In the present seminar I shall attempt to bring into consideration Judith Butler’s critical treatment of the doctrine of linguistic determinism highly advocated in the structuralist school of literary and cultural criticism. Butler is a major recent critical voice that has critically responded to the Structuralist universal claim of linguistic determinism as dominant in the process of subjectivization. After a brief discussion of Butler’s major theoretical premises, I shall examine the Hegelian influence on her intellectual career. Furthermore, the present seminar addresses Butler’ concept of ‘the agent’ and its relation to language which provides a relative freedom for the agent in reconstructing his/her identity. While structuralism focused on the linguistic determinism for the subjects; post-structuralism faces examples of constructivism for the agent. The subject engaged in performativity seeks to be not subjected to any established signifying chain; the subject here tends to be rather an agent who escapes from the prisonhouse of linguistic determinism.
