Them, Annika. Unbecoming Subjects: Judith Butler, Moral Philosophy and Critical Responsibility. New York: Fordham UP, 2008.
Poststructuralist critiques have demonstrated that we can no longer retrieve an individual, a person, or a self in a way that could ground theory and practice cross history and cultures, because this ground is itself a product of a particular culture and history.
… there is no longer a subject outside of subject FORMATION to which moral philosophy could have recourse. The accounts that Butler offers are not developmental accounts of the subject in the sense of outlining a series of events that we all undergo and from which in the end we emerge maturely, finally, as subjects.
Instead, the subject emerges as a question and problem for moral philosophy insofar as it does not have a secure status or position. “The subject,” therefore, is better rendered as an ongoing process, an ongoing formation in relation to norms as well as in relation to others. In The Psychic Life of Power, this process of subject formation is termed assujetissement (subjectivation) to describe this emergence of the subject through subjection.
The process of becoming a subject is for Butler a process of becoming subordinated by norms through which power relations work, and to exist socially as well as self-consciously requires not only relating to norms but also to become subjected to them.
In Giving Account of Oneself, Butler explains that we do not encounter norms and power on their own, but they become knowable through encounters with others (11).
Thus “the body” cannot function as backdrop against “normalized” consciousness or as a reality that we can be certain of independent of social norms. In other words, Butler refutes a strand of phenomenologically informed arguments that seek to establish the facticity of the body’s materiality as independent from social constructions.
These positions hold that even though we cannot have any positive, substantive knowledge about the materiality of the body outside of discursive constructs and social understandings, we can nevertheless know THAT there is a material existence of the body; this existence, then, is a kind of pure or presocial “facticity” of bodily materiality.
Butler argues that even the understanding of the body as material is neither prediscursive nor presocial, but the possibility of a bodily referent is always bound to the efficacy of social norms and the ways in which social norms regulate and construct bodies (24).