Thiem, Annika. Unbecoming Subjects: Judith Butler, Moral Philosophy and Critical Responsibility. New York: Fordham UP, 2008.
If we follow Levinas, we begin with responsibility, but it is not an unambivalent responsibility, because the emergence of the moral subject is marked by the emergence of a desire for violence. (106)
This means that the awakening to the face of the other is constitutively an awakening to being conflicted, and if the temptation to violence is issued by the face itself, then there is not only no subject but also no responsibility that could be pure and uncompromised (107).
Responsibility, in other words, emerges as what remains irreducible to and propels one beyond self-reflexive questioning of the moral self (107).
There is no time of the subject when and no place for the subject where there is no responsibility. there is no time or place when or where the subject has not already been approached by the other.
Precisely because the address absolutely exceeds the subject, “responsibility” in Levinas’s account can no longer be thought of primarily in terms of one’s accountability for one’s actions and choices. The responsibility for the other is not a responsibility that one could have chosen, to which one could have agreed; the other overwhelms, and the “I” cannot even remember being overwhelmed and enjoined (108).
Consciousness thus can only belatedly and never adequately reconstruct and grasp this scene that conditioned its own possibility.
Levinas’s account of ethical subject formation is radical because there is no subject who could remember and decide before the encounter with the other.
Hence one’s responsibility radically exceeds one’s ability to account for oneself and to assume this responsibility consciously, because one has become responsible for the other’s death before there was even an “I” that could have accepted or refused this responsibility and before there was an “I” that could have acted mindfully (108).
This “before,” this “prior to every memory” … is not a nonpresence in the sense of a past that once was present and now is no longer present. It is a past that has never been present, but as such, it also has never been past. … this “past” is not one that could be remembered, recollected, and re-presented in memory. …
… but this nonpresence impossible to remember … while not being present and having never been present, is precisely not absent. It signifies that which cannot be surpassed and that continues to interrupt the present.
The address has always already happened, and any response is coming irrecoverably too late, but nonetheless, precisely because of its belatedness, is only ever so much more urgent. (109)