Authorship: A Trick of the I

Abstract

In her Introduction to Excitable Speech, Judith Butler writes that the subject is:

brought into social location and time through being named. And one is dependent upon another for one’s name, for the designation that is supposed to confer singularity. Whether the name is shared by others, the name, as a convention, has a generality and a historicity that is in no sense radically singular, even though it is understood to exercise the power of conferring singularity.

(1997, p. 29)

Naming, and the subjectivity it bolsters, requires ‘an intersubjective context’, states Butler, because ‘the very possibility of naming another requires that one first be named’. To name is not simply to offer oneself up as an individual subject, but to participate in a ‘dyadic relation’ with another who also offers themself up. That is not to say, however, that those who participate in this intersubjective relation are generally aware of how it constitutes them: ‘the time of discourse is not the time of the subject’ (ibid., p. 31). The system of the subject’s enunciability, as Butler portrays it, is a ‘linguistic scene’, a stage whose spatio-temporal frame is ordinarily invisible.