To be sure, Butler herself does not emphasize resignification here, althpugh she notes that sovereign power extends itself by producing equivocation (PL, 8o). For her, the crucial aspect of this extension is the way it is bound up with the "extra legal status of these oficial acts of speech" ( PL, 8o) . Gover�entality extends power throughout the population, using law tactically and instrumentally and relying on various nonstate bureaucracies and arrangements. "With regard to the indefinite detention of so-called enemy combatants, Butler argties that decisions to detain "are already outside the sphere of law" $( P L 5 8 , 6 7 )$ . She refers repeatedly to the extralegal status of various decisions, decisions which, precisely because of their externality to the law, animate a resurgent sovereignty. Sovereignty appears as and through the emergence of an unaccountable power dispersed th:oughout the difse operations and tactics of gov�rnmentality and concentrated in specific sites of illegitimate decision.
I disagree with Butler's account of the compensatory emergence of a lost sovereignty within the field of governmentality:, and I think she misdescribes contemporary changes in the structure of the contemporary state when she finds this sovereignty at work outside of law. Butler, in keeping with the limted view of law she presents in Excitable Speech, fails to attend to conflicts and changes within law. After all, the Bush administration's policies with regard to trying so-called enemy combatants in special military commissions had to be afirmed by the Supreme Courtwhich, fortunately, rejected such a grab for power out of hand. "When law is itself a site of contestation (as well as a contested site), the very idea of a division between inside and outside makes no sense. Conflict over the limits, extension, and terrain of law persists throughout various legal apparatuses,· including the writings and opinions of multiple lawyers and judges, journalists, and politicians, in the setting, in other words, of a governmentalized legal regime.
130
FIVE