Question:
If preserving the life of the other is a precondition of the self, are we not still arguing out of self preservation?
Judith Butler: (at 6:33)
If it’s the case that I only am obligated to preserve the life of the other because I must preserve my own life and if my own life is the final reason why I preserve the life of the other then you’re absolutely right (I’m a modernist egological Bush right-winger RT).
But if in preserving the life of the other I am articulating my social and political existence in the relation to the other then I have left an egological framework for a relational one and I have lost my bounded I, or rather recast it as a certain kind of relational practice, so I would be preserving my ‘self’ my new self my recast self as a secondary effect of preserving the life of the other since it would turn out that I am bound. But it would not be for myself rather than the other or on the basis of any other distinction between self and other that that act of preservation would occur.