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GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 11.2 (2005) 311-313



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Butler's Bodies of Work

The Judith Butler Reader. Edited by Sara Salih, with Judith Butler. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. viii + 374 pp.

Those who teach Judith Butler's work have looked forward to a reader that gathers key parts of her extensive corpus and provides a context in which to understand the major themes and continuities of her eclectic philosophical, psychoanalytic, cultural, and political interventions. Sara Salih has done an admirable job of providing such a frame, introducing each book chapter, essay, or interview with a critical summary that characterizes the piece and situates it alongside the larger issues that preoccupy Butler. In addition, Salih provides readers with the filiations and affiliations of Butler's work, noting where Butler derives, revises, and critiques the conceptual elaborations of others.

The reader, which covers the late 1980s to 2000, is divided into topical sections, following a roughly chronological order, and includes selections from the major books of the period: Subjects of Desire, Gender Trouble, Bodies That Matter, Excitable Speech, The Psychic Life of Power, Antigone's Claim, and Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (coauthored with Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek). It also includes a section devoted to Butler's discussion of pornography and censorship and both an essay and an interview that reflect on her critical practices and style. The book chapters and articles are mostly not excerpted, which comes as a relief to those of us who are eager to teach from readers with promising titles but often find their contents hopelessly dismembered. This volume demonstrates the coherence of the set of issues with which Butler is concerned, introduces her major concepts and coinages, and shows how her conceptualizations have developed over time, mutating to become more complex rather than evolving in a progressive teleological sense. It concludes with a selected bibliography of Butler's writings (Salih also mentions the very complete online bibliography [13]). In these respects, the reader is an achievement.

But any collection of the work of a scholar so widely read in so many disciplines is inevitably unsatisfactory in some respects. Given that there are many [End Page 311] important fields of reference for, and many genealogies of, Butler's work, I hope that this will not be the only Butler reader. We may need a different selection for our feminist theory courses than for our philosophy courses, for our gay and lesbian theory courses, or, finally, for our courses on critical cultural theories. The introduction—a tour de force of clarity—somewhat underplays Butler's engagement with feminism. However, it does justice to Butler's philosophical formations, and in this way it serves as a corrective to other characterizations that have deemphasized her disciplinary training. It also clearly shows the degree to which Butler is a Foucauldian thinker whose critical writing is politically engaged and thus who takes seriously her vocation as activist intellectual.

Occasionally, the introduction to a particular essay does not deal primarily with the essay's argument. For example, one may wonder why, given the introduction provided for Gender Trouble (90–94), Salih does not reprint chapter 2 instead of chapter 3, since she spends more time introducing the former than the latter. Similarly, in the introduction to "The Lesbian Phallus," from Bodies That Matter, Salih treats other parts of the book at length, coming to this essay late in the discussion. This manner of proceeding is useful for teachers introducing Butler's work as a whole, and I appreciate the summaries; it is only the lack of an explanation for these decisions that puzzles me.

I do have two theoretical disputes with Salih's interpretation of Butler's work. The first, in the introduction to the reader (7–8), involves Salih's characterization of Butler's revision of Freudian theories of desire and identification in The Ego and the Id. Salih seems to argue that Freud posits an innate sexual disposition on the part of the infant and that Butler's work exposes this disposition as...

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