fuck yeah theorists

… what constitutes the fixity of the body, its contours, its movements, will be fully material, but materiality will be rethought as the effect of power, as power’s most productive effect. And there will be no way to understand “gender” as a cultural construct which is imposed upon the surface of matter, understood either as “the body” or its given sex. Rather, once “sex” itself is understood in its normativity, the materiality of the body will not be thinkable apart from the materialization of that regulatory norm. “Sex” is, thus, not simply what one has, or a static description of what one is: it will be one of the norms by which the “one” becomes viable at all, that which qualifies a body for life within the domain of cultural intelligibility.

the ideological conflation of the intimate with the forms of the normal world locates power and the political in the hegemony of true feeling, a notion of right affect as a nonideological measure of truth. This idea of right affect as higher reason is central to the long history of liberalism, too, as any student of sentimental reform and imperialist empathy knows. This is why any political thought that confronts overcoming structural discriminations that are experienced as visceral aversions must, as Joan Copjec writes in an analogous context, become ‘literate in desire’.

Judith Butler on Peace

The specificity of the language is sometimes necessary because quite often the subjects being discussed are notoriously complicated, frighteningly dangerous and self-revelatory. Let me assure you that when our feminist scholars, philosophers, speculators and thinkers use this language they’re not always talking about a distanced subject but about their specific lives. The sex act they may in fact have committed, enjoyed, desired or refused. They are standing naked, and the only thing holding them up, in some cases, is that complicated language.

“Try standing at a party of queer friends and charting all the histories, sexual and nonsexual, among the people in the room. (In some circles this is a common party sport already). You will realize that only a fine and rapidly shifting line separates sexual culture from many other relations of durability and care. The impoverished vocabulary of straight culture tells us that people should either be husbands and wives or (nonsexual) friends. Marriage marks that line. It is not the way many queers live. If there is such a thing as a gay way of life, it consists in these relations, a welter of intimacies outside the framework of professions and institutions and ordinary social obligations … Queers should be insisting on teaching these lessons”.

“When you removed the gag that was keeping these black mouths shut, what were you hoping for? That they would sing your praises?”

But it is also true that ghosts are never innocent: the unhallowed dead of the modern project drag in the pathos of their loss and the violence of the force that made them, their sheets and chains. To be haunted and to write from that location, to take on the condition of what you study, is not a methodology or a consciousness you can simply adopt or adapt as a set of rules or an identity; it produces its own insights and blindnesses. Following the ghosts is about making a contact that changes you and refashions the social relations in which you are located. It is about putting life back in where only a vague memory of a bare trace was visible to those who bothered to look. It is sometimes about writing ghost stories, stories that not only repair representational mistakes, but also strive to understand the conditions under which memory was produced in the first place, toward a countermemory, for the future.

…knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting.

Deconstruction, if one wants a formula, is among other things, a persistent critique of what one cannot not want.

murderandmetonymy:

The word police normally evokes what is known as the petty police, the truncheon blows of the forces of law and order and the inquisitions of the secret police. But this narrow definition may be deemed contingent. Michel Foucault has shown that, as a mode of government, the police described by writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries covered everything relating to ‘man’ and his ‘happiness.’ The petty police is just a particular form of a more general order that arranges that tangible reality in which bodies are distributed in community. It is the weakness and not the strength of this order in certain states that inflates the petty police to the point of putting it in charges of the whole set of police functions. The evolution of Western societies reveals a contrario that the policeman is one element in a social mechanism linking medicine, welfare, and culture. The policeman is destined to play the role of consultant and organizer as much as agent of public law and order, and no doubt the name itself will one day change, caught up as it will be in the process of euphemization through which our societies try to promote the image, at least, of all traditionally despised functions… [In spite of their general shittiness,] [t]he police can procure all sorts of good, and one kind of police may be infinitely preferable to another. This does not change the nature of the police, which is what we are exclusively dealing with here. The regime of public opinion as gauged by the poll and of the unending exhibition of the real is today the normal form the police in Western societies takes. Whether the police is sweet and kind does not make it any less the opposite of politics.

The main topic I’d like to talk about today, however, is language and violence. In our common sense, we often speak as if violence and language were mutually exclusive. We think one begins where the other ends: when people stop talking, they start fighting, when they stop fighting they start talking. We see violence and words, violence and language, in complementary distribution. We also think of violence as often that which is beyond language. People often describe war as being beyond words. But violence actually is almost always accompanied by language. One of the reasons why language cannot grasp violence, I think, is that it is usually embedded in it. When violence occurs, it seems to rely much of the time on a discursive accompaniment that assigns the violence its meaning. Such verbal framing marks the social character of violence. Anthropologists say that aggression is biological, violence is social. It seems to me that very often the accompanying language gives violence its social meaning, gives it its social character. So even though violence might erupt when dialogue stops, language is usually there as an accompaniment to violence. This is also true in the case of torture. Elaine Scarry’s famous book, The Body in Pain, describes torture as the thing beyond language, that which breaks past the possibility of language. But in fact, as testimonial texts reveal, torture is almost always accompanied by a verbal commentary that assigns it a social or interpersonal meaning. For example, torture may be accompanied by interrogation, and the relation between them works both ways. Torture can be an instrument for interrogation, but it’s just as common I believe that interrogation is the alibi or the pretext for cruelty.

hystericalblackness: