Agency

The chapter focuses on what it means to act. In various places, Butler claims that performativity is an account of agency. Agency, as this chapter endeavours to explain, is a mode of remaking the social reality in which we live as embodied beings. In that sense, it needs to be understood as Butler’s political commitment to social transformation. However, agency is not only employed to transformative ends. It belongs to acting itself, it is part of our performative becoming in the world, it constitutes us into subjects. The chapter therefore introduces a full-fledged understanding of performativity as citationality, and presents the notion of constrained and conditioned agency, offering Butler’s peculiar theory of the subject. It unpacks the transformative aspects of agency, attempting to define who is the agent of social transformation. The last part of this discussion involves various subjects – from drag queens, Antigone, to the precarious assembled to performatively protest their disposability. It also prefigures the notion of the social, which is important for subsequent chapters.