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European Journal of English Studies

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WHO IS THAT NAME?

Athena Athanasiou
Version of record first published: 28 Nov 2012.

To cite this article: Athena Athanasiou (2012): WHO IS THAT NAME?, European Journal of English
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Athena Athanasiou
WHO IS THAT NAME?
Subjects of gender and queer resistance,

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or the desire to contest

Embodied subjects are simultaneously produced and foreclosed via gendered and sexualised
regulatory schemas. The processes by which such subjects present themselves in their
erasure, in face of losing the perspective of a recognisable human subject, constitute the
main concern of this essay. The question of critical agency and its relation to multiple
forms of undoing and being undone represents a call to invent new forms of political
subjectivity by means of engaging with the unpredictable becomings of gender and queer
melancholia. This involves taking into account the politics of dispossessed and spectral
subjectivity in the forging of an alternative sense of what might constitute the desire to
contest itself.
Keywords gender; queer; subjectivation; spectrality; resistance; affect; desire;
performativity

Subjects in crisis, subjects of critique

To pose the question of gender resistance today at a moment which is increasingly
defined as a moment of ongoing crisis is to engage with genres of critique that shape
gender and its differently inflected critical political subjectivities in our late capitalist
era. What will concern me in this essay is the question of gender resistance in relation
to the grid of intelligibility by which the very humanness of human subjects is asserted
or questioned. I propose to undertake a meditation on the ways in which gender and
the human determine and in-determine each other as conditions of possibility in the
processes, affects, technologies, and events through which bodies are constituted as
explicable and recognisable subjects. Gender resistance gives a name to stories and
histories of differentiated constitution of subjects, bodies, and desires as either viable
or disposable according to certain regulatory ideals of human intelligibility including
gender, sexuality, race, able-bodiedness, class, and economic resources. The problem
then is how to seek out the possibilities of engaging with gender-in-resistance in varied
contexts of unevenly distributed vulnerability; how to think gender without the
categorical and numerical order of identification and difference such as the bipolar
system of masculine and feminine; how to think the political beyond the epistemes
of bourgeois ideology and Western liberal governmentality; and how to think

European Journal of English Studies Vol. 16, No. 3, December 2012, pp. 199213
ISSN 1382-5577 print/ISSN 1744-4243 online 2012 Taylor & Francis
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subjectivity beyond the established onto-epistemologies of the white, male,

colonising, capitalist, property-owning, sovereign and self-willed human subject.
Through a perspective that draws on political performativity and engages with the
co-implication of the performative and the political, I seek to explore gender
resistance beyond the standards of self-willed individualism in terms of a collective
radical desire that displaces the very preconditions by which the normativity of the
political is produced and sustained. Thus the problematic that interests me here is as
epistemological as it is political. The question for me is how to tackle the problem of
gender resistance drawing on post-essentialist thought without reiterating the terms
set by liberal imaginaries. Post-essentialism refers here to a contemporary poststructuralist critique of the idea that there can be a universal human subject
disengaged from historical contingencies and sociocultural discursive formations; it
also refers to the refusal to assume a trans-historical, essential and originative human
subject. This theoretical orientation, which could also be called post-humanist or
post-foundationalist, has often been described as the death of the subject. For our
purposes here, the notion of post-essentialism provides a resource for critically
exploring the multiple tropes and questions of the body and embodiment, subjectivity
and subjection as well as a non-sovereign account of agency especially in contexts of
subversive gender and queer performativity. Just as the withdrawal of the authentic
subject position of Western metaphysics is the spectral condition for engaging with
the subject as constituted by various forms of ellipsis from intelligible, imaginable,
affectable and recognisable humanness, undoing gender (Butler, 2004a) is the way,
perhaps the only way, to resist gender as a normative category. Simultaneously, it is
only possible to resist gender with and through gender as a provisional and selfreflexive place and time of contestation.

Spectral subjectivity and the intimacy of un-belonging

In a book that heralded its subversive edge in its title Am I That Name? (1988)
Denise Riley assumed the ambivalence and indeterminacy of the category women as
a necessary condition for an effective feminist political philosophy. The name, as a
mode of naming, being named, becoming a gendered subject and being situated in
kinship designations, signifies the intimate and personal relation of the subject to the
forcible, uncontrollable, and impersonal affect of language. The forces of being
interpellated through being called categorical names denote the dispossession upon
which our affective being/becoming is premised. We do not own the signifier
woman to which some of us are subjected and through which we are hailed as
sociable subjects; but it does not own us either, as it is constitutively incomplete and
provisional, and as we are, from the start, outside ourselves. We are spoken, we are
open to linguistic harm, we are exposed to the psycholinguistic and social affect of
identitarian names and yet we are not those names. As Judith Butler (1993: 219) asks:
What are the possibilities of politicising disidentification, this experience of
misrecognition, this uneasy sense of standing under a sign to which one does and
does not belong?
The possibilities of this uneasy sense of (dis)identification and (un)belonging are
akin to the possibilities emerging from a spectral conception of subjectivity, whereby

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WHO IS THAT NAME?

subjects present themselves in their erasure. It is at the centre of the subjects

disappearance that philosophical language proceeds as if through a labyrinth, not to
recapture it but to test (and through language itself) the extremity of its loss, writes
Michel Foucault (1977: 43) reading the work of Maurice Blanchot. Within the
Foucauldian archaeology of the human, the subjects disappearance in effect, a
disappearance of the self-referential sovereign agent of liberal logic is described as a
space of dissension; one that enables weighing and pondering the event of its loss
rather than inciting to its restoration. The withdrawal of the subject, the very
condition of its passage and loss, becomes a condition of possibility for the question
of the subject. This is about a phantasmatic conception of the subject, whereby its
absence indicates its repetition devoid of any grounding in an original (177).
Furthermore, from Foucaults point of view, the question of the subject after
the sovereign and foundational subjects disappearance arises as if through a
labyrinth. The latter describes a convoluted architectural structure containing the
mythic monster, which, for our purposes in this text, denotes not only the primal
imago of the repressive, prohibiting master and the Law established by the-name-ofthe-father (which for Lacan [1977: 67] is the law of language and a precondition for
desire), but also the recurrence of fugitive, abject alterity. The (Lacanian) Symbolic
order, as it is regulated by the Law of the Father, produces subjects and structures the
social bonds between them; it describes a phallic economy of signifiers that
differentiates masculine and feminine subjects. However, this discourse of mastery
that names and identifies the masculine subject as the universal subject is haunted by
various embodiments of non-universal, feminine, and other unnamable alterity that
have enabled the discursive construction of the conceit of a unified, universal and
sovereign subject. Hence a post-Lacanian feminist epistemology has taken the
unnamability of female subjectivity as a space for challenging the socio-symbolic
order ruled by the phallic signifier and inventing alternative modes of the symbolic
(Whitford, 1991). If the (gendered) subject takes place somewhere, then, it does so
in spaces created by its uncanny absence and the monstrous (i.e., post-human)
possibilities of its spectral appearance or return. It takes place in spaces and recurring
moments of dispossession, foreclosure, and dissension, that is, in relation to, and
occasionally differentiation from, the normalising ideals of subjection, which precede
and exceed the subjects reach.
The subject returns here to do the work of differance (that is, to unsettle the
fixity of self-sufficient presence by revealing its internal limit) in relation to the
normativities of subjectivation and subjection, including those related to identitarian
conceptualisations of gendered and sexual being, becoming, and belonging. In
breaking down the logic of self-presence, this subject embodies the movement of
differance and thus is interminably differential and deferred: it is and it is not, it is
absent and yet elusively present (Derrida, 1982). It is this spectral quality of subjects,
particularly subjects of gender resistance in relation to identitarian norms, that I will
attempt to unravel in what follows. If the line or the horizon of its passage in-between
is the only possible spatiality and temporality of the subject, I suggest that we reflect
on the subjects relation to the limit both as loss and as contestation, but also as the
contestation at the heart of loss. The processes by which embodied subjects,
simultaneously enabled and foreclosed through gendered and sexualised matrices,
present themselves in their erasure constitute the main concern of this essay. I will

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denote this pursuit, provisionally and somewhat awkwardly, as a concern with the
uncanny ways in which subjects find themselves in the traces of their own loss, in the
place of internal dissidence left by their own emptying of themselves.1

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Dissonant performativity
Becoming a gendered subject requires becoming subjected to regimes of
phallogocentric and heteronormative power through being called prescribed names,
such as either feminine or masculine, which corresponds to a putting into place of a
subject with regard to given sexualised proper names. Any sense of critical agency
against these regulatory designations involves a struggle against being totalised or
dispossessed by these proper names, and against being complicit in the injurious
interpellations they harbour.
One might ask: What remains then of gender after the de-naturalisation and
displacement of the descriptive and prescriptive binary system of gender classification,
its supposed biological basis and the desires it incites? What remains of gender after
the emptying of naturalised gender narratives from their emblematic figures of man
(as the one who desires women) and woman (as the one who desires men) by which
subjects are designated? What remains of gender agency after it has been unravelled
by various feminisms (Marxist, psychoanalytic, post-structuralist) that the mechanisms
of gender making are not immediately disposed to the subjects grasp? From my
perspective, these questions are already constrained by the problematics of
relinquishment, succession, loss and remainder, as well as an inflexible distinction
between before and after as purportedly sequential units unfolding through time:
Now that gender is over, what comes next?
I propose to open these questions to multiple and unpredictable temporalities,
forces of affect, anachronisms, and incommensurabilities. I argue that what
remains of such situated perspectives of denaturalising the identitarian formations
around binaristic gender and compulsory heterosexuality is precisely the possibility
of gender resistance. Gender, sex and their categories are put in quotation marks
not in order to be put aside, constrained or relinquished; rather, these quotation
marks mark the impossibility of stable categorisation but also the radical rearticulation of categories as sites for endless political contest and agonism. This is
how contemporary feminist and queer theory and politics recuperate the
revolutionary imaginary after feminisms revolutionary second wave. Wendy Brown
(2005: 115) puts it aptly: If we are without revolutionary possibility today, we are
also free of revolution as the paradigm of transformation: what new political
formations might be born from this moment?
I would like to suggest, however, that the shifts and displacements implied by the
aforementioned questions do not instantiate a loss of feminisms revolutionary edge,
but rather articulate significant possibilities for renewing and reconfiguring critical
reflection, radical desire, and political action in concert. Radical desire here involves
the desire for a certain politics of gender and sexuality, one that makes desires and
lives possible when no such space of intelligibility is in place in the existing political
order of things. In this sense, the antifoundationalist frame, the refusal of the fixity
and certainty of a pre-existing gendered subject, becomes the condition of possibility

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WHO IS THAT NAME?

for a radical reframing of the thinkable, the sensible and the affectable within political
discourse.
There can be no political struggle for the possibility of living that does not involve
this insurrectionary struggle within and against the normative matrices (gender,
sexuality, class, race, able-bodiedness) that determine who can be denominated as a
who in the existing domain of relatedness and liveability. This ontological
insurrection in the habitus of essence does not amount to an ontological negation of
the feminine or a depreciation of women as subjects, but rather clears the way for
reconfiguring and pluralising resistant gendered subjectivities beyond the divide
between essentialism and anti-essentialism and beyond the monologic gender
nominations and binaries. Thus, gender resistance involves using proper names
improperly, and it is a matter of life and death, especially for those discursively
marked by heteromasculinist economies as abject, de-realised, illegible, and
unliveable bodies. This terrain of the abject includes not only women, but also
gays and lesbians, transsexuals and intersexuals, transgender and queers; and it is a
sphere of socially situated intimate traumas constituted not only by gender and sexual
normativity but by the multilayered co-implication of gender with racial, ethnic, and
class regulatory vectors of power.
As a normative matrix determining how bodies are made to appear and act as
male or female, and how they are made to desire appropriately, gender is an
ascension and accession to becoming intelligible and affectable as properly human. If
recognisable humanness is constituted and haunted by means of demarcation related
to power differentials of gender, sexuality, class, race, and ethnicity, then what we
call dissonant performances interrupt the common certainties and idealised fictions
sustaining those discursive orders. In discussing the Vaticans objection to including
gender in the United Nations non-governmental organisations platform due to a
concern that it was a coded word for homosexuality, Butler (2004a: 190) argues
that, indeed, to admit the lesbian into the realm of the universal might undo the
human, that is, might disrupt the established power/knowledge schemas about what
it means to be human.
What seems crucial about the relation between normative matrices and dissonant
performativity is precisely the ways in which subjects are shaped at once within and
against the regulatory horizon of subjection. Queer theory has explored the ways in
which gay subjects are constituted by homophobic discourses and the power of namegiving, which they come to adopt and rework in order to define themselves while
resisting the injurious function of heteronormative interpellations, such as insult,
shame, the pain of guilt, physical assaults, family melancholia, caricaturing,
pathologising, silencing, discreet isolation, misrecognition, and de-realisation
(Sedgwick, 1990; Weed and Schor, 1997; Eribon, 2004; Eng, Halberstam and
Munoz, 2005). In the context of queer theory, gender resistance involves both
attending to the political and affective repertoires of performative dissonances as denormativisation and re-subjectivation that emerge in processes of subjection and
challenging the very heterosexist frameworks present in gender theory. Thus,
dissonance might be understood not as a set of tactics that would free us from the
discursive normativity of gender, but as a reworking of this discursive order into
political agency that might produce unexpected meanings or modalities of
signification.2

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What is central to our concern here is that gender resistance does not presuppose
the epistemological and ontological certainties of a self-contained and self-authorising
individuality, but rather refers to responsive dispositions towards plural performativity, as it is manifested, for example, in the various affects that throw us out of
joint and beside ourselves, such as abjection, self-policing shame, guilt, despair,
outrage, and desire. Resisting a social condition is not a matter of ones own
individual choice, disposition, virtuousness, or morality. It is not even a matter of
personal desire. It is rather a matter of sustaining the desire of relationality in the ways
we are interpellated by injurability and injustice. Gender resistance, in this sense,
denotes our common susceptibility and responsiveness to socially assigned
disposability. Such perspective of critical agency troubles the figuration of freedom
as an inalienable form of private property, and instigates a shift towards enacting
freedom with others through the perspective of bodily materialities and relational
affectability. Affirming that gender resistance does not presuppose the certainties of an
autological subject, Linda Zerilli (2005) criticises the tendency to pose the question of
freedom in relation to the sovereign individual I and seeks to epistemologically
reorient feminist theory toward action in plurality and within the world. Zerillis
critique poses the significant question of how political collectivities can be formed in
the service of freedom. But does this action in plurality necessitate the conceptual
move of constituting a positive and inclusive identity? The challenge here is not to
think of freedom as a property of an ontologically pre-existing agent of choice or as an
unmediated pursuit of will. Rather, the question might be how we articulate
collective aspirations of freedom and self-determination without seeking recourse to
the grand narrative of the self-contained, liberal individual.

Cross-border practices of feminist/queer political

subjectivity
The matrices that prefigure and differentiate the field of intelligible bodily life can
become the occasion of subjugation but also, at the same time, a place of potentially
enacting the desire for collective freedom and for globalised coalitions that reflect
intertwined embodied struggles related to postcolonial, feminist, migrant, anti-racist
and queer political subjectivities. It is in this context, for example, that feminist and
queer migration perspectives are brought together with scholarship on borders and
citizenship with the aim of forging a more subtle account of the shifting terms of
political subjectivity, one that explores also the nuances of differential inclusion
rather than merely outright exclusion and expulsion of noncitizens in migration and
deportation regimes of Southeast Europe (Andrijasevic, 2009). These perspectives,
which go beyond a static inclusion/exclusion model, allow for a critical consideration
of the changing forms of border regimes, governmentality, labor, sovereignty,
citizenship, and, most significantly, of emerging political subjectivity and coalition
related to mobility, mobilisation, gender and sexuality.
Such coalitions of global resistances contest the processes of migration
management, whereby the liberal state legislates in the name of republican
universalism (i.e., rule of law, equity, secular citizenship, toleration), in ways that
instrumentalise, misuse and incorporate feminist and queer subjectivities into the

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mainstream fold of the nation-state. On the level of political performativity, this

misrecognition of womens and queer politics against immigrant rights is contested by
allied constellations of anti-racist, immigrant, and queer communities. One
instantiation of this feminist/queer/anti-racist political performativity is the campaign
Not in Our Name launched by NextGENDERation Network, a European network
of students and researchers in womens studies, on the occasion of 8 March 2004:
To the new crop of self-proclaimed guardians of womens rights, whom we
have never encountered as participants or supporters of our womens movements
and struggles over many years, we say determined: NOT IN OUR NAMES! . . .
As feminists and women truly concerned with womens emancipation we will not
allow them to use the emancipation of women for anti-immigrationist,
assimilationist, islamophobic and ethnocentric politics. We will continue to fight
all the oppressions women are confronted with in their lives. Happy International
Womens Day!
(NextGENDERation, 2010)
In another context of cross-border practices of feminist political subjectivity, the
transnational and antimilitarist movement Women in Black embodies the event of
making, shifting and undoing national, gendered, and sexed borders. Their affective
modes of antinationalist counter-memory constitute a political poetics which turns
frontier space into a vibrant site for reconfiguring the political in Europe today.
Following Women in Black of Israel-Palestine, who emerged in 1988 when a group of
Israeli women started marching into the West Bank to protest at the occupation, the
Women in Black of former Yugoslavia started in 1991 to engage in acts of border
crossing and to stand silently in public places calling on the public to face the
responsibility for crimes committed by nationalist military and paramilitary forces. In
mourning for the dead of the rival side (those officially coined as ethnic enemies),
these activists undermine the normative associations of mourning with the feminine,
the familial, and the patriotic, while, at the same time, exposing the silences
shrouding injurious national and gendered histories. As silence and mourning are
stereotypically reduced to gendered incapacity to speak or act, the dissonant
performative silence of Women in Black enters and alters language especially, the
language of mourning as feminine and attached to the norms of grievability that
sustain kinship and the nation. Thus, the silence of mourning turns from a proper
feminine language into a disquiet performative catachresis expelled by, but also
opposed to, the very audibility and intelligibility of the discourses of the political
(Athanasiou, 2005).

Affects of gender and queer resistance

I have been proposing so far throughout this essay a return to questions of
subjectivity through its manifold interrelations and intersections with subjectivation
and desire. I have been seeking to situate this project within a post-structuralist
feminist, (post-)queer framework of deconstructing the liberal humanist fiction of
self-willed human subject, and of critically engaging with the question of gender and

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queer resistance. The latter draws our attention to the supra-individual modes of recrafting ones crafted condition as gendered subject an enactment already
conditioned to some degree but not entirely encompassed by, and submitted to,
social regulation. In other words, the means through which gender normativity is
established are also the condition of possibility for the emergence of gender
resistance. Gender and queer resistance refers to forms of dissonantly relating to
norms the norms upon which our gendered and sexualised subjectivity, in all its
pleasures and pains, critically depends. It has to do with the performativity of
attending to and producing states of critical intensity in the interstices of given
discursive matrices.
What is at stake in this perspective is that the question of subjectivity returns to
power, and, more specifically, to particular grids of intelligibility that make subjects
appear, endure and matter as recognisable subjects, or otherwise. As Butler (1990: 2)
has put it: The question of the subject is crucial for politics. But who is the
subject of resistance and who is the subject of gender in gender resistance? Who
and what become produced and foreclosed, recognised and misrecognised, in
processes of gender and sexual subjection? Such questions take us to the inherently
ambivalent and undecidable, indeed spectral, forces of subjectivation, but also to the
forces involved in the emergence of radical subjectivities subjectivities of gender
resistance, as it were.
Butler (1997b) has importantly theorised subjectivity as an effect of melancholy,
whereby homosexual attachments and desires, culturally and psychically prohibited
and foreclosed, become gendered identifications. Buried, unlived and ungrieved,
these secreted and repudiated passional attachments form the very ground indeed,
the burial ground of gender and sexual identity. Subject formation and the
assumption of gender refer to processes of forming normative structures that are
ambivalently and melancholically haunted by disavowed losses: the exclusionary
matrix of disowned and disclaimed sexed identifications by which subjects but also
their spectral abjects are produced. Despite their being constitutive of the subject,
those identifications must be repudiated in advance and can only recur at the risk of
initiating the dissolution of the subject. Although this account of identifications that
are foreclosed, that is, not merely unexpected and unauthorised but not even available
as an option, might seem to disallow any space or time for critical agency, it is
precisely this instance of founding ambivalence (that is, coeval affirmation and
repudiation) at the heart of identification that becomes the condition of possibility for
re-imagining and re-inventing political positions of critical agency. Such perspective
compels us to move beyond the conventional, liberal understanding of agency in
terms of ones own assumption of an available option over another, and towards
attending to the agential affectivity and effectivity of identificatory injuries and
misperformances.
In her examination of the relation between lesbian public cultures and the trauma
of childhood sexual abuse, Ann Cvetkovich (2003) has been concerned with the ways
in which injured subjects forge creative responses to their intimate traumas and their
everyday experience of feeling bad. Indeed, engaging with archives of feeling bad is
a crucial element of gender and queer acts of resistance, even though, or precisely
because, taking action (at least in the mainstream understandings of activism) is at
stake in contexts of profound social and psychic injury. Consider, for example, the

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feel tank Public Feelings Project, a Chicago-based academic and activist organisation,
in which Cvetkovich herself is involved, and which organises an International Day of
the Politically Depressed: protesters march in their bathrobes to indicate their fatigue
with conventional forms of protest, and carry signs that read Depressed? It might be
political! (Cvetkovich, 2007). The goal is to unsettle the conventional models of
political action that make it difficult to imagine such pathologised negative affects as
political. In other words, the goal is to imagine alternative modes of
political subjectivity and the politics of contestation, which might take various states
of political depression and melancholia as a possible resource for transformative
political collectivity and action.

Traumas of abjection and the promise of critical agency

Such focus on the affects of (queer) feeling bad in theory and politics alike
neither means to counter positive affects of pleasure nor presumes an impossible link
between melancholia and pleasure (be it lived, lost, thwarted, unlivable or derealised) as well as between melancholia and taking action.3 Indeed, might we think
of gender and queer performances of affective negativity (i.e., dyke anger,
anticolonial despair, racial rage . . ., in Judith Halberstams words [2011: 110]), as
intimately entwined to, or lying at the heart of, political acts of resistance and
contestation? This is about the necessary challenge of taking into account the politics
of dispossessed and spectral subjectivity in forging an alternative sense of what might
constitute the desire to contest with others. The task that lies ahead, as I see it, lies in
attending to self-shattering not as a non-political, inert state of negativity, but rather
as a condition of possibility for critical agency, understood in terms of counter-heroic,
anti-self-engrandising, even melancholic, political desire to unfix and unfasten the
very terms of insidious hardship and everyday despair, such as those related to
patriarchy, hetero/sexism, and their intersections with racism and economic
inequalities. Douglas Crimp (2002) has called for forms of militancy that not only
dont foreclose, but actively include mourning. Similarly, Butler (2004b) has taken up
the affective and political registers of loss and melancholia in the context of her
engagement with gender and sexual identifications and repudiations, but also in the
context of her work on differential allocation of vulnerability, grievability and
precariousness.
The spectral, the uncanny, and the trace, then, all can be thought of as being akin
to the conjured, indeterminate ghostly presences of the past and future that haunt the
processes of subjectivation. To be sure, this is not merely about the spectre of the
Cartesian subject that haunts Western philosophical tradition according to Slavoj
Zizek (2000: 15), but rather about the unpredictable and spectral becomings of
gender and queer melancholia in face of losing the perspective of a recognisable
human subject. We deal here with modes of becoming that, in their entwinement to
multiple forms of undoing and being undone, do things, as they effectively become an
occasion for gender and queer resistance.
Subjects are constituted in being profoundly haunted by registers of injunction
and self-shattering that precede them, while unwittingly producing spectral doubles of
themselves, that is, identifications that must remain foreclosed and repudiated but can

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make their ghostly appearance in improper contexts. Carla Freccero (2005) has
illustrated this double affective temporal movement of being haunted and becoming
ghostly, in her work on an ethics of haunting that would motivate a historiographic
project of queering temporality. Drawing on Jacques Derridas concept of spectrality,
she proposes an account of fantasmatic historiography that interweaves past and
present, history and fantasy, event and affect. Like past texts and events persist within
the present in spectral form, subjectivity is itself a social temporality open to being
haunted and ghostly at once, as Freccero (2011: 22) has shown in forging the notion
of queer spectrality: ghostly returns suffused with affective materiality that work
through the ways trauma, mourning, and event are registered on the level of
subjectivity and history. Indeed, the very undefinability and productive indeterminacy signalled by the term queer (in its implications of appropriation,
disidentification, and alterity within mimesis) lends itself not only to a critique of
heteronormative presumptions but also to opening the stage for theorising unfinished,
unfinishable and reanimated temporal proprieties as well as their future possibilities.
Subjectivity, then, is inescapably haunted by the never-perfect dynamics of
identification and disidentification; by unfinished and unrealisable pasts, presents and
futures. The logic of spectral subjectivity refers to the paradoxical, elusive and
indeterminate logic of that which is neither present nor absent, neither here nor
there, neither now nor not now, neither merely material nor merely spiritual
(Derrida, 1994). The indeterminacies of subjectivity bring together, in an uncanny
and disquiet way, presence and absence, spirit and matter, negativity and affirmation,
active and passive, situatedness and otherwordliness, affect and event, the traumas of
abjection and the promises of radical resignification.
As subjects-in-process abandon and repudiate potentialities of gender and sexual
subjectivity that are defined as fundamentally unthinkable and unlivable, the formation
of the subject is premised upon foreclosed identifications and repressed desires, which
recur and persist in spectral form, without overtly articulating themselves. The logic of
subjection, premised as it is upon abjection, displacement, and foreclosure, is
interminably mapped onto our bodies through normative matrices of gender, raciality,
sexuality, intimacy, able-bodiedness, economy, and citizenship. But it is also enacted in
the ordinary not merely as domination but as a metastructure of consent (Berlant,
2011: 185), as spontaneous appreciation of and desire for the comforts of social
belonging, recognisability, liveability, and lovability. The embodied ordinariness of
subjection, in other words, involves both authoritarian desire and aspirational
conventionalities, both subordination and sustaining fantasies of appropriateness as the
ground of belonging in established sociability. In the context of queerly deconstructed
subjectivation, gendered and sexual subjects emerge (always being in the process of
coming into being) both as the effect of regulatory power, through the intimate folds of
prohibitions, incitation, acquiescence and self-regulation, and as the condition of
possibility for social resignification, subversion, and self-altering.

Radical desire, or trouble in desirability

How does gender resistance emerge within and against the subjects fundamental
attachment to regimes of idealised and embodied norms that seem or promise to

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WHO IS THAT NAME?

secure its own recognisable being and becoming? How does the subject undo and
unlearn its own desire for the condition of its own or anyones subordination and
convert it into a political desire for collective resistance and alteration of the terms of
subordination? How do we undo the passionate attachments that sustain us, such as
the hetero-normalisation of desire? It is important for the purposes of this particular
text to situate gender and queer resistance in the imbrication of desire and subjection.
The powers of subjection, powers that form the subject, provide the condition of the
subjects desire, including its desire to contest. It seems crucial here to resist the
model of desire that would set up the desiring subject as situated prior to the
phallocentric, heterosexual, and racial matrices of desire.
In Hegelian thought, desire is posited as the means that produce reflexive
consciousness and the self-knowing subject by way of the subjects conceptualising and
dialectically superseding alterity. Whereas Hegelian formulations and their appropriations by French post-Hegelian traditions are concerned with the ways in which
desire works to exceed the negativity of human life, Lacanian psychoanalysis retains
the role of the desire in subject formation, but emphasises that it is the repression of
desire that constitutes the subject as incomplete and eccentric. In her own account of
desire, one that is at once indebted to and critical of Hegel, Butler (1987) turns to
Nietzsche and Deleuze in order to respond critically to the Hegelian narrative of the
subjects full realisation and affirmation through its desire to supersede difference. She
also turns to Foucault in order to account for the discursive historicity of desire;
desire is not situated prior to the world, as in the Hegelian metaphysics, or prior to
repression, as in the Lacanian perspective, but rather is produced by power workings
and discursive formations that precede and exceed the subject. Butlers account of the
subjects of desire draws precisely on Foucaults critique, in which desire does not
merely constitute a means to describe an affective experience but also a regulatory
fiction through which that experience is discursively determined. Thus, Butlers
desiring subject is an incomplete, not self-identical, and ek-static one, a subject
outside itself. The subject that contests the regulatory power that compels and enables
it always draws from that power in order to enact its critical agency.
This account of the social and psychic formation of the desiring subject in
submission is of particular interest here. The subjects interpellation into existence
takes place in provisional, insidious, insistent and insinuating ways, and, above all, in
ways which allow for, and render subjection vulnerable to, various infelicities,
falterings, and deferrals. Far from being a programmed reinstatement of an allencompassing power, and far from being mechanistically aligned with the formative
workings of discursive apparatuses, desire emerges in this process as an affective
potential at once produced through and subjected to regulatory power; as a potential
which belies the crisp distinction between being produced and being subjected, or
between becoming a subject and becoming subjected. Thus, although critical agency
takes place within the matrices of power, it is not entirely regulated by them. Gender
and queer resistance takes place within the terms of gender and sexual normativity but
in ways that potentially counter those terms. In this sense, gender and queer radical
desire constitutes an affective and performative dissonance in the processes and
apparatuses that produce and regulate desirability. The question of critical agency
commits us to the constant call for imagining and inventing new forms of political
subjectivity, in the direction of transforming the conditions through which the

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political is established, activated, effected and affected. It is this mode of theorising critical agency, which Ewa Plonowska Ziarek (2001) calls an ethics of
dissensus, that would provide an alternative both to liberal predication on
individualised, self-contained, disembodied selves and to normalising, conservative
communitarianism.

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Conclusion: Undoing the melancholic properness of

intelligibility
The question that has concerned me throughout this text is how gender and queer
resistance becomes an occasion for undoing the melancholic properness of
intelligibility through what Butler (1997a: 161) has aptly called the political promise
of the performative. Thus what emerges from an inquiry into gender resistance is a
multifaceted critical engagement with incongruities and infelicities between
interpellative command and its performative (dis-)identificatory effects.
If critical agency presupposes some notion of the self, the latter is not construed
here as an individuated substance (or as the atomistic market maximiser of neoliberal
governmentality) but rather is taken in its being-at-the-limit, or singular plurality.4
Importantly, therefore, gender and queer resistance, what I have called the desire to
contest, does not imply the conceit of a pre-discursive sovereign I that performs its
volition or pure opposition in the sense of transcendence of existing normative
regimes of racial, ethnic, class, kinship, heterosexual gender norms. On the contrary,
it refers to a practice of freedom akin to a performative rupture in the discursive
constitution of prevailing truth-regimes of intelligibility. This rupture is marked by
and contingent upon the spectral return of what has been disavowed and foreclosed by
the regulatory repetition of the norms that sustain subjectivation. The we of gender
resistance and critical agency is acted upon, yet acting. As we desire to contest, we
are haunted and interpellated by certain histories of desire and given terms of
desirability. The singularity of our radical desire that contests gender normativity
cannot be contained and fixed once and for all by the use of proper names as signs of
pure identity. Rather it is itself always plural and differential, partially identifiable and
partially unidentifiable. As I have tried to show in this essay, this laying bare of the
ontological presuppositions of critical agency (such as the idea of an initiating or
originating agency) does not foreclose but rather opens up the space for the political.
In other words, the unavoidable entanglement of our desire (both as resistant
gendered desire and desire for gender resistance) in the very terms of desirability
which haunt the identitarian apparatus and the plural pronoun of our desire does not
refer to a retreat of the political but rather is concerned with the affects of dissension
that the political is made of.
To that extent, I would claim, the subject returns, in a way, not as a
transcendental signified and a pre-existing and self-determining volitional agent, but
rather as a plural and provisional, performative approximate occasion of its own
subjectivation and exposure. It is the space of this approximation which opens up the
possibility (but also the wounds) of a spectral altering an agency of internal
disruptive reworking and making over of the terms by which subjectivation takes
place as an embodiment of norms. Desiring gender and queer resistance is the site of

WHO IS THAT NAME?

this incalculable and inevitable expropriation; above all, the expropriation of a certain
relationship between identification and desire.

Notes
1

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Foucault (1994: 342) has importantly argued that the void left by mans
disappearance constitutes the unfolding of a space in which it is once more
possible to think.
As Rosi Braidotti (1991: 146) writes, the term dissonance seems apt to emphasise
the falsely reassuring nature of any dream of unity or global synthesis. Interestingly
enough, Braidotti deploys the term dissonance to denote also the diverging routes
that feminism and post-structuralism have taken in pursuing the seemingly common
project of revisiting the subject. Feminist epistemology differs from philosophical
anti-humanism in that it poses a vision of subjectivity as embodied, multiple,
relational, and differentiated. The crisis of modern mainstream visions of
subjectivity, conventionally perceived as loss and decline, marks for feminism an
opening-up of new conceptual and political schemes of thought and action, which
themselves stem from undoing hegemonic masculinity and compulsory heterosexuality as the unquestioned norms of humanness.
See Love (2007) for an apt deployment of backward feelings to respond to Elizabeth
Freemans (2010) argument that the turn to loss, grief, shame, and suffering in queer
studies has made it impossible to envision and enact a politics of pleasure. See also
Eng and Kazanjian (2003).
Jean-Luc Nancys notion of singular plurality argues for a primacy of relatedness and
mutual exposure to one another, which preserves the difference and the freedom of
the self (2000). In this conceptual context, both community and individuality are
problematised and de-essentialised.

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WHO IS THAT NAME?

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Athena Athanasiou is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at Panteion

University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, Greece. She holds a PhD from the
New School for Social Research, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Pembroke Center
for Teaching and Research on Women, at Brown University (20012002). She has
authored the books: Life at the Limit: Essays on Gender, Body and Biopolitics (Athens,
2007); and Crisis as a State of Exception: Critiques and Resistances (Athens, 2012). She
has also edited Feminist Theory and Cultural Critique (Athens, 2006); Rewriting
Difference: Luce Irigaray and the Greeks (co-ed. with Elena Tzelepis, SUNY Press,
2010); and Biosocialities: Perspectives on Medical Anthropology (Athens, 2011). She
recently co-authored (with Judith Butler) the book, Dispossession: The Performative in
the Political (Polity Press, forthcoming).

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