Karen Barad’s quantum revision of Judith Butler’s performativity theory casts matter and discourse as co-constituting intra-active phenomena. While Butler’s theory challenges cultural determinism, allowing subjects to freely stylize acts of gender performance, Barad’s theory challenges scientific determinism, allowing people to morally intervene in the reconfiguration of phenomenal boundaries. By presenting causality and human freedom as oppositional, both theorists grant the human will a level of autonomy, or self-origination. The problem is that their performativity theories are themselves deterministic and, for this reason, foreclose the possibility of an autonomous, self-originating will. In order to resolve this ostensible contradiction, the author argues that both theorists should adopt a compatibilist freedom that positions volition as the natural outworking of deterministic forces. Doing so paradoxically makes sense of moral culpability while denying free will, or the capacity to autonomously intervene in the reconfiguration of phenomenal boundaries. A compatibilist revision of agential realism may therefore, the author concludes, prove significant to the ethics of material ecocriticism.

中文翻译：

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生态批评与道德责任：凯伦·巴拉德的表演理论中的能动性问题

Karen Barad 对 Judith Butler 的述行理论的量子修正将物质和话语视为共同构成的内部活动现象。巴特勒的理论挑战文化决定论，允许受试者自由地将性别表现行为风格化，而巴拉德的理论挑战科学决定论，允许人们在道德上干预现象边界的重新配置。通过将因果关系和人类自由视为对立的，两位理论家都赋予人类意志一定程度的自主性或自我起源。问题在于，他们的述行理论本身就是确定性的，因此排除了自主、自发意志的可能性。为了解决这个表面上的矛盾，作者认为，两位理论家都应该采用相容论的自由，将意志定位为决定性力量的自然表现。这样做自相矛盾的是，在否认自由意志或自主干预现象边界重新配置的能力的同时，道德上的罪责是有道理的。因此，作者得出结论，对主体现实主义的相容修正可能对物质生态批评的伦理学具有重要意义。