Thiem, Annika. Unbecoming Subjects: Judith Butler, Moral Philosophy and Critical Responsibility. New York: Fordham UP, 2008.
Understanding the self as produced around the body in relation to social norms and becoming the principle of the body’s subjection challenges moral philosophy to reconsider the notions of the self or self-concept.
Instead of seeking in the self a narrative, an integrated truth of a person, it becomes possible to draw on the notion of the self to understand how stories and histories produce the self through and in relation to the formation of the body.
The self reconsidered as an effect of the bodily effects of subjection to social norms is not, then, a repository of a person’s authenticity or an authentic self-expression of one’s body.
Rather, the self comes to join social norms in bringing about the body as a certain kind of body, and the self becomes the very mediation and agent of normalization.
This does not mean that narratives are inherently oppressive or nothing but perfidious instruments of social regulation, yet they are also not radically other than social norms and cannot offer an authenticity of the self as recourse to oppose social norms. (33).
… one intricacy of Butler’s account of subject formation lies in its critique of accounts that attempt to secure a prediscursive reality for the bodily subject. Butler’s critique brings together Derrida’s arguments on signification and materiality and Foucault’s analytics of power relations and discourses.
This juxtaposition allows her to offer an account of the political and social relevance of thinking materiality as not independent of signification. Matter comes to matter not prior to social norms and relations of power but as social practices and institutions render matter intelligible. Drawing on Foucault’s analytics of power, Butler offers these “social conditions” as mechanisms of normalization.
The challenge that her accounts poses regarding the bodily subject is that bodies, bodily reality, or “facticity” cannot be invoked as providing some sort of more original freedom, a point of departure prior to social norms to launch a critique of social normalization (36-37).