Thiem, Annika. Unbecoming Subjects: Judith Butler, Moral Philosophy and Critical Responsibility. New York: Fordham UP, 2008.
Butler approaches the unlinking of responsibility and accountability differently from Levinas, as for her the constitutive opacity that disorients the perspective of the “I” stems from both the dispossession of the “I” by virtue of social norms and a kind of primary relationality to others.
Responsibility as accountability is brought into crisis by Butler, as the “I” can never fully know and adequately narrate and account for either its origins or the origins of its actions. The dimension of the social dispossession of the “I” that undercuts the possibility of attaining and producing full self-knowledge is that this “I” is never anyone’s “I” alone, and as such … the “first-person perspective” is always bound by, interrupted, and dispossessed by the social norms that confer intelligibility.
This interruption and dispossession of my perspective AS MINE can take place in different ways. There is the operation of a norm, invariably social, that conditions what will and will not be a recognizable account, exemplified in the fact that I am used by the norm precisely to the degree that I use it (Giving 36) (110)
This dispossession by social norms is precisely that which I can never render transparent to myself as I speak, because I can make myself understood — paradoxically — only insofar as I undergo this dispossession, which cannot be made into a narrative or an account of the “I.” (110)