17.7.13

The risk of becoming broken by the law

Mejor dicho, imposible. Judith Butler comenta en este fragmento cómo el Derecho nos puede arrancar nuestras subjetividades, y aún así, como instrumento del sistema liberal, se hace necesario acudir a él. Lo importante, dice Butler, es reconocer la importancia de que acudir al derecho tiene que venir acompañado con un movimiento social que mantenga una distancia crítica hacia éste. Dejo el fragmento del capítulo 'Recognition and survival':

“[W]hen a woman who is raped goes before the law in order to have the crime against her prosecuted, she has to comply with the very idea of the reliable narrator and legitimate subject inscribed in the law. As a result, if the law finds that she is not a legitimate subject, that what she claims has no value, and the her speech in general is without value, then she is actually deconstituted as a subject by the law in question. It is a moment, like any number of moments within immigration politics, when the demand to comply with the subject can goes and does lead to the deconstitution of the subject by the law itself. 

Does this mean that we do not turn to the law to prosecute rape? No, and perhaps here the law is something we cannot not want. And this is particularly true in those instances where there are no such laws, or where laws are being instituted that recognize rape as a crime (including marital rape). And yet, in turning to the law, one runs the risk of becoming broken by the law. And the struggle then to regain “standing” and “voice” becomes one that cannot be done alone, requiring as it does collective support, if not a social movement. And when this happens –and we see the importance of grounding any appeal to the law within a social movement that sustains a critical relation to law (and the risk of becoming deconstituted, abjected, precisely through the liberal instruments one needs).”

-Judith Butler, en Dispossession: the performative in the political.

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