SubStance

In her conclusion to Gender Trouble (1990) , Judith Butler proposes to move from parody to politics through a deconstruction of identity and re-description of identities which, while they already exist, are deemed unintelligible and impossible by the hegemonic order of society and culture. “If identities were no longer fixed as the premises of a political syllogism, and politics no longer understood as a set of practices derived from the alleged interests that belong to a set of ready-made subjects,” Butler writes, “a new configuration of politics would surely emerge from the ruins of the old” (149). Arguably, Butler has tried to make good on this gambit in much of what she has written since the publication of this first major work. This is most clearly so in The Psychic Life of Power (1997), which concludes with a description of the ego as a melancholic response to power imposing on a subject a choice of objects she must lose (even if she never had them) in order to find her self,¹ and the same line appears to turn up in her latest works, Undoing Gender (2004) and Giving an Account of Oneself (2005). With attention to the ethics of responsibility, Butler closes the latter with a discussion of the formation of the self out of a relation with itself occasioned by a risky encounter with what is not itself, by a “willingness to become undone in relation to others” that “constitutes our chance of becoming human” (136).

My aim here is not to critique or correct Butler, but to explore and extend some possibilities opened up by this line of thought. I am less interested in where this line is taking Butler than in the strategy that supports it and keeps it in flight. I am more interested in how this tactical forming of identity from what is non-identical—or, in non-dialectical terms, the formation of a truth about our self from what is false—engages the puzzle that concludes the first volume of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality or The Will to Know—namely, that we can, by a “tactical reversal of the various mechanisms of sexuality,” “counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures and knowledges in their multiplicity and their possibility of resistance. The rallying point for the [End Page 112] counterattack against the deployment of sexuality,” Foucault says there, “ought not to be sex-desire but bodies and pleasures” (157). This puzzle has been fruitfully engaged by Ladelle McWhorter in a book-length study that fashions from Foucault’s concept of counter-memory the mainstay and principal engine of this proposed counterattack. In Bodies and Pleasures, McWhorter invokes counter-memory for the transformative effects it has on the bodies and pleasures constituting her own identity and, by extension, all the identities that serve as stereotypes defined by the normalizing procedures that judge them—what turn up in Butler’s scheme as fixed premises of the political system.

What I offer in the following is an alternate account of countermemory that pulls the counterattack described by McWhorter closer to the line drawn by Butler in an attempt to set that line in flight toward a more radical vision of the bodies and pleasures I think Foucault has in mind. I introduce here an account of counter-memory outfitted for making false (false faces, false movements, false promises, false claims), for compromising or disqualifying what are supposed to be our truths, our name, our place, our destiny, our part of the whole. This account will draw immediate suspicion from those who accept the psychoanalytic verdict that holds a subject always misrecognizes herself and that it’s precisely the lie or the feint that stabilizes this delusion.² Making false would seem to those so aligned to restage the aim of ego psychoanalysis: keeping the Real at bay with imaginative fictions that enslave us ever more to the Law. At the other extreme, champions of liberal political theory will say it’s precisely the false we want to avoid if we expect to represent ourselves fairly in deliberations about the best ways...