States of Fancy

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Notes

notes

1. Generally, I adopt Mieke Bal's terminology: “A narrative text is a text in which an agent relates (‘tells’) a story in a particular medium, such as language […] A story is a fabula that is presented in a certain manner. A fabula is a series of logically and chronologically related events that are caused or experienced by actors” (5; emphasis in original).

2. Personal conversation with A.L. Kennedy, University of Glasgow, May 2004.

3. Approximate quotation, A.L. Kennedy, Aye Write! Festival reading, Mitchell Library Theatre, Glasgow, 19 Feb. 2007.

4. A vision of how this happens is suggested in Kennedy's novella Original Bliss, which explores the idea of a cybernetics of the imagination understood as the way one is steered from the inside: “our interior lives have seismic effects on our exterior world” (151–311 (154)).

5. Bourdieu 474.

6. Butler, “Gender Trouble” 324–40 (333). See also Schaffer.

7. Butler, “Gender Trouble” 333.

8. Ibid. 334.

9. Laplanche and Pontalis 26.

10. Cowie 70–105.

11. Laplanche and Pontalis 26.

12. Derrida, Signéponge/Signsponge 120.

13. By “fantasy script” I understand a scenario of social interaction that one fantasises as suitable for oneself based on scripts derived from narrative “acquaintance” with the world, i.e., based on the schemata of social interaction offered in narratives that make sense of (signify) the world.

14. The concept of “iterability” is used by Derrida throughout his work but see, for instance, Jacques Derrida, “‘This Strange Institution Called Literature’: An Interview with Jacques Derrida” in Jacques Derrida: Acts of Literature, trans. Nicholas Royle, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992) 33–75 (62); and Derrida, Limited Inc. Judith Butler's understanding of iterability and reiteration is developed in the context of her theory of performativity in Butler, Gender Trouble esp. 140, 145, 226; and idem, Bodies That Matter esp. 1–29, 124–40, 187–89.

15. Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context” in Limited Inc 1–21. See also Austin.

16. Derrida, “Signature Event Context” 17.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid. 9, 18.

20. Butler, Bodies That Matter 8; emphasis in original.

21. Haraway 50.

22. Cohan and Shires 97.

23. Smyth 44.

24. Cohan and Shires 153. Their argument is based on an analysis of Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller.

25. De Man 11.

26. Genette 27.

27. Ibid. 26.

28. Ibid. 27.

29. Butler, Gender Trouble 147; emphasis in original.

30. See Althusser 127–87, 172–75.

31. Benveniste 209.

32. According to Benveniste:

I can only be identified by the instance of discourse that contains it and by that alone. It has no value except in the instance in which it is produced. But in the same way it is also as an instance of form that I must be taken; the form of I has no linguistic existence except in the act of speaking in which it is uttered.

.However, as Derrida's powerful argument restated in Limited Inc demonstrates, it can be argued that this I does have a linguistic existence beyond the act of speaking. This existence is implied by the iterability of narrative. Benveniste asserts that “in saying ‘I,’ I cannot not be speaking of myself.” However, I acknowledge in line with Derrida's argument that it is possible that in saying “I,” I may be citing an “I” that is not necessarily myself, but it overtakes myself within its forcing coherence. Benveniste 218, 197.

33. Weissenborn and Klein 3.

34. Levinson 54.

35. Derrida, “Signature Event Context” 18; emphasis in original.

36. In fact, as Butler insists, “reiterations are never simply replicas of the same” (Bodies That Matter 226).

37. See, for instance, Jacques Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” in Écrits 31–106 (65–67).

38. Butler, Bodies That Matter 2.

39. Butler, Psychic Life of Power 21.

40. Bakhtin 123.

41. Butler, Gender Trouble 145.

42. See Lacan, Seminar of Jacques Lacan esp. 161–230.

43. Butler, “Gender Trouble” 336–37.

44. Butler, Gender Trouble 77.

45. Ibid.; emphasis in original.

46. Phillips and Hardy 2.

47. Kress 115–40 (122).

48. McDowell 7.

49. Sellers vii.

50. Butler, Bodies That Matter 2.

51. Idem, Undoing Gender 217.

52. Idem, Gender Trouble 14.

53. Belsey and Badmington 1–12 (3).

54. Boje 997–1035 (1000).

55. Collins 984–1013.

56. Butler, “Gender Trouble” 333.

57. See idem, Bodies That Matter 1–23.

58. McClintock 16.

59. Martin 104–21 (119).

60. Or, to phrase this point in psychology terminology, one assumes that one's body image is underlain by one's body schema. John Campbell proposes that one's representations of one's body

might be used only in mediating one's own perceptions and actions, in which case I will speak of a body schema. Or the representation might also be used in registering the impact of one's behavior on other people, in which case I will speak of a body image.

In my analysis, the fantasising of one's identity through using narrative in discursive interaction yields a body image. Yet the location produced by discursive deixis also interferes with one's body schema, with his/her sense of belonging to a material environment. Campbell 29–42 (33–34).

61. Keller 209–18 (211, 214–15).

62. Cixous 347–62 (362).

63. Kristeva 4.

64. Ibid. 71–72.

65. Grosz, “Bodies and Knowledges: Feminism and the Crisis of Reason” in her Space, Time, and Perversion 25–43 (33); emphasis in original.

66. Clayton 58–76 (66).

67. Rich 42–50 (45); emphasis in original.

68. McDowell 215.