The jarring, even terrible, power of naming appears to recall this initial power of the name to inaugurate and sustain linguistic existence, to confer singularity in location and time. After having received the proper name, one is subject to being named again. In this sense, the vulnerability to being named constitutes a constant condition of the speaking subject. And what if one were to compile all the names that one has ever been called? Would they not present a quandary for identity? Would some of them cancel the effect of others? Would one find oneself fundamentally dependent upon a competing array of names to derive a sense of oneself? Would one find oneself alienated from elsewhere? Thus, as Benveniste has shown, the very conditions of the possibility for becoming an “I” in language remain indifferent to the “I” that one becomes. The more one seeks oneself in language, the more one loses oneself precisely there where one is sought. (29-30)
Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politics of Performance. New York: Routledge, 1997.
hmmm… Michael, baby, boy, child, man, fag, homo, girl, man, woman, faggot, gay, fairy, queer… Conflicting terms…
On another note, I wish I had read this book when I was an undergraduate. I took an independent study on fantasy literature (Tolkien, Lewis, Rowling, and a few others) and had great conversations with my professor over names and slurs in Harry Potter, but both of us lacked any knowledge of the power of naming and slurring at that time. This would have been useful then.
Interesting post. Does Butler go on to talk about the differences between internalizing “names” and rejecting them? That is, is my being Joanna dependent on what others have called me, or is it based on what I know about myself, that is, am I truly lazy or do I have depression-related fatigue? Or is Butler more concerned about the way that external sources name us and that then becomes the label by which everyone knows us?
Butler is working with J.L. Austin’s term perlocutionary speech act and Althusser’s term interpellation. The process of naming is actually the process of doing something: giving someone an identity, or interpellating them as a subject. Butler does understand that there are failed speech acts (those speech acts which do not fulfill their effects) and interpellation only works when someone identifies (at least somewhat) with the naming. So, yes, Butler isn’t a determinist; she seems to fully understand that the process of naming doesn’t always work to create someone’s subjectivity.