Norms govern recognizability: There’s a million quotes I can find to underscore this argument. What I need to outline with regards to this is
– The geneology of the emergence of Butler’s turn to normativity, which I’ll find as the Foucault Effect no doubt
– The more difficult part is the exegesis of this quote:
“Does recognition, as Hegel argues, consist in a reciprocal act whereby I recognize that the other is structured in the same way I am? And do I recognize that the other also makes, or can make, this recognition of sameness? Or is there perhaps another encounter with alterity here that is irreducible to sameness? If it is the latter, how are we to understand this alterity?” (27)
🙂 Is Butler saying in effect that introducing difference into Hegelian dialectic of recognition forces now not any reconciliation with sameness
– norms and language, decentre the subject, as Hegel mentions as the system of customs Sittlichkeit and in this way Žižek and JB are not that far apart. As both in their respective way resist pegging down Hegel as this authoritarian philosopher of logocentric identity.
There is a language that frames the encounter, and embedded in that language is a set of norms concerning what will and will not constitute recognizability. (30)
Adriana Cavarero
Cavarero is a post-Hegelian in her approach to ethics and the other.
– “there is an other not fully known or knowable to me”
– “exposure and vulnerability of the other makes a primary ethical claim upon me”
Butler agrees and disagrees. She definitely likes the part about exposure and vulnerability, but she offsets Cavarero’s emphasis on singularity, which can slide into an individualist ethics. Butler instead emphasizes ‘substitutability’ of the account. This is because …
“discourse is not life its time is not yours (36)
indifferent structures, a sociability that exceeds me, which gets to the fact that for Butler any emphasis on singularity effaces the extent to which this originality resembles too strictly a frame of referencing that doesn’t correspond to the deconstructionist framework. That is for Butler, the account is impossible because the exposure and vulnerability undoes the subject, the other’s opaqueness is my opaqueness and this is the substitutable condition of subjectivity, and to that extent it is substitutable.
The account I give of myself exceeds narration, it can not be narrated. It can’t be a story, there is no stable subject, it doesn’t unfold in a linear way.
If I try to give an account of myself, if I try to make myself recognizable and understandable, then I might begin with a narrative account of my life. But this narrative will be disoriented by what is not mine, or not mine alone. And I will, to some degree, have to make myself substitutable in order to make myself recognizable. The narrative authority of the “I” must give way to the perspective and temporality of a set of norms that contest the singularity of my story. (37)