Samuel A. Chambers

‘An Incalculable Effect’ : Subversions of Heteronormativity

The writings of Judith Butler are now canonised in the fields of feminist and queer theory, yet her contribution to politics and her role in the field of political theory remain uncertain. I argue, perhaps uncontroversially, that Butlers is a politics of subversion; I also contend, perhaps more contentiously, that Butlers understanding of subversion only takes clear shape in light of her implicit theory of heteronormativity. Butlers work calls for the subversion of heteronormativity; in so doing her writings both illuminate the general problem of normativity for politics and offer a robust response to that problem. Butler resists the tendency to treat norms as merely agreed-upon standards, and she rebuts those easy dismissals of theorists who would take seriously the power of norms thought in terms of normativity and normalisation. Butlers contribution to political theory emerges in the form of her painstaking unfolding of subversion. This unfolding produces an account of the politics of norms that is needed desperately by both political theory and politics. Thus, I conclude that political theory cannot afford to ignore either the theory of heteronormativity or the politics of its subversion.

Jacques Rancière and the problem of pure politics

Over the past decade, Jacques Rancière’s writings have increasingly provoked and inspired political theorists who wish to avoid both the abstraction of so-called normative theories and the philosophical platitudes of so-called postmodernism. Rancière offers a new and unique definition of politics, la politique, as that which opposes, thwarts and interrupts what Rancière calls the police order, la police — a term that encapsulates most of what we normally think of as politics (the actions of bureaucracies, parliaments, and courts). Interpreters have been tempted to read Rancière as proffering a formally pure conception of politics, wherein politics is ultimately separate from and in utter opposition to all police orders. Here I provide a different account of Rancière’s thinking of politics: for Rancière politics goes on within police orders and for this reason he strongly rejects the very idea of a pure politics. Politics is precisely that which could never be pure; politics is an act of impurity, a process that resists purification. In carefully delineating the politique—police relation I show that the terms of Rancière’s political writings are multiple and multiplied. Rancière consistently undermines any effort to render politics pure, and therein lies his potential contribution to contemporary political theory.

Working on the Democratic Imagination and the Limits of Deliberative Democracy

Now is not a period of “normal science” for the field of political theory, whatever we (or Kuhn 1970) might mean by that phrase. Many political theorists will today be found toiling in fields that ostensibly belong to other disciplines, and some of the best work done “in” political theory proves interdisciplinary by its very nature. The essays in this symposium offer a vibrant cross-section of what one might then call the “new” political theory: they exemplify the diversity of writing that currently marks the field of political theory. They are impressively broad in scope yet powerfully concrete in their implications. In their diversity, they show us something absolutely crucial about the practice of political theory today. But the pieces collected here also prove to be marginal in a number of important senses. They live and breathe “at the edge” of political theory in those spaces where they have easier access to other fields. They run the risk of further marginalization by posing unexpected questions and by suggesting unconventional responses. At their core lies a refusal of the standard themes and the typical problems of political theory. They come together to find common ground only from their respective margins of the subfield. Thus, they share the project of not only operating at those margins but also working on them. Perhaps this is precisely the type of work that the “new” political theory must do today. In this essay I argue that such a project always proves to be a labor of imagination. Imagination must be considered here neither as flight of fancy, nor disregard of reality; imagination cannot be reduced to representation. The power of imagination is a synthetic power of creation and of reconstruction—an ability to combine the uncombinable, to surpass binaries without merely collapsing them, to fashion something new. “Working on the democratic imagination” means, then, to think the limits (and their transgression) of democratic theory and of democracy as well.

Normative Violence after 9/11: Rereading the Politics of Gender Trouble *

Today, both politicians and the media echo the refrain that the world has changed fundamentally since 9/11. This shift involves the tacit sense that the world is more violent, as 9/11 is conceived as an act of pure violence. This article works against the grain of such received wisdom, but not by trying to refute it empirically. Instead, the article articulates and elucidates the latent concept of “normative violence” lodged within the writings of Judith Butler. Normative violence names not a type of violence that is somehow “normative,” but the violence of norms. Further, normative violence should be understood as a primary form of violence, because it both facilitates typical, physical violence and simultaneously renders such violence invisible. The article puts the concept of normative violence to work for two purposes: it rereads the politics of Butlers Gender Trouble and it rethinks our notion of violence after 9/11. The article thereby makes a case for Butlers contribution to political theory while it seeks to make sense of our post-9/11 predicament.

Kinship Trouble: Antigone's Claim and the Politics of Heteronormativity

Heteronormativity has recently emerged as a fully shaped and well theorized concept in numerous fields, and it proves central to sexual politics and the politics of sexuality. In Antigones Claim (2000), Judith Butler explores the heteronormativity of kinship as structured by the state, and she links this language of kinship to the incest taboo. This article focuses on Butlers politicization of kinship structures in her reading of the figure of Antigone. Because she sees the incest taboo as a social force that maintains heteronormativity by producing a particular configuration of the family, Butler advances the critique of heteronormativity. She does this through both her introduction and explication of the concept of (un)intelligibility and her explicit attention to the “incest born” person. The unintelligibility of the incest-born demands a thoroughgoing reconsideration of the liberal framework of tolerance: The unintelligible cannot be tolerated because they have not even been granted access to the category of the human. By asking us to reconsider kinship outside the defining and dominant terms of heteronormativity and the incest taboo, Butler promotes a distinct conception of politics. She thereby makes a noteworthy contribution to the political project of undoing gender hierarchy.

Jacques Ranciere's Lesson on the Lesson.

Abstract This article examines the significance of Jacques Rancière’s work on pedagogy, and argues that to make sense of Rancière’s ‘lesson on the lesson’ one must do more but also less than merely explicate Rancière’s texts. It steadfastly refuses to draw out the lessons of Rancière’s writings in the manner of a series of morals, precepts or rules. Rather, it is committed to thinking through the ‘lessons’ of Rancière in another sense. Above all, Rancière wants to ‘teach’ his readers something absolutely crucial about teaching. In making this claim the article emphasizes the extent to which Rancière advocates an utterly radical pedagogy, one that completely reconceives all the central elements of ‘schooling’, including teacher, student, intelligence and knowledge. Rancière thinks it possible to teach without knowing; he believes that the best schoolmasters can operate not on the assumption of their expertise, but on the equality of intelligence; and this means ultimately that Rancière contends that we can ‘teach what we do not know’. The best schoolmasters are ignorant schoolmasters. Rancière’s radical pedagogy depends upon, just as it consistently advances, a thoroughgoing resistance to a certain form of epistemological and ontological mastery. The rejection of mastery—of schoolmasters who would know it all, and convey this knowing to their students—forms the very backbone of all of Rancière’s writings and critical investigations. This is the chief reason why Rancière is, in a way, always talking about pedagogy, even when his subject matter appears to be something else entirely.

FOUCAULT'S EVASIVE MANEUVERS: Nietzsche, interpretation, critique

Michel FoucaultÕs essays, books, and interviews (not to mention his personal life and political activism) would seem to raise the need for some sort of general interpretation of his work.1 Indeed, the publication of more and more of FoucaultÕs writings since his death, the numerous collected essay projects, and the burgeoning business of ÒFoucault biographyÓ attest to a tendency to fill this need. The compulsion to play the intellectual historian in reading Foucault Ð to locate and outline influences, to find the pattern into which an authorÕs works fit Ð proves particularly strong among those who have treated the relation of Foucault to Nietzsche. In particular, attempts to place Foucault within the history of thought often end up tracing FoucaultÕs position back to Nietzsche. By resting the interpretation of Foucault upon his ÒNietzscheanism,Ó this kind of intellectual historiography functions as an enabling device for the strongest and most compelling criticisms of Foucault; after all, most of these accounts take NietzscheÕs supposed skeptical relativism as a given, so if Foucault turns out to be a Nietzschean he also turns out to be a cryptonormativist at best, a nihilist at worst. No sensitive reader of Foucault attempts to reject all of his insights, but many, especially political theorists, tend to turn sharply away from Foucault precisely as Foucault himself turns toward Nietzsche. As JŸrgen Habermas, possibly FoucaultÕs best critic, puts it: Òonly in the context of his interpretation of Nietzsche does Foucault yield to the familiar melody of professing irrationalism.Ó2 I will not produce yet another defense of Foucault against the common conclusion that his work lacks normative foundations Ð a project carried out by numerous authors in various fields, and one which is likely to have run its course by now. If it has not been Òresolved,Ó the normative foundations debate has at least reached a certain stalemate, with the two sides at an impasse over the required epistemological foundations for critique. Instead, this essay provides a closer reading of Foucault that calls into question both the reduction of his thought to Nietzscheanism and the very practice of interpretation by which his thought is so reduced. The stakes for such a challenge to interpretation prove much higher than they might at first appear. Through their overt challenges to categories such as Òwork,Ó Òcommentary,Ó Òauthorfunction,Ó and ÒoeuvreÓ FoucaultÕs writings urge their readers to resist the tendency to take up the very practice of general interpretation that has been used so frequently against Foucault. Foucault engages in a set of maneuvers that evade the attempt to pin him down in this way; he thus challenges precisely the rules of the game of the intellectual historian to which his critics commonly subject him. This challenge to inter-

Books in Review: The Poetics of Political Thinking, by Davide Panagia. London and Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. 166 pp.

enhances one’s sense of the depth and complexity of Kant’s thinking in ways that have previously gone unseen, and simultaneously raises our suspicions concerning an insidious project lurking in the fibers of Kant’s moral and political work that is desperately in need of more critical reflection. To give itself the moral law, it appears that Kant’s rational subject must receive and cultivate repeated doses of humiliation that are disturbing from the vantage point of what may be most admirable about this subject’s achievements. This book offers a host of fresh questions that have the potential to spur rich paths of reflection among many different kinds of readers. To be sure, it will also likely provoke questions concerning its own interventions. For example, while Saurette’s engagements with Habermas and Taylor are often nuanced and insightful, at times they may offer somewhat cramped critical readings, the problems of which Saurette then seeks to move beyond by offering a development of each thinker’s work that may actually be closer to its spirit in the first place. Again, though Saurette does not claim to be “above the fray,” his critical work nevertheless does not develop its own ethical vantage point in a manner that might render it questionable and vulnerable to the positions he criticizes (as well as others). At the end of his book Saurette discloses the sensibility that undergirds his project: “we need to cultivate ethical and political approaches that interrogate and challenge all [sounds imperative] philosophical strategies by which the politics of humiliation and imperialism reproduce and justify themselves” (p.249). Yet one wants to hear more concerning how Saurette would have us engender such a position, and what practices, relationships, disciplines, powers, exclusions, and habits it might require, and what its relation may or may not be to the imperative structures of which he is critical. That said, Saurette’s first book is outstanding. When his next book is published—in which I suspect he will address some of these questions—I hope to be among the first to read it.

74.95 (cloth),

The following essays were initially written for a roundtable in celebration of Joel’s work that was convened at the Annual Meeting of the Western Political Science Association in 2012.We set out to speak about the wide range of commitments and concerns that shaped Joel’s career as an activist-teacher-scholar: anarchism, the abolition of whiteness, the virtues of fanaticism, the dangers of corporate capitalism, and the necessity and joys of grass-roots action. Joel set so many forces in motion that what we hoped to accomplish by our engagement was not merely to look back in remembrance but to keep moving forward. Yet very few, if any, of us feel equal to the example that Joel set. From the beginning of his academic career at the University of Minnesota in 1991, Joel integrated political activism with intellectual inquiry. This is not to say that he bent ideas to serve political ends but that he posed questions to the history of political thought that would bring insights to his politics. Early on, that politics was anarchism and his political theory interlocutor was Hannah Arendt. A seminar that he took with me inspired him to a critical engagement with Arendt’s “council democracies” and the revolutionary committees of the Spanish anarchists. It first took shape as a seminar paper but Joel lost no time in asking me what it would take to develop it for publication. He was characteristically New Political Science, 2014 Vol. 36, No. 2, 238–265, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07393148.2014.894702