Category: ethics

“Politics, Power and Ethics: A Discussion between Judith Butler and William Connolly” Theory and Event 4:2. 2000.

William Connolly: One impressive thing about Gender Trouble was its creative and detailed elaboration of the Foucauldian idea that the demand to secure a “true identity” or “a core” identity is entangled with ugly processes that close off the development of a plurality of identities on the same social field. That which was thought by many to provide the basis and guide to ethics was, therefore, itself said to be entangled in the politics and power of ethics. One way of putting the point in Gender Trouble (1990) was to say that “the displacement of a political and discursive origin of gender identity onto a psychological ‘core’ precludes an analysis of the political constitution of the gendered subject and its fabricated notions about the ineffable interiority of its sex or of its true identity” (p.136). This book opened up important issues that had been closed down, including the possibility of pursuing a new plurality of sexual and gender practices. It also played a crucial role in helping to mobilize and energize an entire political movement. But it is has nonetheless been taken by some of its critics, even by some who support gay and lesbian rights, to have deleterious consequences. They sometimes assert that it treats all identity as if it were oppressive, or that it does not sufficiently appreciate the pleasures and attachments to identity we find ourselves implicated in, or that it diminishes the capacity to evaluate different claims to identity ethically, or that it makes it difficult to identify the political energies from which to proceed in pushing for a pluralization of identities, or that it makes it difficult to see how to mobilize such energies in dominant constituencies who are asked to respond to new pressures for pluralization.

There may be misunderstandings behind some of these criticisms, or they may reflect more basic disagreements about how power operates, how ethical responsiveness proceeds, to what extent an ethical orientation must be grounded in something fixed, authoritative or final to be informed, and how diverse a contemporary culture should strive to become. I hope you will take the opportunity as we proceed to respond to some of those questions. For example, would you now modify the idea that a challenge to the idea of truth in identity also necessarily involves a challenge to the idea of a “core” identity? Could one emphasize the contingent elements in the formation of identity and probe the fugitive possibilities of mobility that may inhabit it even while saying that identity often enough acquires a certain core?

One way to proceed, perhaps, is to consider an arresting moment in The Psychic Life of Power (1997). You have been examining the role that melancholy plays in consolidating heterosexuality out of a larger field of possibilities. There is unavowed grieving involved here, and this condition seems both to entrench the attachment to identity and to complicate the possible political relations between constituencies. A poignant formulation occurs:

This raises the political question of the cost of articulating a coherent identity position by producing, excluding, and repudiating a domain of abjected specters that threatens the arbitrarily closed domain of subject positions. Perhaps only by risking the incoherence of identity is connection possible (p. 149).

I interpret this formulation to mean that people often become profoundly attached to the identities that inhabit them, that the abjection of some other identity possibilities often becomes tempting as a means to secure the self assurance of your own, and that an ethos of plurality is apt to be both fragile and uneven in part because people often refuse to run identity risks to cultivate connections across difference. This formulation, to me, addresses simultaneously the importance and difficulty of a generous ethos of public life, and it discloses the element of fragility that may persist in such achievements if and when they are achieved. The risks are more palpable than those acknowledged by many self-proclaimed proponents of public virtue. One thinks of liberal communitarians and neo-Kantians here. The theme also may also help to explain why some non-Kantian, cultural conservatives are so eager to bond the identities they profess to the truth of identity itself. Nietzsche calls this an instance of the “immorality of morality,” meaning in this context the immoral demand to treat the identity you profess as if it were commanded by the dictates of morality itself so that it can never become incumbent upon you to make adjustments in its hegemony to create more room for diversity. One thinks of the Christian Right in this context, though there are many Christians who oppose those tendencies in the name of Christian love. And one thinks as well of those academics who identify same-sex marriage and families with the demise of western civilization itself.

Let me ask you, then, to use these two formulations, one published in 1990 and another in 1997, to respond to one or two of the issues posed above and, particularly, to address the relation between political ethics and the risks to identity posed by negotiation of a generous ethic of plurality. It may be that you will not find my use of the terms “ethics” or “ethos” helpful in this context. That too would be interesting. It will get us started if you say something about your current thinking concerning 1) risks to identity posed by formation of generous connections across opaque lines of difference and 2) what within the asymmetrical play of power that might foment a call to such negotiations.

Judith Butler: There are several interesting points that you raise, and I think I may be able to answer them best by proceeding more or less chronologically. You ask whether I might be willing to rethink the critique of core identity now that Gender Trouble is ten years old. And my answer to this question is two-fold: first, it seems important to realize that GT made an argument against the notion of core gender identity, especially the view of Robert Stoller, an ego-psychologist who claims that one might find the truth of gender in an ostensibly interior ‘core’ gender identity. The second is that identity itself may become experienced as a ‘core,’ but that is only to say that a certain discourse of the core conditions our self-understanding, sometimes even essentially.

The reason I opposed Stoller’s view is that it set up a very speculative, even metaphysical postulate as the criterion by which the truth of gender might be known, and assumed that this non-phenomenal core somehow structured all that emerged as gender in the realm of appearances. This struck me, and continues to strike me, as a needlessly and dangerously regulatory view which sets up the ‘expert’ as the one who has special knowledge about one’s ‘core,’ a core that is only known through its appearance, but is said to be not only distinct from the appearances by which it is evidenced, but is said to act causally to produce such appearances. My view was, and remains, that sometimes gender does come to feel like a ‘core,’ or it becomes available to us through the discourse of the ‘core’ or, as you yourself say, it is “acquired.” So I don’t dispute that it can, for some people, come to really feel like a core, and even, through the metaphor of the core, come to structure their self-understanding essentially. But that is, of course, different from saying that it “is” one, and I don’t think we have any way to actually say the latter and know it to be true. The regulatory dimension of the doctrine to which I am opposed has to do with the truth-claim it makes, a truth-claim that seems to be made precisely by the psychologist who devises and institutes the theory. So I suppose my complaint is not unlike Foucault’s in the first volume of The History of Sexuality where he wonders how and why sex became the innermost secret that we are compelled to expose to the psychological establishment. But more than that, it seems important to acknowledge that if a core gender contains the criterial truth of gender, then it is possible to announce about another person that the truth of their gender is manifested by their acts or their appearances. This can be used to say that the truth of a masculine-looking woman is her core femininity — which she denies — or that the truth of a feminine-looking woman is her core femininity — which she affirms. And it may be that the genders which inhabit persons and which they simultaneously inhabit, don’t quite fit into established conventions of masculine and feminine, and that the discourse of truth which assumes the stability of those terms, and relates them as though they were mutually exclusive, is itself an idealization of gender under the norms of a certain (uninhabitable) heterosexuality, and so not to be embraced without qualification. This is not to say that the idealized norms of heterosexuality are not conditions of pleasure. They most surely are. But what becomes interesting is when these pleasures are not exactly manifested by the bodies and genders that one expects, or where certain reversals make clear that heterosexuality does not belong exclusively to heterosexuals. I think this point has been made about homosexuality most emphatically by Eve Sedgwick: homosexuality is not the property of homosexuals.

I certainly don’t mean to treat all identity as oppressive, but I do mean to underscore that forms of regulation operate through available notions of identity, and that this produces them as sites of ambivalence. As ambivalent, they are the sites of both pleasure and pain, and I am suspect both of the desire to eradicate identity (and its pain) and to install it as foundational (which very often seeks to forestall the ‘anxiety’ that the tenuousness of identity implies). Probably The Psychic Life of Power makes these latter claims a bit more evenly than Gender Trouble. I think we all have investments in identity, those which give us pleasure, even take us to certain heights of exhilaration, but that both that pleasure and exhilaration of ‘being’ such and so are also haunted by a certain anxiety, a knowingness about the contingency of what we ‘are.’ We can, of course, seek to legislate that contingency and anxiety away and make claims to the effect that our identities are foundational or that they are to be found in enduring ‘cores,’ but here the very insistence belies its own instability. I believe that you have brought out this double dimension of identity in a different, but parallel way, when you claim, for instance, that the contingency of identity is its relationality, and that the latter is the basis of our openness toward others. If I parallel you here, it is probably because I am citing you in the way that one cites another whose thought has become so formative of one’s own that it no longer quite stands out as distinct from one’s own thinking.

I think some of the misunderstandings that attend my early work may arise when on moves too quickly from the theory of gender identity put forth there to a more generalized theory of identity. For instance, you cite for me one popular criticism of GT which worries that my view diminishes our capacity to make ethically relevant distinctions between kinds of identities. This view usually arrives at my door in the following form: Butler makes room for new possibilities of gender, but she fails to give us a criterion by which to distinguish between good and bad possibilities. Surely, Butler does not mean to condone or support the proliferation of all such possibilities, regardless of their ethical content. I think that the only way to answer this question is to take a few steps back and ask the following: under what political conditions does possibility itself emerge as a political good? And the answer to that is: under conditions in which gender has been constrained, in which certain sexual and gender minorities have felt their lives to be “impossible,” unviable, unlivable, then “becoming possible” is a most certain political achievement. GT is, of course, about desiring subjects who either fall outside the heterosexual norm, or operate within it as one set of norms among others, but in “perverse” or illegitimate ways. We are talking about sexual practices and modes of gendering that are deemed unlivable precisely because they defy the tacit and violent presumption that human life only appears as livable under the description of heterosexuality. I worry that those who too quickly abstract from this analysis lose sight of the specific ways that compulsory heterosexuality works the power of foreclosure. And it is only once this is no longer seen that the political valorization of ‘possibility’ becomes confusing or seems in need of an ethical supplement. That lives foreclosed now take themselves to be ‘possible’ strikes me as a political good under conditions in which a certain heightened norm of compulsory heterosexuality works to make non-compliant lives into those which are impossible.

This leads me to your last set of very interesting questions, pertaining to ethics and to ethos. I confess to worrying about the turn to ethics, and have recently written a small essay that voices my ambivalence about this sphere. I tend to think that ethics displaces from politics, and I suppose for me the use of power as a point of departure for a critical analysis is substantially different from an ethical framework. But I do know the use to which you put this term, and I understand that your question is asking me to think about our bearing towards others and ourselves, and how that can take place in a way that fosters generosity, especially within a differentiated field of power.

I do believe that a certain ability to affirm what is contingent and incoherent in identity allows one to affirm others who may or may not ‘mirror’ one’s own constitution, or that the recognition that one is, at every turn, not quite the same as what one thinks that one is, implies in turn a certain patience for others which does not demand that they be who they claim to be at every moment. Suspending the demand for self-identity or, more particularly, for complete coherence, seems to me to counter a certain ethical violence which demands that we manifest self-identity and require that others do the same. For subjects who live in time this will be a hard norm to satisfy. And for subjects who are multiply constituted, and sometimes constituted in ways that are not quite known or knowable, this will be an ethical norm before which one can only fail.

But then the question — we might say ‘post-Kafka’ — is whether a new sense of ethics emerges from that inevitable ethical failure. And I suppose that it does, and that it would center perhaps on a certain willingness to acknowledge the limits of acknowledgment itself, that when we claim to know and present ourselves, we will fail in some ways that are nevertheless essential to who we are, and that we cannot expect anything different from others. This involves, perhaps paradoxically, both a persisting in one’s being (Spinoza) and a certain humility, or a recognition that persistence requires humility, and that humility, when offered to others, becomes generosity. For me, though, an essential part of that generosity involves the suspension of the regime of truth that governs the elaboration and totalization of identities. If the identity we say we are cannot possibly capture us, and marks immediately an excess and opacity which falls outside the terms of identity itself, then

any effort we make ‘to give an account of oneself’ will have to fail in order to approach being true. And as we ask to know the other, or ask that the other say, finally, who he or she is, it will be important that we do not expect an answer that will ever satisfy. And by not pursuing satisfaction, we let the other live, offering a recognition that is not based on knowledge, but on its limits.

William Connolly: Your ambivalent orientation to ethics is moving. It shows us how some traditional models of morality, when folded into a system of differential power, are readily pulled into the service of domination; and it then counters that tendency with an ethical generosity fueled by the paradoxical energies of self-modesty. It indeed fleshes out things articulated perhaps more briefly or indirectly in your recent texts.

I would like to turn now to the nexus between performativity and corporeality. In Excitable Speech: The Politics of the Performative, you show how discursive practices help to constitute selves and the operative norms governing them even as they also provide openings for the creative modification of those selves and norms. You also show how theorists who emphasize the first of these possibilities often tend to overlook the political significance of the second. When you then engage Pierre Bourdieu you criticize his tendency to ignore the transformative potential of discourse, but you also seem to affirm some of his insights.

If one accepts your critique of Bourdieu’s tendency to depreciate the elements of ambiguity and possibility in established contexts, it is intriguing to probe further what it is in his thinking that informs you. Bourdieu wants to show, through the discussion of habitus, how linguistic practices intersect with other dimensions to constitute habitual norms operating below the threshold of intellectual articulation. The result, I take it, is a set of dispositions incorporated into demeanor, gesture, movement and mood that help to set the stage for linguistically mediated performances even as they are marked by them. Here is a statement in which you take issue with Bourdieu after appreciating how habitus operates. You are resisting, or so it could seem, the idea that there are extralinguistic elements at work here as well as linguistic ones:

[I]f one argues that language itself can only act to the extent that it is ‘backed’ by existing social power, then one needs to supply a theory of how it is that social power ‘backs’ language in this way. If language only represents the larger, institutional conditions that give it its force, then what is that relationship of ‘representation’ that accounts for institutions being represented in language? It seems that such a relationship can only be explained through a further theory of language and signification (p. 158).

You are persuasive in objecting to the sufficiency of a representational model of language. And it seems true that there is to date no compelling theory available of how such ‘backing’ occurs. But there is a side of Foucault that may speak to the latter issue without falling into the situational one-dimensionalism of Bourdieu. In “On The Genealogy of Ethics,” Foucault concurs with you on the ambivalence of discursive iteration and reiteration. He then says,

It is not enough to say that the subject is constituted in a symbolic system. It is not just in the play of symbols that the subject is constituted. It is constituted in real practices — historically analyzable practices. There is a technology of the constitution of the self which cuts across symbolic systems while using them.

I don’t like Foucault’s choice of terms here. But I take “real practices” to be things like a cop spreading you out for a search after he has hailed you; an architectural/behavioral regime of prison surveillance that folds the sense of paranoia and self-watchfulness deeply into the brains, muscles and visceral feelings of those under observation; or habits of gesture, posture and walking sometimes ingrained in us by others in similar gender, ethnic, age or class positions. Such disciplines do seem to “cut across symbolic systems while using them.” They install their effects in somatic dispositions and habits of performance. Do you think these effects, as Foucault reads them, close in on the connection between institutional practice and habitus that Bourdieu addresses, while still appreciating the ambiguity and creative possibilities residing in these crossings? To what extent does the linguistic dimension require such supports and supplements to do its work? (I bracket the more judicious phrase “linguistic practice” here to focus on what the other elements in those practices are.) Put another way, what, if anything, does the idea of the performative draw from Bourdieu on habitus and Foucault on technologies that “cut across symbolic systems while using them”? This is a fascinating and, perhaps, treacherous terrain. Your appreciation of Foucault and your theory of performativity make you an excellent person to negotiate it.

The last issue, for this second round, speaks to the same question from another side. It involves Foucault’s exploration of “arts” or “tactics of the self.” It may be that his intense interest in the formation of “disciplinary society” (“the middle Foucault”) eventually called him to explore arts of the self as one way to respond to those disciplines by strategic means (“the later Foucault”). It surely would not be a sufficient way politically, but perhaps a pertinent one. Gilles Deleuze may address a more robust intersubjective version of such arts through his explorations of micropolitics. An art of the self, one might say, involves strategic mixings of word, image, movement, posture, touch and sound to try to alter something in your previous sensibility. Micropolitics applies such strategic mixtures to the ethos of larger constituencies.

What do you make of Foucault’s arts of the self? And, by extension, the micropolitics of Deleuze? How are they bound up with, or differentiated from, the ambiguous power of the performative?

Judith Butler: As always, I appreciate your extremely provocative and generative questions. I’ll try to do my best with them, but I think they lead us, perhaps collectively, to the brink of a problem that we don’t yet know how to think. Let me begin by trying to restate the objection to Bourdieu that I make in Excitable Speech so that we can be clear that I don’t mean to give further support to a representational view of language. What interests me there is that precisely at the moment at which Bourdieu seeks to establish a difference between linguistic and non-linguistic practices, he posits a relationship between them. The latter work to support the former, and so we are prompted to ask: in what does that ‘backing’ or ‘supporting’ consist? That he understands the difference between the two to take place as a relation implies that he knows what this relation is and, further, that the relation is describable. If language registers and represents non-linguistic movements of power, then a relation of representation is set up between language and non-language. And what this means is that a new venue for language, understood as representation, has been established. Rather then diminish the notion of language through counterposing it to its other, he enhances the representational model of language by asserting a relation of representation between language and its other.

The problem with this move is two-fold: in the first instance, the representational model of language and, in this instance, the representational relation between language and its opposite, fails to appreciate the ways in which language forms the object it claims to represent. Thus, the constructive dimension of language is overridden in favor of one that assumes that language remains anterior to the object it represents. Of course, the theory of construction immediately raises the fear of a complete linguisticism, i.e. that the object is nothing but the language by which it is construed. But this kind of linguistic reduction must be resisted. The second problem with the claim that language represents power relations which, in turn, back or support linguistic practice, is that we fail to understand the way that power works through discourse, especially discourses that naturalize and occlude power itself. Again, this is not to claim that power is nothing but discourse, but it is to claim that the one cannot be thought without the other. Indeed, they are not the same, and this very difference conditions the question: what are the ways they are mapped onto one another, and how do they become the vehicle for one another?

Foucault does not help much here when he merely asserts that it is necessary to add to symbolic systems the sphere of practices and of institutions. For now we simply have a list of things to keep in mind, but we do not yet understand the relation among the items on the list: language, discourse, practice, institution. He does, of course, give us several different kinds of formulations for understanding this relation, and I will review some of them below. But first I would like to emphasize that the problem I am thinking about is not simply this: how do we take account of the important workings of power that take place in the form of non-discursive practices and institutional domains, in forms of asceticism or in the panoptical prism. Surely this is important and necessary. But to focus on linguistic practice here and non-linguistic practice there, and to claim that both are important is still not to focus on the relation between them. It is that relation that I think we still do not know how to think. Most of the neo-Marxian models for thinking the relation rely on mimetic notions of representation that fail to account for the constructivist challenge, and some of the constructivist positions fall into a linguisticism that closes the gap which calls to be thought. It will not be easy to say that power backs language when one form that power takes is language. Similarly, it will not be possible to look at non-discursive practices when it turns out that our very way of delimiting and conceptualizing the practice depends on the formative power of a certain conceptual discourse. We are in each of these cases caught in a chiasmic relation, one in which the terms to be related also partake of one another, but do not collapse into one another.

As for the second part of your question, I think that Foucault gives us a way to think power in relation to the arts of self, but that this artistry is not precisely self-generated. It is a complex artistry that cannot happen without the prior operation of norms as they work to condition and form subjects. Indeed, I think that whereas discourse is perhaps the site in the earlier Foucault where the ‘formative’ power is to be found, in the middle to late Foucault, a certain formative power belongs jointly to the operation of the norm and the arts of the self. I think it is important to remember that even here, when the subject of discourse becomes replaced in part by a self (soi) with a more subjective sense, we are not free of power, and the self in question does not simply juggle its own possibilities in a protean way. There is a limitation on the subject enforced by operative norms that becomes the condition of its artistry. And what this means is that the aesthetic and the ethical are not finally dissociable in this domain.

In the introduction to Volume II of The History of Sexuality, we learn that the self forms itself, but it forms itself within a set of formative practices that are characterized as modes of subjectivations. That the range of its possible forms is delimited in advance by such modes of subjectivation does not mean that the self fails to form itself, that the self is fully formed. On the contrary, it is compelled to form itself, but to form itself within forms that are already more or less in place. Or, one might say, it is compelled to form itself within practices that are more or less in place.

Thus, for Foucault, it is not possible to study this moral experience without understanding both the codes and the shifts that happen between and among them, and the modes of subjectivation and the shifts that happen between and among them. Foucault concedes that some kinds of morality are very code-focused, and we might actually read Discipline and Punish as such a morality. In the 13th century, he argues, European morality underwent a strong ‘juridification’ of the code, a form in which the moral code appeared as highly prescriptive. One reason he returns to the Greek and Roman context is to reemphasize the meaning of ethics as a practice of the self.

In conducting this history, he makes clear it is important not to assume a given prescription as a constant, but to ask how, “given the continuity, transfer, or modification of codes, the forms of self-relationship (and the practices of the self that were associated with them) were defined, modified, recast, and diversified” (pp. 31-32). The norm does not dictate the form of artistry that will emerge as a response to the norm, and here there is a contingent, even free, moment. The individual is “urged” to develop an ethical relation to self. And again, the individual is “summoned” to recognize himself as an ethical subject of sexual conduct. But what form will it take?

A subject does not exist who then confronts an ethical law and seeks to make itself compliant with that law. The law enters into the practices of subjectivation that form the context, the modes of possible subjectification, which in turn establish some region of the self as that to be acted on, transformed, and cultivated as the subject becomes an ethical subject. The ethical subject is not presumed, but is itself cultivated by the norm which summons the subject to recognize itself according to the norm. The norm thus makes the subject possible, and it is also the means by which the subject comes to recognize itself as an ethical subject. It is in other words both that toward which I strive and that which gives my striving the particular form that it has.

It would not be quite right to say that Foucault assumes that the subject is reflexive, that it has a specific relation to itself, and that this relation to itself is elaborated in reference to the moral precepts furnished by moral codes. The subject develops this relation to itself only in response to the ‘summons’ delivered to it by an ethical code or norm.

The subject is bound to have some relation to itself, a reflexive relation, but the form that this relation takes will depend fundamentally on the practices of subjectivation within which it is formed.

And that we will not be able to understand the ethical experience if we are not ready to ask what kinds of self-production are made possible by a given set of codes, and how those very codes only achieve a certain kind of meaning once they are understood as embedded in and actualized by these practices of the self.

What becomes interesting here is how discourse reemerges in the midst of this ethical and artistic practice of the self. For it will be the case that the subject seeks to recognize itself in terms of the norms that condition and constrain subjectivation. It comes to interpret itself in light of this norm, and to measure itself against that ideal. And this ideal and norm will be, invariably, discursively elaborated: here is the term, the sign which you must approximate, the one that will allow you to be known, the one that will allow you to know and, indeed, experience yourself as a self. You will be nothing without this sign of the subject that allows you to be, but it would be a mistake to think that therefore you are nothing without this sign. That the code must be approximated and negotiated presumes that it is not fixed or determining, but it does remain the necessary condition for the formation of the subject that follows.

I am sorry not to be able to answer your question about Deleuze. I worry that a certain metaphysical hopefulness takes the place of the analysis of power. So perhaps I will stay here, worrying the relation between power and discourse a bit longer.

William Connolly: In For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, Martha Nussbaum presents (what I would call) a single-entry model of universalism to address cross-cultural relations. She advances a thick conception of the universal to guide judgments and actions across cultures. In that book you respond both by refusing to eschew the universal and by engaging it in a more complex and ambivalent way. Too confident a deployment of universalism can inadvertently devalue, exclude or discipline differences that have not yet been placed on the register of the universal, while a refusal to invoke the universal altogether forfeits a resource minority constituencies need to press ethico-political claims upon dominant constituencies. There are good historical reasons for concern here. Kant’s portrayal of non-Christian cultures in the context of his universalism provides one example of how universalism can foster imperialism in the name of compassion and inclusion. There are numerous others. Nussbaum, however, passed by an opportunity to define the issues and sharpen the options on that occasion. In this section I will pursue the opportunity she forfeited.

Let me review the argument in “Universality in Culture.” You begin by conceding it would be a “great consolation” to “return to a ready-made universal perspective.” But the problem is that “‘the universal’ proves to be culturally variable, and the specific cultural articulations of the universal work against its claim to a transcultural status.” In response to this dilemma you call upon us to appreciate the value of the universal as “a contested term.” For to accept a particular consolidation of the universal as final is to run the risk of further entrenching (as universal) cultural particularities that impose unnecessary suffering upon particular constituencies or upon features of all of us. Conceptions of race, sexuality, gender, morality or religious truth culturally coded into the operative universal at a particular historical moment have often turned out at later moments to appear unjust. What is to be done?

The general idea is to appreciate the possibility that new political movements might seize the language of the universal, put themselves inside it, and through insistent and creative action modify the terms of the universal in surprising ways. The insurgents “set into motion a ‘performative contradiction’: claiming to be covered by that universal, they thereby expose the contradictory character of previous conventional formulations of the universal.” There is a temporal gap between the received reading of the universal prior to insurgency and that reading adopted after an insurgent movement has extended its frontier. So you might be said to adopt a double-entry orientation to the universal to improve upon the single-entry approach adopted by so many moralists. But this double-entry model might be read in two distinct ways. One might say, according to one reading, that the insurgents actually do identify a performative contradiction in the conventional enactment of the operative universal and, partly by the pressure of that exposure, promote the possibility of an expanded futural universal. The language I used in the first paragraph is most consonant with such a reading. Or you might say that they act as if there were such a performative contradiction and through the creativity of their action (and the responsiveness of strategic figures in the majority) eventually add a new element to the operative universal. Let us call the first reading “dialectical” and the second “enactive.” The enactive account is suggested when you speak of a “universality that has not yet arrived, one for which we have no ready concept, one whose articulations will only follow, if they do, from a contestation of universality at its already imagined borders.” But even here, one could try to press the interpretation into a temporal dialectic, by treating the modification of the universal as enactive when the event is taking place and a dialectical logic of historical advance after it has become consolidated.

Do you resist placing your complex thinking about the universal within a dialectical logic? Is there something in your double-entry orientation to the universal that must eschew any conception of logic as sufficient to it? On the other hand, if you do adopt an enactive account, or something close to it, is there something like a “regulative idea” or a protean orientation to be invoked whenever we are actually “in” that indeterminate situation where a constitutive universal is under challenge but a new dimension of the universal has not yet crossed the magical threshold of cultural consolidation? It may be that it is precisely in this open, uncertain moment you identify so effectively that the supplements offered by thinkers such as Nietzsche, Foucault and Arendt are most appropriate and timely. Foucault, for instance, cultivates a “care for that which exists and might exist”; Arendt invokes “love of the world”; and Nietzsche affirms “the abundance of life” over the actual organization of being. You might say that each of these figures bestows a certain respect upon the entitlements enabled by an operative universal — though they differ significantly in their emphases here — but that each also draws creative sustenance from another fugitive resource when they are “in” that uncertain moment in which an aspect of the operative universal is under challenge but the response to the challenge is still in question. One way of reading them is to say that they refuse the comforts of one-dimensional universalism through concern for the unnecessary injuries it may impose below the register of contemporary attentiveness, and that they turn back the (contemporary) charges of “relativism” and “strategic universalism” made against those who adopt such a refusal through appeals to such diffuse, affirmative energies. Two of these figures — Nietzsche and Foucault — may even try to cultivate a distinctive sensibility to increase the probability of a generous and exploratory response when such uncertain moments arise. Anyway, it seems to me that you too resist the reduction of your perspective to the options many single-entry universalists have prescripted for it, such as relativism, nihilism and strategic universalism. Such dismissive representations enable them to defend a simple model of the universal by negation. That is why I am tempted to call them “unconscious strategic universalists.”

Still, the terms of your resistance might be clarified further. Does your presumptive receptivity to new possibilities solicit something beyond the consolidated universal that, nonetheless, does not conform exactly to those solicitations commonly pursued within several religious and dialectical traditions? Does it provide some resources or critical assurance to those who worry that “anything goes” as soon as anyone complicates the universal? If so, is there anything to be said about it? Are Nietzsche, Arendt and Foucault unwise (or superfluous) in invoking dispositional supplements, even in the diffuse ways they do? Are Levinas and Derrida unwise in doing so in their different ways? I read you as the thinker who refines our appreciation of the paradoxical circumstances in which such dispositions become most pertinent.

My pleasure in these exchanges has been enhanced by the fact that they allow me to pose questions to you that perplex me. Let me, then, close with a final quotation from the essay in question, one that speaks to the issues addressed above:

[T]he extension of universality through the act of translation takes place when one is excluded from the universal, and yet belongs to it nevertheless…That translation is not the simple entry of the deauthorized into the authorized, whereby the former term simply alters its status and the latter domain simply makes room for what it has unwittingly failed to accommodate…The kind of translation that exposes the alterity within the norm (an alterity without which the norm would not assume its borders and ‘know’ its limits), exposes the failure of the norm to effect the universal reach for which it stands, exposes what we might underscore as the promising ambivalence of the norm.

Judith Buter: This is a very wide-ranging and important question, and there is no way that I can do justice to its complexity in my response. In fact, its very complexity suggests a number of impasses into which the discourse on universality has fallen. Although I do not believe these impasses are final or even “structural,” I do think they constitute serious sites of intransigence, and I am not sure that I know how best to try and move them.

In the first part of your question, you ask which of two readings of my position I would accept. According to the first, a performative contradicted is identified at the core of the convention of universality. According to the second, the performative contradiction is enacted by those who conjecture a form in which the universal might be rewrought to include them. Perhaps this is an Hegelian impulse, but I would like to take a moment to consider what matters might look like if both readings were true. According to the first, a given conventional formulation of universality is exclusionary: it acts as if it were universal, but the very limits to universality that it presumes and posits give the lie to its substantive claim. Thus, we might say that the conventional formulation of universality in this instance is a conjecture, takes place in the mode of as if, but proves to be substantially false by virtue of the kinds of positions it fails to include within its purview. This insurgent who seeks to identify the performative contradiction or, indeed, to bring it into being identifies precisely this moment in which two forms of spectrality can occur: first, the universality that claims the status of truth turns out to be both conjectural and limited, and so becomes a spectral instance of its own claim. Second, those who fail to be included by the universal are still “subjects,” but they exist in a spectral zone, an ontologically suspended zone, to the extent that they lack authorization as human by the conventions of universality that set limits on that term. What proves promising for critique is that, depending on the perspective by which this situation is viewed, one of the other terms appears as irreal, and so no stability is achieved. One might say that this very vacillation between spectral attributions (universality is irreal or the ‘subjects’ excluded by its terms are irreal) shows the differential distribution of ontologizing effects, and provides a space, an interval, for an intervention that seeks to show the unstable truth at issue in the scene. Those who enact the performative contradiction, weighing in on the side of the excluded, positing their ontological effects, not only deepen the impression of the exclusionary universality’s spectrality, but enact an allegory, as it were, of those performative acts by which ontological effects are achieved within the field of politics.

So, I would answer your very thought-provoking question by suggesting that the performative contradiction is ‘in and of’ the convention of universality at issue, but that it is brought into the fore, even driven into crisis, by the acts which exploit the vacillating ontological effects of the convention and build the ontology of the excluded in the process.

I think it would not make sense for me to say that I resist the dialectics. I do resist the claim that dialectics leads to teleological closure. I believe that much of the French reception of Hegel opened up the possibility of a Hegel without closure. I believe we see this version most eloquently presented in Jean-Luc Nancy’s work, but it can be traced to Hyppolite’s reading of the Logic as well. I suppose I resist as well the notion that the dialectic can only and always rehabilitate binary oppositions. It is necessary to understand how certain oppositions spawn a field of possibilities. But to the extent that field has its limit, and there is an ‘outside’ to that limit, there is a new dialectical problem brewing.

Whatever new dimension of universality emerges from the exposure of the limits of the old will not be a dimension built into universality, part of its inherent plan which is simply waiting for those conditions of crisis that provoke its further unfolding. I think that the forms of what waits ahead are unknowable, and cannot be derived, even retrospectively, from an already established plan. So, in this sense I would insist that what comes of certain dialectical crises is ‘the new,’ a field of possibility which is not the same as an order of possibility. I think many people recoil from this possibility, fearing that the new which is not predictable will lead to a full-scale nihilism. And it is, in a way, a risky moment in politics. What the new form of universality brings will not be necessarily good or desirable, and the politics of judgment will be brought to bear on what arrives. But it is equally true that nothing good or desirable will arrive without the new. The distinction seems to me to be very important.

So how does one live in that risk? You describe the ‘dispositional supplements’ of Nietzsche, Arendt, and Foucault. These are no doubt useful in establishing an orientation toward the universality yet to come. And this orientation is no doubt related to what Foucault called “critique,” which is an art and an attitude that interrogates the limits of what is knowable. I would add: it is an art which interrogates the limits of what is knowable now. Critique, Foucault claims, derives from the Enlightenment and poses the question, “do you know up to what point you can know? Reason as much as you want, but do you really know up to what point you can reason without it becoming dangerous?” And is there any way to think the limits without undergoing that danger? And for a political reflection on the future of universality, is there any way for this question that I have just posed to be anything other than open?