Thiem, Annika. Unbecoming Subjects: Judith Butler, Moral Philosophy and Critical Responsibility. New York: Fordham UP, 2008.
Butler argues that what we have in the first instance is the deed or action and that we ascribe it only belatedly, in considering an action, to a doer or agent. Even more radically, for Butler there is no agent as such prior to the deed, but the agent is an after effect of the deed. The agent is a peculiar effect, insofar as this effect (the agent) is taken to be the cause and source of what becomes its own origin (the action).
The challenges to conventinal accounts of subjectivity and agency result from the implication of this account of performative subject formation, because one can no longer try to trace back from actions to the intentions beneath them and evaluate agents according to their intentions. (79)
There is no original or authentic self or individual that only later enters into relations with others and comes to act on a social scene. Rather, Butler’s account offers a rigorous way of considering how social norms, practices, and institutions need to be taken into account as con-constitutive of subjects as well as of their acts. The difficulty for moral philosophy and more specifically for reflections on questions of accountability and political and social agency is then to think how this co-constitution requires but also allows a thorough reworking of our conceptions of individual responsibility and accountability (80).