Changing the Subject: Judith Butler's Politics of Radical Resignification.

Abstract

Judith Butler is arguably one of the world's most influential and innovative scholars dealing with questions of difference, identity, and the role of rhetoric in subject formation. In fact, much of Butler's oeuvre in one way or another concerns the workings of rhetoric, the workings of language. For example, she has struggled all her life against the notion that intellectuals should strive in their scholarship to be transparent or clear because she believes such an ideal serves to shut down thought. She reminds us in the interview below that rigorous intellectual work is necessarily extremely hard labor. Becoming a critical intellectual involves working hard on difficult texts, and it entails undergoing something painful and difficult: an estrangement from is most familiar. It is precisely because intellectual work is so demanding, so painful, that not everybody wants to undergo it. Perhaps the very pain of intellectual work is one cause of the upsurge of anti-intellectualism that the academy is currently experiencing. Butler wonders whether there is guilt about being an intellectual because we simply don't know what effects, if any, the intellectual (especially the intellectual in the humanities) can have on the larger social world. Butler goes on to say that the present anti-intellectualism is in part structural, in that people in the humanities are no longer certain that they are central to the academy; they are derided by people outside of the humanities, and they are unable to articulate how their scholarship can have concrete effects both in the lives of their students and in the world in general. This anxiety often has disturbing consequences: Those intellectuals who speak in a rarified way are being scapegoated, are being purged, are being denounced precisely because they represent a certain anxiety about everyone's effect-that is, effect are any of us having, and effect can we have? While she agrees that those intellectuals who have a sense of social responsibility should be able to shift

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