Thiem, Annika. Unbecoming Subjects: Judith Butler, Moral Philosophy and Critical Responsibility. New York: Fordham UP, 2008.
On the one hand responsibility is seriously called into question by this theory of subject formation, but on the other hand, responsiveness and responsibility become a crucial link to understand how being decentered in and through our relations to otherness is related to moral conduct in response to others.
In effect, the notion of responsibility undergoes a reformulation that disarticulates accountability as the basis for responsibility. (145)
We become responsible not because actions can be attributed to us and we can be held accountable for them but because we are addressed by others in ways that demand that we respond, and respond well.
The ways in which desires and the rhetorical aspects are at work matter for theorizing responsibility as responding and relating to others, insofar as desires and the rhetorical aspects of communication make fully transparent self-reflective speech impossible. (150)
In Laplanche, the primary encounter does not circumscribe a time before time and is not a scene of passivity before all passivity, as it is in Levinas. Instead, in Laplanche the primary encounter is the infant’s encountering the adult world, and in this regard he considers drives and desires as being crucial to understanding the formation of ego and unconscious. The unwanted address is overwhelming in Laplanche not because it carries an ethical commandment, as it does for Levinas, but because the gestures and utterances the infant encounters are already infused with meaning, desires, and fantasies —especially unconscious ones for which the infant has no register. In Levinas’s account of the encounter with the other, there is a constitutive ambivalence because the encounter itself incites one to violence against the other, while at the same time the commandment not to kill is delivered in that very encounter. In Laplanche’s account, ambivalence emerges through the overwhelming and enigmatic character of the messages that produce a scene of helplessness, anxiety, and desire that is never fully left behind and never fully recoverable. (152)