James Martel, in his generous review of my book, suggests that I could perhaps provide a more charitable reading of Butler. In particular, he points out that I may be too quick to suggest that she wants to give up on the subject completely. Perhaps Butler would like to do away with the subject, but Martel maintains that she “acknowledges that we are effectively stuck with our subjectivity. In this way, subjectivity may be shifting, but it is not utterly ephemeral; it has a tenacity that forces us to contend with it.” He furthermore points out that those mechanisms that form part of recognition might help to make that transformation possible. For example, although Adorno produces gendered stereotypes, he also offers a theoretical concept, non-identity, which helps us undermine such stereotypes.

In Chapter 6 I argue that the idea of “desubjectivation,” or giving up on the subject altogether at the basis of feminist politics, which Butler defends in The Psychic Life of Power (1997), is a dead end for a transformative feminist political theory and practice. I argue that Butler ends up with this idea because, first, she rejects limit concepts (such as the Lacanian real and the Adornian notion of non-identity) and, second, because she holds on (albeit ambivalently) to the language of recognition. Since for Butler we must identify with an oppressive social category and thus be recognized by an alienating Other to secure our existence, the moment of becoming a subject is always bound up with capitulation to one’s subordination—a “sorry bind” that we can only escape through desubjectivation.

One does not need to go the route of desubjectivation, however, if one avoids the sorry bind that Butler gets herself into. In my book, I argue that subject formation does not necessarily imply a capitulation to subordination, if we employ limit concepts in our theorizing and break with the language of recognition. The moment of the limit, the moment of the real or non-identity, points at the holes or gaps in the Other, the symbolic domain and its signifiers (or oppressive social categories). In this moment, the Other does not recognize or misrecognize me but calls any wholeness of my identity into question. It makes me question who I am, and thus allows the political subject who questions and transforms all predetermined social categories to emerge.

Martel correctly points out that we find in Butler also the idea of a “constantly shifting subject.” In his reading, Butler’s subject is not really all that shifting. Such a reading helps to remove Butler’s fluid subject from its being entrenched in (neo) liberal market capitalism. However, the problem remains that the subjectivity we are stuck with is a tenacious and subordinated subjectivity, because it is the result of the identification with (or recognition) of an oppressive social category. Only if we theorize the subject as emerging in the moment beyond (mis)recognition can we envision a political subject that has a certain coherence necessary to rebel against the ills of (neo) liberal capitalism, while it remains an outline, or permanently open to contestation, necessary to counter its own oppressive tendencies.