Third International Conference of the Whitehead Research Project
Date: December 3-5, 2009
Location: Claremont, California
Judith Butler at the Claremont Graduate School, School of Art and Humanities. Look for it on Itunes or here In her 2 hour talk with students on her book Giving Account of Oneself I found this to be one of her most interesting points. She made this in response to a question at 1:18:30 into the talk.
When we strive for the single, the one account. When we are asked to give an account even of an accident, we go back and tell the story one way, and then another way, we give different accounts at different times, each of these accounts produce a constellation, so there has to be a revisability that should not be understood as falsification, each of these accounts produce a constellation that gives us a more complex idea of what happened.
But when we come to the question of identity, if we say I am this and this and also this and we try to undo the logic of “non-contradiction” that governs our statements about what we are. I am not this, I am rather this and this. I am both, I am both and more. But we are still within what Foucault calls the “regime of ontology.” I’m still trying to determine what I am, I’m just doing it multiplee (multiply? multiple? Judy pronounces it with a long ‘e’ sound, as in ‘multiplicity’).
But maybe the thing is to NOT determine who I am whether singly or multiplee, but to be engaged in a kind of scene of address to oneself, to another, to a set of others, where those terms get re-worked in ways that make a difference, then we are less interested in determining who we are singly or multiply than in some act of communication, or some act of avowing and articulating a relationship which is more ethically significant than establishing who I am. I guess I would displace the framework to some degree.