Category: butlerEthics

thiem desire foreclosure repression

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

[D]esires are formed insofar as they cannot simply take any object; rather object choices take place only in relation to norms (43).

Despite being inevitable, the loss occasioned by foreclosure is never prior to the social but occurs through the horizon of and in relation to social norms. These can and must be interrogated, criticized, and possibly reworked and changed (45). The ego-ideal controls the desires of the ego, demands the repression of certain desires, and becomes the agency of producing and preserving precisely the desires it seeks to regulate.

It is not possible to seek recourse to discovering more original versions of desire that might precede social regulation.  Further, matters become complicated with regard to attempts to rework patterns of social regulation.

Critique cannot mean simply to impart knowledge and give reasons about what is repressive, as if this means that we could then simply get rid of these conditions. Instead, critique comes to be bound to an archaeology of passionate attachments, and such an archaeology means an unbecoming practice of undoing the very subject and its passionate investments in that which it is opposed.  Such an archaeology will constantly run into its own limits, because these attachments are not transparent and hence readily avowable (46).

thiem norms foucault psychoanalysis

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

By putting psychoanalysis and Foucault in conversation, Butler offers an explanation of how the subject emerges as passionately attached to the scenes of its subjection only through a necessary disavowal of these attachments and how passionate attachments thus never work independently of frameworks of social norms and cultural horizons but also never work deterministically in accordance with them.  The relation between social norms and subject formation with regard to desire is traversed and made possible through the emergence of the unconscious (42).

“Norms are not first external to preexisting subjects and then subsequently encountered by those subjects and possibly internalized. Rather, the differentiation between the “I” and the others and the world, the differentiation between internal and external, is formed in relation to these norms (42).

The social and the psychic are implicated within each other because the differentiation between the perspective of the “I” and the world outside which is “not me” happens only through internalization of norms (43).

Drawing on psychoanalysis thus allows Butler to consider both the complexity of psychic life and those instabilities that ensue from the ambivalences of our relations to social norms and practices insofar as they produce attachments and identifications. With psychoanalysis we can understand subject formation as a process of subjection that is not simply externally imposed but fueled as well by the subject’s investments in this subjection. (82)

Butler elaborates an account of how normalization brings forth a divided subject. That which does not conform to normality neither is annihilated nor preexists the subject as such; what does not conform to normality is produced and reproduced within the subject: “the unconscious is … a certain mode in which the unspeakably social endures.” (bulazi 153).

As the subject emerges through its subjection to rules and norms, it is never fully fitting, never fully reducible to these rules and norms, but constantly undone from within. With psychoanalysis, Butler theorizes how norms address and bring about attachments as well as sustain (albeit not in an easily accessible manner) that which threatens the coherence and normality of the subject.

Rather, the difficulty lies in the confluence of social normalization and psychic investments and identification. Consequently the potential that disrupts the normalization cannot be mobilized easily but also always threatens to disrupt both the subject as well as the social horizon of its formation.

The efficacy of norms’ ordering social relations relies on a self-subversion and repetition by reproducing that which resists not only in terms of certain subjects who are on the fringes of what counts as normal and acceptable, but within the subject itself.

“The Foucaultian subject is never fully constituted in subjection …; it is repeatedly constituted in subjection, and it is in the possibility of a repetition that repeats against its origin that subjection might be understood to draw its inadvertently enabling power.” (Psychic 94)

In the repeated inhabiting and appropriating of the norms and practices that animate this subjection and subject formation lies the potential for change, for repeating the norms and practices in not quite the same way they arrived. Insofar as the regulating norms and practices are actualized and sustained only be being rehearsed and enacted, this repetition is precisely where the possibility of change and reworking is located. (83)

thiem passionate attachments

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

While Foucault rejected psychoanalysis and the notion of the unconscious, Butler draws on psychoanalysis for her critiques. She insists that understanding the formation of the unconscious and of passionate attachments to subjection plays an important role in offering an analysis of social life. In her arguments Butler sides with formulations, such as ones offered by Spinoza, Hegel, Nietzsche, and psychoanalysis, that understand the human being as a fundamentally desiring being.

Social regulation not only is a curbing of desire but orients and fuels desires. In fueling and forming desires, social regulation becomes the very site for desire and brings forth a passionate attachment to that regulation, insofar as this regulation becomes as well the condition that sustains the possibility of this desire. In other words, insofar as desires are not easily given up or willed away, social regulation becomes what makes the survival of this desire possible, albeit in an ambivalent, regulated, or even repressed and reoriented form.

To theorize the way in which these passionate attachments are nothing to which the subject could easily have access in conscious reflection, Butler holds to the notion of the unconscious.  These attachments work in ways that remain unconscious, making up a part of the subject’s psychic life.

These unconscious attachments are neither simply the internalized version of the social norms in relation to which the attachments are formed nor are these unconscious attachments simply possible psychic resistances equivalent to deliberate opposition against normalization.

Crucial to Butler’s understanding of how our desires and passionate attachments are formed and reinforced is a combination of the notion of the unconscious, the formation of desires through regulations and prohibitions of certain desires, and the impossibility of fully rendering these psychic mechanisms conscious. (38)

thiem mattering bodies

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

Understanding the self as produced around the body in relation to social norms and becoming the principle of the body’s subjection challenges moral philosophy to reconsider the notions of the self or self-concept.

Instead of seeking in the self a narrative, an integrated truth of a person, it becomes possible to draw on the notion of the self to understand how stories and histories produce the self through and in relation to the formation of the body.

The self reconsidered as an effect of the bodily effects of subjection to social norms is not, then, a repository of a person’s authenticity or an authentic self-expression of one’s body.

Rather, the self comes to join social norms in bringing about the body as a certain kind of body, and the self becomes the very mediation and agent of normalization.

This does not mean that narratives are inherently oppressive or nothing but perfidious instruments of social regulation, yet they are also not radically other than social norms and cannot offer an authenticity of the self as recourse to oppose social norms. (33).

… one intricacy of Butler’s account of subject formation lies in its critique of accounts that attempt to secure a prediscursive reality for the bodily subject. Butler’s critique brings together Derrida’s arguments on signification and materiality and Foucault’s analytics of power relations and discourses.

This juxtaposition allows her to offer an account of the political and social relevance of thinking materiality as not independent of signification. Matter comes to matter not prior to social norms and relations of power but as social practices and institutions render matter intelligible. Drawing on Foucault’s analytics of power, Butler offers these “social conditions” as mechanisms of normalization.

The challenge that her accounts poses regarding the bodily subject is that bodies, bodily reality, or “facticity” cannot be invoked as providing some sort of more original freedom, a point of departure prior to social norms to launch a critique of social normalization (36-37).

thiem foucault assujetissement

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

This kind of Foucaultian assujetissement is not merely a subjection in the sense of domination; it is not merely an exertion of power on a preexisting body that shapes the substance that has existence outside and prior to the workings of power and social norms.  There is no “raw” body or materiality prior to and outside of power; power itself, in return, is for Foucault not an immaterial form but exists and works in the form of political and social practices and institutions.  Assujetissement thus is a bringing of the bodily subject into existence, since “there is no body outside of power, for the materiality of the body —indeed, materiality itself— is produced by and in direct relation to the investment of power” (Butler Psychic 91)

thiem materiality

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

There is usually not merely one single framework that renders experiences intelligible; instead, there are various frameworks that compete with and among each other. Some are culturally prevalent and dominant; others are relegated to the margins. Yet such frameworks, as ways of making sense of the world, others, and oneself, are not unchangeably closed, fully consistent worldviews in themselves within which one is immersed and to which one is unalterably confined.

Consequently, experiences of pain or pleasure can bring the prevailing modes and frameworks of intelligibility into crisis and open them up for critical questioning and reworking. One runs in many ways up against and thus in a way experiences the limits of one’s hermeneutical framework which is one’s epistemological field. Since one operates from within that field, however, one is not in a position to look upon the field as a whole and so have reflective access to the field’s topography.

🙂 She loses me here: The limits are experienced, but they resist total sublation into reflective knowledge. This resistance depends on the fact that every paradigm works according to a certain foreclosure that occasions the preservation and return of that which cannot be signified within the given order of being. (25) 🙂 We experience the limits but these limits resist “sublation” into something she calls ‘reflective knowledge’

thiem butler subjectivity

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

Poststructuralist critiques have demonstrated that we can no longer retrieve an individual, a person, or a self in a way that could ground theory and practice cross history and cultures, because this ground is itself a product of a particular culture and history.

… there is no longer a subject outside of subject FORMATION to which moral philosophy could have recourse. The accounts that Butler offers are not developmental accounts of the subject in the sense of outlining a series of events that we all undergo and from which in the end we emerge maturely, finally, as subjects.

Instead, the subject emerges as a question and problem for moral philosophy insofar as it does not have a secure status or position. “The subject,” therefore, is better rendered as an ongoing process, an ongoing formation in relation to norms as well as in relation to others. In The Psychic Life of Power, this process of subject formation is termed assujetissement (subjectivation) to describe this emergence of the subject through subjection.

The process of becoming a subject is for Butler a process of becoming subordinated by norms through which power relations work, and to exist socially as well as self-consciously requires not only relating to norms but also to become subjected to them.

In Giving Account of Oneself, Butler explains that we do not encounter norms and power on their own, but they become knowable through encounters with others (11).

Thus “the body” cannot function as backdrop against “normalized” consciousness or as a reality that we can be certain of independent of social norms.  In other words, Butler refutes a strand of phenomenologically informed arguments that seek to establish the facticity of the body’s materiality as independent from social constructions.

These positions hold that even though we cannot have any positive, substantive knowledge about the materiality of the body outside of discursive constructs and social understandings, we can nevertheless know THAT there is a material existence of the body; this existence, then, is a kind of pure or presocial “facticity” of bodily materiality.

Butler argues that even the understanding of the body as material is neither prediscursive nor presocial, but the possibility of a bodily referent is always bound to the efficacy of social norms and the ways in which social norms regulate and construct bodies (24).

constitutive outside

Ziarek, Ewa Ponowska. “From Euthanasia to the Other of Reason: Performativity and the Deconstruction of Sexual Difference” in Derrida and Feminism. eds. Feder, Ellen K. et al. New York: Routledge. 1997, 115-140.

🙂 This is a great note but it stops short with 8 pages to go. I need to track down the article and find Z’s conclusion!

On the Derridian Ethical

Ungraspable in positive terms, and yet irreducible to epistemological contradiction, the signification of alterity confronts us, once again, with the limit, or the outside to the symbolic order. This limit differs, however, from both the psychoanalytic concept of the Real and Butler’s notion of the “constitutive outside.” Unlike the radical non-coincidence, both temporal and spatial, that the signification of the other generates, Copjec’s and Žižek’s discussion of the Real emphasizes the immediate coincidence of opposites. For Butler, the abject —designating the excluded possibilities of signification threatening the purity of the law— functions as the constitutive outside to the symbolic order. The exclusion of the abject is thus an act of violence that ensures heterosexual hegemony. The task of critical intervention, then, is to question the seeming neutrality of this exclusion, and to recover the foreclosed possibilities of signification, even though this recovery will produce different exclusions in its wake.

For Derrida however, the persistence of alterity as a certain beyond or excess of the social and conceptual totality is not a sign of violent exclusion, but the condition of the very possibility of ethics. The other does not belong to the order of the “production” of the constitutive outside —as radically other, the signification of alterity exceeds both the notion of production and constitution.

(131-132).