ethics – Page 9 – objet (a)

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 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 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).

ziarek on Žižek real

Butler, in the process of deconstructing sexual difference, contests nothing less than the Real itself. … The Lacanian Real, central to Copjec’s and Žižek’s reading of sexual difference, is the realm of being that is radically unsymbolizable, that remains foreclosed from the symbolic order. In this formulation, the Real constitutes a necessary outside of any symbolization — a limit to the totalization of the social or discursive filed. Like Copjec, Žižek suggests that any attempt to define the Real leads to paradoxical formulations … the Real is the starting point, the “impossible kernel” of symbolization and, at the same time, an effect of the symbolic order, an excess, or left-over of symbolization (124)

At stake in the argument about the Real is, on the one hand, a renegotiation of the relations between contingency and compulsion in social and discursive formations, and, on the other, the status of the concept of the outside of history and symbolization.

On the basis of the conceptualization of the Real as the necessary outside of the symbolic order, Žižek condemns both the universalization of the symbolic and its obverse side, its “rapid historicization,” which treats the subject merely as the effect or the actualization of its historical conditions. Both of these gestures … ignore that which is foreclosed from historicization. In order to take into account the incompleteness and contingency of the historical process, the critical accounts of history, Žižek argues, have to presuppose an empty place, an non-historical kernel, that which cannot be symbolized and yet is produced by symbolization itself (Žižek Sublime 135) (Ziarek 125).

Butler’s argument with the Real neither disputes the contingency of social formations nor denies the constitutive outside to symbolization. On the contrary, through her reading of Laclau and Mouffe, she links such contingency and incompleteness to the promise of radical democracy: “The incompleteness of every ideological formulation is central to the radical democratic project’s notion of political futurity. The subjection of every ideological formation to REarticulation … constitutes the temporal order of democracy as an incalculable future, leaving open the production of new subject-positions, new political signifiers …” (Butler, Bodies 193)

What she does contest … is the fixity of the Real (or rather, to articulate it more cautiously, the invariable failure of its inscription) and the permanent structure of its exclusion.

Even though the foreclosure of the Real “guarantees” contingency and incompleteness of all social relations, the process of this foreclosure is not marked by the contingency or historicity, and therefore is not open to redescription. We are confronted here, Butler argues, with the unchangeable production of the outside, even though the ‘production’ in question is marked by the instability of cause and effect. As Butler points out, “if we concur that every discursive formation proceeds through constituting an ‘outside’, we are not thereby committed to the invariant production of that outside as the trauma of castration (nor to the generalization of castration as the model for all historical trauma) (Butler Bodies, 205) (125).

Campbell critique sexual d Ziarek Outside

Campbell, Kirsten. “The Plague of the Subject: Subjects, Politics, and the Power of Psychic Life” in Butler Matters: Judith Butler’s Impact on Feminist and Queer Studies. eds. Sönser Breen, Margaret and Warren J. Blumenfeld. Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Ltd. 2005, (81-94).

Foreclosure: Freud never uses the term “foreclosure”, he used “repression” and “disavowal” to describe the ego’s refusal of an incompatible idea together with its affect. Instead she uses Lacan’s use of foreclosure as “A foundational psychic exclusion that cannot be represented within the subject’s symbolic economy”. This deployment of Lacan in the name of Freud allows Butler to evade certain theoretical difficulties posed by Lacanian theory to her conception of foreclosure.

Butler’s account implies that the prohibition against the homosexual object is pre-oedipal, because it is prior to the constitution of the subject. This prohibition, however, CANNOT be pre-oedipal. If it is pre-oedipal, then it must be prior to sexual difference. If the prohibition is prior to sexual difference, then the object that is prohibited cannot be a homosexual object, because a homosexual object is defined by sexual difference. The definition of a same-sex object relies upon a notion of sexual difference because such a concept would be meaningless without an already established distinction between the sexes. In order for Butler’s prohibition to operate against desire for same-sex objects, those objects must already be defined by sexual difference and, so, the prohibition described by Butler must be an oedipal prohibition in the register of sexual difference. The failure to address this problem of sexual difference entails that there is a lack of coherence in this theory of the formation of heterosexual identity (89).

In Butler’s interpretation, what is thus foreclosed from the symbolic is not the prediscursive “empty” kernel but those possibilities of signification that threaten the purity and permanence of the law instituting sexual difference. With such a concept of the outside, Butler articulates the main task of her inquiry iin a very diffferent way from Žižek’s. She does not intend to affirm the exclusion of the Real as a guarantee of social contingency but questions the stability and ahistorical character of this exclusion.

“How might those ostensibly constitutive exclusions be rendered less permanent, more dynamic? How might the excluded return, not as psychosis or the figure of the psychotic within politics, but as that which has been rendered mute, foreclosed from the domain of political signification?” (Butler Bodies 189).

By rethinking the historicity and contingency of the law as the sedimentation of subjective approximations through time, Butler can argue that the mechanisms of exclusion are also, … historical workings of specific modalities of discourse and power. … the “constitutive outside” is an inevitable effect of any identity claims, including the claims of queer identities, but the forms of these exclusions are neither invariant nor ahistorical. Undercutting the political neutrality and ahistorical permanence of “the constitutive outside,” Butler’s emphasis on the historicity of exclusion removes the threat of psychosis associated with it and opens the borders of intelligibility to political contestation (Ziarek 130).