Performative Signification

Performative Signification is the concept — drawn from Judith Butler's theory of gender — that sex and gender are not pre-given natural substances but are produced through the iterative, citational practice of signs: sex is constituted as an effect of its own repeated enactment rather than expressing an interior biological truth. On this account, there is no "natural" or originary sex beneath the performance; the appearance of a naturalized interior is itself an artifact of the performative surface. Butler's formulation, as Copjec presents it, treats the instability, slippage, and incompleteness inherent in any signifying practice as evidence that sexual identity is never fully closed or fixed — and therefore as an opening for resistance through parody and subversive repetition.

Copjec's intervention, however, is to expose a structural equivocation in this framework. By collapsing the incompleteness of the signifying process into the incompleteness of sexual being, Butler's performative signification illegitimately converts a logical limit of representation into a political resource — as if the gap in signification were simply available for voluntarist recoding. From the Lacanian/Freudian standpoint Copjec defends, sex is produced not by the success of signification (not by what the performance achieves) but by signification's internal, constitutive failure: the antinomy generated at the limit of the signifying field. This is a Real impasse, not an open horizon of re-signification, and it cannot be resolved by either the dogmatic claim that sex is a stable structure or the skeptical claim that it is endlessly malleable.

Within radical-thinkers-joan-copjec-read-my-desire-lacan-against-the-historicists-verso, Performative Signification is the primary critical target against which Copjec articulates the Lacanian account of sex and the antinomy of sexuation. It functions as the limit-case of what Copjec calls "historicist" constructivism: the position that reduces the Real of sex to an effect of discursive practice that remains, in principle, revisable. The concept thus sits at the intersection of the cross-referenced canonicals. From the angle of Contradiction, Butler's view inadvertently dissolves the antinomy of sex into a merely empirical instability — a contingent incompleteness — whereas Copjec insists that sexual contradiction is logically irreducible, operating in the same register as Kant's antinomies and Lacan's formulas of sexuation. Against the Not-all structure of Feminine Sexuality, Performative Signification is inadequate because it misreads the "not-all" — the structural incompleteness of the feminine side of sexuation — as a sign that sexual identity is always open to parodic re-inscription, when in fact the not-all names a determinate logical impasse, not an indeterminate political opportunity.

The concept also implicates Language and Dialectics: Butler's framework, as Copjec reads it, treats the signifying process as a dialectical back-and-forth between norm and subversion that could in principle be redirected, while Lacan insists that the failure of signification to capture sex is not a dialectical moment to be sublated but a remainder — a Real — that is constitutively non-dialectizable. The appeal to Reason and Euthanasia of Reason is also relevant: Copjec's argument is that the skeptical-constructivist solution (Performative Signification as endless play) is as dogmatic as the structuralist solution, because both fail to sit with the antinomy that Contradiction and Dialectics in their Lacanian form require us to hold. The Imaginary dimension is implicitly at stake too: the "parodic proliferation" Butler celebrates risks remaining at the level of the imaginary — a play of surfaces and images — rather than reaching the symbolic and Real registers where Lacan locates the production of sex.

Read My Desire: Lacan Against the HistoricistsJoan Copjec · 2015 (page unknown)

Butler defines sex as a 'performatively enacted signification … one that, released from its naturalized interiority and surface, can occasion the parodic proliferation and subversive play of gendered meaning'

The phrase "released from its naturalized interiority and surface" is theoretically loaded because it presupposes that signification's failure to naturalize sex is a liberation — an opening rather than a deadlock — while "parodic proliferation and subversive play" reveals the voluntarist slide Copjec diagnoses: the assumption that the instability of the signifier translates directly into political plasticity at the level of sexual being itself.