Category: subjectivity

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 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 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 performativity

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

Butler argues that what we have in the first instance is the deed or action and that we ascribe it only belatedly, in considering an action, to a doer or agent. Even more radically, for Butler there is no agent as such prior to the deed, but the agent is an after effect of the deed. The agent is a peculiar effect, insofar as this effect (the agent) is taken to be the cause and source of what becomes its own origin (the action).

The challenges to conventinal accounts of subjectivity and agency result from the implication of this account of performative subject formation, because one can no longer try to trace back from actions to the intentions beneath them and evaluate agents according to their intentions. (79)

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 con-constitutive of subjects as well as of their acts. The difficulty for moral philosophy and more specifically for reflections on questions of accountability and political and social agency is then to think how this co-constitution requires but also allows a thorough reworking of our conceptions of individual responsibility and accountability (80).

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 desire foreclosure repression

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

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

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

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

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

thiem norms foucault psychoanalysis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

thiem passionate attachments

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

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

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

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

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

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

thiem mattering bodies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

thiem foucault assujetissement

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

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

thiem materiality

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

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

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

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

thiem butler subjectivity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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