"Given such a tragic view, it is hard to see how Butler could develop a hopeful politics. But she is in a position to rail against the rigid strictures of a repressive society. (Again, the parallel with Freud is exact.) No good can come, both she and Freud would argue, from trying to push all sexual desire into overly narrow channels. The chances for success are slim, and the costs of that forcing on psychic health are very high. Butler's politics, like Freud's are necessarily therapeutic. The focus is on making individual lives easier to live and bear (which, I take it, accurately characterizes Nussbaum's aims as well. The difference comes in the means chosen-and in the diagnosis of what is causing the patient pain.) Social transformation in Butler as in Freud would be aimed at relaxing the rigidity of approved identity categories, in reducing guilt and anxiety."John McGowan
Michael Berube Online
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There's a parallel conceit in the chaotic and disunited opposition to the "War in Iraq".
The simple idea that the stated goals, and the consensus of assumed goals generally, aren't real, that the present situation or something like it was the purpose for the invasion and occupation, and that all the subsequent seeming-incompetence was a result not of failure but deceit.
That the sexual tension Butler's seeking to relieve and transform was the purposed and intended result, not the seemingly clear goal of "having forced" people into constrictive and unrealistic categories of identity, of getting them in there - but the tension produced by that forcing. So that it isn't the goal that drives the pathology, it's the driving itself that was the goal.
Whatever's creating the ill-fitting Procrustean beds wanting not that everyone get in there, amputated or diminished, but that the grind of being forced itself produces something that was sought after all along. That it would rather have us crippled and unable than adapted.
Democracy and freedom for the Iraqi people was never in the cards. A strong nation could too easily change course, as we've seen here at home.
The pathologies Butler defends us against aren't as simple and simply puritanical as they might seem. They don't want us pure and conformist - they want us broken.
