Butler and Rousseau on Identity

Discussions, often controversial ones, about same-sex marriage are largely, among other things, about one's gender identity.  And discussions about gender identity can vacillate from the deterministic pole ("I was born this way") to the performative pole ("I construct my own 'gender,' which might differ from my 'sex'").  A recent speech by Lori Watson, Director of the Women's and Gender Studies Program at the University of San Diego, illustrates especially the performative emphasis.  The speech was given in support of the Catholic university's Pride organization student group, which was organizing its 2nd Annual Drag Show.  In thinking about contemporary issues involving gender identity, I returned to the influential theorist Judith Butler.  Her 1990 book Gender Trouble is a seminal study of performativity that is influential in gender/queer circles such as Professor Watson's.

As I began Butler's 2004 book Undoing Gender, in which she clarifies her position on this passive/performative spectrum, I began to wonder about the pedigree of her central theoretical claims.  To what extent does her balancing act now between biological determinism and social construction resemble concerns about identity that also flowered in another era like the Enlightenment?

Although Judith Butler herself would likely not draw connections between her critique of gender and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s critique of the Enlightenment, some noteworthy echoes (and perhaps unacknowledged debts) exist. In particular, her insistence in Undoing Gender that gender “is a practice of improvisation within a scene of constraint” (p. 1) reflects, despite some important differences, a comparable tension that in his discourses Rousseau argued attended human self-invention in Enlightenment society: enslaving liberation, or alternatively liberated confinement. This similarity between Butler and Rousseau appears in several respects: recognition, the paradox of agency, and (in)authenticity.

Nietzsche and Foucault on Domination

Michel Foucault is justifiably regarded as a Nietzschean thinker.  In Madness and Civilization, Foucault adapts Friedrich Nietzsche’s genealogical method of inquiry and extends Nietzsche’s idea that “in all events a will to power is operating” (“Second Essay:  ‘Guilt,’ ‘Bad Conscience,’ and the Like,” in Genealogy of Morals, 514). Influenced by Nietzsche, Foucault interprets the history of madness in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries as attempts to control or dominate others, especially when society’s morals are perceived to be violated or threatened. 

Darwin and Nietzsche on Genealogy

Taking a genealogical approach to an idea -- what is its lineage, family tree, or antecedent chain of births? -- is not new.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau had arguably taken a similar approach to moral degradation and inauthentic living in his "Discourse on the Origin of Inequality" (1754).  (See, e.g., two prior notes on this, here and here.)  It does seem, however, that genealogy more explicitly comes into its own as a method of inquiry in the nineteenth century.  Sigmund Freud himself later will follow much the same path in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930).  When one reads Freud's exploring the genealogical history of human unhappiness with civilization, which he explains by tracing the evolution of guilt in the development of the super-ego, one detects not only the influence of Rousseau's incipient genealogical explorations, but also the more mature and distinct projects of nineteenth-century luminaries Charles Darwin and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Rousseau and Flaubert on History

What is the role of historical progress, or its effects, in the thinking of two Frenchmen, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) and Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)?  In my last post, I compared Rousseau to Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) on the subject of what Enlightenment is and has done.  In this post, I want to build on that by focusing more specifically on the question of history as it marched from the period of Enlightenment further into the period of modernity.  And I want to explore this within the French borders.  Kant and Rousseau were contemporaries but not countrymen.  The opposite is true of Rousseau and Flaubert, and it may be beneficial to glimpse how successive generations of French writers saw things unfolding.  Before turning to that, however, a refresher on the European context may be helpful.

Was Rousseau an Enlightenment Figure?

I have recently been re-reading some key texts of modernity, which partly explains my blog silence for the last few months.  Among these texts are essays on the Enlightenment by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778).  Sometimes the best questions for learning are the most basic ones.  Here are two:

1. What was Kant's understanding of the Enlightenment?
2. Was Rousseau an Enlightenment figure according to Kant's definition?