. The sense in which the imagination is inven- tive is not that it produces bodies where there were none. Just as refer- ential suggestion of the term effingo complicates the problem, tying imagining to fact making, so Descartes's notion of the image as relay- ing the object in some specific way ties imagining to objects of percep- tion, but in both cases the link is made not conceptually, but through a semantic equivocation. Indeed, if the method of doubt involves sup- posing or positing as true a set of conditions that he then seeks to doubt, it involves conjecturing what is counterintuitive, and so central- ly engages the imagination.
"Je supposerai"--I suppose, I will suppose, I would suppose--this is the strange way that Descartes renders his doubt in language, where the term supposer carries the referential ambiguity that plagues his dis- cussion. After all, supposer means to take for granted, to accept as a premise, but also to postulate or posit, to make or to produce. If the "I" is not a corporeal thing, then it cannot be imagined.
When he writes "I suppose," he offers appositions that suggest its interchangeability with the following formulations: I persuade myself, I posit, I think, I believe. Then the object of that supposing and think- ing takes the form of a different fiction than the one he has just per- formed: what he supposes or believes is "that body, figure, extension . . . are nothing but fictions of my own spirit. " Here there appears to be a doubling of the fictional going on, for he is supposing that the body, among other things, is a fiction of his own mind, but is that supposing not itself a fictionalizing of sorts? If so, is he then producing a fiction in which his body is the creation of a fiction? Does the method not allego- rize the very problem of fictive making that he seeks to understand and dispute, and can he understand this fictive making if he continues to ask the question within the terms of the fiction from which he also seeks to escape?
Supposing, self-persuasion, thinking, believing, work by way of posit- ing or, indeed, fabulating, but what is it that is fabulated? If the body is a fiction of one's own spirit, then this suggests that it is made or com- posed of one's own spirit. Thus, to posit is not merely to conjecture a false world or to make one up, but to invent and refer at the same
How Can I Deny . . . ? 265
266 Judith Butler
moment, thus confounding the possibility of a strict distinction be- tween the two. In this way, "the fictions of the spirit" for Descartes are not in opposition to the acts of thinking or persuasion, but the very means by which they operate. "Positing" is a fiction of the spirit which is not for that reason false or without referentiality. To deny the fictive aspect of positing or supposing is to posit the denial, and in that sense to reiterate the way that the fictive is implicated in the very act of posit- ing. The very means by which Descartes seeks to falsify false belief in- volves a positing or fictionalizing that, homeopathically, recontracts the very illness it seeks to cure. If the falsification of the untrue must take place through a counterfactual positing, which is itself a form of fiction, then falsification reintroduces fiction at the very moment in which it seeks to refute it. Of course, if we could establish that what is fictional in supposing is not the same as what is fictional in what is being supposed, then we would avoid this contradiction, but Descartes does not offer us any way of doing precisely that.
I hope that I have begun to show that, in imagining the body, Des- cartes is at once referring to the body through an image or figure--his words--and conjuring or inventing that body at the same time, and that the terms he uses to describe this act of supposing or imagining carry that important double meaning. Hence, for Descartes, the lan- guage in which the body is conjectured does not quite imply that the body is nothing other than an effect of language; it means that conjec- turing and supposing have to be understood as fictional exercises that are nevertheless not devoid of referentiality.
When we consider Descartes's efforts to think the mind apart from the body, we see that he cannot help but use certain bodily figures in describing that mind. The effort to excise the body fails because the body returns, spectrally, as a figural dimension of the text. For in- stance, Descartes refers to God as one who inscribes or engraves on his soul, when he writes, for instance, that he will never forget to refrain from judgment of what he does not clearly and distinctly understand "simply by [God's] engraving deeply in my memory the resolution never to form a judgment on" such matters. Descartes's mind is here figured as a slate or a blank page of sorts, and God is figured as an en- graver. "God deeply engrave(s) [grave? ] a resolution in memory not to judge. "
Similarly, Descartes appears to imprint a thought on his memory in the same way that God engraves a resolution on the will: he refers to his own human and frail capacity to "forcibly impress [imprimer]" a
thought on his memory, and so help in the process of building up a new memory where the old one had been destroyed. 5 Meditation now appears as a particular kind of action, one that, he claims, must be re- peated, and that has as its goal the forcible imprinting (imprimer) of this same thought on the memory, an imprinting that is as apparently forceful as God's engraving is profound: indeed, both convey a certain formative violence, a rupture of surface, as the effect of writing.
Indeed, "the engraving" is thus the means by which God's will is transferred to Descartes, a peculiar form of transitivity that the trope of writing helps to effect. His memory becomes the object in which God engraves a resolution, as if Descartes's memory were a page, a surface, an extended substance. But this is clearly a problem, since the mind is supposed to be, as we know, res cogitans rather than res exten- sa, but is figured here precisely as an extended surface and substance. Hence, the memory in some ways becomes figured as a kind of body, extended substance and surface, and we might well read here the resur- facing of the lost and repudiated body within the text of Descartes, one on which God now so profoundly engraves a resolution; indeed, the metaphorical stage is now set for Kafka's "In the Penal Colony. "
Indeed, it makes sense to ask whether the writing of The Meditations is precisely what guarantees this soldering of the memory to the will. The extended writing of The Meditations acts to imprint a new knowl- edge on his memory. To the extent that the page substitutes for memo- ry, or becomes the figure through which memory is understood, then does that figure have philosophical consequences, namely, that intro- spection as method succeeds only to the extent that it is performed in writing on the page? Is writing not precisely the effort to solder a new memory to the will, and if so, then does it not require the very material surface and, indeed, the materiality of language itself that are hardly compatible with what Descartes seeks to separate from the introspec- tive act of the mind? And does this writing not implicitly require the hand of the one who engraves and the body as surface on which to write, dispersing bodily figures throughout the explanation of the soul?
If it seems that Descartes's text cannot but figure the body, that it does not reduce the body to its figuration, and if that figuration turns out to be referential, that does not mean that the referent can somehow be extracted from its figuration. The act by which the body is supposed is precisely the act that posits and suspends the ontological status of the body, an act that does not create or form that body unilaterally (and thereby not an act in the service of linguisticism or linguistic monism),
How Can I Deny . . . ? 267
268 Judith Butler
but one that posits and figures, one for which positing and figuring are not finally distinguishable.
If there is no act of positing that does not become implicated in figu- ration, then it follows that the heuristic of doubt not only entails figura- tion, but works fundamentally through the figures that compromise its own epistemological aspirations. But this conclusion is immediately impaired by another, namely, that the figuration of the body meets its necessary limit in a materiality that cannot finally be captured by the figure. Here is where proceeding by way of both grammar and figura- tion falters, though it is a telling faltering. If the body is not reducible to its figuration or, indeed, its conceptualization, and it cannot be said to be a mere effect of discourse, then what finally is it? The question stands, but just because there is a grammar of the question in which the ontological status of the body is posed does not mean that the an- swer, if there is one, can be accommodated within the grammatical terms that await that answer. In this case, the posability of the question does not imply its answerability within the terms in which it is posed. The body escapes the terms of the question by which it is approached. And even to make such a formulaic claim, relying on "The body" as the subject-noun of the sentence, domesticates precisely what it seeks to unleash. Indeed, the grammar itself exposes the limits of its own mimetic conceit, asserting a reality that is of necessity distorted through the terms of the assertion, a reality that can only appear, as it were, through distortion. 6
Descartes makes this point perhaps unwittingly as he proceeds to dismember his own body in the course of his written meditation. We might rush in to say that this "dismemberment" is merely figural, but perhaps, Paul de Man suggests, it marks the very limits of figuration-- its uncanny limits. Indeed, de Man makes his point in reference to Kant, centering on the problem that emerges in his third Critique, where the need for a bridge between conceptual and empirical dis- courses arises. He argues in favor of a "materiality" that eludes both kinds, and that also marks the conditions and limits of figuration itself.
The aesthetic is introduced as a "phenomenalized, empirically mani- fest principle of cognition on whose existence the possibility of such an articulation depends" (79). But, de Man notes, this articulation "de- pends on a linguistic structure (language as a performative as well as a cognitive system) that is not itself accessible to the powers of transcen- dental philosophy. "
Although he has earlier insisted that the relationship between the
transcendental and the empirical depends on a widening notion of language as both tropological and performative, he makes clear that what he is approaching is that which cannot be accounted for by ei- ther the performative or the tropological dimensions of language, and that this linguistic structure which is supposed to bridge the gap be- tween the conceptual and empirical discourses will be instead a mode of disarticulation.
Isolating what is prior to figuration and cognition, de Man concen- trates on the use of the apparent figure of the Augenschein, which is the eye itself, or rather, pure vision or ocularity. We broach here that which is, strictly speaking, neither figurable nor cognizable. It cannot be called literal, he tells us (99), for that would imply its possible con- version into figuration or symbolization. Materiality will be precisely that which is convertible into neither figuration nor cognition. This materiality characterizes an aesthetic vision in its irreducibility. The "eye," he writes, is here its own agent, and not the specular echo of the sun. The trope of the "sea," he writes, functions similarly; although Kant calls it "a mirror," it reflects nothing. And it seems that, for de Man, at this textual instance, the failure of these figures to reflect or to act mimetically disqualifies them as figures. This is no doubt a strange requirement to set upon figures, and I doubt that it is one that he has consistently applied. At any rate, in both cases, the effect of these fig- ures is that they fail to perform their figural function and thus relapse into the material condition of figuration, one that is itself, strictly speaking, not convertible into any figure and not understood by its op- posite, the literal, and not, strictly speaking, even a condition, since this materiality does not support figuration, but exercises a corrosive effect on all figuration. Whereas the phenomenality of the aesthetic rests on an adequate representation, the materiality of aesthetic vision is a pure materiality that makes no reference to adequate representation.
Toward the end of the essay, de Man turns to the chapter titled "The Architectonics of Pure Reason" in the third Critique in which he refers to the organic unity of systems, and this unity is conceived through "the recurring metaphor of the body, as a totality of limbs and parts. " Because the aesthetic will involve the suspension of all refer- ence to organic purposiveness, Kant admonishes that "we must not re- gard as the determining grounds of our judgment the concepts of the purposes which all our limbs serve . . . and we must not allow this unity of purpose to influence our aesthetic judgment. "
If aesthetic judgment is to be separated from the understanding of
How Can I Deny . . . ? 269
270 Judith Butler
natural unities of purpose, and there is an aesthetic judgment of the body, then it will be precisely of the limbs as severed from the unity of purposes (natural) that the body is. Assuming that this unity of pur- pose is expressed by the notion of substance, and that substance is understood as torso, it would appear that the aesthetic vision of the body would be one of dismemberment wherein the limbs are separated from the torso or the substance of the body. Thus, de Man writes, "we must, in other words, disarticulate, mutilate the body . . . : "we must consider the limbs . . . severed from any purpose or use. "
He writes not only in the imperative, but identifies disarticulation with mutilation, and offers mutilate itself as a transitive verb--we must mutilate--although the following sentence amplifies this meaning by claiming that we must only "consider" the limbs as severed. Inter- estingly, the very formulation that gives us what is prior to figuration and cognition and, indeed, the performative, is one that figures our own "seeing" as a mutilating activity that works on the body. Indeed, de Man makes his pedagogical point by likening this dismembered body to the dismemberment of language. He writes: "To the dismem- berment of the body corresponds a dismemberment of language, as meaning producing tropes are replaced by the fragmentation of sen- tences and propositions into discrete words, or the fragmentation of words into syllables or finally letters" (113). The use of "corresponds," however, in this last sentence seems to recall the very model of adequa- tion from which materiality as dismemberment is supposed to differ. Here de Man is seeking to trace the relapse of a trope into the materi- ality of the letter, a materiality that grounds and exceeds the trope and that is never exhaustively convertible into the trope itself: the condi- tion of the trope, but also the destiny of its disarticulation.
But why is this point about language introduced through a compari- son or, indeed, a correspondence with the body? And what is the rela- tion between materiality understood as bodily dismemberment and the fragmentation of words into letters and the so-called materiality of aes- thetic vision? In what sense does the dismemberment of the body, which is one that takes place in or for vision, not precisely a figurative operation? If seeing effects this dismemberment, then seeing is figured as a performative, and both the figural and performative dimensions of language remain at work in the description of this materiality, a de- scription that may well have to be fully catachrestic to make any sense at all. Indeed, if the body in pieces is neither figurative nor literal, but material, then it would still follow that the only way to convey that
materiality is precisely through catachresis, as de Man actually does, and so through a figure. If the body is not literally dismembered, though the language figures that as its effect, in what sense is it dismembered? And if dismemberment is but a sign of a prefigural materiality, then that materiality has been converted into a trope through the very ex- ample that is said to illustrate that nonconvertibility. A figure can func- tion as a substitution for that which is fundamentally irrecoverable within or by the figure itself: indeed, this is perhaps where Benjamin on allegory would, if he could, if I would let him, make his eery return. Such a figure is, however, no less a figure than a mimetic one, or one whose terms can be related through means of adequation. So is this body figurable or not? It depends, I would suggest, on how one ap- proaches the question of figurality. If Descartes's body is not literally dismembered, though the language figures that as its effect, in what sense is it still dismembered? And if dismemberment is but a sign of a prefigural materiality, then that materiality has been converted into a trope through the very example that is said to illustrate that non- convertibility. The body does not, then, imply the destruction of figu- rality if only because a figure can function as a substitution for that which is fundamentally irrecoverable within or by the figure itself. 7 Such a figure is, however, no less a figure than a mimetic one, and a fig- ure need not be mimetic to sustain its status as figural.
Clearly, though, the final question here must be to consider this strange separation of the limbs from the body, this repeated scene of castration, the one that Descartes enacts through the grammar that conditions the question he poses of his body in which he is already sepa- rated from that which he calls into question, a separation at the level of grammar that prepares the philosophical question itself, in which the hand that writes the doubt and the hand that is doubted--is it mine? -- is at once the hand that is left behind as the writing emerges in, we might say, its dismembering effect. 8
There is no doubt a hand that writes Descartes's text, and a hand figured within that text as appearing at a distance from the one who looks upon it and asks after its reality. The hand is reflexively spectral- ized in the course of the writing it performs. It undoes its reality pre- cisely at the moment in which it acts or, rather, becomes undone pre- cisely by the traces of the act of writing it performs. If the body is what inaugurates the process of its own spectralization through writing, then it is and is not determined by the discourse it produces. If there is a materiality of the body that escapes from the figures it conditions and
How Can I Deny . . . ? 271
272 Judith Butler
by which it is corroded and haunted, then this body is neither a surface nor a substance, but the linguistic occasion of the body's separation from itself, one that eludes its capture by the figure it compels.
NOTES
This essay was first presented as an invited lecture at the American Philosophical Association Meetings in December 1987 in Philadelphia. It was re-presented in revised version for the "Culture and Materiality" conference at the University of California at Davis in April 1998, and appeared in Qui Parle 11: 1 (1997).
1. Excellent work reconsidering the relationship of language and materiality in sexual difference is currently being done by Charles Shephardson, Debra Keates, and Katherine Rudolph.
2. "Il me fallait entreprendre se? rieusement une fois en ma vie de me de? faire de toutes les opinions que j'avais rec?