Category: subjectivity

Excerpt from “Antigone’s Claim: A Conversation With Judith Butler”
Theory & Event Volume 12, Issue 1, 2009

This conversation was held in Pordenone, Italy, in September 2008, during a major cultural event that takes place every year. What follows is an expanded version of our conversation, including a few questions she received from the public and a few more questions that Judith Butler kindly took from us after the event.

Your work has attracted much attention both in America and outside of America, and your books are translated in many languages. What kind of audience do you have in mind when you write philosophy (We are still thinking of Giving an Account of Oneself)? Who is your implied reader?

Judy Butler: Let me say two things in response. I’m not sure I set out to write philosophy. I think sometimes I write philosophically. But those might be different things, to write philosophically and to write philosophy. When one writes philosophy one usually tries to stay within a genre that will be regarded as philosophical, or in accord with a protocol that has been accepted as part of philosophy. In either case, one writes in relation to the norm that governs philosophical thought at a given time. I consider philosophy as a resource, and it remains true that some of the questions I pose are derived from philosophical traditions. But it is very rarely the case that I actually write for a philosophy audience. Who, then, is my reader? When I write, I’m asking that question. Are you there? Who are you? I don’t have an image of the reader in mind; writing is more like an open petition, trying to find out whether there is someone there, opening up the place of the other within one’s own writing.

Maybe it would be worthwhile for me to go back for a moment to talk about what the questions are, because sometimes when I write I’m posing a set of questions to a reader, but that presupposes that the reader and I share some set of cultural predicaments. For instance, consider Simon De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex: do we call that philosophy or not? Is it a philosophical work? I would say yes. Does it stay within the boundaries of philosophy? No. She is asking relevant questions: what is a woman? Is a woman a person? Can she become a person? What does it mean to become a woman? In her work I saw that someone could take a philosophical question and bring it to bear on a concrete cultural and political problem. Consider Antigone. As we know, she buried her brother in spite of Creon’s order, and then, when she is asked to deny that she has done this, she enters a very interesting and particular position. Because she is not a citizen, she is not allowed to speak; she is prohibited from speaking, and yet she is compelled by the sovereign law to speak. So, when she does speak, she defies that law, and her speech exceeds the law that governs acceptable speech. To what extent, then, can Antigone figure for us in the position of the speaker who is outside of the accepted discourse, who nevertheless speaks, sometimes intelligently, sometimes critically, within and against that discourse? Perhaps the norms that govern philosophy work that way, producing a mimetic excess that questions the legitimacy of those norms. More broadly, these questions may have larger appeal and prove relevant to any number of people who are in minority positions or understand themselves as excluded from official public discourse – but somehow are still talking.

We read with great interest an unpublished paper in which you address a point that keeps coming up in your work, at least since the early 1990s. It is the question “who is the subject of responsibility?” In our post-Kantian world, the individual, by definition is subject of responsibility, while it seems that you question this standard assumption, criticizing its premises.

Judy Butler: Perhaps we might rephrase the question by asking, who qualifies as the subject of responsibility today? I know that under the Bush regime, the government promoted a very strong discourse about responsibility: the moral rationale for the devastation of the social welfare state was that individuals should take responsibility for themselves; the moral rationale for unilateral military incursions into sovereign nations has been that the US is understood to be responsible for the free world (I’m not sure, though, that the US will take its fair share of responsibility for the current economic crisis as a result of the deregulation of the stock market). The word is used in political ways that are quite interesting. In France and in Italy there is the term called ‘responsabilization’, which is the process of making citizens responsible for themselves – a process which would seem to contradict the very idea of selflegislation and self-formation that follows from Kantian notions of moral autonomy. “Responsibilization” is a way of describing a government procedure for the making of moral subjects. Not only is the government’s agency occluded by this term, but moralization in general seeks to ground behaviour and action in individual agents and so to deflect from the power of government in the regulated making of such subjects. It deflects as well from nongovernmental powers, including NGOs, that regulate who may become a subject of responsibility and who may not. In the US, we assume responsibility for the lives of those who are like us (and here “responsibility” means “compelled to make an intervention on behalf of”); we assume responsibility for the lives of Americans, but we don’t always recognize as a life those whose cultural backgrounds do not transparently conform to prevalent images of “our own,” especially when it is a question of racial difference and religious alterity.

The questions,’to whom am I responsible?’, ‘for whom am I responsible?’, seem, in these cases, to be limited in advance by the question, ‘with whom can I identify?’. And implicitly, if not forcibly, identification within the national frame assumes the kind of subject already recognizable to me, a subject, in other words, who poses no challenge to the norms of recognizability with which I operate. I confess that when I first started to think about responsibility I was worried primarily about forms of moralism, especially on the Left, where individuals with certain “subject positions” were held responsible for the entire history of social domination. I wanted then to think about a different idea of responsibility, one surely influenced by Levinas, but perhaps also by Arendt, that would not make responsibility into a purely individual matter. What interested me most was the idea that when I’m asked to take responsibility for my actions, I’m asked by someone, and this is also true when I pose such a question to myself. Derrida surely makes this clear in bringing out the sense of “response” in “responsibility”: I’m asked to respond to another human being, so I am already in a social situation. And if I am the one who asks myself to assume responsibility, I have become, through my own doubling, a social creature at the moment in which I pose the question. It is not just the fact of alterity, however, that makes the exchange a social one, but the fact that I am asked in a specific language or through a specific medium, and so am compelled to take responsibility in a language or medium that is understandable to the person who asks this of me; in that sense my efforts to take responsibility for myself are socially prompted and mediated, if not socially constructed, in a specific sense. Within such frameworks, we can situate moral theory within social theory essentially – and not contingently. I would suggest that the same holds for politics and political theory as well, since we have to ask about the political context in which the notion of responsibility emerges – and be able to parse the various meanings of “responsibility”. This is not, however, in my view, an effort to relativize and vanquish the use of the term, but to understand the concrete changes in political conditions that are necessary to establish responsibility on non-cynical grounds. The changing of those conditions is itself a responsibility, but it also leads to a realization of responsibility as part of the very process of instituting a more egalitarian and just organization of social life. This allows us to distinguish between spurious and non-spurious uses, even though the “spurious” is a risk to which any operative notion of responsibility is subject.

We see this most starkly when “responsibility” becomes one of the instruments for sustaining the condition of global irresponsibility, i.e., when under the Bush regime the US actively distinguishes between those populations worthy of protection and grief and those who are not. Let us hope that this modality changes substantially under the Obama administration.

We understand that the notion of “precarious life” is critical to your attempt at identifying the subject of responsibility. In fact, my life is precarious so long as I, as a subject, “am already in the hands of the other.” Could you elaborate on this point? If I, as a subject, am already in the hands of others, it means that I’ve lost a fundamental normative prerogative, meaning to consider my actions as consititutionally mine.

Judy Butler: (yay go judy!)

In the last two wars that the US has been fighting in Iraq and in Afghanistan, it has become very clear that the lives of US citizens, who were killed in 9/11, or the lives of US soldiers, are considered to be precious, are considered invaluable, grievable, openly grievable in public, and therefore made into heroic lives. But the lives that were taken in Iraq — and right now we can see it very clearly, when US army bombed a village in Pakistan, our ally, and it continues to disavow responsibility for this — are not considered lives at all, they are already dead before we killed them, they are already non-living before we deprive them of life. This is kind of schism that characterizes US foreign policy, but also public discourse in a number of venues, including the popular media. If we offer an alternative to this schism between lives that are grievable and lives that are ungrievable, it seems to me that we start with the presumption that human life is precarious life — I could also say that non-human life is also precarious life and that maybe precariousness links human and non-human life in ethically significant ways. When we start understanding our lives as precarious, we understand that we are linked to one another, but how can I take responsibility, how can I assume responsibility if I do not recognize that link?

When I say that we are already in the hands of others, or others are already in our hands, I’m saying that there is a link and that link is precariousness and it is by virtue of that link that we must assume responsibility for shared life.

You ask about what is properly “my own” – I think we can only lay claim to what is “my own” if there is someone before whom the claim is made and/or a language through which the claim is made legible. In this sense, “mineness” is made possible by sociality, and it is only secured through social and political arrangements; otherwise, it becomes a kind of madness.

Question:

You are wary of invocations of “global responsibility” since it is on the basis of such invocations that some countries seek to bring or install democracy in other countries. Carl Schmitt famously argued that “whoever invokes humanity is trying to cheat”… You see a moral puzzle in the ways people invoke global responsibility, and you point to a difficulty in determining whether such invocations are “responsible.” Is this talk of precarious life a way to go about the notion of “human rights” by possibly avoiding some of the difficulties (moral and theoretical) that such a notion (inevitably) involves?

Since I am, in general, less sure than Schmitt about who is cheating or how the cheat takes place, I would suggest that invoking humanity is ambivalent. For instance, when we (any of us) respond with horror when we witness the destruction of human life, is it because we recognize our common or shared “humanity” with those destroyed? Or is it that we become “humane” (and so give evidence to our own humanity) in reacting with a moral sentiment such as horror? What is less evident, but everywhere pressing, is the tacit framework presupposed by this burst of fierce and sudden sentiment. To the degree that certain scenes of destruction compel our horror more than others (equally destructive), it makes sense to ask, who is, without question, included and who is excluded from that humanity? In other words, which lives emblematize humanity, and which ones cannot so easily wield that signifying power?

So, one has to be critical about how and when the notion of humanity is invoked, but I am not convinced that it is always a lie or, indeed, a way of cheating. It is important to ask what it occludes, and how whatever it illuminates presupposes a consequential occlusion – one that turns the idea of “humanity” against the universality by which it is supported and seems, invariably, to reinstitute a certain anthropocentrism. As a result, I think it might be more helpful to consider instead a term such as ‘precarious life’ which, though it has strong resonances with the idea of humanity, functions very differently. There are at least two differences: the first is that

precarious life is a life that is shared in a specific sense: “shared life” is not simply a “life” that functions as a common element in which individuals participate on the order of a mathesis. Rather, it is common in the sense that we are reciprocally exposed and invariably dependent, not only on others, but on a sustained and sustainable environment.

Humanity seems to be a kind of defining ontological attribute, who I am, or who we are, that properly belongs to us as persons, and in that sense, it keeps the human within the humanistic frame. But what if our ontology has to be thought otherwise? If humans actually share a condition of precariousness, not only just with one another, but also with animals, and with the environment, then this constitutive feature of who we “are” undoes the very conceit of anthropocentrism. In this sense, I want to propose ‘precarious life’ as a non-anthropocentric framework for considering what makes life valuable.

Even when we ask the question, who is the human in human rights? In an effort to ground human rights in the conception of the human, we fail to ask what the human “is” such that it requires certain kinds of protections and entitlements. The “human” is not so much the presupposition of such a discourse, but a continually contested and rearticulated term. As a result, you find political organizations that at once expose the limits of the concept of the human and call for its reformulation: women’s human rights, the human rights of gays and lesbians, or the human rights of the physically challenged or the sans-papiers. Such populations are not only outside some conception of the “human” and requesting inclusions, but they are also establishing that precarious “outside” as the site from which certain kinds of claims can and should be made. If there is a language in which the claim is made, and if it is made before someone, then it establishes a social domain that exceeds the idea of the social presupposed by an historically contingent notion of human rights. Antigone, again, to be sure.

Question:
In your recent work, the focus on the “national subject” or the subject of violence or, for that matter, the subject of responsibility, has eclipsed the notion of a gendered subject, that had been a quite dominant issue in your work for almost twenty years. Here in Italy many people still think of Judith Butler as a feminist philosopher. Do you think this definition is still a valid one?

I am quite sure that I am a feminist thinker of some kind. Sometimes I am a feminist philosopher. I continue to work in feminism, and I will always work in feminism, there is no question about that. And maybe I am not always thinking in feminist terms, but if I am thinking that is probably a feminist achievement (laughs). I continue to work on transgender issues, on questions of violence on women, on sexual minorities; I work with clinical psychoanalysts to rethink the explanatory frameworks and categories that tend to pathologize sexual and gender minorities. That’s surely part of my ongoing work, and it will always be.

I would add that the idea of precarious life also emerges from a certain kind of feminist perspective, a critique of a certain presumptively masculine idea, embedded in classical liberal political forms, of the subject who is selfsufficient and a-social. Surely the critique of the idea that any of us can exist outside a condition of dependency is an important, enduring contribution of feminist theory and politics.

Perhaps what links my work on gender and my more recent work on war has to do with how social ontologies are regulated. I have been interested in how certain kinds of heterosexual frames and normative gender schemes make certain kinds of lives unliveable and ungrievable. That was an important dimension of AIDS activism, and remains one now, especially in light of the sufferings and losses on the African continent: it is very often a struggle to make certain kinds of lost life publicly grievable. The deaths by AIDS were not shameful deaths, but horrible deaths that deserved and deserve a public mourning. In a way, that point brought me to consider Antigone, her insistence on burying her brother even when the open public burial and grieving was against the law. The politics of mourning within war is clearly linked to that question of the distribution and regulation of grievable lives. How do we think about who is grievable and who is not, who is allowed to grieve openly and who is not? And what kind of public speech, parrhesia, is needed to call attention to the horrifying way that our capacity to feel horror is differentially distributed and naturalized?

As we titled this conversation “Antigone’s Claim”, so we may ask what would Antigone’s claim be for the present and how we understand her claim in the present. It seems to me that in insisting on the public grievability of lives, Antigone becomes for us a war critic who opposes the arbitrary and violent force of sovereignty. In a way, she stands in advance for precarious lives, including new immigrants, the sans-papiers, those who are without health insurance, those who are differentially affected by the global economy, questions of poverty, of illiteracy, religious minorities, and the physically challenged. That she, in some sense, becomes a figure through whom we can think what it means to understand certain lives as more precarious than others, who live out a precariousness so that others can engage in the fantasy of their impermeability and omnipotence.

Question:

Would it be possible to define your concept of “precarious life” as a new form of “humanism”?

Currently, I do not want a new humanism. If we ask what the human could be beyond humanism, then it seems we resituate the human within the non-human, not as a contingent fact of existence, but as a necessary ontology, an ontology that articulates certain constitutive bonds and binds. So I am struggling toward a non-anthropocentric conception of the human, if that is possible – even a non-anthropocentric philosophical anthropology. The other way of saying this is that wherever the human is, it is always outside of itself in the non-human, or it is always distributed among beings, among human and non-human beings, chiasmically related through the idea of precarious life. So we can neither lodge the human in the self, nor ground the self in the human, but find instead the relations of exposure and responsibility that constitute the “being” of the human in a sociality outside itself, even outside its human-ness.

Question:

You are defining the human in its frailty and at the limits of its capacity to make sense of the world. It’s a weak subject (although not in the sense of Vattimo’s). Do you see a form of universalism (perhaps the only one) in this idea? The universality of frailty, of mourning and loss? Are we relapsing though in a form of essentialism? Moreover, does this frailty entail a negative counterpart: the universality of violence, oppression, subjugation?

I am amused by this idea of a “relapse”! What is at stake is a way of thinking about what is ‘essential’ that implies a dispossession of the self. What strikes me as much more problematic is the idea of a self-aggrandizing subject, the kind that gets nationally instituted at times of war. But I am not just working with grief and frailty, but also with aggression and the various forms it takes. The point is to think about the frailty, the necessity, and the demands of the ties by which we are bound

In your book, you comment on Adriana Cavarero’s work, as much as she borrows from you in her Orrorismo, for instance regarding the vulnerability of the subject or the ethics of self-narrative. In spite of the transatlantic divide between European essentialism and Anglo-American postmodernism (or non-foundational post-structuralism), there are several points of convergence for the definition of an ethical and political (feminist) agenda. Which one do you think is the more prominent and relevant, but also do you see any major point of disagreement between you and Cavarero?

Cavarero is the one who has read Arendt and Levinas quite effectively to show that the singularity of the “you” requires a certain story. I am most interested in this move, and I have been led to rethink my own relation to these figures by virtue of her compelling analyses. Perhaps my own work tried to think more about the social and political conditions under which horror and grief are regulated, and this might be a bit different from hers, which tries to establish an ethical framework for moral sentiments. But yes, as you can imagine, the link between our work is an important one.

When you talk about war and conflict, you seem to adopt a language that has religious rather than simple ethical undertones. When you talk about non-violence, to break the cycle of revenge, for instance in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which implies forgiveness, you seem to open up your discourse to an ethical ground that resonates with a broad Judeo-Christian frame of reference. How do you stand in relation to religion and the new centrality of religious in contemporary thought, considering that it has become a central issue and concern for many intellectuals like Habermas, Zizek, Vattimo and others?

I don’t see a term like “forgiveness” as necessarily implicated in a religious framework. Maybe that seems odd, but it seems to me that the term, whatever its religious background, has and does travel outside of explicitly religious circles and can operate within ostensibly secular contexts. There will be those for whom the resonance exists, but I think we have to consider more closely, for instance, how reparation works in the theory of Melanie Klein, or how “forgiveness” operates in various international human rights commissions. What interests me most are modes of operating within conflict that find ways of expressing rage without retribution. This problematic is articulated in the Oresteia and, if I am right, marks a certain distinction between matters of justice and ideas of religious authority.

That said, I think it is important that we take note of the ways in which religious discourse informs many of our secular understandings of politics, and to see how such terms become resignified over time and through the shifting of contextual frames. I have been interested in Walter Benjamin’s appropriation of ‘forgiveness’ in some of his early writings on aesthetics. There, it is actually linked with the eradication of traces of guilt and the inauguration of a new temporal modality. Perhaps there continues to be ways of thinking revolution in such terms.

In recent years you have been writing and speaking about Israeli politics, and the problem of the ‘anti-Semitic’ charge to quell public criticism of Israel that it is almost inevitably advocated in many quarters. Anti-Semitism is indeed an oversensitive issue in the collective Western consciousness. How do you place yourself, being Jewish but anti-Zionist, in reference to this? And do you see the danger of a ‘culture of victimhood’ in the critical political discourse?

I want to suggest that public criticisms against gratuitous state violence form an important, if underappreciated, dimension of Jewish values, and that ideals of co-habitation with the non-Jew are also central to early strains of Zionist thought and to contemporary dissenting positions within Jewish intellectual life. I understand that my position is difficult to defend, since it would be important to know what is meant by “Jewish” here. But I want to suggest that the term refers to both secular and religious positions, but also to historical situations that are agnostic both in relation to secularism and religious belief. Within this broad domain, public criticism of gratuitous state violence has been crucial to a number of Jewish intellectual positions. I wish to underscore both the risks and obligations of public criticism, since whatever the motivations are for levelling criticisms against certain forms of state violence, it remains true that the criticism of Israeli state violence, for instance, can be construed in any number of anti-Semitic ways. This situation became acute, for instance, for Primo Levi, whose criticisms of Israel were exploited by those who covered the walls of Turin, his home town, with anti-Semitic slogans. How, then, does one unequivocally oppose anti-Semitism at the same time that one revives and furthers that Jewish tradition of public criticism that is formulated as a critique of state violence, an opposition to the forcible dispossession of minority populations? It is clearly impossible to accept anti-Semitism, just as it is to jettison key values furnished by this internally complicated Jewish tradition of public criticism. Much depends on our ability to distinguish between forms of public criticism that are part of democratic deliberation and those that propose violent and non-democratic means to achieve political ends. So perhaps my hope is that active and internal dissension among Jews on the topic of Israel can work in tandem with other political efforts to oppose the occupation and the radical disenfranchisements of 1948.  In a way, this is to shift the “moral” discourse from persecution\victimization to an affirmative responsibility for cohabitation that links not only with precarious life as a social ontology, but also with a new fathoming of global responsibility for this time.