The norms by which I seek to make myself recognizable are not fully mine (35).
To revise recognition as an ethical project, we will need to see it as, in principle, unsatisfiable (43).
🙂 Butler maintains that going back to some of her earliest debates over the perils of seeking to come establish common principles on the identity of political subjects in order to engage in political action. At that time Butler discouraged attempts to discipline the feminist subject around a core set of features. But the debate has matured greatly since those early days. Now the political salience of fluid identities has been displaced by Butler who rejects the ontological moorings that would even lay claim to any claim of an ‘identity’ as an ontology of ‘identity’ is rejected. For Butler, it isn’t that identities are bad, or not useful, of course we have identities to a certain degree to function every day, however, in the realm of politics, of being addressed, of having to give an account in various state and other social institutional frames, immigration hearing, marriage ceremony, citizenship hearing, child adoption, job application, and other social arrangements and institutional settings that require one to give an account and stand in judgement of that account. Butler’s ethico-political project is to overturn and open up the the normative frames within which these institution function. The formation of the subject relies on a social ontology and for Butler this means that she underscores the importance of relations that humans depend upon in order for a human life to flourish. Relations with primary caregivers at the start of life, relations with other sentient life forms and the environment, all figure in to Butler’s project of a non-anthropocentric conception of the human
even a non-anthropocentric philosophical anthropology. The other way of saying this is that wherever the human is, it is always outside of itself in the non-human, or it is always distributed among beings, among human and non-human beings, chiasmically related through the idea of precarious life. So we can neither lodge the human in the self, nor ground the self in the human, but find instead the relations of exposure and responsibility that constitute the “being” of the human in a sociality outside itself, even outside its human-ness. (interview in 2009 Theory and Event)
… desire sets the limits and the conditions for the operation of recognition itself. Indeed, a certain desire to persist, we might say, following Spinoza, underwrites recognition, so that forms of recognition or, indeed, forms of judgment that seek to relinquish or destroy the desire to persist, the desire for life itself, undercut the very preconditions of recognition (44).
This failure to narrate fully may well indicate the way in which we are, from the start, ethically implicated in the lives of others. Although some would say that to be a split subject, or a subject whose access to itself is forever opaque, incapable of self-grounding, is precisely not to have the grounds for agency and the conditions for accountability, the way in which we are, from the start, interrupted by alterity may render us incapable of offering narrative closure for our lives. The purpose here is not to celebrate a certain notion of incoherence, but only to point out that our “incoherence” establishes the way in which we are constituted in relationality: implicated, beholden, derived, sustaind by a social world that is beyond us and before us (64).