Butler and Ethics 9780748678860

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Butler and Ethics

Critical Connections A series of edited collections forging new connections between contemporary critical theorists and a wide range of research areas, such as critical and cultural theory, gender studies, film, literature, music, philosophy and politics. Series Editors Ian Buchanan, University of Wollongong James Williams, University of Dundee Editorial Advisory Board Nick Hewlett Gregg Lambert Todd May John Mullarkey Paul Patton Marc Rölli Alison Ross Kathrin Thiele Frédéric Worms Titles available in the series Badiou and Philosophy, edited by Sean Bowden and Simon Duffy Agamben and Colonialism, edited by Marcelo Svirsky and Simone Bignall Laruelle and Non-­Philosophy, edited by John Mullarkey and Anthony Paul Smith Virilio and Visual Culture, edited by John Armitage and Ryan Bishop Rancière and Film, edited by Paul Bowman Stiegler and Technics, edited by Christina Howells and Gerald Moore Badiou and the Political Condition, edited by Marios Constantinou Nancy and the Political, edited by Sanja Dejanovic Butler and Ethics, edited by Moya Lloyd Latour and the Passage of Law, edited by Kyle McGee Forthcoming titles Agamben and Radical Politics, edited by Daniel McLoughlin Rancière and Literature, edited by Julian Murphet and Grace Hellyer Nancy and Visual Culture, edited by Carrie Giunta and Adrienne Janus Balibar and the Citizen/Subject, edited by Warren Montag and Hanan Elsayed Visit the Critical Connections website at www.euppublishing.com/ series/crcs

Butler and Ethics

Edited by Moya Lloyd

EDINBURGH University Press

© editorial matter and organisation Moya Lloyd, 2015 © the chapters their several authors, 2015 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun­– ­Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 11/13 Adobe Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 7884 6 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 7886 0 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 7887 7 (epub) The right of Moya Lloyd to be identified as Editor of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Contents

Acknowledgements

vi

Introduction Moya Lloyd

1

1. Signifying Otherwise: Liveability and Language Nathan Gies

15



2. Undoing Ethics: Butler on Precarity, Opacity and Responsibility 41 Catherine Mills

3. Butler’s Ethical Appeal: Being, Feeling and Acting Responsible 65 Sara Rushing 4. Violence, Affect and Ethics Birgit Schippers 5. Sensate Democracy and Grievable Life Fiona Jenkins 6. Two Regimes of the Human: Butler and the Politics of Mattering Drew Walker

91 118



7. The Ethics and Politics of Vulnerable Bodies Moya Lloyd

141 167



8. Subjectivation, the Social and a (Missing) Account of the Social Formation: Judith Butler’s ‘Turn’ Samuel A. Chambers

193

Notes on Contributors Index

219 222

Acknowledgements

For the invitation to put together this volume for the Critical Connections series, I would like to thank series editors Ian Buchanan and James Williams. Thanks are also due to Carol Macdonald and her colleagues at Edinburgh University Press for their patient assistance with and support for this volume. I would also like to say a big thank you to all the contributors to the edited volume itself. It’s been a real pleasure to work with all of them. I especially appreciated their always prompt responses to emails, and openness to suggestions for chapter alterations. Finally, I need to thank Andrew and Daniel for distracting me when I needed distracting, allowing me to lock myself away in my study when I needed to write, and providing plentiful cups of tea to keep me going while I was in there. Chapter 8 is a revised and shortened version of Chapter 1 of Samuel Chambers, Bearing Society in Mind: Theories and Politics of the Social Formation, London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2014. Thanks to the publisher for permission to use this material.

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Introduction Moya Lloyd

As Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen and Rebecca Walkowitz write: ‘From Aristotle and Kant to Nietzsche and Hegel to Habermas and Foucault to Derrida and Lacan and Levinas . . . the concept of ethics and the ethical has been reconceptualized, reformulated, and repositioned’ (2000: viii). Originating from the ancient Greek word ethos, used to denote the customs or character of the polis and its citizens, ethics, it has been suggested, consists in the study of ‘what is morally good and bad, right and wrong’ (Singer 2014); and the ‘systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong behavior’ (Fieser 2012). Jacques Rancière offers a different formulation, however, classifying ethics as a mode of thinking in which ‘an identity is established between an environment, a way of being and a principle of action’ ([2006] 2010: 184). Conventionally, ethics, often distinguished as ‘normative ethics’,1 has been sub-­divided into three fields: deontology, which takes duties that are obligatory, irrespective of their consequences, as the focus of ethics; consequentialism, of which utilitarianism is the most influential form, and which stresses the results of actions, as in the maximisation of happiness; and virtue ethics, which focuses on moral character or ‘the virtues’, such as generosity or compassion. Not all recent accounts of ‘ethics’, however, conform easily or neatly to the three approaches listed. Levinas, for example, defines ethics as ‘first philosophy’ (1984), and understands it in terms of a relation to – and an impingement by – the other that precedes the formation of the self. Within poststructuralism broadly conceived, ethics has been theorised variously as a mode of self-­fashioning or ‘care of the self’ (Foucault 1985, 1991, 2000), and as an ‘ethos of critical responsiveness’ (Connolly 1995: xvi) or of ‘generosity’ (for example, Connolly 2002a, 2002b). Just as ethics was once seen as 1

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the province of ‘an ideal, autonomous and sovereign subject’ and a universal humanism (Garber et al. 2000: viii), so too of late the subject has come to be regarded as the ‘problem’ of ethics, not its ground (Loizidou 2007: 46). Troubling definitional matters do not end there. Paradoxically, ethics has been seen simultaneously as ‘the philosophical study of morality’ (Deigh 1999: 284); as a synonym for both morality (Deigh 1999) and for ‘moral philosophy’ (Singer 2014); and as conceptually distinct from morality. Thus, according to thinkers such as Jürgen Habermas, ethics addresses questions about the ‘good life’ while morality focuses on the rules or norms that ought to govern human interaction, such as principles of justice. Alternatively, ethos is understood by Theodor Adorno as commonly accepted or collective ideas, interpreted by Annika Thiem as meaning ‘habituated frameworks and rationales for action’ (2008: 233),2 whereas morality, by contrast, is conceived of as a ‘practice of reflection and deliberation’ (Thiem 2008: 233), of questioning and inquiry (Adorno 2000; see also Menke 2004; Butler 2005: 3–6). During the last decade or so of the twentieth century a ‘turn’, or perhaps more accurately a ‘return’ to ethics took place. It is this return that sets the context for Butler and Ethics. According to Peter Dews, this reappearance of ethics was marked by a number of features, including a re-­centring of questions of obligation, respect, recognition and conscience that ‘not so long ago would have been dismissed as the residue of an outdated humanism’; an increased focus on the work of Levinas; and a growing curiosity about questions of ‘radical evil’ (2002: 33; see also Garber et al. 2000; Davis and Womack 2001; Myers 2008; Rancière [2006] 2010). Not everyone greeted the return to ethics positively. Chantal Mouffe considers it to be a retrograde step signalling the ‘triumph of a sort of moralizing liberalism’, and producing a ‘moralization of society’ (2000: 86). Ethics, that is, as a ‘retreat from the political’ (Mouffe 2000: 85). Frederic Jameson views ‘the return to ethics . . . and its subsequent colonization of political philosophy’ as ‘one of the most regressive features’ of postmodernity (2010: 406). Intriguingly, amongst these critics is Judith Butler, who, in a now much-­cited conversation with the renowned political philosopher William Connolly, remarks: I confess to worrying about the turn to ethics, and have recently written a small essay that voices my ambivalence about this sphere.

Introduction 3 I tend to think that ethics displaces from politics, and I suppose for me the use of power as a point of departure for a critical analysis is substantially different from an ethical framework. (2000; see, for instance, Lloyd 2007, 2008; Chambers and Carver 2008; Rushing 2010; and Schippers 2014)

Butler is, of course, best known for Gender Trouble (1990), the book that helped inaugurate queer theory, shifted the course of debates within feminism by challenging its conventional wisdom about the relation between sex and gender, and introduced the idea of gender performativity. Since Gender Trouble, Butler has published another nine books: Bodies that Matter in 1993; Excitable Speech and The Psychic Life of Power in 1997; Antigone’s Claim in 2000; Undoing Gender and Precarious Life in 2004; Giving an Account of Oneself in 2005; Framing War in 2009; and Parting Ways in 2012. To this can be added several co-­authored volumes, including Contingency, Hegemony, Universality with Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek in 2000; Who Sings the Nation State? with Gayatri Spivak in 2007; Is Critique Secular? with Talal Asad, Wendy Brown and Saba Mahmood in 2009; and Dispossession with Athena Athanasiou in 2013, as well as chapters, interviews and journal articles too numerous to mention.3 It is the publication of one of those works, however, that is the main prompt for this edited volume. Given Butler’s public reservations and confessed ‘ambivalence’ about the return to ethics, it surprised many when in 2005 Giving an Account of Oneself appeared, a book described on its dust jacket as ‘her first extended study of moral philosophy’, in which Butler is said to elaborate ‘a provocative outline for a new ethical practice’. Could it be that Butler had overcome her doubts and was now actively embracing – turning to – ethics? Did she no longer regard the return to ethics as ‘an escape from politics’ or as entailing a ‘heightening of moralism’ (Butler 2000b: 15)? Was there, perhaps, another explanation for the publication of this tome? Could it even be that ethical considerations were never, in fact, fully absent from Butler’s work to this point? Certainly Giving an Account of Oneself is something of a departure from her other work insofar as it takes moral philosophy as its starting point. However, Butler’s explicit embrace of ethical considerations occurs before its publication, with, for example, the ‘small essay’ mentioned above, ‘Ethical Ambivalence’ (Butler

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2000b), as well as with Precarious Life (Butler 2004a), the volume of essays written in response to the events of 9/11 and its aftermath. I say explicit embrace here deliberately for two reasons. Firstly, these texts mark the start of Butler’s ongoing critical reflections on Levinas (see, for instance, Butler 2013) – regarded with disquiet by some of her interlocutors, who consider her ‘turn’ to Levinas as provoking a regretful and problematic shift in her thinking, but viewed by other readers as simply emblematic of a change of focus to matters ethical.4 Secondly, there is an unresolved debate amongst her critics, shared by the contributors to this volume, as to whether Butler’s interest in ethicality is, in fact, a new development in her thinking or whether it is, instead, a persistent feature of her thought. A brief mapping of the terrain will help to give a flavour of this debate. On the one side there are those who propose that, in one form or another, ethical considerations have been an ever-­ present theme in Butler’s oeuvre.5 Sara Salih was one of the first commentators to contend that ‘Butler’s work as a whole’ may be defined by ‘its ethical impetus’, which she construes in terms of an extension of ‘the norms by which “humans” are permitted to conduct liveable lives’ (2004: 4). Annika Thiem likewise proposes that ethical considerations have ‘characterized her [Butler’s] work all along’. For Thiem this is evident in its focus on the norms and structures that ‘condition, enable, and animate forms of marginalization’ (2008: 9, 8). Equally Samuel Chambers and Terrell Carver, in their co-­ authored book Judith Butler and Political Theory, maintain that ‘Butler has raised questions concerning ethics throughout her writings.’ This is discernible, for them, in Butler’s ‘distinct and considered concern with the way in which a theory of subjectivity, or an ontological formulation, shapes, enables, constrains or produces particular sorts of ethical relations’ (2008: 94, original emphasis). Acknowledging that Butler’s interest in ethics has certainly ‘intensified’ since 9/11, Hannah Stark concludes that this has only rendered ‘explicit . . . what has always been implicit’ (2014: 89) in her thought. Together with Chambers and Carver, Stark dates Butler’s initial exploration of ethicality to her first major published work, Subjects of Desire (Butler 1987). In marked contrast to those who trace the ethical dimension of Butler’s thought to her exploration of Levinas, Stark ties it to Butler’s enduring concern with the Hegelian theme of recognition.

Introduction 5 Other critics, however, disagree that the entire compass of Butler’s writing is ethically oriented. Some discern a ‘definitive turn’ in Butler’s work ‘toward ethics’ (Mills 2007: 133) after 9/11,6 a reorientation that a number regard as highly problematic, particularly because her alleged ‘turn’ to ethics is seen as occasioning a flight away from politics.7 Jodi Dean, for instance, contends that Butler’s ‘ethical sensitivity’ is bought at ‘the cost of politics’; indeed, she avers, ‘Butler presents ethical resources as available only under conditions of the denial of politics’ (2008: 109). Plotting changes in Butler’s work in the decade and a half following Gender Trouble, Lynne Segal declares her scepticism about ‘what might be read as her substituting ethical abstractions for political analysis’, which Segal locates in ‘some’ of Butler’s ‘recent Levinasian and Arendtian turns’ (2008: 384; see also Gies in this volume); a position echoed by Diana Coole, who worries about the ‘more abstractly normative Kantian – and more recently, Levinasian – aspect’ of Butler’s thinking ‘[p]ulling against the possibility’ of ‘political engagement’ (2008: 27). Lauren Berlant likewise expresses reservations that Butler’s account of ethical commitment not only eliminates the unconscious, but ends up assuming an intentionalist subject who is able consciously to ‘short-­circuit foundational affective attachments in order to gain a better good life’, thus displacing politics (2007: 294). This concern about the link between ethics and politics in Butler’s work – whether ethics supplants politics, subtends politics, is itself politically inflected or involved in an agonistic duel with it – is something that several authors in this volume explore, and, as might be expected from the foregoing discussion, in relation to which they adopt a variety of divergent positions. For all their differences, however, there is one matter that all commentators more or less agree upon: that Butler – whether always or belatedly – advances an ethical discourse of some kind. The question is: what kind? The appellations abound. Annika Thiem talks of Butler’s ‘ethics of critical inquiry’ (2008: 8); Slavoj Žižek describes Butler’s ethics as an ‘ethics of finitude’ (2013: 137); while David Gutterman and Sara Rushing, focusing on Precarious Life, explore her ‘ethics of grief’ (2008). Bonnie Honig aligns Butler’s work with what she calls an ‘ethics of mortality and suffering’ fastened to ‘mortalist humanism’ (2010: 1, original emphasis). Elena Loizidou cautions that Butler does not ‘offer an ethical code for action’, but rather a ‘philosophical account of

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ethical responsibility’ (2007: 14, 76). Butler describes her own project in terms of an ‘ethic of non-­violence’ (in Stauffer 2003), while contributors to this volume characterise it variously as ‘an ethics of failure’ (Mills), an ‘ethics of grievability’ (Walker) and an ‘ethics of vulnerability’ or ‘precariousness’ (Rushing). In spite of the different lexical terms used to describe Butler’s ethical discourse, there are nevertheless a number of common themes that normally come to the fore in these discussions – some of them newer additions to Butler’s theoretical vocabulary, others of longer standing. They include the body, corporeal vulnerability, precariousness and precarity, grief and grievability, together with notions of the ‘human’, intelligibility, liveability, and the possibility of a liveable life, as well as questions of violence, and particularly in the context of this book, of ‘ethical violence’ (see Jenkins, Mills and Schippers, this volume). In addition, scholars have also begun to draw attention to the language of affect that has begun to seep into Butler’s writings of late (see Rushing and Schippers, this volume). Butler and Ethics opens with a chapter by Nathan Gies that takes as its starting point Butler’s engagement with the work of Levinas and its role in understanding the relationship between ethics and politics in the former’s work. In particular, Gies confronts head-­on the charge that Butler’s encounter with Levinas has resulted in both a certain moralism and flight from politics in her work. Instead, Gies asserts that Butler’s reading of Levinas enables her to build on and develop the themes of ‘liveability’ present in one form or another in her work since Gender Trouble. It is Gies’ argument that Butler’s use of Levinas thus extends her thinking in significant ways, enabling her to develop and ‘politicise’ Levinas’s apprehension of ‘the ethical’. In the final part of the chapter, Gies turns the tables and offers a Levinasian reading of Butler, focused on Levinas’s discussion of communication, which Gies regards as offering both a useful supplement to Butler’s ethico-­political approach and a corrective for some of its limitations. Far from her encounter with Levinas resulting in a retreat from politics, for Gies, it enables Butler to produce work on liveability that is more radical, and by implication more open to politics, than her earlier work. In Chapter 2, Catherine Mills explores the idea of vulnerability in the construction of Butler’s ethics, tracing its evolution as a concept from Precarious Life (Butler 2004a) onwards.

Introduction 7 Vulnerability has been a common concept in feminist discussions of ethics, including the ethics of care and discussions of relational autonomy. While some of these accounts construe vulnerability primarily in terms of contingent social factors, Butler, according to Mills, offers a different approach. Without totally disregarding situational vulnerability (or what Butler calls ‘precarity’), Butler understands vulnerability primarily as a constitutive condition of subjectivity which has a certain ‘normative force’. Turning to Butler’s encounter with Levinas, Mills argues that although she is often read as advancing an ‘ethics of relationality’ drawn from the latter’s work, in fact, Butler’s ethics displays little similarity to his. Hers is rather an ethics that sites responsibility in the subject’s opacity to itself; as such, it is an ‘ethics of failure’. For Mills, Butler never fully addresses the problem of responsibility for the other. Rather her discussion of substitutability (in the context of discussing the normative force of shared human vulnerability) results in Butler’s ethics foundering on what Mills calls ‘the twin of sovereign conceptions of subjectivity’, namely ‘community conceived as commonality’ (p. 43). The next two chapters explore the role of affect in Butler’s ethical work. In Chapter 3, Sara Rushing returns to her paper ‘Preparing for Politics’ (2010), to raise questions about the nature of Butler’s ethics in the light of her references in Frames of War to ‘feelings’ and sensations. In the earlier piece, Rushing characterised Butler’s ethics as not requiring affinity between participants in an ethical encounter, what she describes in this chapter as ‘an ethics without affect’. With the shift in Butler’s language, however, Rushing wants to know: ‘What is the relationship . . . between being responsible, feeling responsible and acting responsible?’ (p. 69). She begins by reflecting on the affective turn in political and social theory in order to help determine what kind of work ‘affect’ is doing – or might do – in Butler’s ethical theory, and how Butler conceives affect. A number of critics have drawn attention to what might be called a motivational deficit in Butler’s work: that is, how it is possible to cultivate ethical responsiveness in conditions of precarity when the vulnerability of the other is not perceptible to us (see, for instance, Lloyd and Schippers, this volume). Rushing indicates that Butler’s discussion of affect as a political and ethical resource has the potential to help here, though at present her account is too thin to do so satisfactorily. A ‘constructive engagement’ with virtue ethics, she proposes, might provide

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Butler with the conceptual resources to better connect being, feeling and acting, and to link ethics affectively with politics. Like Rushing, Birgit Schippers is interested in the link between affect and ethics, and like Rushing she situates Butler’s discussion in connection to the ‘affective turn’. However, what concerns Schippers in Chapter 4 are the connections between affect, violence and ethical responsibility in Butler’s discussions of conflict and war, and what Butler’s account of global ethics looks like (see also Schippers 2014). In contrast to Rushing, who draws a qualitative distinction between Butler’s earlier references to affective language and her treatment of affect in Frames of War, Schippers contends that the affective dimension of political and social existence form an ‘integral part’ of her work from the beginning. Specifically, she proposes that affect appears in three modes in Butler’s writings: first as desire in Subjects of Desire (1987), next as trauma in The Psychic Life of Power (1997b) and finally as excitability in Excitable Speech (1997a). The precise link between affect and ethics, however, is less well developed in Butler’s texts. While Schippers charges that a focus on affect ought to be part of any conception of ethics, including especially global ethics, she also notes that at the moment it is not entirely clear from Butler’s thought ‘how ethical responsibility becomes an affective demand’ or in what contexts ‘I feel ethically responsible’ for the other (pp. 102–3, original emphasis). Perhaps one of the most discussed features in Butler’s work since 9/11 has been the idea of grievability. In Chapter 5, Fiona Jenkins takes up this theme.8 Rejecting an understanding of grievability as simply charting the ‘prohibitive or censorial power’ (p.  125) to withhold recognition from particular populations, Jenkins contends that for Butler grievability is tied to the idea of a pluralising critique directed at contesting dominant norms; a contestation that Jenkins sees as immanent to Butler’s idea of ‘sensate democracy’ and to ethics, itself understood as critique. Against those such as Bonnie Honig who have suggested that Butler’s recent emphasis on grief and mourning portends a depoliticising ‘universal humanist ethics of lamentation’ (Honig cited by Jenkins, p. 121), Jenkins argues that Butler’s interest in what she refers to as the ‘nationalism of grieving’ (p. 121) is political, and that what is important about her work is precisely the significance for politics of the ethical framework she outlines. Like Gies, Jenkins thus sees Butler as advancing an ethico-­politics. For Jenkins, however, this

Introduction 9 ethico-­politics is concerned with contesting ethical violence as ‘an anachronistic nationalist violence’ (p. 132), with the ‘obligation of dissent’ (p. 135) that characterises a living practice of critique, with demands for pluralisation, and with what she suggests Butler regards as the potential of post-­nationalist political formations. In Chapter 6, Drew Walker also attends to grievability. His focus is the place of the ‘human’ in Butler’s thought. It is Walker’s contention that ‘both before and after her “ethical turn” ’ (p. 141), Butler has deployed two distinct images of the human, each aligning with a different theme in her work. The first, tied to the idea of survival, entails a politically problematic view of the human as a subject position necessary for persons to count – or to ‘matter’ as he puts it – and is detectable in her discussions of grievability, dehumanisation and abjection. Walker suggests that this understanding operates within a ‘framework of recovery’ (p. 145) and is the basis for ethics. The second image, tethered to the notion of subversion, construes the human more dynamically, and to Walker in more radical political terms, as an entity always ‘in the flux of reiteration’ (p. 142). Invoking Stanley Cavell and Jacques Rancière, and exploring various examples including the AIDS crisis in the USA and the activities of the Zimbabwean women’s movement, he argues contra Butler that the lives that are seen to be problematic – dangerous, deviant or the like – matter intensely because they are always already human. Politically, for Walker, the issue is not whether people are grievable or not; the issue is to contest the unjust and brutal conditions within which humans live. We return in the next chapter to the theme of vulnerability, first introduced by Mills in Chapter 2, though the focus this time is on the idea of corporeal vulnerability and ecstatic relationality. Readers often equate Butler’s account of vulnerability with a sense of injurability, harm or propensity for suffering. In Chapter 7 I argue, however, that to focus exclusively on vulnerability as injury is to overlook a second sense of vulnerability at work in Butler’s writings: vulnerability as impressionability, which, I commend, is central both to Butler’s understanding of ethics and politics. For me, as for Gies and Jenkins, ethics and politics are complexly intertwined. What I am concerned with, however, is the question of how it is possible to practise politics and ethics in concrete conditions of precarity. That is, where certain lives are produced historically as less protected or more impoverished than others, and where certain bodies are unrecognisable as human; when to

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borrow from Butler, a ‘vulnerability’ can be neither ‘perceived or recognized’ and thus cannot ‘come into play’ (2004a: 43). What, I inquire, if anything, may be done in such a context to facilitate ethical responsiveness, given Butler’s own assertion that ethical solicitations cannot be prepared for in advance? The final chapter of the volume takes us in a new direction. Critical interpreters of Butler have supposed that her putative ‘ethical turn’ is a response to a gap in her writing. Samuel Chambers advises otherwise. For him, what is missing from her earlier work is not ethicality but rather an account of the social formation that furnishes the condition of possibility for all subjects. To explore this, he turns to the theory of subjection outlined by Butler in The Psychic Life of Power (1997b), homing in on her evaluations of Hegel and Althusser in that text. Chambers claims that the ‘Hegelianised’ reading of Althusser she advances here divests Althusser’s account of the social formation of its complexity. As a result, the theory of subjection that she allegedly derives in part from Althusser lacks an adequate concept of social order. Chambers suggests, however, that in her so-­called ethical writings after 9/11, Butler introduces an alternative conception of ‘the social’, tied to an ontology of finitude and vulnerability. This is an attempt, he proposes, to respond to the deficit in her earlier work. The problem with her new account, however, is that it offers, at best, ‘little more than a liberal conception of the social’ (p. 210). For Chambers the end result is that ‘something significant has been lost’ in Butler’s writing: namely, the radicalism of her earlier work (p. 215).

Notes 1. For Fieser this might entail exploring where ethical principles derive from and what they connote (metaethics); examining the moral standards that determine what constitutes wrong or right behaviour (normative ethics); or deciding what the morally appropriate response or course of action might be in specific areas, such as abortion, capital punishment or animal rights (applied ethics) (2012). 2. An ethos that for Adorno might, in certain contexts, ‘acquire repressive and violent qualities’ (2000: 17). 3. She is also the author of Subjects of Desire in 1987, which was her first book, the published version of her doctoral thesis. 4. For competing assessments of Butler’s debt to Levinas in this volume

Introduction 11 see the chapters by Gies, Mills and Rushing. Interestingly, in ‘Ethical Ambivalence’ Butler dates her own reading of Levinas to a point in the 1990s – the same period, in other words, when the resurgence of interest in his writings roughly began, at least ‘among the deconstructively minded’ (2000: 19). 5. In addition to those noted here, see also Loizidou 2007 and Rushing 2010. 6. Although Mills spots a certain continuity in Butler’s concerns from Bodies that Matter, Excitable Speech and The Psychic Life of Power to Precarious Life and particularly Giving an Account of Oneself, to do with her ‘critical ontology of subjectivity and materialization’, she argues that where initially this centred on ‘political resistance and agency, her recent reflections . . . are turned more specifically toward the ethical dimensions of social existence’ (2007: 133, 134). 7. On the displacement of politics in Butler’s more ethically-­oriented writings, see also Shulman 2011; Benhabib 2013; and Walker, this volume. 8. Grievability is also discussed by Lloyd, Schippers and Walker, this volume.

References Adorno, Theodor (2000), Problems of Moral Philosophy, ed. Thomas Schröder, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Asad, Talal, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler and Saba Mahmood (2009), Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech, The Townsend Papers in the Humanities No. 2, Berkeley: University of California Press. Benhabib, Seyla (2013), ‘Ethics without Normativity and Politics without Historicity’, Constellations, 20: 1, 150–63. Berlant, Lauren (2007), ‘Nearly Utopian, Nearly Normal: Post-­Fordist Affect in La Promesse and Rosetta’, Public Culture, 19: 2, 273–301. Butler, Judith (1987), Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-­Century France, New York: Columbia University Press. Butler, Judith (1990), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, London: Routledge. Butler, Judith (1993), Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, London: Routledge. Butler, Judith (1997a), Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, London: Routledge.

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Butler, Judith (1997b), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Butler, Judith (2000a), Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death, New York: Columbia University Press. Butler, Judith (2000b), ‘Ethical Ambivalence’ in Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (eds), The Turn to Ethics, New York: Routledge, pp. 15–28. Butler, Judith (2004a), Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, London: Verso. Butler, Judith (2004b), Undoing Gender, London: Routledge. Butler, Judith (2005), Giving an Account of Oneself, New York: Fordham University Press. Butler, Judith (2009), Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, London: Verso. Butler, Judith (2012b), Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, New York: Columbia University Press. Butler, Judith, and William Connolly (2000), ‘Politics, Power and Ethics: A Discussion between Judith Butler and William Connolly’, Theory & Event, 4: 2. Butler, Judith, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek (2000), Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, London: Verso. Butler, Judith, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (2007), Who Sings the Nation-­State?: Language, Politics, Belonging, Oxford: Seagull Books. Butler, Judith, and Athena Athanasiou (2013), Dispossession: The Performative in the Political, Cambridge: Polity. Chambers, Samuel A., and Terrell Carver (2008), Judith Butler and Political Theory, London: Routledge. Connolly, William E. (1995), The Ethos of Pluralization, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Connolly, William E. (2002a), Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Connolly, William E. (2002b), Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of the Political Paradox, expanded edn, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Coole, Diana (2008), ‘Butler’s Phenomenological Existentialism’, in Terrell Carver and Samuel A. Chambers (eds), Judith Butler’s Precarious Politics: Critical Encounters, London: Routledge, pp. 11–27. Davis, Todd, and Kenneth Womack (eds) (2001), Mapping the Ethical Turn, Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. Dean, Jodi (2008), ‘Change of Address: Butler’s Ethics at Sovereignty’s Deadlock’, in Terrell Carver and Samuel A. Chambers (eds), Judith

Introduction 13 Butler’s Precarious Politics: Critical Encounters, London: Routledge, pp. 109–26. Deigh, John (1999), ‘Ethics’, in Robert Audi (ed.), The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, 2nd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 284–9. Dews, Peter (2002), ‘Uncategorical imperatives: Adorno, Badiou and the ethical turn’, Radical Philosophy, 111, 33–7. Fieser, James (2012), ‘Ethics’ (7th edn), The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://www.iep.utm.edu/ (last accessed 6 December 2014). Foucault, Michel (1985), The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, trans. Robert Hurley, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Foucault, Michel (1991), ‘On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress’, in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader, Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 340–72. Foucault, Michel (2000), ‘The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom’, trans. Phillis Aranov, Dan McGrawth and James Faubon, in Paul Rabinow (ed.), Michel Foucault: Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, pp. 281–301. Garber, Marjorie, Beatrice Hanssen and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (eds) (2000), The Turn to Ethics, London: Routledge. Gutterman, David S. and Sara L. Rushing (2008), ‘Sovereignty and Suffering: Towards an Ethics of Grief in a Post-­9/11 World’, in Terrell Carver and Samuel A. Chambers (eds), Judith Butler’s Precarious Politics: Critical Encounters, London: Routledge, pp. 127–41. Honig, Bonnie (2010), ‘Antigone’s Two Laws: Greek Tragedy and the Politics of Humanism’, New Literary History, 41, 1–33. Jameson, Frederic (2010), Valences of the Dialectic, London: Verso. Lloyd, Moya (2007), Judith Butler: From Norms to Politics, Cambridge: Polity. Lloyd, Moya (2008), ‘Towards a Cultural Politics of Vulnerability: Precarious Lives and Ungrievable Deaths’ in Terrell Carver and Samuel A. Chambers (eds), Judith Butler’s Precarious Politics: Critical Encounters, London: Routledge, pp. 92–105. Loizidou, Elena (2007), Judith Butler: Ethics, Law, Politics, Abingdon: Routledge-­Cavendish. Menke, Christoph (2004), ‘Genealogy and critique: two forms of ethical questioning of morality’, in Tom Huhn (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Adorno, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 302–27. Mills, Catherine (2007), ‘Normative Violence, Vulnerability, and Responsibility’, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 18: 2, 133–56.

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Mouffe, Chantal (2000), ‘Which Ethics for Democracy?’, in Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (eds), The Turn to Ethics, New York: Routledge, pp. 85–94. Myers, Ella (2008), ‘Resisting Foucauldian Ethics: Associative Politics and the Limits of the Care of the Self’, Contemporary Political Theory, 7: 2, 125–46. Rancière, Jacques ([2006] 2010), ‘The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics’, in Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. Steven Corcoran, London: Continuum, pp. 184–202. Rushing, Sara (2010), ‘Preparing for Politics: Judith Butler’s ethical dispositions’, Contemporary Political Theory, 9: 3, 284–303. Salih, Sarah (ed.), with Judith Butler (2004), The Judith Butler Reader, Oxford: Blackwell. Schippers, Birgit (2014), The Political Philosophy of Judith Butler, New York and London: Routledge. Segal, Lynne (2008), ‘After Judith Butler: Identities, Who Needs Them?’, Subjectivity, 25, 381–94. Shulman, George (2011), ‘Acknowledgment and Disavowal as an Idiom for Theorizing Politics’, Theory & Event, 14:1. Singer, Peter (2014), ‘Ethics’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, http:// www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/194023/ethics (last accessed 6 December 2014). Stark, Hannah (2014), ‘Judith Butler’s Post-­ Hegelian Ethics and the Problem with Recognition’, Feminist Theory, 15: 1, 89–100. Stauffer, Jill (2003), ‘Peace is a Resistance to the Terrible Satisfactions of War’, interview with Judith Butler, The Believer, 117: 2, 64–72. Thiem, Annika (2008), Unbecoming Subjects: Judith Butler, Moral Philosophy, and Critical Responsibility, New York: Fordham University Press. Žižek, Slavoj (2013), ‘Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence’ in Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santer and Kenneth Reinhard, The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology, With a New Preface, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, pp. 134–90.

1

Signifying Otherwise: Liveability and Language Nathan Gies

. . . although his words wound us here or, perhaps precisely because his words wound us here, we are responsible for him, even as the relation proves more painful in its nonreciprocity. (Butler 2012: 47) Deformed and ill-­understood? Perhaps. At least this deformation will not have been a way to deny the debt. (Levinas 1998a: 189 n. 28)

Has Judith Butler been ‘duped by morality’?1 Although I doubt even the most sceptical among them would put the question in such stark terms, many of Butler’s readers have expressed a sense that her work may have taken a wrong turn. Such readers worry that, in her engagement with moral philosophy, and in particular with the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Butler has retreated from some of the important political insights of her earlier work in feminist and gender theory. For instance, Lynne Segal finds Butler ‘substituting ethical abstraction for political analysis in some of her recent Levinasian and Arendtian turns’ (2008: 384). For her part, Diana Coole provides a more positive evaluation of Butler’s recent work, going so far as to argue that it offers a possible ‘renewal of political engagement’, but quickly adds that ‘pulling against this possibility there is also . . . the more abstractly normative, Kantian – and recently, Levinasian – aspect of her thinking’ (2008: 27). Moya Lloyd likewise contends that, although Butler departs from Levinas on certain points, ultimately, ‘instead of subjecting to critical scrutiny the [Levinasian] idea of the face as the means by which others make ethical demands on us, Butler simply concurs with it’, to deleterious effect (2008: 103). Levinas himself often contrasts the ethical and the political,2 and so one can understand the suspicion evinced by many of Butler’s readers upon encountering the name Levinas in her work. For these critics, 15

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Butler’s recent writing has become weighed down by the gravity of moralism. I read Butler’s recent work differently. Certainly, critics have voiced important reservations about Butler’s recent work distinct from a concern over its ‘Levinasian’ aspects; however, taking Butler’s readings of Levinas as a kind of case study, I use the encounter between these two thinkers as a starting point for reconsidering the relationship between ethics and politics in her work and beyond. To advance the debate over Butler’s ethics, we will need to move beyond simply calling her recent work Levinasian and more carefully consider how she reads Levinas. In my first three sections, I therefore situate and explicate the work Butler has done as a reader of Levinas. The first section shows how Butler draws on Levinas as part of her career-­long exploration of the role of practices of representation in enabling and constraining life conditions. My second section details how Butler’s deployment of Levinas pushes her own thinking beyond an exclusive focus on socially mediated practices of representation. In the third section, I consider Butler’s use, development and politicisation of Levinas’s sense of ‘the ethical’ In the final two sections, I move beyond Butler’s reading of Levinas to offer my own Levinasian reading of Butler. I highlight ways Levinas’s work on communication, which has so far received little attention from Butler herself, complements the strengths (and avoid some of the limitations) of Butler’s ethico-­political position. Moving between Butler and Levinas, I explore the relational modes that might attend a non-­deliberative theory of communication less structured by the drive to decipher the intentions of discrete individuals and less motivated by the aspiration to symmetrical exchange. This perspective on communication emphasises ambivalent activities of individual and collective transformation at work as meanings shift unevenly and things come to signify otherwise. This process is ambivalent in part because, as my epigraphs suggest, attempts to communicate often generate considerable damage and loss. However, my epigraphs also suggest an ethos of communication that, instead of disavowing the possibility of misunderstanding or even injury in communicative life, moves through these distortions to find a shared but differentiated mode of existence. Weaving together themes drawn from Butler and Levinas, I thus problematise a number of received views regarding the relationship between ethics, politics and language; at the same



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time, I affirm alternative coalitional modes of political community and communication.

Speech and survival Throughout her career, Bonnie Honig has developed an important critique of political visions that focus myopically on survival, understood in terms of ‘mere life’. She has urged readers to transform discussions framed in terms of matters of survival into struggles over issues of sur-­vivance or ‘more life’ (see Honig 1993: 114; Honig 2009: 10). Honig’s position here is necessary, but I think this argument misses its mark when used, as Honig has recently used it, to articulate a critique of Butler (Honig 2010, 2013). Nevertheless, Honig’s reading articulates many readers’ discomfort with Butler’s recent work in compelling and original terms. For Honig, Butler’s recent work evinces a ‘mortalist humanism’ that reductively defines humans in terms of ‘the ontological fact of mortality’ or ‘vulnerability to suffering’ (2010: 1). In this section, I work to rebut this reading by exploring Butler’s arguments about the connections between what she calls ‘livability’, or a liveable life, and language. Tracing the development of these arguments across Butler’s work, my reading of Butler emphasises that the links between liveability and language are neither natural nor spontaneous: they emerge through ethical changes and political struggles. Much of Butler’s work departs from the premise that, in order to have one’s words heard and understood, one needs to appeal to certain norms and conventions. No one needs to explicitly articulate or consciously take up these norms; indeed, we rarely confront norms so directly. Nevertheless, those who go beyond such norms, who are the occasion of ‘an irruption of the unspeakable’, find the relevance (or even the intelligibility) of their speech discounted (Butler 1997: 136). Butler finds such an operation of norms at work in, for example, the appeals to ‘purity’ still all too often required for survivors of sexual abuse or assault to be recognised as such; attempts to affirm simultaneously that one is a sexual being and that one has experienced a sexual violation frequently encounter only derision and dismissiveness (Butler 1997: 136–7). For those thus unable to have their words heard, the result may often be psychically ‘falling apart’, physical incarceration or ­‘dissolution’ as any self at all (Butler 1997: 136).

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In Excitable Speech, Butler presents this argument in terms of a ‘link between survival and speakability’ (1997: 136). She characterises this idea as a development of the claim, made by ‘political theorists from Aristotle to Arendt’, ‘that it is as linguistic [beings] that humans become political kinds of beings’ (Butler 1997: 179 n. 9). Departing from Aristotle and Arendt, though, Butler gives this view a decidedly tragic cast, insofar as she places greater emphasis on the unhappy implication that, if our speech makes us the kind of beings we are, then ‘to move outside of the domain of speakability is to risk one’s status as a subject’ or one’s ‘viability’ (Butler 1997: 133). The roots of this argument connecting speech and survival reach back to Butler’s earliest work in feminist theory. That work derives theoretical energy and political impetus from its conviction that the system of sex determination and sexual intelligibility is a system for distributing violence. For Butler, gender is best understood ‘as a strategy of survival’, insofar as ‘discrete genders are part of what “humanizes” individuals within contemporary culture; indeed, those who fail to do their gender right are regularly punished’ (1988: 522). Butler’s writing throughout the 1990s continues to build on and refine this problematic. In Bodies that Matter, what Butler previously referred to as ‘survival’ is articulated in terms of ‘cultural viability’, and she places new emphasis on the fact that viability for some is often secured at the expense of the viability or vitality of other lives by means of ‘a repudiation, a subordination, or an exploitative relation’ (1993: 114, 117–18). Here again, Butler describes a process whereby lives that fail to take shape in ways that neatly overlap with normative forms of life struggle to sustain themselves. While in these works Butler considers a range of embodied modes of self-­presentation rather than focusing on speech per se, she persistently connects historically constrained capacities for representation with questions about the ability to live and live well. The genealogy of this argument can be read forward as well as backward: the themes of viability and survival seem contiguous with the concept of liveability elaborated in Butler’s more recent cited formulations from Excitable Speech, for work.3 The just-­ example, return in parallel, if now slightly more accessible, terms in Undoing Gender: The ‘I’ that I am finds itself at once constituted by norms and dependent on them but also endeavors to live in ways that maintain a critical



Signifying Otherwise: Liveability and Language 19 and transformative relation to them. This is not easy, because the ‘I’ becomes . . . threatened with unviability . . . when it no longer incorporates the norms in such a way that makes this ‘I’ fully recognizable . . . I may feel that without some recognizability I cannot live. But I may also feel that the terms by which I am recognized make life unlivable. (Butler 2004b: 3–4; see also Butler 2004a: xix–xx)

In this passage and throughout her work, Butler’s invocations of ‘life’ not only concern themselves with whether or not a being will physically endure, but in what form and on terms how far from what that being aspires to be. Thus, Butler’s discussion of viability and survival already pulses with ‘more life’. Inverting Honig, I find more liveliness in Precarious Life and subsequent work, where Butler gives pride of place to the term ‘livability’, than in Butler’s earlier writing, where one often encounters the language of viability and survival. The term liveability accommodates, more easily than viability or survival, a broader sense of the stakes. Liveability refers not only to the mere possibility of existence, but also to conditions for life’s ‘flourishing’ (Butler 2004b: 4, 88, 92, 100; see also Butler 2009: 2, 23, 28, 133).4 As I receive it, Butler’s reading of Levinas does not retreat from but philosophically elaborates these arguments. In Precarious Life, for example, Butler begins her engagement with Levinas with the claim that, as Levinas uses it, ‘“face” is always a figure for something that is not literally a face’ (2004a: 133). This figure thus notably fails a basic requirement of figuration: ‘it fails to capture and deliver that to which it refers’ (Butler 2004a: 144). For Levinas, this failure is necessary, because he believes that no system of meanings, no totality of references, could fully delimit the human. Through what Butler reads as a generative tension or a telling failure, ‘the face’ provides a way of indexing this unindexable dimension of humanity: There is something unrepresentable that we nevertheless seek to represent, and that paradox must be retained in the representation we give. In this sense, the human is not identified with what is represented but neither is it identified with the unrepresentable; it is, rather, that which limits the success of any representational practice. The face is not ‘effaced’ in this failure of representation, but is constituted in that very possibility. Something altogether different happens, however, when the face operates in the service of a personification that claims to

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‘capture’ the human being in question. For Levinas, the human cannot be captured through representation, and we can see that some loss of the human takes place when it is ‘captured’ by the image. (Butler 2004a: 144–5)

The problem Butler here calls ‘capture’ recalls the paradox of recognition and liveability detailed in Undoing Gender: what I need to live (in this case, recognition as human) may also qualify or even foreshorten my life. As in that book, this negative or threatening condition simultaneously offers a site of critical leverage. Levinas’s notion of ‘the face’ shows how critique might become possible by means of a reference that ‘not only fail[s] to capture its referent, but show[s] this failing’ (Butler 2004a: 146). In this startling but carefully elaborated use of Levinas, then, his notion of ‘the face’ comes to serve exactly the function of drag in Gender Trouble. Drag gains its denaturalising power and critical potential in Butler’s earlier work from the precisely parallel way its status as a ‘failed copy’ reveals the ‘constitutive failure of all gendered enactments’ (Butler 1999: 186). Rendered in the bluntest terms possible, Butler’s recent work thus suggests that the Levinasian face acts as a kind of ‘human drag’. The face shows the instability of all attempts to offer ‘the human’ as a clearly defined category in the same way drag points to the instability of normative gender categories. What characteristics are ‘essentially human’? How do we know an ‘original gender’ when we see one? As styles of reference that invite critical questions about the unity and coherence of their objects, the slippery Levinasian language of ‘the face’ and the amusing impersonations of the drag queen trouble the assumptions of these questions. Giving face, in both senses, becomes something other than itself when it merely reproduces that which it figures.5 But both figures can also work critically to help us to ‘know and feel at the limits of representation as it is currently cultivated and maintained’ (Butler 2005: 151). At least in this instance, then, Butler’s use of Levinas works to extend her ongoing concern with the link between modes of representation and possibilities for living well.

Conditions and capacities In Butler’s recent work, she often couches this link between speech and survival in terms of a ‘social ontology’ of bodies; through the



Signifying Otherwise: Liveability and Language 21

framework of ‘social ontology’, Butler both reaffirms and reworks her earlier thinking. To think of bodies in terms of a ‘social ontology’ means, for Butler, to affirm that bodies ‘invariably come [. . .] up against the outside world’, and that ‘“coming up against” is one modality that defines the body’ (2009: 34). This argument echoes a claim made by Butler in the opening pages of Bodies that Matter: ‘bodies tend to indicate a world beyond themselves’ (Butler 1993: iii). In that book and in other earlier work, Butler describes this ‘beyond’ primarily as the inter-­ human world of language, culture and norms, and she understands the process of ‘indicating’ primarily as a ‘citing’ of those norms. In other words, bodies are not self-­sufficient; rather, as detailed in the previous section, bodily viability requires making reference to and conforming with certain conventions and structures of intelligibility. This argument persists even in Butler’s most recent work. Butler still argues that a body will struggle to endure unless it appeals to some social norms, unless it finds some cultural recognition. However, she now emphasises, bodies also need more than cultural recognition through social norms. Butler now argues, contra her formulation in Excitable Speech, that it is not merely or primarily ‘as linguistic’ that our intelligibility and survival are negotiated. While Butler still argues that ‘a life is produced according to the norms by which life is recognized’, she now rejects the implication that ‘everything about a life is produced according to such a norm’ (2009: 7; my emphasis). When Butler writes that ‘there is no life without the conditions that variably sustain life, and those conditions are pervasively social, establishing not a discrete ontology of the person, but rather the interdependency of persons’, she appears well within the terms of Bodies that Matter: bodies indicate a world beyond themselves. But we step beyond the terms of that book when she adds, completing the same sentence, that that ‘interdependency’ also involves ‘relations to the environment and to non-­human forms of life, broadly considered’ (Butler 2009: 19). Butler now offers ‘a conception of the body as fundamentally dependent on, and conditioned by, a sustained and sustainable world’, where the meaning of ‘world’ seems to have expanded to cover both the inter-­human world and the non-­human world (Butler 2009: 34). Even as it gestures beyond the human world, this ‘social ontology’ does not depend on a dehistoricised assertion of what is and must be, ‘a description of fundamental structures of being that

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are distinct from any and all social and political organization’ (Butler 2009: 2). Butler insists that her account of liveability does not require positing life as some ‘raw’ essence, ‘stripped bare of all its usual interpretations, appearing to us outside all relations of power’, awaiting cultural cooking (Butler 2009: 51).6 In other words, ‘life’ here does not hold the status ‘sex’ held in the variants of feminist theory criticised by Butler’s earlier work.7 The life for which liveability is a problem does not appear as an apolitical substance or biological facticity awaiting political determinations (Butler 2009: 1; Butler 2004a: 43). In her recent attempts to articulate a theory that focuses less exclusively on bodily exposure to socio-­linguistic norms, Butler has not suddenly converted to the position that ‘construction [is] something which happens to a ready-­made object;’ instead, she has more fully elaborated her earlier insight that linguistic attempts to capture, circumscribe or refer to bodies always fail, and that this failure, ‘while in language, is never fully of language’ (Butler 1993: 11, 67, original emphasis). Norms cannot of themselves fully explain why some lives flourish and others fail, but the environments and non-­human forms of life on which human life also depends are not posited as existing simply ‘outside of’ linguistic norms. This argument is informed by and exemplified in Butler’s reading of Levinas. As Butler reads him, Levinas suggests that, before I can act or forgo action, there will have first been a ‘subjectivation’, a series of acts and events that enables me to emerge as an ‘I’ in the first place, which Levinas calls ‘a passivity prior to passivity’ (Butler 2005: 77). For Butler, this ‘non-­narrativizable exposure’ in the process of subject formation complements, but is not reducible to, the operations of ‘norms that facilitate my telling about myself’ familiar from her earlier work (Butler 2005: 38–9, original emphasis). Norms work co-­constitutively upon, but do not fully saturate, other factors that condition and constitute our existence. Even as she retains a focus on norms, Levinas thus helps Butler moderate a certain ‘anthropologistic’ tendency that some critics have persuasively argued haunts her earlier work on norms. If read to simply expose everything taken to be ‘natural’ as merely a sedimentation of human norms, Butler’s early work would tend to reproduce a traditional theory of agency that reduces everything inhuman to a mere ossification of human activity which the dynamism of human existence might overcome (Cheah 1996: 129–30;



Signifying Otherwise: Liveability and Language 23

see also Mahmood 2012). Her reading of Levinas, by contrast, helps her to emphasise that ‘not every condition of the subject is open to revision, since the conditions of formation are not always recuperable and knowable’ (Butler 2005: 134). In other words, when Butler points to aspects of subjectivity irreducible to the operation of norms, she does not retreat to but further displaces a traditional account of agency. Yet, as seen in the previous section’s discussion of ‘the face’, for Butler the recognition of limits, incoherence and failure is not a qualification of the project of expanding possibilities for life but a goad to it: ‘new modes of subjectivity become possible . . . when the limiting conditions by which we are made prove to be malleable and replicable’ (Butler 2005: 133). Thus, if the forces (irreducible to the force of norms) Butler now draws our attention to are not open to being reworked just as we see fit, neither are they simply givens, imposed on us with a brutal and incontestable finality. This attempt to find a space between determinism and voluntarism has been an important ongoing task of Butler’s work. It remains a point of emphasis in Butler’s more recent texts (2005: 133). But now, Butler will add that linguistic norms, social norms and cultural norms are not the only ‘limiting conditions’ we face, and thus do not of themselves exhaust the possible sites of replicability and malleability (see especially Butler 2004a: 16; 2005: 19). By thus extending the logic of her earlier arguments, Butler has radicalised, not hedged on, her earlier work. Butler’s recent work on liveability does not represent an insidious naturalism creeping into her theory at the expense of her politics. Rather, the theme of ‘liveability’ works to open up new sites for political engagement, intervention and transformation.

The language of ethics On this reading of Butler’s ongoing and emerging concerns, her work constitutes an invitation to think through the specific and variable interactions among the many forces that afford, condition and constrain bodily persistence and flourishing. In her recent work, Butler has conceived of this exploration of liveability as a political and ethical problem. As shown in the introduction, several of Butler’s readers see ethics as ‘substituting’ for or ‘pulling against’ politics; in this section, I explore Butler’s own distinctive way of understanding the relationship between these two domains.

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Butler is keenly aware that moralism often moves quickly into the space opened by ethical questions (2009: 87, 51), and so her engagements with ethics begin and remain in ambivalence. Indeed, Butler opens an essay on ‘Ethical Ambivalence’ by claiming that she doesn’t have much to say about ‘why there is a return to ethics, if there is one, in recent years, except to say that [she has] for the most part resisted this return’. She then proposes to offer ‘a map of this resistance and its partial overcoming’ (Butler 2000: 15). I want to underline here both the scepticism Butler expresses about the very idea of an ‘ethical turn’ (or even ‘return’) in the first place, as well as the ambiguity of her own ‘partial overcoming’. She explains her resistance by noting that a ‘return to ethics’ frequently involves ‘an escape from politics’ (Butler 2000: 15). Nevertheless, Butler makes clear that this need not be a reason to desist from engaging in ethical analysis, only a reason to proceed carefully, map in hand. Butler concludes the essay by describing a scene in which ‘there is no innocence, only the navigations of ambivalence’ (Butler 2000: 26). This step away from innocence and purity, this insistence on sticking with ambiguity and ambivalence, informs Butler’s understanding of both the content of ethics and the category of ‘the ethical’. For Butler, the ethical is not a category with clearly delimited boundaries, and so is not something we can confidently turn either towards or away from; she suggests ethics itself may involve a capacity for uncertainty. Although many critics (and some acolytes) associate Levinas’s name with the highly non-­ambivalent, all-­too-­certain stance of moralising, this is not Butler’s Levinas. Her rejection of an ‘innocent’ stance in this essay is not a check on her own Levinasianism; on the contrary, it derives from a reading of Levinas. Butler’s account of Levinas in this short essay is sophisticated, but a bit sketchy, and so a return to Levinas’s own texts can help illustrate the ‘navigations of ambivalence’ emerging from his ethics. As Levinas himself stresses, he does not use the term ‘ethics’ to designate anything ‘moral’ (1987: 116). His work ‘resorted to’ ethical language because that language provides the most ‘adequate’ way to describe a mode of approaching the world otherwise than through ‘knowing’ (Levinas 1998a: 120; see also Davies 1995). ‘Ethical’ is thus, in the first place, Levinas’s way of indicating ‘a relation between terms . . . where they are bound by a plot which knowing can neither exhaust nor unravel’ (Levinas 1987: 116 n. 6). Ethics describes a ‘reversal of certainty’, a ‘relaxation of virility



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without cowardice’ (Levinas 1998a: 56, 185). In its most primary sense, then, ‘the ethical’ names a mode of relationality less structured by a need for certainty, and so less motivated by an anxiety about being ‘duped’.8 This sense of the ethical moves in the same direction as Butler’s ‘navigations of ambivalence’. She calls for ‘a new sense of ethics’ that begins in an experience of ‘the very limits of knowing’ (Butler 2005: 42). She is especially interested in ‘a disposition of humility and generosity’ (Butler 2005: 42). ‘Disposition’ is a key term in this formulation of ethics. As I read Butler, her sense of ‘the ethical’ has little to do with a lofty, quasi-­transcendental domain.9 Her use of the language of ethics comes closer to a more mundane sense of ‘ethics’ derived from Greek sources by way of Michel Foucault. In this tradition, ethics refers to the crafting of character and habit, of an ethos or disposition. But Foucauldian ‘ethics’ and Levinasian ‘ethics’ might have something to say to each other, and both might have something to say to ‘politics’. I take Butler’s recent work to be exploring the questions that follow from this wager. What happens to an ethics of ‘self-­fashioning’ when we highlight (more insistently than Foucault did in his later work) the way the self is fashioned all along by forces that exceed its will, forces that paradoxically fashion the very will that later fashions? What sort of practices might cultivate and follow from a capacity for uncertainty, a ‘relaxation of virility’ distinct from apathy? I insist on calling these questions ethical and political or ethico-­ political because, despite the careful and varied attention Butler has given in recent years to conditions and histories of subject formation, her interest remains in the future – in the ways the future might differ from the past and not merely reproduce it (cf. Edelman 2004). On Butler’s account, ‘precisely at moments of unknowingness, when what forms us diverges from what lies before us’, we find opportunities to ‘risk ourselves’ in the creation of something new. Although she notes that such divergences or undoings can be both ‘a primary necessity’ and ‘an anguish’, she refuses to rest in any naturalism or mortalism, arguing that such moments of uncoupling also present ‘a chance – to be addressed, claimed, bound to what is not me, but also to be moved, to act, to address myself elsewhere, and so to vacate the self-­sufficient “I” as a kind of possession’ (Butler 2005: 136). This move through action beyond the ‘I’ develops arguments present in Butler’s earliest work in gender theory. While she

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­ roposes thinking of gender as a kind of act, in light of ‘the scale p and systemic character’ of sex determination and sexist oppression, Butler also emphasises a need to think of what ‘acts’ in terms other than those of ‘individual action’ (Butler 1988: 525). The action that establishes and sustains gendered embodiment is always a ‘public action’ or an ‘acting in concert’ (Butler 1988: 526). In order to facilitate this transformation of our understanding of ‘action’, Butler draws on an analogy with theatrical performance.10 Just as actors in a theatrical context freshly interpret and enact a pre-­ existing script, and those collective acts of interpretation shape and reshape our sense of what a particular play is or does, ‘so the gendered body acts its part in a culturally restricted corporeal space and enacts interpretations within the confines of already existing directives’ (Butler 1988: 526). Although these latter ‘interpretations’ may often be neither deliberate nor fully conscious, they might become sites for critical intervention and transformation. Butler refers to this process as ‘a difficult labor of forging a future from resources inevitably impure’ (Butler 1993: 241). I take this to be perhaps the central preoccupation of Butler’s large and varied corpus: acting with others to do something with what has been done to you, making something of the ways you have been made, and, in so doing, making alternative modes of collective life possible. If Butler has ‘turned to ethics’, then, she has turned to an ethics that shares these same concerns: ethics imagined as an impure or ambivalent activity of individual and collective transformation.

The ethics of language The way we use and are used by words is one important site for ethico-­ political activity in the sense described in the previous section. Pursuing this thesis involves asking what role language might play in shaping and expanding liveability once language has been de-­centred from its organising place in providing for those possibilities. How might the conjunction of elements Butler pointed to in Excitable Speech – speakability and survival – be further developed in light of the new concerns raised by her more recent work? Taking up these questions through Levinas’s writing, I consider Levinasian themes that push Butler’s exploration of the connections between speech and survival further away from questions of individual persistence and towards modes of political action and relationality.



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My reading of Levinas takes energy from Graham Harman’s suggestion that ‘the narrowly ethical reception of [Levinas’s] thought seems to be one-­sided’, and too easily dissolves into ‘an abstract piety’ (2007: 21, 22). What Harman here calls ‘the narrowly ethical’, I have been calling the moralistic or moralising. Rather than suggest that there are moments in Levinas’s thought that are something other than ‘ethical’, I want only to temporarily set aside the now all too familiar intensity of his formulations of infinite responsibility, the face and the Other (cf. Sparrow 2013). Instead, I focus on Levinas’s fresh take on ‘one of the forgotten central problems of modern philosophy: communication’ (Harman 2007: 26). Because Butler has not so far explored this theme through Levinas’s thought, here I depart from Butler’s explicit engagements with Levinas to offer my own interpretation of his work. In what sense does Levinas consider communication a ‘forgotten problem’ for philosophy? Certainly, philosophy has not forgotten language. Indeed, on Levinas’s view, the philosophical tradition takes language as both its origin and its end. For the mode of thought Levinas calls philosophy, everything can be said – explicated and explained – and what can be said can always be said in terms of what has already been said. Levinas thus defines philosophy as ‘speech directed upon the present’ (1996: 66). But here Levinas draws a surprising conclusion: if language functions as an indexing of whatever appears in terms of the already apparent, it seems that communication is superfluous, or at best redundant, a mere ‘circulation of messages’ (1987: 115, 109). Within the Western philosophical tradition as Levinas understands it, precisely because of its narrow focus on questions of language, communication thus appears as an unfortunate detour in an ongoing process of disclosure in which all possibility for genuine novelty or real surprise are strictly foreclosed (Levinas 1996: 100). Yet, while he considers language to be a traditional locus of the unbroken circle of philosophical thought, Levinas also notes that language gives us one of the best examples of those possibilities otherwise than philosophy, otherwise than knowing, which he calls ethical.11 While the philosophical tradition has focused on the linguistic function of reference – that is, the capacity of language to thematise anything whatsoever as something in particular by relating it to something else already known – language is also for someone. Regardless of what one says, in saying anything,

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l­ anguage produces something available ‘for others’ and not merely ‘about something’. By focusing on the for rather than the as, Levinas thus finds ‘the source of a meaning signifying otherwise’, a communicative dimension of language irreducible to the ‘already said’ and the ‘already present’ (Levinas 1996: 101). There are two dimensions of Levinas’s alternative account of communication I wish to emphasise and put in conversation with Butler’s work: non-­intentionality and non-­reciprocity. Even when I say something ‘as simple as hello’ (Levinas 1996: 103), the meaning of what I say for you may often correspond to the meaning it has for me, but nothing guarantees that it will. This non-­intentional element of communication not only follows all words I might happen to say, but also comes prior to any words I might ever say (Levinas 1998a: 48). Before I offer ‘my opinion’ or say ‘as for me’, I have a meaning ‘for others’ that I do not control or will or intend (Levinas 1998a: 180). One’s meaningfulness is ‘despite oneself’ (Levinas 1998a: 74). This does not mean that meaning is somehow natural rather than cultural: the despite oneself of meaning ‘cannot be converted into an “inward need” or a natural tendency’ (Levinas 1998a: 53).12 Nevertheless, Levinas insists that, regardless of what I intend, and irrespective of how closely my behaviour conforms to those intentions, I am not only what I intend. I am, significantly, despite my intentions, without my consent, and beyond my control. When I speak carefully, wilfully and consciously, I do not terminate but underline this non-­ intentional element of communication. Perhaps my words will not be heard as I intend them. Perhaps I won’t be understood. Perhaps there is not even any ‘other’ there to see or hear me (Levinas 1998a: 120). ‘The for-­the-­other’ always risks becoming ‘for nothing’, the communication of sense always risks becoming ‘pure non-­sense’, but at least by this risk avoids the circular logic of a philosophy for which everything is always already said (Levinas 1998a: 50). For Levinas, meaning not only exceeds my intentions but also any possibility of reciprocity. When significance is for others, it will be for them in a way it cannot be for me. Moreover, my ‘meaningfulness’ is never exhausted. For Levinas, meaning is always characterised by ‘a for of total gratuity’, ‘outside of any correlation and any finality’ (Levinas 1998a: 96). I am never finally ‘for’ one thing but always possibly ‘for’ something more. Even hundreds of years after I die and am completely forgotten, my unknown bones might be studied by some future anthropologist



Signifying Otherwise: Liveability and Language 29

or be used as fuel by some enterprising new explorer. My meaning for them could not be correlated with or returned back as something meaningful to me, since ‘I’ will have been long gone from the scene.13 For Levinas, all meaning, or at least an aspect of all that is meaningful, is similarly accomplished only in ‘a time without me’, a ‘world without me’ (Levinas 1986: 349). Fundamentally non-­ reciprocal, Levinasian communication is thus irreducible to any sort of intersubjective exchange (Levinas 1998a: 48). Meaning for is ‘a one-­way action’ that cannot be ‘inverted into a reciprocity’ or ‘absorbed again in calculations of deficits and compensations, in accountable operations’ (Levinas 1986: 349). Can there be a politics that neither originates from subjective intentions nor aims at intersubjective reciprocity? Levinas himself thought not: he persistently understood politics on liberal terms, as a contract among equal individuals, and explicitly set the de‑subjectification and non-­reciprocity of the ethical against such a politics. Many political theorists, even those who depart from orthodox liberalism, would likely agree that politics requires either a strong theory of individual subjectivity or a normative foundation in reciprocity, if not both. For example, Lynn Sanders (1997) offers a non-­Levinasian theory of political testimony that comes close to what I call Levinasian non-­reciprocity, insofar as she draws attention to forms of talk not anchored or oriented by ‘the pursuit of commonality’, ‘seeking communal dialogue’, ‘finding a common aim’ or ‘the resolution of a community problem’. However, unlike Levinas, Sanders seems to reassert a direct and authoritative subjectivity or interiority, insofar as she is interested in ‘telling one’s own story’, contributing one’s own ‘voice’, ‘views’ or ‘perspective’ (1997: 371–2; cf. Levinas 1996: 98–107). Iris Marion Young, on the other hand, draws on many of the less subjective features of Levinas’s theory of communication that I am also highlighting but she nevertheless remains committed to ideals of reciprocity (2000: 59–61). However, Butler’s work provides a space for revising this understanding of politics. She points to a politics less oriented by either the individual voice, on the one hand, or the correlation and coordination of needs and desires, on the other. For Butler, as for Levinas, language fundamentally exceeds our intentions and ‘is always in some ways out of our control’ (Butler 1997: 15). The words we speak or write ‘continue to signify in spite of their authors, and sometimes against their authors’ most

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precious intentions’ (Butler 1993: 241). Following what Butler calls a ‘not owning of one’s words’, or what Levinas might call the ‘for’ aspect of signification, ‘the hope of ever fully recognizing oneself in the terms by which one signifies is sure to be disappointed’ (Butler 1993: 242). To say that we do not find ourselves in language or return to ourselves through language, however, is not to say that nothing can be found there. Butler figures this possibility in explicitly political terms, insisting that ‘the taking up, reforming, deforming of one’s words does open up a difficult future terrain for community’ (1993: 241). There is a link between language and liveability here, but I now place emphasis on the constitution of a relation, rather than, as in the reading of Excitable Speech traced above, on the ways that an ability to have one’s words heard conditions one’s own chances of persisting and flourishing. Reading Butler with a Levinasian accent, and Levinas with a Butlerian twist, suggests an ethico-­political model of language in which ‘my’ survival is quite precisely ruled out, but ‘our’ vitality is – not secured but – at least made possible.14 Although the vocabulary of an ‘us’ or a ‘community’ often serves to naturalise and depoliticise, Butler mitigates this tendency by describing the ‘we’ in coalitional terms. A coalitional politics, in Butler’s sense, involves thinking beyond ‘some kind of reciprocal relationship and future harmony’ (2009: 162). Rather than ‘agreed-­upon identities or agreed-­upon dialogic structures, through which already established identities are communicated’, Butler characterises a coalition as ‘an emerging and unpredictable assemblage of positions’ (1999: 21, 20). Speech and communication are vitally important here, but their dynamics cannot be reduced to ‘an ideal form’ asserted in advance. For Butler, efforts to ‘determine what is and is not the true shape of dialogue, what constitutes a subject-­position, and, most importantly, when ‘unity’ has been reached’ are neither the preconditions of politics nor goals sought in politics, but a foreclosure in advance of potent spaces for politics (1999: 20). In a politics of coalition, the emergence, convergence and divergence of forms of communication helps to sustain alternative modes of liveability, and the flourishing of new shapes of vitality prompts new representational practices. Lloyd has persuasively argued that ‘translation’ is a basic term and practice in Butler’s conception of politics (2007: 150–4). Effectively, the reading of Butler’s ethico-­political project I am



Signifying Otherwise: Liveability and Language 31

proposing re-­ describes the ‘subversive resignification’ famously elaborated in her work from the 1990s not as the image of politicality, but as one practice among several gathered under the umbrella of ‘practices of translation’.15 Translations are modes of ‘signifying otherwise’, now meant in a sense informed by but not quite reducible to Levinas’s sense of that phrase. Any translation plainly confronts issues of power and plurality, but translation allows ways of negotiating power and plurality otherwise than through subversion or simple reduplication. Practising translation well requires one to tarry with the possibility of misunderstanding, working through languages that one may not fully possess or command, to find some possibility of a shared but differentiated existence. This process cannot be neatly charted or precisely controlled, but Butler has tried to find ways of living with, by and through our non-­ownership of words. Levinas complements these efforts insofar as he offers an ethos of communication that does not seek to secure itself in advance against ‘the risk of misunderstanding’, ‘the risk of lack of and refusal of communication’ (1998a: 119–20; see also 1986: 349). For Levinas, communication becomes communicative only to the extent that it runs the risk of going awry, beset by the possibility that it might blunder or break. This is not to deny the harm that may be done to us by the misuse, misrepresentation, or misunderstanding of our words. It may, however, mean that we need ways of talking about those harms and ways of imagining remedies beyond those that merely attempt to reassert control, ownership and authority.16 It may also mean that we cannot focus on harms alone but must also push ourselves to think and feel the ‘promise’ to be found in those ‘incalculable effects of action’ (Butler 1993: 241). As words move between us, wounds, pains, deformations and misunderstandings may take place. But, as my epigraphs suggest, those apparent failures to relate may in themselves contain potent forms of relationality. Even as I have taken distance from the overly familiar Levinasian themes of responsibility and debt emphasised by Butler, I have been trying with Butler and Levinas to make space to conceive of modes of connection which might similarly ‘admit a difference between oneself and the others’, an ‘inequality, in a sense absolutely opposed to oppression’ (Levinas 1998a: 177).

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Personal and political Butler’s reading of Levinas has so far attracted little attention from those more singularly focused on explicating and expanding on Levinas’s work, and it has been a point of marked scepticism among many readers who have aligned themselves with other aspects or eras of Butler’s work. Here I have shown that both sets of readers would benefit from giving Butler’s ‘Levinasian turn’ another look. Butler’s engagement with Levinas, and with ethical questions more broadly, is not some regrettable turn or detour which she would do well to correct. Rather, her encounters with Levinas represent the ongoing trajectory of her writing striking out into a new domain, one that has already sent back powerful contributions to our understanding of Levinas as a thinker and ethico-­political thought more generally. The ethico-­political here names the diffuse set of problems and puzzles involved in positioning oneself among the various forces that enable, condition and constrain liveability. Practices of communication remain one – though only one – site where liveability is so negotiated. The well-­known mantra of second-­wave feminism, ‘the personal is political’, offers an example of the kind of politics that might take shape there. This phrase still surges with a life that has not been deadened by cliché or zombified by appropriation. But to appreciate this ongoing vitality, one needs to take care to recognise the ways politicality here differs from ‘politics as usual’.17 The feminist community formed under the banner ‘the personal is political’ does not merely shore up the subjectivity of feminist activists as they have known it so far or provide those activists with resources for a course charted in advance, but rather initiates a process that ‘enables and empowers . . . in certain unanticipated ways’ (Butler 1988: 523, my emphasis).18 Butler herself draws out certain analogies between her project and this familiar feminist claim: ‘the personal is political’, she argues, ‘suggests, in part, that . . . my pain or my silence or my anger or my perception is finally not mine alone, and that it delimits me in a shared cultural situation’ (Butler 1988: 523). This sentiment finds a little-­noticed echo in a well-­known passage from Butler’s more recent work: although ‘many people think that grief is privatizing, that it returns us to a solitary situation’, she will claim that ‘it exposes the constitutive sociality of the self’ (Butler 2004b: 19). While the claim ‘the personal is the political’ has often been appropriated for a priva-



Signifying Otherwise: Liveability and Language 33

tised, depoliticised account of individual lifestyles and consumer choices, Butler’s work pushes in the opposite direction: my perception and my anger in the 1980s, no less than my grief in the 2000s, might at first appear merely private, but in fact suggests a complex political relation. The claim that ‘the personal is political’ points to a coalitional mode of politics which involves ‘not just “one’s own” struggle or the apparent struggle of “another” but precisely the dehiscence at the basis of the “we” ’ (Butler 2009: 183). A dehiscence takes place here because the original impetus for transformation cannot be neatly located either here or there, on ‘my side’ or on ‘your side’. On Butler’s account, the claim that ‘my’ feelings are never mine alone involves neither a simple recognition of what I feel in another (‘we feel the same’) nor a mere sympathetic identification with the feelings of others (‘what you feel is like what I once felt’). To name and claim a personal feeling as a political relation is, rather, to situate individual projects and experiences within ‘invariably collective’ forms of ‘acting in concert’ (Butler 2004b: 4; Butler 1988: 526). This form of political action also involves a set of ethical tasks: the formation of habits and sensibilities through experiences of difference. The shaping and crafting of ‘ties that bind and unbind’, ‘the forming and unforming of such bonds’, takes place here in an unsteady rhythm, as one comes to feel the limits of what had felt most obvious and certain (Butler 2009: 182). These moments of ethico-­political dehiscence move us to cede our most cherished comforts and certainties as we act with and are interrupted by others in efforts at expanding possible forms of life, at nourishing those for whom liveability has been violently foreclosed, at dismantling and replacing systems that secure survival for some only through the disavowal and exploitation of what might otherwise be vibrant and vital.

Notes   1. I have adapted this first sentence from the first sentence of Totality and Infinity: ‘Everyone will readily agree that it is the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality’ (Levinas 1969: 21). My title is also drawn from Levinas (1996: 101). The paper greatly benefited from the generous editorial guidance of Moya Lloyd, thoughtful readings from Samuel Chambers and Timothy Vasko, and years of agonal exchange with Drew Walker.

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 2. For a concise elaboration of this position, see Levinas 1998b: 100–1. For her part, however, Butler has suggested that in his more practical writings Levinas sometimes helps himself to an illicit blurring of the ethical and the political (2005: 91–6; see also Butler 2012). Crucially, although Butler has been critical of these moments of slippage in Levinas, she has not articulated that critique in terms of a need to shore up the boundary between the ethical and the political.   3. Although some have seen ‘a concern with “livability” ’ as one of the distinctive features of Butler’s writing since 2000 (Mitchell 2008: 418), my arguments here build on those of Vicki Bell, who traces the genealogy of ‘livability’ in Butler’s fundamental concern with ‘matters of survival’ (Bell 2008).  4. Moreover, Butler’s critique of Giorgio Agamben suggests that she does not consider ‘mere life’ in itself a coherent or promising political ideal, and thus remains quite far from positing the undifferentiated ‘common humanity’ Honig ascribes to her (see Butler 2004a: 67–8; Butler and Spivak 2007: 40–3). Finally, contra Honig’s suggestion that Butler’s writing since Precarious Life adopts a limited ‘affective repertoire’ (Honig 2013: 44), I find that ‘a wide range of affects’ flows through Butler’s recent work (Butler 2009: 33–4). Indeed, Butler faults Levinas for his failure to account for the ‘range of affective response’ that might accompany subject formation (Butler 2005: 98). None of this is exactly news to Honig. In Antigone, Interrupted (2013), Honig does not moderate her argument about Butler’s recent work, but is more careful to say where the distinctions drawn between her position and Butler’s are differences of emphasis rather than kind. This is fair enough as far as it goes; an attention to tone and emphasis may draw out important features of an argument missed by other modes of analysis. However, I have found it productive to suggest ways we might read Butler with a different set of accents and underlinings.   5. See Butler 2004a: 145–6, Butler 1993: 128–31. In the case of gendered embodiment, this does not mean that those who aim at or convincingly approach normative gender presentations are somehow ‘bad’ or ‘merely hegemonic’, only that those practices would have to be thought in their specificity. Engagements with Butler’s work motivated by trans and lesbian-­ femme concerns have helpfully underlined this point (see Halberstam 2005: 50–3, Samuels 2003).  6. The language of the raw is drawn directly from Frames of War, while my invocation of ‘cultural cooking’ is meant to suggest a link



Signifying Otherwise: Liveability and Language 35

between this ‘raw’ and Butler’s earlier analysis of the ‘raw’ of Claude Lévi-­Strauss (Butler 1999: 47).  7. The central and provocative claim of that work was that, while earlier feminist theorists had productively contested ‘naturalistic explanations of sex and sexuality’, the most common tool for doing so, ‘distinguishing sex and gender’, recapitulated the very naturalism that it was intended to interrupt (Butler 1988: 520). Distinguishing sex from gender helped to contest the idea that having a certain kind of sexed body necessitated doing certain gendered actions, but tended to shore up an understanding of sex as a ‘biological facticity’ (Butler 1988: 522). By reducing the body to ‘a predetermined or foreclosed structure, essence or fact’, these naturalistic models of sex constrain political imagination (Butler 1988: 523); Butler’s work, by contrast, considers sex, just as much as gender, in terms of action rather than as ‘a substantial core’ that exists ‘prior to the various acts, postures, and gestures by which it is . . . known’ (Butler 1988: 528). See Chambers 2003, Lloyd 2008 and Honig 2010. Each of these authors, in different ways and in some cases quite persuasively, have argued that certain elements in Butler’s thought since Gender Trouble have come to function as pre-­discursive and apolitical essences awaiting cultural elaboration and thus are analogous to ‘sex’ in the feminist theories of sex/gender rejected above. What I elaborate in the main text, drawing primarily on a book by Butler that appeared after their essays were initially published, is not meant to ‘disprove’ their arguments so much as show that she remains attentive to such concerns.  8. In this way, his famous question about morality, with which I opened, might be read as a ‘trick question’: we have not been ‘duped by morality’; rather, we are ‘duped’ by an endless concern about being duped, by the endless quest for lucidity and enlightenment that has defined the philosophical tradition’s self-­interpretation as ‘a break with naivety’ or a departure from mere opinion. Levinas situates even someone as ‘up-­to-­date’ as Jacques Derrida within that tradition, and ventures to ask whether there might ‘be something misguided about these dreams of a unnaive beginning’ (Davies 2002: 166, glossing Levinas 1996: 20). One way for otherwise sceptical readers to appreciate the radicalism of Levinas’s work is to note the striking parallels between Derrida’s critique of Michel Foucault’s History of Madness and the questions he puts to Levinas’s Totality and Infinity, and the even more surprising continuities in the responses by the respective authors of those works. In both

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of his essays, Derrida is centrally concerned with the moral and methodological difficulties inherent in trying to gesture towards ‘a certain silence’, which he takes to be the project of both Levinas and Foucault. How can we point to what philosophy has silenced except by way of philosophical language? Wouldn’t the only alternative be to simply pass over that silence in silence, and thus to repeat the violence of silencing? (Derrida 1978: 35–6, 117, 148). Like Levinas, Foucault will respond in part by suggesting that Derrida’s questions make him the best and most recent representative of a philosophical anxiety about naivety, and Foucault too sought to step back from or relax that anxiety (2006: 576, 589–90). I point out this parallelism not necessarily to take cheap shots at Derrida, Derrideans and/or philosophers (after all, ‘some of my best friends are . . .’), but in the service of my general mission to make Levinas a more appealing and radical figure for readers of Butler who might otherwise be inclined to dismiss him.  9. In other words, Butler does not exactly follow more orthodox readers of Levinas, who remain within the frame of thinking ‘ethics as the infinite responsibility of the face-­to-­face relation’ (Critchley 2004: 173). 10. In her initial formulation, Butler is explicit that the language of ‘“performative” itself carries the double-­ meaning of “dramatic” and “non-­referential” ’ (1988: 522). This deliberate exploitation of a conceptual proximity between ‘performance’ and ‘performative’ is humorously mirrored in an apparently unintentional editorial slippage between the two: the first page of the essay announces its title as ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’, but the header that runs across the top of the article’s subsequent pages reads ‘Performance Acts and Gender Constitution’. Butler wavers on the usefulness of the theatrical understanding of performance in Bodies that Matter (Butler 1993: 12). However, she subsequently reaffirms the earlier formulation (Butler 1999: xxv). 11. For Levinas, this insistence that it is possible to interrupt or get beyond the closures of philosophy is the central difference between himself and Derrida. He characterises Derrida’s critical response to Totality and Infinity as follows: ‘“Not to philosophize is still to philosophize.” The philosophical discourse of the West claims the amplitude of an all-­encompassing structure or of an ultimate comprehension. It compels every other discourse to justify itself before philosophy’ (Levinas 1996: 129). In his own voice, however, Levinas



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will conclude that the modes of signification he attends to make it possible to imagine a way in which ‘not to philosophize would not be “to philosophize still” ’ (Levinas 1996: 148). While, again, more robust readings of Derrida are certainly possible, I take this difference to be an important one, and it has guided my choice of Levinas, rather than Derrida, as a figure to read alongside Butler’s work on liveability, language and ethics. 12. Underlining this theme might push Butler’s thought away from the Spinozist theme of a ‘desire for life’ flagged by Chambers and Lloyd as especially problematic. Note, however, that other readings of Spinoza, and Butler’s Spinozism, are also possible. For example, in relation to Butler, Gordon Hull offers readers a ‘tragic Spinoza’ who insists on contingency, who is a critic of the ‘tendency to naturalize and/or ontologize’, and for whom conatus is not so much stable ‘bedrock’ but an insistent ‘principle of deconstitution’ (Hull 2012: 158, 154). 13. That I might in some way continue to confront existence after my death is figured by Levinas as something not so much impossible as it is horrifying. Aligning horror with the ‘return of presence in negation’, Levinas suggests that ‘Hamlet recoils before the “not to be” because he has a foreboding of the return of being (“to dye, to sleepe, perchance to Dreame”)’ (Levinas 1978: 57). 14. This need not mean that I physically die, of course, only that I cease to exist as the I that I have been until now. Despite the differences I am playing up here, both physical survival and the possibility of community are crucially important and importantly linked: ‘We should not underestimate what the thought of the possible does for those for whom the very issue of survival is most urgent’ (Butler 2004b: 29; see also Butler 1999: viii). 15. Reading somewhat with and somewhat against Butler 2004b, 38. For four very different accounts of the limits of an exclusive focus on ‘resignification’, see Sedgwick 1993, Cheah 1996, Edelman 2004 and Mahmood 2012. 16. My dissertation contributes to the development of such a vocabulary and imaginative repertoire through a different line of thinkers and themes. 17. For a recent account of both the origins of the phrase and the trajectory of its diminution, see Hesford 2013: 119–30. 18. Although these formulations obviously tilt a bit more towards Butler than Levinas, consider that another way Levinas designates the ‘for’ element of meaning is with the Greek word leitourgia, a ‘liturgy’

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References Bell, Vikki (2008), ‘From Performativity to Ecology: On Judith Butler and Matters of Survival’, Subjectivity, 25: 1, 395–412. Butler, Judith (1988), ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’, Theatre Journal, 40: 4, 519–31. Butler, Judith (1993), Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith (1997), Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith (1999), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Tenth Anniversary Edition, New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith (2000), ‘Ethical Ambivalence’, in Marjorie B. Garber, Beatrice Hanssen and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (eds), The Turn to Ethics, New York: Routledge, pp. 15–28. Butler, Judith (2004a), Precarious Life, London and New York: Verso. Butler, Judith (2004b), Undoing Gender, New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith (2005), Giving an Account of Oneself, New York: Fordham University Press. Butler, Judith (2009), Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, London and New York: Verso. Butler, Judith (2012), Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, New York: Columbia University Press. Butler, Judith, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (2007), Who Sings the Nation-­State?: Language, Politics, Belonging, London and New York: Seagull Books. Chambers, Samuel A. (2003), Untimely Politics, New York: New York University Press. Cheah, Pheng (1996), ‘Mattering’, Diacritics 26: 1, 108–39.



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Critchley, Simon (2004), ‘Five Problems in Levinas’s View of Politics and the Sketch of a Solution to them’, Political Theory, 32: 2, 172–85. Coole, Diana (2008), ‘Butler’s Phenomenological Existentialism’, in Terrell Carver and Samuel A. Chambers (eds), Judith Butler’s Precarious Politics: Critical Encounters, New York: Routledge, pp. 11–27. Davies, Paul (1995), ‘On Resorting to an Ethical Language’, in Adriaan Peperzak (ed.), Ethics as First Philosophy: The Significance of Emmanuel Levinas for Philosophy, Literature, and Religion, New York: Routledge, pp. 95–104. Davies, Paul (2002), ‘Sincerity and the End of Theodicy: Three Remarks on Levinas and Kant’, in Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 161–87. Derrida, Jacques (1978), Writing and Difference, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Edelman, Lee (2004), No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Foucault, Michel (2006), History of Madness, New York: Routledge. Harman, Graham (2007), ‘Aesthetics as First Philosophy: Levinas and the Non-­Human’, Naked Punch, 9: 21–30. Hesford, Victoria (2013), Feeling Women’s Liberation, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Halberstam, Judith (2005), In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, New York: New York University Press. Honig, Bonnie (1993), Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Honig, Bonnie (2009), Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Honig, Bonnie (2010), ‘Antigone’s Two Laws: Greek Tragedy and the Politics of Humanism’, New Literary History, 41:1, 1–33. Honig, Bonnie (2013), Antigone, Interrupted, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hull, Gordon (2012), ‘Of Suicide and Falling Stones: Finitude, Contingency, and Corporeal Vulnerability in (Judith Butler’s) Spinoza’, in Hasana Sharp and Jason E. Smith (eds), Between Hegel and Spinoza: A Volume of Critical Essays, New York: Bloomsbury, pp. 151–69. Levinas, Emmanuel (1969), Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, Pittsburgh: Duquesne. Levinas, Emmanuel (1979), Existence and Existents, Pittsburgh: Duquesne. Levinas, Emmanuel (1986), ‘The Trace of the Other’, in Mark C. Taylor

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(ed.) Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 345–59. Levinas, Emmanuel (1987), Collected Philosophical Papers, Boston: Kluwer Academic. Levinas, Emmanuel (1996), Basic Philosophical Writings, Adriaan Theodoor Peperzak, Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi (eds), Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel (1998a), Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, Pittsburgh: Duquesne. Levinas, Emmanuel (1998b), Entre Nous: On Thinking-­of-­the-­Other, New York: Columbia University Press. Lloyd, Moya (2007), Judith Butler: From Norms to Politics, Cambridge: Polity. Lloyd, Moya (2008), ‘Towards a Cultural Politics of Vulnerability: Precarious Lives and Ungrievable Deaths’, in Terrell Carver and Samuel A. Chambers (eds), Judith Butler’s Precarious Politics: Critical Encounters, New York: Routledge, pp. 92–106. Mahmood, Saba (2012), Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mitchell, Kaye (2008), ‘Unintelligible Subjects: Making Sense of Gender, Sexuality and Subjectivity After Butler’, Subjectivity, 25: 1, 413–31. Sanders, Lynn M. (1997), ‘Against Deliberation’, Political Theory, 25: 3, 347–76. Samuels, Ellen (2003), ‘My Body, My Closet: Invisible Disability and the Limits of Coming-­Out Discourse’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 9: 1, 233–55. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1993), ‘Queer Performativity: Henry James’s the Art of the Novel’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 1: 1, 1–16. Segal, Lynne (2008), ‘After Judith Butler: Identities, Who Needs Them?’, Subjectivity, 25: 1, 381–94. Sparrow, Tom (2013), Levinas Unhinged, Arlesford: Zero Books. Young, Iris Marion (2000), Inclusion and Democracy, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

2

Undoing Ethics: Butler on Precarity, Opacity and Responsibility Catherine Mills

Introduction The concept of vulnerability has been an important point of reference for recent feminist interventions in ethics and political philosophy. Arguments have been made for the necessity of a concept of vulnerability in diverse fields, and there have been several recent books and collections on the concept. While different approaches have been proposed, one core aspect of this turn to vulnerability is a deep interest in the idea of a universal vulnerability that is characteristic, if not definitional, of the human. Judith Butler’s reflections on the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center in Precarious Life (2004a) and recent works such as Dispossession (Butler and Athanasiou 2013) provide one particularly significant and influential articulation of this idea. In these works, Butler presents a case for the ethical and political importance of recognising the vulnerability that necessarily attends subjectivity insofar as the subject is given over to others from the start. The ethical implications of this vulnerability are most clearly elaborated in Giving an Account of Oneself (Butler 2005), where she argues that it is by virtue of the fundamental opacity of the subject to itself that ethical responsibility is incurred and sustained. Whether identified as precariousness or opacity, for Butler, universal vulnerability is always tied to the corporeal interdependency or fundamental relationality that grounds subjectivity, figured in part through the status of the infant in its radical dependency on others for its survival. Thus, she simultaneously reworks the terms of bodily ontology and ethics. What is interesting about Butler’s account, then, is the way that she attempts to build an approach to ethics on the basis of a universal vulnerability that emerges in a revised bodily ontology. That 41

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the condition of vulnerability has a normative force is not in itself a new claim, as it has been of central – though not ­uncontested – importance to various approaches to vulnerability as a moral concept. However, other theorists have generally sought to elaborate the normative implications of vulnerability in terms of situational vulnerability or the unjust distribution of social goods. For Butler, the universal vulnerability that attends being human itself has a kind of normative force. That is, it is the primary vulnerability that arises from our relational corporeality that provides the essential motivation for an ethics. This is not simply because primary vulnerability predestines us to a more situational vulnerability, though it may do that, but because our vulnerability as humans is indicative of the way that each of us is given over to others from the start. This common condition of being given over entails that the subject is never able to attain the moral ideal of a self-­directed, rationally motivated and wholly self-­knowing agent. But rather than stymieing efforts towards ethics, this ‘failure’ is ultimately generative of ethics, insofar as one recognises these limits as the shared predicament of oneself and all others. In this chapter, I will examine the nature of this failure, to question whether it is adequate to the task of generating a new way of thinking about ethics, one which Butler argues should be ‘non-­ violent’. I am not going to be concerned here with the question of whether such an ethics can rightly be described as ‘non-­violent’ – or whether a non-­violent ethics is possible within Butler’s theoretical framework, and at what theoretical cost it might be achieved. I have addressed these questions in another article (Mills 2008), to which the current discussion can be seen as something of a companion piece that investigates more closely the conceptualisation of vulnerability that Butler is proposing. Throughout this investigation, I will trace the development of Butler’s approach to ethics, arguing throughout that this cannot strictly be understood as an ethics of relationality, since responsibility is for her primarily a responsibility for oneself. As I will show, this opens a problem in terms of the normative status of the other, or in other words, of the ‘ought’ of ethics. I suggest that this problem is resolved in a turn to the thematic of substitutability. But this ultimately means that her emphasis on the common, on what we humans share with one another, ties her efforts more strongly to traditional ethical thinking than she may really wish. That is, we are capable of an ethical relationship with another because of what we have in



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common, of what we share. Thus, her ethics founders on the twin of sovereign conceptions of subjectivity – community conceived as commonality.

Towards an ethics of failure Although vulnerability has long been important within Butler’s work,1 it is in her work from about 2004 onwards that she develops this theme most systematically, particularly with an eye to disclosing its ethical and political implications. As the various claims that she makes of vulnerability are not always consistent across the relevant texts, I want here to provide a brief summary of each of the major discussions, not in order to impress overall coherence upon them, but to bring out the stepwise development of Butler’s thinking on vulnerability and ethics. The first major text to consider is Precarious Life, in which two essays are of particular importance for this discussion – ‘Violence, Mourning, Politics’, and ‘Precarious Life’. Butler poses Precarious Life, published in 2004, as a response to the post-­9/11 political climate in the US – the ‘conditions of heightened vulnerability and aggression’ (Butler 2004a: xi) that followed these attacks on American soil – and asks whether a different form of political reflection might emerge if injurability and aggression are taken as departure points. In ‘Violence, Mourning, Politics’, Butler takes up the problem of injurability through the prism of a fundamental dependency on others and the vulnerability that this necessarily entails. In the midst of arguing for the political valency of grief, she posits that loss and vulnerability ‘follow from our being socially constituted bodies’, whereby the attachment to another always threatens us with loss, and exposure to others threatens us with violence (Butler 2004a: 20). This brings out the double edge of what one can call relationality2 – we are not only constituted by and through relations with others, but also dispossessed by those relations. In a sense, relationality is necessarily ecstatic in that it always renders one ‘beside oneself’, both constituted and undone by one’s attachment to another. This emerges, in part, from the physical or corporeal dependency of one upon another, a dependency that yields a normative aspiration insofar as it compels us to ‘take stock of our interdependence’ (Butler 2004a: 27). At times, this physical dependency is understood through the radical dependency of the infant, who is fundamentally and ­ radically

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exposed to the care and touch of others insofar as he or she could not survive without that care and touch. But this does not mean that the relational dependency that Butler is working with is limited to that figuration; infancy is not a period of dependency that we ‘grow out of’ but entails a primary dependency that we cannot escape and that will ultimately provide the impetus for an ethics in its ineluctability and irrecoverability. Perhaps what distinguishes Butler’s account of vulnerability most in this text is the way that she entangles it with questions of humanisation and dehumanisation, that is, with a kind of constitutive violence that shapes what can even appear as an appropriate subject of ethical response. Certainly, Butler concedes that there is differential vulnerability to prosaic violence, but this is not her principal concern. Rather, she focuses on the way that norms regulate the social field, and thus the ethical encounter, such that the very recognition of the vulnerability of another may be foreclosed, shut out of the possibilities of discourse and of grief. She writes: [a] vulnerability must be perceived and recognized in order to come into play in an ethical encounter . . . if vulnerability is one precondition for humanization, and humanization takes place differentially through variable norms of recognition, then it follows that vulnerability is fundamentally dependent on existing norms of recognition if it is to be attributed to any human subject . . . [thus,] norms of recognition are essential to the constitution of vulnerability as the precondition of the ‘human’. (Butler 2004a: 43)3

Butler’s formulation here is somewhat contorted, in that it is never really clear whether the attribution of vulnerability allows for recognition of the human as human, or whether humanisation allows for the recognition of vulnerability. One way to read this is to say that neither the human nor vulnerability can be posited as prior to the other, but are instead intertwined in a way that is mediated by the force of regulatory norms, such that at times they are mutually constitutive and at other times, mutually destructive. But there is also a tension or hesitation in Butler’s theorisation here, whereby vulnerability is posited as both a precondition of humanisation, and an attribute of the human. Thus, we can ask, in what sense is a precondition an attribute? Or, what kinds of vulnerability are at stake here – and what is the cost of conflating them?



Undoing Ethics 45

I will return to this question later, but first, let me continue tracing the development of Butler’s thought on vulnerability. The eponymous essay of Precarious Life (Butler 2004a) extends on this initial theorisation to consider the obligation that arises in the encounter with the other, and in particular, its imbrication with aggression or violence. Her central claim, derived in large part from Levinas, is that moral obligation does not emerge from one’s autonomy, but from heteronomy – that is, from the address of the other, figured in the Levinasian notion of the ‘face’. Of interest to Butler is Levinas’s linking of the face with the commandment ‘thou shalt not kill’, where the face simultaneously appears as an incitement to killing, thereby tying questions of responsibility for the other together with the provocation for their destruction. For Butler, Levinas’s philosophy offers two possibilities for thinking about vulnerability and its relation to ethics: he opens a way firstly to think the relationship between representation and humanisation, and secondly to consider the relationship between ethics and violence in a manner that may help to generate a non-­ violent ethics. The first of these concerns preoccupies Butler in the remainder of this essay, with the latter concern more deeply mined in later works. Before I turn to these works, let me briefly note that in this essay Butler refers to ‘precariousness’ as a synonym or substitute for vulnerability, a term that Levinas uses as well. But, as with the previous essay, she does not allow for the differentiation of different kinds of precariousness, such as what we might call the ontological and ontic, or universal and situational. Thus, questions about whether all lives are precarious or whether some are more precarious than others, and moreover, the relation between these conditions, are somewhat obscured. It is worth noting at this point that Butler is here less interested in the recognition of the vulnerability of the other, than she is in the recognition of the potential injuriousness of oneself – an injuriousness that emerges from the denial of one’s own vulnerability. We can postulate that this emphasis is supposed to place a limit on the potential violence that emerges when confronted by the vulnerability of the other. As Ann Murphy astutely analyses, there is nothing internal to the recognition of the vulnerability of the other that entails that responses to the other will not take the form of violent aggression. In fact, it may be precisely that vulnerability that generates violence (Murphy 2012: 74). This, of course, is the

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central tension of the Levinasian approach that Butler is working within, and she is well aware of the insuperable connection between violence and vulnerability. However, it is perhaps Butler’s hope that recognising, and further, ‘abiding with’ one’s own vulnerability will help to curb one’s more aggressive and destructive tendencies; learning to live with one’s vulnerability, and the incipient grief and loss it entails, may be requisite for the new forms of community that Butler gestures towards. As we will see later, ultimately for Butler community emerges out of the recognition that vulnerability is a mode of existence not only for oneself but for all others as well, that new forms of community emerge through the avowal of a ‘common human vulnerability’ (Butler 2004a: 31). As this reveals, though, what is missing from Butler’s analysis at this point are the ethical motifs of empathy and forgiveness, which would allow one to move from avowal of one’s own vulnerability (and related propensity to violence), to the recognition of the vulnerability of the other. Frames of War (Butler 2009a) consists of essays written between 2004 and 2008, and while Butler rarely explicitly engages Levinas in this text, it can nevertheless be read as taking up the provocations of Levinas’s philosophy that she identified in Precarious Life. As such, it recasts and to some extent deepens her earlier reflections on vulnerability, grief and representation. The key leitmotif that carries across Precarious Life and Frames of War is that of the relation between representation and humanisation. In the first of these books, Butler drew on Levinas to initiate a study of the way that the framing of images of war plays into the normative schemes that establish humanisation or dehumanisation, and involves a suspension of the precariousness of life (Butler 2004a: 143). She here identifies two forms of occlusion of the human – first, the ‘symbolic identification of the face with the inhuman’ such that the human cannot be discerned in the image, and second, the radical effacement of the human, such that ‘there never was a human’ and the realm of appearance is constituted on the basis of this exclusion (Butler 2004a: 147). This analysis is extended in Frames of War, where the framing of the image is tied more explicitly to the social mobilisation of affect. She argues, with and against Susan Sontag, that the ‘transitive affectivity’ of the photograph neither numbs nor determines a particular response; rather, unlike in previous war photography, the state now ‘works on the field of perception and, more generally, the field of r­epresentability, in



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order to control affect – in anticipation of the way affect is not only structured by interpretation but structures interpretation as well’ (Butler 2009a: 72). This can happen because the frame of the image enacts norms of humanisation and delimits what or who can appear as the victim of violence, rightfully entitled to protection from (state-­sanctioned) violence. However, though it is difficult to see the frame and the exclusions enacted therein, these frames and norms are not inscrutable. The critical task, she suggests, is to ‘learn to see the frame that blinds us’, in order to develop a ‘sensate opposition to war’ (Butler 2009a: 100; also see Jenkins 2013). While many of Butler’s reflections in Frames of War follow on from Precarious Life, she also introduces several innovations that shift the terrain of her discussion. For one, she now introduces a distinction between precarity and precariousness, where the latter is a ‘more or less existential concept’ and the former is ‘more specifically political’. Further, she claims that it is the differential allocation of precarity that should provide the departure point for ‘both a rethinking of bodily ontology and for progressive or left politics’ (Butler 2009a: 3). Outlining the distinction further, she writes that precariousness and precarity are ‘intersecting’ concepts, where ‘lives are by definition precarious’ since they are subject to mortality and their persistence is not in the least guaranteed, and ‘precarity designates that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence and death’ (Butler 2009a: 25). She then reasserts the political priority of precarity, writing that ‘[t]his work [Frames of War] seeks to reorient politics on the Left towards a consideration of precarity as an existing and promising site for coalitional exchange’ (Butler 2009a: 25). However, even given this priority Butler also asserts, ‘[t]he recognition of shared precariousness introduces strong normative commitments to equality and invites a more robust universalizing of rights that seeks to address basic human needs’ (Butler 2009a: 21–2). What are we to make of this? In drawing the distinction between precariousness and precarity, Butler appears to be moving close to a standard analytic distinction between a universal vulnerability characteristic of human life by virtue of our embodiment (which entails finitude and a fundamental sociality), and a situational vulnerability that renders some humans more at risk than others of exploitation, injustice

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and violence.4 Further, she keeps company with many other philosophers of vulnerability in asserting the political priority of situational vulnerability, or what she calls precarity. What sets her apart somewhat, though, is the linking of normative commitments to equality and justice to the recognition of universal vulnerability, or the ‘existential’ condition of precariousness. This places an onus on her to provide some explanation of the relationship between the normative force of precariousness, and the political import of precarity. Moreover, some explanation of why precariousness has this normative force should also be forthcoming. Now, it is conceivable that precariousness does give rise to obligation – that the existential condition of our ‘predestination’ to loss, grief and death, as well as our primary entanglement in the lives of others, means that we are always bound to others in a way that can be understood as entailing obligation. But while precariousness may thus give rise to an obligation, it does not determine the shape of that obligation, or tell us what it is. Thus, Butler’s claim that the recognition of precariousness entails a commitment to egalitarianism and the universalisation of rights appears to be without justification. To be fair, however, one needs to be mindful of the specific terms that Butler uses to limn the relation that she sees between precariousness and normativity. For she does not commit herself to the view that normative commitments are necessarily generated by precariousness – but only to the idea that they are ‘invited’ or ‘introduced’ by it. Further, in examining this problem in more depth, she writes that ‘[t]he postulation of a generalized precariousness that calls into question the ontology of individualism implies, although it does not directly entail, certain normative consequences’ (Butler 2009a: 33, emphasis added). Butler’s point here is subtle, but by this, one can understand that normative consequences do not necessarily flow from precariousness or universal vulnerability; that is, the concept is not intrinsically normative. Nevertheless, it may be that normative consequences do, at least in certain circumstances, follow from such vulnerability. In other words, normativity is entangled with vulnerability – or it is signified by it – but is not intrinsic or necessary to it. I will return to this question of the entanglement of vulnerability and normativity in the following section. For now, I wish to note one further aspect of the distinction between precarity and precariousness. Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of reading Frames of War is Butler’s apparent failure to abide by the distinction she draws



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between precariousness and precarity. For instance, she speaks of the ‘differential distribution of precariousness’ (Butler 2009a: 31) or the need and obligation to ‘minimize precariousness in egalitarian ways . . . Precariousness grounds such positive social obligations . . . at the same time that the aim of such obligations is to minimize precariousness and its unequal distribution’ (Butler 2009a: 22). Here, precariousness is conflated with precarity, since, one would assume, the point of precariousness as a universal or common feature of the human is that it is not unequally distributed. Of course, precarity is unequally distributed – and a commitment to egalitarianism may be a commendable (though not necessary) response to that unequal distribution. Now, there is certainly a strong practical relationship between precarity and precariousness, insofar as greater exposure to the former allows the latter to predominate in some lives in ways that it does not in others. Further, there is a conceptual relation insofar as both may be said to arise in some way or another from conditions of human plurality. But this still does not mean that precarity and precariousness are interchangeable. At times, then, it appears as if the distinction Butler has drawn is overwhelmed by the limitations in her approach in fully reckoning with precarity.5 At this point, I would like to turn to another work of Butler’s, namely Giving an Account of Oneself, since while the term ‘vulnerability’ rarely appears in the text itself, this book can nevertheless be read as the most systematic account of the ethical implications of this notion that Butler offers. The guiding hypothesis of this book is summarised in Butler’s statement that [i]f it is precisely by virtue of one’s relations to others that one is opaque to oneself, and if those relations to others are the venue for one’s ethical responsibility, then it may well follow that it is precisely by virtue of the subject’s opacity to itself that it incurs and sustains some of its most important ethical bonds. (2005: 20)

Several things should be briefly noted about this claim. First, the vulnerability that takes hold by virtue of our dependency upon others is here rendered in a more obviously epistemological order than previously, under the term ‘opacity’. This is not to say that vulnerability is simply a matter of unknowability or ignorance; it is that, but not simply that, since the epistemological and ontological are always imbricated in Butler’s work.6 But there is a

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t­erminological, and hence theoretical, difference between this text and those already discussed. Second, while Levinas’s work is again a significant theoretical resource in Giving an Account, this statement already marks some of Butler’s distance from Levinas – there is no conception of responsibility as an infinite demand here. Third, it is significant that it is the subject’s inability to know itself, that is, its failure to achieve the status typically required to the moral subject, that ultimately founds an ethics for Butler – that is, it is ultimately from failure that Butler’s conception of ethics emerges. Let me now elaborate Butler’s claim in more detail. The first step in Butler’s argument is to provide a revised ontology of ethical subjectivity that establishes the fundamental dependency of the subject on others for its existence, and by virtue of that, its necessary opacity to itself. Butler’s starting point is the view that narrating oneself or giving an account of oneself is prompted by an encounter with another – it is always in a condition of relationality, the condition of being addressed by another, that one seeks to elaborate who one is. Within this scene of address, two conditions necessarily limit the capacity of the subject to give a complete account of itself and to render itself transparent to itself and to others. First, Butler postulates that our ‘primary relations are formative in ways that produce a necessary opacity in our understanding of ourselves’ (2005: 20–1). Second, social norms also confound the narrative of the subject, lending the very terms of intelligibility and forming a ‘domain of unfreedom and substitutability within which our “singular” stories are told’ (Butler 2005: 21).7 The first of these claims is elaborated in reference to Jean Laplanche’s psychoanalytic account of the emergence of infantile subjectivity in the face of the overwhelming demand made upon the infant by its carers and the world. For Laplanche, infantile life is characterised not only by helplessness but also an ‘opening to the world’ that requires a primary repression of the ‘messages’ of the adult world that he or she is incapable of handling. This primary repression ultimately means two things: first, affect originates from the outside, and it always maintains this external character, and second, this primary repression through which subjectivity emerges lies outside the articulable. As Butler writes, the ‘origin of affect cannot be recovered through proper articulation, whether in narrative form or in any other medium of expression . . . no subject can narrate the story of a primary repression that constitutes the



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irrecoverable basis of his or her own formation’ (Butler 2005: 72). Laplanche thus gives a psychoanalytic priority to the other, which means that attachment is ‘overdetermined from the start’ and the emergence of the ego is necessarily tremulous – it is a ‘struggle that can have only limited achievement’ (Butler 2005: 74).8 Adding to this scene of being necessarily outside of oneself, dependent on the other for one’s own formative desires, Butler circumscribes the encounter with the other in the scene of address within the operation of ineluctable social norms, a view she arrives at through a combination of Foucault and Hegel. The import of this is threefold. First, the terms through which one can give an account of oneself are always already foreign to oneself – they precede and exceed the time of one’s being, thus rendering the account that one gives of oneself not exactly false, but impersonal. Second, this entails that the ethical encounter itself is cut through with norms that regulate the possibility of recognisability, including the recognition of the other as other. Butler writes, [i]n asking the ethical question ‘How ought I to treat another?’ I am immediately caught up in a realm of social normativity, since the other only appears to me, only functions as an other for me, if there is a frame within which I can see and apprehend the other in her separateness and exteriority. (2005: 25)

Third, the ‘normative horizon’ of recognition may be subject to rupture and critical transformation, in the Foucauldian sense, when a demand or desire for recognition is not easily accommodated within existing norms. Having thus established the relation between opacity and ­relationality – the subject is opaque to itself because of its primary dependence on others and its dependence on social norms that are shared with others for recognition – we can now begin to consider the link that Butler is postulating between relationality and responsibility. In the quote above, Butler refers to relationality as the ‘venue’ of responsibility. What might this mean? Interestingly, this would appear to mean that relationality is not the cause or source of ethical responsibility as it is often supposed – we are not responsible for the other because of our fundamental entanglement with them on this account. Rather, casting relationality as the ‘venue’ of responsibility means that relationality is the place in which responsibility happens – it is the place of its taking place.

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Relationality allows responsibility to take place, but it does not cause it as such. It neither grounds nor generates it, though it does make it possible in some sense. Perhaps similarly, a concert hall is the place for a concert to happen, but is not strictly the cause or source of that concert. The concert could conceivably take place elsewhere, though it would then necessarily be a different concert. To summarise, then, relationality itself does not give rise to responsibility; rather, it is the opacity of the subject that yields responsibility, and relationality is the place or occasion of the realisation of that responsibility. Instead of locating the source of responsibility in relationality, Butler locates it in the opacity of the subject to itself. As she writes in the quote above, ‘it is precisely by virtue of the subject’s opacity to itself that it incurs and sustains some of its most important ethical bonds’ (Butler 2005: 20). Or, more directly, ‘my own foreignness to myself, is, paradoxically, the source of my ethical connection with others’ (Butler 2005: 84). Granted, this opacity or foreignness in part derives from our primary dependency on and entanglement with others, but for reasons that become clearer later, Butler nevertheless refrains from positing relationality as the fundamental source of responsibility in Giving an Account of Oneself. This identification of the opacity of the subject to itself as the source of responsibility places Butler’s account of ethical responsibility in direct contrast with theories of ethics that make autonomy a prerequisite of responsibility. It also short-­circuits the attempt to maintain the moral priority of autonomy, while arguing that autonomy is only achieved in contexts of social relations with others. For Butler, it is not the achievement of autonomy – whether against or with others – that matters in ethics; rather, it is precisely the failure to achieve a condition approximating autonomy that is of primary significance. And notably, this failure is not occasional or circumstantial – it is a necessary feature of ethical subjectivity. The upshot of this is that her ethics are less an ethics of relationality than they are an ethics of failure. In Butler’s account of ethics, it is in the failure or incapacity to provide a full account of ourselves that our accountability emerges. Further, Butler contends that this requires a rethinking of the ‘very meaning of responsibility’, since ‘to take responsibility for oneself is to avow the limits of any self-­understanding, and to establish these limits not only as a condition for the subject but as the predicament of the human community’ (2005: 83). The emphasis here on the limits



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of self-­knowledge links the problem of responsibility with that of critique, such that taking responsibility for oneself is ultimately a form of critique. Several questions emerge from this: perhaps most obviously, if it is the case that a certain unknowingness – a lack of transparency of oneself to oneself – gives rise to responsibility for oneself understood as critique, whither responsibility for the other, or others? This question returns us to the matter of the role that Levinas plays in Butler’s account of ethics. The pre-­eminence given to the work of Emmanuel Levinas in Butler’s turn to questions of ethics predisposes her work to be read as an ethics of relationality, primarily concerned with the responsibility for others. In fact, however, Butler takes distance from Levinas in various ways, such that the approach to ethics that she outlines ultimately bears little resemblance to his. This is not the place to undertake a full analysis of Butler’s position in relation to Levinas, but it is worth mentioning several points. First, while Levinas understands the encounter that allows for the emergence of the subject, and with it responsibility, as synchronic, Butler favours a diachronic approach adopted from psychoanalysis that privileges the primary dependency of the infant and its developmental implications. Further, while both cast dependency on the other as foundational for the emergence of the subject, Butler rejects Levinas’s accusative characterisation of this interdependency and of responsibility. Butler is very clear in her rejection of Levinas’s characterisation of primary impingement by the other as a matter of accusation, and the related construal as ethics as persecution, and further, the association that he draws between this and Judaism. In addition, there are aspects of Levinas’s characterisation of the ethical encounter that Butler is less explicit about, but nevertheless rejects. Recall her formulation that it is by virtue of the opacity of the subject to itself that it ‘incurs and sustains’ its ethical bonds. To ‘incur’ is to run or fall into something, or to bring something upon oneself – to make oneself liable. Thus, it entails a form of agency on the part of the responsible subject, albeit one that is limited and problematised in various ways. For Levinas, in contrast, the ethical encounter is characterised by a profound passivity in relation to the Other. Responsibility, on this account, is experienced as a demand from the Other, one which the ethical subject can neither recuse itself from nor fulfil. In fact, the question of whether the subject can fulfil its responsibilities is an interesting one in relation to Butler too – for, on

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the one hand, the subject is never able to give a full account of itself and its actions, suggesting that it is unable to live up to the requirements of responsibility; but, on the other hand, the limits of self-­knowledge that undermine full accountability themselves become the basis for responsibility, suggesting that one fulfils one’s responsibilities by abiding by those limitations and the opacity that they entail for the subject. This ‘abiding by’ the limitations of self-­knowledge takes the form of something like an ethics of the self, inspired by the later work of Foucault, in which critique becomes a central vector of responsibility. Butler emphasises the way that for Foucault, telling the truth of oneself always comes at the cost of other historical possibilities and requires the denial or obfuscation of the historicity of the regime in which that truth is presented. The relation to oneself entailed in practices that exhort one to tell the truth of oneself – such as in confessional scenarios – thus necessarily entails a limit to knowledge as much as self-­examination in the interests of self-­knowledge. Self-­reflexivity cannot be a matter of perfect reflexivity, since it always entails a kind of failure, that is, an ‘open-­ended and unsatisfiable’ attempt to ‘“return” to a self from a situation of being foreign to oneself’ (Butler 2005: 129). Further, this means that truth-­telling is always implicated in matters of power, thus generating questions about the conditions of truth, as well as of how the truth can be told, by whom and why. Thus, the self-­reflexivity of the subject – which is predicated on the subject’s estrangement from itself while allowing for self-­knowledge – is tied to critique. From this, Butler concludes that the question of responsibility must be returned to the question of the social formation of the subject. That is, if narcissistic forms of moral enquiry find support in a theory of the subject that accepts ‘socially enforced modes of individualism’, and if those modes of inquiry lead to an ethical violence that excludes self-­acceptance and forgiveness – particularly, we can presume, the acceptance of opacity and vulnerability – then it becomes obligatory and perhaps urgent to ‘return the question of responsibility to the question of “How are we formed within social life, and at what cost?” ’ (Butler 2005: 136). Ethics, she claims: requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness, when what forms us diverges from what lies before us, when our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance



Undoing Ethics 55 of becoming human. To be undone by another is a primary necessity, an anguish, to be sure, but also a chance – to be addressed, claimed, bound to what is not me, but also to be moved, to be prompted to act, to address myself elsewhere, and so to vacate the self-­sufficient ‘I’ as a kind of possession. If we speak and try to give an account from this place, we will not be irresponsible, or, if we are, we will surely be forgiven. (Butler 2005: 136)

I have quoted these concluding words of Giving an Account at length because I find them both provocative and puzzling. They are puzzling because the final sentence simultaneously asserts a necessary relation between opacity and responsibility, and undermines it by raising the question of forgiveness. Why, if we speak from a position of opacity, would we not be irresponsible? Even if recognising or abiding within the limits of self-­knowledge and the interdependency it entails is a precondition of responsibility, does it ensure that we are henceforth acting or speaking responsibly? And why, then, would there be a need for forgiveness, and further, why would that forgiveness be assured? In the following section, I wish to address these questions and related ones through a deeper examination of three particular axes within Butler’s account of an ethics of failure; these are normativity, responsibility and commonality.

Undoing ethics The question of how responsibility may be reconceptualised on the basis of the revised ontology of the subject that Butler is proposing is a more difficult question than I can take up in any detail here. Further, it should be said that Butler’s comments on responsibility do not constitute a theory of responsibility – at best, they point towards a possible direction for theorising ethical responsibility, but they are as yet schematic and suggestive. In other words, while she indicates the necessity of rethinking responsibility, that task has yet to be undertaken in a significant way. Nevertheless, I do want to make several points about the shape that Butler’s conception of responsibility seems to be taking so far. First, a predominant way of thinking about moral responsibility in contemporary philosophy conceives of responsibility in terms of actions (done or not done) for which an agent may be considered blameworthy or praiseworthy, that is, in terms of ‘reactive attitudes’. This

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approach also involves the provision of reasons for an action or the failure to act appropriately – the agent may provide justifications or excuses for acting in particular ways, or failing to act in ways deemed appropriate. Butler’s approach works to sabotage this hegemonic conception, insofar as she rejects the individualism upon which it is predicated and reworks the conditions under which an agent may provide an account of him or herself.9 While there are nuances throughout her comments on responsibility, in general, this is achieved first by emphasising the ethical salience of embodiment and the relationality that this entails, and second, by undoing the very capacity to provide an account – and by dint of that, the legitimacy of the demand to provide one. This is not to say that giving an account is impossible, but rather, that its possibility is limited in various ways, such that one always and necessarily fails to give a complete account. Perhaps what sets Butler’s approach to responsibility apart even further, though, is the attempt to conceptualise the role of heteronomy within ethics within the frame of a thoroughgoing sociality. Butler follows the Continental tradition of moral philosophy in emphasising the necessity of relationality or the interdependency of the subject and the other in the emergence of ethical responsibility. But the novelty of her approach is to thoroughly circumscribe this encounter within the horizon of social normativity. As we have seen, there are a number of aspects to this insistence on the social circumscription of the ethical encounter. The upshot of these aspects is that ‘the social’ cannot simply be taken as a context for the ethical encounter, along the lines, for instance, of the popular view that social circumstances can mitigate or attenuate responsibility. Rather, the ethical subject itself only emerges through the operation of social norms, can only give an account of itself in terms given by those norms; and the very possibility of an ethical encounter with another or others is delimited by the exclusions and inclusions of the normative horizon of the human. So central is the matter of sociality to ethics that the question of how to rethink responsibility becomes one of how to rethink the social constitution of the subject. Thus, the central ethical question becomes, ‘How are we formed within social life, and at what cost?’ (Butler 2005: 136). Whether or not one is wholly convinced by Butler’s conflation of the question of responsibility with that of the social constitution of the subject, what becomes clear at this point is that ­normativity



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cannot be a straightforward matter for her. This is reinforced by the fact that the key theorists for her in developing her ethics of failure are themselves extremely wary of normative thinking – from Levinas’s reformulation of ethics as first philosophy that apparently divorces it from prescriptive morality, to Foucault’s refusal to tell others ‘what to do’. I have elsewhere made a case for understanding the kind of critical activity proposed and undertaken by Foucault as philosophy in an interrogative key (Mills 2010). Not far removed from this approach, Butler makes a case in Frames of War for the deferral of judgement in favour of understanding, which entails examining the ways in which descriptive accounts are already shot through with normative commitments (2009a: 151–63). Importantly, this approach does not constitute an alternative to normative thinking for Butler, but a reformulation of what normative thinking might amount to; she does not reject the project of normative thinking, but instead reworks what might be considered to be normative thinking. Nevertheless, worries remain: for how long do we defer judgement? How much understanding is enough? And what about when judgements must be made in circumstances of uncertainty and ignorance, as, arguably, they always must? If the subject is characterised by opacity, and certain and complete knowledge is unattainable, how, then, are judgements to be made and justified? Is the deferral of judgement necessarily infinite? These questions deserve more attention, but they are not my primary concern here. Rather, I want to explore two other aspects of Butler’s approach to normativity: first, the relation between norms and normativity, and second, the matter of singularity and substitutability. As I have said, the distinctive feature of Butler’s approach to ethics is the central place that she gives to social norms in the circumscription and constitution of the ethical encounter. Norms are for her an ineradicable part of social life, and thus of the life of the subject.10 However, given this centrality of norms, Butler herself refrains from elaborating desirable norms for acting. Again, this is not simply a reluctance to engage in normative thinking along the lines of Foucault; rather, Butler explicitly reinscribes normativity within the order of the ontological. To engage in normative thinking is to engage in a form of world-­making, and in order to do that with a good conscience, we must first engage in a process of understanding. Put simply, we must understand the world as it is before we engage in the process of making it what we wish it to be.

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This is all well and good, but what are its implications for the project of developing an ethics of failure? For a start, it means that Butler is wary of attempts at ‘prescriptivism’, or the positing of prescriptions for ‘what ought to be done’. Even more interestingly, Diane Perpich has characterised Levinas’s approach to  ethics as a ‘normativity without norms’, insofar as he is able to provide an account of ‘how we come to be bound to respond to other’s claims’ but refuses to provide norms of action (2008: 126). Perhaps the opposite can be said of Butler, in that she can give an account of why we act in certain ways, because of the regulatory force of norms, but cannot give an account of why we are compelled to respond to the claim of others. Recall here that Butler’s account of ethics is primarily concerned with responsibility for oneself, and responsibility for the other is epiphenomenal upon that primary concern with oneself. Thus, Butler does provide us with an account of the fundamental sociality of the subject – that is, she outlines an ontology of the subject wherein it is necessarily bound to others for the duration of its life. But what is less clear is just how this ontology is tied to any moral concern for those others upon whom we depend for our existence. This problem is deepened when we consider the matter of singularity and substitution. One of Butler’s more pointed critiques in Giving an Account is directed towards Adriana Cavarero’s discussion of a ‘relational ethics of contingency’ (Cavarero 2000: 87), which centralises the notion of singularity in the context of mutual exposure. She argues that others are necessary for the appearance of who one is, since it is only in the disclosure made possible by the presence of others that the uniqueness of oneself is apparent. For Cavarero, the condition of mutual exposure grounds an ‘ontological altruism’ wherein one cannot give an account of oneself but – contra Butler – must rely upon others for that narration. While Butler is sympathetic to aspects of Cavarero’s approach, she also takes issue with the emphasis on singularity, arguing that the constitutive role of norms in the formation of the subject renders the singular always substitutable. Further, in a Hegelian vein, she points out that the ‘this’ of singularity cannot specify without simultaneously generalising, from which she concludes that singularity is necessarily substitutable. She writes, [i]nsofar as ‘this’ fact of singularizing exposure, which follows from bodily existence, is one that can be reiterated endlessly, it constitutes a



Undoing Ethics 59 collective condition, characterizing us all equally, not only reinstalling the ‘we’, but also establishing a structure of substitutability at the core of singularity. (Butler 2005: 35)

The apparent paradox that we are all singular, and therefore substitutable, may appear as something of an aside within Giving an Account, but I think it actually has a greater significance. This is because, ultimately, substitutability becomes the mechanism by which we are morally bound to others. And part of this substitution is that as humans, we have certain characteristics – most significantly, vulnerability – in common. Thus, it is by virtue of this ‘collective condition’ of being substitutable that we are morally beholden to others, not just to ourselves. There is much more to the question of substitution than I can possibility take up here, but let me pose one possible interpretation of its significance within Butler’s ethics. This is that the Hegelian emphasis on generality and substitutability at the heart of singularity carries the risk of tying Butler’s ethics to the reintegration of otherness within the order of the same. Her emphasis on the collective condition or the common attribute, the vulnerability that we all share as humans, as the basis for being bound morally to another arguably risks a kind of totalisation that says, despite our differences, we are all human, that is, vulnerable. In this, it seems to embed her formulation of ethics more firmly in the standard tradition of Western moral philosophy than one might ordinarily imagine. Of course, the terms of her ethics are juxtaposed with those of the philosophical tradition: not happiness, but grief; not rationality, but opacity; not autonomy, but vulnerability. Nevertheless, the fundamental structure whereby moral agents are bound to others by virtue of shared characteristics remains the same. This means that Butler’s project to reformulate ethics away from ‘self-­grounding’ conceptions of subjectivity appears yet to founder on the counterpart of that concept of subjectivity, that is, on community understood as commonality. Arguably, Parting Ways (Butler 2012a) can be read as a struggle with this dynamic of singularity and substitutability, and at points it suggests at least a partial escape from it. Butler’s terminology in Parting Ways indicates a curious convergence of terms that she has previously distinguished: in the index, vulnerability is cross-­referenced to precarity; but the term precarity is only used minimally in the text, in the claim that ‘a different social

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­ ntology would have to start from this shared condition of preo carity’ (Butler 2012a: 174). The terms used instead throughout the text are ‘precarious’ and ‘vulnerable’ or ‘vulnerability’. Thus, precarity is no longer conceived as a specifically political concept, but has become a capacious term that also encompasses both vulnerability and precariousness. This shift in terminology may be associated with a shift in focus from ethics to politics, determined by the specific problem of Zionism and the purported necessity of a Jewish nation-­state therein that she addresses in the book. More specifically, it may be said to arise from the effort to think about the way in which the ethical demand articulated by Levinas emerges or comes to have meaning within specific political configurations and conflicts. This effort sees her re-­read Levinas in the frame of conflicts between Jews and non-­Jews, and leads to a sharp critique of his designation of some as faceless, as imposing no ethical obligation or making no ethical demand. If this signals a more definitive move away from Levinas, Butler then appears to move instead towards a conception of cohabitation that draws firmly on the work of Hannah Arendt (though Butler is not without criticism of her work as well). For example, there are indications of a certain distance being taken from some of the previous formulations of vulnerability as a constitutive aspect of subjectivity. For instance, in reference to the interdependency characteristic of subjectivity analysed in Frames of War, Butler ruminates that this may be ‘less our common condition, conceived existentially, than our convergent condition – one of proximity, adjacency, up-­againstness . . .’ (2012a: 130). What, then, are the implications of cohabitation? The notion of cohabitation points to the essentially unchosen plurality of others amongst whom we must abide. In short, to be born is to be born into a world of others, a world that precedes us, makes our existence possible, and which we cannot therefore  choose. Plurality is the sine qua non of human existence, which Butler also reads as entailing normative obligations. She writes, we must actively preserve and affirm the unchosen character of inclusive and plural cohabitation: we not only live with those we never chose and to whom we may feel no social sense of belonging, but we are also obligated to preserve those lives and the plurality of which they form a part. (Butler 2012a: 125)



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No doubt there are questions to be asked about this formulation and the assertion of obligations flowing from plural cohabitation, but the recognition of plural cohabitation as the starting point for such obligations has some potential advantages over the emphasis on vulnerability in previous formulations. For one, it allows for a more nuanced analysis of the kinds of dependency and vulnerability that may take hold in the mutual exposure to others that constitutes plurality. For instance, while it may be that subjectivity is formed in conditions of radical dependency, it does not follow that all relations with others will therefore take the shape of dependency. Similarly, obligations arising from cohabitation may allow for greater recognition of the contextual variances of vulnerability, wherein the same person or group of persons may be constituted as vulnerable in one context and not another. To be sure, feminist analysis of the centrality of dependency and vulnerability have been crucial to developing more expansive conceptions of ethical subjectivity; but just as we should avoid the idealisation of autonomous self-­realisation and invulnerability, so we should also avoid the idealisation of vulnerability.

Conclusion Throughout this chapter, I have discussed Butler’s conception of a universal vulnerability, variously understood as precariousness or opacity, and her positing of this as the starting point for rethinking the central terms of ethics, primarily responsibility and normativity. In tracing the development of Butler’s ethics over several texts, I have been interested in the way that relationality is treated, and relatedly, how others are figured within the sphere of normativity. I have argued that Butler is primarily concerned with responsibility for oneself, though it is true that relationality is central to her ethics insofar as it provides the ‘venue’ for responsibility. I have suggested, though, that Butler does not quite broach the question of responsibility for the other. Moreover, in considering the question of the normative force of the other, that is, the ‘ought’ of ethics, I have suggested that Butler turns to the theme of substitutability in a way that is ultimately problematic for a project that seeks to undo the hegemonic conceptions of ethics tied to visions of a ‘self-­grounding’ subject. It is problematic as it means that Butler’s ethics founders on the conceptual counterpart of that vision of the subject, that is, community understood as

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c­ ommonality. Finally, then, I suggested that her most recent turn to the concept of cohabitation may provide an avenue for the kind of reworking of substitution and singularity required for a genuinely new conception of ethics to emerge.

Notes   1. It is, for instance, central to Excitable Speech (Butler 1997a), and the politics of resignification that Butler proffers herein. See Mills (2000) for a closer discussion of her usage of the concept here.   2. The term ‘relationality’ is not entirely adequate here, and on occasion Butler herself rejects it. However, I use it throughout this chapter for two reasons – first, because at other times, Butler does use this term herself, and second, because it is less theoretically committed in the sense of being tied to a particular theoretical/philosophical approach than alternative terms such as ‘exposure’.   3. To be more pointed in one’s response, the conclusion that the attribution of vulnerability to the human is dependent on norms does not actually follow from the premises that vulnerability is a precondition of humanisation, and humanisation is dependent on norms. That vulnerability and norms are conditions of humanisation does not mean that norms are a condition of vulnerability. To be clear, I broadly agree with the claim that norms shape the recognition of vulnerability, but this statement of her argument does not do justice to that claim.   4. For a useful discussion of this distinction and its normative force, see Rogers, Mackenzie and Dodds 2012a and 2012b.   5. Notably, the notion of ‘precarity’ does not seem to appear within the text beyond the introduction. It is also interesting that Butler does not engage with the literature on precarity as a political concept (see especially Neilson and Rossiter 2008). That said, it is laudable that Butler’s use of precarity, while remaining somewhat suggestive, expands the concept from discussions of labour and economic relations to structures of subjectivity such as gender. On this see Butler 2009b. Note that Butler reiterates this distinction in Dispossession (Butler and Athanasiou 2013). However, in ‘Can one lead a good life in a bad life?’ (Butler 2012b) Butler uses the term ‘precarity’ but not ‘precariousness’ which is instead encompassed within the term ‘vulnerability’.   6. On vulnerability and ignorance, see Gilson 2011. However, while important, this analysis risks a kind of idealisation of vulnerability as the counterpart of its critique of the ideal of invulnerability.



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 7. Note that it is unclear exactly who the target of Butler’s critique in  Giving an Account is, for it is not clear who thinks that a self must  be ‘fully transparent to itself’ (2005: 83) in order to be responsible.   8. It is well worth considering the account of subjectivity that Butler is proposing in Giving an Account of Oneself alongside that developed in earlier work such as The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Butler 1997b). In my article ‘Normative violence, vulnerability and responsibility’ (Mills 2008), I initiate an examination of the integration of Butler’s later work on ethics with her earlier approaches to subjectivity.   9. Even so, it is not entirely clear which account of responsibility Butler takes as her target, for it is not obvious that even hegemonic concepts of responsibility require complete self-­knowledge in order for an agent to be held responsible, though they would clearly require some degree of cognitive competency. 10. This is a consistent theme in Butler’s work, but for her most explicit discussion of norms see Undoing Gender (Butler 2004b).

References Butler, Judith (1997a), Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, London: Routledge. Butler, Judith (1997b), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Butler, Judith (2004a), Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, London: Verso. Butler, Judith (2004b), Undoing Gender, New York and London: Routledge. Butler, Judith (2005), Giving an Account of Oneself, New York: Fordham University Press. Butler, Judith (2009a), Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, London: Verso. Butler, Judith (2009b), ‘Performativity, Precarity and Sexual Politics’, Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana (AIBR), 4: 3, i–xiii. Butler, Judith (2012a), Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, New York: Columbia University Press. Butler, Judith (2012b), ‘Can one lead a good life in a bad life? Adorno Prize Lecture’, Radical Philosophy, 176, 9–18. Butler, Judith, and Athena Athanasiou (2013), Dispossession: The Performative in the Political, Cambridge: Polity.

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Cavarero, Adriana (2000), Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, trans. Paul A. Kottman, London and New York: Random House. Gilson, Erinn (2011), ‘Vulnerability, Ignorance and Oppression’, Hypatia, 26: 2, 308–32. Jenkins, Fiona (2013), ‘A Sensate Critique: Vulnerability and the Image in Judith Butler’s Frames of War’, SubStance, 42: 3, 105–26. Mills, Catherine (2000), ‘Efficacy and Vulnerability: Judith Butler on Reiteration and Resistance’, Australian Feminist Studies, 15: 32, 265–79. Mills, Catherine (2008), ‘Normative violence, vulnerability and responsibility’, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 18:2, 133–56. Mills, Catherine (2010), ‘A Manner of Speaking: Declaration, Critique and the Trope of Interrogation’, Law and Critique, 21: 3, 247–60. Murphy, Ann V. (2012), Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Neilson, Brett, and Ned Rossiter (2008), ‘Precarity as a Political Concept, or, Fordism as Exception’, Theory, Culture & Society, 25: 7–8, 51–72. Perpich, Diane (2008), The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Rogers, Wendy, Catriona Mackenzie and Susan Dodds (2012a), ‘Introduction’, International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, 5: 2, 1–10. Rogers, Wendy, Catriona Mackenzie and Susan Dodds (2012b), ‘Why Bioethics Needs a Concept of Vulnerability’, International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, 5: 2, 11–38.

3

Butler’s Ethical Appeal: Being, Feeling and Acting Responsible Sara Rushing

In this essay I return to certain questions raised in my 2010 article ‘Preparing for Politics: Judith Butler’s Ethical Dispositions’. I examine Butler’s continued articulation of a politics and ethics of precariousness, particularly in her most recent book Frames of War, and specifically the role of the concept of ‘affect’ in that text. Affect did not play an explicit part in Butler’s analysis throughout Giving an Account of Oneself or Precarious Life. Indeed, as I explain below, though the word appears in those texts occasionally (and in Undoing Gender, to the extent that it overlaps with Precarious Life), I interpreted the ethics Butler articulates there as inhering specifically between people who did not necessarily know each other, recognise and identify with each other, or have any particular feelings for each other. Absence of affinity was obviated as an obstacle to ethical bonds to others. In Frames of War, however, Butler makes frequent recourse to the term affect, and though the precise substance and implications of the term remain underdeveloped, this shift suggests some change in her thought regarding the role of what I shall call for the moment ‘feelings’. This essay seeks to gain some purchase, then, on what, whether and how feelings matter for the ethical appeal that Butler is mounting across her recent body of work.

Butler before ‘affect’ In ‘Preparing for Politics’ I argued that in order to fully comprehend the political implications of Butler’s work it was necessary to grasp the relationship and distinction between four vectors of her thinking: her diagnosis of the human condition as fundamentally exposed and vulnerable, or precarious; her expression of normative aspirations for liveable life and a more inclusive conception of 65

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‘the human’; her defence of a particular ethical comportment that grew out of, not despite, our basic aggression when confronted by the Other; and her theory of a new kind of political engagement defined by responsiveness to the claim of non-­ violence. While acknowledging that the four vectors of her thought were in fact not neatly separable, and that the order of priority among them was complex, and not linear or progressive, I nonetheless maintained that these dimensions of her thought were not reducible to each other. Such reductions, I argued, are what have led numerous critics of Butler to misread her as anti-­normative, apolitical and ethically silent. Looking back over Butler’s body of work, it is clear that only through a very narrow definition of normative theory and of ‘the political’ can she be called anti-­normative and apolitical. It has perhaps been easier to miss the distinct ethical thread running through her work. In this vein, ‘Preparing for Politics’ constituted an effort at reconstructive theory that aimed to bring into relief Butler’s persistent concern with ethics as a form of self-­cultivation that can be seen as preceding and informing – i.e. ‘preparing’ us for – the contingent, contestatory political interactions that she will never describe in advance for us.1 I sought to distil out what I saw as the key ethical dispositions informing particularly Butler’s post-­ 9/11 work, namely generosity, humility, patience and restraint. By way of conclusion, I argued for understanding the ‘entirely different politics’ she gestured towards in terms of ‘unsatisfaction’, a term that captures multiple dimensions of Butler’s work. In part, unsatisfaction got at how Butler’s political theory frequently leaves her readers unsatisfied. In a more substantive sense, unsatisfaction was meant to capture Butler’s ultimate commitment to the importance of a cultivated, insurrectionary practice of not-­ doing as a way of challenging traditional modes of ‘doing’ that are immediate and often gratifying despite their frequent unintended consequences. Finally, unsatisfaction was intended to capture Butler’s persistent critique of the project of recognition, wherein others must make themselves intelligible to me within existing social norms of identity that I comprehend in order for me to grasp my ethical responsibility to them. This traditional ‘mode of ethicality’ – predicated on the question, ‘Who are you, and thus how must I treat you?’ – fails, and is implicitly violent, in Butler’s account. Not demanding that an other give an account of herself that satisfies me is conceived then as a form of generosity, an



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ethical disposition we can cultivate through humility and patience towards others we have a responsibility to but may never fully grasp or have anything like traditional moral sentiments towards. As she puts it in Frames of War, ‘it is to the stranger that we are bound, the one, or the ones, that we never knew and never chose’ (2009: xxvi). We must then always ask, ‘What is our responsibility toward those we do not know, toward those who seem to test our sense of belonging or to defy available norms of likeness?’ (Butler 2009: 36). Butler’s notion that we ‘have’ a responsibility to others, whether we recognise or embrace it or not, emerges largely from her engagement with Levinas. For Levinas, our ethical responsibility to others reads like something of a fact. We are not born, do not attain subjectivity, and then develop relationships within which we consent to ethical obligations to others. We come into the world in relations with others, impinged upon by the world from the start, and thus always already responsive to others and responsible for how we act on that. This moral (pre)ontology of the impinged subject is not wholly satisfying to Butler, because Levinas fails to appreciate how social conditions inform the norms through which we come into subjectivity as well. For Butler, this sociality also has something of the status of fact. She writes in Precarious Life about the ‘interdependence we can’t argue with’ (Butler 2004a: 22). She describes relationality in community with others as ‘a descriptive or historical fact of our formation’ (Butler 2004a: 27). We are given over to others and to norms, without contract or consent, and as such ‘there is no living being that is not at risk of destruction’ (Butler 2009: xvi). In short, precariousness, as a ‘generalized condition’ of all humans, is ‘undeniable’ (Butler 2009: xxvi; 22); a ‘timeless feature’ of subjects (Butler 2009: 178). While these assertions, on their own, seem to be truisms, when paired with Levinas’s theory of ethical subjectivity they lead to the normative claim that ‘the precarity of life imposes an obligation on us’, which exists whether we know or understand it or not. The fact of our material existence – our corporeal and psychic exposure to others, our vulnerability to destruction, and the capacity of even the weakest and the injured among us to respond with violence or aggression to another person – implies an ethical demand from the outset. I interpreted Butler here as attempting to ground a theory of ethics in the absence of affinity. This is an account not reliant on

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the usual modes of recognition, but on dispositions cultivated in their stead. Another way of putting this point is to say that in Precarious Life and Giving an Account of Oneself I took Butler to be gesturing towards something like an ‘ethics without affect’. Implicit in this account is the belief that feelings are a poor guide for our ethical relations with others. Feelings are often unreliable impulses (for example, of threat, of aggression or of the desire for certain knowledge of the other, or the desire to shore up our autonomy and sense of self-­mastery), which produce demands on others that we must resist the urge to satisfy. In Frames of War, for example, Butler is deeply critical of how readily the state and society work on our emotional being, often by way of our material bodily existence, to inculcate us as the kinds of citizens that will acquiesce to violent political agendas. She writes of the ‘righteous coldness cultivated over time through local and collective practices of nation-­building, supported by prevalent social norms as they are articulated by both public policy, dominant media, and the strategies of war’ (Butler 2009: xxiv). While not exactly claiming that citizens of the United States are unthinking pawns, Butler is disturbed by the increasingly diminished space for critique in public discourse, specifically discourse about war. Absent the ability to grasp how norms of recognition are generated and deployed – how such norms are mediated by the powers that be, and how those interpretive frames function to naturalise as reality relations that are in fact politically and ethically contingent – Butler fears we will simply default to a ‘cultural reflex’ (2009: 36) whereby our narcissistic/nationalistic emotional responses seem preconscious, authentic, universal, and thus correct. So, feelings are tricky. Yet an effective ethical appeal requires more than just work at the cognitive level, or recourse to the facticity of it all. For despite emphasising the fact of our interdependence and vulnerability, and the fact of ethical responsibility to the other, Butler readily acknowledges how adept we are at not knowing these facts. Throughout Frames of War she makes this point. Referring to the relationship between Israel and Palestine, she writes, ‘[t]his undeniable situation of proximity and interdependency, of vulnerability, is nevertheless denied’ (Butler 2009: xxvi). More generally, precariousness is handily ‘disavowed in particular political formations’ (Butler 2009: 30). War, in particular, ‘seeks to deny the ongoing and irrefutable ways in which we are all subject to one another’ (Butler 2009: 43). The US ‘national



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subject’, in so far as that subject does violence to others to prevent violence to itself, suffers from cognitive dissonance that ‘constitutes the disavowal of dependency’ (Butler 2009: 54). Over and over again we ‘fail to understand that the life of the one is bound to the life of the other, and that certain obligations emerge from this most basic social condition’ (Butler 2009: xxx). And this disavowal has serious political consequences in Butler’s account – not the least of which is moral sadism: a ‘violence that righteously grounds itself in an ethics of purity wrought from the disavowal of violence’; ‘a mode of persecution that passes itself off as virtue’ (Butler 2009: 177). So what kind of failure is this failure ‘to understand’? Is this denial a matter of rejecting as fact the claim that ‘we are all precarious lives’ (Butler 2009: 43), or that ‘all the potential actors in [a] scene are equally vulnerable’? (Butler 2009: 181). Does Butler find herself here facing the same kind of challenge as Hobbes? Leviathan builds from the undeniable fact that even the strongest can be killed in the state of nature. Recognising that mere cognition of this fact was insufficient, Hobbes invoked vivid imagery to induce the experience of corporeal vulnerability necessary to activate the fear required for his theory to compel. That is, he worked on his readers by interweaving rational argumentation and affective appeal. Yet while Hobbes revolutionised the way we think about the power of a people to construct an artificial entity like the state for mutual self-­preservation, his dream of an abiding peace guaranteed by a social contract remained (and perhaps remains) unfulfilled. Knowing that, in theory, the basic reality of our bodies makes us all susceptible to violence or destruction does not adequately counter our frequent disavowal of, or failure to understand, that fact in practice. So the question remains: does being exposed to each other and thus being obligated to each other matter, or must we feel exposed in order to feel responsible to each other? What is the relationship, in other words, between being responsible, feeling responsible and acting responsible?

Affect and responsibility: facticity vs. feeling Butler acknowledges this question when she writes in Precarious Life that ‘a vulnerability must be perceived and recognized in order to come into play in an ethical encounter, and there is no guarantee that this will happen’ (2004a: 43). This fundamental dilemma

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continues to drive her inquiry in Frames of War, where she delves deeper into the conditions for moral responsiveness. But is there a shift or reframing between Precarious Life and Frames of War? Where the vocabulary of Precarious Life, regarding the perception and recognition of the undeniable fact of our vulnerability, dwells in the realm of the cognitive, in Frames of War a vocabulary not particularly evident before emerges, including apprehension, perception, the senses and, importantly, affect. Moreover, in the final chapter of that book Butler addresses the issue I outlined above, regarding Levinas and the fact of responsibility, by noting that It is not enough to say, in a Levinasian vein, that the claim is made upon me prior to my knowing and as an inaugurating instance of my coming into being. That may be formally true, but its truth is of no use to me if I lack the conditions for responsiveness that allow me to apprehend it in the midst of this social and political life. Those ‘conditions’ include not just my private resources, but the various mediating forms and frames that make responsiveness possible. (2009: 179–80)

What Butler means by ‘mediating forms and frames’ becomes tangible over the course of Frames of War. But what does she mean when she talks about one’s ‘private resources’ for ethical responsiveness? Are the private resources she has in mind our ‘affects’, or something else? Perhaps she means our bank accounts, our citizenship status, our social network, our racial and sexual privilege, our educational level, and the like. This comment is nebulous. But it goes to the heart of the question of what Butler’s ethics is all about. In addition to the social – the normatively regulated and mediated categories and concepts through which we encounter the world (and in terms of which we make moral judgements about what lives count as lives) – there is some implicit conception of the subject, the ‘I’, who encounters that world and the ‘private’ resources that attach to that ‘I’. In what follows, I explore this question of what affect is, for Butler, and how it informs ethics. The word affect appears almost not at all until Precarious Life (2004a) (and, as noted above, a bit in Undoing Gender (2004b)), and Giving an Account of Oneself (2005). The terminology of affect emerges where Butler takes up the question of the representational practices through which the human, and human suffering, are framed. Precarious Life ends with a call ‘affectively, to reinvigorate the intellectual projects of critique, of questioning . . .’ and



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specifically to question ‘what media will let us know and feel at the limits of representation’ of human frailty (Butler 2004a: 151). In Giving An Account of Oneself Butler writes about the body as a site of impingement by the other, the emergence of an ‘I’ through its dependence on the primary address of the other, and the range of affective responses that happens at the moment of impingement (2005: 70, 98). Drawing on Laplanche and his account of infant love, Butler notes that, ‘the other is, as it were, the condition of possibility of my affective life’ – that which ‘gives rise to the drives and desires that are mine’ (2005: 77). She quickly returns here, however, to Levinas, and the persecutory scene of address that constitutes the structural condition of responsibility. While Butler notes the importance, for Levinas, of the ‘outrage’ we experience in response to our exposure to the other (an outrage that can feel ‘horrible’, and a desire for murderous revenge that feels ‘overwhelming’) (2005: 92), she nonetheless explains that ‘responsibility is not a matter of cultivating a will, but of making use of an unwilled susceptibility as a resource for becoming responsive to the Other . . . meaning that I am, as it were, precluded from revenge by virtue of the relation I never chose’ (2005: 91). As Moya Lloyd has characterised this tendency, Butler remains here in the ‘quasi-­Derridean impulse to explore ontological conditions of possibility’ (2008: 104) of ethical responsibility, which, to draw on the language I used above, makes responsibility to the other a fact regardless of how I feel about it. Of course, the presence of the word ‘affect’ is not required for Butler to be addressing this dimension of life. If by affect she merely means something like passionate attachments or our ‘drives and desires’, then such a concern can be traced back through The Psychic Life of Power (Butler 1997b) and Subjects of Desire (Butler 1987), and arguably be shown to inform aspects of all of her work.2 In terms of something more specific we might point, as discussed earlier, to certain dispositional tendencies or ‘comportments’ (including generosity, humility and patience) that have emerged as significant in her work, and that seem to acknowledge an affective register. Yet Lloyd’s point above is apt. Though terms like desire, melancholia, loneliness, anxiety, fear, aggression, grief and even hope and love appear throughout her body of work, they generally shape up more as structural conditions (or ‘sites’) of possibility for the emergence of the subject, and not as affective dimensions of that socially constructed subject’s

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experience of the world.3 Admittedly, Butler has tended to focus on how the very idea of a boundary between the interiority and exteriority of the subject has been constructed within psychic and social formations of power (1997b: 19; 1999: xv). So perhaps it is not surprising that she has not given more explicit attention to the inner emotional life of subjects and how that affective register can be worked in the service of ethical relations. Similarly, though a focus on the body pervades Butler’s work, she admits that she is ‘not a very good materialist’, noting that whenever she writes about the body she ends up writing about language (Butler 2004b: 198). The body, too, has typically featured as a formal condition or site and not, as Diana Coole puts it, ‘an active, expressive body with the visceral capacities sometimes to resist the constraints imposed upon it’ (2008: 17). Coole’s insights are instructive and I shall return to them below, particularly her suggestion that Butler has traditionally offered ‘merely structural opportunities, not capacities, for agency’; that she has theorised subjects ‘that require scare quotes and lack any interiority’ (2008: 25). To the extent that affect comes to the fore in Frames of War, does it indicate a shift for Butler, perhaps away from the conditions of subjectivity and towards the experiences of vulnerable subjects? Frames of War begins with the claim that ‘every war is a war upon the senses’ (2009: xvi). Reality is produced and popular assent cultivated through the deployment of technologies of war on ‘the field of the senses’ (Butler 2009: ix) (including media framing, photography, discursive framing). Butler asserts that this solicitation to acquiescence operates on our ‘act of passive reception’ (2009: xii) and thus the book focuses on exposing ‘cultural modes of regulating affective and ethical dispositions through a selective and differential framing of violence’ (2009: 1). What, she wants to know, are the ‘conditions for breaking out of the quotidian acceptance of war’? (Butler 2009: 11). The main condition seems to be the disruption of the normative frames that function to produce the field of ontology within which certain lives can be perceived or ‘apprehended’ as lives – a field of normativity that has deep ‘implications for why, when and for whom we feel politically consequential affective dispositions such as horror, guilt, righteous sadism, loss and indifference’ (Butler 2009: 24). The concept of apprehension is offered here as a replacement for ‘the stronger term’ (Butler 2009: 5) of recognition. ‘Apprehension’,



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she writes, ‘is less precise, since it can imply marking, registering, acknowledging without full cognition. If it is a form of knowing, it is bound up with sensing and perceiving, but in ways that are not always – or not yet – conceptual forms of knowledge’ (Butler 2009: 5). Though at times apprehension has an almost mystical quality of moral wisdom, akin to someone’s simply ‘getting’ something, it functions as an important form of ethical knowledge for Butler because of the way it combines the cognitive and the affective – the relevant socially produced concepts and categories that frame the intelligibility of the world for our mental perception, as well as the sensory impressions that occur on and through the body, and give our encounters with normative ontology an emotional resonance. Butler’s long engagement with Foucault has led her to consider over and again the epistemological question of how power-­saturated normative social frames condition what we can know. In Frames of War she expands this consideration to the affective question of how such frames produce sensation and feeling; how they regulate the interpretive structures that mediate what we might mistakenly think are innate emotional responses ‘of the universal human that supposedly resides in us all’ (Butler 2009: 159). Thus her point, stated at the outset, is that we must examine ‘what restructuring of the senses’ is required for an affective ethics of non-­violence (Butler 2009: xii). These questions and comments notwithstanding, affect remains relatively under-­ theorised in Butler’s work. For that reason, I pause here to consider the so-­ called ‘affective turn’ underway in the humanities and social sciences in recent decades, and the rapidly growing secondary literature that aims to formulate, classify and assess this turn (Ahmed 2004; Clough 2007; Clough 2010; Connolly 2011; Gregg and Seigworth 2010; La Caze and Lloyd 2011; Leys 2011; Pedwell and Whitehead 2012; Smith 2011). While the finer points of the detailed debates within or about the affective turn might be beyond the scope of Butler’s comments, the categories and concepts articulated therein may help situate and illuminate her recent work.

The turn to affect Within the recent turn to affect, scholars distinguish between various strains of thought that reject or aim to transcend the more traditional account of affect. This traditional approach focused on

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subjective ‘emotion’ as consciously apprehended and codified by a rational individual manifesting personal beliefs and intentions. Emotions are regarded as feelings that, as Sianne Ngai puts it, are perceived to originate in and thus belong to an ‘I’, are labelled and unified in a narrative structure and are object-­oriented (I feel mad at you) (2007: 26). In contrast, contemporary affect theory posits embodied affective experience as ‘non-­signifying autonomic processes that take place below the threshold of conscious awareness and meaning’ (Leys 2011: 437). Thus as Marguerite La Caze and Henry Martyn Lloyd articulate it, the turn to affect is broadly ‘construed as a turn away from minds, towards bodies’ (2011: 6). This tension – between affect as consciously apprehended subjective emotion, feeling or mood versus unconscious and impersonal vital/viral bodily experience that is not (or not yet) identifiable as a nameable feeling – characterises debates in philosophy and psychology, of course, but also cultural, feminist and literary studies. Attempting to map this terrain, Gregg and Seigworth inventory ‘eight of the main orientations that undulate and sometimes overlap in their approaches to affect’ (2010: 6). Other theorists, of course, map the affective turn differently. My point in noting this is that there is a broad range of concepts and commitments indicated by invoking affect, in terms of the subject required, the mind-­body-­world connection indicated, how educable affects are, and what being affected entails, feels like, means and does. At one end of the continuum, for example as conceptualised by Brian Massumi (drawing on Deleuze, drawing on Spinoza, who claimed in Ethics IIIP2 that ‘men are conscious of their actions and ignorant of the causes by which they are determined’), affect as registered bodily intensity follows an entirely different logic than emotion. Affects are vital forces that originate outside of the individual, in contexts of cultural relations, and are transmitted via our always porous and impingeable bodies in ways we are generally not aware of. This approach contrasts, for example, with Ngai’s in Ugly Feelings, which takes affect as ‘less formed and structured than emotions, but not lacking form or structure altogether’ (2007: 27, original emphasis). For Massumi, in contrast to emotion, affect is ‘the unassimilable’ (2002: 33); it is ‘not ownable or recognizable and is thus resistant to critique’ (2002: 28). If emotion is about appraisal and meaning, affect is unqualified and non-­signifying sensation; it is pre-­personal, socially constructed and contracted, autonomous from the subject, and escapes ‘con-



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finement in the particular body whose vitality, or potential for interaction, it is’ (Massumi 2002: 35). One point of these insights is that it is the non-­conscious bodily affective resonances that move us more than the consciously grasped messages by which we think we are being rationally guided. And yet as mobilising as affect is, because it operates largely unconsciously it is characterised by what Gregg and Seigworth call ‘an intense and thoroughly immanent neutrality’ (2010: 10). What this means is that affect in itself cannot be relied on for ‘somehow producing always better states of being and belonging’ (Gregg and Seigworth 2010: 10). In response to conclusions such as this, Rachel Greenwald Smith notes that, ‘[i]f affect is, in its preconscious form, unqualified, the social and political stakes are very high for who and what masters the narratives by which affect is intensified, directed and codified’ (2011: 431). This is a point Butler fully grasps, and which drives her focus on framing as well as her acknowledgement that apprehending the precariousness of life could ‘lead to a heightening of violence’ (2009: 2) and not the opposite. While other affect theorists also seem to grasp this point, many nonetheless betray optimism about the positive transformative potential of affect. Clare Hemmings notes, for example, that while recognising the possibility of ‘bad affect’, both Massumi and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003) invoke affect as a counter to the pessimistic determinism they identify with poststructuralism (including references to Butler).4 In Hemmings’ words, ‘one of the main reasons affect has been taken as the hopeful alternative to social determinism is its positioning of the individual as possessing a degree of control over their future’ (2005: 552). As Massumi put it in a 2002 interview: Experiencing this potential for change, experiencing the eventfulness and uniqueness of every situation, even the most conventional ones, that’s not necessarily about commanding movement, it’s about navigating movement. It’s about being immersed in an experience that is already underway. It’s about being bodily attuned to opportunities in the movement, going with the flow. It’s more like surfing the situation, or tweaking it, than commanding or programming it. (in Zournazi 2002: 212)

Because affect is outside of narration and unpredictable in how it attaches to and relates bodies, it implies potentiality – a capacity to

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affect and be affected in endless, contagious, ways. Thus Massumi says, ‘I guess “affect” is the word I use for “hope” ’ (in Zournazi 2002: 212). There are (at least) two issues here. One is that affect is taken to open up possibilities for agency that social constructivism seemingly forecloses. The other is that, even when figured as impersonal intensities that ‘assert nothing’ (Massumi 2010: 64), affect tends to connote optimism about the potential for progressive social change to the extent that affect theorists often focus on ‘the good affect that undoes the bad’ (Hemmings 2005: 551). In analysing what is at stake in ‘invoking affect’, Hemmings expresses scepticism about the implicit faith in something outside of culture or the social, and about how freely (and transformatively) affect really circulates, given how its investment varies for differently gendered, raced and sexualised bodies.5 Lauren Berlant similarly cautions that ‘shifts in the affective atmosphere are not equal to changing the world’ (2010: 116). The question of what kind of agency affective potentiality gives rise to, or what kind of transformative potential it has, is an important one. On the question of agency, Ruth Leys’ critique of the affective turn goes so far as to argue that a defining trait of recent affect theory is a deep anti-­intentionalism (2011: 443) that suggests only the most minimal form of agency: a ‘layer of preconscious “priming to act” such that embodied action is a matter of being attuned to and coping with the world without the input of rational content’ (2011: 442 n. 22). ‘Going with the flow,’ as Massumi puts it. In this same interview, however, Massumi explores affective experience through the metaphor of ‘walking as controlled falling’, or the interplay between constraints on freedom (for example, gravity) and the room to manoeuvre or to ‘navigate’ the fields of potential we find ourselves always already in. Here Massumi presses the point that others make as well, which is that the turn to affect is not reflective of a theoretical preference for freedom over determinism, but a challenge to that dichotomy itself. William Connolly has thus responded critically to Leys’ account of affect theory’s anti-­ intentionalism, noting that consciousness ‘arrives at a late point in the consolidation of intention’ (2011: 795). Meaning: affect theory does not reject all intentionality, per se, but rather sees agency as already deeply informed by work done on the affective register, or by ‘affect-­imbued tendencies that nudge us in different directions’ (Connolly 2011: 795). Yet the ques-



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tion remains (and I take this to be Leys’ concern): when Massumi likens affective ethical responsiveness to controlled falling, what is the nature of that control? Connolly gives some attention to the question of how we might work with, or on, affect – channel, educate or at least develop practices to prime it ourselves, or to cultivate a certain ethos, instead of just being unconsciously worked over at the infra-­ sensible level. Other scholars similarly venture into the territory of the ‘how’. Teresa Brennan has written about the role of meditation in managing affect and cultivating responsive ‘discernment’ instead of reactive ‘judgment’ (2004). Elena Cuffari takes up the question of ‘habits of transformation’ through analysis of Dewey and Beauvoir, both of whom explore practices of ethical education and self-­cultivation, and see habit (both of affective attitude and of action) as the constraining and enabling condition for ethical responsiveness and adaptation (2011). Cuffari ends by considering Ladelle McWhorter’s take on what transformative habits might look like, including, drawing on Foucault’s work on self-­care, the use of bodily pleasure cultivated through digging in the dirt (i.e. gardening) and dancing (Cuffari 2011: 546–7). All of these accounts theorise a kind of engagement with affect and ethical practice that does not lapse back into the sovereign subject, but does at least gesture towards what one might do if one wanted to build some affective ethical muscle by which to be fortified when one’s responsiveness and responsibility are at stake. So what about Butler? A set of questions emerges from this brief foray into affect theory, the answers to which would help clarify the work that ‘affect’ is doing or could do in Butler’s ethical theory. Most basically, what is affect? Does she use the term in a consistent and precise way – as unconscious emotion; pre-­discursive and asocial vital bodily intensities; the capacity to affect and be affected; conscious emotion albeit of a contingent subject; feelings; drives? Is affect importantly different from emotion, and if so, how does this matter for Butler (as it matters for Massumi insofar as emotion requires a subject and involves interpretation, and affect does not)? What kind of knowledge does affective experience produce (what is the ‘intelligence of the flesh’, in Brennan’s words (2004: 139)), and how does that knowledge inform ethical judgement and political action? In other words, why does Butler invoke ‘affect’? I do not think the references to affect in Frames of War yet allow full answers to these questions. So far, it is not clearly the case that

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Butler intends any ‘thick’ meaning by the word itself. Nonetheless, its use cannot be incidental – it features in the title of the first chapter of Frames of War. Furthermore, the preponderance of the evidence to date does not suggest that she sees affect as impersonal bodily intensities that ‘assert nothing’. Rather, her recourse to affect has the effect, and arguably the intention, of personalising precariousness, imbuing it with meaning-­making power that motivates one to perceive and sense the ontological vulnerability that relative political privilege so easily obscures.6 Most basically, then, ‘affect’ evokes some kind of embodied experience of a porous and interdependent yet also bounded corporeal being, who is moved some way or other by what they have undergone or could undergo – moved ethically, insofar as embodied understanding of our precariousness might lead us to identify and feel solidarity with vulnerable peoples around the globe; and moved politically, insofar as this identification spurs action aimed at collective life. Still, I want to resist suggesting that Butler is engaging in a distinct ‘turn’ to affect, particularly if this would be taken to signal a break with her past trajectory, or indicate a late-­career de facto acquiescence to standard humanism. We know this line of argumentation well from work on Foucault, about whom numerous scholars have alleged his ultimate capitulation to humanism, human rights and the subject (O’Leary 2002; Paras 2006; Wolin 2006; for a critique of this interpretation, see Golder 2010). Regarding Butler, Ann Murphy has recently pointed to a ‘new humanism’ underlying her attention to corporeal vulnerability, Bonnie Honig has identified her with a form of ‘mortalist humanism’, and in this volume Drew Walker raises this question in terms of the tension between ‘two regimes of the human’ that he discerns in her work. Below I pursue this issue a bit more by considering Diana Coole’s analysis of Butler, which addresses the phenomenological legacy of her early work that haunts her recent work (suggesting, perhaps, a return to humanism, or at least the lived experience of humanisation or becoming-­human). What motivates me to want answers to the suite of questions I raised above, however, is less this question of Butler’s humanism, and more the desire to understand whether and how the ‘affect’ emergent in her recent texts is susceptible to being worked with, channelled, or directed. In other words, how does reading Butler help us think about what to ‘do’ with affect? And here I do not mean politically, in terms of specific collective action she indicates



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we should undertake to move the world in the direction of more room for liveable life. As I articulated in ‘Preparing for Politics’, I acknowledge (and more or less accept) Butler’s resistance as a philosopher to supplying any so-­called action items or road map to political transformation. In Frames of War she gestures towards areas that collective action might target, such as ‘concrete social policy regarding issues such as shelter, work, food, medical care and legal status’ (Butler 2009: 13), but they are general enough to leave readers seeking specific directives unsatisfied. So when I ask here what possibilities or actions her work opens up, I mean ethically: how does she think we can restructure our senses, effect the significant shifts she calls for in disposition and thus in our relation to norms, or cultivate the kind of emotional comportment she values? Insofar as she equates ethics with a kind of personal struggle (the ‘struggle of a single subject’ (Butler 2009: 167)), is that struggle only ever against social norms and with our psychic aggression?7 To the extent that the struggle Butler has in mind is one against social norms that forcibly craft our subjectivity, that struggle would be to critically embody and perform norms differently, and would thus be a fundamentally social and relational endeavour of engaging with the exterior world. But to the extent that it is a struggle with our innate tendency towards aggression as a response to impingement, is the work to be done work on the self? Does the subject craft its own interiority at all, for Butler – is this what ‘affect’ opens up? If the struggle for non-­violence is ‘not about finding and cultivating a non-­violent region of the soul’ or some ‘purified’ or ‘beautiful’ soul, is it about ‘the soul’ at all? (Butler 2009: 171, 178). If ‘our affect is never merely our own’ (Butler 2009: 50), and ‘the body does not belong to itself’ (Butler 2009: 53), then in what sense do we have any ‘private resources’ for ethical responsiveness? At the end of Frames of War Butler asks, ‘[c]an one work with such formative violence against violent outcomes and thus undergo a shift in the iteration of violence?’ (Butler 2009: 170). She links this question directly to clinical psychoanalysis, so it is clear she has our interior life at least partly in mind, both in terms of the psychic or normative violence through which our subjectivity is forged, and in terms of how one might ‘work’ that violence against violent outcomes. But she never answers this question. Can one? What kind of practices of the self might be involved in such work?

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And what kind of revised theory of the subject might be required to answer this question? When Butler invites us to develop a ‘point of identification with suffering itself’ (Butler 2004a: 30), what is the nature of that identification? If she is precisely not counselling empathy with others we do not necessarily know or recognise, but rather ‘apprehension’ of a shared condition of precariousness, is identification a matter of undergoing the affective experience of suffering – feeling vulnerability, loss and dispossession? As I mentioned above, Coole raises this question of the centrality of experience for Butler, suggesting that Butler is returning to the thread of existential phenomenology that ran through her earliest work and then got lost in the high-­poststructuralist, anti-­humanist constructivism of Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter, in particular (Coole 2008: 22). For Coole, this question of experience and the interiority of the subject matters for understanding the capacity for resistance, but also for understanding the motivation for resistance. The formal possibility, or site, for resistance may always exist, but what leads us to enter that space? To put this question in Butler’s language, under what conditions do we heed the solicitation to resistance? Writing with a focus on Undoing Gender, Coole calls for ‘a level of sociological and experiential analysis that still seems to be lacking in Butler’s work’ (2008: 22), but which Coole thinks is there to be embraced. While Precarious Life and Frames of War may show Butler moving slightly more in that direction, she still seems hesitant to theorise agency beyond resistance to the repetition of violent and exclusionary norms; agency as working our potentially dangerous affects against themselves (cultivating ‘aggressive vigilance over aggression’s tendency to emerge as violence’ (Butler 2009: 170)). In addition to offering an explicit conception of the subject of lived experience, if Butler is to move further in this direction she must do more to develop certain affects that are latent in her recent work: not only generosity, humility and patience (and versions of those dispositions that do not reduce to restraint), but also love, care, hope, humour, courage and solidarity.8 Grief may provide an important ethical and political resource (Gutterman and Rushing 2008; McIvor 2012; Lloyd 2007: 141), and destructiveness may be ‘lived and directed’ in a way that ‘seeks to protect the other against destruction’ (Butler 2009: 177). But the question of the motivation to dwell in vulnerability, resist aggression and keep ambivalence alive demands, I think, something more. This is not a call for a



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full-­blown care ethics, or a return to the ‘voluntarist subject of humanism’ (Butler 1993: 7) that Butler has persistently interrogated. But it is a recognition that, for all of the appeal of Butler’s ethics of vulnerability and interdependence, her ethical appeal falls short without more of an answer to the question of how one can cultivate the ‘private resources’ that make responsiveness possible, and what those private resources are, such that they move ethics from the refusal to react and towards the capacity to respond.

Being, feeling and acting responsible Of course, it need not be Butler that provides this supplement.9 In ‘Preparing for Politics’ I asked whether there might be an unconventional virtue ethics emerging in Butler’s work. I think now that the answer to that question is no. Butler invokes the terminology of virtue in ‘What is Critique: An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue’ (2002) and she takes up the question of how life and the good life go hand in hand for Spinoza in ‘Ethical Ambivalence’ (2000). But in Frames of War she clearly equates virtue with a pure, peaceful and harmonious soul that bears no resemblance to the messy, opaque and aggressive subjects she presumes. I believe, though, that the conceptual vocabulary of virtue ethics may have some useful resources to offer Butler.10 By way of conclusion, then, I shall suggest a few points for constructive engagement, which might provide the opportunity to return to the question I asked above: what is the connection, for Butler, between being, feeling and acting responsible? First, ‘character’. Though character has acquired distinctly puritanical connotations in contemporary discourse, it is a performative concept that allows for the cultivation of some ethical agent that need not be an essential, re-­metaphysicalised sovereign or atomistic subject. You do, do, do and become, and the doing is always relational and the becoming is always provisional. Though with Excitable Speech performativity became for Butler primarily a discursive concept, in Undoing Gender she returns to a key point of Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter, namely that ‘performativity is not just about speech acts. It is also about bodily acts’ (Butler 2004b: 199). These bodily acts are not the intentional doings of the voluntarist subject, but they may indicate the kind of agency that Massumi suggests, and which fits well with Butler’s normatively conditioned, constrained and thereby enabled

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‘subject’. In other words, in making a habit of performing the ethical human (the human who fights for ‘the human’?), what is consolidated is some kind of doer, but one effected by the deeds.11 Character is not nature, but rather a set of cultivated dispositions that we can work to habituate ourselves to, and which, when repeated over time, can become something like ‘second nature’. Of course, the question, again, is what kinds of deeds Butler might have in mind. In Gender Trouble, she famously articulated the critical force of parodic subversion enacted by non-­normative gender performances. Her more recent work has explored the force of the act of deferring to the non-­act as a way of performing critique and resistance. In Frames of War, however, we might see the beginnings of a more ‘positive’ account, in the form of the affective ethical appeals we can actively make to each other. In her analysis of the poetry produced by prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, for example, Butler describes the longing and rage conveyed in their words as ‘appeals’ – as efforts to establish a social connection to a world within which such a connection seems impossible (Butler 2009: 49). Quoting from Ariel Dorfman’s epilogue to a published collection of some of the few surviving poems, Butler notes how ‘the body breathes, breathes itself into words, and finds some provisional survival there. But once the breath is made into words, the body is given over to another, in the form of an appeal’ (2009: 61). I would argue that much of Butler’s recent body of work also has the status of an appeal. In Precarious Life she says at one point, ‘I am arguing, if I am “arguing” at all . . .’ (Butler 2004a: 24), which suggests to me that she is not making arguments, but rather is working on us affectively, through her words, by repeatedly invoking a vocabulary of affect, vulnerability, interdependence, loss, grief and, somewhat, love and care. This body of words has aesthetic appeal, a certain poetry to it, which is meant not so much to communicate ideas to us as to induce an experience of precariousness, or to perform it iteratively across multiple texts and talks, and to solicit a community of solidarity. To return to the concept of character, Butler seems to be calling us to at least desire to become a certain way – to value the fragility of corporeal existence for the ethical potential it has, even if she won’t explicate what she thinks one must do to perform that being. Similarly to Aristotle’s, then, Butler’s appeal can be read as an invitation to a certain ethical value structure (practising non-­ violence, risking oneself to live in critical resistance to norms,



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extending care to others who suffer, all in the name of inclusion and liveable, or flourishing, life). But also like Aristotle, Butler offers no formal rules or specific guidelines. I suggested above that ‘apprehension’ takes on a sort of mystical quality in Frames of War, much like phronesis does in the Nicomachean Ethics. And yet, it is not the case for Aristotle, or for Butler, that you either have it or you don’t. Critical understanding of relevant social and historical formations and relations, careful attention to the details of any unique context and event, and certain external resources (money, a community, security, education) are required in order to practise practical wisdom, as they are for apprehension. Second, a few comments on ‘virtue’ or virtues. While Aristotle offers ‘Virtue’ (with a capital V) as the target at which we aim, he nonetheless makes clear that most of us only ever achieve continence. So, not the pure and perfect soul that Butler rejects, but rather a (more or less) consistent practice of resisting or struggling against the impulse to do wrong. But an ethos of anxiety and struggle does not define Aristotle’s approach, as one might argue it has Butler’s. For Aristotle, pleasure is a central dimension of moral conduct. The analogy here is limited, of course, because this aspect of Aristotle’s theory is directly linked to his teleological conception of the human being (i.e. a virtuous person takes pleasure in the objectively right things, namely exercising the virtues, because doing virtuous actions for the right reasons means living closer to the nature of objective human excellence, and thus flourishing). But the idea that it might be what feels good (for lack of better words) that leads us to consistently practise ethical action seems important. For example, Butler notes that the affect of outrage is not necessarily ‘transformed into a sustained political resistance’. Thus she asks, ‘Is there another way to act upon the senses, or to act from them . . .?’ (2009: xiv) A sense of fear and paranoia seems like a reasonable response to apprehending that all life is precarious and vulnerable to destruction, but clearly this is not what she has in mind either. So what are the desired dispositions of the provisional doer or agent that Butler’s ethical appeal solicits us to? Underlying the appeal she makes is something much more pleasurable – ­connective or generative affects including a sense of humour at life’s absurdity and uncontrollableness, a sense of care for and solidarity with people who suffer, a sense of freedom or possibility that comes with ‘talking back’, and a sense of hope

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for and love of the world. Drawing out these dimensions would trouble Bonnie Honig’s characterisation of Butler as a ‘mortalist humanist’, focused on finitude and suffering as the source and extent of human commonality. Honig argues that mortalist humanism’s focus on the universality of human finitude problematically displaces politics, because ‘such solitary affects and shared vulnerabilities are not themselves a rich basis for the democratic, concerted, or oppositional politics’ that she seeks (Honig 2010: 4). Butler’s work has the potential to challenge this claim. But she must confront the claim directly by fleshing out what work affect is doing for her. In particular, she might clarify the extent to which ‘affect’ returns her to questions of embodiment, builds on what she has already articulated regarding relationality and interdependence, and provides the material through which we can cultivate virtues of responsiveness to suffering itself. In short, Butler might address Honig’s critique by showing how affect, far from indicating a retreat from politics, functions as a synapse firing between being and acting, or ethics and politics.

Notes   1. My title builds on Butler’s statement in a 1999 interview: ‘I do think that political decisions are made in that lived moment and they can’t be predicted from the level of theory – they can be sketched, they can be schematized, they can be prepared for . . .’ (Butler in Bell 1999: 166).   2. Even if we push beyond passionate attachments, drives and desires to ‘feelings’, there may be gestures towards this concern in earlier texts. In the preface to the 1999 edition of Gender Trouble, for example, Butler notes that one objective of the text was ‘to understand some of the terror and anxiety that some people suffer in “becoming gay” ’ (Butler 1999: xi). Notably, though, she does not articulate this concern in terms of the feelings such people experience. And as Chapter 1 of Gender Trouble makes clear, Butler is more interested in how regulatory practices produce a façade of ‘internal coherence of the subject’ who might be susceptible to such experiences; a constructed and then naturalised and invisibilised metaphysical ‘unity of experience’ (1999: 30) that reveals less about the person than about how binary gender norms function in the production of and as the conditions for that subjectivity. In Bodies That Matter, Butler’s focus is even more on the scene of production of categories



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of sex and gender. And feminist social theory’s assumptions about the materiality of the body (let alone lived affective bodily experience) create the problematic that she seeks to respond to. Moreover, the experience of ‘despair’ (Butler 1993: 117) driving many forms of identity politics is something she is specifically seeking to evade. Thus Bodies That Matter aims to ‘rethink the terms that establish and sustain bodies that matter’ (Butler 1993: 240), but not to inquire into the experience of mattering or not. Finally, in Excitable Speech Butler is overtly critical of the role of feelings, citing the tendency in literary and cultural studies at the time towards a ‘nearly compulsory production of exorbitant affect as the sign of proof that the forces of censorship are being actively and insistently countered’ (1997a: 144).   3. For example, abjection is a key concept for Butler from early on, but as Lloyd notes, abjection is figured as a discursive process (2007: 75). Butler describes ‘the domain’ or ‘zone’ of abjection – it is a location of exclusion, but not a feeling that a subject has in experiencing such exclusion.  4. Hemmings’ main target is the uncritical use of ‘affect’ as a rhetorical device, whereby affect is ‘mentioned or celebrated but rarely explained either as a critical tool or object’ (2005: 551). In her analysis of Massumi and Sedgwick, she notes how ‘bad affect’ comes to mean deterministic and pessimistic about change, thus affirming the dominant social order, and ‘good affect’ comes to mean whatever shakes loose the hold of that order in the name of freedom. Hemmings summarises the impulse of Massumi and Sedgwick in terms of ‘a new academic attitude rather than a new method, an attitude or faith in something other than the social and cultural, a faith in the wonders that might emerge if we were not so attached to the pragmatic negativity’ (2005: 563). Though in-­depth consideration of the question of ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ affect is outside the scope of this paper, I want to acknowledge Sara Ahmed’s point about what amounts to a social injunction to so-­called good affects like happiness (and her desire to show how the distinction between good feeling and bad feeling fails to hold) (2010: 14). Attention to how ‘good emotions’ normalise and regulate ‘good subjects’ has informed a number of inquiries that seek to resist this injunction, which is traceable in part to positive psychology but with deeper roots, I would argue, in a general Puritan ethic. Such a resistance informs Ngai’s turn to ‘ugly feelings’ (2005), Diana Tietjen Meyers’ focus on ‘rancorous emotional attitudes’ (1997), Lisa Tessman’s

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c­onsideration of the critical moral function of anger (2005), and other philosophical and empirical social science examining the importance of ‘negative emotions’ (Rodriguez 2013).  5. Sara Ahmed has similarly explored how the objects of emotions like fear or disgust can get ‘stuck’ with over-­determined affective baggage, which can lock bodies into relationships that they are not free to simply feel differently (2004: 62).  6. At the very end of Frames of War Butler writes, ‘[a]ll this is just another way of saying that it is most difficult when in a state of pain to stay responsive to the equal claim of the other for shelter, for conditions of livability and grievability’ (2009: 184). But in fact, it does not seem like a state of pain is the hardest condition for responsiveness. It seems like it is ‘most difficult’ when in a state of distraction, oblivion, self-­righteousness or hubris.   7. Aggression is certainly foregrounded in Butler’s most recent work, both as a primary dimension of psychic and social production and a quality of violent actions against others. This is partly due to her concern with literal geopolitical military violence after 9/11. However, the violence of the norm is a tenet across her body of work, and the subject is forged, for her, as it responds to normative violence by turning against its own will and desire through aggression in the form of self-­berating and self-­regulation. As she makes clear in The Psychic Life of Power, however, ‘love and aggression work together’ (Butler 1997b: 26), so in suggesting that aggression is innate, I do not mean to suggest that it is the only or the primary affect of subjects. My concern here, then, is whether the facticity of our primary aggression – the belief that it is always with us, and not something we transcend – ultimately limits how we can direct our energies beyond working aggressively against aggression’s tendency to do violence, and towards something more creative and constructive.  8. Per note 4, I am grasping for a precise way to characterise the affects I have in mind. While calling them ‘positive’ or ‘good’ affects begs the questions raised above, I nonetheless want to suggest that there is something positive I am after, in the sense that we use that word, for example, when talking about positive and negative liberty. Negative liberty involves not doing (a person is free to the extent that external restraints are removed), while positive liberty involves doing (a person is free to the extent that supportive conditions are actively created). So here I have in mind affective dispositions to act in certain ways, not only to resist acting in certain ways. While the ­theories of restraint and resistance that Butler offers are norma-



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tive ones, theorising which affects we should cultivate in the service of a more liveable life requires a different degree of normative constructivism.   9. I agree, though, with David McIvor (2012) when he argues that the ethico-­political promise of her work is compromised by some of her current investments (for McIvor, in melancholia). 10. I confess to sharing Butler’s concerns about how notions of ‘virtue’ can be deployed to exclude, stigmatise and discipline, as well as to frame one’s justification in lashing out against the so-­called vicious, evil or deviant. My nagging desire to put Butler into conversation with virtue ethics has much to do with my goal of finding ways to save virtue ethics from essentialists, absolutists and moralisers; though I also think Butler’s ethical theory could be strengthened by this engagement. 11. In addition to this point, Gender Trouble also takes up the question of what a ‘disposition’ is. Butler examines Freud’s remarks about masculine and feminine dispositions, and, contra Freud, urges the recognition of how dispositions are not original or causal but rather are the ‘effects or productions of a series of internalizations’ (1999: 77, original emphasis). While in the context of Freud and sexuality this may constitute a radical challenge, in the context of Aristotle and ethics it makes perfect sense.

References Ahmed, Sara (2004), The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ahmed, Sara (2010), The Promise of Happiness, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bell, Vikki (1999), ‘On Speech, Race and Melancholia: An Interview with Judith Butler’, in Performativity and Belonging, London: Sage Publications, pp. 163–74. Berlant, Lauren (2010), ‘Cruel Optimism’, in Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (eds), The Affect Theory Reader, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, pp. 93–117. Brennan, Teresa (2004), The Transmission of Affect, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Butler, Judith ([1987] 1999), Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France, New York: Columbia University Press. Butler, Judith (1993), Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, New York: Routledge.

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Butler, Judith (1997a), Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, New York and London: Routledge. Butler, Judith (1997b), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Butler, Judith (1999), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Tenth Anniversary Edition, New York and London: Routledge. Butler, Judith (2000), ‘Ethical Ambivalence’, in Marjorie B. Garber, Beatrice Hanssen and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (eds), The Turn to Ethics, New York: Routledge, pp. 15–28. Butler, Judith (2002), ‘What is Critique?: An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue’, in David Ingram (ed.), The Political, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 212–26. Butler, Judith (2004a), Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, London and New York: Verso. Butler, Judith (2004b), Undoing Gender, London and New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith (2005), Giving an Account of Oneself, New York: Fordham University Press. Butler, Judith (2009), Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, London and New York: Verso. Butler, Judith (2012), Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, New York: Columbia University Press. Butler, Judith, and Athena Athanasiou (2013), Dispossession: The Performative in the Political, Cambridge: Polity Press. Butler, Judith, and William Connolly (2000), ‘Politics, Power and Ethics: A Discussion between Judith Butler and William Connolly’, Theory & Event, 4: 2. Clough, Patricia Ticineto, with Jean Halley (eds) (2007), The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Clough, Patricia Ticineto (2010), ‘Afterword: The Future of Affect Studies’, Body & Society, 16: 1, 222–30. Connolly, William E. (2011), ‘Critical Response I: The Complexity of Intention’, Critical Inquiry, 37: 4, 791–8. Coole, Diana (2008), ‘Butler’s phenomenological existentialism’, in Terrell Carver and Samuel. A. Chambers (eds), Judith Butler’s Precarious Politics: Critical Encounters, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 11–27. Cuffari, Elena (2011), ‘Habits of Transformation’, Hypatia, 26: 3, 535–53.



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Golder, Ben (2010), ‘What is an Anti-Humanist Human Right?’ Social Identities, 16: 5, 651–68. Gregg, Melissa, and Gregory J. Seigworth (eds) (2010), The Affect Theory Reader, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Gutterman, David S and Rushing Sara L. (2008), ‘Sovereignty and Suffering: Toward an Ethics of Grief in a Post-9/11 World’, in Terrell Carver and Samuel A. Chambers (eds), Judith Butler’s Precarious Politics: Critical Encounters, Routledge: New York, pp. 127–42. Hemmings, Clare (2005), ‘Invoking Affect: Cultural Theory and the Ontological Turn’, Cultural Studies, 19: 5, 548–67. Honig, Bonnie (2010), ‘Antigone’s Two Laws: Greek Tragedy and the Politics of Humanism’, New Literary History, 41: 1, 1–33. La Caze, Marguerite and Lloyd, Henry Martyn (2011), ‘Editor’s Introduction: Philosophy and the “Affective Turn”’, Parrhesia. 13, 1–13. Leys, Ruth (2011), ‘The Turn to Affect: A Critique’, Critical Inquiry, 37: 3, 434–72. Lloyd, Moya (2007), Judith Butler: From Norms to Politics, Cambridge: Polity Press. Lloyd, Moya (2008), ‘Towards a cultural politics of vulnerability: Precarious lives and ungrievable deaths’, in Terrell Carver and Samuel A. Chambers (eds), Judith Butler’s Precarious Politics: Critical Encounters, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 92–105. Massumi, Brian (2002), Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Massumi, Brian (2010), ‘The Future Birth of the Affective Fact’ in in Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (eds), The Affect Theory Reader, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, pp. 52–70. McIvor, David (2012), ‘Bringing Ourselves to Grief: Judith Butler and the Politics of Mourning’, Political Theory, 40: 4, 409–36. Meyers, Diana Tietjens (1997), ‘Emotion and Heterodox Moral Perception: An Essay in Moral Social Psychology’, in Feminists Rethink the Self, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, pp. 197–218. Murphy, Ann V. (2011), ‘Corporeal Vulnerability and the New Humanism’, Hypatia, 26: 3, 575–90. Ngai, Sianne (2005), Ugly Feelings, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. O’Leary, Timothy (2002), Foucault and the art of ethics, London: Continuum. Paras, Eric (2006), Foucault 2.0: Beyond power and knowledge, New York: Other Press.

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Pedwell, Carolyn and Whitehead, Anne (2012), ‘Affecting feminism: Questions of feeling in feminist theory,’ Feminist Theory, 13: 2, 115–29. Rodriguez, Tori (2013), ‘Negative Emotions Are Key to Well-Being,’ Scientific American, 24: 2, 5 June 2013. Rushing, Sara (2010), ‘Preparing for Politics: Judith Butler’s Ethical Dispositions’, Contemporary Political Theory, 9: 3, 284–303. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (2003), Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Series Q), Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Smith, Rachel Greenwald (2011), ‘Postmodernism and the Affective Turn’, Twentieth Century Literature, 57: 3/4, 423–47. Tessman, Lisa (2005), Burdened Virtues: Virtue Ethics for Liberatory Struggles, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wolin, Richard (2006), ‘Foucault the neohumanist?’, Chronicle of Higher Education, 1 September 2006, p. 106. Zournazi, Mary (2002), ‘Navigating Movements: A Conversation with Brian Massumi’, in Hope: New Philosophies for Change, Melbourne: Pluto Press, pp. 210–42.

4

Violence, Affect and Ethics Birgit Schippers

Why do we respond with empathy and compassion to some forms of human suffering and loss of human life, yet react with indifference or loathing to other forms of human suffering, and other losses of human life?1 This question, raised in Judith Butler’s recent writings on violence, war and ethics,2 connects her work with two current developments in humanities and social science discourses: these are the so-­called ‘affective turn’, and the turn towards ethics. In her work, Butler intimates that affect plays a central role in the differential structuring, or framing, of human experience, and in responses to the vulnerability and suffering of others. However, although her writings are peppered with references to affect and its impact on our responses to, and responsibility for the other, she has not given this feature of her work the kind of focus that I believe it deserves. And while Butler’s ventures into the field of ethics have already received considerable critical attention,3 there has, as yet, been little discussion of her deployment of affect.4 Considering the enormous output of scholarship that her writings tend to generate, this oversight is remarkable, and it is one of my aims in this essay to review and evaluate Butler’s deployment of affect in more detail. My main objective, though, is to unravel the connection between affect and ethics, and to establish its import for understanding our responses to violence and war. It is my contention that the linkage between affect and ethics in Butler’s writings is of significant explanatory and critical value: it contributes notably towards an understanding of the differentiated visceral reactions and responses to the suffering of others, specifically in the context of war. Her construal of ethics as enmeshed with affect (see Butler 2009: 34) is noteworthy for two further, and related, reasons: first, it conveys how ethical responsibility is not inherently at odds with the notion of the decentred subject. Rather, ethical responsibility 91

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is anchored in the subject’s constitution as relational. Thus, at the heart of Butler’s account lies her assertion of an affective relationality, or interdependency, out of which ethical obligations are said to arise: responsibility becomes grounded in relationality and in our vulnerability towards and dependence upon the actions of known and unknown others. Second, Butler’s affective underpinning of ethics contributes to the development of a conception of global ethics that takes seriously the visceral dimension of global dependence and interdependence, and of our responses towards intimate and distant others. Building on my exposition of what I call Butler’s affective conception of ethics, I present a broadly sympathetic interpretation of her ideas. As I argue, her emphasis on the visceral dimensions of social and political life makes an important contribution to a still neglected topic in the fields of ethics and political philosophy. Furthermore, her account is particularly helpful in understanding the affective dimension of violence. However, whilst Butler’s rendering of the relationship between affect and ethics carries substantial explanatory force and normative ambition, it lacks, in my view, normative plausibility: although she tells us why we should respond ethically towards others, she cannot tell us why we should feel ethically disposed towards others. As I argue, this connection between ethical obligation and ethical feeling, or affect, is not finally resolved in her work. The first two sections of my chapter are mapping exercises. To contextualise my discussion, I offer a brief exposition of the main themes associated with the so-­called affective turn; this exposition will be followed by an outline of Butler’s treatment of affect, which I track through several of her pre-­9/11 publications.5 The linkage between affect, ethics and violence occupies me in the remainder of this chapter, where I focus on two aspects: first, I attend to the linkage between affect, violence and ethical responsibility in Butler’s moral philosophy and in her writings on war, and second, I draw on Butler’s discussion of relationality and community in order to sketch the broad parameters of her conception of global ethics.

The affective turn The notion of affect has generated substantial interest in recent humanities and social science research.6 Notwithstanding dif-



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ferences in thematic focus, methodological orientation or disciplinary background, scholars of affect tend to agree that social life, broadly conceived, cannot be studied through the prism of rationalism alone, or by attending to cognitive processes only. Rather, affect is said to play a central role in the way we relate to others, how we experience social life or how we engage in collective action. Furthermore, what unites this turn to affect is an expressed intention to overcome the distinction and barriers that are said to stand between the natural sciences on the one hand, and the social sciences and humanities on the other; and, more broadly, to connect visceral life with social or political life. Still, affect scholarship is a diverse and richly textured field. As Gregg and Seigworth point out, the concept of affect has accumulated ‘a sweeping assortment of philosophical/psychological/physiological underpinnings, critical vocabularies, and ontological pathways’ (2010: 5). These, as they continue, are said to turn on a variety of political ends and purposes. Regardless of the multiplicity of origins and investigative directions, four major sources surface regularly within affect scholarship. These are (1) philosophical traditions associated with the ideas of Spinoza, Bergson and Deleuze; (2) modern popular culture; (3) psychoanalytic theories of the drives and intersubjectivity; and (4) the insights of neuroscience for research in the humanities and social sciences. Interest in affect has achieved particular prominence in recent work in political studies, a discipline traditionally less open to the idea of affect. Much of this work considers the significance of affective display to the study of politics, such as anger and rage, passion and compassion, fear and hope, joy and sadness, as well as shame, guilt and disgust (see for example Clarke, Hoggett and Thompson 2006; Hoggett 2009; McManus 2011; Thompson and Hoggett 2012).7 One of the key challenges facing affect scholarship to date has been the task of providing conceptual clarity. As the French psychoanalyst André Green declares, as early as 1977, affect eludes clear meaning and definition. More than thirty years later, Gregg and Seigworth proclaim that there is ‘no single, generalizable theory of affect’ (2010: 3). Not surprisingly, there is no agreed definition of what the concept of affect denotes. Much of the definitional efforts turn on affect’s relationship to emotion. While some commentators make no distinction between the two (see for example Neuman, Marcus, Crigler et al. 2007), others deploy the extent of cognitive evaluation as a distinguishing criterion: affects

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are said to be automatic physical responses that require limited cognitive evaluation, and that communicate changes in physiological reactivity. Emotional responses, on the other hand, are said to require higher-­order cognitive processes that establish a plan of action (see Stein, Hernandez and Trabasso 2008). A different way to distinguish between affect and emotion references the logical, or chronological, priority of affect over emotion. Lawrence Grossberg, for example, argues that ‘our emotional states are elicited from within the affective states in which we already find ourselves. Unlike emotions, affective states are neither structured narratively nor organized in response to our interpretations of situations’ (1992: 81). Thus, whereas emotions are said to be identifiable sets of feelings such as fear, hate or love, affect is regarded as more diffuse, indicating what cannot be clearly named, and what tends to be linked to pre-­discursive or pre-­ontological bodily excitations.8 Furthermore, Grossberg insists on the articulation of affect through ideological narratives, which, he suggests, produce different forms of emotional responses and involvements. As stressed frequently in the critical commentary, affect operates in an equivocal or ambiguous manner. Thus, how affect is experienced, how, and to what extent, we are affected, and how particular affects work in particular situations cannot be pre-­ determined (see also Grossberg 1992).9 Following Cvetkovich, such ‘queer approaches’ to affect are said to ‘value the many feelings that people can experience, including feelings of confusion and ambivalence that don’t fit into neat models of anger and grief’ (Cvetkovich 2003: 284). Considering the equivocal nature of affect may also lead to a reorientation of affective responses, and towards a different formulation of affective ethics. I attend to this discussion further below, where I argue, with respect to Butler, that affect’s equivocal qualities constitute the promise of an affective ethics aimed at political transformation. This brief excursion into some of the definitional struggles of affect studies illuminates an aspect of the debate that Butler addresses unequivocally: this is her assertion that affect lies within the realm of discourse or signification. Put differently, while affect is discursively produced, its workings are often disguised as pre-­discursive operations. In this respect, the distinction between affect and emotion is of limited significance to my discussion: to discriminate between raw, bodily or pre-­social affect on the one hand, and socially, culturally or cognitively worked-­over emotion on the other, would entrench the



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binary between body and mind that affect studies seeks to counter. How Butler conceives of affect, and how affect relates to her conception of ethics, will occupy me in the next section.

The affective subject: desire, trauma and excitability As I alluded above, Butler has yet to provide her readers with a systematic exposition of affect that would be comparable to her work on ethics. To be fair, references to affect surface regularly in her writings, beginning with some of her earliest publications, such as Subjects of Desire, and extending to her more recent work published in the wake of 9/11 and the US interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, such as Precarious Life and Frames of War. However, affect’s import to her conception of ethics has, so far, only been presented in rudimentary form. This absence of a detailed exposition mirrors the relative neglect of this element of her ideas in the critical commentary on her work, and in the coverage of Butler in the wider field of affect studies. Although scholars engaging with Butler’s ideas reference her attention to the visceral dimension of social and political life,10 her work does not feature prominently in the field of affect studies. Of course, this lack of attention does not, in itself, lessen the import of affect to Butler’s ideas in general, and on ethics in particular; neither does it diminish the significance of her contribution to the scholarly study of affect. My concern is not with affect studies’ deployment of Butler, though; rather, I want to think through her treatment of affect and its significance for ethics under conditions of war and violence. Admittedly, the concept of affect may not carry the same weight in Butler’s critical thought as her discussion of performativity or her intervention in debates on recognition or universality; however, I want to suggest that her attention to the affective dimensions of social and political life constitute an integral aspect of her work that deserves closer critical scrutiny. The relevance of affect, as I discuss below, turns on its centrality to Butler’s articulation of the subject, to her theorisation of the intersubjective conditions of social and political life, and to her recent work on war and violence. As I outline in this section, affect construes the subject as both affective and affected, and it surfaces in three forms: as desire, as trauma and as excitability. In Subjects of Desire, Butler sets herself the task of tracking philosophy’s treatment of impulse, specifically ‘the philosophical effort to domesticate desire as an instance of metaphysical place’

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([1987] 1999: 15). Implicitly contained within this aim is her critique of the project of philosophy, which, she contends, either juxtaposes desire to philosophical reason, or domesticates desire in the name of such reason. As she argues, ‘[t]o desire the world and to know its meaning and structure have seemed conflicting enterprises’ ([1987] 1999: 1). Yet, as Butler seeks to demonstrate, desire continues to haunt the philosophical project as its constitutive outside that cannot be willed away. Criticising philosophy’s efforts to abject or discipline desire, Butler’s philosophical thinking develops as a sustained interrogation of the importance of the visceral dimension of social and political life in general, and of its import to the emergence and persistence of the subject in particular. Such visceral dimension is said to stem from desire’s association with an animal appetite for the sensuous and perceptual world.11 Central to the philosophical acknowledgement of desire is, in her view, the tradition inaugurated in the wake of Spinoza and Hegel. Of particular import to the development of Butler’s thinking is the Spinozan assertion of the desire to persist.12 It is out of this desire to persist, or the desire for life, that ethics emerges: persistence, as Butler suggests, is only possible if we acknowledge our fundamental dependency upon others. This relation to an other lies at the heart of Butler’s conception of ethics. As she argues, ‘the question of ethics is always a question of an ethical relation, that is, the question of what binds me to another and in what way this obligation suggests that the “I” is invariably implicated in the “we” ’ (Butler 2013: 107). Below I outline how the desire for persistence, and the structures of dependency that enable such persistence, are modulated by the specific conditions of liveability that we find ourselves in, leading Butler to posit the existence of differentiated sets of human life and liveability. Thus, it is in the context of her post-­ 9/11 writings on war that the question, ‘what kind of world makes desire possible?’ (Butler [1987] 1999: 24) obtains renewed poignancy. Underpinning Butler’s discussion of desire is her consideration of the famous passage on lordship and bondage from Hegel’s Phenomenology, which provides her with one of the key concepts of her political thought: that of recognition. As she argues: ‘desire creates a distinctively human subjectivity through recognition of and by another desire’ (Butler [1987] 1999: 78, original emphasis). The significance of desire, and its relation to recognition, obtains renewed attention in the Preface to the paperback edition



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of Subjects of Desire, published in 1999, where Butler contends that ‘the constitution of the subject entails a radical and constitutive relation to alterity’ ([1987] 1999: xiv). This struggle for recognition configures human desire and subjectivity, where emergence as a subject requires emergence into those structures of alterity that are sustained by desire and recognition. Thus, it is through the figure of the Other that a rudimentary ethics emerges. Hegelian themes, specifically the significance of alterity, desire and recognition, re-­emerge in The Psychic Life of Power (Butler 1997a) and later work (see Butler 2004b; 2009), where Butler reformulates this desire for the Other in two related directions: first, she stresses the emergence of the subject in relation to the operation of norms; second, she avers the subject’s vulnerability and potentially ‘unwilled dependency’ on others (see 2009). After Subjects of Desire, these Hegelian themes receive an altogether more sobering response. Unlike the almost exuberant journey of the Hegelian subject in Subjects of Desire, The Psychic Life of Power narrates the story of a subject whose traumatic emergence is the result of disavowed loss, and who is deeply entrenched in its melancholic attachments and turns. Key to this shift in emphasis in Butler’s ideas is her consideration of Freudian psychoanalysis, specifically her deployment of Freud’s concept of melancholia and its constitutive role in the generation of the subject. Her claim, that the subject emerges as a result of disavowed loss, traces the vicissitudes of desire and affect in a culture that is deeply heterosexist.13 Heterosexist cultural imperatives create, regulate and police affective responses, at times with devastating effects. As Butler illustrates, we can only understand the wider cultural inability to mourn the losses from HIV/AIDS if we put this incapacity in the context of the panic and fear triggered by the figure of homosexuality, conceived as an abject sexuality, and the preceding internalisation of the prohibition of a moral principle that comes to form conscience.14 Several years later, in Precarious Life, she makes a similar argument in relation to the disavowed losses and the ‘flamboyant mourning’ undertaken by the Bush administration in the wake of 9/11 (Butler 2004b: 149), and she continues to return to the topic of grievability, to the regulation and policing of mourning and of the affective responses to loss. Before I develop this argument further, I want to remain with the influence of Hegelian ideas on her work after Subjects of Desire.

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Key to Butler’s discussion of the subject, of ethics and of affect is her insistence on what she terms ‘ontological ek-­stasis’ (2004a: 150). This idea refers to the subject’s fundamental dependence on the figure of the Other; it displaces conceptions of an autonomous and sovereign self, and it posits the subject as relational, dependent and vulnerable. I have already intimated above that Butler’s renewed attention to Hegel, this time in the context of the framework of a passionate attachment of the subject to its own subjection, is significant to her conception of relationality and dependence, and its implications for ethics. To unpack her argument briefly, in The Psychic Life of Power, Butler avers that the subject must attach itself in order to persist. Such need for attachment arises because the subject is dependent upon the care it receives from others: care forms the condition of the subject’s sustainability and, quite literally, its liveability. It is, as she puts it, ‘the formation of primary passion in dependency’ (Butler 1997a: 7). However, such dependency and attachment to others leave the subject vulnerable to those who may not attend to our needs in a sufficient or good enough way; thus attachment may, paradoxically, undermine the subject’s chances to flourish. Furthermore, she contends that in order to persist, it is necessary to submit to subjection, or, as she puts it, ‘to desire the conditions of one’s own subordination’ (Butler 1997a: 9). This emphasis on submission should be seen in the context of Butler’s insistence on the dependence, or interdependence, of subject constitution. To quote again from The Psychic Life of Power: as she argues, ‘no subject emerges without a passionate attachment to those on whom he or she is fundamentally dependent’ (Butler 1997a: 7). Thus, passionate attachment delineates the condition and indeed the limits to progressive politics and resistance; as she states, there are limits to liberation that constitute the condition of the emergence of the subject (Butler 1997a: 33). Moreover, as she continues, these limits are experienced in one’s subjection to the norms and ideals of ethical laws – in other words, the moral principles of ethical life. If Subjects of Desire and The Psychic Life of Power track the subject’s emergence through the affective structures of desire and trauma, Excitable Speech turns on the affective capacity of linguistic interpellation. In fact, although the term is rarely mentioned, Excitable Speech constitutes one of Butler’s most explicit forays into the topic of affect.15 Frequently considered as her contribution to the debate on free speech, the book could profitably be read as a



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map into the topic of affect, and as an effort to document the concrete instantiations of affect’s workings. Significantly, Excitable Speech prefigures much of Butler’s more recent work on vulnerability, injurability and the question of ethical responsibility. As Butler outlines, hate speech plays on the excitability of language and its capacity to work on, and to interpellate, the addressee. Hate speech also structures the subject’s responses to unwelcome forms of language. Injurious terms have the potential to produce affective responses that, as Butler alleges, constitute the subject (as subjugated) in the first place. As she argues, name-­calling emerges from a scene of ‘enabling vulnerability’ (Butler 1997b: 2) that can be derogatory and demeaning, yet paradoxically provides the possibility for social existence.16 Whereas Excitable Speech discusses the circulation of hate speech as it moves from speaker to addressee, pondering the interpellative emergence of, and potentially injurious effects on the subject, Butler’s recent work, especially her texts published since 2004, offers a detailed account of the ontology of the subject in and through injurability and vulnerability.17 To develop my discussion of Butler’s deployment of affect further, I will now attend to her more recent writings on violence and ethics in the context of the War on Terror.

Affect, violence and ethical responsibility Although it is not my aim to plot the development of Butler’s thinking on ethics, it is worth highlighting that her acknowledgement of ethics’ import, which features prominently in her recent work, stands in contrast to her initial resistance to ethics. This resistance, articulated in an interview with William Connolly, conveys her concern that a focus on ethics may detract attention from politics (see Butler and Connolly 2000).18 As is well known, Butler’s thinking has undergone a remarkable turn towards the acknowledgement that ethical considerations matter to politics. This position, articulated in her writings published since 2004,19 centres on a concern for existential questions, which in turn inform her discussion of the concept of liveability. At the core of this account sits her claim that life is precarious, vulnerable to the actions of others. To briefly unpack this assertion, Butler distinguishes between precariousness, which refers to the existential condition of vulnerability, and precarity, which articulates the contingent allocation and differential distribution of vulnerability, based on social ­cleavages

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such as sexuality, ethnicity or class (2009: 3). Butler pursues the significance of life’s precarity/precariousness in two related directions: the emphasis of Giving an Account of Oneself, her book on moral philosophy, lies with tracing ethical responsibility in the ontological structure of alterity, while Precarious Life and Frames of War develop a critique of the political fall-­out of 9/11, the ensuing military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the controversies surrounding the conduct of US military personnel in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. In this section I map the linkage between affect, violence and ethical responsibility through a discussion of Butler’s moral philosophy; as I aver, it is through her moral philosophy that she establishes, more explicitly than perhaps elsewhere, the connection between affect, violence and ethics. I also begin to explore Butler’s attention to the conditions of war and violence (I continue this discussion in the final section of my chapter), where affective ethics is played out. Butler opens her discussion in Giving an Account of Oneself by introducing the notion of ethical violence, a concept she borrows from Adorno: following Adorno, Butler suggests that moral principles exert a form of violence, which they impose, through the application of normative ideals, onto the subject. This idea, by no means Butler’s first foray into the field of moral philosophy, develops several key themes already presented in The Psychic Life of Power, specifically in relation to her discussion of Hegel’s concept of the unhappy consciousness. There, as in Giving an Account of Oneself, Butler ponders the emergence of the subject via its subjection to ethical demands and norms. As she suggests, while the Phenomenology’s famous section on lordship and bondage has been mined for its liberationist narrative, such a reading overlooks how fear, in fact terror, already looms large in the constitution and the life of the subject. Thus, a central tenet of The Psychic Life of Power is the insight that Hegel’s story of lordship and bondage does not end with the mutual recognition of two consciousnesses. Rather, the subject must submit to ethical principles, or norms, which produce and regulate affective behaviour as well as, more broadly, normative conceptions of human life. Ethical principles, and the norms that govern intelligible life, generate affective structures, including fear and terror, which come to regulate the subject, and which contribute to the development of guilty conscience. In her recent work (Butler 2004b; 2005; 2009), Butler articulates the ethical–affective ordering of the subject with the notion of the



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frame. Frames, as she avers, are interpretative structures that regulate recognition, including the recognition of life and loss; frames categorise the norms that govern the structures of recognition, they mould those lives that are recognised as liveable, and hence grievable, and they order our affective responses to others. One of Butler’s central claims is her assertion that the subject’s ethical agency operates in the dark, under conditions of opacity, specifically the opacity in relation to its own emergence. What, though, are the implications for ethical responsibility? As Butler asks, ‘[d]oes the postulation of a subject who is not self-­ grounding, that is, whose conditions of emergence can never fully be accounted for, undermine the possibility of responsibility and, in particular, of giving an account of oneself?’ (2005: 19). Already in Excitable Speech, she ponders the question of the responsibility for injurious language. As she argues, whilst the speaker of hate speech is responsible for his/her utterances, such language must be understood in the wider context of its circulation, which does not originate with the utterances of individual speakers. Thus, responsibility becomes displaced, but it does not release the decentred subject from its ethical responsibility towards others. Likewise, opacity does not release the subject from ethical responsibility. Rather, as she insists, responsibility is grounded in relationality, specifically in our vulnerability towards, and dependence upon, the actions of known and unknown others. Much of Butler’s thinking on ethical responsibility is influenced by the writings of Emmanuel Levinas and Jean Laplanche, both of whom posit the figure of the Other at the origin of being. As Butler argues, drawing on Levinas, we are, ‘in a primary way . . . impinged upon by otherness, and . . . this defines us as receptive and relational from the start’ (Butler in Butler and Athanasiou 2013: 95).20 To unpack this claim briefly, pondering the question of whose lives matter, whose lives are recognised as having been lived, and whose lives are grievable, Butler positions the subject as relational, thereby undercutting any claims to autonomy that the subject may express. As she suggests, the language of autonomy is misleading, since what lies at the heart of the subject is a mode of dispossession, or being beside oneself. This ‘ethical enmeshment’ (Butler 2004a: 25) has consequences for the life of the subject, because it makes us vulnerable to the actions of others, including those actions that are violent. The language Butler uses to articulate such vulnerability is indicative of her claim regarding

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the openness of the subject: she talks about ‘being dispossessed’, ‘being undone’, ‘being beside oneself’, ‘given over to the other’, ‘being a porous boundary’, ‘being outside myself’. Such modes of dispossession, however, do not ring the death of the subject; rather, as Butler suggests, ‘the ec-­static character of our existence is essential to the possibility of persisting as human’ (2004a: 33, original emphasis). As I already indicated above, with the notion of ek-­stasis, which emerges initially via her theory of the subject, Butler formulates a notion of the subject as dependent upon, or given over to an other. In Undoing Gender, this idea is captured with her expression of ‘being undone’: this is the idea that the connection, or ties, we have with others constitutes our sense of self (Butler 2004a: 18). And, to briefly highlight a point I argue below, while this concept has intrinsic value as the foundation for a conception of ethics, it also serves the formulation of a global ethics that is orientated towards conditions of otherness, and that can begin to conceive of community as the project of responsibility and liveability. Moreover, it is grounded in conceptions of grievability and precariousness that add force to the ethico-­political ambition of Butler’s wider critical thought. Dispossession further underwrites the paradoxical nature of the subject. But while this paradox was initially formulated exclusively in relation to subjection to norms (see Butler 1997a), it is now developed in relation to the existence of the other. For Butler, as we have already seen, survival and persistence are only possible because of the sustaining actions of an other; hence, she concludes that ‘my existence is not mine alone’ (2009: 44). Drawing on Laplanche’s claim that ‘[t]he other is prior to the subject’ (Laplanche 2001; Butler 2005: 73), she concludes that the ‘I’ is ‘authored by what precedes and exceeds me’ (Butler 2005: 82). Such rendering of the subject as ecstatic or dispossessed undercuts any claims to sovereignty, establishing the subject instead in and through its relations to others. I am sympathetic, on normative grounds, towards Butler’s conception of ethical responsibility, and I welcome her attention to the ethical agency of the decentred subject. I remain unconvinced, though, by the way she conceives of ethical responsibility as an existential category, deduced from the ‘fact’ of dependence.21 Further, what is missing in Butler’s account is an explanation of how ethical responsibility becomes an affective demand; that is, why should my ethical obligations towards others be affectively underpinned? In what contexts, and under what conditions, do I



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feel ethically responsible? And, as I outline below, how can such affective ethics withstand the selective and differential framing of ethical feelings along racial or gendered lines? Regardless of my reservations towards these aspects of Butler’s theorising, I want to suggest that her pursuit to establish ethical responsibility in the absence of transparency and (self-)knowledge, in other words, in the context of being decentred, acquires a particular poignancy and urgency under the conditions of post-­9/11 politics, articulated in Precarious Life and Frames of War. What concerns Butler in these texts are ‘cultural modes of regulating affective and ethical dispositions through a selective and differential framing of violence’ (2009: 1). The ontologically anchored injunction towards ethical responsibility, as articulated in Giving an Account of Oneself, is undercut by political and cultural practices that, in a best-­case scenario, nurture and care for the subject, and in doing so, ensure the subject’s survivability and liveability. However, in a worst-­case scenario, under conditions of violence and war, these practices absolve from responsibilities towards others, resulting in death and destruction. To unpack this aspect a little further: building on earlier assertions articulated in Precarious Life, Frames of War grounds the ontology of the subject in its precariousness. In other words, as subjects, we are dependent on, but also vulnerable to the – potentially injurious – actions of others. However, while such precariousness is said to be an existential condition of human life, it manifests itself differently, dependent upon the (geopolitical) location of the subject and its framing in accordance with hegemonic conceptions of human intelligibility. Central to the further development of Butler’s discussion in Frames of War is the connection she establishes between affect, violence and ethics under conditions of war. One of the concerns, articulated in this book, pertains to the regulation of our responses to the losses emerging as a result of war and conflict. The question of grievability is indeed at the heart of much of Butler’s work, and it poses the question of how the state is involved in the planning and organisation of commemorative events, and in the allocation and use of public spaces that facilitate commemoration, as well as, more fundamentally, in the generation, regulation and policing of affective responses to loss. As I intimated above, Butler has previously attended to the issue of our affective engagement with loss in the context of HIV/AIDS. Her recent work focuses on grievability and the recognition of loss in the context of the so-­called War

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on Terror, and the conflict in Israel/Palestine. As I have already intimated, she criticised the Bush administration’s ‘flamboyant mourning’ (Butler 2004b: 149) after 9/11, and she challenged the differential treatment of the victims of the attack on the Twin Towers according to their sexuality, ethnicity and citizenship status. One noteworthy example, also discussed in Precarious Life, refers to the death of two Palestinian families killed by Israeli military. An obituary submitted to the San Francisco Chronicle was refused by the paper on the grounds that no proof of death was provided. The paper invited the submission of memorials, but rejected these on the grounds that the paper did not wish to offend anyone (see Butler 2004b: 35). As Butler has argued persistently, such public regulation of loss, and its recognition or misrecognition, forms an integral part of the discourse of humanisation: it determines whose lives are grievable, and who is recognised as having lived a liveable life, and it regulates which affective responses are recognised as legitimate. The question of grievability, and of the public recognition of loss, remains significant in the ongoing responses to the loss of life as a result of the War on Terror, where civilian casualties, especially victims of the growing number of drone attacks, remain unnamed losses of this conflict (see also Butler 2009: 38–40).22 In Frames of War, Butler draws on Talal Asad’s On Suicide Bombing (2007) to question our differentiated responses to violence, war and loss. In his book, Asad ponders the differentiated responses to different forms of violence. Specifically, he asks why the Western public reacts with horror to representations of suicide bombing, yet does not display the same sense of dread and revulsion at the dispensation of state-­directed or state-­legitimised forms of violence. In Frames of War, Butler responds to Asad’s question by referring back to the notion of the frame. As she argues, affective responses are framed differentially; hence, we respond differently to different lives, and this distinction demarcates liveable, and thus grievable, from non-­liveable and non-­grievable lives, that is, those lives which are not, or not fully, recognised as human. Violence already persists in the frame of what can be seen, and what is shown (Butler 2004b: 5; see also 2009). Affective responses are thus implicated in the normative power of the frame, but they can also be put to work in the service of a politics of outrage (Butler 2009: 40; see also next section). Of particular significance to the issues raised by Butler is, in my view, the development of Asad’s



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argument in a later article. In ‘Thinking about terrorism and just war’ (2010), Asad suggests that ‘terrorists’ and liberal states share the same space of violence, where the lines between war and peace are not properly demarcated (see also Asad 2007: 39). In this space, terror is normalised; its practices include suicide bombing and the beheading of hostages, but also aerial warfare and what he terms ‘individualized terror’ (2010: 7), such as the use of violent practices in the interrogation of prisoners that have become part of the repertoire of the liberal security regime (see also Butler 2004b, 2009). In fact, violence, Asad suggests, lies at the origin of the liberal state. As he continues, ‘[l]iberal powers have used massive force and liberal arguments to make, unmake, expand and dissolve states violently’ (Asad 2010: 19). In his view, the creation of modern France out of revolutionary wars, the emergence of nation-­states out of the dissolution of the Austro-­Hungarian Empire, or the destruction of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of new political entities in the Middle East all emerge out of the practice of violence deployed by liberal states. As we have already seen, like Asad, Butler also subscribes to the notion of violence as constitutive or productive: the submission to moral principles, and the crafting of bodies in accordance with hegemonic norms of cultural intelligibility feature prominently in her discussion. Such constitutive violence, however, produces what she terms an ‘ethical quandary’: that is, ‘how to live the violence of one’s formative history, how to effect shifts and reversals in its reiterations’ (Butler 2009: 170). How we respond to violence, how we deploy the terminology of violence, including terms such as ‘terrorism’ or ‘terrorist’, is subject to ‘moral affect’ (Butler 2009: 159), and its differential distribution and framing within the interpretative structures of hegemonic conceptions of liveability. Further, while the violence emanating from war may trigger traumatic responses, this outcome is by no means certain. What is crucial is the response to such trauma. That is, the response to violence can either be further violence, or, as Butler counsels, a suspension of violence.23 Reflecting on how to engage with trauma, and how to respond to violence, has significance beyond national boundaries.24 Butler thus cautions strongly against what she terms ‘nationalistic triumphalism’, and, as I discuss in the next section, to account for the transnational and global effect of trauma she advocates the formation of global communities, and the adherence to a global ethics.

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Affect, communal bonds and global ethics In his recent book, Arthur Kroker claims that Butler’s insistence on the inherent failure of interpellation keeps her attentive to the subject’s passionate attachment to subjection (2012: 7). Such attachment, as we have seen, foregrounds Butler’s rendering of the subject as paradoxical, indebted equally to the traumatic experience of melancholic loss, and the capacity to enter into community with others. As I intimated, this paradox also underpins her recent work, specifically her engagement with 9/11 and the ensuing military campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond. What interests me in this final section is Butler’s consideration of affect and its connection with relationality and community, her conception of ethical responsibility, and the context for the formulation of a global ethics. The elements of this thinking can be located in some of her recent writings, especially in Undoing Gender and Giving an Account of Oneself, but before I inspect the claims contained in these books further, I want to return briefly to her discussion of affect in The Psychic Life of Power. Towards the end of her reflection on attachment and subjection in The Psychic Life of Power, Butler establishes a linkage between Hegel, Freud and Foucault, which she traces back to Spinoza’s conception of the conatus.25 As she argues, ‘the capacity of desire to be withdrawn and to reattach will constitute something like the vulnerability of every strategy of subjection’ (1997a: 62). Desire’s capacity to withdraw, to reattach or to attach differently opens affective ethics to possibilities of change and transformation. Exploring the prospects for such transformation informs Butler’s discussion in Undoing Gender, a collection of essays on the so-­called New Gender Politics that puts forward a distinctly relational account of the subject (2004a). As I outlined above, key to this discussion is the notion of ek-­stasis, which Butler deploys to articulate the human’s capacity to being undone by an other (hence the title of her book). Thus, the capacity to enter into community with an other becomes an ontological precondition of the subject’s ethical relationship with others, and its ethical responsibility towards others. Such capacity for community should be understood in a non-­communitarian sense: it does not refer to the creation of bounded entities. Rather, community, for Butler, signifies the subject’s debt towards others, but it is not confined to cultural or physical space. This stress on relationality carries



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particular significance because it provides a way of conceiving of Butler’s work as a global ethics. In Frames of War, Butler asks what happens to the ‘we’ during times of war, and how we can consider the ‘we’ in global terms (2009: 39), but already in Undoing Gender, she alludes to the prospect of a global community that is responsive to the survivability and liveability of distant others. As she outlines there, this sense of community arises in the context of the ecstasy, passion and grief experienced by LGBT communities and their ­subjection to violence.26 Political community, as Butler suggests, is thus wrought from the ties that emerge as a result of grief, rage and passion (see 2004a: 20). Given the equivocity of affect, it is important to recognise that affective impingement of and by the other remains ambiguous. This equivocity is already captured with Butler’s vocabulary of affect: ecstasy, passion or dispossession point to the dissolution of the subject, to a state of ‘social death’ (Patterson 1982), where life is no longer, or not yet, liveable. However, affect also points towards the possibility of creating sensate communal relationships that enable the conditions for the formation of democracy, and for the articulation of ethical relationships with distant others (see Butler 2004b, 2009). Although Butler’s take on universalism is complex,27 it is fair, I believe, to argue that Precarious Life and Frames of War articulate a moral cosmopolitanism or a set of ‘cosmopolitan sentiments’ (Brassett 2010) that constitute important building blocks in the development of a global ethics.28 Conceptually, this global ethics draws on Butler’s critical reworking of universalism and her attention to differentiated conceptions of the human (see 2004a; 2006), while it also unfolds in a critical encounter with the politics of 9/11 and its aftermath. However, neither of the two books offers much insight into what such a community would look like, what its institutional structures could be, whether it maps onto particular geographical spaces, what, precisely, our global ethical obligations towards others are, or where its limits lie. To gain better purchase on the way Butler conceives of community, it is helpful to look at what she terms ‘politics in the street’ (see Butler 2011a). Reflecting on the protest movement located in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, Butler considers how attention to bodily needs, and to the question of a division of labour, constitute a significant aspect of a radical democratic body politics that engages in processes of political transformation.29

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To further flesh out the affective register of such a politics of radical democracy, I want to briefly consider Chantal Mouffe’s depiction of what she refers to as a politics of passion (2000).30 As Mouffe argues, passion is a place-­holder for all those things that cannot be reduced to interest or rationality (Mouffe in Zournazi 2002). More specifically, passion, according to Mouffe, becomes an alternative way of mobilising affect, different from those affective registers that sustain the politics of the New Right and anti-­ immigration movements. Such passion, according to Mouffe, is therefore necessary for emancipatory politics. The task of political theory, Mouffe suggests, is to recognise the dimension of passion, and to mobilise the affects of imagination mobilised in the service of democratic politics. As I outlined above, passion is central to Butler’s ethics and politics, and its articulation of the subject’s desire to persist. However, as I sought to demonstrate, Butler conceives of passion as always ambivalent: it sustains the subject’s attachment to others and in doing so, contributes to existence; but it does so by building on a disavowed loss, which keeps the subject in the thrall of a melancholia it cannot recognise. In other words, passionate attachment generates the ecstatic structure of the subject that leaves the subject undone in both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ ways. What’s more, knowledge of the causes of melancholia, and of the subject’s debt and ethical connection towards others, remain barred (see Butler 1997a). It becomes the task of politics to spell out the conditions of the emergence of the subject, and of articulating its ethical debt towards the other. What, then, is the significance of Butler’s affectively underpinned ethics? My aim in this chapter was to outline Butler’s account of affect, and to explore its relation to ethical responsibility in the context of violence. As I suggested, even though affect plays a significant role in Butler’s writings, to date it has been largely overlooked in the critical commentary on her work. Yet, as I sought to argue, it deserves critical attention because it enhances our understanding of our responses to violence, and of the way we relate ethically to others. Affect bears on our feelings of ethical responsibility towards others. Thus, attention to affect should be an integral element in any conception of global ethics. In fact, one of the most significant and exciting aspects of Butler’s recent writings is the global orientation of her conception of ethical responsibility, and its effort to articulate global structures of affective relationality. Such relationality, as we have seen, derives from an ontological



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vulnerability that exploits our dependence on the actions of close and distant others. It is in light of these assertions that Butler’s counsel towards reflection and the disruption of cycles of violence, articulated in response to the actions of the US government in the wake of 9/11, takes account of the interconnected way of living (see Butler 2004b and 2009; see also Rushing 2010). Whilst I remain broadly sympathetic to Butler’s wider ethico-­ political project, and to her rendering of the significance of an affectively formed conception of ethical responsibility, I have also raised questions about the conditions that trigger a feeling of ethical responsibility towards others. Thus, regardless of my ecstatic enmeshment with others, under what conditions should I feel ethically responsible towards others, including distant others? And how, precisely, do affective attachments work in global contexts? I am yet to be convinced of the plausibility of Butler’s ethical pronouncement.

Notes   1. I wish to thank Moya Lloyd for her helpful suggestions and comments on an earlier version of this essay. I would also like to thank the participants at the SWIP Ireland Spring Conference 2013 for engaging with me on the issue of affect and ethics.  2. Butler’s two best-­known and most widely discussed texts on this topic are Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004b) and Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (2009). For Butler’s other post-­9/11 texts that engage the topic of violence and ethics, see for example 2005, 2006, 2012, 2013.  3. Although ethical considerations can be found in some of Butler’s texts published prior to 2005, her most systematic foray into the field of moral philosophy to date is Giving an Account of Oneself (2005). Ethical themes also feature significantly in her work published since 2005. For a discussion of Butler’s treatment of moral philosophy see Thiem 2008. See also Chambers and Carver 2008; Dean 2008; Lloyd 2008; and Rushing 2010.   4. See Lloyd 2010 for a consideration of Butler in the context of her discussion of the work of William Connolly.  5. I draw on Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-­ Century France ([1987] 1999), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (1997a) and Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997b).

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  6. For useful introductions into the topic see Blackman and Venn 2010; Clarke, Hoggett and Thompson 2006; Clough 2007; Greco and Stenner 2008; Gregg and Seigworth 2012; Hemmings 2005; Hoggett 2009; Protevi 2009; Wetherell 2012.   7. For a useful survey on the range of affective displays and their effects on politics, specifically in relation to mass political behaviour, see Neuman, Marcus, Crigler et al., 2007.   8. Defining affect via its relation to bodily excitation does not imply that emotions lack a corporeal dimension. Rather, their corporeal aspects are said to be already cognitively worked over, and have entered the realm of signification, whereas affect, according to this classification, precedes signification and discourse.   9. See Cvetkovitch 2003 on affect’s ambiguities, and Ngai 2005 on the equivocal status of what she terms negative feelings. 10. See for example Ahmed 2004; Brassett 2010; Crociani-­Windland and Hoggett 2012; Cvetkovitch 2007; Greco and Stenner 2008; Hemmings 2005; Lloyd 2010; McManus 2011; and Ngai 2005. 11. Butler connects such animal appetite to the German translation of desire as ‘Begierde’ (see [1987] 1999: 33), and she juxtaposes the association of desire with animal hunger, which she associates with the German connotation, to desire’s alleged anthropocentric meanings in French and English. I would suggest that the German word ‘Begierde’ is more ambiguous than Butler’s discussion in Subjects of Desire implies: desire connotes both animal appetite and longing for the other. 12. For a critique of Butler’s reading of Spinoza, see Lloyd 2008. 13. As Butler avers, the loss of a same-­sex love object becomes enforced through the cultural compulsion for heterosexuality (see Butler 1997a; see also 1990). 14. For a consideration of the affective structures within ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) see Gould 2012. 15. An extract of Excitable Speech is included in Emotions: A Social Science Reader as Butler’s contribution to the study of compassion, hate and terror (Greco and Stenner 2008: 467). 16. And, it should be added, for ‘talking back’ or ‘resignification’, Butler’s term for forms of critical agency that undercut the ostensible sovereignty of the speech act. 17. For a discussion of Butler’s ontology, see Chambers and Carver 2008 and Lloyd 2008. 18. This same concern, that ethics displaces politics, is now articulated by some of her critics, who worry about Butler’s turn towards



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ethics. See for example Dean 2008. There is also some debate as to the status of Butler’s ethics prior to the publication of Giving an Account of Oneself (2005). For opposing readings, see Lloyd 2008 and Chambers and Carver 2008. 19. Apart from Precarious Life, Giving an Account of Oneself and Frames of War, they also include Undoing Gender (2004a) and her two most recent books, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2012) and Dispossession: The Politics in the Performative (2013; co-­authored with Athena Athanasiou). 20. See also Butler’s discussion of Melanie Klein, specifically of the importance Klein accords to the affective development of the child, and to the distinction between aggression and violence. Klein’s influence on the development of Butler’s wider ideas is not as substantial as that of Hegel, Foucault, or even Freud, but she serves as a significant interlocutor in Frames of War, where Butler ponders the question of survivability, the role of affect and its relationship to ­violence. Following Butler’s reading, Klein posits self-­preservation as a primary instinct that shapes our subsequent interactions with others. Thus, the survival of the subject is always bound up with the survival of an other, on whom my survival depends. Yet, murderous impulses interfere, which, following Klein, become transformed into guilt. This guilt, as Butler suggests, arises because of the destructive impulse to destroy the bond necessary for one’s own survival (see 2009: 45). What Klein does not consider, according to Butler, is the sense of the Other and its significance for the subject. Thus, against Klein, Butler insists on the dispossessed or ecstatic structure of the subject. 21. For a similar criticism of Butler’s Levinasian formulation of ethics, see also Coole 2008. As I argue in Judith Butler and Political Philosophy (2014), Butler’s recent reflections on cohabitation go some way towards fleshing out her claims regarding ethical responsibility. 22. At a recent briefing of US Congress, which included Pakistani victims of US drone attacks, only five members of Congress were in attendance. Military repatriation funerals in Britain are a good example for the public recognition of loss. Until 2011, these funerals passed through the town of Wootton Bassett, where, following initial organisation by the Royal British Legion, the public lined the streets to show their respect. Wootton Bassett was subsequently renamed Royal Wootton Bassett in recognition of its support for fallen British military personnel. 23. On Butler’s discussion of violence and its relationship to ­non‑violence,

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see her exchange with Catherine Mills and Fiona Jenkins in the journal differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies (Butler 2007; Jenkins 2007; Mills 2007). 24. See Ann Cvetkovitch’s call, made with reference to 9/11, that trauma culture be constructed along transnational, not national lines (2003: 284). 25. See above footnote 12. 26. Butler’s discussion of the so-­called John/Joan case is testament to her continued insistence on the violent operation of norms. In Undoing Gender, Butler narrates the life of David Reimer, better known as the child in the John/Joan case. Following a failed circumcision procedure that led to the burning of his penis, David underwent a series of psychological, surgical and hormonal treatments that were meant to aid his/her transformation into a girl. This experiment in implementing a norm of gender failed, however, and David wished to return to a male body. Tragically, in 2004, David took his life. As Butler argues in the postscript to her essay on David Reimer, it is difficult to determine the reasons for his suicide. However, as she repeatedly points out, normative conceptions of human morphology have profound implications for the way we conceive of and recognise the human: they generate normative conception of the human. Thus, ‘embodiment denotes a contested set of norms governing who will count as a viable subject within the sphere of politics’ (Butler 2004a: 28). This argument, though made in relation to her discussion of the new gender politics in Undoing Gender, is not restricted to the politics of gender, broadly conceived. As she argues, with reference to the War on Terror, racial embodiment plays an equally significant role in conception of human intelligibility, ‘[undergirding] the culturally viable notions of the human, ones that we see acted out in dramatic and terrifying ways in the global arena at the present time’ (2004b: 33). 27. See for example her critique of Nussbaum (Butler 1996). 28. Undoing Gender’s critical interrogation of the concept of the human should also be considered here. 29. For further reflections on Tahrir Square see Butler and Athanasiou (2013). 30. According to Mouffe, passion and affect are crucial in fostering identification with democratic values, and in creating democratic individuals. Mouffe fears that affect and passion have been monopolised by the right, whereas much of the centre-­left democratic discourse subscribes to a rational consensus. As Mouffe argues, ‘the prime



Violence, Affect and Ethics 113 task of democratic politics is . . . to mobilize those passions towards democratic designs’ (2000: 103).

References Ahmed, Sara (2004), The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Asad, Talal (2007), On Suicide Bombing, New York: Columbia University. Asad, Talal (2010), ‘Thinking about terrorism and just war’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 23: 1, 3–24. Berlant, Lauren (ed.) (2000), Intimacy, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Blackman, Lisa, and Couze Venn (2010), ‘Affect’, Body & Society, 16: 1, 7–28. Brassett, James (2008), ‘Cosmopolitanism vs. Terrorism? Discourses of Ethical Possibility Before and After 7/7’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 36: 2, 311–37. Brassett, James (2010), ‘Cosmopolitan Sentiments after 9/11? Trauma and the Politics of Vulnerability’, Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies, 2, 12–29. Brennan, Teresa (2004), The Transmission of Affect, Ithaca, NY: University of Cornell Press. Brown, Wendy (2010), Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, New York: Zone Books. Butler, Judith ([1987] 1999), Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-­Century France, New York: Columbia University Press. Butler, Judith (1990), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York and London: Routledge. Butler, Judith (1996), ‘Universality in Culture’, in Joshua Cohen (ed.), For Love of Country? Debating the Limits of Patriotism: Martha C. Nussbaum with Respondents, Boston: Beacon Press, pp. 45–52. Butler, Judith (1997a), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Butler, Judith (1997b), Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, New York and London: Routledge. Butler, Judith (2004a), Undoing Gender, London and New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith (2004b), Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, London and New York: Verso. Butler, Judith (2005), Giving an Account of Oneself, New York: Fordham University Press.

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Butler, Judith (2006), ‘Violence, Non-­ Violence: Sartre on Fanon’, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 27: 1, 3–24. Butler, Judith (2007), ‘Reply from Judith Butler to Mills and Jenkins’, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 18: 2, 180–95. Butler, Judith (2009), Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, London and New York: Verso. Butler, Judith (2011a), ‘Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street’, Transversal: #occupy and assemble, 10, http://eipcp.net/transversal/​ 1011/butler/en (last accessed 6 December 2014). Butler, Judith (2011b), ‘Confessing a Passionate State . . . – Judith Butler im Interview’, Feministische Studien, 2 (November), 196–205. Butler, Judith (2012), Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, New York: Columbia University Press. Butler, Judith, and Athena Athanasiou (2013), Dispossession: The Performative in the Political, Cambridge: Polity Press. Butler, Judith, and William Connolly (2000), ‘Politics, Power and Ethics: A Discussion between Judith Butler and William Connolly’, Theory & Event, 4: 2. Cavarero, Adriana (2009), Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, New York: Columbia University Press. Chambers, Samuel A., and Terrell Carver (2008), Judith Butler and Political Theory: Troubling Politics, London and New York: Routledge. Clarke, Simon, Paul Hoggett and Simon Thompson (eds) (2006), Emotion, Politics and Society, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Clough, Patricia Ticineto, with Jean Halley (eds) (2007), The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Connolly, William E. (2002), Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Coole, Diana (2008), ‘Butler’s phenomenological existentialism’, in Terrell Carver and Samuel. A. Chambers (eds), Judith Butler’s Precarious Politics: Critical Encounters, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 11–27. Crociani-­Windland, Lita, and Paul Hoggett (2012), ‘Politics and affect’, Subjectivity, 5: 2, 161–79. Cvetkovich, Ann (2003), An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality and Lesbian Public Cultures, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Cvetkovich, Ann (2007), ‘Public Feelings’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 106: 3, 459–68.



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Dean, Jodie (2008), ‘Change of address: Butler’s ethics at sovereignty’s deadlock’, in Terrell Carver and Samuel A. Chambers (eds), Judith Butler’s Precarious Politics: Critical Encounters, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 109–26. Esposito, Roberto (2008), Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Gould, Deborah B. (2012), ‘Political Despair’, in Simon Thompson and Paul Hoggett (eds), Politics and the Emotions: The Affective Turn in Contemporary Political Studies, New York and London: Continuum, pp. 95–114. Greco, Monica, and Paul Stenner (2008), ‘Introduction’, in Monica Greco and Paul Stenner (eds), Emotions: A Social Science Reader, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 1–21. Green, André (1977), ‘Conceptions of Affect’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 58, 129–56. Gregg, Melissa, and Gregory J. Seigworth (eds) (2010), The Affect Theory Reader, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Grossberg, Lawrence (1992), we gotta get out of this place: popular conservatism and postmodern culture, London and New York: Routledge. Hemmings, Clare (2005), ‘Invoking Affect: Cultural Theory and the Ontological Turn’, Cultural Studies, 19: 5, 548–67. Hoggett, Paul (2009), Politics, Identity, and Emotion, Boulder, CO and London: Paradigm Publishers. Jenkins, Fiona (2007), ‘Toward a Nonviolent Ethics: Response to Catherine Mills’, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 18: 2, 157–79. Kroker, Arthur (2012), Body Drift: Butler, Hayles, Haraway, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Laplanche, Jean (2001), ‘An Interview with Jean Laplanche’, http:// pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-­only/issue.101/11.2caruth.txt (last accessed 6 December 2014). Lloyd, Moya (2007), Judith Butler: From Norms to Politics, Cambridge: Polity Press. Lloyd, Moya (2008), ‘Towards a cultural politics of vulnerability: Precarious lives and ungrievable deaths’, in Terrell Carver and Samuel A. Chambers (eds), Judith Butler’s Precarious Politics: Critical Encounters, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 92–105. Lloyd, Moya (2010), ‘Hate, loathing and political theory: Thinking with and against William Connolly’, in Alan Finlayson (ed.), Democracy and Pluralism: The Political Thought of William E. Connolly, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 114–28.

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McManus, Susan (2011), ‘Hope, Fear, and the Politics of Affective Agency’, Theory & Event, 14: 4. McRobbie, Angela (2006), ‘Vulnerability, violence and (cosmopolitan) ethics: Butler’s Precarious Life’, The British Journal of Sociology, 57: 1, 69–86. Manning, Erin (2007), Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mills, Catherine (2007), ‘Normative Violence, Vulnerability, and Responsibility’, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 18: 2, 133–56. Mouffe, Chantal (2000), The Democratic Paradox, London and New York: Verso. Neumann, W. Russell, George E. Marcus, Ann N. Crigler and Michael MacKuen (eds) (2007), The Affect Effect: Dynamics of Emotion in Political Thinking and Behaviour, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Ngai, Sianne (2005), Ugly Feelings, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Patterson, Orlando (1982), Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Probyn, Elspeth (2005), Blush: Faces of Shame, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Protevi, John (2009), Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rushing, Sara (2010), ‘Preparing for Politics: Judith Butler’s Ethical Dispositions’, Contemporary Political Theory, 9: 3, 284–303. Schippers, Birgit (2014), Judith Butler and Political Philosophy, London and New York: Routledge. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (2003), Touching, Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stein, Nancy L., Marc W. Hernandez and Tom Trabasso (2008), ‘Advances in Modeling Emotion and Thought: The Importance of Developmental, Online and Multilevel Analyses’, in Michael Lewis, Jeannette M. Haviland-­ Jones and Lisa Feldman Barrett (eds), Handbook of Emotions, New York and London: The Guildford Press, pp. 574–86. Thiem, Annika (2008), Unbecoming Subjects: Judith Butler, Moral Philosophy, and Critical Responsibility, New York: Fordham University Press. Thompson, Simon, and Paul Hoggett (eds) (2012), Politics and the Emotions: The Affective Turn in Contemporary Political Studies, New York and London: Continuum.



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Wetherell, Margaret (2012), Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding, London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Zournazi, Mary (2002), ‘Hope, Passion, Politics: A Conversation with Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau’, in Hope: New Philosophies for Change, London: Lawrence and Wishart, pp. 122–48.

5

Sensate Democracy and Grievable Life Fiona Jenkins

The ungrievable gather sometimes in public insurgencies of grief, which is why in so many countries it is difficult to distinguish the funeral from the demonstration. (Butler 2012b) The limit on what can be remembered is enforced in the present through what can be said and what can be heard – the limits of the audible and the sensible that constitute the public sphere. (Butler 2011)

There is a moment that Judith Butler several times alludes to in illustration of how she thinks about sensate democracy (see Butler 2012a: 14; and Butler in Butler and Spivak 2007: 59–63). Illegal immigrants to the US, gathered in 2006 to protest at their precarious and unliveable situation, start singing the national anthem of the United States in Spanish; and in the middle of this comes the line ‘somos equales’, we are equal. The affirmation of equality of the stateless within the nation, and the performance of song in Spanish, transgress the boundaries of what it is thinkable for the nation to be. President George W. Bush declared in response that the national anthem of the USA cannot be sung in Spanish. But for all the power of his sovereign declaration, he does not ‘make the anthem less sing-­able’; indeed, what he responds to here is ‘already out of his control’ (Butler in Butler and Spivak 2007: 60–9). Enacted as performative contradiction, the singing is demanding a move beyond the present legal articulation of rights, pressing against both sovereign and public understandings of what can and cannot ‘be’ (Butler in Butler and Spivak 2007: 69). A freedom is asserted that is without prior legitimation, and an equality performed that concerns, Butler tells us, ‘a state of the social that takes form in discourse and other modes of articulation, including song’ (Butler in Butler and Spivak 2007: 65). The right to rights so 118



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claimed sets up the problem of the ‘we’ of democracy, and the entitlement to protection the nation-­state confers, as a perpetually and critically open question. Singing as a plural act, merging voices that remain different, ruptures the mono-­lingualism of the nation, putting in motion the task of translation (Butler in Butler and Spivak 2007: 61). Moreover, this demonstration emerges from conditions of precarity – unreliable conditions of life, the absence of the political and legal rights and protections that would make life ‘liveable’; and there is something important pertaining to that about the singing itself, which is presenting plurality and embodiment in a performative form that cannot quite be spoken – belonging less to discursive language than to its limits, bearing traces of the living body as the social demand for protection and support. It is possible, perhaps, to link this set of democratic gestures to a story about ethical violence that is at the heart of Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself (2005): a violence that arises from the impossibility of appropriating or taking up a relation with universal precepts. Ethical violence (in a formulation that is drawn from Adorno) arises from: an operation of universality that fails to be responsive to cultural particularity and fails to undergo a reformulation of itself in response to the social and cultural conditions it includes within its scope of applicability. When a universal precept cannot, for social reasons, be appropriated, or when – indeed for social reasons – it must be refused, the universal precept itself becomes a site of contest, a theme and object of democratic debate . . . [It] loses its status as a precondition of democratic debate. (Butler 2005: 6)

In what follows I shall suggest we think about this diagnosis of ethical violence primarily in terms of the need it implies for a continual remaking of spatio-­temporal relations and social bonds in contemporary polities; and within this, the active appropriation of sacred ‘universals’ into the space of democratic contestation. In Butler’s most recent books, the relevance for politics of the ethical framework she develops out of a critique of the subject – a critique that leads her to engage Adorno, Foucault, Levinas, Benjamin and Arendt – is increasingly evident. In particular, a preoccupation with the potentials of post-­nationalist political formations guides much of her recent work. When she writes of Israel in Parting Ways – but equally, when she writes of the USA in Precarious

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Life – a p ­ rofound criticism is directed at forms of nationalism that reject every limitation imposed by international law (Butler 2012b: 177; Butler 2004: 98). Such nationalism, moreover, is animated by a defensive ethos that interprets all criticism as threatening sovereignty and the entitlement of the nation to existence (Butler 2012b: 19). Thus in post-­9/11 America, Butler tracks how public criticism of the War on Terror was heard as a repetition of that terror (Butler 2004: 1). In the case of Israel, she marks how questioning the violent dis-­ appropriation of Palestinians from their lands is heard as abusing the memory of the Holocaust, casting doubt upon the right of Israel to exist, and thereby threatening Jews with a repetition of genocide (Butler 2012b: 25). Universal values of freedom and democracy, the right of a people to self-­determination, here enter into the legitimation of military violence, unconstrained by international law and inflicted on a population that is ‘ungrievable’. The question becomes how the claim to embody the universal can be negotiated democratically, or translated into a mode of contestation and a problem of address. A key term Butler will use to think through this is ‘pluralization’.1 The nation-­state, attached to a sovereignty that is defined by militarily defended supremacy, exemplifies an ethical violence that finds hyperbolic expression in the imposition of unilateral terms on peoples who are either stateless or treated as if they were so, and are exposed to a re-­iterative violence (Butler 2004: 33). Such action, in an exemplary way ‘decides’ who or what will be a human subject, a decision that often takes the form of bureaucratic license for legally unaccountable practices of detention, in a context where a lack of recognised national citizenship corresponds to exposure to the full violence of the nation-­state.2 One way to parse Butler’s analysis of what the stakes are here would be to say that a universality that is invoked as self-­justificatory (often in a nationalist form) fails to recognise its specific mode of answerability – which is to reformulate itself in terms of the sphere of its applicability, that is, to be open to the historical and contingent sphere of its address. Hence on Butler’s account, universal precepts must be understood as being addressed to those they would bind, and must enter into a political space of contestability when the question arises as to whether they can be appropriated or whether they must be refused (see Butler 2012a: 14). If that political space is not active, then universal precepts congeal into impositions. Law is undergone as a deathly thing, an ethical violence. A



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key political question thus becomes who is addressed by universal precepts, for instance the precepts associated with ‘humanity’; and whether social conditions support that precept being appropriable by particular subjects (Butler 2005: 5). In this sense, maintaining a sphere of application for universals will reflect their critical deformability by the social and cultural conditions they encounter. Butler’s term for this process of rupture and interruption, as aspects of a temporalised political task of universalisation, is ‘translation’ (2012b: 8, 22–3). Butler’s reflection on ethical violence as an aspect of nationalism is precisely where Giving an Account of Oneself begins – a text often taken alongside Precarious Life as marking Butler’s ‘ethical turn’ away from politics. Butler’s discussions of the nationalism of the obituary have also been taken to signal a turn away from politics, most recently by Bonnie Honig, who argues that in Precarious Life, Butler endorses a universal humanist ethics of lamentation in which the focus is on suffering. Sensitivity to shared vulnerability and exposure, Butler argues, can move us to cross the merely political lines of friend/enemy and inspire us to treat all lives as grievable and human. (Honig 2013: 42)

But this reading ignores the politics that, I argue here, is embedded in Butler’s concern with the nationalism of grieving.3 Indeed, nationalism, on the account Butler draws from Adorno, will be anti-­political precisely to the extent that it reflects an imaginary unity, an idealised collective ethos, which postulates a ‘false unity that attempts to suppress the difficulty and discontinuity existing within any contemporary ethos’ (Butler 2005: 3–4). The analysis of ethical violence that Butler articulates speaks against Honig’s reading of her post-­ 2001 work on nationalistic forms of mourning as offering a universalism premised on common humanity. Here Honig overlooks a crucial aspect of the politics of obituaries that Butler describes. For instance, one story Butler tells in Precarious Life is of a Palestinian citizen of the United States who submitted to the San Francisco Chronicle obituaries for two Palestinian families killed by Israeli troops. Informed by the paper that the obituaries could not be accepted without proof of death, he is told that a statement ‘in memoriam’ could be accepted. Yet upon submission of the memorial, this record was again rejected on the grounds that the newspaper did not

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wish to give offence (Butler 2004: 35). The sense of offence seems to assume a monopoly on suffering, the inadmissibility of comparative terms, reflecting not merely the exceptional and singular character attributed to national suffering (Butler 2011: 75, 90), but the feeling that universal conditions of justice are at stake in it. The newspaper’s response could be said to generate the prohibition on content – which does not exist in any written form of law – insofar as it recites a given understanding of some established norms of national recognition, seeking to confirm them retroactively as absolutes. In a fine illustration of what Butler means by the ‘anachronism’ of the collective ethos (Adorno cited in Butler 2005: 3–4), the ‘offensiveness’ thereby recited is one that presumes a given knowledge of what the culture of the United States is, what it must exclude or cannot tolerate, and aims to re-­iteratively consolidate that understanding. Regarded as a gesture of contestation, however, the submission by the Palestinian citizen of the USA brings into the democratic sphere a question about who can be remembered – who counts – that evidences changes that are already underway in the composition of the membership of the United States, and even more fundamentally in the set of relations in which the nation is globally enmeshed. 4 It is as just such a disturbance of the ‘we’ that the request for an obituary meets with opposition. Its import, then, cannot be analysed simply as a reflection of parochialism and partiality, set over against a given norm of ‘universal humanity’. Rather the attempt to enforce what can be heard or seen, and so to limit what can be remembered, arises from rejecting a certain ‘practice’ of remembrance, one bound up with addressing and rethinking terms of co-­belonging (Butler 2011: 89). I shall return to this politics of remembrance at the end of my discussion. For now, I am interested in tracking how ethics and politics are entwined in the argument Butler is making. According to Butler, something on the order of ‘event’ is foreclosed when an obituary is refused: ‘In the silence of the newspaper there was no event, no loss . . .’ (Butler 2004: 36). The dehumanisation it effects is bound up with the ‘unspeakable’ limits of discursive life, rather than any positive content of discourse: ‘There is less a dehumanizing discourse at work here than a refusal of discourse that produces dehumanization as a result’ (Butler 2004: 36). What is meant by the ‘refusal of discourse’? ‘Discourse’ is a weighty term for Butler, who stresses a phrase she takes from Levinas, that the



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encounter with the other’s face is the ‘situation of discourse’. In her discussion of that phrase she notes that this ‘situation’ is both a scene of address and a scene of conflict, in which the temptation to destroy the Other, to annul all relation, is thwarted at the level of responsibility by an irreducible dependency, a dimension of relationality – discourse – that exceeds the will (Butler 2004: 139). The way in which the ‘situation of discourse’ thus limits powers of decision, of agency or of prohibition, even limits the very capacity to kill the ‘face’, is vital to the account of obligation that Butler gives in this work (which is not, I think, based ultimately in ‘ontological facts’ of common precariousness or vulnerability5 even though it enfolds these). When Butler writes that where there is no life, no loss, there also will have been ‘no common bodily condition, no vulnerability that serves as the basis for apprehension of our commonality . . . no sundering of that commonality’ (2004: 36), it would be very easy to understand this as making reference to a universal human fragility, a common human condition which a parochial and exclusionary nationalism fails to heed. But I am suggesting that the ‘refusal of discourse’ is perhaps something different, something more immediately political. If we think about what happens when discourse is refused as beginning from the response to an event of contestation, an address initiated when the request was made by a Palestinian citizen of the United States that Palestinian lives be marked and mourned in the public sphere, then the salience of a dynamic and plural social ontology that subtends this scene might become more evident. A foreclosure, of the kind the San Francisco Chronicle engaged in, perhaps can be understood as seeking to disavow a new spatial configuration of the nation-­state and an interruptive temporality that is always-­already thwarting powers of sovereign decision to determine what can and cannot be (just as the demonstration by illegal residents of the USA introduces such disruption). In the refusal to acknowledge deaths as important, the newspaper is attempting to maintain a law of identity, boundary or self-­sameness that anachronistically refuses new forms of potentiality, arising from emerging relations, or new possibilities of discourse. To the extent that gestures in the public sphere can effect this mode of ‘de-­realization’ of a life, then at issue is ‘not just that a death is poorly marked but that it is unmarkable’ (Butler 2004: 35). The ‘unmarkable’, however, so Butler tells us, is shadowed

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by its ‘ontologically uncertain double’, that which troubles our sense of reality. This ‘double’ that a foreclosure reacts to or ‘apprehends’ (meaning ‘senses’, but also ‘seizes’ – apprehends as a criminal is apprehended) exceeds what can be contained by established norms of appearance in the public sphere (Butler 2009a: 5, 11). In such phrases as ‘unmarkable’ or ‘ungrievable’ we should therefore note and try to understand in Butler’s text a shift she is in effect performing from the censorialism of a sovereign prohibition on marking death (as in Creon’s edict in Antigone) to a quasi-­transcendental register. This is a register in which the prohibition ceases to function as the manifestation of law and is re-­read as gesture, as sign and as reaction to conditions experienced as threatening to the project of maintaining a presumptively universal ethos. In the tension between these two gestures we might come to see the prohibition placed upon events that must not be seen, heard or known, as a response to the emergence of conditions that in fact challenge or trouble the confident application of the norm. Here demonstration or contestation enters to render the scene one of a potentiality residing within ‘impossibility’. Thus the quasi-­ transcendental ‘haunted’ or spectral dimension of prohibition should be taken seriously as registering the question of ‘recognizability’ in ways that open towards a politics of contestation. As Butler puts the political question that follows: The problem is not merely how to include more people within existing norms, but to consider how existing norms allocate recognition differentially. What new norms are possible, and how are they wrought? What might be done to produce a more egalitarian set of conditions for recognizability . . . to shift the very terms of recognizability to produce more radically egalitarian results? (Butler 2009a: 6)

Here, I suggest, Butler’s critique and its concern for more ‘equally grievable’ and thus ‘liveable’ lives integrates these terms with the forms of provocation or questioning from which such equality might emerge – not as a moral and universal given whose proper subjects are already known, but as a provocative claim arising from material and social conditions of existence brought into tension with social practices reflecting the mode of their articulation as systemic inequalities. These contestatory claims find one kind of model in the scene of demonstration from which I began. Thus in a sensate democracy, it is not only established authority,



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such as that of the nation-­state, which gives meaning to what is ‘grievable’ or ‘recognizable’, but also what escapes it – the emergent claim, or the performativity of address, whereby the question of how to ‘take up’ a norm in a critical way becomes salient. The temptation to be avoided here is to read such terms as ‘grievability’ as though they simply tracked the prohibitive or censorial power to withhold recognition – to mark certain lives as mattering, while refusing that status to others. The countervailing desire to extend recognition in more inclusive ways, without offering a critique of the social and political conditions under which inequality and difference are established (as in the universal humanism Honig argues Butler now leans towards) would also fail to offer a critique of the mode of power expressed in the nation-­ state, and of the forms of social relation that a nationalism posing as the universal facilitates. A pluralising critique must instead aim to open up a relation with dominant norms that defies their presumptive status as necessary schemas for the recognition of value. This project, I am arguing, is at the core of what Butler calls ‘sensate democracy’. The persistent shift from discussion of recognition to discussion of the ‘recognizable’, or indeed, from grief to the ‘grievable’ in Butler’s texts, thus register a plural and dynamic space of relations, a potentiality and conditionality, not simply a unilateral operation of power. How is that potentiality and conditionality to be interpreted? How do we challenge the way in which a normative ideal of recognition (perhaps a nationalist one) comes to colonise recognisability?

Pluralisation and obligation Contrasting with the nation-­state-­centred work of the normative division of life, in her essay ‘Is Judaism Zionism?’6 Butler outlines an account of a pluralising process. This implies marking how identity always remains in relation to that which is placed ‘outside’, thus to an alterity that not only can never be assimilated, but disrupts and interrupts any established understanding of who ‘we’ are (be that the universalised ‘we’ of humanity, of a religious community or of the nation-­state). Pluralisation is not pluralism in the sense of respecting fidelity to some pre-­given cultural particularity; nor is it fidelity to the legitimating universality claimed by the nation-­state. Plurality, Butler tells us, can have no given or established form; it is antithetical to the work of creating

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­ oundaries in establishing an inside and an outside, for plurality b ‘cannot be exclusionary without losing its plural character’ (Butler 2011: 84). Pluralisation is a process that always invokes a potential condition as well as an actual one (Butler 2011: 84, compare Connolly 2005). Citing Arendt approvingly in support of this idea, Butler suggests we might take from her the thought of man (subject of universal rights) not as individual but as a ‘situation of community and equality, both of which are preconditions of change and building agency . . . this notion of man doesn’t define a priori features or properties of an individual but actually designates a relation of equality among beings’ (Butler in Butler and Spivak 2007: 57, my emphasis). Political action, according to this conception, is action that first and foremost seeks to establish equality in the sense of plurality, as the ‘minimal condition’ for being politically efficacious. An ontological condition is in this way bound to a political aspiration towards equality in relations. The ontological condition (which in a key sense is conditionality, as I explain further below) might be thought to signal the being of potentiality that is at stake in the performativity of the process of pluralisation (see Butler in Butler and Spivak 2007: 57). Singing the US anthem in Spanish might be one demonstration of what this means as political action. On this pluralising understanding of politics, ‘equal protection, or indeed equality, is not a principle that homogenizes those to whom it applies; rather, the commitment to equality is a commitment to the process of differentiation itself’ (Butler 2011: 85). Differentiation might itself be thought of as the way in which the ‘event’ or singularity is brought to appearance; so that a process of differentiation does not begin with the categorical statement of a universal (‘everyone’) but rather makes the ‘every-­one’ appear, as aspects of a co-­habiting plurality, or as relationality. The implication of the ‘I’ in social relations is critical here, as is the ethical problem of how the ‘I’ takes up those relations, a question central to Butler’s ethics, which I discuss more fully in the final section. Self-­differentiation – the bringing to appearance of the ‘one’ or the event – also fractures the collective subject or ‘we’. As I develop this argument, I will also suggest that Butler puts this thought precisely in terms of obligations that derive from our ‘unchosen’ ways of being in relation with one another, impinged upon and dependent, ‘precarious’. Such obligations, she argues, cannot be captured by speaking of what ‘we’ owe to others, since that ‘we’ is



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from the start ‘interrupted’ by the alterity it would (or would not) recognise. And thus she concludes, again aligning her thought with that of Levinas, ‘the obligations “we” have are precisely those that disrupt any established notion of the “we” ’ (Butler 2009a: 14). This account of obligation will resonate with how Butler follows but also critically departs from Levinas in rendering the ‘situation of discourse’ (Butler 2004: 139) by locating the situation of discourse within the sphere of appearances, and thereby in the contested spatio-­temporality of the public sphere. In Frames of War Butler specifies that her use of the term ‘ontology’ refers to what it is to be a body that is ‘given over to others’ in a world that is socially and politically organised in differential terms to ‘maximize precariousness for some and minimize precariousness for others’ (Butler 2009a: 2–3). Sensate democracy requires the cultivation of ‘conditions of responsiveness’ that transgress this form of organisation. If there is to be a claim of non-­violence (as Levinas proposes) that is not ‘meaningless’ (a criticism, this hints, that he may be exposed to) Butler argues that there must be an essential alliance between generating the conditions under which the apprehension of the ethical claim of precarious life becomes possible, and criticism of the work of norms that work to perform a division, structuring the field of appearance so as to differentiate the lives that are ‘liveable’ and ‘grievable’ from those that are not (Butler 2009a: 180). Politically, it becomes vital to support ‘those  modes of representation and appearance that allow the claim of life to be made and heard’ (Butler 2009a: 181). But the kind of political work this is understood to be will depend upon how in turn we understand the structure of the field of appearance, and of agency with respect to its hegemony. I have suggested we find one exemplar of this politics in the performativity of singing the US anthem in Spanish, as it manifests plurality in an act of claiming equality. Obligation is generated here in a sense that tracks the points made above – an obligation to see and hear that breaks with a prohibitive framework. It is important that insofar as the ethical claim of non-­violence is also registered within this act, it falls as obligation upon the disrupted ‘we’ (Butler 2009a:14); and so it will reveal its ‘subject’ (the one to whom the claim is addressed) less as an individual who must independently decide on a course of action, than a part of that sociality from which the ‘we’ arises, that is, as ‘a being bound up with others in inextricable and irreversible ways, existing in

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a generalized condition of precariousness and interdependency, affectively driven and crafted by those whose effects on me I never chose’ (Butler 2009a: 180). The ontology elaborated by Butler in this way reflects that sociality from which a ‘we’ arises, including the sense of this as a dynamic and fractured space of iterability. Sociality structures norms as imperfect, incomplete, temporal and heterogeneous, thus contestable and deformable. Here it is also worthwhile to consider how Butler specifies the meaning she lends life’s ‘precariousness’ in terms of a modality of being, not a property of beings – a way of thinking that aligns what the term means for her with this temporalised and dynamic social ontology of normative life. For precariousness, Butler tells us, is simply the ontological condition of being conditioned, and this can be posited as a generalised c­ ondition – indeed, as the very mode of equality – precisely because it is not ‘proper’ to one individual or another (Butler 2009a: 23). Precariousness – and here Butler parts company with Arendt – traverses the boundary between the human and the animal, the social and the environmental conditions of sustainable and liveable life. It is not ‘proper’ to the human. It cannot properly be recognised (Butler 2009a: 13). Rather, ‘it can be apprehended, taken in, encountered, and it can be presupposed by certain norms of recognition just as it can be refused by such norms’ (Butler 2009a: 13). It is in this sense ‘inassimilable’ (Butler 2012b: 23). Far from being what we already recognise as the ‘common condition of humanity’, under political conditions that press us to ‘a dissolution and reformulation of the process of universalization’ precarious life is the very site of the ‘inassimilable’ that perpetually bears the potential to break norms apart. And only thus, by registering and engaging the inassimilable, does ‘universalization renew itself within a radically democratic project’ (Butler 2012b: 23). It is important, then, to notice how conditions and relations are thematically linked to life and to obligation in Butler’s account, and drive the sense of contestability. The ‘a priori’ of recognisability (in the ‘sovereign’ sense) becomes temporalised, as conditions of intelligibility for what counts as a ‘life’ emerge as politicised and contestable (Butler 2009a: 6). We saw earlier how this shift plays out in the demand for a Palestinian obituary. But it also explains, I think, why in Frames of War, Butler strongly emphasises the way her argument moves between epistemological and ontological registers. Whereas at the epistemic level, operations of power



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aim to ‘delimit the sphere of appearance itself’ even if they fail to ‘unilaterally decide it’ (Butler 2009a: 1), at the ontological level it seems we touch on or apprehend the precarious ‘being’ of a life; mortality, vulnerability but also temporality and potentiality. Although it is impossible to refer to this life without reliance on the rubrics of power, life nonetheless exists at ‘a limit internal to normative construction itself, a function of its iterability and heterogeneity’ (Butler 2009a: 4). Life is thus both the condition of the norm bearing its ‘crafting’ power and that which ‘limits the finality of any of its effects’ (Butler 2009a: 4). In this context, Butler stresses two political dimensions of the ‘recognizability’ that precedes recognition. First, as Foucault argued and as I discuss further below, the norms that prepare or establish a subject for recognition, making recognition possible, also ‘induce a subject of this kind’ (Butler 2009a: 5) – that is, a subject who takes up a certain relation with normative life, a relation that is at once compelling and critical. Secondly, a contestation in and around the normative framing of life is constantly taking place, indeed, the ‘taking place’ of life and death – the eventfulness we might say, of existence, itself – ‘calls into question the necessity of the mechanisms through which ontological fields are constituted’ (Butler 2009a: 7). In this way the normative inscription of life is ‘haunted’; a thought we might be inclined to read ‘ontically’ in terms of what is excluded from recognition, but that may be better registered ontologically (or better again, ‘hauntologically’ in Derrida’s phrase) as concerning the apprehension of foreclosed potentials, indeed of the very temporality that means that ‘every normative instance is shadowed by its own failure’ (Butler 2009a: 7). If the normative framing of life is only given temporally, then this temporality is that of a living relation with norms (Butler 2005: 5) – the critical space in which the norm is ‘taken up’ or refused. Moreover, insofar as the modality of power of norms is re-­iterative (that is to say, the norm must be re-­instated by those who live within its frame), this ‘uptake’ of relationality can be construed as implying a dynamic space of perception, and one in which the ‘unrecognizable’ fleetingly appears. We might return again from this analysis to the question of the politics at stake in the attention Butler pays to the nationalism of mourning. If, as Butler tells us, the ‘apprehension of grievability precedes and makes possible the apprehension of precarious life’ (2009a: 15), then we should hesitate before assuming that such

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‘grievability’ is only or always the individualised logic of recognition that Butler’s example of the obituary might at first seem to suggest. Rather, it may be helpful to think of the way that Butler engages together the themes of grievability (which risks seeming like a nation-­state sanctioned attitude) and precariousness (which risks seeming like a given bodily condition, or ‘ontological fact’) as aspects of a process of pluralisation opposed to the divisive work ‘grievability’ does in the nation-­state. Cast as the ethico-­political work she is herself practising, we might consider how her discussion of the obituary tarries with the limit of recognition – with those who are ‘unburied, if not unburiable’; those we apprehend, rather than ‘know’, perhaps as we apprehend the ‘gaps’ in public record (Butler 2004: 34) without necessarily seeking thereby to fill them with content. Such apprehension becomes the basis for a critique of given norms of recognition (Butler 2009a: 5). She is insisting here on the historical and political production of ‘recognizability’ over and against the sense of these norms as a priori conditions of appearance (as a nationalist frame, posing as universal, may well seem to be). Where ‘grievability’ is thought in the mode of critique, the plural conditions of social existence become activated within her account, conditions that open a life to ­‘exposure’ – that is, our exposure and dependency before others as well as their dependency upon and exposure to us.

Ethics as critique In the Acknowledgements to Frames of War, Butler directly specifies her project as one of critique, with a particular focus on sociality as what binds and connects us. She writes: The critique of war emerges from the occasions of war, but its aim is to rethink the complex and fragile character of the social bond and to consider what conditions might make violence less possible, lives more equally grievable and hence, more livable. (2009a: viii)

What does it mean for this project of re-­thinking the ‘social bond’ to be one of critique? In the concluding pages of Precarious Life, critique is tasked with creating a sense of the public in which oppositional voices of dissent can flourish, alongside practices of cultural translation that work against the consignment of the face of the other to the sphere of the unintelligible – as the ­‘ungrievable’



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or ‘already dead’ (Butler 2004: 151). An intimate link is proposed between the discourse that comes to audibility in the public sphere, and the legal, social and material conditions that support and protect life. The ‘life’ in question, I have been arguing, is ­‘relational’ – in relation to others, to an environment, to norms, to itself – thus conditional and conditioned. Here, I suggest, Butler engages in a critique that, like Kant’s, examines conditions of possibility of appearance, but also goes beyond him in asking how denying the conditionality of action, or foreclosing acknowledgement of relationality, becomes a mode of doing violence; asks, indeed, how the elements that stabilise Kant’s notion of ‘conditions’ by reference to a subject who is an ‘I’ might mis-­locate the proper terms of a social critique. Here again we are on territory mapped out as ethical in Giving an Account of Oneself. Butler, indeed, devotes considerable attention to describing critique as an ethical and political practice in Giving an Account and elsewhere. Thus in an essay on Foucault, for instance, Butler first recites how Foucault, like Adorno, diverges from Kant in refusing to assimilate critique to a practice that would secure judgement. For Adorno, if the critic is not to be separated from the social world, critique must operate as part of a praxis that would not simply apply already constituted categories to particulars but ‘apprehend the ways in which categories are themselves instituted, how the field of knowledge is ordered, and how what it suppresses returns, as it were, as its own constitutive occlusion’ (Butler 2002: 213, compare 2005: 133). In alignment with these gestures, the question Foucault addresses in his own well-­known essay – ‘What is critique?’ – does not in fact simply ask what critique is, but ‘enacts a certain mode of questioning which will prove central to the activity of critique itself’ (Butler 2002: 215). Over against Habermas, who finds that critique cannot deliver the kind of normative orientation we need if we are to make judgements about social conditions, Foucault insists upon an engagement in critique that is no less Kantian in interrogating epistemological limits. Here Butler suggests that Foucault’s particular way of approaching ethics displaces the question Habermas insists upon as the locus of normative judgement – ‘what are we to do?’ – in favour of paying attention to a prior set of questions, examining the very formation of the ‘we’, and thus the sense in which the ‘we’ might be considered to be known or its action possible (Butler 2002: 214).

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The question, Who are we? is posed in this conception of critique that is indebted to Foucault, as prior to the question, What should we do? As such it articulates the question of the social bond and of the ‘action in concert’ that Arendt delineated as political. ‘Who are we?’ is not an abstract question, yet the temptation will always be to answer it in identitarian terms, as though the ‘we’ were simply looking for a particular to give it content, or as though it conjured a given membership (subsumed under the categories provided by the nation-­state, say). How might an ethics respond? If, as Foucault holds, critique seeks not to evaluate its objects, but to bring into relief the framework of evaluation itself, it induces what we might think of as a reflection on the conduct of evaluation. Critique is formulated as a virtue, in the sense that it belongs to an ethics that cannot be fulfilled by following objectively formulated rules or laws, but requires being in excess of them, demanding that a critical relation to norms is practised. Experiences can then be properly described as ‘moral’ not simply because they prohibit or command but because they open the very relation to law that the practice of critique as questioning enacts (Butler 2002: 216). What critique interrogates are ‘settled domains of ontology’ which constrain our understanding of what is possible; and it does so insofar as a living relation to given codes of conduct implies the formation and transformation of the self: ‘To be critical of an authority that poses as absolute’, Butler writes, ‘requires a critical practice that has self-­transformation at its core’ (2002: 218). Again, the point can be adapted to speak to the account of ethical violence as an anachronistic nationalist violence, and thus to the demand for a thinking that is post-­nationalist or inter-­nationalist. But this is on particular terms: social critique construed thus is a mode of questioning that dislodges the moral primacy of passing judgement, and interrogates something prior to that – the living (in)stability of discourse that supports, sustains, but also undermines normativity. In the same way, I will suggest, the questions Butler poses when she initiates a critique of war have precisely this concern for transformation at their core, a transformation – or ­transformability – that enters the very conditions of existence, and that we should hear at work in the ambition to render life ‘more liveable’. In the term ‘sensate democracy’, an openness to transformation is perhaps already registered; we may hear in it at once the idea of attention to what is felt, experienced or lived – the world



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that appears or is ‘apprehended’ as living; and that which is itself feeling, experiencing, living – the plural subject or ‘we’ of democracy, and this ‘we’ perhaps conceived less as a subject than as an openness to a world in transformation, sensing and sensed. This broadening of the ‘sensate’ to connote what is living, and thus sensing and sensed, suggests a need to be wary of any suggestion that Butler is somehow concerned with a politics of feeling or sentiment alone, as if her idea is simply that these might be mobilised to widen the circle of regard for fellow human beings. There is a deeper ontological concern at work in Butler’s reflections, a concern with the ‘crafting’ of the subject or of the body, as that which can be ‘felt’ or can ‘feel’ (or ‘cannot’ be felt, cannot feel) in iterations of the normative that may be deformed and reworked by their medium. We might indeed name the ‘sensate’, rather than any more abstract notion of temporality, as the ‘limit internal to normative construction itself’ (Butler 2009a: 4). If ‘life’ always exceeds the normative conditions of its recognisability, as Butler claims, it is perhaps because life is the locus of a crafting that is at once active and passive, an iteration by which a temporality is in play that does not begin with the subject but disorientates and dispossesses it, limiting the finality of any of the effects of normative construction – a precarious life. Likewise the renewal of the social bond described by Butler as ‘sensate’ is not abstract; it emerges at specific sites, as we might imagine in the reclaiming of the street and in the articulation of plurality in a song that by virtue of containing a pressing contradiction, can operate as a mode of address. The importance of the ethical for Butler as it emerges in her discussion of Derrida is that it marks a critical temporality, one that gives the rhythm to any project of collective self-­making. At stake in this is the specific futurity that Derrida marks with the ‘to come’, which Butler glosses as inaugurated by the ‘fact of linguistic address and this way of offering the future’; and as the foundation not only of law, but politics, insofar as the ‘gift of speech makes possible the emergence and sustainability of the “we” ’ (Butler 2009b: 303). As the relation of address, the ethical ‘inaugurates, time and again, the political’ – and thus the ‘to come’ is the condition of possibility of politics itself (Butler 2009b: 304): The unrealizable is also the condition of possibility (what Derrida might call the ‘impossible condition of possibility’) for events and

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for persons, and in this sense, what is ‘to come’ is already there, even always, as the condition of possibility for what exists. (Butler 2009b: 305)

The questions of what or who we are in relation with, and how or whether we take up a relation with norms, are at the core of this ethico-­politics. This is a point that Butler makes particularly clearly in her Adorno Prize Lecture of 2012. When Butler turns in Frames of War to elaborate a ‘bodily ontology’ to defend a claim about the obligations she holds are imposed upon us by the ‘precarity of life’, she is careful to specify how the term ‘ontology’ is for her located within a ‘political organization and interpretation’ (Butler 2009a: 2). In her lecture, Butler likewise embeds a vital set of considerations about the need to attend to life in its dependency on material and social conditions of survival within an equally insistent responsibility for invigorating the socio-­political sphere where moral reflection arises. If ‘morality from its inception is bound up with biopolitics’ this is because the moral question is: ‘how do I live this life within the life, the conditions of living, that structure us now?’ (Butler 2012a: 10) The question, which like Foucault’s is concerned with the conduct of evaluation, seeks to render moral reflection inseparable from the categories, power differentials and structures in which my ‘living’ is embedded. A moral reflection that takes account of what it is to be living, implicates the subject who asks ‘how to live a good life?’ in a social inquiry into the sustaining contexts precisely of reflection and action. To ask, with Adorno, ‘how to live a good life in a bad life’ – that is, in a world whose categories and structures produce effacement and inequality (Butler 2012a: 11) – is to allow the problem of how I affirm my own life as a life, to resonate with the question of how the affirmation of life occurs and is distributed socially. Moreover, it is to accept that reflection is inseparable from dependencies, or that its very form has to do with conditionality, with being-­ conditioned. Reflection is in this sense itself ‘precarious’. It is the way in which my life is bound up with others, the way in which my life ‘is and is not my own’, that makes critique of the biopolitical order a ‘living issue for me’: This practice of critique is one in which my own life is bound up with the objects I think about. My life is this life, lived here, in the spatio-­ temporal horizon established by my body, but it is also out there,



Sensate Democracy and Grievable Life 135 implicated in other living processes of which I am but one. Further, it is implicated in the power differentials that decide whose life matters more, and whose life matters less . . . (Butler 2012a: 11)

At the same time, relationality bears an irreducibly discursive aspect, and constrains and enables reflexivity – ‘the only terms by which this “I” grasps itself are those that belong to a discourse that precedes and informs thought without any of us being able to fully grasp its working and its effect’ (Butler 2012a: 11). Indeed, it is in a sense towards an order of discourse that is inseparable from the material conditions of life that Butler invites us to turn in practising critique. When a life is ‘ungrievable’ it is because there is ‘no present structure of support that will sustain that life, which implies that it is devalued, not worth supporting and protecting as a life by dominant schemas of value’ (Butler 2012a: 10). For this reason, we are led to critique as a relationship with those schemas, as a problem of how we live them. Our obligations, accordingly, are not to this or that life, but to the ‘generalizable conditions’ of life (Butler 2009a: 22–3) – that is, to the ‘condition of being conditioned’ (Butler 2009a: 23) or ‘precariousness’. This in turn implies an ongoing process of universalisation (a pluralisation) which might well be contrasted with the universalising form of Kantian moral law. Thus when Butler writes ‘the precarity of life imposes an obligation on us’ (Butler 2009a: 2), I have taken it that a crucial part of that imposed obligation is the obligation of dissent; that is, of living a practice of critique, ethically and politically, which as such engages the excess of life over given epistemological limits, and moreover suspends the ontological grounding of the subject in and by initiating transformation. Obligation arises from the very texture of dependency and sociality, and is ‘constitutive obligation’ in the sense that such dependency and sociality, far from being facts or givens by which the necessity of certain actions would be morally entailed, instead themselves immediately demand to be ‘lived’. Conditionality is a ‘living issue for me’ because I cannot escape taking up some relation with it, be it to re-­establish existing conditions, or to open them to critique (Butler 2012a: 11). Illustrating this thought leads to a vital insight into the conditional limitation ethics imposes on every sovereign decision. Reading Arendt’s account of Eichmann’s crime, Butler condenses it to this precept, which chimes closely with her rendering of

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Levinas’s account of the ‘face’ as that which I am unable to kill:7 ‘no one has the right to decide with whom to co-­habit thus everyone has the right to cohabit with equal degrees of protection’ (Butler 2011: 85, my emphasis). If we thought about this precept in terms of the problem of the conduct of evaluation, we might notice the critical role played in the argument by the limitation Butler follows (and adapts) Arendt in placing on the right to decide (it is analogous to the limitation imposed by the Levinasian face – that it cannot be killed).8 This claim, ‘No one has the right to decide with whom to co-­habit’ is not simply articulated as a free-­standing axiom. Rather, it is cohabitation itself that limits decision. The limitation on decision reflects conditionality; and to seek to choose where there is no choice is to seek to destroy the conditions of social and political life. In deriving from this the ‘right to cohabit’, Butler is performing a pluralisation, which involves circumscribing the unilateral right to decide through reference to its own conditionality – its existence within a plural space.9 Also in play here is the sense that there must be room made for the ‘conduct’ of evaluation itself, the relation with the norm. Thus we are obligated not only to preserve the lives of the others with whom we cohabit, but ‘the plurality of which they form a part’ (Butler 2011: 85), and this transforms the principles by which we act into a ‘speaking for’ plurality – a political gesture of equality – which contrasts with simply deriving the universal from a given understanding of who properly belongs in the set (all rational human beings, for instance). In this sense the process of differentiation does not begin from the universal category ‘everyone’ but rather makes ‘every-­ one’ appear, the ‘one’ whose relation with the norm invites, in Foucault’s terms, a conduct of evaluation, and who thus practises critique as a virtue. The obligation to preserve plurality is then an obligation that binds us in the absence of properly ‘belonging’ to a normative field populated by the universal truth of a common humanity, moving along a teleologically established path of progress. That is why it can be characterised by Butler both in terms of proximity, adjacency, up-­againstness – a ‘convergent’ condition, rather than a ‘common’ one (Butler 2011: 88); and in terms of an interruptive temporality, the interruption of one time by another – precisely where a time ‘cannot be’ (Butler 2011: 88). The ‘measure of a life’ proper to grievability involves this struggle, as Butler remarks, reading Benjamin:



Sensate Democracy and Grievable Life 137 Remembrance attends to the ways that history works now as well as what opens up within that reiterated history to reclaim the history of the oppressed. The measure of a life is the way that history continues to act in the present which means, of course, that the presence of those contingent moments accumulate, chances or wagers, flash upon flash, a struggle for the past which is the only way to transform the present . . . (Butler 2012b: 113)

The singing in Spanish of the US national anthem does not only contest the limits defining citizenship; it also, one might think, practices a certain politics of remembrance of loss and of the potentialities of realising loss that can be directly aligned with the political demand for an obituary. The question of how the limit of what can be remembered is enforced in the present (Butler 2011: 89; 2004: xx) provides one schema by which to analyse contemporary, yet anachronistic, formations of the nation-­state – and it runs throughout Butler’s discussions of ‘grievability’ and of whose life is grievable under contemporary conditions. But I have argued that there is another, countervailing politics at stake in every account she gives of the ‘gaps’ in public record of lives lost. Here, rather than simply seeking to fill in the gaps, we should apprehend the emergence of a contest, a demand for pluralisation. This demand is given as a living history that does not ‘enforce the present’, but conversely ‘acts in the present’. A politics of remembrance, then, poses the democratic questions of translation, and of the applicability of law to life, reminding us of the necessary interruption of one space of appearance, one sense of space–time continuum with another that disrupts it. To practise remembrance in the Benjaminian sense might give rise to a new concept of citizenship, Butler tells us – one that arises from, but is against dispossession and precarity (Butler 2011: 90). Such remembrance insists upon registering the ‘impossible’ co-­habitation of peoples that is already taking place, and that demands acknowledgement, mourning, and affirmation in the company of those plural others who make up the political world.

Notes 1. William Connolly’s account in The Ethos of Pluralization (2005) is an important source, but so too is a reading of Arendt developed in Parting Ways, chapters 5–6.

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2. See ‘Indefinite Detention’, chapter 3 of Precarious Life (Butler 2004). The political situation that makes Guantanamo possible thus already has a background that finds its diagnosis in Arendt’s formulation of what placed nationalism above the law: that ‘the same nation was at once declared to be subject to laws which would supposedly flow from the Rights of Man, and sovereign, that is bound by no universal law and acknowledging nothing superior to itself’ (Arendt 1951: 230). 3. Honig is not alone. There are many readings highly critical of Butler’s ‘ethical turn’, such as those offered by Slavoj Žižek (2006), Lauren Berlant (2007), Catherine Mills (2007) or Jodi Dean (2009), as well as more sympathetic readings, such as that of Ann Murphy (2011). Butler’s demand in her works since 2001 that grief become a resource for non-­violence, her apparent belief that we might derive normative claims from a common bodily condition of vulnerability, and her mobilisation of aspects of a Levinasian ethics of the face, have all led to charges of political naivety, which Dean labels as Butler’s ‘prescriptive niceness’, the demand of ethical openness to the other. Dean’s objections to this ‘niceness’ are in no way offset by Murphy’s sympathetic account of what the ethics might be. Murphy argues that we find in Butler’s work a re-­invented humanism that would combine the ‘ontological truism’ of corporeal vulnerability with a response to the ethical provocation of unequally distributed precarity, implying we might learn to perceive the generalisability of precariousness (see Murphy 2011: 582). The resulting ethic is exactly that attacked by Dean as apolitical. Here I seek to offer an alternate account of the ‘ontological’ obligation Butler relies upon in these arguments. 4. Compare Butler’s discussion in Is Critique Secular? (2009c: 133). 5. Ann Murphy, for instance, argues that the sense of ethical obligation that would call us to remedy the conditions of unequal distribution of grievability rests on affirming precariousness as a common condition; the key claim is that ‘ontological facts about the human body – particularly its vulnerability and exposure to violence – might be read as indicating certain obligations’ (2011: 577). Murphy thus suggests that Butler is proposing the obligation to ‘ameliorate suffering’, arising from the common condition of precarious life, and that it is this ‘common condition’ that renders the egalitarian dimension of her argument the primary normative claim (2011: 581). This is an apolitical reading of Butler that would fit very well with the sort of criticisms that Honig levels. 6. This essay appears in The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere



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(Mendieta and VanAntwerpen 2011), and is largely reproduced in Parting Ways (Butler 2012b). 7. Parting Ways (Butler 2012b), Chapter 2 passim. 8. Butler writes: ‘An obscure point of contact between Levinas and Arendt guides me here’ (2012b: 23). 9. There is a parallel discussion of the ‘right to life’ in the introduction to Frames of War (Butler 2009a: 20) which argues that there is no ‘decision’ without a field of its application, conditions of validation and authorisation; discursive props that are sedimented in material arrangements.

References Arendt, Hannah (1951), The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Berlant, Lauren (2007), ‘Nearly Utopian, Nearly Normal: Post-­Fordist Affect in La Promesse and Rosetta’, Public Culture, 19: 2, 273–301. Butler, Judith (2002), ‘What is Critique?: An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue’, in David Ingram (ed.) The Political, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 212–26. Butler, Judith (2004), Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, New York: Verso. Butler, Judith (2005), Giving an Account of Oneself, New York: Fordham University Press. Butler, Judith (2009a), Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, New York: Verso. Butler, Judith (2009b), ‘Finishing, Starting’, in Pheng Cheah and Suzanne Guerlac (eds), Derrida and the Time of the Political, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, pp. 291–306. Butler, Judith (2009c), ‘The Sensibility of Critique: Response to Asad and Mahmood’, in Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler and Saba Mahmood, Is Critique Secular?: Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech: The Townsend Papers in the Humanities, No. 2, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, pp. 101–36. Butler, Judith (2011), ‘Is Judaism Zionism?’ in Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (eds), The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 70–91. Butler, Judith (2012a), ‘Can one lead a good life in a bad life? Adorno Prize Lecture’, Radical Philosophy, 176: 9–18. Butler, Judith (2012b), Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, New York: Columbia University Press. Butler, Judith, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (2007), Who Sings the

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Nation-­State?: Language, Politics, Belonging, London and New York: Seagull Books. Connolly, William (2005), The Ethos of Pluralization, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dean, Jodi (2009), Democracy and Other Neo-­ Liberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Honig, Bonnie (2013), Antigone, Interrupted, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mills, Catherine (2007), ‘Normative Violence, Vulnerability and Responsibility’, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 18: 2, 157–79. Murphy, Ann (2011), ‘Corporeal Vulnerability and the New Humanism’, Hypatia, 26: 3, 575–90. Žižek, Slavoj (2006), ‘Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence’, in Slavoj Žižek, Kenneth Reinhard and Eric Santner, The Neighbor: Three Inquiries In Political Theology, Chicago: Chicago University Press, pp. 134–90.

6

Two Regimes of the Human: Butler and the Politics of Mattering Drew Walker

Despite the continual displacement of nearly every established conception of the human, the figure of the human remains a powerful idea for political and ethical theorising. In the era of human rights, the language of dehumanisation has become a dominant frame for accounting for and criticising a wide range of abuses and social harms: from the crimes of slavery to indefinite detention to the torture of ‘enemy combatants’ to the indiscriminate use of drone attacks. Likewise, the human has come to mark a status that promises protection from the ‘dehumanising’ effects of violence, discrimination and other modes of injustice. Judith Butler’s recent work on the concepts of precarity and grievability have contributed to this discussion by providing an important analysis of the conditions that we call human and by pointing towards an ethical grounding for politics. As such, Butler’s ethical turn towards the precariousness, vulnerability and grievability of life has been simultaneously praised for its perspicacity as an analysis of current state practices and condemned for depoliticising these conflicts in favour of the assertion of a ground for ethics (see Dean 2008; Honig 2010 and 2013).1 Instead of retreading the depoliticising perils of this ethical turn, this essay argues that Butler – both before and after her ‘ethical turn’ – presents two distinct images of the human that track competing drives for subversion and survival that mark all of her work. These conceptions of the human – and of subversion and survival – carry with them very different political effects. First, in her recent focus on ‘grievability’ and the precariousness of human life, Butler offers a view of the human as a subject position necessary for one’s life to matter and bear political agency. With this image, Butler participates in the now-­familiar discourse that presents the victims of violence, oppression or the denial of human rights as inhabiting 141

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a space in which they are rendered inhuman, invisible, spectral or derealised. This figure of the human, I suggest, tends to obscure as much as it reveals and to exclude as much as it promises to include. It risks overstating the power of the ‘human’ to protect us from state and social violence, and it tends to overlook, and thus undervalue, the agency and worth of lives that fall outside the dominant norms of the ‘human’. Second, Butler presents an image of the human as a more dynamic field of contestation that is always in the flux of reiteration and subversion, where the terms of the human can be debated and put to the test. This second image of the human comes closer to realising the potential of Butler’s notion of performativity to trouble the terms of the human and provoke a politics of difference. To illuminate the consequences of these two images of the human, I examine Butler’s many theorisations of the human and then consider several moments that dramatise the uncertainty of ‘the human’ as a power both to redeem and to abject: Stanley Cavell’s claim that we cannot fail to see the other as human alongside Frederick Douglass’s self-­description of the experience of the American slave, responses to the American AIDS epidemic, and finally a contemporary Zimbabwean women’s movement. Instead of focusing on the potential grievability of the subjects of these experiences as necessary for their coming to matter in the public arena, I suggest that their lives, and their forms of life, mark a devious, dangerous expression of the human, one that matters intensely as a potential disruption of normative orders of the human through perhaps aberrant, but very human, modes of race, gender and sexuality. In so doing, I develop a politics of the human that is both indebted to and in tension with Butler’s work on ‘the human’. This politics of the human resists the language of the dehumanised, the spectral, the inhuman in order to dramatise those moments where the human – and human agency – expresses itself in spite of attempts to stifle it or snuff it out.

Two regimes of the human Carrying out this task of tracing ‘the human’ in Butler’s work is perhaps more complex than it would seem, for the figure of the human plays an important, but deeply ambiguous, role throughout her work. This ambiguity is clearly demonstrated in Precarious Life, a text that, Butler asserts, begins and ends with ‘the question



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of the human’ (2004a: 20). As she writes, ‘We start here not because there is a human condition that is universally shared – this is surely not yet the case’ (Butler 2004a: 20, my emphasis). Given that this is ‘not yet’ the case, the central questions of this text are, then, ‘Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? And, finally, What makes for a grievable life?’ (Butler 2004a: 20, original emphasis). Implied in the not yet of a universal human condition, it seems to me, is the wish for or fantasy of such a condition, one that presumably depends on the universal grievability of all (human) lives. This appeal to universality may strike readers of Butler as strange given her own criticisms of universality (2000), her advocacy of William Connolly’s concept of pluralisation in her most recent work (2012), and, perhaps most starkly, her theory of performativity, which so clearly rejects a concept of a single human condition (1990). My claim is not that Butler herself desires this universal human condition, but that the logic of her argument points towards such a wish, and this position has important consequences for politics and ethics. Thus, even as Butler suggests the possibility for a shared human condition, she calls the possibility (and desirability) of such conditions into question. Later in Precarious Life she suggests, ‘We make a mistake, therefore, if we take a single definition of the human, or a single model of rationality, to be the defining feature [of the human]’ (Butler 2004a: 90). In this discussion Butler is working to undermine a common definition of the human that would be based on a determinable set of cultural features or standards of ­rationality – features and standards that might demarcate the limits of what would be considered human, and therefore, grievable life. For Butler, the limits of the human that are revealed in the rhetoric of politicians and pundits wishing to determine a field of insiders and outsiders can (and should) unsettle taken-­for-­granted notions of what counts as human. To take up the ‘challenge to rethink the human,’ then, is ‘part of the democratic trajectory of an evolving human rights jurisprudence’ (Butler 2004a: 90). In this way, Butler presents the problem of the human as a central aspect of political, and specifically democratic, life. Yet she immediately returns to the logic of the universal by elaborating that ‘an ongoing task of humans rights’ is ‘to reconceive the human when it finds that its putative universality does not have universal reach’ (Butler 2004a: 90). My point here is not that Butler is simply contradicting herself. Instead, I am trying to

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make the – perhaps obvious, but too often overlooked – point that how we theorise the figure and subject position of the human has critical consequences for our conceptions of the possibilities for life, and for a politics of difference. To interrogate this tension in Butler’s use of the human, we need to look closely at how Butler theorises the making of the ‘human’ and the meaning of dehumanisation. Following a certain reading of Foucault, Butler has consistently argued that normative categories like the human are constructed in a ‘field of discourse and power that orchestrates, delimits, and sustains that which qualifies as “the human” ’ (1993: 8). For Butler the key to this process of defining a category like the human is that it occurs through ‘exclusionary means’ that begin not only with what counts as human and inhuman, but with that which must both be excluded, and more powerfully, not allowed to be spoken or to exist. Thus, as she writes, ‘the human is not only produced over and against the inhuman, but through a set of foreclosures, radical erasures, that are, strictly speaking, refused the possibility of cultural articulation’ (Butler 1993: 8, original emphasis). As such, the category of the human is defined against a ‘constitutive outside’ that is not merely the inhuman, but a form of life that is ‘derealized’, ‘spectral’, ‘deconstituted’ (see Butler 2004a: 34, 91). Dehumanisation, then, takes on a function in Butler’s work that differs from the common trope that reads dehumanisation as an effect of violence and injustice. Instead, for Butler ‘dehumanization occurs first’: the very defining of the human requires the production of a zone of dehumanisation that then makes possible the practice of violence and injustice against those who already find themselves ‘derealized’ or ‘deconstituted’ by the normative category of the human from which they are excluded (Butler 2004a: 34). As she writes, ‘dehumanization becomes the condition for the production of the human’ (Butler 2004a: 91). Butler’s understanding of the human and the dehumanised then makes possible her now well-­known account of ‘grievability’. In Precarious Life she presents a case in which the San Francisco Chronicle in 2002 refused to publish obituaries for two Palestinian families who had been killed by Israeli troops. For Butler, this refusal marks the unwillingness, or perhaps inability, of the West to recognise these lives as grievable, and thus human, lives. Their exclusion from the public realm (at least in the form of this particular newspaper) is, for Butler, a result of the prior dehumanisa-



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tion of Palestinian lives in the very construction of the normative definition of the human, which blocks our ability to connect to them in a shared experience of vulnerability and grievability. That is, they simply do not show up for us, and thus they do not matter. Butler argues that: if there were to be an obituary there would have had to have been a life, a life worth noting, a life worth valuing and preserving, a life that qualifies for recognition . . . It is not just that a death is poorly marked, but that it is unmarkable. (2004a: 35)

The key to overcoming these conditions, then, would be to recognise and respond to the vulnerability and grievability of the other – to see that we share in the condition that she calls ‘precarious life’. On its face, Butler’s insistence on the grievability of all lives as an ethical ideal for politics seems difficult to dispute. But as I am arguing here, the problem with this perspective arises from the way that Butler accounts for the relationship between the human and its others. This image of the human relies upon a model of visibility and invisibility, of the real and the derealised. In this way, Butler’s position presumes that the solution to the problems of violence and injustice depends upon the recovery, recognition and making-­visible of the humanness of the other. The result, however, is that Butler overlooks, for instance, both the ways that her ‘dehumanized’ others do in fact appear in the public realm, and the possibility that this analysis itself devalues the struggle of those whose lives are read as derealised and spectral.2 As such, the power to determine these conditions appears to rest with a dominant, or even hostile, other. However, from another perspective, Butler also offers a view of the ‘human’ as a more contested field where the political and ethical terms of the human are dramatised and played out. Here Butler’s call to ‘rethink the human’ provides inspiration for challenging ‘the normative notion of the human, a normative notion of what the body of a human must be’ (2004a: 33). Drawing upon the impulse of her development of the concepts of iterability and citationality, in Undoing Gender Butler moves towards a language and understanding of the human that exceeds the framework of recovery and that turns instead on the contestation of the normative use of the ‘human’. There she considers what it would mean to disrupt the language of the human and human rights, which

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she reads as masculinist and racial constructions, by resignifying human rights as, for instance, ‘women’s human rights’ or ‘lesbian and gay human rights’ (Butler 2004b: 38). Her response moves out of the normative frame of the human: ‘It says that such groups have their own set of human rights, that what human may mean when we think about the humanness of women is perhaps different from what human has meant when it has functioned presumptively as male’ (Butler 2004b: 38). Here Butler’s mode of political contestation depends not on the acts of recognition and making visible a shared condition, but in contesting the notion of a shared condition as the basis for politics and for human rights in the first place.3 In moments like these, the notion of the human serves as the ground of subversive political action, but it also, paradoxically, promises to be a safe harbour from the vicissitudes of that very political life. This tension drives Butler’s work – a tension between a focus on survival and a desire for subversion as the primary aim of feminist and queer politics and theory. The focus on survival has come to mark the starting point for ethics, whereas the orientation towards subversion motivates the more radical political dimensions of Butler’s thought. But if the figure of the human can truly remain politically salient, I argue, this latter dimension of dynamism and contestability – of the human at the limits – must be our focus. If there is to be a rethinking of the human as Butler suggests, it must arise here, where settled concepts of the human are already being challenged by lives no less human for not being called human.

What is a liveable life? The rhetoric of universal rights, in which Butler’s ethical turn is rooted, contains within it an assumption that we can fail to see others as humans, or at least that we are able to dehumanise others in order to allow for their being treated as other than human. However, I contend that to defend this claim, as Butler (at least implicitly) does, runs the risk of foreclosing the question of the human by turning the issue of particular practices and their effects into a general problem of recognition or recovery. To make this point clear, it is helpful to return to the discussion begun above on the construction of the figure of the human to see what Butler and her interlocutors see as missing in the ‘extra-­human and extra-­ juridical sphere of life’ (Butler 2004a: 91). Addressing the question



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of the human in Butler requires that one take up a constellation of key concepts that appear in various forms throughout her work. In the 1999 Preface to Gender Trouble Butler writes that her attempt to denaturalise gender came from ‘a desire to live, to make life possible, and to rethink the possible as such’ (1999: xx). Throughout her work, she variously characterises the fulfilment of this possible life as ‘livable’ (Butler 1999: xxii) and ‘intelligible’ (1999: 22). Conversely, an unliveable life is ‘foreclosed’ (Butler 1999: xx), ‘false unreal, and unintelligible’ (Butler 1999: xxiii), ‘illegible’ (Butler 2004b: 5) and ‘less than’ (Butler 2004b: 2) or ‘not human at all’ (Butler 2004b: 2). For Butler, then, the less-­than-­human or unintelligible primarily lack recognition and visibility, or categories of recognition in which to realise oneself that are not already characterised by repressive norms (see Butler 2004b: 3). From this perspective this lack of visibility, in turn, seems to imply that those who fall outside recognised norms simply do not matter. As Chambers and Carver explain this point, the unintelligible lack the agency of a subject because they are not received into intelligible discourse. They write, the ‘terms of intelligibility’ that grant one visibility and legitimacy as a subject may not allow ‘the “I” that appears in deviant gender, racial or sexual form . . . to “appear” at all’ (Chambers and Carver 2008: 88). On Moya Lloyd’s reading, the lack of social, legal and political validity means that those who fall outside normative recognition ‘simply will not matter’ (2007: 33). Conversely, a liveable life, according to Lloyd, is one having ‘value and legitimacy’ (2007: 33). Similarly, Chambers and Carver construe a liveable life as being dependent on being a ‘recognisable subject . . . thought through the idea of a “received subject”’ that involves being recognised as intelligible (2008: 78). Thus, it appears that in order to matter, one must be able to appear in the realm of intelligibility and the human, even if the intelligible is already determined by the terms of exclusive norms. All of these perspectives focus on the repressed (or the impossibility of) visibility of lives and forms of agency that fall outside established norms and practices, thus allowing for their systematic exclusion and repression. The question, then, is how to account for norms that can be simultaneously totalising in the exclusion of non-­normative lives and open to contestation by these very inhuman, unintelligible, unliveable lives. Butler has provided answers to this question throughout her work, even as she has

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simultaneously undermined and covered over that position by reifying the power of norms and the violence of the subject formation. As Butler argues through her development of the concept of citationality, the bounds of the unintelligible and the invisible are always already being challenged. In her discussion of the category of gender in Gender Trouble Butler contends that normative categories are always incomplete; thus, they are always open to being filled in by contestable meanings (1999: 21). Likewise, the notion of personhood as regulated by gender and sexuality norms of intelligibility is always already contested by persons who fail to conform to these norms (Butler 1999: 23). Because of these discontinuities and the overflow of subjectivity from the bounds of intelligibility, breaking or expanding these boundaries is always a possibility already in play (Butler 1999: 40). She further argues that the making invisible of both dominant norms and those they exclude requires performative repetition from the subjects of these (gender) norms, and because the performance of norms is always incomplete and unsuccessful, norms always remain open to contestation. Deviant expressions, then, may promise to expand the range of legitimacy to more kinds of subjects, but they do not do so easily. Obviously, the visibility of deviant expressions is one of the primary instigators of violence against marginalised people. Yet, the incompleteness and boundlessness of categories and expressions of gender, sexuality and the human has important effects for thinking about the liveability and intelligibility of lives and the possibilities for political agency.

Always, already human Much of this argument turns on the central, but often unasked, question here of whether we (can) really fail to see some humans as human – whether we can render, as the common trope goes, some humans inhuman, dehumanised, spectral. I am inclined to say that we cannot, or that we do not. I draw inspiration for this claim from a reading of Stanley Cavell’s contention in The Claim of Reason that we cannot fail to see other humans as human (see Cavell 1979: Part IV). Cavell challenges the familiar argument that atrocities from slavery to war crimes to abortion (from the perspective of those who oppose it) can be attributed to some humans seeing or treating some other humans as less than or not at all human. In making this argument Cavell is not suggesting that people never claim to fail to



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see some others as human. Instead, he, on my reading, is making two other, related points. First, Cavell argues that when we claim to fail to see the other as human we can mean ‘nothing definite’ by this claim (1979: 376). That is, claiming to fail to see some other as human can only be meant relatively or perspectively. The effects of this way of seeing may be disastrous for some lives, but from this Cavellian perspective, it does not saturate or fix the scene of possibilities for those other lives as Butler’s theory of norms seems to do. The ‘nothing definite’ of Cavell’s argument challenges the power of norms to determine the limits of the human in a way that even Butler’s notion of the incompleteness of norms does not; for though she continually returns to the subversive power of citationality, she does so only after ceding the grounds of determining the limits of the human to the norm in the first place. Cavell continues this argument by suggesting that the moral or ethical response to the other is not a matter of knowledge or recognition, particularly of their humanity. Responding to another, for Cavell, is not a matter of knowledge or recognition in which I might be shown something about the other that might make me come to see her humanity. If there is something missing here, it is not the recognition of the other’s humanness. The ethical dilemma, then, of slavery, torture and so on is not that we fail to see some others as humans. On the contrary, ‘[t]he anxiety in the image of slavery [we could include other atrocities that fall under the banner of abuses of human rights] is that it really is a way in which certain human beings can treat certain others whom they know, or all but know, to be human beings. Rather than admit this we say that the ones do not regard the others as human beings at all’ (Cavell 1979: 377). Attributing the violence and harm we do to others to their dehumanisation, instead of sharpening our view of these practices, relieves us of the anxiety we might feel about what some humans are capable of doing to others they ‘all but know’ to be humans. The appeal to a failure to see the other as human marks an evasion of these actual conditions and practices. Cavell, thus, offers a different conception of what it means to respond to, or acknowledge the human: What is implied is that it is essential to knowing that something is human that we sometimes experience it as such, and sometimes do not, or fail to; that certain alterations of consciousness take place, and sometimes not, in the face of it. (1979: 379)

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This experience of the human as something that attempts to acknowledge the uncertainty and inconsistency of how we understand and respond to the other is much closer to Butler’s second image of the human – one that depends on the notion of performativity, not spectrality, and that always puts ‘the human’ just beyond our grasp. Here Cavell radically inverts the typical logic of the human by suggesting that even our experiences of failing to see the other as human (and our processes of dehumanisation) are part of what it means to know and respond to the human. That is, Cavell’s analysis reveals that the violence we do one another, far from erasing the humanness of the other, can (and should) provoke us to see that the humanness of the other is what is at stake at every turn. Take, for example, Frederick Douglass’s description of the relationship between the slave and the slaveholder. Certainly, in his autobiography, he often highlights the experience of slavery as an attempt to undermine or deny his humanness. However, in ‘What to the Slave is the Fourth of July’, he argues that his humanness was never in question, even to the slaveowners, and thus puts into question a reading of slavery as an institution built upon something like a prior zone of dehumanisation: Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? That point is conceded already. Nobody doubts it. The slaveholders themselves acknowledge it in the enactment of laws for their government. They acknowledge it when they punish disobedience on the part of the slave. There are seventy-­two crimes in the State of Virginia which, if committed by a black man (no matter how ignorant he be), subject him to the punishment of death; while only two of the same crimes will subject a white man to the like punishment. What is this but the acknowledgment that the slave is a moral, intellectual, and responsible being? (Douglass [1852] 2000: 195)

In these lines Douglass calls attention to the fact that slaves and blacks are abused not because they are subject to a kind of erasure or derealisation that then allows for their being abused. Instead, in this reading, Douglass points out that the institutions of slavery and oppression are in fact violent, cruel responses to an expression of the human itself. These institutions might aim to undermine, or even eradicate, the agency of these ‘other’ humans, but they ultimately cannot. In fact, the institution itself reinforces that the



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humanness of the other is always at stake, even when it is read as dangerous and worthy of control or even death. This reading of slave laws challenges Butler’s view that dehumanisation comes first; for here Douglass reads these laws as a response to the very humanness of the other. Butler’s view of the human as a kind of norm of recognition constructed upon the dehumanisation and derealisation of marginalised groups then misses the political point that arises from Cavell’s reading of the human and from Douglass’s self-­description. For her argument takes for granted that to remain outside dominant orders of recognition or a position of abjection will mean that one’s agency and worth will be denied. But the examples from Cavell and Douglass bring this image of the human into question. Returning to Butler’s account of the functioning of norms in these terms makes clear that far from making invisible those who do not conform to norms, their lives make them more visible as aberrations from and threats to dominant normative practices. Consider the reciprocal, reiterative process that works to make invisible (always incompletely) both norms and those who conform to them. In describing the working of gender norms, Butler argues that ‘gender is the effect of a regulatory practice that seeks to render gender identity uniform through compulsory heterosexuality’ (1999: 42). This attempt at uniformity works to restrict and regulate aberrant expressions of sexuality, thus exposing such expressions all the more. If we look from the other direction at this description of normativity, we see the Foucauldian point that these discursive practices, rather than aberrant expressions of them, are precisely what are always being covered over; when dominant norms are enforced, awareness of their normative function can slip out of view. Thus, Chambers and Carver can claim, following Butler, that ‘to do gender “right” is to remain unmarked by societal gender norms’ (2008: 89). Read this way, it appears that if there is a place where some subjects fail to see others as human, it is within the functioning of norms of intelligibility themselves. To be able to be unmarked by societal gender norms is to be able to forget the contingency and incompleteness of these normative practices (and one’s own identity insofar as it remains within safe distance of norms of behaviour). The regulative practices of the normative system take over the responsibility of relationship that would be demanded of us if contingency were made visible. As with Cavell’s reading of the language of the human, the relative

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invisibility of norms (so long as things are going smoothly) allows us to forget, or ignore, the contingency, and at times arbitrariness, of normative practices. If conforming to norms makes one less visible, then, we can see that the possible disruption of a given normative order is the very reason that deviance from these norms (including claims for justice, equal treatment and so on, where such claims are not welcome or are even forbidden) is so dangerous – it reveals our anxiety about our practices and marks deviance for violence. As Chambers and Carver put the point, ‘[t]o do our gender “wrong” is to open ourselves up to normative violence because we mark our gender and sexuality as potentially non-­ normative’ (2008: 89). That is, we have made ourselves visible or spoken up in the face of normative order that knows, or all but knows, that we are already present and human, even if it wishes for things to be otherwise. The response of normative violence is not the result of dehumanisation or a life rendered unintelligible, but rather a response to the very expression of the human itself. Expressing oneself deviantly seems to be the very thing that marks, or reveals, one as human, that is, as a contingent, discontinuous, overflowing expression of subjectivity in relation, but not in lockstep, with a set of norms. Deviant expression makes visible the contingency of normative structures in/on the body of the subject. We cannot fail to see that human as human. The punishment for this expression may be swift and harsh, but it cannot be because we fail to see you as human. Your life is too liveable; your life matters too much. In it we see the unpredictable ways humans are capable of living. Like a moment of Heideggerian breakdown, these moments of disruption of normative practices reveal our involvement with the world and with others. When things break, or fall out of their ordinary role in everyday ways of being, they stand out and reveal our relationship to them (Heidegger 1962). Heidegger’s discussion of ‘breakdown’, though staged in the context of the ‘equipmentality’ of Dasein’s existence, can provide a helpful lens for examining the functioning of norms. For this purpose, we can consider two forms of breakdown that Heidegger discusses: the broken tool and the obstinate tool. In both cases, Heidegger argues that the breakdown of the everyday context allows us to become aware of our ‘normal’ relations by disrupting them. In the case of the broken tool, the implement becomes conspicuous as an unworkable tool that must either be repaired or be replaced in order to return to



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‘normal’ relations. The obstinate tool, on the other hand, gets in the way of work and stands out as an impediment to the normal functioning of the everyday. In the context of norms, I suggest, we can read the aberrant expression of the human as somewhere between the broken and the obstinate. Deviant expressions appear both as unworkable in terms of established norms and as obstinate refusals to go along with accepted ways of being. These expressions produce trouble because they threaten both the functioning of established orders and the contingency of these orders that their smooth functioning covers over. Moments of breakdown – as deviant or unacceptable performances of identity, and as eruptions of resistance to and violence against such expression – reveal the anxiety that we feel about the real possibilities for the human as various subjects push against established norms and their limits. For as always already human (in deviant forms), marginalised subjects are always already engaged in the logic and mechanism of subversion.4 Butler, too, turns to Heidegger in a similar way in Antigone’s Claim, noting that for Heidegger, ‘participation in what is non-­living turns out to be something like the condition of living itself’ and that ‘proximity to being involves estrangement from living beings even as it is the ground of their very emergence’ (2000: 92–3, n. 4). Norms seem to operate in this experience of estrangement at the ground of experience, which makes them both powerfully violent as attempts to cover over this anxiety, and powerfully modifiable as always already contestable. The human is revealed at this moment of uncertainty at the limits of the norms and zones of intelligibility that give shape to our subjectivity. As Butler writes, ‘we cannot precisely give content to this person at the very moment that he speaks his worth, which means that it is precisely the ways in which he is not fully recognizable, fully disposable, fully categorizable, that his humanness emerges’ (2004b: 73). The political salience of this emerging humanness is at least twofold. Negatively, it can be addressed violently as an aberrant articulation to be punished in the name of reinforcing the norm. Positively, as Lloyd points out, Butler uses this kind of moment to show how challenges to the norm are intrinsic to the norm itself (2007: 152). Thus, we can begin to provide an answer to Butler’s question of how to think of ‘the one with no place who nevertheless seeks to claim one within speech, the unintelligible as it emerges in the intelligible’ (2000: 78). This emergence, on the

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account I have been trying to give here, is not from invisibility to visibility or from not mattering to mattering. The limits of norms are always contestable sites where the human – the one we can accept and the one that we try to cover over – is always at stake. How this emergence occurs – and how it is presented and received – will determine whether it shows up as a kind of ethical recognition of a common humanity or as a political intervention into the order of dominant norms.

The human, politics and ethics in the AIDS crisis To illustrate this point more fully, consider Leo Bersani’s reading of the response to the AIDS epidemic in ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’ (1987). Bersani begins by pointing out the apparently obvious claim that the US government’s (specifically, the Reagan administration’s) lack of response to the growing epidemic and the increasing number of deaths of homosexual men illustrates that the life, suffering and death of gay men did not matter and failed to warrant intervention. But Bersani goes on to show how this logic of not mattering is actually evidence of its opposite. Bersani argues that in investigating the (now seen as early) responses to the AIDS epidemic we must pay attention to the ‘fantasmatic logic’ that attends it. As evidence he points to a report in the New York Times that attributed to the mayor of Arcadia, Florida, where a family’s home was torched because three boys who lived there were rumoured to have AIDS, the following position: ‘a lot of local people, including himself, believed that powerful interests, principally the national gay leaders, had pressured the Government into refraining from taking legitimate steps to help contain the spread of AIDS’ (Nordheimer cited in Bersani 1987: 210). Bersani points out both the fantastical argument (at that time) that any gay leaders were powerful enough ‘to pressure the federal government to do anything at all’ and that somehow those ‘hit most heavily by AIDS want nothing more intensely than to see it spread unchecked’ (1987: 211). More powerfully he shows how this assumption implies that ‘those being killed are killers’ (Bersani 1987: 211). Further, ‘the presumed original desire to kill gays may itself be understandable only in terms of the fantasy for which it is offered as an explanation: homosexuals are killers’ (Bersani 1987: 211). Here the fear of the spread of HIV/AIDS figures gay men, not as lives that do not matter, but as larger-­than-­life perpetrators of



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sexual deviance and carriers of disease and death. Gay men appear on the scene of the HIV/AIDS crisis as an expression of the human that the social order cannot process or handle. If their lives were not yet grievable in Butler’s terms, it was not because their lives did not matter, nor that their lives have been marked as inhuman in the constitution of the human norm. Instead, their lives mattered intensely, and it is only as human that their lives show up as deviant and dangerous. Following Foucault, we might say that their lives must be disallowed to the point of death (Foucault [1978] 1994: 138). But we must not read this disallowing of life as a response made possible by a prior process of dehumanisation, for that risks forgetting the politics of the social order that made such suffering possible by turning a specific political conjuncture into a generic process of dehumanisation. Bersani’s portrayal of the AIDS crisis and of queer responses to it additionally warns against an easy amelioration of these damaging conditions through expanded social recognition of identities and practices. Bersani worries about what he calls the ‘redemptive reinvention of sex’ that has arisen from ‘contemporary discourse that argues for a radically revised imagination of the body’s capacity for pleasure’ (1987: 215, original emphasis). Bersani is particularly concerned that a celebration of the pleasures of the body that might arise out of a particular reading of Foucault will cover over our ongoing anxieties about various sexual practices. That is, a quick move to a generic pluralist embrace of multiplicity can overlook the importance of the specificity of lives and practices.5 The political ends to which Bersani directs this critique are different from my own here, but his criticism is important nonetheless. For if we make the AIDS crisis and the response to it into a simple story of the recognition of the vulnerability, the grievability, and thus the humanity of gay men and their sex practices, which has led to their redemptive admission into the world of political mattering and agency, then we lose sight of the political salience of their lives, and their agency, before, during and after the gay rights revolution. This story would become an ethical one of recovery, rather a political one that required the reconfiguration of norms through the disruption of and intervention in the normative order. The turn to the ethical task of mourning, as Honig points out in her reading of Douglas Crimp, ‘was unavoidable in the face of devastating losses [of so many lives to AIDS] but it was also dangerous: it threatened to absorb the much-­needed political ­energies

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of a nascent movement’ (2013: 75). The work of mourning, as Honig points out, does not necessarily stifle the movement’s political energy, though it can too easily slide in that direction. In her discussion of the controversy of the AIDS Names Project quilt, Honig juxtaposes the more political response of Crimp’s ambivalent attitude towards the quilt with Butler’s embracing of it as ‘exemplary, ritualizing and repeating the name itself as a way of publically avowing limitless loss’ (Butler cited in Honig 2013: 61). Crimp, as Honig writes, ‘worries that the quilt undoes the passion and anger of activism’. Further, ‘[m]aking gay male deaths grievable, Crimp worries contra Butler avant la lettre we might say, is less an achievement than making gay male lives acceptable’ (Honig 2013: 62, original emphasis). To put the point a bit differently: the issue here is not to make gay men grievable so that they might matter, but to make gay men matter in such a way that their deaths may cause us grief and also provoke us to anger (or even rage). This shift in emphasis from Butler’s concept of grievability more clearly foregrounds the way that, in this case, gay men mattered (and mattered intensely) politically before the widespread mourning of their suffering and deaths. Further, the political movement provoked by the outrage over their suffering focuses attention on the specific ways that they were actively ignored and excluded: not because they did not matter or were considered inhuman, but because their expression of humanness threatened the given order. The move to public grief over the AIDS crisis, most notably in the AIDS quilt and the red ribbons campaign, threatens to obscure the responsibility we bear for the violence and harm caused by the social order. Our anxiety over these conditions, in the act of mourning, can be too easily ameliorated by the ability to mourn publicly together. We need only see the act of holding vigils and announcing our grief on social networking sites as evidence of the depoliticising power of these kinds of acts of mourning. For once the grief and outrage has been expressed collectively via these collective acts of mourning, it often quickly fades from view. Thus, Honig can write, ‘[t]he risk is that we let go of the rage and righteous anger that feed political protest, activism, and self-­organization. “We Have Turned Our Anger into a Piece of Quilt and Red Ribbons” read one ACT UP poster’ (2013: 62).



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Subversion or survival? The tension in responses to the AIDS crisis between mourning and activism parallels the dichotomy in Butler’s work between a politics of subversion and an ethics of grievability. This tension manifests itself perhaps most starkly in Butler’s theory of the subject, particularly as it is articulated in The Psychic Life of Power (1997a). There Butler wants to interrogate what pre-­subjective entity or drive might cause us to turn to becoming subjects, to give ourselves over to terms of existence that we do not author. The basic answer for Butler is survival. That is, there must be some kind of Spinozan conative drive for existence and persistence that pushes us to accept the (mostly unhappy on Butler’s reading) terms of becoming a subject (Chambers 2003: chapter 5 and Lloyd 2007: 102). This drive reinforces the vulnerability of the human because, as she argues, ‘the desire to survive, “to be”, is a pervasively exploitable desire’ (Butler 1997a: 7). To be a subject, then, originally means to be vulnerable, manipulable and repressible because our desire to be forces us to take up the conditions of existence that we do not determine. The factical story behind this condition, for Butler, is the fact that we all begin as children and, thus, are always at the mercy of another. For Butler, the basic terms of subjectivity, then, involve an originary vulnerability and, indeed, ‘unfreedom’. Moreover, to be a subject is to be caught in ‘the bind of self-expression’ (Butler 1999: xxiv), in which the subject is never able to speak in her own voice, but only in the terms by which she has been conferred subjectivity. Even so, Butler argues that, again, the phenomenon of iteration makes it possible that the agency that comes along with subjection can to some extent outrun the terms of our subjection. Further, she suggests that we can loosen the knot of subjection, even if we cannot untie it or break the (apparently vicious) circle. One way to loosen these binds is to form a kind of passionate attachment to the terms of our subjection that grants some increased agency in determining which ways of life we live (Butler 1997a: 66). This account of the subject, then, requires an ability to manipulate ‘the gap between the originating context or intention by which an utterance is animated and the effects it produces’ (Butler 1997b: 14), which the notion of the conative drive works to provide. The problem here is that for Butler the possibility of escaping these terms of subjectivity themselves requires a new form of spectral

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existence. She suggests that turning away from the normative forms of existence calls for a form of agency that can resist the norm’s ‘lure of identity, an agency that outruns and counters the conditions of its emergence. Such a turn demands a willingness not to be – a critical desubjectivation – in order to expose the law as less powerful than it seems’ (Butler 1997a: 130). This turn to desubjectivation as an alternative to the binds of subjectivity, in this way, parallels Butler’s understanding of the human in relation to the power of norms. For on Butler’s account the alternative to recognition or inclusion in dominant norms is a life of spectrality or unreality from the perspective of the dominant normative order. The difference here is that the unreality, which previously featured as an unhappy condition of abjection and invisibility, now shows up as a potentially felicitous condition for the reclamation of the terms of subjectivity (and perhaps of subversion of dominant norms as well). Despite the ‘spectrality’ of this state of being, in Antigone’s Claim Butler argues that there is an important, if peculiar, form of agency here. She suggests that the body of the abject exists in an ontologically suspended mode where it persists ‘in spite of its foreclosure’ by dominant norms (Butler 2000: 78). In this way, the human always exceeds the terms of normative recognition and its attendant images of human identity. Therefore, it marks the site of desire that can exceed and persist in spite of repressive normative practices. This ecstatic persistence serves as a fecund source of political agency because even in this basic persistence, the subject has the possibility to subvert and recast the possibilities open to it. As Butler suggests, this persistence allows for the possibility of an ‘aberrant unprecedented future’ through the possibility of fantasy (Butler 2000: 82; see also Butler 2004b: 27). From this perspective the agency of the human emerges in the fantastical ability to make the ‘impossible claim’ of acting and speaking ‘as if you were human’, in spite of the foreclosure of those possibilities in reality (Butler 2004b: 27–30). Here Butler’s example of ‘women’s human rights’ comes into view as an ‘impossible claim’ that has become a reality as a call to political action against the injustices done to women in our masculinist social order. By putting together these terms together in an apparently ‘inappropriate’ way, the possibility of disrupting the normative force of ‘women’, ‘human rights’ and a whole constellation of terms is put into play. Agency emerges, then, in spite of its



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foreclosure by the normative image of the human and intelligibility. As Butler writes, ‘[i]f there is an operation of agency, or, indeed, freedom in this struggle, it takes place in the context of enabling and limiting field of constraint. This ethical agency is neither fully determined nor radically free’ (Butler 2005: 19). It is uncertain whether some readers would find this ‘ethical agency’ sufficient for the task of politics, but I find in its emphasis on a potential for agency (one that lies between determinism and radical freedom) an important recasting of the figure of the human and the agentic possibilities open to it. I hold on to the significance of this recasting despite the fact that Butler herself slides back towards a focus on the unhappy conditions of being a subject when she notes that this freedom ‘is made possible, paradoxically, by the persistence of this primary condition of unfreedom’ (Butler 2005: 19). We come closer to capturing the experience of the human agency, I suggest, when we remain with the notion of agency between determinism and freedom. When we turn back to an abstracted initial condition of unfreedom, then we risk returning to a project of recovery of, or at least melancholy for, a primary freedom that cannot be.

A politics of the human Given the ethical and normative pull of the concept of the human, it remains an open question whether we can have a politics of the human. Honig’s response to this dilemma is to call for an ‘agonistic humanism’ that privileges natality and contestation over vulnerability and mortalism (Honig 2010: 4). The presumption of agonism, however, is that one can simply struggle. The ambiguity (and, indeed, inconsistency) of Butler’s treatment of the human calls into question the presumption of struggle by privileging the problem of survival that surely attends the lives of the abject. Must struggle and survival, and the political and ethical, remain opposed? The question might be whether there are also forms of mattering and agentic capacities that can emerge from the need for and the conditions of survival, those in which we are always given over to (and potentially undone by) others. The persistent mattering of the human that I have been advocating in this essay offers the possibility of seeing the kinds of agency and potential for politics that endures in the concept of the human. Here I offer one more example of human expression that is suspended between the drives for struggle and survival. In recent years, a Zimbabwean

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women’s movement, Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA), has developed in response to the abuses of the Mugabe regime. The women often demonstrate in the streets even though they are typically quickly arrested, detained and intimidated. One way of ­theorising these conditions might be to read them as a result or practice of dehumanisation in which these women are being made invisible by the ongoing repression of the Mugabe regime. But I think it is crucial to listen to their own self-­description here. In an interview on Public Radio International one woman described the protests as an expression of the human: ‘When we go to the street and demonstrate, we are human beings enjoying our freedom. They will never take away the beauty, the joy, and the celebration of those moments when we are on the street’ (The World, 22 April 2013). As witnesses of experiences like these, it is crucial that we not take them as lives that have been rendered derealised, spectral, unintelligible, caused not to matter. These protests and other like expressions of subversion present a complex of the human as a form of life that at once is free and restrained, oppressor and oppressed, and perhaps even human and inhuman. In the case of the WOZA women, subversion and survival are intimately linked. To frame this last point, I consider Jacques Rancière’s reading of ‘the rights of man’ in which he offers a criticism of the rhetoric of the rights that parallels my account of the human here (Rancière 2004).6 Rancière resists Arendt’s claim that there are those who are rendered inhuman and, thus, denied human rights, and in so doing he pushes the claim of the universalism of human rights to its limit. Against the idea, put in Butler’s terms, that the putative universalism of human rights is ‘not yet the case’, Rancière offers the following provocative restatement of the logic of human rights: ‘The Rights of Man are the rights of those who have not the rights that they have and have the rights that they have not’ (2004: 302). That is, the putative universalism of human rights necessarily implies that everyone already possesses them. Therefore, in their inability to enact these rights, the excluded illustrate the limits of the power and accessibility of human rights, for they ‘possess’ them but cannot utilise them. In this way, Rancière refuses the logic that those people who fall outside of a given regime of ‘the human’ are simply dehumanised or are somehow excluded from the possible universality of human rights. As he notes, ‘this attempt [at dehumanisation] depopulates the political stage by sweeping aside the always-­ambiguous actors’ (2004: 301). Against the logic of dehu-



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manisation, Rancière affirms the universalism of human rights in a very particular way by showing that those who are denied these rights can and do continue to claim them, drawing upon the universality of human rights that putatively extends to everyone. As he suggests, ‘[t]he Rights of man are the rights of those who make something of that inscription who decide not only to “use” their rights but also to build such and such a case for the verification of the power of the inscription’ (Rancière 2004: 303). Human rights on Rancière’s account are universal only insofar as anyone can claim them and attempt to make use of them. The human, and human rights, then, cannot be determined in advance by a set of norms and the limits that they draw. ‘Politics,’ as Rancière puts it, ‘is about that border’ (2004: 303). The possibilities for politics, dissensus and agonism become less available when we accept or affirm in advance what counts as human, as mattering, as struggle, or even as the political or ethical. The desire and struggle for survival itself may contain within it certain modes of politics that we might be able to locate alongside given regimes of the human and of ethics and politics. There is another way to frame my question of the always-­already human: lives persist in spite of being closed out, and their persistence, even if they do not know what they are doing, continues to challenge the hegemony of dominant social and normative orders. In continuing to live lives even outside the normative structure of the police, these lives are always already beginning to construct a new scene for the human and its possibilities (Rancière [1995] 1999 and 2001). Despite the ontological suspension of this state of being, in Butler’s terms, these humans are nonetheless never completely wiped out or covered over. A ‘human’ politics of subversion might work this way: take the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay who were systematically named ‘detainees’ in order to cover over their claims for basic human rights. From one perspective the state has worked to strip them of humanity in order to indefinitely detain and even torture them. But on the account I have been trying to give, the state and its norms of the human cannot fully determine the situation, for there is an ever-­ongoing contestation of the prisoners’ status. As Rancière puts it, ‘[t]hese rights are theirs when they can do something with them to construct a dissensus against the denial of rights they suffer. And there are always people among them who do it’ (2004: 305, my emphasis). Despite the foreclosure of the detainees’ right to speak, many of them

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through their hunger strikes and other acts of resistance, along with their lawyers and outside voices of families, communities and activists, continue to deviate and attempt to establish a new scene for their staging of ‘the wrong’ of these practices. The persistence of deviant forms of life requires a constant revision of limits of the human and the practices these limits allow. On Butler’s terms, the issue at stake here is whether we can come to recognise the vulnerability and grievability of these people, and whether they can come to matter to us as persons of ethical and political concern. But the central political issue is not that people may or may not be grieved, or whether we can come to terms with the precariousness of our lives. Politics and ethics do not begin nor end with vulnerability and our recognition of it. Instead, the task is to illuminate and contest both these unjust conditions and the persistence of people in spite of these injustices. The movements of humans at the borders of what we might call human work to subvert – sometimes slowly eroding, and sometimes violently ­challenging – the power of certain norms to regulate our lives. This account works to relieve the problem of accounting for those who might be considered unintelligible or inhuman to find a way to cross the seemingly impossible epistemological, agentic gap into the terms of the liveable, the intelligible and the human. For, if the deviant is part of the structure of the norm itself, subversion is always already in play. In Butler’s words, ‘[i]t [the norm] is overcome, in part, precisely through the repeated scandal by which the unspeakable nevertheless makes itself heard through borrowing and exploiting the very terms that are meant to enforce its silence’ (2000: 78). To realise this latter impulse, then, requires a politics of the human that prioritises the experience and expression of struggle over the desire for a common essence through which the ‘mattering’ of all human beings will be made visible. The human, as one expression of difference in the world, is not a question of loss and recovery; instead, the human is always-­already a process of a difference and repetition, human and inhuman, acknowledgment and betrayal. If we are to ameliorate the often brutal conditions of human life, then it cannot be a matter of moving from the inhuman to the human, the spectral to the visible, but a matter of responding to the human and all that we are capable of doing to one another.



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Notes 1. This criticism of the role of vulnerability in Butler’s work is not exactly new. The weight of the role of wounding, mourning and melancholy on her theories of the subject and of agency has long been criticised, even by her most sympathetic readers. It has been variously criticised for dragging down the creative potential of performativity (Phillips 1997), for contributing to an overly dramatic and individualised concept of performativity (Sedgwick 2003), for reifying the dichotomy between subversion and subjection in her models of agency and subjectivity (Mahmood 2005), and, now most recently, for contributing to a ‘new humanism’ as part of the ongoing ethical turn in political theory and philosophy (Honig 2010). In a different mode, David McIvor (2012) suggests a reorientation of the politics of mourning by moving from Butler’s Freudian-­inspired project to a Kleinian approach to mourning. 2. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick makes a related argument in a discussion of alternatives to a hermeneutics of suspicion. She writes: ‘While there is plenty of hidden violence that requires exposure there is also, and increasingly, an ethos where forms of violence that are hypervisible from the start may be offered as an exemplary spectacle rather than remain to be unveiled as a scandalous secret. Human rights controversy around, for example, torture and disappearances in Argentina or the use of mass rape as part of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia marks, not an unveiling of practices that had been hidden or naturalized, but a wrestle of different frameworks of visibility’ (2003: 140). 3. My thanks to Moya Lloyd for help in clarifying this position. 4. It is important not to suggest a glorified image of the work of subversion or downplay the suffering of those who do not conform to heteronormativity, who are the subject of indiscriminate bombings, or who are tortured in the name of national security. As Butler convincingly argues: ‘to veer from the norm is to produce the aberrant example that regulatory power may quickly exploit’ (2004a: 52). Indeed, to deviate from the norm marks one for violence, and the regulatory power of the norm can ‘foreclose the thinkability of its disruption’ (Butler 2004a: 43). 5. It should be noted that it was much easier to imagine a more generic pluralism in 1986, when Bersani wrote this essay, than it is today, given the development of theories of pluralism. Of particular importance to this development is William Connolly’s notion of pluralisation as an ever-­ongoing process of working for a more plural world

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(Connolly 1995). Butler turns to this concept of pluralisation in her critique of Zionism in Parting Ways. 6. For a discussion that focuses more particularly on the relationship between Arendt and Rancière’s reading of her concept of ‘the right to have rights’, see Schaap 2011. Many words have been written on Arendt’s conception of human rights. Those that have been important for my work here include Ingram 2008, Michelman 1996 and Honig 2005. Joe Hoover (2013) has, likewise, taken up an analysis of the language of the ‘human’ in human rights, focusing on the ambiguity of the ‘human’ through the work of William Connolly and Bonnie Honig.

References Bersani, Leo (1987), ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’, October, 43: 197–222. Butler, Judith (1993), Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, New York and London: Routledge. Butler, Judith (1997a), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Butler, Judith (1997b), Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, New York and London: Routledge. Butler, Judith (1999), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Tenth Anniversary Edition, New York and London: Routledge. Butler, Judith (2000), Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death, New York: Columbia University Press. Butler, Judith (2002), ‘What is Critique?’, in David Ingram (ed.), The Political: Readings in Continental Philosophy, London: Basil Blackwell, pp. 212–26. Butler, Judith (2004a), Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, London and New York: Verso. Butler, Judith (2004b), Undoing Gender, New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith (2005), Giving an Account of Oneself, New York: Fordham University Press. Butler, Judith (2010), Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, London: Verso. Butler, Judith (2012), Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, New York: Columbia University Press. Butler, Judith, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek (2000), Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, London: Verso.



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Carver, Terrell, and Samuel A. Chambers (eds) (2008), Judith Butler’s Precarious Politics: Critical Encounters, New York: Routledge. Cavell, Stanley ([1979] 1999), The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chambers, Samuel A. (2003), Untimely Politics, New York: New York University Press. Chambers, Samuel A. (2015), ‘Subjectivation, The Social, and a (Missing) Account of the Social Formation: Judith Butler’s “Turn” ’, in Moya Lloyd (ed.), Butler and Ethics, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 193–218. Chambers, Samuel A., and Terrell Carver (2008), Judith Butler and Political Theory: Troubling Politics, New York: Routledge. Connolly, William E. (1995), The Ethos of Pluralization, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dean, Jodi (2008), ‘Change of Address: Butler’s Ethics at Sovereignty’s Deadlock’, in Terrell Carver and Samuel A. Chambers (eds), Judith Butler’s Precarious Politics: Critical Encounters, London: Routledge, pp. 109–26. Douglass, Frederick ([1852] 2000), ‘The Meaning of July Fourth to the Negro’, in Philip S. Foner (ed.), Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, Chicago: Chicago Review Press, pp. 188–206. Foucault, Michel ([1970] 1994), The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, New York: Random House. Heidegger, Martin ([1927] 1962), Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, New York: Harper. Honig, Bonnie (2010), ‘Antigone’s Two Laws: Greek Tragedy and the Politics of Humanism’, New Literary History, 41: 1, 1–33. Honig, Bonnie (2013), Antigone, Interrupted, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hoover, Joe (2013), ‘Towards a Politics for Human Rights: Ambiguous Humanity and Democratizing Rights’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 39: 5, 935–61. Ingram, James D. (2008), ‘What is a “Right to Have Rights”? Three Images of the Politics of Human Rights’, American Political Science Review, 102: 4, 401–16. Lloyd, Moya (2007), Judith Butler: Norms and Politics, Cambridge: Polity Press. Mahmood, Saba (2005), Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Princeton: Princeton University Press. McIvor, David (2012), ‘Bringing Ourselves to Grief: Judith Butler and the Politics of Mourning’, Political Theory, 40: 4, 409–36.

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Michelman, Frank (1996), ‘Parsing “A Right to Have Rights”  ’, Constellations 3:2, 200–8. Phillips, Adam (1997), ‘Keeping it Moving: Commentary on Judith Butler’s ‘Melancholy Gender/ Refused Identification’ in Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 151–9. Rancière, Jacques ([1995] 1999), Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rancière, Jacques (2004), ‘Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?’, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 102: 2–3, 297–310. Rancière, Jacques (2009), The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliot, New York: Verso. Rushing, Sara (2009), ‘Preparing for Politics: Judith Butler’s Ethical Dispositions’, Contemporary Political Theory, 9: 3, 284–303. Schaap, Andrew (2011), ‘Enacting the Right to Have Rights: Jacques Rancière’s Critique of Hannah Arendt’, European Journal of Political Theory, 10: 1, 22–45. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (2003), Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. The World (22 April 2013), Public Radio International, http://www. pri.org/programs/world/pris-­world-­04222013-­chechnya-­guatemala-­ zimbabwe (last accessed 6 December 2014). Watson, Janell (2012), ‘Butler’s Biopolitics: Precarious Community’, Theory & Event, 15: 2.

7

The Ethics and Politics of Vulnerable Bodies Moya Lloyd

In an essay from 2000, Judith Butler confesses her worry that the ‘return to ethics has constituted an escape from politics’ (15). In a published conversation with the political theorist William Connolly from that same year, she makes a similar claim, commenting that ‘I tend to think that ethics displaces from politics.’ The nature of the problem as she sees it is that ‘the use of power as a point of departure for a critical analysis is substantially different from an ethical framework’ (Butler in Butler and Connolly 2000). How ironic, therefore, that several critics see Butler’s own engagement with ethics in the same way: as a turn to ethics that heralds either a turn away from politics or its displacement. (See, for example, Dean 2008; Honig 2010, 2013; and Shulman 2011.) Using this debate as the backdrop for this chapter, I want to plot a different route through Butler’s discussion of ethics and politics, by way of the vulnerable body. As I see it, it is not that her ethical considerations lead her to abandon politics; in fact, she is at pains throughout her work to emphasise how power operates to regulate and determine who counts as human, to shape and condition the scene of recognition, and to circumscribe the types of ethical encounter that might take place there. Butler is thus fully aware of the ‘ethical stakes’ in ‘political encounters’ and of the ‘political modalities’ shaping ‘ethical questions’ (in Butler and Athanasiou 2013: 74), of the ways that politics and ethics are inter-­imbricated. The difficulty is rather that there is a tension in her work between ethical responsiveness as an abstract potentiality arising from ecstatic relationality and existential precariousness and the actualisation of ethics and politics in specific contexts of politically induced precarity. Central to my discussion will be a consideration of the ambivalent way that the idea of corporeal vulnerability operates in her work. 167

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The body has been a core idea in Butler’s work from her very earliest writings through to the most recent; however, her characterisation of it has been far from static or straightforward. She has, at various points, posited a phenomenologically-­informed account of the body as an ‘historical idea’ (Butler 1989); an understanding of ‘sex’ and the sexed body as the effect of a binary ‘gender apparatus’ such that sex was ‘always already gender’ (Butler 1990: 7); a revised understanding of sex as a regulatory norm of embodiment related to, but different in its operations from gender (Butler 1993); and, in what appeared to be a quite distinct and even unexpected turn in 2004 (Butler 2004a, 2004b), she offered a conceptualisation of the body as vulnerable, precarious and what she has more recently termed ‘socially ecstatic’ (Butler 2011a). In fact, the theoretical antecedents of this conceptualisation can be found in The Psychic Life of Power (Butler 1997). It is this relational account of the body that I will focus on in this chapter. I am particularly interested in the paradox inherent in Butler’s contention that the very circumstance that renders certain bodies unrecognisable as ‘human’ – namely their precariousness, albeit mediated through states of express precarity – is simultaneously the condition for embodied political action and ethical responsiveness. In the first section of the chapter, I examine Butler’s most recent thinking on the body, outlining the main characteristics of that thought and setting out the dualistic approach to vulnerability that I contend that Butler adopts here. This is followed by a discussion of the distinction that she draws between precariousness and precarity, and their relation to the politics of vulnerability. In the final two sections of the chapter, I consider first how it is possible to perform politics in conditions of precarity, exploring in particular Butler’s debt to Hannah Arendt, and second what practising ethics in those same conditions might entail, focusing on whether Butler is able to explain what needs to be done to encourage ethical responsiveness in contexts where we are unable to ‘see’ particular persons as ‘human’ or ‘hear’ their address. Throughout the chapter, I will relate my discussions to Butler’s work on gender.

Towards a ‘new body politics’ After 9/11 Butler started to make repeated calls for what she variously described as a ‘new body politics’ (2012a: 14), ‘a different kind of bodily politics’ (2012a: 13), and the basis for a revised



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‘progressive or left politics’ (2009a: 2). Sometimes she couched this call in terms of the need for ‘a new bodily ontology’ (Butler 2009a: 2) or its ‘rethinking’ (Butler 2009a: 3); at others, she formulated it as a broader need to ‘conceptualize the body in the field of politics’ (Butler 2011a: 385) or, at least, to ‘reconsider’ how it is conceptualised (Butler 2009a: 52). Her avowed hope was that a reorientation of this kind might open up ‘another kind of normative aspiration within the field of politics’ (Butler 2004a: 26) and ‘a different conception of politics’ (Butler 2004b: 21). Why was this necessary? What was wrong with, or deficient about, the prevailing conceptualisation of corporeal politics that it required revising? Indeed, what according to Butler did this prevailing conceptualisation look like? In Frames of War, she provides a partial answer: ‘We have to consider’, she remarks, ‘whether the body is rightly defined as a bounded kind of entity’ (Butler 2009a: 52; see also 2011a: 385). The idea of ‘bounded’-ness, as Butler describes it, is intimately connected with two politically salient ideas:1 corporeal autonomy, where the capacity to demand rights over (the disposal of) our bodies depends on the sense that, in some way, we own them, that they are ours to control;2 and the ability to make anti-­ discriminatory claims on behalf of ‘a group or a class’, when, she declares, it is necessary to ‘present ourselves as bounded beings – distinct, recognizable, delineated, subjects before the law’ (2004a: 24). These ideas are, of course, integral to many political campaigns and to the movements that espouse them, from feminist calls for reproductive freedom, access to contraception and abortion, through demands for the right of ‘intersex people . . . to make their own decisions affecting own (sic) bodily integrity, physical autonomy and self-­determination’ (Third International Intersex Forum, 2013), to gay and lesbian demands for sexual freedom. Corporeal integrity and self-­determination are seen to go hand in hand. One cannot live one’s life as one chooses if someone or something else – another person, institution or the state – controls one’s body, including both what is done by it and to it. Butler is certainly sympathetic to the need to campaign for certain rights – she talks, for example, of the need to continue to ‘maximize the protection and freedoms of sexual and gender minorities, of women, and of racial and ethnic minorities’ (2004a: 26). Additionally, she acknowledges that it is nigh on impossible to make such demands without deploying the language of

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autonomy, and specifically corporeal autonomy (Butler 2004b: 21). Nevertheless she discerns a problem with the way that ‘certain notions of autonomy’ have ‘made us think about individuals as self-­motored’ (Butler in Butler with Taylor 2009: 210). In Undoing Gender, she indicates why: autonomy is problematic when it is assumed to signify ‘a state of individuation, taken as self-­persisting prior to and apart from any relations of dependency on the world of others’ (Butler 2004b: 32). The difficulty, she explains, is that ‘the body does not belong to itself and never can’ (Butler 2011a: 385). To survive, bodies depend from birth on what is outside or beyond them. When Butler calls for the development of a ‘new’ conceptualisation of the body and a new bodily politics, based on a ‘new’ corporeal ontology, therefore, she is not calling simply for a dismissal of (bodily) autonomy and its associated claiming of rights; bodily autonomy, as she sees it, is ‘a lively paradox’ (Butler 2004b: 21; see Chambers and Carver 2008: 71), something that must be claimed just as it needs to be disclaimed. Her goal, rather, is to champion their rethinking on the assumption of the body’s fundamental dependency. Questioning whether it is possible to talk of the ‘being’ of the body, Butler speculates that if it is, then this ‘being’ is that the corpus is ‘always given over to others, to norms, to social and political organizations’ (2011a: 382; see also 2004b: 21). For Butler this emphasis on the sociality of the body is important ontologically. As indicated, in her terms the body is never simply one’s own. It is always impinged upon from outside: by others, known and unknown, distant and proximate; by social norms; by historically specific conditions of embodiment; by social and political organisations; and by environmental factors. Bodies, in fact, exist ‘not only in the vector of these relations but as this very vector’ (Butler 2011a: 385, my emphasis). Consequently, the flesh is always already public and social – both the individual’s corpus and yet not its own at the same time, bounded yet simultaneously unbounded, impermeable yet permeable. As such, Butler reasons, the body has no essence per se. Rather the ontology of the body, as she apprehends it, is a ‘social ontology’ (Butler 2011a: 382, original emphasis; see also Butler 2009a: 3). Although it might appear that Butler is advancing a relational account of the embodied subject, she is not merely contending that fleshy selves ‘have’ relations with other fleshy selves that somehow



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define them, affect them or shape them into the embodied entities they are. As her discussion of the body-­as-­vector intimates, her claim is rather that the corporeal self ‘“is” ’ its ‘relation to alterity’ (Butler 2004b: 150, my emphasis); it is constituted in and by these relations. Without the ‘forming and unforming’ of ‘bonds’ with others (Butler 2009a: 182) there would be no subject. These bonds are the very condition of possibility for subjectivity, socially, affectively and psychologically. It is its relation to alterity that enables the corporeal subject to desire, to experience passion, to be affected by and to affect others, and to act; in short, to exist. As I have argued elsewhere (Lloyd 2007), Butler is indebted in her thinking here to the idea of ecstasy or ek-­stasis, which she construes as ‘to be transported beyond oneself by a passion’ or to be ‘beside oneself’ (2004b: 20, original emphasis).3 For Butler, ecstasis is ontological (2004b: 150): the embodied subject is beyond itself from the beginning. In The Psychic Life of Power, she explores this in terms of psychic subjectivity. The subject first emerges, Butler suggests, as a result of its ‘passionate attachment’ to those on whom it depends for its survival, such as its initial carers (1997: 7; for further discussion see Lloyd 1998–9), a dependency that must be disavowed if the subject is to attain full subjectivity.4 The subject’s ecstatic existence continues as it experiences desire, passion, grief, rage or love, experiences that ‘undo’ it, and as its body is dispossessed through the senses, as tactile, visual, auditory, haptic, olfactory capacities ‘comport us beyond ourselves’ (Butler in Hark and Villa 2011: 200; Butler 2012a: 16; see Butler 2004a: 24). Being ‘undone’ or dispossessed by another is not just a source of ‘anguish’, however; potentially at least, it is ‘also a chance’ of transformation, ‘our chance of becoming human’ (Butler 2005: 136; see also Stark 2014. I will return to the significance of this claim shortly). The relationality Butler talks of, therefore, is ‘ecstatic relationality’ (Butler in Hark and Villa 2011: 200). Butler’s reconceptualisation of the body also rests on the idea of vulnerability; indeed, it is precisely corporeal vulnerability that makes possible ecstatic relationality, and thence ethics and politics. Butler is usually read by critics as equating vulnerability primarily, even exclusively, with susceptibility to harm or injury. Bonnie Honig’s characterisation of her as a ‘mortalist humanist’, for example, rests precisely on the contention that Butler privileges the ‘ontological fact of mortality’ and ‘vulnerability to suffering’

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(2013: 17; see also Honig 2010) while simultaneously neglecting a natalist emphasis on pleasure, desire and hunger. Ann Murphy, who defines Butler as a ‘corporeal humanist’, describes her as figuring the body ‘as an entity that is – above all else – vulnerable to injury and suffering’ (2011: 577).5 George Shulman talks of Butler’s emphasis on ‘mortal vulnerability’ or ‘mortal precariousness’, and of her ethics as ‘oriented by a finitude that binds us to (the suffering and mortality) of others’ (2011). Reading Butler’s last few books, it is easy to see why critics might stress suffering and mortality. Precarious Life was composed in response to the terrible events of 9/11, and Frames of War is explicitly concerned with questions of grievability. Yet the assumption that detrimental effects necessarily flow from corporeal vulnerability means that another, admittedly less prominent, aspect of Butler’s argument is overlooked. This is what corporeal vulnerability makes possible. The discussion of ecstatic subjectivity demonstrated that to be vulnerable for Butler is to be exposed to what is beyond or outside the self; indeed the body, for her, is ‘vulnerable by definition’ (Butler 2009a: 33). Vulnerability, however, is not synonymous with or reducible to injurability (Butler 2009a: 34, 61).6 In fact ‘[a]ll responsiveness to what happens’, she declares, ‘is a function and effect of vulnerability’ (Butler 2012a: 16, my emphasis), including ‘all the various ways in which we are moved, entered, touched, or ways that ideas and others make an impression on us’ (Butler in Hark and Villa 2011: 200). Vulnerability in this sense is also the condition of possibility for love, desire, care, hope and life, the very natalist features that Honig largely fails to discern in Butler’s work.7 To make sense of Butler’s wider discussions of agency and resistance and of politics and ethics, we have to acknowledge this more expansive apprehension of vulnerability – as the ecstatic capacity to be affected by and to affect others (Gilson 2011). Butler’s revised account of corporeality as vulnerability thus brings to the fore a number of features: that because of their relationality, bodies are ‘invariably in community’ with other bodies, that relationality is ‘a descriptive or historical fact’ of subject formation, and, most importantly given the concerns of this chapter, that relationality is an ‘ongoing normative dimension of our social and political lives’, one that requires us to take account of our interdependence (Butler 2004a: 27). For my purposes here, however, there is one final feature of Butler’s reconceptualised



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account of corporeality that needs addressing; this is the concept of precarity.

From precariousness to precarity and precaritisation Butler’s focus on the body in sociality has the effect, as we have seen, of drawing attention to the vulnerability of somatic life. Simply pointing to the existence of a generalised condition of shared somatic vulnerability says little, however, about the body in politics or the political body. In her earlier discussions, Butler spoke primarily of corporeal ‘vulnerability’ or of ‘precariousness’ (2004a, 2004b). In Frames of War, however, she introduces a distinction that seems to me to be designed to capture the politics of vulnerability. Whether it does so or not is moot. This is the distinction between ‘precariousness’ and ‘precarity’. Butler designates ‘precariousness’ as a ‘more or less existential conception’ (2009a: 3) or ‘general feature of embodied life’ (Butler in Kania 2013: 33), signalling a common vulnerability shared by all bodies. This is in contrast to what she describes as the ‘more specifically political notion of “precarity” ’ (Butler 2009a: 3), or the way that ‘precariousness is amplified and made more acute under certain social policies’ (Butler in Kania 2013: 33). Precarity thus references the differential condition whereby some lives are rendered more insecure, unequal or destitute than others.8 Calling on Foucault, in the essay ‘Can one lead a good life in a bad life?’, Butler thus explicitly tethers precarity to biopolitics, ‘those powers that organize life’ and that ‘establish a set of measures for the differential valuation of life itself’ (2012a: 10). In contrast to her more generalised notion of precariousness, therefore, ‘precaritization’, Butler’s term for the ‘process of acclimatizing a population to insecurity’ (Butler in Butler and Athanasiou 2013: 43), involves the social and political organisation of corporeal need and bodily interdependency in specific, concrete and historically delimited ways. Precarity and precaritisation are interesting terms for Butler to deploy given their recent lexical history.9 As a political concept, the term ‘precarity’ has been deployed, mainly in a European context, to denote ‘the financial and existential insecurity arising from the flexibilisation of labor’ under post-­Fordism (Brophy and de Peuter 2007: 180).10 ‘Precarisation’, an English neologism of the French term ‘précarisation’, refers to what Pierre Bourdieu in 1998 described as a ‘mode of domination of a new kind, based on

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the creation of a generalized and permanent state of insecurity’ for workers (Bourdieu cited in Brophy and de Peuter 2007: 183); while a third term, the ‘precariat’, is used to designate a ‘new kind of political subject’ (Neilson and Rossiter 2008: 52). This is a vocabulary embedded in political economy. There are certainly echoes of these meanings in Butler’s employment of this lexicon: she often mentions, for instance, a ‘disposable’ or ‘dispensable’ workforce (Butler 2012a; Butler in Puar 2012; Butler in Kania 2013); she attends more to economic questions in Dispossession; and she appears aware of their context-­specific usage (see particularly Butler in Hark and Villa 2011; and Butler in Kania 2013). But Butler uses precarity and precaritisation in a somewhat different, and potentially more ambitious way, to encompass not only the insecurities arising from changing labour conditions but as a way to register the diverse ‘modes of “unliveability” ’ (Butler 2012a: 12) that scar the contemporary scene, described by Athena Athanasiou in terms of ‘socially assigned disposability’ and ‘various modalities of valuelessness’ (Athanasiou in Butler and Athanasiou 2013: 19). One way to understand this emphasis, I propose, is to see it in terms of what I call the political problem of the human. Cast in terms of Butler’s own philosophical language, this problem centres on the recognition–recognisability nexus. Drawing from Hegel, she proposes that recognition be understood as ‘an act or practice undertaken by at least two subjects’ that ‘constitutes a reciprocal action’, whereas recognisability is her term to delineate ‘those general conditions on the basis of which recognition can and does take place’ (Butler 2009a: 6). Thus ‘norms of recognizability prepare the way for recognition’ (Butler 2009a: 7). Her point, as I have discussed elsewhere, is that norms of recognisability determine who is eligible for recognition (Lloyd 2007: 147): who, that is, is ‘intelligible’ as ‘human’. For Butler there is, as such, a direct connection between the recognition/recognisability couplet and precarity, which is that ‘the differential distribution of norms of recognition directly implies the differential allocation of precarity’ (Butler in Butler and Athanasiou 2013: 89). Those who are not recognisable as ‘human’ are more precarious than those who are. From her earliest writings on gender, Butler has always been interested in the dangers attaching to those enactments of gender that contest or deviate from reigning heteronormative norms. In an essay from 1988 she observes how the presence of a ‘transves-



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tite on the seat next to us on the bus can compel fear, rage, even violence’ (Butler 1988: 527). In Bodies that Matter (1993), she retells the story of Venus Xtravaganza, a pre-­operative Latina trans(sexual) woman whose murder in 1988 has never been solved. In the 1999 Preface to Gender Trouble she highlights, for instance, the violence of gender norms against those with anatomically anomalous bodies (Butler 1999). Undoing Gender is replete with further examples: the killings of Brandon Teena, Mathew Shephard and Gwen Araujo;11 the use of surgical intervention to ‘correct’ intersexed conditions; the story of David Reimer;12 and psychiatric diagnoses of gender disorders. In all of these diverse and usually briefly documented cases, Butler’s goal is to show the hazards faced by – or what she comes to call the ‘precarity’ of – corporeal figures who do not fit neatly into (hetero)normative categories of sex, gender and sexuality, and who thus ‘fall outside the human’ (Butler 1990: 111). The theory of performativity disclosed that gender is enacted in relation to norms. The idea of ecstatic relationality makes more explicit how this norm-­governed enactment takes place in relation to others (widely conceived). As she puts it, gender is a ‘passionate comportment, a way of living the body with and for others’ (Butler 2009b: xii). In this sense, ‘no one gets to have gender all on their own . . . We can’t – we don’t, actually – make radical or self-­sufficient decisions about who we want to be or how we are perceived or recognized’ (Butler in Butler with Taylor 2009: 208). Rather, how we appear to others is conditioned by gender norms. To be eligible for recognition, an embodied being has first of all to be intelligible to others as gendered – that is, gendered in a way that makes sense according to dominant gender norms. Those who are unintelligible in these terms are unrecognisable – they do not appear in public as legible subjects in their own right, in other words – and as a result, have no ‘place in the social order’ (Butler in Butler with Taylor 2009: 208). Their lives are not worth protecting, sheltering or sustaining; not ‘liveable’ as Butler characterises it. Theirs are disposable lives. We have already seen that precarity for Butler signals a politically generated condition of heightened risk, jeopardy and threat for specific populations. It is thus used by her to distinguish between primary vulnerability, the ontological condition of being given over to others shared by all, and concrete particular, historical conditions of insecurity and liability faced by some. At various

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junctures in her work, Butler furnishes examples of conditions that qualify as precarity: conditions of arbitrary state violence or failing social and economic support networks (2009a: 25–6; 2009b: ii; 2011a: 383); situations of war, occupation, imprisonment and forced emigration (2012a: 12); exposure to unemployment or being part of an ‘expendable’ labour force (2012a: 12; in Butler and Athanasiou 2013: 43), all of which she describes as ‘clearly aims and effects of neoliberal forms of social and economic life’ (in Butler and Athanasiou 2013: 21). While gender is a cleavage that cuts across all of the above, Butler also identifies specifically gendered examples of precarity in the condition of sex workers threatened by police harassment and ‘street violence’, those whose intimate and kinship relations are not recognised by the law, and populations whose nonconformity to gender norms means they are at ‘heightened risk’ of aggression and assault (2009b: ii). She even goes as far as to suggest that precarity is a ‘rubric that brings together women, queers, transgender people, the poor, and the stateless’ (Butler 2009b: xiii). In none of these discussions, however, does Butler ever explore in detail the actual mechanisms that give rise to the concrete precaritisation of a particular population beyond referring to it as a general ‘political’ process induced by ‘police actions, economic policies, governmental policies, or forms of state racism and militarization’ (Butler in Butler with Taylor 2009: 33). She appears to consider it sufficient for argumentative purposes simply to note that bodies are made precarious – or precaritised – politically in a variety of different ways. Of course, it might be questioned whether it is viable to use a single word, precarity, to describe the distinctive and even radically dissimilar ways in which fleshy lives are rendered unrecognisable and thus unliveable; particularly since this risks eliding the very significant differences in experiences of precarity undergone by diverse populations (Thobani 2007), and in overlooking the plural conditions of unliveability operative at any one time. I want to set aside these concerns in this chapter, however, in order to focus on how precaritised bodies are able to act politically and ethically. In the next section I explore how politics materialises both within and against precarity (Butler 2012a: 14), before turning in the final section to the question of the relation between precariousness, precarity and ethics.



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Performing politics in conditions of precarity In a number of places in her work, Butler draws attention to the interplay between two factors: precarity and performativity (see, for example Butler 2009b; and Butler 2012a). She is particularly concerned with what happens to performativity politically when precarity is the starting point. In one of these discussions, Butler indicates that performativity is for her ‘an account of agency’, while precarity refers to the conditions ‘that threaten life in ways that appear to be outside of one’s control’ (2009b: i). Her interest in performativity in conditions of precarity might be recast, therefore, as a question about how it is possible for precaritised populations to act politically. From previous work, we know that Butler regards the reproduction of gender as entailing what she has latterly defined as ‘a negotiation with power’ (Butler 2009b: i): a doing of gender norms that has the potential to re-­do the norm in unanticipated ways or even, in some unspecified circumstances, to un-­do the norm and thus (to borrow from Gender Trouble) to ‘disrupt the categories of the body, sex, gender and sexuality and occasion their subversive resignification and proliferation beyond the binary frame’ (Butler 1990: xxxi). The performativity of gender thus holds out the possibility, as Butler writes in 2009, of ‘remaking . . . gendered reality along new lines’ (2009b: i); not an easy task, to be sure, given that performative agency inheres in reiterating the same norms that sustain the very thing in need of transformation, heteronormativity. Butler’s discussion of precarity adds significantly to this discussion of performative agency. In her Adorno lecture, she asks a particularly pertinent question: ‘When being dispossessed in sociality is regarded as a constitutive function of what it means to live and persist, what difference does that make to the idea of politics itself?’ (2012a: 16). Her answer, given later in the lecture, is that democratic struggle requires political resistance that is ‘plural’, ‘embodied’ and that will, in addition, ‘entail the gathering of the ungrievable in public space’ to demand liveable lives (Butler 2012a: 18, original emphases). ‘Grievability’ is something of an ambivalent term in Butler’s work. The concept emerges from her discussion of deaths that have not been publically mourned or acknowledged, such as deaths from AIDS in the US in the 1980s, or those at the hands of American forces in Afghanistan and elsewhere after 9/11.

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Although Butler exhibits some interest in the role of obituary writing in regulating national identity (2004a), and in the reporting of deaths in the media, by and large she is not concerned with the specific practices that comprise the politics of grief and mourning (Honig 2013). ‘Grievability’ for her is, rather, shorthand for referring to liveable lives, lives that are supported economically, politically and socially (Butler 2012a). As she explains in Frames of War, grievability ‘precedes and makes possible the apprehension of the living being as living’ (Butler 2009a: 15). A grievable life is a recognised life. Conversely, a life that is not recognised as a life, a life that is devalued or unsupported, is, as Butler characterises it, a life that is ‘ungrievable or dispensable’ (Butler 2012a: 11). ‘Grievability’ thus functions in Butler’s work in much the way that abjection (1993) and unintelligibility (1990, 2004a, 2004b) did previously: as a way to differentiate between lives that are eligible for rights, support and recognition (grievable lives) and those that are not (ungrievable lives).13 Butler explains further how ‘the ungrievable’ are able to act politically by turning to Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, from which she draws two ideas: politics as concerted action and the scene of appearance. ‘When people gather to rally against induced conditions of precarity, they are acting performatively,’ Butler writes, ‘giving embodied form to the Arendtian idea of concerted action.’ At such times, the ‘performativity of politics’ emerges from, and in opposition to, conditions of precarity (2012a: 14). Political struggle is not on this quasi-­Arendtian reading reducible to individual action; rather action is ‘concerted’ (or in concert) because it happens between participants in a struggle; and it occurs when ‘bodies appear together’ (Butler 2011b). This has a bearing on how Butler understands public space. Calling (loosely) on Arendt, Butler surmises that public space as such does not exist. Instead, when the ‘new social movements’ (2012a: 18) fighting against precarity demonstrate on the square or rally in the street they ‘reconfigure the materiality of public space’ (Butler 2011b); by laying claim to that space, they constitute it as public. Public space – the polis in Arendt’s discussion (1958: 198) – is not a physical location; it is the organisation of people acting in concert. This links with Arendt’s idea of the ‘space of appearance’. Arendt defines this as ‘the space where I appear to others as others appear to me’ (1958: 198). So, politics necessitates the space of appearance; and that space facilitates politics. For Butler,



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in contrast to Arendt, this space is irreducibly corporeal (2011b): a space where bodies appear to other bodies.14 It is vulnerability understood as sensate impressionability that enables this, that allows the corpus of the other to appear to us (and vice versa). According to Arendt, however, certain categories of persons (slaves, barbarians and foreigners) were excluded from the space of appearance in the classical polis; indeed, their very exclusion defined that space. Pondering this, Butler asks, ‘how do we make sense of those who can never be part of that concerted action’? Are the ‘destitute outside of politics and power, or are they in fact living out a specific form of political destitution?’ (Butler 2011b). The answer to this question is important because to concede Arendt’s point is to construct certain forms of political agency and action as either pre- or extra-­political. An example of such reasoning may be found, she suggests, in the work of Giorgio Agamben (1998) when he construes the excluded in terms of ‘bare life’. Butler worries that this depoliticises the plight of those so described and denies a way to discuss the modes of agency and action engaged in by them, for to her mind such populations are ‘more often than not, angered, indignant, rising up, and resisting’ (Butler 2011b). In contrast, Butler proposes that the precarity of the ungrievable is biopolitically regulated; it is ‘a state actively produced, maintained, [and] reiterated’ (Butler in Butler and Spivak 2007: 10), often by governments, though not exclusively. It is thus a state internal to politics and power. This is an important qualification for Butler because it allows exclusion to be considered as a political problem and it makes visible the forms of agency and resistance associated with and facilitated by it. While the ungrievable may be excluded from ‘established and legitimate political structures’, that is, while they may be unrecognisable as ‘subjects’, they are not ipso facto excluded from politics per se. Preferring Foucault’s biopolitical account to Agamben’s discussion of bare life, Butler contends not only that a life without rights is still ‘within the sphere of the political’ but that far from being ‘bare’, the life of the stateless, the occupied and the disenfranchised is, in fact, ‘mired’ in power (Butler in Bell 2010: 149). Butler invites us to think about how it is possible for the ungrievable to lay claim to the public sphere – to (re)constitute it – by turning to another of Arendt’s concepts, this time from The Origins of Totalitarianism, namely the ‘right to have rights’

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([1951] 2004). This is a right that comes into existence as it is exercised by persons acting in concert. It is the means, I suggest, by which performativity and precarity are conjoined. By way of illustration I want to examine an example alluded to briefly by Butler in ‘Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street’ (2011b). This is the annual ‘Walk against Homophobia and Transphobia’ that takes place in Ankara, Turkey.15 Routinely fined for appearing in public, often beaten, including by the police, and with trans murders occurring on average once a month, the situation of trans persons in Turkey is, as Butler notes, highly insecure.16 In this context, occupying public space, both singly and collectively, is incredibly risky for members of this precaritised population; it exposes them – renders them vulnerable – to threats of routinised punishment, violence and even death. Following Butler (following Arendt), we might thus conclude that trans persons are, in effect, denied the right to have rights. As effaced and delegitimated persons, they are precluded from the space of appearance and from the plurality that inaugurates that space. This is important: they are precluded from that space but not permanently excluded from it. It is possible, politically, for trans persons, en masse, to lay claim to public space and to performatively enact the right to have rights – rights ‘to place and belonging’ and to ‘appear as the gender we already are’ (Butler 2011b), and to do so in ways that contest the heteronormative ontology that pathologises them by the way it regulates corporeal and morphological appearance.17 Physically occupying space (marching through carrying flags and placards) is, as Butler notes elsewhere, a form ‘of critique that take[s] shape as bodies amass on the street to articulate their opposition to contemporary regimes of power’ (2012a: 17); a ‘living practice of critique’ (2012a: 11) oriented towards the assertion of the idea that persons, ‘no matter how they are gendered . . . are free to move without threat of violence’ (2011b).18 The occupation of public space is thus a way not just to render trans persons publicly visible and audible, or to dispute the precarity of their gendered position; it is, at the same time, a demand for a liveable life. There are, of course, several issues raised by this discussion that warrant further attention, but the one I want to foreground concerns the relation between ethics and politics. Butler’s discussion of the space of appearance, action in concert and the right to have



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rights illustrates how the ‘ungrievable’ might disrupt the field of power in order to make political claims, and to become political subjects (see Butler in Butler and Athanasiou 2013: 101). Notably, she does not say, however, that bodies must first be recognised for politics to occur. And, indeed, she cannot. For politics arising in conditions of precarity is precisely politics that seeks, amongst other things, to contest the terms of recognisability that position certain lives as precaritised and unintelligible. Instead, she charges only that the body has to appear sensately to someone else. The primary focus of these discussions is on those demanding political rights or contesting the terms of recognition. What this leaves unanswered, however, is the place of the other in responding to these demands. In particular, what is it that disposes subjects, especially those constituted as protected or valued subjects, to ethical responsiveness? In what ways is the capacity for an ethical response impacted on by precarity? What enables the other to recognise as ‘human’ a person who was previously invisible to them as such?

Practising ethics in conditions of precarity Precarity, as we have seen, is construed in terms of historically instantiated modes of vulnerability that produce certain populations as exposed; bodies that are biopolitically constituted as at risk – of violence, death, starvation, incarceration and deprivation. Vulnerability as receptivity to what is outside us, what I see as the second sense of the term at play in Butler’s work, is by contrast the basis of political agency and, as we will see, ethical responsiveness. Part of what conditions our political and ethical receptivity in situations of precarity is an acknowledgement of existential precariousness. There is, however, a paradox here, for while Butler argues that ‘precariousness has to be grasped not simply as a feature of this or that life, but as a generalized condition whose very generality can be denied only by denying precariousness itself’ (2009a: 22), she also contends that ‘as soon as the existential claim [that everyone is precarious] is articulated in its specificity, it was never existential. And since it must be articulated in its specificity [namely, as precarity], it was never existential’ (Butler 2012c: 148). In other words, even as she proposes that existential precariousness is an effect of corporeal interdependence shared by all, she simultaneously avers that, in fact, precarity, unevenly distributed,

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is all there is, for every articulation of precariousness is already an articulation of precarity. This has a bearing on ethics. For if precariousness is precisely what is supposed to enable ethical responsiveness; in fact, is also what we are also ethically obligated to affirm (see Jenkins 2009), and if we are always impinged upon, and may even be conditioned by, the operation of social norms and ways of differentiating between grievable and ungrievable lives, then it suggests to me that in practice we may be less open to some ethical demands than others. Especially, as Butler remarks in Dispossession, because of the way ‘vectors of power get registered at the level of primary sensibility, taking hold in spite of us, animating us, and forming a near involuntary dimension of our somatic lives’ (in Butler and Athanasiou 2013: 96). So, what interests me here is the tension between the moment of ethical solicitation, when an ethical demand impinges on the subject from the outside, and the capacity to respond to that impingement in determinate circumstances. This returns us to the question of ‘appearing’, which in Butler’s understanding is ‘always to appear for another’ (2011b). In particular, I am concerned with how the normative frames defining who is human govern or encroach upon the ethical scene. Distancing herself from Emmanuel Levinas, who according to Butler suggested that the ethical demand is ‘framed and restricted in advance by certain notions of culture, ethnicity and religion’ (2012b: 39) – his way of contending that the Palestinian had no face – Butler charges that the ‘life of the other . . . is also our life’ (2012c: 140). Ethics on her understanding is always an issue of an ethical relation: that is, all persons, whether we know them or not, are from the very beginning implicated in the lives of others, such that the ‘“I” is invariably implicated in the “we” ’ (Butler in Butler and Athanasiou 2013: 107). Ethical obligations, for Butler, are thus ‘prior to any individual sense of self’ (2012c: 141). The ethical relation precedes individuation and ethical responsiveness precedes ethical responsibility. Ethical obligations, including towards those who frighten or threaten us, are an ineluctable feature of unwilled cohabitation, another idea she derives from Arendt,19 and as such they are ‘precontractual’ and ‘nonconsensual’ (Butler 2012c: 143, 137). Ethical obligations, in other words, arise without our consent or without being willed by us, extend to those whom we may not know, and rest on modes of receptiveness that can neither be fully predicted nor controlled (Butler



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2012c: 141–2). This is where, to my mind, matters get a bit more troublesome. The starting point for an ethical response when some form of ethical demand is made is thus not ‘individual disposition’ or ‘personal morality’; ethics is not, in this sense, a private or individual matter. Rather it begins from ‘the presumption of a constitutive sociality’ (Butler in Butler and Athanasiou 2013: 107). To act ethically is to avow that ‘I am my relation to “you” ’ (Butler 2012c: 142). Ethics is thus an effect of dispossession, of ecstatic relationality. The ability to receive a call (possible because the respondent is ‘already answerable’ to the other) does not in itself guarantee a response, however. Rather we need to be ‘moved’ to act (Butler 2012c: 136). It is, she observes, ‘only when we are sufficiently impressed by the injustice of some situation in the world that we are moved to change it’ (Butler in Hark and Villa 2011: 198). Here some comments Butler makes in relation to the process of politicisation might point the way to what facilitates such movement. Politicisation, she commends, might be understood as ‘motivated by an intelligent vulnerability’ that transforms receptivity into action (Butler in Hark and Villa 2011: 198). It is openness to the world that enables us to demand change; when that demand is made, receptivity is sustained as ‘a condition and font of intelligence for social and political action’ (Butler in Hark and Villa 2011: 199). Elsewhere she describes ethical obligation similarly: receptivity is not merely the precondition for ethical action; it is one of its ‘constituent features’ (Butler 2012c: 136). At first sight, the objection might be made that one of the shortcomings of Butler’s investigation of ethics is that she does not make clear what kinds of ethical or affective work are necessary to be able to respond ethically to those who do not immediately ‘appear’ to us. Indeed, this is what I initially thought. A closer reading of her work, however, suggests that in refusing to conceptualise ethics as the province of a ‘ready-­made subject’ (Butler 2012b: 9), Butler is also jettisoning the idea that it is possible to ‘prepare’ in advance for, or to ‘anticipate’, the moment of ethical solicitation. The point is that ethical solicitation happens ‘in spite of ourselves and quite apart from any intentional act’, it is ‘beyond our will’, ‘not of our making’ (2012c: 135); when we respond ‘despite’ our egos (Loizidou 2007: 53). Ethical receptivity, furthermore, is largely non-­consensual. This insinuates that it is precisely when we are ‘moved’ – overwhelmed, outraged or

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impassioned – to act that it is possible to discern ‘the working of an ethical obligation on our sensibilities’ (Butler 2012c: 136). Ethics, in this sense, might therefore be taken to signify the acts by which others (‘those who are “not me” ’) are acknowledged as having a ‘place’ in the world (Butler 2012b: 9). The implication of this reasoning is that the evidence of ethical responsiveness is ethical action but that it is impossible to know, categorically, what triggers that responsiveness in the first place beyond the general existential propensity for dispossession. Vulnerability-­ as-­ impressionability is the wellspring for ethics but, to reiterate, ethical encounters only arise in specific, delimited, historical contexts, contexts structured by normative frames. These precaritised situations are conditions of inequality, in which specific populations, as Butler has it, are produced as ungrievable. Given her comments about the ways that the subject is constitutively opaque to itself (Butler 1997, 2005), and her remark, cited earlier, that social norms and ways of discriminating between grievable lives comprise a ‘nearly involuntary dimension of our somatic lives’ (Butler in Butler and Athanasiou 2013: 96), this implies that subjects might be in the unconscious grip of, for example, certain normative bodily ontologies that render them unable to recognise as human those particular bodies produced as unintelligible and ungrievable by that ontology. Consequently, at times, subjects might not be able to respond ethically to an unrecognisable other because they are unable to see the body before them or to hear its address. In this context, it is surely not enough to contend that a shared experience of, for instance, loss, might be a sufficient (though it might perhaps remain a necessary) resource to overcome this block – recall that in Precarious Life Butler remarks that ‘Despite our differences in location and history, my guess is that it is possible to appeal to a “we”, for all of us have some notion of what it is to have lost somebody’ (Butler 2004a: 20) – for this immediately dislocates, dehistoricises and elides the very specific experiences of loss undergone by different groups or persons.20 While an occasion of loss might help us acknowledge that ‘we’ are vulnerable (whoever ‘we’ are), there is nothing in this experience per se that necessarily guarantees that ‘we’ will be able to ‘see’ or ‘recognise’ another’s loss as a loss. We have only to refer to an example Butler herself supplies of a failure to acknowledge loss to see this, the refusal of the San Francisco Chronicle to publish either the obitu-



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aries of, or memorials for, two Palestinian families killed by Israeli soldiers (2004a). Or, we might consider the campaign ‘Humanize Palestine’, designed to try to ‘restore the humanity that is often stripped away when Palestinians are reduced to calculative deaths, forgettable names, and burned and mutilated bodies, rather than people who shared loved ones, stories, dreams and aspirations’ (Humanize Palestine, n.d.).21 These are deaths that in given settings do not register as deaths, losses that do not count as losses.22 My point is not that Butler is unaware of the mechanisms whereby particular populations are dehumanised or, to borrow her terminology, ‘derealized’ (Butler 2004a), or that this impedes the ability to recognise or respond to loss. Quite the contrary. It is rather that she appears to rest her hopes for practising ethics in precaritised situations on the abstract potentiality for ethical openness that emerges from ecstatic relationality and existential precariousness. The problem is that it is not apparent exactly what, if anything, might be done to enable or encourage ethical action in conditions of precarity where the actual prospects for ethical responsiveness appear to be foreclosed.23

Conclusion Butler’s more intense preoccupation with ethics certainly does not, in my view, supplant or neutralise her concern with politics as some critics insist. As her discussions of grievability, and who counts as ‘human’ testify, she is acutely aware of the ethical factors at work in political interactions and of the politics that shapes ethical questions. This is visible in her discussion of the relation between recognition and recognisability. Nevertheless, there is a qualitative difference in her approach to the two. Although both share her dualistic account of vulnerability as both susceptibility to harm and an openness to the other, when she discusses politics, Butler attends to specific, historically instantiated biopolitical regimes or normative frames (such as the ‘heterosexual matrix’); in short, she focuses on precaritisation, on the actual conditions within which political action (of whatever kind) takes place, including the material harms that attend certain modalities of embodiment and how bodies appear to one another in ways that facilitate concerted action. When she turns to ethics, however, her analysis shifts. To be sure, her primary concern is with what I have referred to as practising ethics in conditions of precarity; how, that is, it is ­possible,

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for instance, to respond ethically to those whom normative corporeal ontologies constitute as unintelligible or ungrievable. Nevertheless, her theorisation of the conditions of ethical responsiveness tends to emphasise ecstatic relationality and primary vulnerability in the abstract; that is, it stresses existential precariousness rather than lived precarity. The effect of this abstraction is that it is not clear how in determinate conditions it is possible, if at all, to overcome the normative constrictions that prevent us receiving an ethical address from a body we cannot ‘see’, or in an idiom we cannot ‘hear’, or to experience corporeal vulnerability in a way that opens up, rather than closes down, the chance for transformation that Butler characterises as the chance to become human (2005: 136).

Notes   1. There is a third idea that she is seeking to combat, which is that of invulnerability and sovereign mastery, which I do not explore in this chapter. See, however, Gilson 2011.   2. The classic political theory text here is, of course, C. B. Macpherson’s The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (1962).   3. Butler notes that she derives the idea of ek-­stasis ‘to point out, as Heidegger has done, the original meaning of the term as it implies a standing outside of oneself’ (2004b: 258 n. 7).  4. In The Psychic Life of Power, Butler argues that the result of this disavowal is that the subject is constitutively opaque to itself; there are aspects of who it ‘is’ that are unknown and unknowable to it.  5. To be fair to Murphy, she does note in passing that vulnerability makes bodies available not only for violence but also for care (2011: 579), though she does not pursue this insight.   6. In addition, the body might itself be an instrument of violence, physical harm, threat or death-­dealing against others.  7. In Antigone, Interrupted Honig acknowledges that Butler ‘mentions in passing’ that passion and love share a similar ecstatic ‘structure’ to mourning, and that she also ‘thematizes the idea of a “livable life” ’; Honig nevertheless concludes that Butler’s ‘affective repertoire . . . is largely oriented to loss’ (2013: 44).  8. Although as Catherine Mills (this volume) shows, Butler is not always consistent in her usage of this distinction.   9. In much of this wider literature, reference is made to ‘precarization’ rather than to Butler’s preferred ‘precaritization’.



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10. Precarity has also been linked to political protests designed to ‘make visible’ forms of labour (and the labourers) rendered invisible by dominant modes of capitalist production, the most cited of which are the EuroMayDay parades that have taken place annually in various venues across Western Europe since 2001 (see, for instance, Brophy and de Peuter 2007: 184–5). 11. Brandon Teena, a trans man, was murdered in Nebraska in 1993; Mathew Shephard, a gay man, was murdered in Wyoming in 1998; and Gwen Araujo, a trans woman, was killed in California in 2002. For a discussion of the Araujo case that examines themes pertinent to those discussed in this chapter, see Lloyd 2013. 12. David Reimer, whose story is probably better known as the ‘John/ Joan case’, was born a biological male but, as a result of a bungled circumcision operation when he was eight months old, was raised female under the supervision of psychologist John Money at Johns Hopkins University. It was Money’s contention that a person’s gender identity was the result of cultural conditioning. Further, Money claimed that provided sex (re)assignment was completed by the time a child was two and a half years old, it ought to be able to be socialised into a gender different from the one assigned at birth without adverse effects. The evidence from Reimer, who eventually spoke out about his experiences, and who began living as a man, was that Money was wrong. Reimer committed suicide at the age of 38. 13. The concept of grievability, I want to suggest, is better understood in relation to precarity, and in particular to how specific populations are disposed to it, rather than to either mortalism or finitude per se, as for instance championed by Honig (2010, 2013) or Shulman (2011). To read Butler as a mortalist humanist or as advancing an ethics of finitude risks sidelining her interest in the conditions of liveability, and neglecting the dualistic nature of vulnerability as the condition for suffering and deprivation but also for politics (and ethics). 14. Although it is beyond the scope of this chapter to pursue the comparison any further, Butler is endeavouring here to distinguish her understanding of the space of appearance from Arendt’s (see Butler 2011b; 2012a). For Butler the space of appearance is ‘a necessarily morphological moment’ where the corpus appears, not just to act and speak (as for Arendt), but also to suffer, to labour, to move, to gesture, to join with others and ‘to negotiate an environment on which one depends’ (2011b). So where Arendt consigned particular features of corporeal life (to do with survival) to the private sphere,

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separate from the political, Butler regards them as pertinent political considerations when they point to the precaritisation of whole populations. This latter point is important because it is often the government of corporeal appearance that is at stake for precaritised groupings. 15. It was not only trans individuals that appeared on the street, of course. Another example Butler cites more than once concerns the singing, in Spanish, of the American national anthem by ‘illegal’ immigrants in California in 2006; see, for instance, Butler and Spivak 2007; Butler 2009; also Beltran 2009; and Jenkins (this volume). 16. According to the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, in March 2005 the Law of Misdemeanors (No. 5326) was introduced, which allows the police ‘to fine or otherwise penalize Turkish citizens on a variety of charges, none of which are defined explicitly under the law’. This has resulted in transgender people in Ankara allegedly being fined 140 lira, and then being physically brutalised while in custody (2009). See also Human Rights Watch 2010. 17. It is not enough for the ungrievable merely to refuse a particular way of life or to seek to assimilate to existing norms, what she describes in Precarious Life as ‘a matter of a simple entry of the excluded into an established ontology’ (Butler 2004a: 33). What is required is ‘an insurrection at the level of ontology’ (Butler 2004a: 33). 18. For further consideration of the idea of critique in Butler’s work see Jenkins, this volume. 19. The basis for this idea is Arendt’s contention in Eichmann in Jerusalem ([1963] 1977) that Eichmann believed he could choose with whom to co-­habit the earth, a view Arendt disputed; for her, according to Butler’s reading, cohabitation was not a choice, it was an inescapable condition of social and political existence. See Butler 2011c, 2012b. 20. There is not space to pursue this discussion here, but I think that Lisa Knisely is right to raise questions about the ways in which Butler ‘runs the risk of reinscribing the specifics of a particular historical and political context’, namely that of 9/11, a time when ‘so many people were arguing for the kind of political response . . . that was built specifically on the denial’ of vulnerability and interdependence, into ‘an oppressive ethical command’ operative at all times and in all places (2012: 154, original emphasis). 21. I am current engaged in studying this campaign as part of the research project ‘Who counts? The political problem of the “human” ’, funded by the Leverhulme Trust.



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22. In the case of the San Francisco Chronicle, the setting is the US; in the case of ‘Humanize Palestine’, according to the campaign website, the setting is the Western media. For an important discussion of the way that Butler’s work appears to foreground the experience of the (white) American subject in terms of loss and grief see Thobani 2007; see also Gregory 2012. 23. This is where Thobani’s (2007) discussion has particular purchase.

References Agamben, Giorgio (1998), Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-­Roazen, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Arendt, Hannah ([1951] 2004), The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York: Schocken Books. Arendt, Hannah (1958), The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Arendt, Hannah ([1963] 1977), Eichmann in Jerusalem, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Beltran, Cristina (2009), ‘Going Public: Hannah Arendt, Immigrant Action, and the Space of Appearance’, Political Theory, 37: 5, 595–622. Bell, Vikki (2010), ‘New Scenes of Vulnerability, Agency and Plurality: An Interview with Judith Butler’, Theory, Culture, Society, 27: 1, 130–52. Benhabib, Seyla (2013), ‘Ethics without Normativity and Politics without Historicity’, Constellations, 20: 1, 150–63. Brophy, Enda, and Peuter, Greg de (2007), ‘Immaterial Labor, Precarity, and Recomposition’, in Catherine McKercher and Vincent Mosco (eds), Knowledge Workers in the Information Society, New York: Lexington Books, pp. 177–91. Butler, Judith (1988), ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’, Theatre Journal, 40: 4, 519–31. Butler, Judith (1989), ‘Gendering the Body: Beauvoir’s Philosophical Contribution’, in Ann Garry and Marilyn Pearsall (eds), Women, Knowledge, and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy, London: Unwin Hyman, pp. 253–62. Butler, Judith (1990), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, London: Routledge. Butler, Judith (1993), Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, London: Routledge.

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Butler, Judith (1997), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Butler, Judith (1999), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Tenth Anniversary Edition, London: Routledge. Butler, Judith (2000), ‘Ethical Ambivalence’ in Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (eds), The Turn to Ethics, New York: Routledge, pp. 15–28. Butler, Judith (2004a), Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, London: Verso. Butler, Judith (2004b), Undoing Gender, London: Routledge. Butler, Judith (2005), Giving an Account of Oneself, New York: Fordham University Press. Butler, Judith (2009a), Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, London: Verso. Butler, Judith (2009b), ‘Performativity, Precarity, and Sexual Politics’, Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana, 4: 3, i–xiii. Butler, Judith (2011a), ‘Remarks on “Queer Bonds” ’, GLQ, 17:2–3, 381–7. Butler, Judith (2011b), ‘Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street’, #Occupy Los Angeles Reader, 1–3. Butler, Judith (2011c), ‘Hannah Arendt’s Death Sentences’, Comparative Literature, 48: 3, 280–95. Butler, Judith (2012a), ‘Can one lead a good life in a bad life? Adorno Prize Lecture’, Radical Philosophy, 176, 9–18. Butler, Judith (2012b), Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, New York: Columbia University Press. Butler, Judith (2012c), ‘Precarious Life, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of  Cohabitation’, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 26: 2, 134–51. Butler, Judith, and William Connolly (2000), ‘Politics, Power and Ethics: A Discussion between Judith Butler and William Connolly’, Theory & Event, 4: 2. Butler, Judith, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (2007), Who Sings the Nation-­State?: Language, Politics, Belonging, Oxford: Seagull Books. Butler, Judith, with Sunaura Taylor (2009), ‘Interdependence’, in Astra Taylor (ed.), The Examined Life: Excursions with Contemporary Thinkers, New York: The New Press, pp. 185–213. Butler, Judith, and Athena Athanasiou (2013), Dispossession: The Performative in the Political, Cambridge: Polity. Chambers, Samuel A., and Terrell Carver (2008), Judith Butler and Political Theory, London: Routledge.



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Gilson, Erinn (2011), ‘Vulnerability, Ignorance, and Oppression’, Hypatia, 26: 2, 308–32. Gregory, Thomas (2012), ‘Potential Lives, Impossible Deaths’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 14: 3, 327–47. Honig, Bonnie (2010), ‘Antigone’s Two Laws: Greek Tragedy and the Politics of Humanism’, New Literary History, 41, 1–33. Honig, Bonnie (2013), Antigone, Interrupted, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Humanize Palestine, ‘About Humanize Palestine’, http://humanize palestine.com/ (last accessed 6 December 2014). Hark, Sabine, and Paula-­Irene Villa (2011), ‘Confessing a Passionate State . . . Judith Butler im Interview’, Feministische Studien, 29: 2, 196–205. Human Rights Watch (2010), ‘Turkey: Stop Violence Against Transgender People’, http://www.hrw.org/news/2010/02/19/turkey-­stop-­violence-­ against-­transgender-­people (last accessed 6 December 2014). International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (2009), ‘Turkey: Change Law of Misdemeanors to End Abuse of Trans People’, http://iglhrc.org/content/turkey-­change-­law-­misdemeanors-­ end-­abuse-­trans-­people (last accessed 6 December 2014). Jenkins, Fiona (2009), ‘Queering Foetal Life: Between Butler and Berlant’, The Australian Feminist Law Journal, 30: 63–85. Kania, Eliza (2013), ‘Exercising Freedom: Interview with Judith Butler’, Revolutions: Global Trends and Regional Issues, 1: 1, 32–41. Knisely, Lisa C. (2012), ‘Oppression, Normative Violence, and Vulnerability: The Ambiguous Beauvoirian Legacy of Butler’s Ethics’, philoSOPHIA, 2: 2, 145–66. Lloyd, Moya (1998/9), ‘Politics and Melancholia’, Women’s Philosophy Review, 20, 25–43. Lloyd, Moya (2007), Judith Butler: From Norms to Politics, Cambridge: Polity. Lloyd, Moya (2013), ‘Heteronormativity and/as Violence: The “Sexing” of Gwen Araujo’, Hypatia, 28: 4, 818–34. Loizidou, Elena (2007), Judith Butler: Ethics, Law, Politics, Abingdon: Routledge-­Cavendish. Macpherson, C. B. (1962), The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Murphy, Ann V. (2011), ‘Corporeal Vulnerability and the New Humanism’, Hypatia, 26: 3, 575–90. Neilson, Brett, and Ned Rossiter (2008), ‘Precarity as a Political Concept, or, Fordism as Exception’, Theory, Culture & Society, 25: 7–8, 51–72.

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Puar, Jasbar (ed.) (2012), ‘Precarity Talk: A Virtual Roundtable with Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, Bojana Cvejic´, Isabell Lorey, Jasbar Puar, and Ana Vujanovic´’, TDR: The Drama Review, 56: 4, 163–77. Shulman, George (2011), ‘Acknowledgment and Disavowal as an Idiom for Theorizing Politics’, Theory & Event, 14: 1. Stark, Hannah (2014), ‘Judith Butler’s Post-­ Hegelian Ethics and the Problem with Recognition’, Feminist Theory, 15: 1, 89–100. Third International Intersex Forum (2013), ‘Public Statement’, http:// www.ilga-­europe.org/home/news/latest/intersex_forum_2013 (last accessed 6 December 2014). Thobani, Sunera (2007), ‘White wars: Western feminisms and the “War on Terror” ’, Feminist Theory, 8: 2, 169–85. Willig, Rasmus (2012), ‘Recognition and Critique: An Interview with Judith Butler’, Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory, 13: 1, 139–44.

8

Subjectivation, the Social and a (Missing) Account of the Social Formation: Judith Butler’s ‘Turn’ Samuel A. Chambers Cornel West has recently called Judith Butler ‘the leading social theorist of our generation’ (West 2011: 92), and while I agree completely with the spirit of West’s claim, here I plan to dissent from the specific content of his laudatory description. Doubtless Butler takes her place today as one of the foremost theorists and public intellectuals; her work is widely recognised as helping to reshape a number of fields across the humanities; and she speaks with a powerful voice to a variety of national and international political contexts. Nonetheless, I contend that precisely a social theory – or better, a richer account of what I call the social ­formation – is lacking in Butler’s work. In order to defend this claim and to show why it matters, the core of this chapter examines the location in Butler’s corpus where, I argue, she expunges a conception of the social formation from her very own sources, thereby calling more conspicuous attention to its absence in her own work. I also articulate the significance of this move in relation to her broader intellectual trajectory, particularly in terms of her post-­20011 writings. I read Butler with the working hypothesis that her putative turn to ethics has little to do with the questions of moral philosophy per se. Rather, while something is missing in Butler’s early work, that something is not ethics, but rather an account of the social formation. Butler’s early fascination (indeed, at times, a fixation) with the problem of subject-­formation produces, within The Psychic Life of Power (1997a), a series of blind spots concerning the larger question of society, of the social whole; Butler’s intense focus on producing a ‘theory of subjection’ leads her to purge a viable account of the social formation from the very texts she draws from. This subtraction of the social formation in Butler’s reading helps to explain her explicit efforts in recent works to offer an 193

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account of ‘the social’ – an account, I argue, that merely falls back on a liberal, aggregative model (one that Butler would otherwise eschew). The chapter focuses on a close engagement with Butler’s self-­ named ‘theory of subjection’. Butler derives that theory from her readings of Freud, Foucault, Lacan and Althusser, but here I centre my analysis specifically on Butler’s reading of Hegel and Althusser. I demonstrate that Butler’s appropriation of Hegel frames and limits her encounter with Althusser: ultimately Butler gives us what we might call a ‘Hegelianised Althusser’, one stripped of the rich understanding of the social formation that Althusser himself was trying to delineate. Butler’s focus on desire and the theory of subject gives her no way to grasp or make sense of the social formation that provides the conditions of possibility for all subjects. I close by suggesting that Butler’s ontology of vulnerability and finitude, as it emerges in her most recent writings, serves the purpose of standing in for a more rigorous account of the social formation. And this substitution, I suggest, proves to be a poor one, since it reduces Butler’s work to the terms of liberal political philosophy.

A philosophical theory of subjection The Psychic Life of Power (hereon PLP) lacks a preface or any other personalising apparatus; it opens instead with a very general and generalising claim: ‘As a form of power, subjection is paradoxical’ (Butler 1997a: 1). This sentence places readers of the book onto philosophical terrain. Butler’s first two major books contained subtitles that situated them squarely within the terms of feminist politics and feminist debate, whereas PLP’s subtitle is the broadly abstract ‘theories of subjection’. It is not just that this book asks more sweeping questions than Butler’s first two, but that Butler herself seeks to shift the work of this book out of the fields (the confines?) of feminist theory and politics and onto the stage of the discipline of philosophy. This book specifically focuses on questions of theory; it draws from and directs itself towards philosophers. To see what is at stake in PLP, and to see it as a part of the development of Butler’s thought, it helps very much to mark the genre (i.e. the discipline of philosophy) in which it is written. In PLP Butler retains a singular focus on questions about the philosophical category of the subject, about the process of sub-



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jection, and above all about the workings of power in relation to the subject. I frame my reading of this text in terms of this issue of genre, because the turn to a discourse of philosophy in PLP highlights the absence in Butler’s work (in all her writings up to this point, but magnified in this particular text) of a richer account not just of ‘the social’ as a virtual space of plurality, but of society, of the political order – of the social formation.2 The differences between an account of ‘the social’ or a social theory on the one hand, and a conception of the social formation on the other, cannot be delineated by way of an abstract, analytic set of definitions of each entity. I aim to bring these distinctions into sharper relief by way of my reading of Butler’s texts for their failure to account for the social formation, and I do not wish to pre-­ empt that discussion here by trying to define terms. Nevertheless, to elucidate the stakes of the argument, I can offer a more polemical formulation of the gap between the two: the social formation is itself a political form, a politicised structure, whereas ‘the social’ may well be a sphere separate from ‘the political’ domain. We understand that ‘society’ or ‘the social realm’ (or Gesellschaft) can easily be seen as a virtual domain, a space in which individuals interact with one another. Hegel offers this sort of account of the social in terms of a dyadic relationship of recognition, and social contract theory depends on understanding ‘society’ as formed by the consent of free and equal individuals. The social formation, on the other hand, points towards the always specific yet constantly shifting arrangement of practices; ‘social formation’ names the simultaneously lateral and vertical arrangement of relationships between diverse activities. Butler has clearly maintained a constant concern with the signifying and resignifying of particular practices from within the realm of ‘the social’. But an understanding of the social formation focuses on the way that such practices are structured from without, as part of an overall system. While I do not attend in detail to Butler’s most famous early texts, Gender Trouble ([1990] 1999) and Bodies that Matter (1993), I claim that, like the later texts that I will discuss in more detail below, those early works contain no developed conception of the social formation. Butler’s early writings do indeed use the word ‘social’ quite frequently. Often the word functions simply as a modifier, e.g. ‘social context’, ‘social power’ and ‘social norms’ (Butler 1999: 20 and ff.). More frequently, ‘social’ appears within a chain of terms such as ‘cultural’, ‘historical’ or ‘­political’, all

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of which function as contrasts to terms such as ‘natural’ or ‘prediscursive’; here Butler makes her well-­known arguments about how to understand the distinction between sex and gender as itself a product of historical discursive practices (Butler 1999; see Chambers 2007). Above all, Butler’s earlier arguments always work against the idea of a ‘presocial’ (1999: 38; 1993: 202). As with her more recent books, and as I will discuss in my final section below, Butler’s early works use the word ‘social’ mainly as a descriptor to indicate relationality, to mark contextuality and to suggest a basic sense of plurality. Overall, Butler has no interest in developing a social theory in these early books, much less in offering an account of the social formation. To defend my claim that PLP lacks an account or understanding of the social formation puts me in something like the position of trying to prove the negative. Yet my aim is not to fault Butler for not having a ‘theory of’ anything, not even the social formation. The form of critical theory that I subscribe to, and to which I think Butler subscribes as well, does not require that a thinker have a ‘theory of’ every concept that they discuss, nor does the failure to have a ‘theory of X’ indicate, on its own, anything at all about their work. Indeed, important critical work today proceeds by eschewing the very notion of producing more ‘theories of . . .’ (Rancière 2009; Chambers 2013). Thus, my charge against Butler is distinctly different. Unlike much of Butler’s work, especially her early work, in PLP Butler attempts to develop just such a ‘theory of’, in this case, as the book’s subtitle makes clear, a ‘theory of subjection’. And in order to create her own theory of subjection, Butler erases elements, concepts and articulations of the social formation that are present in the authors she herself is reading. Put differently, just because Althusser has a concept of the social formation (probably, in his case, a full theory of the social formation) does not mean that Butler must do so as well, but in her reading of Althusser she expunges his account of the social formation – and it is this erasure that has significant implications for Butler’s work, and for any effort to understand politics and history. I focus on PLP because in that text the absence of a concept of the social formation becomes palpably visible, and has meaningful effects. Hence, in the remainder of this section I offer a broad overview of the main argument in Butler’s book, and then, in the section that follows, I work closely through two of the key interpretive/­ philosophical readings that she uses to support this argument.



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Butler’s central (philosophical) claim in PLP can be delineated both with and without the proper (philosophical) names. Starting with Foucault, Butler moves towards Freud, with particular readings of Hegel, Nietzsche and Althusser designed to help her on the journey. To start with Foucault means to begin with the claim that the process of subject-­formation always proves double: to form a subject capable of exercising power (the capacity of agency itself) is always simultaneously to subject to power.3 ‘Subjection’ connotes both ‘becoming-­ subject’ and ‘being subordinated to or dominated by’. Thus we see subject formation as a vexed and complex process of turning: the subject turns in response to power, but the subject only comes to be through the turning, and power only really flows through the turning. We might think of this process as a very odd sort of dance between power (the music) and the subject (the dancer); hence, the (solo) dancer only comes into being by responding to the music (there is no dancer prior to the music), operating to some extent autonomously yet still somehow always subject to the terms of the music, while the music itself only plays when the dancer dances (there is no music without the dancer). Now, to move towards Freud, for Butler, means insisting on something much more than a contingent connection between the subject and power; it is to indicate the ‘passionate attachment’ of the subject to the very power that forms him/her/ it. And for Butler this means an attachment not only to the agency made possible by subjection, but also to the subordination at the heart of subjection (1997a: 6). The psyche (or the psychic) is one name for this stubborn tie that binds the subject to the power of domination. Thus Butler wants to go beyond – or better, to somehow go inside – the dance, so as to find out what links the dancer to the music, not just as a mutual condition of possibility (neither exists without the other) but as a fundamental and unbreakable link that somehow transcends any particular dance. What persists before or after the music? What makes the dance possible? Butler offers various responses to this question, e.g. guilt, or the Spinozan conatus,4 but the general answer always remains the same – namely, the psyche. In just her second paragraph Butler poses the central and overriding question of the book: ‘what is the psychic form that power takes?’ (1997a: 2). But the question proves to be loaded, since to ask what psychic form power takes is to presume that power does indeed take psychic shape. It is to

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presume that a full account of the process of subject formation cannot be given without the psyche. Butler’s formulation of this point is pregnant with particular meaning and significant implications for her overall project: ‘an account of subjection, it seems, must be traced in terms of psychic life’ (Butler 1997a: 18). Given this framing logic, Butler ‘naturally’ (my quotation marks) devotes this book to tracing that psychic form, to showing within particular readings of nineteenth and twentieth century philosophers how power might ‘take psychic form’. In each case it will be a matter of showing how there is something more to the relationship between power and the subject, something sticky that makes power and the subject whirl around one another and get the twofold process of subjection underway. My primary interest lies less with this general argument that Butler positions ‘between Freud and Foucault’, and more with the movement away from Foucault (clearly Butler’s starting point) as well as with the important use of Hegel and Althusser in helping Butler to carry out this shift. While ‘between Freud and Foucault’ points to the general location of Butler’s ‘theory of subjection’, it can be shown that the reading of these other thinkers does the bulk of the work. And it is in Butler’s apparent engagement with Althusser, as framed by her interpretation of Hegel, that we can start to feel the presence of the absence of the social formation. That is, in order to trace the psychic form of power, Butler must simultaneously read out of Althusser the very account of the social formation that otherwise proves so central to his project. In the following sections I will track the movement that Butler takes away from Foucault as she works through Althusser, at the same time as I make my own case for the palpable absence of an account of social order in Butler’s reading – and all of this despite the clear presence of those accounts in the actual texts of Althusser (and Nietzsche as well).

Hegelianising Althusser Butler’s academic career begins with her dissertation on Hegel, but significantly, in her first two major books (Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter) Hegel plays almost no role whatsoever. As I have noted above, this may be because both of those books are more situated political encounters. In any case, with PLP Butler not only returns to Hegel but returns to the beginning with



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Hegel, as Butler places her reading of Hegel at the foundation of the book (in the first substantive chapter). Butler’s exegesis of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit targets the section on ‘unhappy consciousness’. This concept, Butler will stress, starkly expresses the key dimension of ‘self-­subjection’ that makes up a part of any and all forms of subjection. Butler uncovers this dimension through a close reading of the ever-­famous, infinitely-­read lord and bondsman section of the Phenomenology. I will not rehearse the details of that subtle and sophisticated reading here. What matters most to me is not the substance of Butler’s reading of the lord and bondsman passages, but the very structure, the shape and the form of this, one of the most famous passages in the history of philosophy. The story of ‘the Lord’ and ‘the Bondsman’ is a story of Subjects (with a capital ‘S’) relating to one another. The philosophical narrative says little to nothing about context, about institutions, about the history that brought about these subject categories (clearly categories of feudalism) in the first place. For Hegel the lord and bondsman are not social creatures, enmeshed in social context; they are figures that help account, philosophically, for subjectivity itself. The subjectivity that is established, interrupted and reconstituted in the lord and bondsman narrative never interrogates the material conditions that might underlie or be intertwined with the process of recognition that Hegel delineates, and in a certain sense – that is, subject to the terms of Hegel’s discourse – such conditions ought not be investigated, since these subjects are not historical subjects but philosophical subjects. Butler’s reading of Hegel’s famous passages always proceeds by descriptions of the actions and reactions, feelings, emotions and senses, of the two main characters in a philosophical tale of subjectivity. One can see clearly why Butler would start here in an effort to write on ‘theories of subjection’, and at the same time one can easily note that there is no social formation here, no political order. I offer this possibly obvious reflection not as a criticism of either Hegel or Butler’s reading of Hegel, but as a frame for making sense of Butler’s interpretation of Althusser. Butler leaves nothing obvious out of her elucidation of Hegel, but the same cannot be said for her exegesis of Althusser. Butler approaches Althusser as if he, like Hegel, were describing relations among abstract philosophical subjects. For Butler, Althusser’s ‘theory of interpellation’ is clearly a ‘theory of subjection’, one that illuminates the twofold

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process of subject-­formation by establishing an abstract relation between language and the subject. Indeed, Butler highlights and foregrounds the role of ‘language’ to such a strong degree that a reader unfamiliar with Althusser’s own texts might mis-­recognise the Marxist Althusser as a philosopher of language (in dialogue with J. L. Austin). Hence she opens her chapter on Althusser with the following: ‘Althusser’s doctrine of interpellation . . . offer[s] a way to account for a subject who comes into being as a consequence of language’ (Butler 1997a: 106, my emphasis). Butler reads Althusser as symmetrical with Hegel: where Hegel has two subjects (lord and bondsman) relating to one another through a process of recognition, Althusser has two subjects (passer-­by and policeman) relating to one another through hailing. Given this relatively empty framework – one that only contains subjects and a power relation between them – Butler must provide, in her account of Althusser, an explanation for why the subject responds to the hail. She sees this as the fundamental limitation or stumbling block with Althusser’s own account. She writes: ‘Significantly, Althusser does not offer a clue as to why the individual turns around’ (Butler 1997a: 5). For just this reason, Althusser’s account of interpellation provides Butler with the perfect example for her argument that we must move away from a Foucauldian account of subjection as somehow produced only by disciplinary power itself. Precisely what we need, for Butler, is to answer this missing question in Althusser: the subject turns to respond to the hail, and in turning becomes a subject while also being subjected to power. But why does the subject turn at all? Butler’s answer is guilt: ‘subject formation . . . take[s] place only on the acceptance of guilt, so that there is no “I” who might ascribe a place to itself, who might be announced in speech, without first a self-­attribution of guilt’ (1997a: 107, my emphasis). The subject – who is not a subject before he turns – turns because he is a guilty subject. In a move that anticipates her post-­2001 work on precarious lives and her development of a mortalist humanism, Butler rereads the Althusserian scene of interpellation in such a way as to identify (or construct) a set of universal features, what she calls ‘an openness or vulnerability to the law’, that precede the very response to that law (1997a: 108).5 Butler’s answer to why we respond to the call of the law is that we are somehow always already subject to its terms, vulnerable to its force. Our vulnerability ‘before the



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law’ appears in the form of a guilt that precedes the law. ‘Guilt’, Butler contends, ‘is prior to knowledge of the law’, and guilt therefore constitutes a ‘prior desire for the law’ (Butler 1997a: 108, my emphasis). Why do we turn when we hear the call of the law? Because we already want to turn; because we desire the law; because the call of the law triggers the guilt we already possess. I have called this a ‘rereading’ of Althusser, but perhaps that description proves overly nominalist. In Chapter 4 of PLP it is difficult to discern exactly where Althusser leaves off and Butler begins. Butler mainly writes as if she is reading, synthesising and interpreting Althusser. Hence one might easily presume that the notion of ‘guilt’ plays a central role in Althusser’s account of subjectivation. At the same time, Butler does suggest in her Introduction (and as I quote above) that Althusser fails to provide any answer as to why the subject, who is hailed, turns. And for this reason one might instead assume that Butler seeks to supplement Althusser’s account with her own concept of guilt (which she borrows from Freudian thought). However, neither sense is really quite right. The reasons prove multiple: first, contrary to Butler’s explicit claim, Althusser poses to himself the very question of why the individual turns, and he goes on to give a response. As Drew Walker puts it, contra Butler, ‘Althusser has an answer’ (2010: 3). Second, Althusser’s answer excludes the very idea of guilt or bad conscience. Althusser makes both of these moves at the very centre of the brief passages on the scene of interpellation, the passages that Butler suggests she is reading in her account but which she never cites.6 Let me unpack these claims by turning to Althusser’s actual text. I should begin by emphasising a point that Butler elides: the famous ‘scene of interpellation’ – Butler’s term, not Althusser’s (see also Butler 1997b: 30) – appears quite late in Althusser’s long essay on the particular question of ideology, and as part of a broad discussion of Marx’s and Marxist conceptions of the social formation. Althusser’s own project is quite different from Butler’s: he wants to ask how the material conditions of production are themselves reproduced (Althusser 1971: 124). What is the status, the structure and the dynamics of power within a social order such that it can recreate the conditions for material production? This is Althusser’s way of asking the question of the social formation. Althusser contends that the reproduction of the conditions of production cannot come about without the workings of ideology, and it is for this reason that, very near the end of the essay, he advances

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a few speculative theses towards a theory of ideology. In this context Althusser seeks to show that we cannot understand any concept of ‘ideology’ without first grasping it as fully material, as embedded within practices that are themselves embedded within the material structures of a social formation. I use italics here to try to capture Althusser’s own emphasis in an essay marked by heavy usage of italics in the original. Thus, in the page just before the account of interpellation, Althusser claims that whenever we try to deal with a ‘single subject’ – apparently isolated, in much the way the subject is for Butler throughout PLP – we must always remember that ‘the existence of the ideas of his belief is material in that his ideas are his material actions inserted into material practices governed by material rituals which are themselves defined by the material ideological apparatus from which derive the ideas of that subject’ (Althusser 1971: 158). Althusser’s so-­ called ‘scene of interpellation’ appears almost directly after this argument, and I would insist that Althusser’s thesis about interpellation, that ‘ideology interpellates individuals as subjects’, must be understood as situated in exactly this context (Althusser 1971: 160). Althusser refines the general thesis into the more focused claim that ideology hails ‘concrete individuals as concrete subjects’ (Althusser 1971: 162). I read this line as echoing and emphasising the fact that ideology only functions (and interpellation is a function of ideology in Althusser’s account) in concrete cases. It is in this light that Althusser says we might ‘imagine’ the workings of ideology along the lines of ‘everyday’ hailing, by the police or by anyone else. In response to ‘hey, you there!’ a concrete individual responds, turns around, and in so turning becomes (what he/she already is) a concrete subject. Butler would have us believe that Althusser has nothing to say about why the individual turns: ‘Althusser does not offer a clue’ (Butler 1997a: 5). But Althusser offers much more than a clue to the question Butler wants to pose, since he himself raises the same question, and then answers it. And he does so at the exact centre of the discussion of the ‘scene of interpellation’, the scene that Butler is putatively reading throughout Chapter 4 of PLP. I say ‘putatively’ since, again, Butler never quotes from these passages nor even cites them at any place in her text. Had she done so, she would have found Althusser asking her own question for her. Althusser says that the individual will turn around, will make, in response to the call, a 180-­degree ‘physical conversion’. He continues:



Subjectivation and the Social Formation 203 Why? Because he has recognized that the hail was ‘really’ addressed to him, and that ‘it was really him who was hailed’ (and not someone else). Experience shows that the practical telecommunication of hailings is such that they hardly ever miss their man: verbal call or whistle, the one hailed always recognizes that it is really him who is being hailed. And yet it is a strange phenomenon, and one which cannot be explained solely by ‘guilt feelings’, despite the large numbers who ‘have something on their consciences’. (Althusser 1971: 163)

There is a great deal to unpack in this passage, particularly as it relates to Butler’s project – both in PLP and more broadly. Althusser explains the ‘reflexivity’ of the individual/subject not in terms of any inherent internal dimension or capacity of that subject, but rather in relation to the overall scene of ideological hailing. Put differently, for Althusser, the social formation itself provides an account of why the subject turns. He responds to the call because he hears it as a call, and as a call for him. Hailings work – they almost never miss their mark – because ideology works. After the famous passage with the policeman and the passer-­by, Althusser goes on to argue that the temporality of the logic in the example is all wrong, since it presumes that there is first a hailing and then a response. However, there really is no such succession: ‘ideology has always-­already interpellated individuals as subjects’ (Althusser 1971: 164). The ‘individual’ is, in fact, the abstract idea, since in practice, in reality – that is, in ideology – we always find concrete subjects. It is in this sense that I read Althusser as demonstrating that the turn, the reflexivity of the subject, comes about strictly in terms of the social formation itself and without recourse to an interior psyche or conatus that would offer a separate, causal explanation for why the subject turns. When we understand the scene of interpellation as taking place within a concrete social formation, we then see that the response to the call happens ‘naturally’, i.e. thoroughly ideologically. For Butler, of course, Althusser’s explanation for ‘why the individual/subject turns’ will seem inadequate; it may not sound like an explanation at all, since one might hear Althusser’s answer as, ‘it just works’. Nonetheless, the apparent hollowness of this answer is not intrinsic to the Althusserian account, but is rather a product of Butler’s hollowing out of Althusser’s thick, detailed and lengthy argument. Butler has taken

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away the account of the social formation that Althusser offers in the more than thirty pages that precede the famous ‘scene of interpellation’. Hence, she reads that scene as an abstract account of two entities (policeman and passer-­by) relating to one another within a field of power. And when taken in that way, the account lacks an explanation for how subjective reflexivity comes about. The culmination of this series of logical moves gives us the Hegelianised ‘Althusser’ that appears in PLP – an Althusser shorn of his account of the social formation. Thus we see in Butler’s book that without that account, Althusser has little to offer. Yet in jettisoning Althusser’s account of the social formation, Butler strips any concept of social order out of her own theory of subjection. Ultimately, a philosophically abstract theory of subjection, one disconnected from any historico-­political conjuncture, is not worth very much: it tells us something thin and vague about a relation between so-­called subjects and so-­called power, but it fails to grasp that individuals in the world always take up subject positions in the world, and these always exist within a concrete social formation. Therefore the ‘scene of interpellation’ that Butler describes turns out to be Butler’s own scene, a product of her philosophical discourse, not Althusser’s. Into that scene, Butler injects a description and theory of guilt, a story of a bad conscience that precedes the hailing and therefore allows the hailing to work. For Butler, guilt serves as a substitute for the social formation; she must project guilt into the philosophical narrative she offers, for no other reason than the fact that she had already removed the social formation from that narrative. However, I must emphasise what Althusser states directly in the passage above, in the only place in the entire text that he mentions the word guilt: Althusser directly rejects Butler’s narrative, and he refuses the psychoanalytic supplement. Interpellation, for Althusser, has nothing whatsoever to do with guilt or bad conscience. One is therefore led to ask why Butler turned to Althusser in the first place? The turn to guilt gives Butler’s argument within PLP a real consistency, since it links up the reading of Althusser with her work on/in psychoanalysis; it renders the engagement with Althusser’s text consistent with Butler’s move away from Freud. Perhaps most of all, Butler’s reconstruction of the so-­called Althusserian ‘doctrine’ of interpellation bridges the enormous – some would say unbridgeable – gap between Hegel and Althusser. At the heart of



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Althusser’s political and theoretical project, and across the range of his writings, lies his emphasis on the fundamental difference between a Hegelian understanding of the social ‘totality’ and a Marxist conception of the social ‘whole’ (Althusser 1976: 181). Althusser defends the seemingly semantic distinction because it points to a fundamental difference between, on the one hand, understanding a totality as containing an ‘essence’ or core that would always remain the same, or, on the other, grasping the whole as complex, overlapping, discontinuous and yet still ‘structured in dominance’ (Althusser 1976: 181). ‘The social formation’ is a name that Althusser borrows from Marx but emphasises in a way that Marx did not: it allows him to highlight and leverage the difference between a thin, idealist concept of society and a thick, rich, materialist conception. He writes: For Hegel, society, like history, is made up of circles within circles, of spheres within spheres. Dominating his whole conception is the idea of the expressive totality, in which all the elements are total parts, each expressing the internal unity of the totality which is only ever, in all its complexity, the objectification-­alienation of a simple principle. (Althusser 1976: 182)

Hegel’s philosophy cannot account for the social formation as formed by contradictions that are not necessarily resolved in the march of history towards its inevitable telos. Marx offers a concept of the social formation that has no essence, no core; society is held together by material practices that contain contradictions and tensions. What marks any particular social formation is not its ‘essence’ or core idea, but relations of complexity and unevenness. According to Althusser, the social formation ‘holds together’ not through simple and pure contradiction (Hegel), but through ‘overdetermination and contradiction’ (Marx). This distinction indicates clearly that Althusser gives a very different reading of Engels’ potentially determinist account of ‘determination in the last instance’, since, according to Althusser, the ‘last instance’ is surely not the ‘first instance’, not a causal ground or fundamental overarching principle, but a structure of domination maintained only in and through historical practices and structures (Althusser 1969: 111–13). We can see, then, that this concept of a social formation provides the context for what appears (wrongly, I am arguing) in Butler’s

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account to be Althusser’s attenuated answer to why the individual/ subject responds to the hail. The figure Althusser describes is not an ‘abstract’ individual who only becomes a subject after the turn. Althusser describes a figure who is always-­already interpellated by ideology – a concrete subject, situated within a social formation, itself structured in dominance. This means that the individual is always already a subject of a particular social formation – a ‘lord’ in feudalism, a ‘worker’ in capitalism or a ‘mother’ in the family. When I pose a question in class and a student responds by raising her hand, the response should be explained, for Althusser, not through an internal investigation of the individual’s conscience, but by the structure of the ideological apparatus, the dispositif in which the call and response occur: the ‘professor-­subject’ asks a question, and the ‘student-­subject’ responds to this call. Althusser’s discussion of hailing provides readers with a political account of subjectivation and/or a historical account of subject formation and subjection, but it does not really provide what Butler hopes to offer – namely, a philosophical ‘theory of subjection’. In other words, Althusser’s work on interpellation does not fit the frame that Butler builds and works with throughout PLP. (Here we see clearly why and how the genre of philosophy matters in this book.) Having started with Hegel and then worked through Freud, Butler reads what she calls Althusser’s ‘doctrine’ of interpellation as very much a ‘philosophy’ of interpellation. But to do so she must Hegelianise Althusser, strip away his own rich understanding of the social formation, and in its place substitute a psychic account of guilt or desire to persist in one’s being.

‘The social’ without a social formation: Butler’s liberal political philosophy In her writings post-­2001, Butler has introduced a markedly different understanding of ‘the social’ – a move that might be read as an effort to overcome problems I have identified above. Thus, while others have noted Butler’s turn towards international political concerns, and many have focused on Butler’s tendency towards posing questions of ethics and calling on the framework of moral philosophy, in this, my final section, I read these later texts in the context I have now established. That is, I explore her later usage of ‘the social’ to again ask the question of the social formation. Butler’s argument in Giving an Account of Oneself (2005) – one



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of her first major works after PLP and the first that appears after 2001 – certainly operates within, even itself emphasises, this frame.7 The book repeatedly recurs to the idea of the ‘the social’ and of the relevance of ‘social theory’ (perhaps explaining West’s description of Butler as a social theorist). In this text the social emerges persistently (and much more richly than in the past), appearing as an element that no moral theory can eliminate: it proves impossible to account for the ‘I’, and the responsibility of that ‘I’ without recourse to something beyond the ‘I’. Butler gives a few different names to this ‘something more’, this element that always exceeds the ‘I’: sometimes she calls it ‘ethical norms’ and ‘moral frameworks’, while at other moments she describes it in the language of ‘the social’. ‘Ethics’ she states early on in the text, ‘finds itself embroiled in the task of social theory’ (Butler 2005: 7). Hence it might appear that Butler’s so-­called ‘turn to ethics’ goes hand in hand with a turn to a thinking of the social. But what does Butler mean here by ‘the social’? She uses the term pervasively throughout the first chapter of Giving an Account, but the usage proves somewhat curious. Perhaps the clearest way to bring this odd usage to light is to show how Butler mobilises her idea of ‘the social’ to link Foucault with Arendt. In simple terms, she does so by faulting Foucault and praising Arendt. Butler starts with Foucault’s concept of regimes of truth so as to deepen her point that no moral account (no moral philosophy) can proceed without reference to norms, to context. Butler reads Foucault as establishing the fact that the critique of a discursive regime, ‘a regime of truth’, must always also be an auto-­critique, since any given regime of truth provides conditions of possibility for the ‘I’ who would launch the critique. Here, however, Butler opens her own line of criticism of Foucault, and she does so by way of a series of ‘as if’ postulates that echo her mode of criticism in PLP. Butler’s critique takes shape in one paragraph, wherein Butler moves from asking a question of Foucault, to presuming that he cannot answer it, to concluding that this failure marks a significant limit for his project. She writes, and I comment in brackets: What are these norms . . . [and] where and who is this other . . . ? It seems right to fault Foucault for not making more room explicitly for the other in his consideration of ethics. [Is seeming right to find fault with Foucault somehow equivalent to mounting a critique of him?] Perhaps this is because the dyadic scene of self and other cannot

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describe adequately the social workings of normativity that condition both subject production and intersubjective exchange. [Yet Foucault does not work with a dyadic scene of self and other; Hegel does. Foucault works with a rich understanding of historical epistemes, with a concrete and material understanding of social and political orders through which power relations flow.] If we conclude that Foucault’s failure to think the other is decisive [Wait, now we are not only coming to a decision that there is a failure here, but we are concluding that such a failure proves decisive in our reading of Foucault, even though the entire logical move is premised on the first ‘if’] we have perhaps overlooked the fact [who is the ‘we’ here, given that the failure was attributed to Foucault] that the very being of the self is dependent, not just on the existence of the other in its singularity [Butler cites Levinas for this claim about singularity, but I note that the logic and grammar of the passage actually attributes this failure to Foucault, since it is he that Butler is undertaking a critique of here], but also on the social dimensions of normativity that governs the scene of recognition. This social dimension of normativity precedes and conditions any dyadic exchange [This might well be a valid claim, but who is it refuting? Surely not Foucault. In any case, this last move again begs the question of the status of ‘the social’ in Butler’s discussion.] (Butler 2005: 23)

Butler goes on to explain that norms are never the possession of an individual; they have a certain sociality. Again, the function of ‘social’ in this discussion seems rather vague, since Butler says nothing about concrete social orders, invokes no theories of society or the social. The consistent function of ‘the social’ in this text is to point to something that is more than one, more than merely the ‘I’. Something is social because it is not merely me. This sense of the social comes into clearer focus when Butler refers to the social not just as what is missing from a dyadic account (Butler 2005: 28), but as something positive in itself. She does the latter with her reading of Arendt (or at least her reading of Cavarero’s reading of Arendt). The first reference to the social as something that one might theorise (and not just an idea that points to the more than one) comes at the opening of this section, when Butler mentions ‘an Arendtian conception of the social’ (Butler 2005: 31). It seems essential to emphasise here that Butler is not referring to the (in)famous Arendtian argument about the ‘rise of the social’ and its encroachment on the sphere of action (and politics). Instead, Butler seems to be gesturing towards



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the Arendtian account of plurality, but using the language of ‘the social’ to describe it. Hence, immediately following the above-­ quoted reference, Butler cites Cavarero citing Arendt on the necessity of action and speech as a response to the question, ‘who are you’ (Butler 2005: 30, citing Cavarero 2000: 20, citing Arendt 1958: 183). But to my knowledge no Arendtian scholars use this idea in Arendt to develop a counter-­concept of ‘the social’ – that is, one that would cut against the grain of Arendt’s well-­known understanding of the social realm. Instead, Butler’s point here, as in earlier sections in the text, seems mainly to be about moving past solipsistic accounts and towards a relation to, and dependency on, the other (Butler 2005: 32). And therefore, once again Butler displaces any answer to a question of what she means by the social. I contend that the first positive answer to this question – as opposed to Butler’s repeated negative uses of the social to contrast with the pre-­social – emerges gradually throughout this text and takes sharper shape towards the end of this first chapter, when Butler rehearses the argument of the book as a whole. The thesis of Giving an Account of Oneself might best be captured in this line from Butler: ‘the account of myself that I give in discourse never fully expresses or carries this living self’ (2005: 35). There can be no exhaustive account given of the self, and the self can never be a sovereign subject that would self-­authorise the account. An account of oneself is always an account given in discourse, which means that the ‘I’ who gives an account is always already given over to the other, and the account given can never exhaust, determine or even fully authorise the self (that gives it). I am not objecting to anything in this broad set of claims. Rather, my focus lies with the way in which Butler inserts an incipient idea of ‘the social’ into this account. Immediately following the quote above, Butler writes: ‘there is the operation of a norm, invariably social, that conditions what will and will not be a recognizable account’ (Butler 2005: 35, my emphasis). What does the italicised phrase add to Butler’s argument? Butler insists that the norm is ‘social’, but as opposed to what? Non-­social? Based on a broader reading of the text as a whole, and consistent with Butler’s otherwise strange references to an ‘Arendtian conception of the social’, I submit that for Butler the exhortation of/to ‘the social’ is an insistence on plurality. Norms cannot be possessed, controlled or contained by the individual who gives an

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account. Norms ‘belong’ to no one, and they arise in the context of everyone. In this sense they are ‘social’ in that they are not private, and they are ‘social’ in that they are not individual. Butler has therefore implicitly defined ‘the social’ as two subjects relating to one another; ‘sociality’ describes the space or scene in which the dyadic philosophical relation occurs (Butler 2005: 23). This seems fair enough, so far as it goes, though clearly from the perspective I have been articulating throughout this chapter, such a notion of ‘the social’ as this cannot stand in for a fuller concept of the social formation. And in a peculiar way, Butler actually has a sense of the limitations of her own theory, since, later in Giving an Account, Butler suggests that even in Hegel ‘recognition’ exceeds a dyadic structure because what ‘eventually follows from th[e] scene’ of recognition is a ‘social account of norms’ (Butler 2005: 28). However, this claim indicates the full extent to which Butler builds her theory of the social on top of, or out of, her Hegelian theory of dyadic recognition. She thereby first evacuates the social–historical context so that she may construct a philosophical account of recognition, and then she turns recognition itself into the context for the emergence of her new, thin account of ‘the social’. Therefore, it is not so much that Butler has it upside down as that she has it inside out: starting from a de-­historicised theory of recognition, she builds an abstract account of ‘sociality’ that turns out to be nothing more than plurality. Ultimately what we are left with in Butler’s own theorisation of ‘the social’ is little more than a liberal conception of the social. Let me unpack this claim. For Butler, the social simply means more than one individual; thus, it functions very much as an aggregative term. Just as we see that the formation of political society, within a liberal social contract theory, depends upon the shift from the individuals within a state of nature to ‘the social’ formed through consent, so we see Butler pivot from the ‘I’ who gives an account to the social norms in which such accounts must invariably be given. The move to Arendt thereby makes a sort of sense, not because Butler really means to invoke Arendt’s understanding of the social, but because she (Butler) needs to draw from her (Arendt’s) notion of plurality. Of course, Arendt’s account of human plurality is decisively not a liberal one, but Butler is not taking up Arendt’s larger political philosophy. Instead, she rests with the idea of ‘the social’ as more than one, and it is exactly this notion that I am claiming resonates with liberalism. Liberalism’s commitment to



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individualism means that ‘the social’ can never be much more than a ‘more than one’, an aggregation of individuals. It is not that Butler explicitly adopts a liberal theory, but that despite her own occasional resistance to liberalism, she winds up with a liberal account of the social. One might protest – as I myself have done with Butler, above – that I make this final move, towards a liberal concept of the social, too quickly. After all, Butler never invokes social contract theory – never cites Locke or Rawls, or anyone else of that ilk. Indeed, I have previously argued that the strategies of denaturalisation practised in Butler’s earlier work can effectively be read against the social contract tradition (Chambers and Carver 2008: 21, 27, 41). Nonetheless, here I wish to defend this very different claim, and to back it up by showing that, over the years, Butler’s work has grown closer and closer in proximity to that of standard liberal political philosophy. Her logic looks more like that of a liberal mode of theorising, and even more, the language she adopts sounds more and more like that of liberal theory. To make this case, I turn to a more recent text, Frames of War (Butler 2009), where I am most interested in the framing structures for, and language used in, Butler’s arguments. Butler has doubtless built a wide and interdisciplinary audience over the years, one far broader and more diverse than the presumed reader of a text in liberal theory. Despite this truth, Butler’s approach and her language now look and sound a lot like egalitarian political philosophy, and we can see this starkly in Frames of War’s Introduction, where Butler makes the case for the overall philosophical and political contribution of her essays. Butler’s fundamental project in this text is to generalise a set of arguments about recognisability and intelligibility that have percolated throughout her previous writings.8 Butler shows that the act by which one subject recognises another depends upon prior conditions. This ontic act rests upon epistemological conditions of ‘recognizability’ – the possibility of apprehending a subject in the first place – while those very conditions themselves presuppose prior conditions of intelligibility, which Butler describes as historical ‘schemas that establish the domain of the knowable’ (Butler 2009: 6). Butler, of course, has written about ‘norms of recognizability’ and ‘schemas of intelligibility’ before, and at great length (2009: 7). The problem of intelligibility lies at the centre of Butler’s understanding of the heterosexual matrix in Gender Trouble; it captures the logic of materialisation that she delineates

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in Bodies that Matter; it underlies the articulation of hate speech in Excitable Speech; and most powerfully, it forms the philosophical and political crux of Butler’s now well-­known re-­reading of Antigone in Antigone’s Claim (Butler 1999; Butler 1993; Butler 1997b; Butler 2000). In this text, however, Butler lays out her philosophy of recognisability and intelligibility at the beginning of the text, and she does so specifically in order to show that this philosophical structure serves as ‘an historical a priori’ (Butler 2009: 6). That is, the philosophical account is both grounding and generalising; it is tethered not to immanent critique (in the tradition of critical theory) but to philosophising in a more universal voice. Let me offer an example of the subtle but distinct difference in Butler’s recent approach. In the middle of Butler’s introduction to Frames she turns the argument away from her broad account of how recognisability and intelligibility function, towards the political dimension of the work. In a line that restates the argument from the preceding dozen pages, Butler writes, ‘to say that a life is precarious requires not only that a life be apprehended as a life, but also that precariousness be an aspect of what is apprehended in what is living’ (Butler 2009: 13). Again we witness Butler’s emphasis that the problematic of precarity goes beyond that of recognisability since precarity turns on bringing into view not just subjects, but the problem itself of recognising subjects. Butler then twists this argument markedly, even calling attention to the turn she makes by explicitly indicating that she seeks to reinterpret her own claims. She writes: ‘normatively construed, I am arguing that there ought to be a more inclusive and egalitarian way of recognizing precariousness, and that this should take form as concrete social policy’ (Butler 2009: 13, my emphasis). The claim is succinct and non-­opaque, but I think there is a great deal at stake here – perhaps much more than there might at first appear to be. First, Butler takes her account of intelligibility and says she will construe it ‘normatively’. This constitutes an explicit gesture towards the language of liberal political philosophy, and a significant move away from Butler’s earlier arguments. Butler’s earlier work showed decisively that the question of intelligibility could never be considered ‘non-­normative’, since intelligibility remains indelibly tied to the problem of ‘normative violence’. There would be no such thing as a ‘non-­normative construal’ of unintelligibility (or precariousness), for the reason that Butler explicitly conceptualises intelligibility as tied up with norms. Here, however, Butler



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uses ‘normative’ in a way very much distinct from those earlier writings on normative violence (see Rushing 2009). With the reference to ‘normative’, this passage invokes the language of liberal political theory, i.e. ‘normative theory’. The very idea of ‘normative theory’ can be traced back to the behaviouralist attempt to redefine political theory as unscientific, and thereby to create a distinction between on the one hand, ‘positive theory’ that addresses the world and discovers facts and laws about it, and on the other, ‘normative theory’ that tells us what we ‘ought’ to do or what an ‘ideal’ world might look like. It is clear that Butler borrows that language here, not only because her use of the word ‘normative’ marks such a departure from her previous writings, but also because she signals the link to so-­called normative theory directly by going on to tell her readers what ‘ought’ to happen. And finally, she answers the very question that empiricists have always asked of their ‘normative’ counterparts: how does your ‘theory’ translate into concrete policy recommendations? Butler emphasises that if she can give a general normative theory of precariousness then it will, in fact, lead to ‘concrete social policy’. This is liberal political philosophy. It follows the playbook that says to start with a priori or generalised philosophical claims, and then bend them towards policy claims. And I must add that Butler’s move in this section is not isolated; quite the contrary, she repeats it (or moves like it) throughout Frames. Butler seems either to have embraced liberal theory or at least tacitly to have accepted its terms. She reiterates those terms throughout the introduction, consistently gesturing towards the idea of ‘generalizing’ her account, of giving it a universal status (Butler 2009: 18, 20). In the process, Butler also ends up adopting much of the language and the limitations of the liberal mode of writing and thinking. Worse than this, Butler winds up speaking in flat and obvious tautologies. For example, she describes the condition of the world with which her work engages, in this language: ‘precarity also characterizes that politically induced condition of maximized precariousness’. Similarly, she articulates part of the goal of her philosophical project in these words: ‘to sustain life as sustainable’ (Butler 2009: 26, 23). Quoting these passages might seem like picking nits, but I point to these examples not as a critique of Butler’s writing style and not even to question her logic. My point is that the circularity of this logic resonates decisively with that of much liberal theory today.

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Conclusion Added together, these scenes from Giving an Account and Frames offer a clearer sense of the status and shape of Butler’s writings since 2001. As I specified at the outset, my aim in this chapter has not been to trace influences on Butler or to explain, internal to her own thinking and intentions, why Butler’s work shifts (often significantly) from her earliest texts to her most recent ones. But the architecture of Butler’s argument in PLP indicates one plausible, structural explanation for her recent turn towards work in moral theory and in the direction of producing writings that look more like that of a liberal public intellectual than a social and political theorist. In the absence of an account of the social formation, exactly that which Butler purges from the thinkers she interprets in PLP, Butler shifts towards normative political philosophy. In showing how Butler has implicitly eschewed a concept of the social formation, I am not accusing Butler of not being Althusserian enough. Nor am I trying to play the ‘structure’ card to Butler’s emphasis on agency (or on post-­structuralism). To the contrary – and perhaps surprisingly – in demonstrating that Butler has made a series of mistakes in grasping the social formation, I am suggesting that she fails to account for the dynamics of the force of normativity. I would argue that this force operates across the entirety of the social formation. But Butler leaves herself with an overly narrow concept of normativity, because she circumscribes normativity within a dyadic field of ‘recognition’. It is as if Butler comes to see normativity as itself a ‘structure’, and while she grasps the structure of normativity as incapable of accounting for everything – because, as she so often shows, every structure always and necessarily fails in its efforts at structuration – Butler misses out on the failure of any structure to account for its own historicity. Althusser proves important, therefore, not only to the extent that Butler reads his concept of the social formation out of his own texts, but also because, unlike Butler, Althusser was a philosopher not of the subject, but of structures themselves. Therefore, following Marx, Althusser insists on the historicity of a structure as itself that which makes determinist closure always impossible (and thereby opens up spaces for agency). Thus, my engagement with Butler in this chapter should not be reduced to or confused with a standard sort of so-­called ‘Marxist critique’ that plays ‘history’



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or ‘structure’ as a trump card against philosophy. Rather, I am trying to trace an internal and essential logic in Butler’s work that plays itself out with particular consequences for how she construes certain political concerns. There can be no doubt, as West indicates, that Butler’s voice as a public intellectual proves robust and important. That voice is heard widely and has a real force; witness Butler’s recent winning of the Adorno prize and the important debate that emerged around this public event (Butler 2012). I have no intention whatsoever of deprecating this crucial work. These achievements notwithstanding, something significant has been lost in Butler’s recent writing – particularly when read in the context of social and political theory. Butler’s early books had a dramatic and transformative impact on a number of fields, and much of this strength was tied to the theoretical radicality of those texts – their ability to think something new – which was itself linked to their concrete critical political engagement. Butler forced a dramatic reconsideration of how we understand sex, gender and the materiality of the body; she permanently reshaped our sense of the relation between sex and gender; and her work served as a sustaining resource for two decades of feminist and queer politics. The power of Butler’s political theory was linked, I suggest, to her commitment to ‘troubling’ established norms, ways of thought and patterns of action (Chambers and Carver 2008). In contrast to this earlier work, what Honig calls Butler’s ‘mortalist humanism’ serves as a general philosophical position – an insistence on fundamental human finitude – with which few would disagree and which many can admire (Honig 2013). While the general ‘truth’ of this ontology can surely be linked to a set of ‘normative claims’, what goes missing in these works is Butler’s previously remarkable ability to inspire and particularly to incite.

Notes 1. Although there is surely nothing definitive or fixed about it, I use the year 2001 as an inflection point in the trajectory of Butler’s published works for at least two reasons. First, at the time of my writing in 2013, the year 2001 splits the time period of Butler’s published works almost perfectly in half, since (if we leave out the publication of her dissertation as a book [Butler 1987], which Butler herself often seems eager to do) Butler’s first important chapters and articles, pre-­ Gender Trouble, appeared in 1989, giving us 12 years until 2001 and

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12 years after. Second, Butler published two books in 2000, both of which remain clearly caught up in debates coming out of her work in the 1990s, while her first book after 2001, Precarious Life (2004a), just as clearly responds not to the terms of those earlier debates but to the events of 9/11 and after. This periodising remains tentative and nominalist, and will likely shift and disintegrate in the future, but at the current moment it offers a helpful way to think about the ‘turn’ in Butler’s work since 2001. 2. For a much earlier critique of Butler’s use of ‘the social’, see Laclau in Butler et al. 2000: 183. 3. For a great deal more on this process, and for clarification of the terms that Butler uses to translate (and mistranslate) Foucault’s French terms, see my discussion in Chambers 2013. 4. Butler’s odd insistence on the supposed universality of the Spinozan desire to persist in one’s being – ‘odd’ not only in its apparently trans-­ historical nature, but also insofar as Butler wrongly attributes a commitment to this force to authors such as Nietzsche, who had explicitly rejected it – has been roundly criticised by readers of PLP (Lloyd 2007; Chambers and Carver 2008). 5. I see my analysis here as a complement to Honig’s critique of Butler’s ‘mortalist’ position (Honig 2013; see also Honig 2010). Honig shows that Butler’s articulation of ‘precarious lives’ can clearly be understood as another version of a philosophy of human finitude. In turn, I am showing how such a philosophy might develop from the position Butler takes up earlier, in PLP, when she erases an account of the social formation. Without a concept of the social order, all that remains are general philosophical statements about the subject (e.g. concerning its finitude). 6. Both in the entirety of this chapter in PLP and also in the entirety of Butler’s earlier article on Althusser (Butler 1995) on which the chapter was based, Butler provides the following references: three total citations of Althusser’s essay, only one of them substantive, and zero citations of the key, famous passages on hailing and ideology. 7. As noted in the text above, Excitable Speech (Butler 1997) is published in the same year, and at around the same time, as PLP and therefore does not come ‘after’ it. Antigone’s Claim (2000), which I would indeed describe as a major text in Butler’s oeuvre, appears prior to what I am marking as the 2001 turn, and while I have discussed it in the past I do not address it here. Precarious Life (2004a) proves to be a very different kind of text, since it contains a collection of essays and occasional pieces originally produced for specific political and



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non-­academic contexts. Hence the book comprises a much more fragmentary and focused set of essays and does not add up to the sort of systematic philosophical project that we see in either PLP or Giving an Account. Similarly but distinctly, Undoing Gender (2004b) also collects together a variety of disparate, focused engagements on sex, gender and sexuality. In this final section I focus mainly on Giving an Account and Frames of War (2009), the two most important systematic books that Butler has published since 2001. 8. Elsewhere and previously I have tried to provide a non-­generalising reading of Butler’s earlier texts through the concept of (un)intelligibility (Chambers and Carver 2008; Chambers 2009).

References Althusser, Louis (1969), For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster, London: Verso. Althusser, Louis (1971), ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation)’, in Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster, London: New Left Books, pp. 123–73. Althusser, Louis (1976), Essays in Self-­Criticism, trans. Graham Locke, London: New Left Books. Arendt, Hannah (1958), The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Butler, Judith (1987), Subjects of Desire, New York: Columbia University Press. Butler, Judith (1993), Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith (1995), ‘Conscience Doth Make Subjects of Us All’, Yale French Studies, 88, 6–26. Butler, Judith (1997a), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Butler, Judith (1997b), Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, New York and London: Routledge. Butler, Judith (1999), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Tenth Anniversary Edition, London and New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith (2000), Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death, New York: Columbia University Press. Butler, Judith (2004a), Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, New York and London: Verso. Butler, Judith (2004b), Undoing Gender, New York and London: Routledge.

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Butler, Judith (2005), Giving an Account of Oneself, New York: Fordham University Press. Butler, Judith (2009), Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, London: Verso. Butler, Judith (2012), ‘Judith Butler Responds to Attack’, Mondoweiss, http://mondoweiss.net/2012/08/judith-­butler-­responds-­to-­attack-­iaffirm-­a-judaism-­that-­is-­not-­associated-­with-­state-­violence.html (last accessed 6 December 2014). Butler, Judith, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek (2000), Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, London: Verso. Cavarero, Adriana (2000), Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, London: Routledge. Chambers, Samuel (2007), ‘“Sex” and the Problem of the Body: Reconstructing Judith Butler’s Theory of Sex/Gender’, Body & Society, 13: 4, 47–75. Chambers, Samuel (2009), ‘A Queer Politics of the Democratic Miscount’, Borderlands, 8: 2. Chambers, Samuel (2013), The Lessons of Rancière, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chambers, Samuel, and Terrell Carver (2008), The Political Theory of Judith Butler: Troubling Politics, London: Routledge. Honig, Bonnie (2010), ‘Antigone’s Two Laws: Greek Tragedy and the Politics of Humanism’, New Literary History, 41: 1, 1–33. Honig, Bonnie (2013), Antigone, Interrupted, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lloyd, Moya (2007), Judith Butler: From Norms to Politics, London: Polity. Rancière, Jacques (2009), ‘A Few Remarks on the Method of Jacques Rancière’, Parallax 15: 3, 114–23. Rushing, Sara (2009), ‘Preparing for Politics: Judith Butler’s Ethical Dispositions’, Contemporary Political Theory, 9: 3, 284–303. Walker, Drew (2010), ‘Getting Beyond Repressive Subjection’, paper presented at the American Political Science Association annual meeting, September 2010. West, Cornel (2011), ‘Prophetic Religion and the Future of Capitalist Civilization’, in Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (eds), The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 92–100.

Notes on Contributors

Samuel A. Chambers teaches political theory and cultural politics at Johns Hopkins University. His interests are broad and interdisciplinary – ranging from central issues in social and political theory, to engagements with contemporary feminist and queer theory, to contributions to critical television studies. He has authored five books, edited four more, and published more than two dozen journal articles, along with numerous chapters and essays. His most recent book is Bearing Society in Mind: Theories and Politics of the Social Formation (Rowman & Littlefield International 2014). Nathan Gies is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. His dissertation makes a case for candour as a contemporary political virtue through readings of Rousseau, Nietzsche and Whitman informed by feminist and queer theory. More broadly, his research interests include theories of the public and the private, phenomenology and its afterlives, and jurisprudence and legal studies. Fiona Jenkins teaches and researches in the School of Philosophy, Australian National University, and is Convenor of the ANU Gender Institute. Her current research covers two projects, one on Judith Butler, which focuses on questions of political legitimacy, violence and non-­violence; the other on gender equity in academic disciplines, including an interest in gender representation and how feminist perspectives are integrated into research. Recent publications include several co-­edited volumes: Women in Philosophy: What Needs to Change? (Oxford University Press 2013); a special issue of Australian Feminist Studies, ‘Gendered Excellence in the Social Sciences’ (June 2014); and Allegiance and Identity in a 219

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Globalising World (Cambridge University Press 2014). Her work on Butler has appeared in journals including Angelaki, differences and SubStance. Moya Lloyd is Professor of Political Theory at Loughborough University. She has published mainly in the areas of feminist theory and contemporary social and political thought. Her books include Beyond Identity Politics: feminism, power and politics (Sage 2005), Judith Butler: from norms to politics (Polity 2007), and with Adrian Little (eds), The Politics of Radical Democracy (Edinburgh University Press 2009). She is currently the recipient of a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for the project ‘Who Counts? The political problem of the “human” ’. Catherine Mills is Associate Professor of Bioethics and the recipient of an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (FT120100026) in the Centre for Human Bioethics, Monash University. Her current research explores issues at the intersection of reproductive ethics, feminist philosophy and Continental philosophy. She is the author of Futures of Reproduction: Bioethics and Biopolitics (Springer 2011) and The Philosophy of Agamben (Acumen and McGill/Queens University Press 2008). Sara Rushing is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Montana State University in Bozeman. Her work brings classical and contemporary political theory into dialogue to explore the intersection of politics and ethics as well as dispositions of critical democratic citizenship. She is currently at work on a book project that uses contexts of corporeal vulnerability – including giving birth, facing death, navigating mental and physical illness, and grieving – to develop revitalised concepts of humility and autonomy. Birgit Schippers is Senior Lecturer in Politics at St Mary’s University College Belfast. She is the author of Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought (Edinburgh University Press 2011) and The Political Philosophy of Judith Butler (Routledge 2014). Her current research focuses on war, human rights and post-­humanist perspectives. Drew Walker is Visiting Assistant Professor of Politics at Whitman College. He completed his PhD in political theory at Johns



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Hopkins University, and his work centres on feminist and queer political theory, politics of sexuality and political ethics. He is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Humanism at the Limits: Alienation and the Politics of Difference. He has publications forthcoming in The Comparatist, Contemporary Political Theory and Das Staatsverständnis von Judith Butler.

Index

Adorno, Theodor, 2, 100, 119, 122, 131, 134 affect, 6–8, 46–7, 50, 65, 68–84, 84n, 91–109, 128, 171, 183 affective turn, 73–7, 92–5 emotion, 68, 73–4, 77, 93–4, 110n Agamben, Giorgio, 179 Ahmed, Sara, 86n AIDS crisis, 9, 154–7, 177 AIDS Names Project quilt, 156 Althusser, Louis, 10, 194, 196, 198–206, 214 guilt, 200–1, 203–4, 206 ideology, 201–3 interpellation, 199–204, 206 Antigone’s Claim, 153, 158, 212 appearance, 46, 58, 124, 126–7, 129, 130–1, 137, 146–7 apprehension, 51, 70, 72–3, 80, 83, 123–4, 127–30, 133, 211–12 Arendt, Hannah, 18, 60, 126, 128, 132, 135–6, 160, 178–80, 182, 187n, 207–10 space of appearance, 178–80, 187n Aristotle, 18, 82–3 Asad, Talal, 104–5 Athanasiou, Athena, 174 autonomy, 45, 52, 68, 101, 169–70 Benjamin, Walter, 136–7 Berlant, Lauren, 5, 76

222

Bersani, Leo, 154–5 Bodies that Matter, 18, 21, 80–1, 175, 195, 198, 211–12 body, 6, 9, 21–2, 26, 43, 71–2, 79, 105, 127, 134–5, 167–92, 215 body politics, 107, 168–9 Bourdieu, Pierre, 173–4 Brennan, Teresa, 77 Cavarero, Adriana, 58, 208–9 Cavell, Stanley, 9, 142, 148–52 Chambers, Samuel and Carver, Terrell, 4, 147, 151–2 cohabitation, 60–1, 136, 182 community, 7, 29–30, 32, 43, 46, 59, 61, 82, 102, 106–7, 126 Connolly, William, 1, 2, 76–7, 143 Coole, Diana, 5, 15, 72, 78, 80 corporeal vulnerability see vulnerability Crimp, Douglas, 155–6 critique, 8–9, 20, 52, 54, 68, 70–1, 82, 125, 130–6, 180, 207–8 Cuffari, Elena, 77 Cvetkovich, Ann, 94 Dean, Jodi, 5, 138n, democracy, 84, 107–8, 112n, 119–20, 122, 128, 143, 177 sensate democracy, 8, 118, 124–5, 127, 132

Index 223 dependency, 21, 41, 43–4, 49–50, 52–3, 61, 69, 96–8, 102–3, 123, 130, 134, 170–1, 209 Derrida, Jacques, 35n, 129, 133 desire, 96–8, 106, 110n, 157, 171, 194, 206 Dews, Peter, 2 Dispossession, 3, 41, 174, 182 dispossession, 101–2, 107, 183–4 Douglass, Frederick, 142, 150–1 drag, 20 ecstasis, 102, 106, 171, 186n ek-stasis see ecstasis emotion see affect equality, 47–8, 118, 124, 126–8, 136 ethics, 1–3, 25, 52 ethic of non-violence, 6, 42, 45, 73, 79, 127 ethical dispositions, 66, 72, 80, 83, 103 ethical responsibility, 5–8, 41, 49, 51–6, 58, 61, 66–8, 70–1, 91–2, 99–103, 106, 108–9, 182, 207 ethical responsiveness, 7, 70–1, 77, 79, 81, 127, 167–8, 181–2, 184–6 ethical violence, 54, 100, 119–21, 132 ethics as self-cultivation, 66, 77 ethics-politics relation, 3, 5–9, 15–16, 23–8, 30, 32, 60, 99, 108, 119, 121, 130, 133–4, 138n, 141, 145, 157, 167 global ethics, 8, 102, 106–9 turn to ethics, 2, 5, 24, 91, 99, 141, 146, 167, 193, 207, 214 virtue ethics, 1, 81–4 Excitable Speech, 18, 21, 26, 30, 81, 85n, 98–9, 101, 212 Fieser, James, 1 Foucault, Michel, 1, 25, 36n, 51, 54, 57, 73, 77–8, 106, 129, 131–2, 134, 136, 144, 151, 155, 179, 197–8, 200, 207–8

frames, 47, 51, 68, 70, 72–3, 101, 104, 129, 130, 146, 177, 182, 184–5 Frames of War, 7, 8, 46–8, 57, 60, 65, 67–71, 72–3, 77–83, 95, 100, 103–4, 107, 127–30, 134–5, 169, 172–3, 178, 211–14 freedom, 76, 83, 118, 120, 159 Freud, Sigmund, 87n, 97, 197, 201 Garber, Marjorie, Hanssen, Beatrice, and Walkowitz, Rebecca, 1–2 gender, 18, 20, 25–6, 82, 147–8, 151–2, 168–9, 174–7, 180 Gender Trouble, 3, 20, 80, 81–2, 147–8, 168, 175, 177, 195–6, 198, 211 Giving an Account of Oneself, 3, 41, 49–55, 58–9, 65, 68, 70, 100, 103, 106, 119, 121, 131, 206–10, 214 Gregg, Melissa, and Seigworth, Gregory, 74–5, 93 grievability, 6, 8–9, 97, 101, 103–4, 118, 120–1, 124–5, 127, 129–31, 135–7, 141–5, 155–7, 162, 172, 177–9, 181–2, 184–6, 187n Grossberg, Lawrence, 94 Guantanamo, 82, 100, 161 Gutterman, David and Rushing, Sara, 5 Habermas, Jürgen, 2, 131 Harman, Graham, 27 hate speech, 99, 101, 212 Hegel, G. W. F., 59, 96–8, 100, 106, 174, 195, 198–200, 204–5, 208, 210 Heidegger, Martin, 152–3 Hemmings, Clare, 75–6, 85n heteronormativity, 174–5, 177, 180 HIV/AIDS, 97, 103 Hobbes, Thomas, 69

224

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Honig, Bonnie, 8, 19, 34n, 121, 125, 155–6, 159, 171–2, 186n, 216n mortalist humanism, 5, 17, 78, 84, 200, 215 human, the, 6, 9, 19–21, 41, 44, 46, 49, 55–6, 66, 73, 82, 107, 112n, 128, 141–63, 167–8, 171, 174–5, 182, 184–6 dehumanisation, 9, 44, 46, 122, 141, 144, 149–52, 155, 160, 185 humanisation, 18, 44, 46–7, 78, 104 non-human, 21–2 human rights, 143, 145–6, 158, 160–2 humanism, 2, 78, 81, 125 intelligibility, 6, 17–18, 21, 50, 103, 105, 128, 147–8, 151, 153, 178, 211–12 interdependence, 21, 41, 43, 53, 55–6, 60, 67–8, 81–2, 84, 92, 98, 128, 172–3, 181 Jameson, Frederic, 2 Kant, Immanuel, 5, 15, 131, 135 Klein, Melanie, 111n Knisely, Lisa, 188n Kroker, Arthur, 106 La Caze, Marguerite, and Lloyd, Henry Martyn, 74 language, 17–31, 99, 101, 133, 200 Laplanche, Jean, 50–1, 71, 102 Levinas, Emmanuel, 1, 2, 4, 15–16, 19–20, 22–5, 27–32, 45–6, 50, 53, 57–8, 60, 67, 70–1, 101, 119, 122–3, 127, 136, 182, 208 Butler’s ‘Levinasian’ turn, 4, 5, 15–16, 32, 53 communication, 6, 16–17, 27–32 face, the, 15, 19–20, 45–6, 123, 130, 136

Leys, Ruth, 74, 76–7 liberalism, 210–13 liveability, 6, 17–20, 22–3, 26, 30, 32–3, 34n, 96, 98, 103, 105, 107, 148 liveable life, 4, 6, 17, 65, 79, 83, 101, 104, 119, 124, 127, 132, 146–8, 152, 175–8, 180 unliveability, 174, 176 Lloyd, Moya, 15, 30, 71, 147, 153 Loizidou, Elena, 2, 5–6, 183 Massumi, Brian, 74–7, 81 Mills, Catherine, 5–6 moral philosophy, 2, 3, 15, 100, 193, 206–7, 214 moralism, 3, 6, 16, 24, 27 morality, 1–2, 57, 132, 134–5, 183 Mouffe, Chantal, 2, 108, 112n mourning, 97, 104, 121, 129, 155–6, 178 Murphy, Ann, 45, 78, 138n, 172 nation-state, 60, 119, 120, 123, 125, 130, 132, 137; see also state nationalism, 8, 120–1, 123, 125, 129, 138n Ngai, Sianne, 74 normative violence see violence norms and normativity, 4, 17, 18–19, 21, 23, 44, 47, 50–1, 56–8, 62n, 66–8, 72, 79–80, 82, 97, 100–1, 105, 112n, 124–5, 127–33, 134, 142, 144–9, 151–5, 158–9, 161–2, 163n, 170, 174–7, 182, 184–6, 207–12, 214–15 obligation, 2, 9, 45, 48–9, 60–1, 67, 69, 92, 96, 102, 107, 123, 125–8, 134–6, 138n, 182–4 ontology, 10, 20–1, 41, 47–8, 50, 55, 58, 60, 72–3, 99, 103, 123, 127–8, 132, 134, 169–70, 184, 188n, 194, 215

Index 225 Parting Ways, 59–60, 119–20 passionate attachment, 71, 98, 106, 108, 157, 171, 197 performativity, 36n, 81, 118–19, 126–7, 143, 148, 163n, 175, 177–8, 180 performance, 26, 36n, 82 Perpich, Diane, 58 personal is political, 32–3 pluralisation, 8–9, 119–20, 125–30, 135–7, 143, 163n, 180 plurality, 31, 49, 60–1, 119, 123, 125–7, 133, 136, 180, 195–6, 209–10 politics, 23, 29–33, 43, 47, 65–6, 78–9, 83–4, 98, 104, 107–9, 121–4, 126–7, 129–30, 133–4, 137, 141–2, 146, 148, 153–6, 158–62, 167–81, 185, 215 politics of grief, 32–3, 43, 80, 107, 118, 156 power, 54, 72–3, 125, 128–9, 134–5, 148, 167, 177, 179, 182, 197–8, 200–1, 204, 208 Precarious Life, 4, 19, 41, 43–5, 46–7, 65, 67–71, 80, 82, 95, 97, 100, 103–4, 107, 121–2, 130, 142–4, 172, 184 precariousness, 6, 41, 45–9, 60–1, 65, 67–9, 78, 82–3, 99–100, 103, 123, 126–30, 135, 141, 162, 167–8, 173–4, 176, 181–2, 185–6, 212–13 precarity, 6–7, 47–9, 59–60, 62n, 67, 99–100, 119, 134–5, 137, 141, 167–8, 173–82, 185–6, 212–13 precaritisation, 173–4, 176 Psychic Life of Power, The, 71, 97–8, 100, 106, 157, 168, 171, 193–207, 214 Rancière, Jacques, 1, 160–1 recognisability, 9–10, 19, 51, 69, 124–5, 128–30, 133, 147, 174–5, 176, 181, 211–12

recognition, 2, 4, 20–1, 44, 51, 66, 68, 95, 96–7, 100–1, 104, 122, 124–5, 128–30, 145–7, 149, 151, 155, 158, 167, 174–5, 178, 181, 184–5, 195, 199–200, 208, 210, 214 Reimer, David, 26n, 175, 187n relationality, 7, 25, 41–3, 50–3, 56, 61, 67, 92, 98, 101, 106, 108–9, 123, 126, 129, 131, 135, 168, 170–2, 175, 183, 196 representation, 18–20, 30, 45–6, 70–1, 127 Salih, Sara, 4 San Francisco Chronicle, 104, 121–3, 144, 184–5 Sanders, Lynn, 29 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 163n Segal, Lynne, 5, 15 sex and gender, 3, 18, 35n, 168, 196, 215 sexuality, 97, 148, 151–2, 175 Shulman, George, 172 Singer, Peter, 1, 2 slavery, 149–51 Smith, Rachel Greenwald, 75 social, the, 10, 56, 70, 194–5, 206–11 social formation, 193–6, 197, 201–6, 210, 214 social order, 10, 155–6, 158, 175, 201, 204, 208 speech see language Spinoza, Baruch, 37n, 74, 96 conatus (desire to persist), 37n, 96, 106, 157, 197, 203, 216n Stark, Hannah, 4, state, 46, 68, 103–5, 141–2, 161, 176; see also nation-state subject, 4, 7, 10, 18, 22–3, 25, 29, 41–4, 49–62, 67–9, 71–2, 77, 79–81, 91–2, 95–103, 106–8, 129, 131, 133, 148, 157–9, 170–1, 184, 193–204, 206, 208–10

226

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subjection, 10, 98, 102, 106, 157–8, 193–206 subjectivation, 22, 201, 206 subjectivity see subject Subjects of Desire, 4, 8, 71, 95–8 substitutability, 7, 42, 50, 58–9, 61 subversion, 9, 31, 82, 141–2, 146, 153, 158, 160–2, 163n survival, 17–20, 26, 30, 34n, 37n, 102, 111n, 141, 146, 157–61, 171 cultural viability, 18 Thiem, Annika, 2, 4, 5 translation, 30–1, 121, 130, 137 trauma, 95, 97–8, 105–6 Undoing Gender, 18–20, 81, 102, 106–7, 145, 170, 175 US national anthem, 118, 126–7, 137

violence, 43–7, 69, 72, 79, 91–2, 99–100, 103–5, 108–9, 120, 130, 144–5, 148, 152, 163n ethical violence see ethics normative violence, 79, 152, 212–13 vulnerability, 6–7, 41–9, 59–61, 65, 67–70, 78, 80–1, 92, 97–9, 101, 103, 106, 121, 123, 145, 157, 162, 163n, 167–8, 171–3, 175, 179, 181, 183–6, 200 Walker, Drew, 201 war, 8, 46–7, 68–9, 72, 91, 95–6, 103–5, 107, 130, 132, 148 War on Terror, 99, 104, 112n, 120 West, Cornell, 193, 215 Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA), 159–60 Young, Iris Marion, 29 Žižek, Slavoj, 5