Embodiment and Subversion

Objections to Judith Butler’s Nietzsche

Bibliographic Data

ID17628148
AuthorsMat Messerschmidt (2462 University of Chicago University of Chicago Committee on Social Thought 1130 East 59th Street Chicago USA, corresponding author)
Year2026
Publication date2026-02-17
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueNietzsche Studien (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0342-1422 • E-ISSN: 1613-0790
PublisherDe Gruyter (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1515/nietzstu-2025-0043
OpenAlexW7129197494
LanguageEN
References cited20

This article considers the importance of Nietzsche’s GM I 13 to Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990), arguing that Butler misreads Nietzsche’s passage and exploring the implications of their misreading. I begin by placing Butler’s reading in the context of French poststructuralist readings of Nietzsche that appear to have influenced Butler. I then turn to Butler’s crucial invocation of GM I 13, showing how Nietzsche is claiming that consideration of the human being as a hierarchy of drives reveals our limitations when it comes to self-transformation – whereas Butler takes the lack of a “doer” behind the “deed” to be a thought that amplifies our capacity for self-transformation. Turning to Saba Mahmood’s criticisms of Butler’s account of the subversion of gender norms, I show how, without speaking of Nietzsche, Mahmood’s critique highlights what Butler failed to register in Nietzsche: namely, that thinking of the gendered human being as embodied means acknowledging that the subversion of cultural norms must involve more than the disruption of repeated culturally significant acts. Rather, it must involve the potentially long, slow work of reengineering the body as a hierarchy of drives

Close reading · Hierarchy · Invocation · Subversion · Diverse academic research themes · Feminism, Gender, and Intersectionality · Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

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