the iconoclast's descending

  Recovering Substrate from Judith Butler’s Symbolic Lawsmearing and Idolatrous Colonization of Sexual Time Douglas Blake Olds April 8, 2026 “ The category of sex is the political category that founds society as heterosexual. ” --Monique Wittig cited by Butler (1999, 3) “ Kinship ceases to be thought in terms of blood relations or naturalized social arrangements but becomes the effect of a linguistic set of relations. ” (Butler 2000, 41) “ Being called a name is also one of the conditions by which a subject is constituted in language. ” (Butler 2021, 2)     ABSTRACT This essay advances a conative metaphysics of substrate, time, and covenantal accountability in order to repudiate and anathematize Judith Butler’s gender queering as a lawgiving regime of pagan inscription onto bodies. It notes the thick claim that reality is disclosed through the bearing of entropic stress into repair for others, not through performative intelligibility, discursive ...