Author: logocentric

stephen white interpellation

White, Stephen K. Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 2000.

Don’t just think in terms of isolated scenes. Imagine rther a lifetime of being hailed into discourse, beginning with the doctor who announces: “It’s a girl!” Keeping in mind the earlier analysis of gender as performative, Butler would have us reconstrue this familiar speech act as the beginning of a lifelong chain of “girling” utterances that enact certain scripts as normal and others as abnormal. With this expansion of the temporal horizon and application of the notion of performativity, the relatively sovereign subjectivity of the passerby begins to dissolve. It is replaced by the image of a subjectiviy produced or constituted by the insistent, interpellating “demand” of “discursive power”. (82)

The policeman who hails the person in the street is enabled to make that call through the force of reiterated convention.  This is one of the speech acts that police perform, and the temporality of the act exceeds the time of the utterance in question. In a sense, the police cite the convention of hailing, participate in an utterance that is indifferent to the one who speaks it. The act “works” in part because of the citational dimension of the speech act, the historicity of convention that exceeds and enables the moment of its enunciation. (Butler Excite 33 cited in White 82)

Thus it is the reiterating function of language that is primarily carrying and reproducing dominant norms and crating the effect of sovereign, disengaged subjects by the continual process of calling them into social existence. We are, in short,“interpellated kinds of beings” continually being called into linguistic life, being “given over to social terms that are never fully [our] own.”

Butler’s ontology is one in which the basic “things” are persistent forces or processes. We must be careful not to imagine these as having qualities of subjectivy. Thus, power is not an anonymous subject that initiates discrete acts of constitution or construction. There is rather only “a process of reiteration by which both ‘subjects’ and ‘acts’ come to appear at all. There is no power that acts, only a reiterated acting that is power in its persistence. (83)

But none of this … implies a notion that subjexts are dopes of discursive power. Reiterating is always potentially open to resignifying in ways that may contest the smooth reproduction of the dominant terms of discourse. Butler has described this subversive potential as “power’s own possibility of being reworked.”

What is not yet clear in Butler’s account is why or how this imperfection mightever be taken advantage of intentionally by an actor (83).

Thinking power together with a theory of the psyche

Why does the passerby turn to answer the policeman?  Power “hails,” but why does one submit to its call?

The violence of the prohibition, the frustrated desire, self-beratement, self-denial, desire turns back upon itself in the form of a will in the service of the regulating regime, that is of terms not one’s own.  There is an investment of erotic libidinal energy in this turning back, in this prohibitive activity of the emergent entity of conscience.  The conscience can never be an adequate site for thinking critical agency, since it is, in its very constitution, in complicity with the violent appropriation of desire by power.

stephen white weak ontology

White, Stephen K. Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 2000.

Weak Ontologies don not proceed by categorical positings of, say, human nature or telos, accompanied by a crystalline conviction of the truth of that positing.  Rather, what they offer are figurations of human being in terms of certain existential realities, most notably language, mortality or finitude, natality, and the articulation of “sources of the self.”  These figurations are accounts of what it is to be a certain sort of creature:

1. one entangled in language

2. one with a consciousness that it will die: finitude

3. one that, despite its entanglement and limitedness, has the capacity for radical newness: natality

4. one that gives definition to itself against some ultimate background or “source,” to which we find ourselves already attached, and which evokes something like awe, wonder, or reverence.

Melancholia, Mourning

Both Freud explained were reactions to the trauma of the loss of an object of love or desire. Mourning is, in short, thehealthy resolution of this situation; the person comes to accept the loss and go on with his/her life.  Melancholia, on the contrary, is Freud’s description of a syndrome of symptoms associated with a failure to accept the loss.  In stead of giving up the object, the person internalizes it in such a way that the ego becomes a substitute for that object.  And yet, since theego is ultimately an unsatisfying substitute, it becomes not just the site of love but also hate and aggression. Above all, it is this “ambivalence that distinguishes melancholia.”

Performativity

words, acts, gestures, and desire produce the effect of an internal core or substance, but produce this on the surface of the body, through the play of signifying absences that suggest, but never reveal, the organizing principle of idenity as a cause. Such acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means. That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality. Gender Trouble 136

mills genealogy

Hence the overwhelming impulse of Excitable Speech is to provide a theoretical argument that makes legal redress illegitimate. This indicates a significant divergence from Foucault’s approach to the question of theoretical engagement
with political problems.

This point becomes clearer if Butler’s theoretical position is contrasted with a genealogical approach, for the aim of the latter would be to trace relations of force in order to bring to the fore the points of weakness and possible intervention. As such, these points of weakness cannot be designated a priori, but this is precisely what Butler does in presuming that the structural instability of language qua power should be the privileged point of intervention in combating hate speech.

In short, while resignification might well be a logically possible mode of redress against the speech of hate, this does not ensure that it is necessarily the most efficacious one, since this could only be decided in loco, not a priori, if even then.

Furthermore, such a presumption of the efficacy of resignification as a strategy of resistance is precisely what her considered arguments against the sovereign force of the speaker warns us against. For just as the efficacy of hate speech cannot be assured through recourse to a notion of the sovereign subject, neither can the efficacy of reappropriation and resignification. The effectiveness of resignification will necessarily be conditioned, not only by the ‘‘condensed historicity’’ of the term, but also by the circumstances in which the attempt at resignification takes place, what might be called the conditions of felicity.

This has the consequence that, while resignification might be logically possible with all terms or utterances, the historical and discursive circumstances in which resignification is attempted will more or less severely limit the actual realizability or efficacy of a strategy of resignification. Contrary to what some of her critics have suggested, Butler is not unaware that resignification is itself both subject to discursive limits and open to the possibility of failure. As she states, ‘‘neither the radically new nor the subversive repetition can be logically guaranteed; there will be a necessary difference between what is shown to be logically possible and what in any given nexus of discourse and power is possible to realize’’.68

Thus she does recognize that, as a strategy of resistance to the interpellative force of hate speech, the success of resignification will vary. However, in developing her arguments against the legal regulation of hate speech, Butler
seems to resile from this recognition and overemphasizes the progressive potential of resignification as a political strategy.

If this is the case, Butler is (to use her words) ‘‘postulating a logic to which social practices are subject but which is itself subject to no social practice’’.69

However, this directly contradicts her stated political allegiance to Foucault’s pragmatics. Instead, it suggests that the Derridean influence within her later work introduces commitments that are not yet reconciled with attention to local
contingencies in considering questions of political practice.

mills butler inconsistant

But I do want to make two further critical points about the ‘‘politics of the performative’’ that Butler elaborates, both of which relate to her analysis of sovereignty and itseffects within the hate speech debate.

In a second argument against recourse to legal regulation of speech, she notes that calls for such recourse typically rely on an illocutionary model of hatespeech, wherein the speech act brings into being what it says in the very saying of it. This means that there is no temporal distinction between the speech act and its consequences or effects—the speaking is the doing. But, she claims, such arguments for legal regulation of speech wrongly attribute a sovereign efficacy to speech acts, or more precisely to the subject that performs such acts. Such arguments presume that speech acts necessarily do what they say they will do, and thereby elide both the conditions necessary for such felicity and the potential for failure that conditions the speech act. This seems to be the case particularly with regard to hate speech, where the power to injure is located in the speaker of hate, thereby detracting from the recognition of a ‘‘condensed historicity’’ that conditions the terms they use.

This dimension of the speech act ensures that in fact their interpellative force is citational or iterative, deriving from the prior uses or conventionality of terms. As she states, ‘‘the iterability of hate speech is effectively dissimulated by the ‘subject’ who speaks the speech of hate’’.

In contesting this presumption of efficacy, Butler argues that this wrongful attribution of sovereign efficacy also operates within the law, since it relies on the location of the origin of hate speech in an individual subject in order to maintain the legal requirement of culpability. For Butler, the attribution of sovereignty that characterizes illocutionary
models of hate speech is a compensating fantasy that arises from an anxiety over the demise of sovereignty such that power is no longer constrained by its parameters.

This fantasy returns in language, figuring the performative as necessarily efficacious and the subject who speaks hate as the origin of that speech. Thus, the constraints of legal language permit the attribution of responsibility for the injurious effects of speech to an individual who can be held culpable, thereby bringing speech and its effects within a controllable field of operation.

She states, ‘‘by locating the cause of injury in a speaking subject and the power of that injury in the power of speech, we set ourselves free, as it were, to seek recourse to the law—now set against power and imagined as neutral—in order to control that onslaught of hateful words’’.

Against this position, Butler argues that the necessary counter-strategy is to insist on the gap between speech and conduct, to ‘‘lend support for the role of non-juridical forms of opposition, ways of restaging and resignifying speech in contexts that exceed those determined by the courts’’. Hate speech is more appropriately construed as perlocutionary, thus maintaining a distinction between speech and conduct and reopening the temporal disjuncture between the speech act and its effects (267-268).

This opens the possibilities for non-juridical forms of opposition to hate speech in several ways. First, because it challenges the presumption of sovereign efficacy of speech acts, allowing for the failure of terms to do what they say. This also has the consequence that terms are thus available for resignification, and the transformation of their interpellative force that this allows. Second, the failure of the performative is for Butler precisely the site of the political agency of subjects; in other words, the constraints on the efficacy of the performative to do what it says not only signal a failure of action but also generate the opportunity for political action.59 Hence the insistence on resignification as the appropriate strategy of non-juridical opposition is directly related to her commitment to the notion that political potential arises precisely from the structural instability of language and the necessary failure of the signifier to describe that which it purports to name (268).

Given this critique of sovereignty, Butler casts Excitable Speech as an attempt to rethink questions of linguistic agency and responsibility; as she states ‘‘[u]ntethering the speech act from the sovereign subject founds an alternative notion of agency and, ultimately, of responsibility’’. This alternative account addresses the subject’s constitution in language, a position which Butler concedes may well ‘‘intensify our sense of responsibility’’ for linguistic utterance, since ‘‘the one who utters hate speech is responsible for the manner in which such speech is repeated, for reinvigorating such speech, for reestablishing contexts of hate and injury’’.

There appears to be a certain amount of tension, however, between the suggestion that responsibility might be heightened by the citationality of language, and the opposition to legal regulation that Butler maintains. The question to be asked here is how the responsibility that is heightened by citationality differs from and undermines legal responsibility; and it seems that the crucial point of difference is a matter of sovereignty, since for Butler the law is mistaken in its casting of the subject as the origin and sovereign agent of hate speech.

But here, her characterization of the attribution of responsibility in law unnecessarily assumes that legal culpability requires a sovereign subject. For surely it could be the case that the speaker of hate can still be held legally culpable even if the philosophical recognition that the individual is not the origin of such speech is maintained. Cannot the individual be held legally responsible for their citing of a term that carries with it considerable historical and cultural weight as racist or homophobic?

Certainly the determination and attribution of culpability is complicated by this recognition, but it may not yet be undermined completely. In any case, further explication of an alternative account of responsibility and its relation to legal culpability would seem to be required.

Furthermore, there is a sense in which Butler herself fantasizes a certain sovereignty of the law in suggesting that the legal regulation of speech closes down or limits opportunities for extra-juridical opposition in the form of misappropriation and resignification. If legal regulation of speech has such an effect, it would be necessary that the law actually do what it says it will do, that is, demarcate the line of the speakable and the unspeakable and rigorously maintain that demarcation. In other words, to imagine the law as sovereign is not to close down such opportunities but to suggest that such opportunities are foreclosed by legal regulation is to imagine that the state and law is sovereign.

Perhaps what underlies these points of tension within Butler’s argument is a crucial conceptual slippage between the terms of ‘‘conduct’’ and ‘‘efficacy’’. For Butler’s argument is on the one hand an argument against the characterization of hate speech as illocutionary, and thus she insists that a gap between speech and conduct must be maintained. On the other hand though, her arguments against the attribution of sovereignty to the speaker of hate rely on a presumption of efficacy, not precisely on whether or not the speech act is illocutionary.

For it is possible to have an illocutionary speech act which fails to do what it says it will do. In other words, illocutionary speech acts are not always or necessarily efficacious, or felicitious to be more precise—and thus do not presuppose a sovereign speaker—but they nevertheless remain illocutionary utterances. If we uncouple the critiques of sovereignty and illocution in this way, then it seems that these two dimensions of Butler’s argument are in fact at cross-purposes, giving rise to further tensions between the critique of sovereignty that she offers and the suggested consequences or effects of this critique for responding to hate speech.

Returning to the question of Butler’s position vis-a`-vis Foucault’s political pragmatism, so far we have seen that Butler conflates the citational logic of language with the operative logic of power and, further, that her political claims are based on the inevitable instability of political performatives. From these claims, Butler goes on to advocate a strategy of resignification as a ‘‘necessary response’’ to hate speech.64

My contention, then, is that Butler forgoes a contextually contingent pragmatics and instead posits a logic of political action that precedes the conditions which it addresses. Her opposition to the legal regulation of hate speech and the correlative reliance on discursive resignification to contest the interpellative violence that hate speech enacts posits resignification as an a priori response, regardless of the contingent conditions of its realization (270).

mills hate speech is not illocutionary

Butler argues against the characterization of hate speech as illocutionary, doing what it says in the saying of it, evident in the work of Catharine Mackinnon, Rae Langton and Mari Matsuda among others.

It is, she claims, necessary to understand such speech as perlocutionary and thus maintain a distinction between speech and conduct. On the basis of this theoretical explication, Butler makes the political claim that state power should not be extended to include legal regulation of pornography, and further, that the state cannot be relied upon for protection against hate speech. In fact, the appropriate response to hate speech for Butler is the adoption of a strategy of the misappropriation of hateful appellations and the restaging of them within different contexts in such a way that these terms necessarily take on different meanings. In other words, the best response to hate speech is more speech (264).

Butler’s characterization of the state is posed in opposition to the portrayal of the state as a neutral arbiter of civil conflict that theorists who call for legal regulation tend to rely on and this corrective is surely important. But there is a sense in which Butler’s characterization of the state runs the risk of reproducing the logic of the argument she opposes (265-266).

The point that is elided here, then, is that a priori designations of state intervention as reactionary, neutral, or even necessary, miss the vagaries of the state’s position within relations of power and political contestation.

Insofar as this is true, Butler’s position on the state is distinctly un- Foucauldian, despite her commitment to his critique of understanding power as sovereign and centralized in the state. This divergence is further evinced by her suggestion that her concern is ‘‘not only with the protection of civil liberties against the incursions of the state, but with the discursive power given over to the state through the process of legal redress’’.

To put it simply, a more strictly Foucauldian intervention in the debates concerning legal regulation of speech would trace the historical problematization of speech within liberalism with the aim of bringing to light the techniques through which speech is able to be governed, the way in which it contributes to the governing of political subjects and the possible points of intervention that raise the possibility of being governed differently (266-267).

This kind of genealogical analysis seeks to bring to light the historical particularity of forms of government and rationalization that present themselves as universal, ahistorical and given.  In doing so, it methodologically brackets the truth claims made by those forms of government and rationalization in order to trace the lines of force that constitute the conditions of their emergence and consolidation. Butler’s methodological approach though is a rhetorical and theoretical questioning, which while attempting to challenge the claims of liberal political institutions on the one hand, is nevertheless bound by the truth claims and problematics of liberalism.

The shift to an Austinian theoretical articulationof the relation between violence and speech, whether one sees that relation as illocutionary or perlocutionary, is, after all, still a matter of trying to establish the extent to which speech causes harm, and is thus played out on theoretical and political ground established by J. S. Mill.

My point here though is not to criticize Butler for not being more strictly Foucauldian.

– My point is to highlight the way in which her work diverges from this theoretical and political lineage against those critics who elide the differences between Butler and Foucault as well as Butler’s own attempt to place herself within that political tradition.

See especially, Michel Foucault, ‘‘Governmentality’’, Ideology and Consciousness, 6 (1979), 5–
21; reprinted in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, eds. G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P.
Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 87–104.

For further elaboration of the relation of civil society to the state and law within a liberal rationality of government, see C. Gordon,‘‘Governmental rationality: an introduction’’ (pp. 1–52) and G. Burchell, ‘‘Peculiar interests: civil
society and governing ‘the system of natural liberties’ ’’ (pp. 119–50) in the same volume.

mills on butler

Butler variously describes the process by which the subject comes into being as a matter of performative constitution or of interpellation. Whatever the differences between these conceptions of the process of
subjectivation—and it is unclear how Butler understands them to differ at all— both figure this process as primarily discursive or linguistic. In other words, the power that produces subjects is cast as a question of the efficacy of speech to call the subject into being, or alternatively, of the subject’s identification with and reiteration of the terms and names given by a discourse which both precedes and exceeds it. Hence the descriptive reference points for an explication of the productive operation of power shifts from social practices and technologies to speech and language. The medium of the production and social existence of subjects is ‘‘linguistic practice’’, where ‘‘linguistic practice’’ encompasses the activities of speaking and writing, both in their immediate forms of intersubjective address and in discourses, utterances and signs that have no obvious subjective origin.

Thus the subject is condemned to ‘‘seek recognition of its own existence . . . in a discourse that is at once dominant and indifferent’’.24 Hence, these social categories through which the subject comes to exist signify subordination and existence simultaneously, such that ‘‘within subjection, the price of existence is subordination’’.25 The disturbing consequence of this primary submission to power in order to exist is that the subject comes to desire the conditions of its own subordination in order to persist as a social being since one would rather exist in subordination than not exist at all (259).

Furthermore, in order to maintain one’s existence as a subject, one is forced to continually re-enact the conditions of existence given by the operation of power. This re-enactment takes the form of citationality or the continuous reiteration of the norms and conditions of power. The status of being a subject is only assured through the repetition of the conditions of power that inaugurate that status, such that these conditions themselves are re-enacted or reproduced through their continued citation (259).

Hence the performativity of sexual identity should be ‘‘understood not as a singular or deliberate ‘act’ but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects it names’’. Or in other words, performativity is ‘‘always a reiteration of a norm or set of norms, and to the extent that it acquires an act-like status in the present, it conceals or dissimulates the conventions of which it is a repetition’’. This means that the site of the subject—which Butler sees primarily as a ‘‘linguistic category, a place holder, a structure in formation’’—is not only the occasion by which the individual comes to acquire a level of social intelligibility without which they cannot survive, but is also the occasion for the reproduction of conditions of power. As Butler states ‘‘if conditions of power are to persist, they must be reiterated; the subject is precisely the site of such reiteration’’ (259).

In Excitable Speech, Butler argues that resistance is made possible by the inevitably polysemic nature of language and the inability of the speaker to irrevocably fix the meaning and efficacy of their speech acts.35 In her discussion of hate speech she claims that while language has the power to constitute subjects as certain recognizable social beings, through the interpellative effects of naming, the names one is called always carry with them a certain ‘‘vulnerability’’ to reappropriation and resignification.

The efficacy of injurious speech acts is destabilised by both the contextual dependence of the meaning of the accusatory term and the lack of power that the speaker’s intentions or original deployments have to determine the way in which the name will be heard and appropriated by those it names. For example, while the term ‘‘queer’’ may be used with an intent to injure and derogate, its reappropriation and revaluation by gays suggest that terms may be ‘‘returned’’ to
the speaker in a transmogrified form.

Thus, the term ‘‘queer’’ no longer interpellates an abject social other, but indicates a positive identification and recognition of oneself that undercuts and transforms the power relations that marginalize and derogate homosexuals. This view of reiteration as resistance is essentially the same as that offered in Bodies that Matter, although it could be
said that in some sense the political scope and field of operation of Excitable Speech is much more specifically linguistic.

Hence, while Butler explicitly calls upon Foucault’s recognition that resistance is not simply opposed to power, but instead derives from it and reinstates its conditions in the very moment of subversion, her account of resistance is limited to the linguistic field, since for her that [the linguistic field] is coextensive with the operations of power. Foucault on the other hand maintains a deliberate focus on the specificity or heterogeneity of technologies of power and thereby maintains a much wider scope for possible modes of resistance to them (261).

FOUCALUT: What is required to understand the operation of such technologies, then, is not a counter-theory of the subject, but rather, local analyses of the operation of the concrete assemblages of power. Such analyses are directed toward the fabrication of opportunities for resistance, insofar as they have as their aim the identification of points of weakness in these assemblages, and the possibilities of using force against force in order to change them.

This is perhaps one of the reasons why Foucault maintained a political interest in those modes of resistance aimed at material technologies of power such as the prison, of which he claims that ‘‘all these movements . . . have been about the body and material things . . . they were revolts, at the level of the body, against the very body of the prison. What was at issue was not whether the prison environment was too harsh or too aseptic, too primitive or too efficient, but its very materiality as an instrument and vector of power’’ (262-263).

mills reviews thiem butler

Mills, Catherine. Review of Annika Thiem’s Unbecoming Subjects: Judith Butler, Moral Philosophy and Critical Responsibility. New York: Fordham UP, 2008.

Mills, C. ‘Contesting the Political: Foucault and Butler on Power and Resistance’. The Journal of Political Philosophy, 2003, 11(3): 253-272

December 2008.

“Accountability” refers to the capacity to give an account of or to reckon or count something, or indicates that someone can be called to give such an account or reckoning, that something is explicable and someone is answerable for that thing. “Responsibility” likewise suggests that someone is answerable to something or accountable for something; it also means being capable of fulfilling an obligation or trust. Clearly, the terms are closely related, but theories of responsibility that distinguish it from accountability — which is calculable in some way or another — emphasize the weight of the (incalculable) obligation to others indicated in responsibility that is not evident in accountability. Recent criticisms of theories of ethics as obligation for their juridicism notwithstanding,

responsibility thus seems to offer resources for thinking ethics beyond calculability and individual intentionality and will, and emphasizes instead the socially embedded, embodied and constitutively relational aspects of ethical subjectivity.

Power must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization; as the process which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations,transforms, strengthens, or reverses them; as the support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or a system, or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another; and lastly as the strategies in which they take effect whose general design or institutional crystallization is embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies. (Foucault cited in Mills Contesting 2003, 254)

Butler’s theory of performativity draws on J. L Austin’s coining of the term ‘‘performative’’ to describe a category of speech acts that do things, as opposed to constative utterances, which describe states of affairs. See J. L. Austin, How to do Things with Words (1962) and ‘‘Performative utterances’’, Philosophical Papers, (1979).

Austin also distinguishes between illocutionary and perlocutionary speech acts; the former of these identifies the ‘‘performing of an act in saying something’’ (How to, 99–100) while the latter identifies speech acts that ‘‘produce certain consequential effects’’ . . . ‘‘by saying something’’ (101, 109).

Louis Althusser ‘‘Ideology and ideological state apparatuses (notes toward an investigation)’’, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971);

That the notion of linguistic practice designates more than speech is evident in Butler’s critique of Althusser’s  mise-en-scene of interpellation on the basis that it presumes a more or less sovereign voice that hails the subject into being; (The Psychic 5–6, 106-31). Interestingly though, Butler also claims to want to privilege speech in order to ‘‘struggle free of a narrow version of textualism’’ (Butler in Bell, ‘‘Speech, Race and Melancholia’’, p. 169), by which she means the theoretical positing of the primacy of writing, by emphasizing the constitutive role of speech over that of writing. Thus, her argument in Excitable Speech is especially concerned with the borders of what speech is. While I will not develop this point here, this privileging of speech may engender a certain difficulty for Butler’s emphasis on resignification as a strategy of resistance to hate speech, since it is then difficult to imagine the scene of speaking back to anonymous graffiti, policy documents and other such discursive elements. In other words, as modalities of invective and hate, do speech and writing permit or necessitate the same response?

thiem deviance

🙂 Don’t look at accountability in terms of justifying actions, I did this BECAUSE of this reason, this is the justification for why I did this and that …

Subject formation .. is important because it provides us with an analytic of power and social normalization by clarifying the material effects of schemes of intelligibility. Critique is concerned with … the question of asking how subjects are formed and how schemes of social and political intelligibility determine who counts as a subject, as an individual, and as a human being (218).

Anything that we can call morality today merges into the question of the organization of the world. we might even say that the quest for the good life is the quest for the right form of politics, if indeed such a right form of politics lay within the realm of what can be achieved today (Adorno in Butler Giving 133) (219)

Individuals and groups are marginalized when the social recognition that is available implies and demands the denial of attachments, taking on positions of inferiority or pathologization. The struggles of the transgender community are an example of how deviant bodies and desires can be made recognizable only when they are contained within the discourse of medical cure… Recourse to a medical diagnosis means that recognition is made available through a therapeutic medical discourse that considers the current state of the individual’s body and desires as pathological. …

While transgendered bodies and desires are not utterly denied recognition, they are recognized only through the available schemes of normality, as a medical condition to be cured. To push this point beyond the particular,

instead of idealizing social recognition, the critical potential of thinking about recognition lies in examining how recognition is administered and what social, institutional, and psychic formations sustain which kinds of lives as normal and recognizable and which other lives as marginal and exposed to violence. (244)

thiem constitutive unknowingness

Thiem, Annika. Unbecoming Subjects: Judith Butler, Moral Philosophy and Critical Responsibility. New York: Fordham UP, 2008.

I argue against defining responsibility primarily as a question of accountability. Responsibility is not reducible to asking what one’s obligations are and for which actions one will be held accountable if one omits them or fulfills them poorly or improperly. Such an approach frames understanding responsibility as measured by criteria for appropriate fulfillment of obligations and by standards for attributing actions to agents. However, such an approach cannot take into account responsibility as a response and its role in subject formation. Instead, theorizing responsibility with accountability as a starting point takes the subject as a settled precondition for the question of responsibility, and the version of the subject that such a theory implies is one that can know what it ought to do and ought to will and that can and will act accordingly (170).

In this attempt I would like to shift our perspective from thinking about accountability primarily as a problem of attributing past actions to someone, possibly to oneself as wrongdoing.

Instead I am primarily interested in how accountability arises as a problem over the irrecoverability and unsettledness of the past and how we might understand accountability as a particular mode of responding to being undone by this past. … understanding accountability as a practice that allows an attending to and a reworking of the ethical predicament that arises when past actions and their consequences give rise to ethical questions in the present.

Constitutive Unknowingness CU

Knowledge about our actions and their consequences is LIMITED because of our CU. This unknowingness is conditioned by namely

– our relation to social norms

– our relation to others

– our relation to temporality

These 3 things constitutive a DISPOSSESSION that we CANNOT become fully conscious of. There is a constitutive limitation to knowledge … we cannot fully know … Without the suspension for this requirement to know completely … we could never act because we can never fully know.

My aim here is to argue that we can acknowledge the unknowingness and irrecoverability of past intentions and that we continue to be accountable and hold others accountable (173).

Rather than knowledge or intentions, it is our constitutive opacity that grounds accountability.

thiem weak i

Thiem, Annika. Unbecoming Subjects: Judith Butler, Moral Philosophy and Critical Responsibility. New York: Fordham UP, 2008.

This account of the formation of the subject through a dispossession by the other allows us, I suggest, to understand that this dispossession can also become the site for altering and developing the way we relate to an other… of how this disorientation and dispossession in relation to an other can shape our practices.  (160)

Responsibility in transference is aimed neither at substituting oneself for the other nor at creating a narrative or “solution” for the other. As Butler emphasizes, “At its best, the tranference provides … a holding environment and offers a bodily presence in a temporal present that provides the conditions for a sustaining address” (Giving 59) (160).

While the address entangles us with an other, it is not a dialogic relation that is instituted, dialogue or mutual understanding does not ground our responsibility toward others. Instead, our translations of the enigmatic messages and responses to the other as well as the social and cultural schemes that delimit our interpretations and understanding of the world around us provide the framework for responding subsequently and for limiting what we can know (164-165).

Friedrich Wilhelm Graf worries that Butler’s WEAK “I”, whether it is possible to derive a theory of “strong recognition”.

How ought I to respond? What ought I to do? cannot be proffered by the “theory of the weak “I,” because it rather limits, undercuts, and questions these orientations as they emerge.

thiem unconscious assumed coherence

Thiem, Annika. Unbecoming Subjects: Judith Butler, Moral Philosophy and Critical Responsibility. New York: Fordham UP, 2008.

The unconscious

is not a site where what remains untranslatable is put to rest but a mechanism to deal with the traces of the overwhelming enigmatic messages that do not lead an indolent life. Subsequent addresses by others rupture the murmur of the “I” and reactivate the primary situation of having been overwhelmed, bringing back the traces of the untranslatable (157).

This reactivation of the untranslatable and of being overwhelmed is the effect of tranference, and with reactivation also comes the possibility of reworking the translation of the untranslatable excess that returns.

The unconscious and repression are important mechanisms in dealing with “too much otherness” in relation to others.

As the unconscious is “enacted” in relation to an other, the undoing of the repression brings to the fore the constitutive dispossession, disorientation, and incoherence of the “I”. I can tell stories about who I am, how I came to be where I am now, but I cannot know with certainty or give a definitive account of what made me.  Key to this impossibility is that these stories came to be only through my relations to others, and in my attempting to offer a story to another other, it is precisely the presence of this other that interrupts and disorients my story by making me ask: Who am I to tell you this story? Who are you? What does this story tell you about me that I do not say? What are you thinking that you are not telling me? So the other becomes the occasion for the unraveling of myself and my assumed coherence.