Thiem, Annika. Unbecoming Subjects: Judith Butler, Moral Philosophy and Critical Responsibility. New York: Fordham UP, 2008.
We are not first alone in the world and then subsequently encounter others and the demands that are made upon us, but that being addressed constitutes us as subjects from the very beginning.
The problem for Levinas with privileging the subject is that there is no openness toward the other in this kind of thought as well as in this kind of subject, because any encounter with an other turns only into a matter of reaffirming the self of the subject. … The conceptions of responsibility and justice that such philosophical approaches subsequently yield are founded on and aiming toward maintaining and achieving the subject’s independence over and against others.
Reading Levinas and Butler together on subject formation through the encounter with the other that is an address and that brings about the subject being as responsible for the other makes it possible to dislodge responsibility from accountability, which means that the primary meaning of responsibility does not come from a scene like the Nietzschean one in which an action is attributed to me and I am held responsible for this action.
Theorizing responsibility as accountability begins with the notion of a subject who seems already to have done something of which it is considered guilty and about which the subject ought to have known better and acted differently.
However the Levinasian description of the “approach” by the other as being constitutive of the emergence of the subject which, for Levinas, compels the use of “ethical language” means that “responsibility” as a conceptual term, captures primarily the modality of the subject rather than a particular modality of actions.
In other words, “responsibility” is moved into the realm of subject theory and away from the question of how to act in a given situation (104).