Public lecture presented by the Humanities and Arts Research Centre of Royal Holloway, the School of Psychosocial Studies (Birkbeck) and the Birkbeck Institute for Social Research 4th February, 2009.
Norms constitute specific ontologies of the Subject, historically contingent ontologies, being of the subject given over to norms, to be a body is to be exposed to social crafting and form, the body is a social ontology, NORMATIVE PRODUCTION OF ONTOLOGY, HISTORICALLY CONTINGENT ONTOLOGY
Our very capacity to discern and name the being of the subject is dependent on norms that facilitate that recognition.
differential allocation of precarity
Apprehension of precariousness leads to heightening of violence, insight into vulnerability increases desire to destroy them
Butler on Hegel
At begin of Lordship and Bondage: a self-consciousness sees another self-consciousness and is scandalized by this event.
Some Other appears, at first that Other appears to be me, how is it possible that this is me over there? How can I account for this apparent distance between me over there and the “I” who regards this “me”.
If I have come outside myself then I am no longer localized and this tells me something new about who I am, my relation to space. If I am no longer localized, I am not fully or in exclusively a bounded being, I have the capacity to appear elsewhere.
I am a kind of being here and there apparently at once. I can as it were face myself, and this involves a certain amount of self-loss. I am then not quite bounded in space as I apparently assumed, this unboundedness by which I am now characterized, seems bound up as it were with a redoubling of myself. The I seems to have become 2.
The problem is that the Other whom I face, is in some sense me and is some sense not-me. I encounter myself at a spatial distance re-doubled. I encounter at the same time and through the same figure the limit to what I can call myself. Both of these things happen at the same time, but this does not mean that these two encounters are reconciled. On the contrary they exist in a certain tension with one another. This Other who appears to be me is at once me and not-me. So what I have to live with is not just the fact that I have become 2, but that I can be found at a distance from myself and what I find at that distance is also and at once not myself.
This Other who appear as me is at once me and not-me. I encounter myself at a spatial distance redoubled.
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Hegel has established through these steps the constitutive sociality of this self-consciousness. The apprehension of the Other as a living being, one whose living is like my own is essential to this process of developing a social bond. There’s a shape over there, a living one and its understood as belonging to this or that living thing.
The living consciousness can only return to its absolute singularity by risking its own life, but dead that living consciousness cannot achieve the self-certainty it seeks. So the question becomes, how best to live and how best to live with others. The defensive effort to shore up one’s singularity in the face of a duplication or substitutability is apparently overwhelming, but is only by considering
Singularity and Substitutability without a dialectical synthesis that an ethical opening to the other can take place.
Who is this I who is on the one hand substitutable and yet also singularly alive on some other hand. If this “I” is to register its substitutability it has to survive as this singular life to do precisely that. In other words its singularity is the precondition of its understanding of substitutability and is presupposed logically by the idea of substitution itself which involves replacing one term by another.
The Non-substitutable, is the persistent, logical and existential condition of substitutability. As much as the “I” might be threatened by negation or threatens the other with negation, so it is clear that the life of the one is dependent on the life of the other. This interdependency becomes a new way of conceiving of life as sociality. Sociality cannot be reduced to the existence of this identity or that identity, this group or that group, but is the open temporal trajectory of interdependency and desire, struggle, fear, murderous dispositions as well as the desire to maintain and repair social bonds.
So although I find my departure here in Hegel, I move in at least two distinct directions:
1. The ethical necessity of a non-coincidence of singularity and substitutability. I’m not interested in a dialectical synthesis of those two terms. The ethical demand to live both singularity and substitutability as an ongoing paradox is something that I affirm.
2. There can be no recognition of my life being like another’s life except through the specific social norms that allow certain populations to emerge as living beings and others to be considered as non-living, as only partially living, or as actually figuring a threat to life itself.
We cannot remain dependent on existing and already established norms of recognition, if we are to try to expand our understanding not only of who deserves to live, who lives are worth protecting but more fundamentally whose lives count as lives and whose lives are finally grievable.
The problems is not merely to include more people in the existing norms but to consider how existing norms allocate recognition differentially? What new norms are possible and how are they wrought.
What might be done to produce a more egalitarian set of conditions for recognizablity. What might be done in other words to shift the very terms of recognizability in order to to produce more radically democratic results.
New egalitarian norms of recognizability.