Undoing Gender.
New York: Routledge, 2004.
☆法によってintelligibleであるとされることに対するambivalence. たしかにgay, lesbian達は自らの不可視性と戦い、社会におけるrecognitionを求めてきたのだが、それは同時に法やシステムによるクラシフィケーションとそれが資するところの（往々にしてheterosexit的な）normalizing disciplineを補強することに繋がるのではないか、という立場が強く押し出される。Butler自身はそれゆえ同性婚の法制化には反対の立場をとっているのだが、同時にそれによって得られる法的権利を求める人々に対する理解ももちろんある。Illegibilityに価値を置くのはlesbianityを名付けに対する抵抗として読むBodies that MatterのCather論と同様の動き。正直にいってこれを読んで始めて同性婚法制化に対するqueer theoryの疑義の意味（hetero-normativeの再補強に対する抵抗、そして例えば同性monogamy以外のkinshipの形を模索しようとしている存在の排除に対する抵抗）が腑に落ちたわけだが、同時にやはりそれはシステムの助けを得ずとも愛するものを守り育てる資力と知力のある者たち（ちなみに本書もやはりButlerのパートナーでありともに養子を育てているWendy Brownにdedicateされているのだが）だからこそ言えることで、抽象的なセオリーだけでは生きていけない人々もいるのだという風に思わなくもない（もちろんButler自身もそれに対しては十分自覚的だし、それでも抽象的な論理を経由することよってはじめて獲得され得ないものもあるのをButlerは示してきたわけだから、難しいのだけれど。そしてPACS--pacts of civil solidarity--がどこまでButlerの言うkinship opened outside the familyに近づき得ているのかもわからないけれど）。Bersaniもそうだけれど、近年のqueer theoryというのはqueerなsociabilityというかqueerな関係性（heteronormativityやmonogamyというシステムの外の可能性）の構築を常に視野に入れているのだな、というのが雑駁な感想になるが、ここにはautonomousではなくどうしようもなくrelationalなselfというのも絡んでいて、たとえばそこから我は世界であるというThoreauやEmerson的transcendental selfとqueer communityという発想にも繋がるかもしれない（Thoreauの一種のアナーキズムをセクシュアリティを軸に考えてみたい）。
★★Illegibility as a source of power: [R]ecognition becomes a site of power by which the human is differentially produced. This means that to the extent that desire is implicated in social norms, it is bound up with the question of power and with the problem of who qualifies as the recognizably human and who does not. (2)/ There are advantages to remaining less than intelligible, if intelligibility is understood as that which is produced as a consequence of recognition according to prevailing social norms. (3)
★Inclusive view of "queer theory": If queer theory is understood, by definition, to oppose all identity claims, including stable sex assignment, then the tension seems strong indeed. But I would suggest that more important than any presupposition about the plasticity of identity or indeed its retrograde status is queer theory's claim to be opposed to the unwanted legislation of identity. After all, queer theory and activism aquired political salience by insisting that antihomophobic activism can be engaged in by anyone, regardless of sexual orientation, and that identity markers are not prerequisites for political participation. . . . it seeks not only to expand the community base of antihomophobic activism, but, rather, to insist that sexuality is not easily summarized or unified through categorization. (7)
★Queer theory and psychoanalysis: ［母父子のheteronormativeな家族であるエディプス関係をその根幹に置く精神分析はqueer theoryと一見して全く相容れないようではあるが］It is important to remember that psychoanalysis can also serve as a critique of cultural adaptation as well as a theory for understanding the ways in which sexuality fails to conform to the social norms by which it is regulated. Moreover, there is no better theory for grasping the working of fantasy construes not as a set of projections on an internal screen but as part of human relationality itself. (14-15)/ also pp127-130 and Section 6, new possibilities of psychoanalysis, especially of Jessica Benjamin's The Shadow of the Other.
★★★Fantasy and possibility: Moreover, fantasy is part of the articulation of the possible; it moves us beyond what is merely actual and present into a realm of possibility, the not yet actualized or the not actualizable. (28)/ Fantasy is not the opposite of reality; it is what reality forecloses, and, as a result, it defines the limits of reality, constituting it as the constitutive outside. The critical promise of fantasy, when and where it exists, is to challenge the contingent limits of what will and will not be called reality. . . . Some people have asked me what is the use of increasing possibilities for gender. I tend to answer: Possibility is not a luxury; it is as crucial as bread. I think we should not underestimate what the thought of the possible does for those whom the very issue of survival is most urgent. (29) 一見して徹底的に抽象化された理論がなぜ大事なのか、なぜ目先の「現実」を目に見える形で変えることだけでなくある種の見果てぬファンタジーとしての理論が大事なのかを考えるにあたっては重要なポイントだし、これまでButlerがやってきたこと（とそれが結果的に「現実」に対し成し遂げてきたこと）を鑑みれば大変説得力のあるパッセージだと思う。perhaps academic work might be regarded as a social site for [] speculation (111)
★Being dispossessed--"beside oneself": As sexual, we are dependent on a world of others, vulnerable to need, violence, betrayal, compulsion, fantasy; we project desire, and we have it projected onto us. (33)/ Sexuality is not simply an attribute on has or a disposition or patterned set of inclinations. It is a mode of being disposed toward others, including in the mode of fantasy, and sometimes only in the mode of fantasy. If we are outside of ourselves as sexual beings, given over from the start, crafted in part through primary relations of dependency and attachment, then it would seem that our being beside ourselves, outside, is there as a function of sexuality itself. (33)
★★★Toward alternative kinship arrangements: To be legitimated by the state is to enter into the terms of legitimation offered there, and to find that one's public and recognizable sense of personhood is fundamentally dependent on the lexicon of that legitimation. It follows that the delimitation of legitimation will take place only through an exclusion of a certain sort, though not a patently dialectic one. (105)/ Why should it be that marriage or legal contracts become the basis on which health care benefits, for instance, are allocated? Why shouldn't there be ways of organizing health care entitlements such that everyone, regardless of marital status, has access to them? まさにこれがファンタジーとしてのalternative kinshipで、これを理想とするからこそButlerはsame-sex marriageに対して懐疑的なスタンスをとる(109)/ Indeed, the argument against gay marriage is always, implicitly or explicitly, an argument about what the state should do, and what it should provide, as well as what kinds of intimate relations ought ti be eligible for state legitimation. . . . For both side of the debate, the question is not only which relations of desire ought to be legitimated by the state but also who may desire the state, who may desire the state's desire. (110-11)/ The state becomes the means by which a fantasy becomes literalized:desire and sexuality are ratified, justified, known, publicly instated, imagined as permanent, durable. And at that very moment, desire and sexuality are dispossessed and displaced, so that what one "is," and what one's relationship "is, are no longer private matters. Indeed, ironically, one might say that through marriage, personal desire acquire a certain anonymity and interchangeability, becomes, as it were, publicly mediated and, in that sense, a kind of legitimated public sex. . . . In this way, the desire for universal recognition is a desire to become universal, to become interchangeable in one's universality, to vacate the lonely particularity of the nonratified relation, and, perhaps above all, to gain both place and sanctification in that imagined relation to the state. (111)/ Are there not other way of feeling possible, intelligible, even real, apart from the sphere of state recognition? Should there not be other ways? (114)/ Indeed, in making the bid to the state for recognition, we effectively restrict the domain of what will become recognizable as legitimate sexual arrangements, thus fortifying the state as the source for norms of recognition and eclipsing other possibilities in civil society and cultural life. (115)/ legitimation is double-edged: it is crucial that, politically, we lay claim to intelligibility and recognizability; and it is crucial, politically, that we maintain a critical and transformative relation to the norms that govern what will and will not count as an intelligible and recognizable alliance and kinship. (117)
