Segal, Lynne. “After Judith Butler: Identities, Who Needs Them?” Subjectivity (2008) 25, 381-394.
5 ways JB has changed (384)
- She has moved from primarily semiotic analysis to stressing the significance of the socio-cultural moment
- from political abstractions to ethical reasoning
- from pivotal concern with gender and sexuality to a general interest in alterity and the face/place of the other
- from a Foucauldian engagement with exteriority and performativity to a more psychodynamic interest in interiority and stress upon the formative early years of life
- from a rejection of identities into the specific embrace of several very distinct ones, articulated – with a suitable plethora of caveats – in the form of an identity politics
Reflecting upon 9/11, for instance, Butler asks how we can prevent the endless recurrence of acts of violence producing, relentlessly, only further cycles of violence. This is indeed, of course, just what that event has served to trigger in US foreign policy, at least under George W. Bush. In the five essays in Precarious Life (Butler, 2004a), Butler wonders how violence, loss, grief and mourning might be used to suggest instead possiblilities for non-violent reactions, asking us to consider ‘‘what makes for a grievable life.’’ In her view, could we but recognize and accept our own complexity and shared ‘‘primary vulnerability;’’ more generous encounters with others on the international stage might become possible. We cannot will away our own vulnerability without ceasing to be human, she observes, but what we need to ask ourselves is why some lives are grievable while others are not. Here, of course, she notes the endless roll calls for the American dead, in 9/11, or in subsequent military maneuvres; the non-existence, even of body counts, let alone obituaries, for the war casualties inflicted by those same military encounters, waged by the US government (ibid., p. xix).
In pointing this out, Butler hopes that she can provide the basis of an ethics for rethinking our conceptions of what is normatively human, for imaging the conditions that would enable all to have access to what ‘‘counts as a liveable life and a grievable death’’ (ibid., p. xv). It is easy to admire the strategic optimism here, even if the philosophical idealism underpinning it is somewhat less than fully convincing.
The Hegelian/Levinasian ethical route Butler navigates in articulating her current global egalitarian, pacifist stance is one which, on its own, seems to need the addition of considerable political analysis if it is to produce convincing goals for engaging with, let alone attempting to confront, the alarming political conjuncture of the 21st century.
However, Butler is absolutely right to emphasize the need for historical and cultural translations if we are to try to understand those we create as the face of the other, as our most threatening outsiders. There is undoubtedly a need for new forms of genuine multiculturalism, critically engaged with the unpacking/the deconstructing of the multiple meanings often attaching to just those emblematic markers of ‘‘otherness’’ that ‘‘we’’ find most disturbing – the ‘‘we’’ here referring to the putatively white westerners, secular, Christian, and today, very determinedly at official levels, also Jewish.
I am not so sure that many will want to follow Butler along her own preferred Hegelian/Levinasian route, asserting the place of the Other in the formation of subjectivity, though I can see that this is what she is encompassing when she writes: ‘‘I am nowhere without you. I cannot muster the ‘we’ except by finding the way in which I am tied to ‘you’, trying to translate, but finding my own language must break up and yield in order to know you’’ (Butler, 2003b, p. 19). Few will master Butler’s own demanding art of translation in the formation of subject positions, or see the radical potential bursting out of her philosophical reasoning that ‘‘the human comes into being, again and again, as that which we have yet to know’’ (ibid.). She is right, I am sure, but this in itself will not draw quite as many people as she might hope into political activism.
why would she, of all people, do this, as a Jew, rather than, as she seemed to suggest one should in her early writings, as a unique individual, politically analyzing the brutalities ensuing from Israel’s 40 long years of Occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and its continued enclosure of Gaza? I asked her this question recently, at a Jewish Book week, which she and I were both addressing, primarily to raise questions about Israel and Palestine, and express our opposition to its occupation and our solidarity with those working for peace and justice over there. She answered, quite simply, that this is her heritage. She was brought up in a very Jewish tradition, so it is, literally, a ‘‘familiar’’ move for her to make.
In one of her most recent books, Giving an Account of Oneself (Butler, 2005), Butler writes more clearly than ever about the specific cultural grounding of any subject position in the precise historical conditions and the particular ‘‘crucible of social relations’’ available for self-narration. Aporias, opacity, gaps and fissures are an inevitable part of any self-narration, given the untidy jumble of experience and the unspeakable dimensions of the unconscious. But Butler today is far more appreciative of narratives of self-making, hoping that studying them may help us find ‘‘some forgiveness to offer to others and perhaps also to oneself when and if it becomes clear that giving a full account of oneself is impossible’’ (Kirby, 2006). ‘‘I may risk intelligibility and defy convention but then I am acting within or on a sociohistorical horizon, attempting to rupture or transform it’’ (Butler, 2005). Put more simply, we might say, we can only give an account of ourselves to an audience that is prepared, and already at least partly knows how, to listen to us through some form of shared vernacular. In a recent article on the limits of translation, Heike Bauer spoke of the significance of ‘‘shared discursive history’’ (an expression borrowed from the linguist Sally McConnell-Ginet) referring to the ways in which our particular conceptual framings affect how we translate
But merely to demonstrate the artifice and fragility of dominant linguistic framings is hardly, thereby, to weaken them. On the contrary, perhaps, the phantasmatic hold of gender and sexuality, rather like the now ubiquitous grip of market capitalism, has always thrived and renewed itself through surviving its own inevitable instabilities and contradictions. Alan Sinfield was neither the first, nor the last, gay theorist to point out that Queers’ celebration of the fluidity and fragmentation of the subject suited market forces very well, glamorizing risk, titillation and the endless embrace of the novel:
‘‘The task,’’ as he says, ‘‘is less to applaud and hasten the disintegration of residual identities – the market will take care of that – than to assess and exert some influence over the emergence of new ones’’ (Sinfield, 1998, p. 198).
her reference points remain, as she says, particular, social and political, there has emerged another rather distinct way of making trouble (in the context of a now long-standing refusal to recognize the humanity of another people) by using Jewish philosophy itself to critique the use of violence by the state of Israel, supposedly in defence of Jewish people everywhere.