frames of war by judith butler

Author:judith butler
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-84467-333-9
Publisher: verso
Published: 2008-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

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Sexual Politics, Torture, and Secular Time

To say that one would like to consider sexual politics during this time raises an immediate problem, since it seems clear that one cannot reference “this time” without knowing which time is being referred to, where that time takes hold, and for whom a certain consensus might emerge on the issue of what time this is. If the problem is not just a matter of different interpretations of what time it is, then it would seem that we already have more than one time at work in this time, and that the problem of time will afflict any effort I might make to try to consider such issues now. It might seem odd to begin with a reflection on time when one is trying to speak about sexual politics and cultural politics more broadly. But I want to suggest that the way in which debates within sexual politics are framed is already imbued with the problem of time, and of progress in particular, and with certain notions of what it means to unfold a future of freedom in time. That there is no one time, that the question of what time this is, already divides us, has to do with which histories have turned out to be formative, how they intersect – or fail to intersect – with other histories, and so with a question of how temporality is organized along spatial lines.

I am not suggesting here that we return to a version of cultural difference that depends on cultural wholism, i.e. that cultures ought to be regarded as discrete and self-identical unities, monolithic and distinct. In fact, I oppose any such return. The problem is not that there are different cultures at war with one another, or that there are different modalities of time, each conceived as self-sufficient, that are articulated in different and differentiated cultural locations or that come into confused or brutal contact with one another. Of course, that could be, at some level, a valid description, but it would miss an important point, namely, that hegemonic conceptions of progress define themselves over and against a pre-modern temporality that they produce for the purposes of their own self-legitimation. Politically, the questions – ”What time are we in?” “Are all of us in the same time?” and specifically, “Who has arrived in modernity and who has not?” – are all raised in the midst of very serious political contestations. The questions cannot be answered through recourse to a simple culturalism.

It is my view that sexual politics, rather than operating at the margin of this contestation, is in the middle of it, and that very often claims to new or radical sexual freedoms are appropriated precisely by that point of view – usually enunciated from within state power – that would try to define Europe and the sphere of modernity as the privileged site where sexual radicalism can and does take place. Often, but not always, the further claim is made that such a

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