normative – Page 2

butler frames

Judith Butler, Frames of War. New York: Verso, 2009.

If the terms of multiculturalism and the politics of recognition require either the reduction of the subject to a single, defining attribute, or the construction of a multiply determined subject, then I am not sure we have yet faced the challenge to cultural metaphysics posed by new global networks that traverse and animate several dynamic determinations at once. 147

When such networks from the basis of political coalitions, they are bound together less by matters of “identity” or commonly accepted terms of recognition than by forms of political opposition to certain state and other regulatory politics that effect exclusions, abjections, partially or fully suspended citizenship, subordination, debasement, and the like. In this sense, “coalitions” are not necessarily based on subject positions; indeed, they can be based on provisionally overlapping aims and there can be — perhaps must be — active antagonisms over what these aims should be and how best to reach them. 147

They are animated fields of differences, in the sense that “to be effected by another” and “to effect another” are part of the very social ontology of the subject, at which point “the subject” is less a discrete substance than an active and transitive set of interrelations. 147

So when we speak about “frameworks” in this respect, we are not simply talking about theoretical perspectives that we bring to the analysis of politics, but about modes of intelligibility that further the workings of the state and, as such, are themselves exercises of power even as they exceed the specific domain of state power. 149

reading Butler’s chapter 2 in GT

Lacanian discourse centers, Butler says, on “a divide”, a primary or fundamental split that renders the subject internally divided and that establishes the duality of the sexes.

But why this exclusive focus on the fall into twoness? Within Lacanian terms, it appears that division is always the effect of the law, and not a prexisting condition on which the law acts. 54-55

It is clearly not enough to claim thta this drama holds for Western, late capitalist household dwellers and that perhaps in some yet to be defined epoch some other Symbolic regime will goven the laguage of sexual ontology. By instituting the Symbolic as invariably phantasmatic, the “invariably” wanders into an “inevitably,” generating a description of sexuality in terms that promote cultural stasis as its result.

butler interview feb 2008

Italian interview Feb 2008 in Monthy Review Magazine (wow, times are a changin)

There are illegitimate operations of power that attempt to restrict our idea of what gender might be, for example in the areas of medicine, law, psychiatry, social policy, immigration policy, or the policies against violence. My commitment involves opposition to all restrictive and violent measures that are used to regulate and restrict the life of gender. There are certain types of freedoms and practices that are very important for human ﬂourishing. Any excessive restriction of gender limits, or undermines, the capacity of humans to ﬂourish. And, what is more, I would add that this human ﬂourishing is a good thing. I am aware that there I am taking a moral standpoint here; I know that I have a strong normative structure, but this has nothing to do with saying “this kind of gender is good and this one is bad”. To do so would constitute a dangerous use of morality; rather, I am trying to shift the moral structure towards another framework in which we can ask ourselves: how does a body survive? What is a ﬂourishing body? What does it need to ﬂourish in the world? And it needs various things: it needs to be nourished, to be touched, to be in social settings of interdependence, to have certain expressive and creative capacities, to be protected from violence, and to have its life sustained in a material sense.

[…] These people are not being given the opportunity of having their lives recognised as worthy of being protected or helped, not even as lives that deserve to be mourned. I question the norms of gender that prevent us or make us incapable of recognising certain lives as being worth living, and which stop us providing the material conditions necessary for these lives to be lived, to ﬂourish. For these lives to be publicly recognised also means their being understood as lives whose disappearance would be felt as a loss.

The same thing happens in war: certain lives are deemed worthy of being protected, while others are considered expendable, of negligible importance, radically dispensable. One could say that all my work revolves around this question: what is it that counts as a life? And in what way do certain restrictive norms of gender decide for us? What kind of life is worth protecting and what kind of life is not?

It is true that, in general, I do not think of freedom in terms of liberation. I continue to be very strongly inﬂuenced by Foucault’s History of Sexuality, in which he warns us against imagining a complete liberation from power. There can never be a total liberation from power, especially in relation to the politics of sexuality. Foucault says two things at the same time:

– we can never totally liberate ourselves from power (there is no space from which to say “no” to power) and, on the other
hand,

– we are never completely determined by power.

Thus, despite the impossibility of transcending power, a space of liberty opens up, and both determinism and radical voluntarism are refuted. What is this space of freedom that opens up once we have understood this? Here freedom is a kind of practice, a struggle, a continuous process with neither a beginning nor an end. When this practice is systematically attacked we cannot function as political subjects, our political capacities have been undermined. When referring to freedom, I am not alluding to the idea of an individual subject, alone, since a subject is free to the extent that s/he is conditioned by conventions, norms and cultural possibilities that make freedom possible, though they do not determine it. They are the conditions of possibility of freedom.

Who we are as subjects of freedom depends on non-voluntary forms of connection with others; I was not only born within a series of rules or conventions that form me, but also within a series of relationships on which I depend for my survival and which constitute me as an interdependent creature in this world. The questions of responsibility emerge in the context of this sociality, this interdependence. On the matter of responsibility I am interested in the productive formulations made by Levinas. For Levinas, I am not responsible for my actions — though in fact I also am — but rather responsible for the Other, for the demands of the Other. And any demand made by the Other is prior to any possibility of social contract: whatever the demand the Other puts before me, it affects me, it involves me in a relation of responsibility. Legal contracts cannot adequately describe this situation of primary responsibility. That means that I am responsible even for those who are not in any form of contractual relationship with me, or who do not form part of my community, or my nation, or who are not covered by the same legal framework as me. This helps to understand, for example, how I can be responsible for those who live at a distance from me, who are under a different form of political organisation, or those who are stateless. In Levinas’ framework, even those we never meet, those whose names and faces we do not know, present us with a demand. It is, then, a question of accepting our global interdependence and even our obligation to protect the lives of those we do not know. For Levinas, this primary obligation is expressed through what we commonly call commandments, “Thou shall not kill”: a requirement to preserve life. This does not mean that I can or should preserve the life of every individual (of course I cannot do so, and to imagine I could would be unhealthy, it would imply some sort of narcissism, a certain messianism), but rather that I should think about what kind of political structures we need to sustain life and minimise those forms of violence that extinguish it. This does not mean I am capable of making these structures come into existence — responsibility is not the same as efﬁcacy — but rather that I can ﬁght for a world that maximises the possibility of preserving and sustaining life and minimises the possibility of those forms of violence that, illegitimately, take life, or at least reduce the conditions that make it possible for this to happen. This is part of what I am thinking about at the moment. And I have to say that it is not easy to situate Arendt in this context.

Despite the fact that Levinas himself was not a paciﬁst, I believe that, taking his ideas as a starting point, it is possible to develop a philosophy of non-violence and even a conception of a trans-national political community that holds these values to be fundamental. We have to take Levinas’ framework and develop a kind of trans-national ethics based on non-violence, and thus it is necessary to disagree with him with respect to the difference between ethics and politics, to his stand on paciﬁsm, and on Israel.

lloyd criticism of desire for existence

For while the terms by which persistence —or survival— is made possible are social terms, that is, norms that are the contingent effects of specific power relations, the desire for existence itself, as she deploys it, appears not to be.

This is clear from her characterisation of it. The desire for existence, she notes, is a desire that is ‘exploited by regulatory power’ (Psychic 19), a desire with the ‘capacity’ to ‘be withdrawn and to reattach’ under different modes of subjection (psychic 62), a ‘desire to survive, “to be”‘, which is a ‘pervasively exploitable desire’ (psychic 7).

For desire to be exploited —or exploitable— by power implies, of course, that it pre-exists power and is thus not one of its effects. Likewise, the notion that desire can withdraw and reattach suggests also that it is a substance with capacities independent of power… desire for existence appears to operate as an a priori universal that transcends and/or precedes culture and society(99-100).

… attributing to the desire to exist certain qualities prior to its imbrication in power relations … For here what interests Butler is the way that social norms of recognition are configured such that the desire ‘to persist in one’s own being’ is denied to certain individuals (undoing 31). In other words it is the norms of recognition that she subjects to critical scrutiny, NOT the desire for existence as such (100).

When Butler deploys the term ‘social’, whether in relation to norms, culture, or language, it signals a contingent effect circumscribed by power. What she does not do, however, is pay sufficient attention to the historical conditions of emergence of these particular effects. She does not, that is, examine the historical practices that themselves generate the social.

stephen white interpellation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thinking power together with a theory of the psyche

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

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

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 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).

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)

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).

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.

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).

butler gender regulation

Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004.

But for gender to be regulated is not simply for gender to come under the exterior force of a regulation. If gender were to exist prior to its regulation, we could then take gender as our theme and proceed to enumerate the various kinds of regulations to which it is subjected and the ways in which that subjection takes place. The problem, however, for us is more acute. After all, is there a gender that preexists its regulation, or is it the case that, in being subject to regulation, the gendered subject emerges, produced in and through that particular form of subjection? (41)

It is important to remember at least two caveats on subjection and regulation derived from Foucaultian scholarship:

1. regulatory power not only acts upon a preexisting subject but also shapes and forms that subject; moreover, every juridical form of power has its productive effect;

2. to become subject to a regulation is also to become subjectivated by it, that is, to be brought into being as a subject precisely through being regulated

The second point follows from the first in that the regulatory discourses which form the subject of gender are precisely those that require and induce the subject in question.

To assume that gender always and exclusively means the matrix of the “masculine” and “feminine” is precisely to miss the critical point that the production of that coherent binary is contingent, that it comes at a cost, and that those permutations of gender which do not fit the binary are as much a part of gender as its most normative instance. To conflate the definition of gender with its normative expression is inadvertently to reconsolidate the power of the norm to constrain the definition of gender … Whether one refers to “gender trouble” or “gender blending,” “transgender” or “cross-gender,” one is already suggesting that gender has a way of moving beyond that naturalized binary.

The conflation of gender with masculine/feminine, man/woman, male/female, thus performs the very naturalization that the notion of gender is meant to forestall (42-43). Thus, a restrictive discourse on gender that insists on the binary of man and woman as the exclusive way to understand the gender field performs a regulatory operation of power that naturalizes the hegemonic instance and forecloses the thinkability of its disruption.

… the distinction between symbolic and social law cannot finally hold, that the symbolic itself is the sedimentation of social practices, and that radical alterations in kinship demand a rearticulation of the structuralist suppositions of psychoanalysis, moving us, as it were, toward a queer poststructuralism of the psyche (44).

How does a shift from thinking of gender as regulated by symbolic laws to a conception of gender as regulated by social norms contest this indifference of the law to what it regulates? And how does such a shift open up the possiblity of a more radical contestation of the law itself (48).

opacity to myself

Butler, Judith. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham UP, 2005. Print.

[…] we might consider a certain post-Hegelian reading of the scene of recognition in which precisely my own opacity to myself occasions my capacity to confer a certain kind of recognition on others. It would be, perhaps, an ethics based on our shared, invariable, and partial blindness about ourselves (41).

The recognition that one is, at every turn, not quite the same as how one presents oneself in the available discourse might imply, in turn, a certain patience with others that would suspend the demand that they be selfsame 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 and maintain self-identity at all times and require that others do the same (41-2).

The means by which subject constitution occurs is not the same as the narrative form the reconstruction of that constitution attempts to provide (69).

So what is the role of language in constituting the subject? And what different role does it assume when it seeks to recuperate or reconstitute the conditions of its own constitution?

The infant enters the world given over from the start to a language and to a series of signs, broadly construed, that begin to structure an already operative mode of receptivity and demand. From this primary experience of having been given over from the start, an “I” subsequently emerges. And the “I,” regardless of its claims to mastery, will never get over having been given over from the start in this way (77).

This mode of relationality, definitionally blind, makes us vulnerable to betrayal and to error. We could wish ourselves to be wholly perspicacious beings. But that would be to disavow infancy, dependency, relationality, primary impressionability; it would be the wish to eradicate all the active and structuring traces of our psychological formations and to swell in the pretense of being fully knowing self-possessed adults. Indeed, we would be the kind of beings who, by definition, could not be in love, blind and blinded, vulnerable to devastation, subject to enthrallment. If we were to respond to injury by claiming we had a “right” not to be so treated, we would be treating the other’s love as an entitlement rather than a gift. Being a gift, it carries the insuperable quality of gratuitousness. It is, in Adorno’s language, a gift given from freedom (102).