Resisting imposed categories requires using them, not rejecting them

Evidence

Wise wants the partition between humans and nonhumans to be flexible, but he cannot do without it. He does not employ the notion of overlapping and intrinsically differentiated networks because human rights law seems to require mutually exclusive categories (human/nonhuman, guilty/not guilty, legal person/nonperson). The assumption is that to qualify for rights “they” must be sufficiently like “us”—and conversely, that if they are too unlike us, they cannot be redeemed. Wise insists that the statement “Animals can’t have human rights” seems like a scientific truth about the world but it is simply a formula for privileging humans over animals (or better, over “mere life”). — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 755 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Echoing Foucault, Butler argues, “The paradox of subjectivation (as jetissement) is precisely that the subject who would resist such norms is itself enabled, if not produced, by such norms. AI.. though this constitutive constraint does not foreclose the possibility of agency, it does locate agency as a reiterative or rearticulatory practice, immanent to power, and not a relation of exter.. nal opposition to power” (1993, 15). — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 158 (#complicates, via linked claim)

The new categories, the impulses, the instinctive actions, the strong knots formed, were observed, talked about, but always incorporated into the old shell; state capitalism or reformist international that would destroy private property and refuse to support the bourgeoisie in imperialist war, an anti-proletarian bureaucracy that throve on state property and would defend it to the last against private property, all the knots, impulses, etc. which drove these into the mind, were allowed in only in so far as they filled into the formed and finished categories which Lenin left. That is why what were the results of Reason in one generation become Understanding in another, and the negating, the transcending of the determinations into a higher unity cannot be done. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1310 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Totalizing critical categories covertly become admission criteria that police inclusion — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 412; Legal rights require rigid binary categories that reject graded differences — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 755; Group members resist surrendering meaningful category identities during intergroup contact — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 1817 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Legal rights require rigid binary categories that reject graded differences #complicates (0.75) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 755
• The resisting subject is itself produced by the norms it opposes. #complicates (0.73) — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 158
• Dogmatic adherence to inherited categories prevents movements from transcending stale frameworks #complicates (0.71) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1310