The fact that woman is not a unequivocal term which has been subjected to different kinds of critiques up to Butler.
Juridical systems produce the subject the purport to represent. Something similar is claimed Derrida and etc.
Derrida touches on the question of a constitution, and how a constitution comes to produce the people that it is supposed to be of. In the act of proclaiming itself to be of, also produces those that it is supposed to safeguard. So it is a kind of autopoiesis.
Butler is reconstructing something similar.
The structures structure the subjectivities they are applied to.
As such, representational politics is the effect of the juridical forms that oppress women. The category ’woman’ is a result of the oppression of them.
Butler embodies a kind of non-foundational philosophy that is not grounding itself in something stable. Like Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Saussure. These are forms of non-foundational approaches to philosophical and political problematisation. Non-foundational here means that the system of oppression that feminism is based on, might be entirely laden within feminism as the liberation of women itself.
The structures of juridical oppression are like throwing rocks and then hiding themselves.
”juridical power inevitably produces what it merely claims to represent”.
Butler is important in bringing french thought to the US.
In the past decade of marxism, there has been a strain of talking about materialism without matter. Alberto Toscano and Simon Frasier. Materialism without Matter. What is really at stake in materialism, is not related to matter, but to abstraction. In the end, materialism is not to do with matter, but with abstractions of capitalism.
Butler sounds like feminism without women.
Butler denies the state of nature hypothesis. Instead saying that it is an effect of society, ie. gender, not something essential to humans.
Rather than thinking through certain problems, Butler dissolves the problem of the woman.
When heidegger talks about anthropology, he is saying that philosophy is now claiming to be based on the anthropos, the human being, which understands the human being in a reified or naturalised way, with an essence. There is no essence of the human being, but existence, or contingency, is its essence. In existing you’ll figure out what the point of that is.