Caszimir Cleutjens | University of Amsterdam (original) (raw)
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Papers by Caszimir Cleutjens
Is there a way to affirm complicity as the basis of political agency, yet insist that political a... more Is there a way to affirm complicity as the basis of political agency, yet insist that political agency may do more than reiterate the conditions of subordination?" (Butler 1997, p. 29, 30) " [T]he paradoxical logic of masculine domination and feminine submissiveness, which can, without contradiction, be described as both spontaneous and extorted, cannot be understood until one takes account of the durable effects that the social order exerts on women (and men), that is to say, the dispositions spontaneously attuned to that order which it imposes on them." (Bourdieu 2001, p. 37, 38) [With Foucault, the theory of power, domination, and subjection definitively took a turn towards power as it functions "through" the "complicit" agency of the subject, as well as "through" the fiction of the "deep inner self". This puts the theory of subjectivation in a paradoxical position: it must simultaneously reject the subject and the self as a fiction or "trope" (a mere function of power) and affirm it as the penultimate site and reality of power (as a thwarted function of subjectivity). Both Judith Butler"s "ethical" investigation of the relation between subject and power, and Bourdieu"s sociology of the subjective, can be understood as responses to that paradox. I argue that Butler"s conception of the subject as "tropological" in fact argues against her own "ethical" approach, which tries to revive an ethical "I" that has become problematic, and in favor of Bourdieu"s distanced sociology, which is agnostic about that "I", even if that sociology flattens some dimensions of subjectivation.]
Is there a way to affirm complicity as the basis of political agency, yet insist that political a... more Is there a way to affirm complicity as the basis of political agency, yet insist that political agency may do more than reiterate the conditions of subordination?" (Butler 1997, p. 29, 30) " [T]he paradoxical logic of masculine domination and feminine submissiveness, which can, without contradiction, be described as both spontaneous and extorted, cannot be understood until one takes account of the durable effects that the social order exerts on women (and men), that is to say, the dispositions spontaneously attuned to that order which it imposes on them." (Bourdieu 2001, p. 37, 38) [With Foucault, the theory of power, domination, and subjection definitively took a turn towards power as it functions "through" the "complicit" agency of the subject, as well as "through" the fiction of the "deep inner self". This puts the theory of subjectivation in a paradoxical position: it must simultaneously reject the subject and the self as a fiction or "trope" (a mere function of power) and affirm it as the penultimate site and reality of power (as a thwarted function of subjectivity). Both Judith Butler"s "ethical" investigation of the relation between subject and power, and Bourdieu"s sociology of the subjective, can be understood as responses to that paradox. I argue that Butler"s conception of the subject as "tropological" in fact argues against her own "ethical" approach, which tries to revive an ethical "I" that has become problematic, and in favor of Bourdieu"s distanced sociology, which is agnostic about that "I", even if that sociology flattens some dimensions of subjectivation.]