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“We come to the gradual realization that the BwO is not at all the opposite of the organs. The organs are not its enemies. The enemy is the organism. The BwO is opposed not to the organs but to that organization of the organs called the organism. …The organism is already that, the judgement of God, from which medical doctors benefit and on which they base their power. The organism is not at all the body, the BwO; rather, it is a stratum on the BwO, in other words, a phenomenon of accumulation, coagulation, and sedimentation that, in order to extract useful labor from the BwO, imposes upon it forms, functions, bonds, dominant and heirarchized organizations, organized transcendences. The strata are bonds, pincers. ‘Tie me up if you wish.’ We are continually stratified. But who is this we that is not me, for the subject no less than the organism belongs to and depends on a stratum? Now we have the answer: the BwO is that glacial reality where the alluvions, sedimentations, coagulations, foldings, and recoilings that compose an organism—and also a signification and a subject—occur. …The BwO howls: ‘They’ve made me an organism! They’ve wrongfully folded me! They’ve stolen my body!’ The judgement of God uproots it from its immanence and makes it an organism, a signification, a subject.”
- Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 158-9.
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“In short, there is a very special relation of synthesis and analysis between a given type of BwO and what happens on it: an a priori synthesis by which something will necessarily be produced in a given mode (but what it will be is not known) and an infinite analysis by which what is produced on the BwO is already a part of that body’s production, is already included in the body, is already on it (but at the price of an infinity of passages, divisions, and secondary productions).”
- Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 152.
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“Paradoxically, the inquiry into the kinds of erasures and exclusions by which the construction of the subject operates is no longer constructivism, but neither is it essentialism. For there is an ‘outside’ to what is constructed by discourse, but this is not an absolute ‘outside,’ an ontological there-ness that exceeds or counters the boundaries of discourse; as a constitutive ‘outside,’ it is that which cam only be thought—when it can—in relation to that discourse, at and as its most tenuous borders. The debate between constructivism and essentialism thus misses the point of deconstruction altogether, for the point has never been that ‘everything is discursively constructed’; that point, when and where it is made, belongs to a kind of discursive monism or linguisticism that refuses the constitutive force of exclusion, erasure, violent foreclosure, abjection and its disruptive return within the very terms of discursive legitimacy. … What I would propose in place of these conceptions of construction is a return to the notion of matter, not as a site or surface, but as a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter.”
- Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 8-9.
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“Certain formulations of the radical constructivist position appear almost compulsively to produce a moment of recurrent exasperation, for it seems that when the constructivist is construed as a linguistic idealist, the constructivist refutes the reality of bodies, the relevance of science, the alleged facts of birth, aging, illness, and death. The critic might also suspect the constructivist of a certain somatophobia and seek assurances that this abstracted theorist will admit that there are, minimally, sexually differentiated parts, activities, capacities, hormonal and chromosomal differences that can be conceded without reference to ‘construction.’ Although at this moment I want to offer an absolute reassurance to my interlocutor, some anxiety prevails. … To claim that discourse is formative 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 formation of that body.”
- Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 10.
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“To think that we can finally get it all together is unrealistic. To seek for some lasting security is futile. To undo our very ancient and very stuck habitual patterns of mind requires that we begin to turn around some of our most basic assumptions. Believing in a solid, separate self, continuing to seek pleasure and avoid pain, thinking that someone ‘out there’ is to blame for our pain—one has to get totally fed up with these ways of thinking. One has to give up hope that this way of thinking will bring us satisfaction. Suffering begins to dissolve when we can question the belief or the hope that there’s anywhere to hide.”
- Pema Chodron, The Pocket Pema Chodron, ed. Eden Steinberg (Boston: Shambhala, 2008), 33.
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“The condition of impossibility of the exercise of power becomes its condition of possibility: just as the ultimate failure of communication is what compels us to talk all the time (if we could say what we want to say directly, we would very soon stop talking and shut up forever), so the ultimate uncertainty and precariousness of the exercise of power is the only guarantee that we are dealing with a legitimate democratic power.”
- Slavoj Zizek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 2000), 94.
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“Does not this solution involve the Kantian logic of the infinite approach to the impossible Fullness as a kind of ‘regulative Idea’? Does it not involve the resigned/cynical stance of ‘although we know we will fail, we should persist in our search’—of an agent which knows that the global Goal towards which it is striving is impossible, that its ultimate effort will necessarily fail, but which none the less accepts the need for this global Spectre as a necessary lure to give it the energy to engage in solving partial problems? Furthermore (and this is just another aspect of the same problem), is not this alternative—the alternative between achieving ‘fullness of society’ and solving ‘a variety of partial problems’—too limited? Is it not that—here, at least—there is a Third Way, although definitely not in the sense of the Risk Society theorists? What about changing the very fundamental structural principle of society, as happened with the emergence of the ‘democratic invention’? The passage from feudal monarchy to capitalist democracy, while it failed to reach the ‘impossible fullness of society’, certainly did more than just ‘solve a variety of partial problems’.”
- Slavoj Zizek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 2000), 93.
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“The task will be to consider this threat and disruption not as a permanent contestation of social norms condemned to the pathos of perpetual failure, but rather as a critical resource in the struggle to rearticulate the very terms of symbolic legitimacy and intelligibility.”
- Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 3.
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“The science of happiness could be described as performative: by finding happiness in certain places, it generates those places as being good, as being what should be promoted as goods. Correlations are read as causalities, which then become the basis of promotion. We promote what I call in the first chapter ‘happiness-causes,’ which might even cause happiness to be reported. The science of happiness hence redescribes what is already evaluated as being good. If we have a duty to promote what causes happiness, then happiness itself becomes a duty.”
- Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 6-7.
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“These three definitions of performance—that it carries out purposes thoroughly, that it actualizes a potential, or that it restores a behavior—commonly assume that performance offers a substitute for something else that preexists it. Performance, in other words, stands in for an elusive entity that it is not but that it must vainly aspire both to embody and replace. Hence flourish the abiding yet vexed affinities between performance and memory, out of which blossom the most florid nostalgias for authenticity and origin.”
- Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996) 5-6.
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“Gender ought not to be conceived merely as the cultural inscription of meaning on a pregiven sex (a juridical conception); gender must also designate the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established. As a result, gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which ‘sexed nature’ or ‘a natural sex’ is produced and established as ‘prediscursive,’ prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts. … This production of sex as prediscursive ought to be understood as the effect of the apparatus of cultural construction designated by gender. How, then, does gender need to be reformulated to encompass the power relations that produce the effect of a prediscursive sex and so conceal that very operation of discursive production?”
- Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 10.
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“The BwO is the field of immanence of desire, the plane of consistency specific to desire (with desire defined as process of production without reference to any exterior agency, whether it be a lack that hollows it out or a pleasure the fills it.)”
- Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 154.
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“We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes’, it ‘represses’, it ‘censors’, it ‘abstracts’, it ‘masks’, it ‘conceals’. In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production.”
- Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 194.
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“New social movements often rely on identity-claims, but ‘identity’ itself is never fully constituted; in fact, since identification is not reducible to identity, it is important to consider the incommensurability or gap between them. It does not follow that the failure of identity to achieve complete determination undermines the social movements at issue; on the contrary, that incompleteness is essential to the project of hegemony itself. No social movement can, in fact, enjoy its status as an open-ended, democratic political articulation without presuming and operationalizing the negativity at the heart of identity.”
- Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Zizek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 2000), 1-2.
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“In contrast to what Theodor Adorno describes as the ‘grimness with which a man clings to himself, as to the immediately sure and substantial,’ the queerness of which I speak would deliberately sever us from ourselves, from the assurance, that is, of knowing ourselves and hence knowing our ‘good.’”
- Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 5.
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"This is a book that speaks of many things, of ticks and quilts and fuzzy subsets
and noology and political economy. It is difficult to know how to approach it." |
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