"HOW CAN I DENY THAT THESE HANDS AND THIS BODY ARE MINE?

"
Author(s): Judith Butler
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Qui Parle, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Fall/Winter 1997), pp. 1-20
Published by: University of Nebraska Press
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"HOW CAN I DENY THAT THESE HANDS AND

THIS BODY ARE MINE?"1
JudithButler

I remember a sleepless night last year when I came intomy living

room and turned on the television set to discover that C-Span was

on feminist topics, and that the historian,

offering a special session
was
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese,
making clear why she thoughtWomen's
Studies had continuing relevance, and why she opposed certain radi
cal strains in feminist thinking. Of those positions she most disliked
she included the feminist view that no stable distinction between

the sexes could be drawn or known, a view that suggests that the
difference between the sexes is itselfculturally variable or, worse,

as if it isall a matter of
discursively fabricated,
language. Of course,
this did not help my project of falling asleep, and Ibecame aware of
being, as itwere, a sleepless body in the world accused, at least

more rel
obliquely, with having made the body less rather than
evant. Indeed, Iwas not altogether sure that the bad dream from
which I had awoken some hours earlier was not in some sense be
Iwaking or was
ing furtherplayed out on the screen. Was
no
was
the
doubt
persecutory dimension
ing?After all, it
noia that hounded me from the bed. Was
it still paranoia

Idream
of para
to think

talking about me, and was there really any way

If itwas me, then how would
I know that I am the one

that she was

to

know?

to

whom

she refers?
I relate this incident not only because

Qui Parle Vol. 11, No.

1 Fall/Winter 1997

itforeshadows

the Car

JUDITH BUTLER

Iwill be preoccupied
in the following
Ipropose to answer the question ofwhether

tesian dilemmas with which

paper, and not because

in language. Iwill, for the mo
sexual difference isonly produced
of
sexual
the
leave
ment,
difference, to be returned to an
question
other time.2 The problem I do propose to address emerges every

time we try to describe the kind of action that language exercised

on the body or, indeed, in the production or maintenance
of bod
ies. And we do tend to describe language as actively producing or
a
we use, implicitly or explicitly, the lan
crafting body every time
guage of discursive construction.

that follows, I
of Descartes' Meditations
to
in
Descartes
which
ask
whether
the
way
propose
posits the irreality
a
more
own
not
of his
general problem of
body does
allegorize
to
in
is
various
of
constructivism and
that
be
forms
found
positing
In the consideration

various critical rejoinders to a constructivism that is sometimes less

well understood than itought to be. The name of this paper that I
have already begun, but not yet begun, is: "How can I deny that
these hands and this body are mine?" These are, of course, Descartes'
words, but they could be ours or, indeed, mine, given the dilemmas

by contemporary constructivism.
The language of discursive construction takes various forms in
contemporary scholarship, and sometimes itdoes seem as if the

posed

ex nihilo from the resources of discourse. To claim,

body is created
is not only to
for instance, that the body is fabricated in discourse
as
a
to
kind
discourse
of
but
activity,
figure
fabricating
sidestep the

important questions of "in what way" and "to what extent." To say
that the line between the sexes, for instance, must be drawn, and
must be drawable,
is to concede that at some level the stability of
the distinction depends upon a line being drawn. But to say thatwe
must be able to draw a line inorder to stabilize the distinction be

tween the sexes may simply mean thatwe must firstgrasp this dis
tinction ina way that allows us then to draw the line, and the drawing
of the line confirms a distinction that is somehow already at hand.
conversely, that there are certain conventions that
how
and
where
the line ought or ought not to be drawn, and
govern
that these conventions, as conventions, change through time, and
But itmay mean,

produce a sense of anxietyand of unknowingnesspreciselyat the

HOW CAN I DENY?

moment

inwhich we

are compelled to draw a line in reference to

line then lets us know what will and will not
qualify
as "sex"; the lineworks as a
in
or
Foucault's
sense,
ideal,
regulatory
a normative criterion that
and
controls
the
and
permits
appearance
knowability of sex. Then the question, which is not easily settled,
becomes: do the conventions that demarcate sexual difference de
termine in part what we "see" and
"comprehend" as sexual differ
ence? It is,you might surmise, not a
large leap from this claim to the
notion that sexual difference is fabricated in
language. But I think
thatwe may need to move more
before
either champion
carefully
or
this
conclusion.
ing
reviling
the sexes. The

The

of construction
language
the
linguisticism,
assumption thatwhat

risks a certain

form of

is constructed by
language
is therefore also
that
the
language,
object of linguistic construction
is nothing other than
language itself.Moreover, the action of this
construction isconveyed through verbal
expressions that sometimes
a
and
at
unilateral
creation
work. Language is said to
imply simple
or
to figure the body, to
fabricate
produce or construct it,to consti
tute or to make it.Thus,
language is said to act, which involves a
as
of language
tropological
understanding
performing and
There
in
is, of course, something quite scandalous
performative.
volved in the strong version of construction that is sometimes at

work when, for instance, the doctrine of construction

implies that
the body is not only made by
but
made
of
language,
language, or
that the body is somehow reducible to the
linguistic coordinates by

which

it is identified and identifiable, as ifthere isno

non-linguistic
stuffat issue. The result is not only an
ontological realm understood
as so many effects of
linguistic monism, but the tropological func
as
of
action becomes strangely literalized in the
tioning
language
of
it
what
does, and how itdoes what itdoes. And though
description
de Man often argued that the
tropological dimension of discourse

works against the performative, it seems here thatwe see, as Ibe

lieve we do in de Man's discussion of Nietzsche, the literalization

of thetropeof performativity.
Iwant to suggestanotherway of approachingthisquestion,
which refusesthe reductionof linguistic
constructionto linguistic
of languageacting
monism,andwhich calls intoquestion thefigure

JUDITH BUTLER

on the object of construction. Itmay

unilaterally and unequivocally
term
"construction" no longer makes sense in this
be that the very
is better suited to what I
context, that the term "deconstruction"
to describe, but Iconfess to not really caring about how or
in relation to one another or,
these terms are stabilized
indeed, in relation to me. My concerns are of another order, per
as the problem of discursive
haps in the very tension that emerges

propose
whether

construction comes

into dialogue with deconstruction.

For my purposes, I think itmust be possible to claim that the

or identifiable apart from the linguistic coordi
body is not known
nates that establish the boundaries of the body without thereby
claiming that the body is nothing other than the language by which

the body an ontological

its
that
effect of the language
governs
knowability. Yet this view fails
to note the incommensurability between the two domains, an in
an opposition. Although one
commensurability that is not precisely
the
that
body isonly knowable through
might accept the proposition
never fully
language, that the body isgiven through language, it is
it is known. This

last claim seeks to make

given in thatway, and to say that it is given partially can only be

we also acknowledge
that it isgiven, when it isgiven,
understood if
at the same time, and
inpartsand
withheld
it is,as it
were, given
language might be said to perform both of these operations. Al
on
language to be known, the body also
though the body depends
would be tempt
exceeds every possible linguistic effortof capture. It
ing to conclude that thismeans that the body exists outside of lan

guage, that it has an ontology separable from any linguistic one,

and thatwe might be able to describe this separable ontology.
But this iswhere Iwould hesitate, perhaps permanently, for as
we begin that description ofwhat isoutside of language, the chiasm
reappears: we have already contaminated,
though not contained,
the very body we seek to establish in itsontological purity.The body

its linguistic grasp, but so too does itescape the subsequent

escapes
effort to determine ontologically that very escape. The very descrip

tion of the extra-linguistic

body allegorizes the problem of the

chiasmic

language and body, and so fails to sup

itseeks to articulate.

relation between

ply the distinction

To say thatthebody is figuredchiasmically is to say thatthe

HOW CAN I DENY?

logical relations hold simultaneously: the body is given

through language but is not, for that reason, reducible to language.
The language through which the body emerges helps to form and
following

establish

in its knowability, but the language that forms

not fully or exclusively form it. Indeed, the move

that body

the body does

ment of language that appears to create what itnames, itsoperation
as a seamless performative of the illocutionary persuasion, covers
over or dissimulates

the substitution, the trope, by which language

a
as
transitive
act, that is, by which language ismobilized
appears
as a performative that simultaneously does what itsays. If
language
acts on the body in some way ifwe want to speak, for instance,
itmight
of a bodily inscription, as so much cultural theory does -

be worth considering whether language literally acts on a body, and

whether that body is an exterior surface for such action, or whether
these are figures thatwe mobilize when we seek to establish the
efficacy of language.
This leads to a converse problem, namely, the case inwhich
own implication in the body, inwhich
language attempts to deny its
the case for the radical disembodiment of the soul ismade within

a
language. Here, it is question of theway inwhich the body emerges
in the very language that seeks to deny it,which suggests that no
operation of language can fully separate itselffrom the operation of

the body. Language itselfcannot proceed without positing the body,

and when ittries to proceed as ifthe body were not essential to its
own operation, figures of the body reappear in spectral and partial

the very language that seeks to perform their denial.

Thus, language cannot escape the way inwhich it is implicated in
bodily life,and when itattempts such an escape, the body returns
in the form of spectral figures whose semantic implications under
formwithin

the explicit claims of disembodiment made within language

itself.Thus, just as the effort to determine the body linguistically
fails to grasp what itnames, so the effort to establish that failure as

mine

definitiveisunderminedby thefiguralpersistenceof thebody.

This chiasmic relation becomes clear through a reconsidera
tion of the opening Meditations of Descartes, wherein he calls the
reality of his body into question. Descartes seeks to know whether
he can deny the reality of his own body and, in particular, the real

JUDITH BUTLER

ityof his limbs.3 For the moment, though, Iwant to suggest that
Descartes' ability to doubt the body appears to prefigure the skepti
cal stance toward bodily reality that is often associated with con
temporary constructionist positions. What happens in the course of
Descartes'
fabulous trajectory of doubt is that the very language
through which he calls the body into question ends by reasserting

the body as a condition of his own writing. Thus, the body that
comes intoquestion as an "object" thatmay be doubted surfaces in
the text as a figural precondition of his writing.
But what

doubt, understood as some

in a writing that we read and

is the status of Cartesian

inwriting,
thing which takes place
which, in reading, we are compelled to re-perform? Derrida raises
the question of whether the Cartesian "I" is compatible with the
method of doubt, ifthatmethod is understood as transposable, one
that anyone might perform. A method must be repeatable or iterable;
intuition (or self-inspection) requires the singularity of the mind un
der inspection. How can a method be made compatible with the

meditative
requirements of introspection? Although Descartes'
method isan introspective one, inwhich he seeks inan unmediated
fashion to know himself, it is also one that iswritten, and which is
apparently performed in the very temporality ofwriting. Significantly,
he does not report in language the various introspective acts that he
has performed prior to the writing: the writing appears as contem

poraneous with this introspection, implying, contrary to his explicit

claims, thatmeditation is not an unmediated relation at all, but one
which must and does take place through language.
As Ipresume my readership knows, Descartes begins hisMedi
tations by seeking to eradicate doubt. Indeed, he begins inan auto

biographical mode, asking how long ithas been that he sensed that
many of his beliefs were false, these beliefs that he held in the past,
that appeared to be part of his youth, thatwere part of his history.

He thenseeks to "ridhimself"(defaire)of his formerbeliefs (26).4

First, he claims:
is, apparently

"I have delivered my mind from every care," and he

luckily, "agitated by no passions," free to "address

of allmy former
myselfto theupheaval (destruction)
opinions" (26).
task is the dispassionate
destruction of his own opinion, but
also of his own past, and so we might understand the onset of the

His

HOW CAN I DENY?

to require performing a destruction of one's own past,

of memory. Thus, an "I" emerges, narratively, at a distance from its
former opinions, shearing off itshistoricity, and inspecting and ad
judicating itsbeliefs from a care-free position. Whatever the "I" is, it

Meditations

is from the start not the same as the beliefs which

itholds and which

itscrutinizes; or rather, the "I" appears to be able to maintain itself,

at the level of grammar, while itcalls such beliefs into question. To
call such beliefs

into question

is apparently not to call the "I" into

question. The one, the "I," ismanifestly distinct from the beliefs that
this "I" has held.
We must then, as readers, inorder to follow this text, imagine
an "I" who
is detachable
from the history of its beliefs. And the

grammar asks us to do this prior to the official beginning of the

method of doubt. Moreover, the very term that is generally trans
lated as "belief" is opinions and so implies a kind of groundless
a
knowing from the start, form of knowing whose groundlessness
will be exposed.
Descartes

seeks the principles of his former beliefs, finds that

on
senses
the
produces deception, and argues that nothing
relying
that once produced deception ought to be trusted again to furnish

in the future.And yet, sometimes the

anything other than deception
senses furnish a certain indubitability, as when the narrator relays
the following famous scene: there is the fact that leads Descartes to

say, "I am here, seated by the fire,attired ina dressing gown, having
this paper inmy hands and other similar matters"(27). Let me call
attention to the fact that the "I" is "here," ici, because this term in

it is a shifter, pointing to a "here"

which could be any here, but which seems to be the term that helps
to anchor the spatial coordinates of the scene and so to ground, at
this sentence

is a deictic one;

least, the spatial ground of its indubitability.When Descartes writes

"here," he appears to refer to the place where he is,but this isa term
that could refer to any "here" and so fails to anchor Descartes to his

we mightexpect itto.
What does thewritingof
place intheway that
hisplace do to the indubitablereferentiality
of that"here"?Clearly,
it is not here; the "here" works as an indexical that refers only by
remaining indifferent to itsoccasion. Thus the word, precisely be
cause itcan referpromiscuously, introduces an equivocalness
and,

JUDITH BUTLER

indeed, dubitability thatmakes itquite impossible to saywhether or

not his being "here" is a fact as he claims that it is. Indeed, the very
use of such an equivocal termmakes itseem possibly untrue.

"here," as itwere, is that Descartes'

exceeds
the
very language
perspective itseeks to affirm, permitting
a
for narration of himself and a reflexive referentiality that distances
I seek to underscore

What

the one who

narrates from the "I" by whom

of a narrative "I" in the Meditations

it is narrated. The emer

for
has consequences
seeks to make. The written

gence
the philosophical

argument Descartes
status of the "I" splits the narrator from the very self he seeks to
know and not to doubt. The "I" has gotten out of his control by
virtue of becoming written. Philosophically, we are asked to accept

is not the same as the history of itsopinions, who can

"undo" and "destroy" such opinions and still remain intact. Narra
tively,we have an "I" that is a textual phenomenon, exceeding the
whose verywritten
place and time inwhich itseeks to ground itself,
an "I" who

character depends upon this transposability from context to context.

But things have already become strange, forwe were to have
in the Preface, with reasons, ones
started, as Descartes maintains
that persuade, and which give us a clear and distinct idea of what

cannot be doubted. We
stead we

are drawn

were

to distrust the senses, but in

into the certainties that they provide, the fact
about

that I sit here, am clothed, hold the paper that I am holding, by the
fire, that is also here.

From this scene, inwhich indubitability is asserted and with

drawn at once, emerges the question of the body. Descartes asks,
"how could I deny that these hands and this body here belong to

(27). Consider the very way inwhich he poses the question,

inwhich the question becomes posable within language.
The question takes, I believe, a strange grammar, one that affirms
the separability of what itseeks to establish as necessarily joined. If
one can pose the question whether one's hands and one's body are

me?"

the way

not one's own, thenwhat

has happened

such that the question

has

become posable? Inotherwords, how is itthatmy hands and my

body became something other than me, or at least appeared to be
other than me, such that the question could even be posed whether

or not theybelong tome?What is the statusof thequestion, such

HOW CAN I DENY?

that itcan postulate a distinction between the "I" who asks and the
so performs grammatically pre
bodily "me" that it interrogates, and
itseeks to show cannot be performed?
Indeed, Descartes begins to ask a set of questions

cisely what

that perform
can
I
cannot
"how
be
claim
they
performed:
deny that these
"
...
isone of them, and it isa strange,
hands and this body are mine
he
because
gives us the graphic contours of
paraliptical question

what

such a doubt, and so shows that such a doubt ispossible. This is,of
course, not to say that the doubt is finally sustainable, or that no

indubitability emerges to put an end to such doubt. For Descartes to

claim that the body is the basis of indubitability, as he does, is a
ifonly because
it appears to appeal to an
strange consequence,
an
sustains
that
uneasy compatibility with the theologi
empiricism
cal project at hand. These examples
lem of clothing, knowing that one

also seem to relate to the prob

is clothed, for he claims to be

sure that he was

clothed in his nightgown next to the fire.

The surety of this claim is followed by a series of specula
tions, however, ones that he imagines that others might make, but
which, in his imagining, he himself makes:
indeed, the writing be
to posit and adopt narrative perspectives on
himself which he claims not to be his own, but which, in adopting,
are his own in the very mode of their projection and displacement.
comes

the occasion

is thus the "I" who, inparanoia, is circuited

through alterity: what of those who think they are
inpurple, but are reallywithout covering, those others who

The other who

appears

and deflected
clothed

are likeme who think they are clothed, but whose thinking turns
out to be an ungrounded imagining? Descartes, after all, is the one
who isactively imagining others as nude, implying but not pursuing
the implication that they might well think of him as nude as well.
But why? Of course, he wants to get beneath the layers that cover
the body, but this very occasion of radical exposure toward which

theMeditationsmove ispreciselywhat threatens

himwith an hallu

cinatory loss of self-certainty.

he seeksof thebody leads

Indeed, itappears thatthecertainty

him into a proliferation of doubts. He is sure that he sits there clothed:

his perspective, as sense-perception and not pure intellection, is in
that sense clothed or cloaked, thus this certainty depends on a cer

10

JUDITH BUTLER

The nudity he attributes to the hallucinatory cer

tainty of others constantly threatens to return to him, to become his

tain dissimulation.

own hallucinatory certainty. Indeed, precisely as a sign of radical

certainty, that nudity undermines his certainty. Ifhe isclothed, he is
certain of what is true, but ifhe is not, then the truth has been ex
leads to the para
posed, the body without dissimulation, which
that only ifhe is deluded about being clothed
doxical conclusion

can his own utterances be taken as indubitable, inwhich case hal

lucination and certainty are no longer radically distinguishable from

one

another.

is not any nude body, but one that belongs to someone

who is deluded about his own nudity, one whom others see in his
some
nudity and his delusion. And this isnot simply any "one" with
This

a
characterological
singularity, but "one" who isproduced precisely
one who calls the reality of his
by the heuristic of doubt. This is

body into question only to suffer the hallucinatory spectrality of his

act. When
he sees others in such a state, nude and thinking them
selves clothed, he knows them to be deluded, and so ifothers were
to see him in such a state, they would know him to be deluded as
for a
well; thus, the exposure of his body would be the occasion

loss of self-certainty. Thus, the insistence on the exposed body as an

ultimate and indubitable fact in turn exposes the hallucinations of
the one who is nude, nude and hallucinating that he or she is fully

clothed. This figure of the indubitable body, one that only the mad
case of the res extensa, a
might doubt, ismade to represent the limit

body that cannot be doubted

will be held to be detachable

comprised of the senses,

from the soul and itsquest for cer

but which,

tainty.
Ifone were

to imagine the body instead as an earthenware

of glass, as Descartes puts it,one would be doubting
is true. But notice that here the very act of doubting seems

head or made
what

ones inwhich
bound upwith thepossibilityof figuralsubstitutions,
with itsartifactualsimulation
the livingbody ismade synonymous
or, indeed, with glass, a figure for transparency itself. Ifthe body is
certain as res extensa, what is to distinguish the human body as res
extensa from other such instances of substance?
tion, be separable

from the soul, what

If itmust, by defini
itshumanity?

is to guarantee

HOW CAN I DENY?

Apparently, nothing can or does.

After all, Descartes not only reports that others perform such
hallucinations, the report constitutes the textualization of the hallu

cination: his writings perform them for us, through an alienation of

perspective that isand is not exclusively his own. Thus, he conjures

such possibilities precisely at themoment inwhich he also renounces

such possibilities as mad, raising the question whether there is a
difference between the kind of conjuring that is a constitutive part
of the meditative method and those hallucinations that the method

remarks: "I should not be any the less

I to follow examples so extravagant [sije me reglais sur
leurs examples]." But what ifhe has already just ruled himself on
these examples, followed these examples, asked us to follow them,
is supposed
insane were

to refute. He

in the sense that towrite them is to follow them, and we are clearly
as
we do. The doubt he wants
following them well in reading him as

to overcome can only be reenacted within the treatise, which pro

duces the textual occasion foran identificationwith those fromwhom

he seeks to differentiate himself. These are his hands, no? But where
are the hands thatwrite the text itself,and is itnot the case that they
never

Can

actually show themselves as we read themarks that they leave?

the text ever furnish a certain sense of the hands thatwrite the

itpossible,
text, or does the writing eclipse the hands that make
such that themarks on the page erase the bodily origins fromwhich
they apparently emerge, to emerge as tattered and ontologically

remains? Is this not the predicament of all writing in

suspended
relation to itsbodily origins? There is no writing without the body,
but no body fully appears along with the writing that itproduces.
is the trace of Descartes' body in the text? Does
itnot resur
Where
face precisely as the figure of itsown dubitability, a writing which
must, as itwere, make the body strange ifnot hallucinatory, whose
condition isan alienation of bodily perspective ina textual circuitry

from
which itcannot be deliveredor returned?
Afterall, the text
quite literallyleaves theauthorialbody behind, and yet thereone
is, on the page, strange to oneself.

At theend ofMeditation I,he resolvesto suppose thatGod is

not good and the fountainof truth,
but some evil genius and that
external things are illusions and dreams. Accordingly,

he writes, "I

11

12

JUDITH BUTLER

shall consider myself as having no hands, no eyes, nor any senses,

yet falsely believing myself to possess all these things." Itwould

is to overcome this doubt

seem, then, that the task of theMeditation
in his own body, but it is that doubt that he also seeks to radicalize.
After all, it isDescartes'
ultimate project to understand himself as a
soul, as a res cogitans and not as a body;

in thisway, he seeks to

of thebody and so to ally himself

establishtheultimatedubitability

dream and hallucinate when they take the body to

be the basis of certain knowledge. Thus, his effort to establish radi
cal self-certainty as a rational being leads within the text to an iden

with those who

tificationwith the irrational. Indeed, such dreams and hallucinations

illimitable ifhe is to understand that certainty of himself as
a thinking being will never be furnished by the body.

must be

He writes that "the knowledge of myself does not depend on

on
things not yet known tome." And itdoes not depend
"things that
are feigned or imagined by my imagination [celles qui sont feintes
et invent6es par I'imagination]"
(42).5 The Latin term
effingo
an
can mean,
image," but also, "to make a
ambiguously, "to form
means
and
this
that
the
fact,"
knowledge of himself does not de
on
or
an
pend
image
making a fact. Inadvertently,Descartes
forming
introduces an equivocation between an imagining of what is not a
fact, and an imagining or making of what is a fact. Has the same
across the divide between delusion and real
imagining wandered

as the basis
ity,such that it is at once what Descartes must exclude
of self-knowledge and what he also must accommodate?

Ifknowledge does not depend on things that are feigned or

or facts that are made, then on what does itdepend? And
imagined
does his dismissal of imagining, invention, and factual making not

the very procedure of doubt that he uses to gauge the

falsifiability of his theses? Indeed, at another moment in the text, he
insists that imagination, even invention, serves a cognitive function,
and that itcan be used as the basis formaking inferences about the
undermine

of substance itself:"Iwould invent,ineffect,

when I
indubitability

am imagining something, since imagining is nothing other than con

templating the figure or image of a corporeal thing."6

The imaginationis nothingother than thecontemplationof

the figure or image of a corporeal

thing. The proposition

foreshad

HOW CAN I DENY?

ows

the claims that Husserl will make about the intentionality of

act
the
of imagining, suggesting that objects appear to the imagina
tion in some specific modality of their essence.
Ifthis is so, then the

imagination does not merely invent bodies, but its inventiveness is

also a form of referentiality, that is, of contemplating the figure or
image of bodies in their essential possibility. The sense inwhich the

imagination is inventive is not that itproduces bodies where there

were none. Justas referential suggestion of the term effingo compli
cates the problem, tying imagining to fact-making, so Descartes'
notion of the image as relaying the object
imagining to objects of perception, but

in some specific way ties

in both cases the link is

not conceptually, but through a semantic equivocation.

In
or
a
set
if
the
method
of
doubt
involves
of
deed,
supposing
positing
as
to
truewhich he then seeks
conditions
doubt, it involves conjectur

made,

ingwhat iscounter-intuitive, and so centrally engages the imagination.

I
I
I suppose, will
Je supposeraisuppose, would
suppose
this is the strange way thatDescartes renders his doubt in language,
where the term supposer carries the referentialambiguity that plagues
After all, supposer means to take for granted, to ac
cept as a premise, but also to postulate or posit, to make or to pro
duce. Ifthe "I" is not a corporeal thing, then itcannot be imagined.
his discussion.

When he writes "I suppose," he offers appositions that suggest

its interchangeability with the following formulations: I persuade
myself, I posit, I think, I believe. The object of that supposing and
one he has just
thinking takes the form of a different fiction than the
or believes is that "body, figure, ex
performed: what he supposes
...
own spirit." Here there
are
tension
nothing but fictions of my
appears to be going on a doubling of the fictional, for he is suppos
ing that the body, among other things, is a fiction of his own mind.
But is that supposing not itselfa fictionalizing of sorts? Ifso, is he
then producing a fiction inwhich his body is the creation of a fic

tion?Does themethod not allegorize theveryproblemof fictive

making

that he seeks to understand and dispute, and can he under

stand thisfictive
making ifhe continuesto ask thequestionwithin
the termsof thefictionfrom
which he also seeks toescape?

thinking, believing, work by way

of positing or, indeed, fabulating
but what is it that is fabulated?
Supposing,

self-persuasion,

13

14

JUDITH BUTLER

isa fiction of one's own spirit, then this suggests that it is

made or composed of one's own spirit. Thus, to posit is not merely
to conjecture a false world or to make one up, but to invent and
Ifthe body

refer at the same moment, thus confounding the possibility of a

strict distinction between the two. In thisway, "the fictions of the

spirit" forDescartes are not inopposition to the acts of thinking or

persuasion, but are the very means by which they operate. "Posit
ing" is a fiction of the spirit that is not for that reason false or with

out referentiality.To deny the fictive aspect of positing or supposing

is to posit the denial, and in that sense to reiterate theway that the
fictive is implicated in the very act of positing. The very means by

which

seeks to falsify false belief involves a positing or

recontracts the very illness it
that, homeopathically,

Descartes

fictionalizing
seeks to cure.

Ifthe falsification of the untrue must take place though

a counter-factual positing, which is itselfa form of fiction, then fal
sification reintroduces fiction at the very moment inwhich itseeks
to refute it.Of course, if
we could establish thatwhat
same
as what is fictional inwhat
not
is
the
supposing

is fictional in

is being sup
avoid
this
text
Descartes'
but
contradiction,
posed,
us
not
does
offer
any way of doing precisely that.
then we would

I hope that I have begun to show that in

imagining the body,
Descartes
is at once referring to the body through an image or fig
urehis words and also conjuring or inventing that body at the
same time, and that the terms he uses to describe this act of suppos

Hence, for
ing or imagining carry that important double-meaning.
in
the
which
is
the
Descartes,
language
body
conjectured does not
quite imply that the body is nothing other than an effect of lan
guage; itmeans that conjecturing and supposing have to be under
stood as fictional exercises
that are nevertheless not devoid of
referentiality.
When we

consider Descartes'

efforts to think the mind apart

fromthebody,we see thathe cannot help but use certainbodily

figuresindescribingthatmind. The effortto excise thebody fails
the body returns, spectrally, as a figural dimension of the
text. For instance, Descartes
refers to God as one who inscribes or

because

engraves on his soul, when

he writes, for instance, that he will never

forgetto refrainfromjudgmentofwhat he does not clearly and

HOW CAN I DENY?

distinctly understand, "simply by [God's] engraving deeply inmy

memory the resolution never to form a judgment on" such matters.
Descartes' mind is here figured as a slate or a blank page of sorts,
and God is figured as an engraver. "God deeply engrave(s) [grave] a
inmemory not to judge."
appears
Similarly, Descartes
memory in the same way that God
resolution

to imprint a thought on his

engraves a resolution on the

will: he refers to his own human and frail capacity to "forcibly im

press [imprimer]" a thought on his memory, and so help in the pro
cess of building up a new memory where the old one had been
now appears as a particular kind of action,
destroyed.' Meditation
one which, he claims, must be repeated, and which has as its
goal
the forcible imprinting (imprimer) of this same thought on memory,
an

imprinting that is as apparently forceful as God's engraving is

profound: indeed, both convey a certain formative violence, a rup

ture of surface, as the effect of writing.

Indeed, "the engraving" is thus themeans bywhich God's will
is transferred to Descartes, a peculiar form of transitivity that the
trope of writing helps to effect. His memory becomes the object in

engraves a resolution, as ifDescartes' memory were a

a
surface, an extended substance. But this is clearly a prob
page,
since
the mind is supposed to be, as we know, res cogitans
lem,
it is figured here precisely as an
rather than res extensa, whereas

which God

extended
becomes

surface and substance. Hence, the memory in some ways

a
figured as kind of body, extended substance and surface,

and we might well read here the resurfacing of the lost and repudi
ated body within the text of Descartes, one on which God now so

a resolution; indeed, the

stage is
profoundly engraves
metaphorical
now set for Kafka's "In the Penal Colony."
Indeed, itmakes sense to ask whether thewriting of theMedi
tations isprecisely what guarantees

this soldering of thememory

to

a
thewill. The extendedwritingof theMeditations acts to imprint
new knowledge

on his memory. To the extent that the page substi

tutesformemory,or becomes thefigurethrough

whichmemory is

understood, does that figure then have philosophical consequences,

namely, that introspection as method succeeds only to the extent

that it isperformedinwritingon thepage? Iswritingnotprecisely

15

16

JUDITH BUTLER

the effort to solder a new memory to thewill, and ifso, does itnot
require then the very material surface and, indeed, the materiality

of language itself that are hardly compatible with what Descartes

seeks to separate from the introspective act of the mind? And does
thiswriting not implicitly require the hand of the one who engraves

and the body as surface on which towrite, dispersing bodily figures

throughout the explanation of the soul?

text cannot but figure the body, that

If itseems thatDescartes'
to
not
its
does
reduce the body
figuration, and ifthat figuration turns
out to be referential, that does not mean that the referent can some
how be extracted from its figuration. The act by which the body is
supposed isprecisely the act that posits and suspends the ontologi

cal status of the body, an act that does not create or form that body
unilaterally (and thereby not an act in the service of linguisticism or
linguistic monism), but one which posits and figures, one forwhom

positing and figuringare not finally distinguishable.

Ifthere is no act of positing that does not become

implicated
in figuration, then it follows that the heuristic of doubt not only
entails figuration, but works fundamentally through the figures that
itsown epistemological
compromise
aspirations. But this conclu
sion is immediately impaired by another, namely, that the figuration

of the body meets its necessary limit in a materiality that cannot

finally be captured by the figure. Here iswhere proceeding by way
of both grammar and figuration falters, though it is a telling falter
ing. If the body

to its figuration or, indeed, its

itcannot be said to be a mere effect of dis

is not reducible

and
conceptualization,
course, thenwhat finally is it?The question
there isa grammar of the question inwhich

stands, but just because

the ontological status of

the body isposed does not mean that the answer, ifthere isone, can
within the grammatical terms that await that
be accommodated
answer. In this case, the posability of the question does not imply its

within the termsinwhich it isposed. The body es

answerability

it is approached. And
capes the terms of the question by which
even to make such a formulaic claim, relying on the "the body" as
the subject-noun of the sentence, domesticates precisely what it
seeks to unleash. Indeed, the grammar itselfexposes the limits of its
own mimetic conceit, asserting a reality that isof necessity distorted

HOW CAN I DENY?

a reality that can only appear, as

through the terms of the assertion,
itwere, through distortion.8
Descartes makes this point perhaps unwittingly as he proceeds
to dismember his own body in the course of his written meditation.

ismerely fig
might rush in to say that this "dismemberment"
as
Man
in
Paul
but
de
another
context, it
ural,
suggests
perhaps,
In refer
its
limits
limits.9
the
of
marks
very
uncanny
figuration
ence to Kant, de Man points out that the body in pieces is neither

We

figurative nor literal, but material, thus suggesting that materiality

sets the limits to cognition. It follows from his view that the only
way to convey that materiality is precisely through catachresis
and so through a figure.
which iswhat de Man actually does
or
not?
It
So is this body figurable
depends, Iwould suggest,

on how one approaches the question of figurality. IfDescartes' body

is not literally dismembered, though the language figures that as its
effect, inwhat sense is itstill dismembered? And ifdismemberment
is but a sign of a pre-figural materiality, then that materiality has
been converted into a trope through the very example that is said to
illustrate that non-convertibility. The body does not, then, imply the

destruction of figurality ifonly because a figure can function as a sub

stitution for thatwhich is fundamentally irrecoverable within or by the
Such a figure is,however, no less a figure than a mimetic
figure itself.10
one, and a figure need not be mimetic to sustain itsstatus as figural.
Clearly, though, the final question here must be to consider

this strange separation of the limbs from the body, this repeated
scene of castration, the one thatDescartes enacts through the gram
mar that conditions the question he poses of his body; inwhich he

is already separated from thatwhich he calls into question, a sepa

ration at the level of grammar that prepares the philosophical ques
tion itself; inwhich the hand thatwrites the doubt and the hand that
is itmine? isdoubted isat once the hand that is leftbehind as

thewritingemerges in,we mightsay, itsdismemberingeffect.11

There

is no doubt that a hand writes Descartes'

text, a hand

figuredwithin that text as appearing at a distance from the one who

looks upon it and asks after its reality. The hand is reflexively
in the course of the writing itperforms. It undoes its
spectralized
reality precisely at the moment

inwhich

itacts or, rather,becomes

17

18

JUDITH BUTLER

precisely by the traces of the act of writing itperforms. If

the body iswhat inaugurates the process of itsown spectralization
through writing, then it is and is not determined by the discourse it

undone

Ifthere is a materiality of the body that escapes from the

produces.
figures itconditions and by which it is corroded and haunted, then

this body is neither a surface nor a substance, but the linguistic

occasion
of the body's separation from itself,one that eludes
its
capture by the figure itcompels.

This essay was firstpresented as an invited lecture at the American Philosophical

inDecember,
Association Meetings
Itwas represented in
1997, in Philadelphia.
inApril,
revised version for the "Culture and Materiality" conference at UC Davis
inQui Parle.
1998, and has subsequently been revised for publication
Excellent work

difference
3

reconsidering the relationship of language and materiality in sexual

is currently being done by Charles Shephardson,
Debra Keates, and

Katherine Rudolph.
Interestingly, and not without

reason, suspended and inscrutable limbs reemerge

inKant" inways that suggest
and Materiality

essay on "Phenomenality
a m?tonymie
relation to the problem
inde Man's

that Descartes

poses.

For de Man,

the body

HOW CAN I DENY?

we can use thatword, as

the Third Critique is understood,
if
prior to figura
one that
itemerges as a particular kind of
tion and cognition. InDescartes,
figure,
status of the term, and thus raises the question of any
suspends the ontologica!

within

absolute separability between materiality and figuration, a distinction that de Man

on some occasions
tries tomake as absolutely as possible.
me fallait
une fois en ma vie de me d?faire de toutes
entreprendre s?rieusement

les opinions que j'avais re?ues... me d?faire de toutes les opinions." The textwas
in Latin in 1641 in France, although Descartes was
originally published
living in
Holland at the time. Descartes apparently had reasons to fear the Dutch ministers
so he had a friend of his oversee
in France. It
itspublication
reading the text, and
did, however, appear the following year, 1642, inAmsterdam, and the second
edition includes the objections and replies. This second edition is usually referred
to as the Adam and Tannery version, and itwas the basis for the French transla
tions. One of those took place that same year by the Duc de Luynes, and Descartes
itto various corrections
approved the translation, which is to say, that he subjected
in revised form in 1647. Hence, we can to some degree
and revisions. Itappeared
some instances,
think of the French text as one that Descartes
approved, and in
one towhich he was
a
signature.
willing to attach
every English version of Descartes will be a translation of the second ver
sion of theMeditations.
There were two French translations offered to Descartes
but nevertheless

wrote,

Almost

one by the Duc de Luynes and another

by Clerselier; he chose the
themselves, and the "objections
by the Duc de Luynes for theMeditations
and replies" translation by Clerselier.
for approval,

one

In 1661, Clerselier

republished his translation, making corrections, and aban

the translation by the Duc de Luynes that Descartes
had approved. Many
scholarly editions take this to be a more exact and literal translation and have used

doning

itas the primary text. Some of them complained

too liberal of a translation, lacking Descartes'
excuses forwhy Descartes might have accepted

was

tics, and the like.

that the Duc de Luynes' version

exactitude. And they have made
?
the translation
politesse, poli

The Frenchthat I followhere is thatprovidedby theDuc de Luynes.The

trans. Haldane
is The Philosophical Works of Descartes,
and Ross (Cam
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).
In the French, he refers towhat is "feintes et invent?e par
l'imagination," and this
notion of 'invented' is translated from the Latin: effingo. Knowledge
of oneself
English

uses
does not depend on what is feigned or invented, but the Latin term Descartes
for the later, effingo, casts doubt on the very denial that he performs.
"Je feindrais en effet, si j'imaginais ?tre quelque
chose, puisque
imaginer n'est

Descartes

autre chose que contempler

la figure ou l'image d'une chose corporelle."
writes, "he has at least leftwithin my power this resolution ... for al
a certain weakness
inmy nature in that Icannot
con
though I notice
continually

centrate my mind on one single thought [yene puis pas attacher continuellement
Icannot continually attach my spirit to the same
esprit ? une m?me pens?e],
I can yet, by attentive and
impress [imprimer] it so
thought,
frequent meditation,

mon

on my memory that I shall never fail to recollect itwhenever

I have need
forcibly
of it,and thus acquire the habit of never going astray" (178).
to Lacan's view of the mirror stage as thatwhich permits a
This view corresponds
specular

version of the body on the condition

of distortion.

19

20

JUDITH BUTLER

For a discussion

of dismemberment

and

10
11

and the limits of figuration, see Raul de Man,

in Aesthetic
Ideology, ed. Andrej

in Kant"

Phenomenality
"Materiality
Warminski
Press, 1997).
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
One might usefully consult Walter Benjamin on the status of allegory for precisely
to the figure.
such an approach
Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands
sance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).

See

of the English Renais