Judith Butler and the Images of Theory

The article examines Judith Butler's work in dialogue, on the one hand, with Abstract Expressionism and the disfiguring of the human figure in de Kooning, and, on the other hand, with a European tradition emblematized by the empasse of Kafka's man before the Law. It discusses how Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) opens under the sign of the Kafkian subject’s saturnine disposition to pine before the law and closes invoking Kafka’s inspiring deconstruction of the inside/outside bar, resulting in a law written not before culture but with the body, on the surface of a body that, simultaneous with norms, repeats them rather than precedes them.