2010-04-04

Butler reduced to poetry

She is, in her own way, dispossessed in the moment of acting as its site of transfer for me.

What am I calling on her to be?
And how does she take up that call?

What my call recalls for her will be the site of the countertransference,  but about this I cannot know.

Vainly I ask, "Who are you?", and then, more soberly, "What have I become here?"

And she asks those questions of me as well, from her own distance, and in ways I cannot precisely know or hear. 
This not-knowing draws upon a prior not-knowing, the not-knowing by which the subject is inaugurated, although that "not-knowing" is repeated and elaborated in the transference
without precisely becoming a site to which I might return.

(About the incommensurability that accounts for the countertransference)

(by Judith Butler, in Giving an Account of Oneself, Diacritics, no. 4, 2001)

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