ABSTRACT
Judith Butler's contribution to contemporary criticism is remarkable for its insightful provocations across a broad range of subjects. This ability to intelligently engage so many different issues is enabled by Butler's appreciation that apparently unrelated intellectual endeavors may be bound and committed to the same conceptual foundations. The value of Butler's style of criticism then comes in her tenacious interrogation of the very ideas whose taken-for-granted necessity may tend to exempt them from inquiry. In the following discussion I want to explore what I take to be one of the most important examples of this foundational excavation in Butler's work, namely, her investigation of the ontology of language/discourse and related debates about cultural constructionism.2
