Category: butlerEthics

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.

thiem laplanche translation

If there is no communcation without transference, and if, owing to transference, the effects of our words and actions remain to some extent beyond our control, then the only way to put an end to transference and desire and gain full control over them would be to take oneself out of the interaction —the scenes of address and response— entirely (153).

Responsibility in relations cannot mean that the aim is to abolish these asymmetries and ambivalences; instead, responsibility becomes a question of precisely how asymmetries and ambivalences are played out and whether they have oppressive and abusive effects or become fluid and enabling.

The emergence of the “I” through this impingement of the other happens through an address that communicates a DEMAND by confronting the infant with it.  This demand is, more specifically, enigmatic and unknowable, which, as Laplanche lays out, conditions the untranslatability of the enigma of the other and at the  same time compels the infant to translate in order to contain that overwhelmingness and to resond as adequately and as well as possible. By translating, the infant transitions from utter passivity —the passivity of being overwhelmed by the other— into activity that is possible only relative to the other’s breaking in.  Translation is in a certain way a closure, a distancing of oneself from the other, but it aslo constitutes an attachment to the other, since that which cannot be translated is repressed and forms the unconscious, where the untranslatable continues to live on. The unconscious is, therefore, for Laplanche, “the result of repression bearing on fragments of communications which it, by doing so, makes foreign to the context which is their origin.” (156)

This means that through the process of translation, the initial message that came from the other person is displaced and the origin evacuated and relocated inside the subject, where that which could not be translated is retained through the unconscious.

thiem primary encounter levinas laplanche

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

On the one hand responsibility is seriously called into question by this theory of subject formation, but on the other hand, responsiveness and responsibility become a crucial link to understand how being decentered in and through our relations to otherness is related to moral conduct in response to others.

In effect, the notion of responsibility undergoes a reformulation that disarticulates accountability as the basis for responsibility. (145)

We become responsible not because actions can be attributed to us and we can be held accountable for them but because we are addressed by others in ways that demand that we respond, and respond well.

The ways in which desires and the rhetorical aspects are at work matter for theorizing responsibility as responding and relating to others, insofar as desires and the rhetorical aspects of communication make fully transparent self-reflective speech impossible. (150)

In Laplanche, the primary encounter does not circumscribe a time before time and is not a scene of passivity before all passivity, as it is in Levinas. Instead, in Laplanche the primary encounter is the infant’s encountering the adult world, and in this regard he considers drives and desires as being crucial to understanding the formation of ego and unconscious. The unwanted address is overwhelming in Laplanche not because it carries an ethical commandment, as it does for Levinas, but because the gestures and utterances the infant encounters are already infused with meaning, desires, and fantasies —especially unconscious ones for which the infant has no register. In Levinas’s account of the encounter with the other, there is a constitutive ambivalence because the encounter itself incites one to violence against the other, while at the same time the commandment not to kill is delivered in that very encounter. In Laplanche’s account, ambivalence emerges through the overwhelming and enigmatic character of the messages that produce a scene of helplessness, anxiety, and desire that is never fully left behind and never fully recoverable. (152)

thiem butler dispossession by norms

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)

thiem accusation

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

“My presence does not respond to the extreme urgency of the assignation. I am accused of having delayed” (Levinas OTB 88) (109). Levinas insists that even without having possibly been able to have acted otherwise, the address by the other arrives as an ACCUSATION.

The “I” is accused of nonaction, of having delayed, of not having been there for the other, of being too late — yet this passivity is not the passivity of a willful and voluntary “letting happen.” The address in the scene of the encounter figures not only as a demand but necessarily also as an accusation.  The I is accused of nonaction, of having delayed, of not having been there for the other, of being too late. (109)

This accusation that Levinas inscribes as being at the core of subject formation is disturbing, because the subject emerges as always already accused of something that it did not will, that it COULD NOT will. The subject therefore emerges only under the burden of a responsibility to which it can never answer adequately …  There are no deeds that precede the scene and for which the subject then becomes held responsible and accountable. (109-110)

Responsibility in the Levinasian formulation arrives as a responsibility for the other that is impossible for us to assume by giving an account of what we did or did not do. Responsibility in Levinas peculiarly precedes the possibility of being able to will and act. (110)

thiem levinas past that never was present

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

If we follow Levinas, we begin with responsibility, but it is not an unambivalent responsibility, because the emergence of the moral subject is marked by the emergence of a desire for violence. (106)

This means that the awakening to the face of the other is constitutively an awakening to being conflicted, and if the temptation to violence is issued by the face itself, then there is not only no subject but also no responsibility that could be pure and uncompromised (107).

Responsibility, in other words, emerges as what remains irreducible to and propels one beyond self-reflexive questioning of the moral self (107).

There is no time of the subject when and no place for the subject where there is no responsibility. there is no time or place when or where the subject has not already been approached by the other.

Precisely because the address absolutely exceeds the subject, “responsibility” in Levinas’s account can no longer be thought of primarily in terms of one’s accountability for one’s actions and choices. The responsibility for the other is not a responsibility that one could have chosen, to which one could have agreed; the other overwhelms, and the “I” cannot even remember being overwhelmed and enjoined (108).

Consciousness thus can only belatedly and never adequately reconstruct and grasp this scene that conditioned its own possibility.

Levinas’s account of ethical subject formation is radical because there is no subject who could remember and decide before the encounter with the other.

Hence one’s responsibility radically exceeds one’s ability to account for oneself and to assume this responsibility consciously, because one has become responsible for the other’s death before there was even an “I” that could have accepted or refused this responsibility and before there was an “I” that could have acted mindfully (108).

This “before,” this “prior to every memory” … is not a nonpresence in the sense of a past that once was present and now is no longer present. It is a past that has never been present, but as such, it also has never been past. … this “past” is not one that could be remembered, recollected, and re-presented in memory. …

… but this nonpresence impossible to remember … while not being present and having never been present, is precisely not absent. It signifies that which cannot be surpassed and that continues to interrupt the present.

The address has always already happened, and any response is coming irrecoverably too late, but nonetheless, precisely because of its belatedness, is only ever so much more urgent. (109)

thiem levinas the other

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

The ambiguity at the heart of the relation to the other is that the face delivering the prohibition on killing is that very instance that also makes possible the wish to get rid of the other completely —and, even more so, the face INCITES, instills a desire, Levinas argues, to rid oneself of the other. … Levinas delimits the scene of subject formation as instantiating both an ultimate responsibility and the temptation to murder.

What is the weakness and helplessness of the face that it incites to murder? What is this call for responsibility that it tempts one to annihilate the other who delivers this call?

The temptation to let the other die, to abandon the other, is instigated by the inescapable demand for responsibility … Levinas is capturing at the heart of subject formation, the struggle between the call of the other and the temptation to forsake the other. (100)

thiem dislodge responsibility from accountability

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

We are not first alone in the world and then subsequently encounter others and the demands that are made upon us, but that being addressed constitutes us as subjects from the very beginning.

The problem for Levinas with privileging the subject is that there is no openness toward the other in this kind of thought as well as in this kind of subject, because any encounter with an other turns only into a matter of reaffirming the self of the subject. … The conceptions of responsibility and justice that such philosophical approaches subsequently yield are founded on and aiming toward maintaining and achieving the subject’s independence over and against others.

Reading Levinas and Butler together on subject formation through the encounter with the other that is an address and that brings about the subject being as responsible for the other makes it possible to dislodge responsibility from accountability, which means that the primary meaning of responsibility does not come from a scene like the Nietzschean one in which an action is attributed to me and I am held responsible for this action.

Theorizing responsibility as accountability begins with the notion of a subject who seems already to have done something of which it is considered guilty and about which the subject ought to have known better and acted differently.

However the Levinasian description of the “approach” by the other as being constitutive of the emergence of the subject which, for Levinas, compels the use of “ethical language” means that “responsibility” as a conceptual term, captures primarily the modality of the subject rather than a particular modality of actions.

In other words, “responsibility” is moved into the realm of subject theory and away from the question of how to act in a given situation (104).

thiem performativity

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

Butler argues that what we have in the first instance is the deed or action and that we ascribe it only belatedly, in considering an action, to a doer or agent. Even more radically, for Butler there is no agent as such prior to the deed, but the agent is an after effect of the deed. The agent is a peculiar effect, insofar as this effect (the agent) is taken to be the cause and source of what becomes its own origin (the action).

The challenges to conventinal accounts of subjectivity and agency result from the implication of this account of performative subject formation, because one can no longer try to trace back from actions to the intentions beneath them and evaluate agents according to their intentions. (79)

There is no original or authentic self or individual that only later enters into relations with others and comes to act on a social scene. Rather, Butler’s account offers a rigorous way of considering how social norms, practices, and institutions need to be taken into account as con-constitutive of subjects as well as of their acts. The difficulty for moral philosophy and more specifically for reflections on questions of accountability and political and social agency is then to think how this co-constitution requires but also allows a thorough reworking of our conceptions of individual responsibility and accountability (80).

thiem subject formation

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

On of the key achievements of Butler’s theoretical interventions is that they take what might be assumed to be ontological questions and make them legible as ethical, political, and social problematics, because, as she demonstrates, ontologies are conditioned by histories of power embodied in social and cultural institutions (74).

Moreover her work importantly offers a language and conceptual framework for lucidly demonstrating how this exclusion of the abnormal is part of what guarantees the normal its status. Butler demonstrates how the stabilities of gendered and sexed identities are attained through repressing what calls them into question and what attests to the ambivalence of gender and sex, of bodies and desires and their potentials and vulnerability (76).

Against understanding subjectivity as an achievement of self-consciousness and autonomous agency, Butler’s work argues for thinking of subjectivity as an unending process of formation that never culminates in full independence or self-sufficiency. Instead becoming a subject means to be formed and undone in relations to others and norms in ways that one can never fully reflectively grasp (78).

Despite the important role that Butler attributes to social norms in subject formation, individuals are not the marionettes of those norms.

Rather, Butler accounts for subject formation in subjection to norms as being irreducible to either a deterministic or an arbitrary relation to these norms. One key concept of these debates as well as of Butler’s attempts to explain her account of subject formation has been the notion of performativity.(78)

… the key insight from Butler’s concept of performativity is that acts cannot simply be traced back to agents and the intentions that preceded them. There is no original or authentic self or individual that only later enters into relations with others and comes to act on a social scene. Rather, Butler’s account offers a rigorous way of considering how social norms, practices, and institutions need to be taken into account as co-constitutive of subjects as well as of their acts.

… norms and their repetition are at the heart of how we come to be conscious and deliberating subjects. To understand subject formation as orchestrated by norms, normalization, and subjection, … does not mean to argue that subjects are fully determined by these norms. … performativity is the reiteration of norms by which one becomes intelligible as a subject (see BTM 94-95).

The performatively emerging subject is the product of the repetition of the social norms that confer intelligibility. It would be to mistake the core idea of performativity to understand this subject as one of PERFORMING the repetition of norms, as if in a theatrical performance …

Instead, the repetition of norms is “what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal condition for the subject” (BTM 95), and this repetition occurs in a ritualized form, constituting the subject over time.

As Butler has repeatedly argued, this mode of subjection does not make subjects into puppets determined by norms; instead, subjection brings about unruly subjects because of the excess of indeterminacyof meaning, power, and agency as norms work by producing their own failures.

The points of resistances that these failures produce are not the conscious acts of subjects, but these gaps and breakages are the condition of possibility for directed action and transformation. (80)

Political action and concerted efforts to change our circumstances are not necessary outcomes of being at odds with the norms, as Butler indicates when she asks, “what are the possibilities of politicizing DISidentifiction, this experience of MISRECOGNITION, this uneasy sense of standing under a sign to which one does and does not belong?” (BTM 219) (84-85).