^aEnglish and American Studies, University of Manchester, UK

Correspondence: Kaye Mitchell, English and American Studies, University of Manchester, Mansfield Cooper Building, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK. E-mail: Kaye.Mitchell@manchester.ac.uk

Abstract

This article responds to Lynne Segal's claims in "After Judith Butler: Identities, Who Needs Them?", concerning the shifts within Butler's work and her turn to questions of ethics, politics and identity. After considering, briefly, some of the main (materialist) critiques of Butler's work in recent years, I address the five shifts identified by Segal, suggesting that there are significant continuities across Butler's oeuvre and that, despite the adoption of a more ethically inflected language, it is still the circulation of cultural meanings that preoccupies her. The final third of the article, therefore, investigates Butler's continuing investment in a language of intelligibility and unintelligibility which represents the process of subjectivation as a process of "making sense of" oneself, and her tacit endorsement of the idea that "there are advantages to remaining less than intelligible" as a subject.