Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-g7gxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-20T03:28:56.876Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Agency, Signification, and Temporality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2020

Stephanie Clare
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The cultural politics of emotion. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Benhabib, Seyla. 1995. Subjectivity, historiography, and politics. In Feminist contentions: A philosophical exchange. London: Routledge, pp. 106–26.Google Scholar
Bergson, Henri. 1998. Creative evolution. Trans. Arthur Mitchell. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications.Google Scholar
Bordo, Susan. 1998. Bringing body to theory. In Body and flesh: A philosophical reader, ed. Welton, Donn. Oxford, N.Y.: Blackwell Publishers.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 1990. Bodies that matter. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 1997. The psychic life of power. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 1999. Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 2004. Undoing gender. New York: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clough, Patricia. 2007. Introduction. In The affective turn: Theorizing the social, ed. Clough, Patricia and Halley, Jean. Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 1–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Colebrook, Claire. 2000. From radical representations to corporeal becomings: The feminist philosophy of Lloyd, Grosz, and Gatens. Hypatia 15 (2): 76–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Deleuze, Gilles. 1997. Bergsonism. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone Books.Google Scholar
Grosz, Elizabeth. 2002. A politics of imperceptibility. Philosophy and social criticism 28: 463–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grosz, Elizabeth. 2005. Time travels: Feminism, nature, power. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hekman, Susan. 1998. Material bodies. In Body and flesh: A philosophical reader, ed. Welton, Donn. Oxford, N.Y.: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 61–70.Google Scholar
Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of piety: The Islamic revival and the feminist subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moi, Toril. 1999. What is a woman? Oxford, N.Y.: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Moya, Paula. 1997. Postmodernism, “realism,” and the politics of identity: Cherríe Moraga and Chicana feminism. In Feminist genealogies, colonial legacies, democratic futures, ed. Alexander, M. Jacqui and Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. New York: Routledge, pp. 125–50.Google Scholar
Muñoz, José Esteban. 2000. Feeling brown: Ethnicity and affect in Ricardo Bracho's The Sweetest Hangover (and Other STDs). Theatre Journal 52 (1): 67–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nussbaum, Martha. 1999. The professor of parody. The new republic online. February 1999, http://www.tnr.com/archive/0299/022299/nussbaum022299.html (accessed November 3, 2000).Google Scholar
Puar, Jasbir. 2007. Terrorist assemblages: Homonationalism in queer times. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2003. Touching feeling: Affect, pedagogy, performativity. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar