Abstract
This article takes up the work of Judith Butler in order to present a vision of ethics that avoids two common yet problematic positions: on the one hand, the skeptical position that ethical norms are so constitutive of who we are that they are ultimately impossible to assess and, on the other hand, the notion that we are justified in our commitment to any ethical norm that appears foundational to our identity. With particular attention to the trajectory of Butler’s project from The Psychic Life of Power to Giving an Account of Oneself, the article discusses the shortcomings of these two positions and the virtues of the alternative account that Butler develops during this period.
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Notes
Butler (2005, p. 15).
In Unbecoming Subjects (Thiem 2008), Annika Thiem offers an account of Butler’s relevance for moral philosophy today. For Thiem, Butler demonstrates how moral philosophy today must be politically mindful and, in turn, how questions of justice and the good life belong to political philosophy.
In a recent interview with The Massachusetts Review, Butler herself says: “I experience my work as returning time and again to Hegel, to problems of recognition and desire, and so I am not sure there is an early and a ‘later’ Butler, but I do think that I have been compelled to take account of that part of my work that gave rise to the voluntarist reading, and to work against some of the relentless activity of Gender Trouble” (Dumm 2008, p. 97).
For Sartre, bad faith rests on a vacillation between transcendence and facticity which refuses to recognize either one for what it is or to synthesize them (Sartre 1956, p. 86–116 and 800).
In Bodies That Matter, Butler writes: “Further, it will be crucial to find a way both to occupy (subject-positions) and to subject them to democratizing contestation in which the exclusionary conditions of their production are perpetually reworked” (Butler 1993, p. 115).
(Dumm 2008, p. 102).
Noddings (1984, p. 5).
See Seyla Benhabib’s “Feminism and Postmodernism,” for example, where she charges that the presentation of the female as a historical artifice rather than a natural kind is antithetical to political goals of liberation and that “strong” versions of postmodernism like this, with which she aligns Butler’s work, jeopardize necessary foundations for political action (Benhabib 1995).
In the same passage, Butler clarifies: “the point is not to do away with foundations, or even to champion a position that goes under the name antifoundationalism. Both of those positions belong together as different versions of foundationalism and the skeptical problematic it engenders” (Butler 1995, p. 7).
Korsgaard (1996, pp. 9–10).
Kathy Dow Magnus is right to point out that Butler’s earlier work makes no real distinction between the dispossessing force of a moral claim and that of a power differential. (Magnus 2006, p. 84) Yet, from the beginning, Butler’s concern has been to interrogate those norms that seem most impenetrable to interrogation, that is, that seem to shut down any debate. In this way, the morally problematic claims in Butler’s early work are those she identifies as univocal claims that leave no space for dialogue or mutual interrogation.
“Subjection” means both the way that one is made subject to forms of power and the way one develops into a subject that is a being with reflexivity and agency. The Psychic Life of Power explores this twofold character of subjection.
Butler (1997b, pp.1–2).
Riley (2005, p.15).
In Excitable Speech, Butler writes: “I wish to question for the moment the presumption that hate speech always works, not to minimize the pain that is suffered as a consequence of hate speech, but to leave open the possibility that its failure is the condition of a critical response. If the account of the injury of hate speech forecloses the possibility of a critical response to that injury, the account confirms the totalizing effects of such an injury” (Butler 1997a, p. 19).
Butler (2005, p. 48).
Butler’s interpretation of Kafka’s story indeed recalls a passage from the Enchiridion of Epictetus, where Epictetus explains that “everything has two handles, one by which it can be carried and the other not.” if your brother acts unjustly toward you, Epictetus explains, you should not carry it by that handle, that is, think that you have been treated unjustly. Instead, you should consider that “he is your brother and was brought up with you” and take it by this handle, the one by which it can be carried (Epictetus 1983, p. 26).
This corresponds to what Butler in Giving an Account of Oneself identifies as “the desire to persist in one’s social being.” (Butler 2005, p. 44).
By contrast, Butler insists in Bodies That Matter that she does not subscribe to the theory that everything is discursively constructed, explaining that “that point, when and where it is made, belongs to a kind of discursive monism or linguisticism that refuses the constitutive force of exclusion, erasure, violent foreclosure, abjection, and its disruptive return within the very terms of discursive legitimacy” (Butler 1993, p. 8).
(Butler 1997b, p. 11).
Note the difference between stating that we must enter a circle to speak about the subject and the denial of subjectivity. As David Stern puts it: “Agency and subjectivity—the doer and the deed—are neither eliminated nor denied (in Butler’s thought). What is denied is only the metaphysical depth of a subject behind the deed as its pure source” (Stern 2000, p. 113).
Magnus (2006, pp. 89–90).
Segal (2008, p. 392).
See especially Butler’s discussion in “Subversive Bodily Acts” in Gender Trouble (Butler 1999). In Bodies That Matter, Butler clarifies her theory of parody’s subversive potential, by explaining that parody is neither the only form of contestation nor always a fruitful one. In her analysis of drag in the film Paris is Burning, for example, she concludes: “At best, it seems drag is the site of a certain ambivalence, one which reflects the more general situation of being implicated in the regimes of power by which one is constituted and, hence, of being implicated in the very regimes of power that one opposes” (Butler 1993, p. 125).
Butler (1997b, p. 12).
For a compelling account of how such critical rupture characterizes modern subjectivity in general, see Tom Boland’s excellent “Critique as a technique of the self: A Butlerian analysis of Judith Butler’s prefaces” (Boland 2007, 105–122).
Heidegger (1996, p. 182).
Butler (2005, p. 24). When Butler repeats this idea in the 2008 interview, she presents it as something that is central to her project. There she says that her recent work has tried to avoid “two extremes that would say that recognition only and always confers value or that recognition is nothing other than a slave morality.” Her sense, she explains, is that recognition is vexed, since it only takes place through social norms and thus “can be a way of subjugating or acknowledging, and sometimes it can be both at once” (Dumm 2008, p. 97).
One could point to Heidegger’s discussion of the authenticity of the German Volk, say, in his lectures on Hölderlin’s “Der Ister” as evidence of a social or cultural Dasein, but if Dasein’s anxiety necessarily concerns its concrete mortality, no clear parallel for the social-cultural Dasein exists.
In her attempt to distinguish her position from one that rejects all foundations, Butler echoes a point that Nancy Fraser makes in her reflections on the debate between Benhabib and Butler in Feminist Contentions. Fraser explains that feminists “need both deconstruction and reconstruction, destabilization of meaning and projection of utopian hope” (Fraser 1995, p. 71).
Butler (2002, p. 216).
Butler (2007, p. 182).
Butler (2005, p. 22).
Emerson (1996, p. 68).
Butler (2005, p. 27).
Emerson (1996, p. 55).
Dumm (2008, p. 98).
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Culbertson, C. The ethics of relationality: Judith Butler and social critique. Cont Philos Rev 46, 449–463 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-013-9271-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-013-9271-z