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Agency, Signification, and Temporality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2020

Stephanie Clare
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Abstract

This paper examines the temporality of agency in Judith Butler's and Saba Mahmood's writing. I argue that Mahmood moves away from a performative understanding of agency, which focuses on relations of signification, to a corporeal understanding, which focuses on desire and sensation. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's reading of Henri Bergson, I show how this move involves a changed model of becoming: whereas Butler imagines movement as a series of discontinuous beings, in Mahmood's case, we get an understanding of becoming.

Type
Research Article
Information
Hypatia , Volume 24 , Issue 4 , Fall 2009 , pp. 50 - 62
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 by Hypatia, Inc.

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