Butler's recent work is emblematic of the ethical turn in left political theory, one that seems to embrace ethics out of a kind of political despair. For her, ostensible barriers to justice can become opportunities for responsibility, recognition, and resignification.2 Opacity, vulnerability; exposure, and grief provide potential openings to others and to ourselves, resources that might enable us to understand how our human being is necessarily and unavoidably a being together. The cost of this ethical sensitivity, however, is politics. Butler presents ethical resources as available only under conditions of the denial of politics. Should we make political choices or act politicaly we wil cut ourselves of from the insights and capacities arising out of vulnerability and grief. Thus, Butler ofers a set of responses to contemporary fundamentalisms that eschew condemnation and conviction and present openness and critique not only as ethically preferable to decisions for or against but as necessarily incomp�tible with the division necessary for politics.
To be sure, Butler's ethical turn need not displace politics. Rathet; as this chapter explains, such displacement results from her constrained conception of sovereignty, wherein sovereignty functions less as a political arangement than as a kind of master capable not only of holding together difuse meanings and efects by the force of its word, a word with power to initiate and end, but also of fully determing the words that it utters and the efects of these words. I show how Butler's critique of sovereignty misfires as it shoots at fantastic returns of a master rather than attending to the more complex reformatting of sovereignty in globalized communicative capitalism. Because she aims at the wrong target, left political conviction . ends up a casualty of friendly fire: a result that contributes to neoliberalism' s advance.
Governmentality and Fantasy
Butler's Excitable Speech, published in 1997, explores power and agency against the background of Michel Foucault's notion of governmentality. Foucault argues that state power from the eighteenth century on has formed an ensemble of "institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections . . . calculations and tactics . . . which has as its target population, as its principal form ofknowledge, political economy, and as its essential technical means apparatuses of security:'3 Butler takes this notion of governmentality to mean that contemporary power is not " constrained by the parameters of sovereignty" but "difused throughout disparate and competing domains of the state apparatus, and through civil society in difuse forms:'4 In contrast to Foucault, who asserts the continued centrality of the problem of sovereignty even as he recognizes that the governmentalized state is lacking in unity, individuality, and functionality, Butler reads governmentality as replacing sovereignty. She writes that "contemporary power is no longer sovereign in character" and power is "no longer constrained within the sovereign form. of the state" --as if there were some time when it had been (ES, 74, 78) .
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