- 著者
-
奥野 佐矢子
- 出版者
- 教育哲学会
- 雑誌
- 教育哲学研究 (ISSN:03873153)
- 巻号頁・発行日
- vol.2006, no.93, pp.85-101, 2006-05-10 (Released:2010-05-07)
- 参考文献数
- 38
It is a specific conceptualization of the twentieth century, the century of the linguistic turn, that language is in general 'performative'. Building from Austinian notion of performativity and Althusseruan notion of interpellation, this essay explores the production/construction of the subjects based upon the main work of Judith Butler.Butler begins with her contention that as linguistic beings, our existence is unavoidably dependent on language. For her, the subject is constructed through the process of subjection; it can be explained as the simultaneous process of becoming the subject and being compelled to participate in reproducing dominant discourse. Butler's understanding that the status of the subject is thus constituted and her insistence that the compelled reiteration of conventions is the essence of performativity help us clarify how the subject is unwittingly complicit in sustaining hegemonic social structures.To deconstruct this discursive and social formation involving the subject, it is necessary to focus on the very process of the construction of the subject. As Butler explains the subject is subjected to a norm while being the agent of its use. Accordingly if the formation of the subject is the repeated inculcation of the norm, it will be possible to repeat that norm in unexpected ways. The norms of performative identity resemble the sign, and they are vulnerable to the recitation of the same and semantic excesses. The subject performatively and linguistically constituted is not ultimately defined by the interpellative call; neither is the subject fully determined or radically free from the deployed discourse. Steering a careful middle course between voluntarism and determinism, Butler distances herself from the strategic deployment of the category of the “essential” identity in political practices. What she offers instead is rejection and resignification in her alternative political mode.Crucially, the deconstruction of the subject is by no means equivalent to its destruction as Butler argues. In seeking out the instabilities of language and of the constitutive terms of identity we are guided to a new sense of ethics, with the limit and inevitable opacity of the subject that always fails to define itself.