Butler, Judith. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham UP, 2005. Print.
[…] we might consider a certain post-Hegelian reading of the scene of recognition in which precisely my own opacity to myself occasions my capacity to confer a certain kind of recognition on others. It would be, perhaps, an ethics based on our shared, invariable, and partial blindness about ourselves (41).
The recognition that one is, at every turn, not quite the same as how one presents oneself in the available discourse might imply, in turn, a certain patience with others that would suspend the demand that they be selfsame at every moment. Suspending the demand for self-identity or, more particularly, for complete coherence seems to me to counter a certain ethical violence, which demands that we manifest and maintain self-identity at all times and require that others do the same (41-2).
The means by which subject constitution occurs is not the same as the narrative form the reconstruction of that constitution attempts to provide (69).
So what is the role of language in constituting the subject? And what different role does it assume when it seeks to recuperate or reconstitute the conditions of its own constitution?
The infant enters the world given over from the start to a language and to a series of signs, broadly construed, that begin to structure an already operative mode of receptivity and demand. From this primary experience of having been given over from the start, an “I” subsequently emerges. And the “I,” regardless of its claims to mastery, will never get over having been given over from the start in this way (77).
This mode of relationality, definitionally blind, makes us vulnerable to betrayal and to error. We could wish ourselves to be wholly perspicacious beings. But that would be to disavow infancy, dependency, relationality, primary impressionability; it would be the wish to eradicate all the active and structuring traces of our psychological formations and to swell in the pretense of being fully knowing self-possessed adults. Indeed, we would be the kind of beings who, by definition, could not be in love, blind and blinded, vulnerable to devastation, subject to enthrallment. If we were to respond to injury by claiming we had a “right” not to be so treated, we would be treating the other’s love as an entitlement rather than a gift. Being a gift, it carries the insuperable quality of gratuitousness. It is, in Adorno’s language, a gift given from freedom (102).