Giving an Account of Oneself
Fordham University Press (2005)
| Abstract | What does it mean to lead a moral life?In her first extended study of moral philosophy, Judith Butler offers a provocative outline for a new ethical practice—one responsive to the need for critical autonomy and grounded in a new sense of the human subject.Butler takes as her starting point one’s ability to answer the questions “What have I done?” and “What ought I to do?” She shows that these question can be answered only by asking a prior question, “Who is this ‘I’ who is under an obligation to give an account of itself and to act in certain ways?” Because I find that I cannot give an account of myself without accounting for the social conditions under which I emerge, ethical reflection requires a turn to social theory.In three powerfully crafted and lucidly written chapters, Butler demonstrates how difficult it is to give an account of oneself, and how this lack of self-transparency and narratibility is crucial to an ethical understanding of the human. In brilliant dialogue with Adorno, Levinas, Foucault, and other thinkers, she eloquently argues the limits, possibilities, and dangers of contemporary ethical thought.Butler offers a critique of the moral self, arguing that the transparent, rational, and continuous ethical subject is an impossible construct that seeks to deny the specificity of what it is to be human. We can know ourselves only incompletely, and only in relation to a broader social world that has always preceded us and already shaped us in ways we cannot grasp. If inevitably we are partially opaque to ourselves, how can giving an account of ourselves define the ethical act? And doesn’t an ethical system that holds us impossibly accountable for full self-knowledge and self-consistency inflict a kind of psychic violence, leading to a culture of self-beratement and cruelty? How does the turn to social theory offer us a chance to understand the specifically social character of our own unknowingness about ourselves?In this invaluable book, by recasting ethics as a project in which being ethical means becoming critical of norms under which we are asked to act, but which we can never fully choose, Butler illuminates what it means for us as “fallible creatures” to create and share an ethics of vulnerability, humility, and ethical responsiveness. Judtith Butler is the Maxine Elliot Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. The most recent of her books are Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence and Undoing Gender. | |||||||||
| Keywords | Self (Philosophy Ethics Conduct of life | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Buy the book | $16.30 new (26% off) $17.65 direct from Amazon (20% off) Amazon page | |||||||||
| Call number | BD450.B895 2005 | |||||||||
| ISBN(s) | 0823225046 9780823225040 0823225038 | |||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,705 |
| External links |
  Try with proxy. |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesIdo Geiger (2007). The Founding Act of Modern Ethical Life: Hegel's Critique of Kant's Moral and Political Philosophy. Stanford University Press.
Karen Kachra (2008). Giving an Account of Oneself by Judith Butler. Constellations 15 (2):274-276.
Allen W. Wood (1990). Hegel's Ethical Thought. Cambridge University Press.
Kathleen Dow Magnus (2006). The Unaccountable Subject: Judith Butler and the Social Conditions of Intersubjective Agency. Hypatia 21 (2):81-103.
Judith Butler (2007). An Account of Oneself. In Judith Butler & Bronwyn Davies (eds.), Judith Butler in Conversation: Analyzing the Texts and Talk of Everyday Life. Routledge.
James Stanescu (2012). Species Trouble: Judith Butler, Mourning, and the Precarious Lives of Animals. Hypatia 27 (3):567-582.
Veronica Vasterling (2010). The Psyche and the Social: Judith Butler's Politcizing of Psychoanalytical Theory. In Jens de Vleminck (ed.), Sexuality and psychoanalysis: Philosophical Criticisms. Leuven University Press.
Paula Cameron (2011). Curriculum Vitae: Embodied Ethics at the Seams of Intelligibility. Hypatia 27 (2):423-439.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2009-01-28Total downloads47 ( #23,147 of 549,198 )Recent downloads (6 months)2 ( #37,418 of 549,198 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
