Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
a n d E thics
Edi ted by M oya L l oy d
CRITICAL CONNECTIONS
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
Nick Hewlett
Gregg Lambert
Todd May
John Mullarkey
Paul Patton
Marc Rölli
Alison Ross
Kathrin Thiele
Frédéric Worms
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
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
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 1
Moya Lloyd
1. Signifying Otherwise: Liveability and Language 15
Nathan Gies
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 91
Birgit Schippers
5. Sensate Democracy and Grievable Life 118
Fiona Jenkins
6. Two Regimes of the Human: Butler and the Politics
of Mattering 141
Drew Walker
7. The Ethics and Politics of Vulnerable Bodies 167
Moya Lloyd
8. Subjectivation, the Social and a (Missing) Account
of the Social Formation: Judith Butler’s ‘Turn’ 193
Samuel A. Chambers
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 permis-
sion to use this material.
vi
Introduction
Moya Lloyd
1
2 Butler and Ethics
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 pub-
lished 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 publica-
tion 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 depar-
ture 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
4 Butler and Ethics
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 repres-
sive 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
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.
12 Butler and Ethics
. . . although his words wound us here or, perhaps precisely because
his words wound us here, we are responsible for him, even as the rela-
tion proves more painful in its nonreciprocity. (Butler 2012: 47)
15
16 Butler and Ethics
The ‘I’ that I am finds itself at once constituted by norms and depend-
ent 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 incor-
porates 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 unliv-
able. (Butler 2004b: 3–4; see also Butler 2004a: xix–xx)
‘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 rec-
ognition 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 threat-
ening 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 coher-
ence 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.
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 determina-
tions (Butler 2009: 1; Butler 2004a: 43). In her recent attempts
to articulate a theory that focuses less exclusively on bodily expo-
sure 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 ‘sub-
jectivation’, 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 dyna-
mism of human existence might overcome (Cheah 1996: 129–30;
Signifying Otherwise: Liveability and Language 23
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 impor-
tance 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.
34 Butler and Ethics
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 factic-
ity’ (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 persua-
sively, have argued that certain elements in Butler’s thought since
Gender Trouble have come to function as pre-discursive and apo-
litical 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
36 Butler and Ethics
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.
Signifying Otherwise: Liveability and Language 39
Introduction
The concept of vulnerability has been an important point of refer-
ence for recent feminist interventions in ethics and political phi-
losophy. 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 char-
acteristic, if not definitional, of the human. Judith Butler’s reflec-
tions 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 pre-
sents 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 implica-
tions 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 uni-
versal vulnerability that emerges in a revised bodily ontology. That
41
42 Butler and Ethics
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 onto-
logical are always imbricated in Butler’s work.6 But there is a
50 Butler and Ethics
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 them-
selves 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 empha-
sises 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 sce-
narios – 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 – particu-
larly, 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:
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 concep-
tion of responsibility seems to be taking so far. First, a predomi-
nant 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 blamewor-
thy or praiseworthy, that is, in terms of ‘reactive attitudes’. This
56 Butler and Ethics
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 com-
pelled 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 deep-
ened 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 sympa-
thetic 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 gener-
alising, from which she concludes that singularity is necessarily
substitutable. She writes,
The apparent paradox that we are all singular, and therefore sub-
stitutable, 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 substitu-
tion is that as humans, we have certain characteristics – most sig-
nificantly, 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 singu-
larity carries the risk of tying Butler’s ethics to the reintegration of
otherness within the order of the same. Her emphasis on the col-
lective 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 strug-
gle with this dynamic of singularity and substitutability, and at
points it suggests at least a partial escape from it. Butler’s termi-
nology 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
60 Butler and Ethics
Conclusion
Throughout this chapter, I have discussed Butler’s conception
of a universal vulnerability, variously understood as precarious-
ness 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 responsi-
bility. I have suggested, though, that Butler does not quite broach
the question of responsibility for the other. Moreover, in consid-
ering 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
62 Butler and Ethics
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 attribu-
tion 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 vul-
nerability 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.
Undoing Ethics 63
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 devel-
oped in earlier work such as The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in
Subjection (Butler 1997b). In my article ‘Normative violence, vul-
nerability 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 con-
cepts 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.
64 Butler and Ethics
65
66 Butler and Ethics
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 experi-
ence 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 ‘respon-
sibility 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 condi-
tions (or ‘sites’) of possibility for the emergence of the subject, and
not as affective dimensions of that socially constructed subject’s
72 Butler and Ethics
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 mysti-
cal 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 percep-
tion, 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 affec-
tive 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, clas-
sify 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.
for and love of the world. Drawing out these dimensions would
trouble Bonnie Honig’s characterisation of Butler as a ‘mortal-
ist 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 problem-
atically 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 coher-
ence 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
Butler’s Ethical Appeal 85
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.
88 Butler and Ethics
91
92 Butler and Ethics
binary between body and mind that affect studies seeks to counter.
How Butler conceives of affect, and how affect relates to her con-
ception of ethics, will occupy me in the next section.
map into the topic of affect, and as an effort to document the con-
crete instantiations of affect’s workings. Significantly, Excitable
Speech prefigures much of Butler’s more recent work on vulner-
ability, 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.
Notes
1. I wish to thank Moya Lloyd for her helpful suggestions and com-
ments 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 pub-
lished 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).
110 Butler and Ethics
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 mean-
ings 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
Violence, Affect and Ethics 111
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 sub-
stantial 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 attend-
ance. 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,
112 Butler and Ethics
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 recog-
nise 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 discus-
sion 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 iden-
tification with democratic values, and in creating democratic indi-
viduals. 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
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.
114 Butler and Ethics
118
Sensate Democracy and Grievable Life 119
claimed sets up the problem of the ‘we’ of democracy, and the enti-
tlement 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 embodi-
ment in a performative form that cannot quite be spoken – belong-
ing 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 univer-
sal precepts. Ethical violence (in a formulation that is drawn from
Adorno) arises from:
But this reading ignores the politics that, I argue here, is embed-
ded 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 nationalis-
tic 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 obitu-
aries 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
122 Butler and Ethics
wish to give offence (Butler 2004: 35). The sense of offence seems
to assume a monopoly on suffering, the inadmissibility of com-
parative 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 prohibi-
tion 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 retroac-
tively 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 contes-
tation, 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 dis-
turbance of the ‘we’ that the request for an obituary meets with
opposition. Its import, then, cannot be analysed simply as a reflec-
tion 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 dehu-
manizing 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
Sensate Democracy and Grievable Life 123
The problem is not merely how to include more people within existing
norms, but to consider how existing norms allocate recognition dif-
ferentially. 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 articula-
tion 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,
Sensate Democracy and Grievable Life 125
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 situa-
tion 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 differenti-
ate 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
128 Butler and Ethics
Ethics as critique
In the Acknowledgements to Frames of War, Butler directly speci-
fies her project as one of critique, with a particular focus on social-
ity 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’
Sensate Democracy and Grievable Life 131
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)
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.
138 Butler and Ethics
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
140 Butler and Ethics
141
142 Butler and Ethics
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 griev-
ability 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 pluralisa-
tion 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 con-
ditions 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 recon-
ceive 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
144 Butler and Ethics
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 cat-
egories 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 ‘exclu-
sionary 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 articula-
tion’ (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’, ‘spec-
tral’, ‘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 ‘dereal-
ized’ 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 par-
ticular newspaper) is, for Butler, a result of the prior dehumanisa-
Two Regimes of the Human 145
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
Two Regimes of the Human 151
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 mat-
tered 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 damag-
ing 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 capac-
ity for pleasure’ (1987: 215, original emphasis). Bersani is par-
ticularly 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 differ-
ent 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 mat-
tering 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 dan-
gerous: it threatened to absorb the much-needed political energies
156 Butler and Ethics
Subversion or survival?
The tension in responses to the AIDS crisis between mourning and
activism parallels the dichotomy in Butler’s work between a poli-
tics of subversion and an ethics of grievability. This tension mani-
fests 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 repress-
ible 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
158 Butler and Ethics
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 mel-
ancholy 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 indi-
vidualised 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 contro-
versy 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 subver-
sion or downplay the suffering of those who do not conform to heter-
onormativity, 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 impor-
tance to this development is William Connolly’s notion of pluralisa-
tion as an ever-ongoing process of working for a more plural world
164 Butler and Ethics
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.
Two Regimes of the Human 165
167
168 Butler and Ethics
The body has been a core idea in Butler’s work from her very
earliest writings through to the most recent; however, her charac-
terisation 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 appa-
ratus’ 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 conceptualisa-
tion of the body as vulnerable, precarious and what she has more
recently termed ‘socially ecstatic’ (Butler 2011a). In fact, the theo-
retical 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 pre-
carity, 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’ particu-
lar persons as ‘human’ or ‘hear’ their address. Throughout the
chapter, I will relate my discussions to Butler’s work on gender.
define them, affect them or shape them into the embodied enti-
ties 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 attach-
ment’ 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 experi-
ences 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’
172 Butler and Ethics
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 anatomi-
cally 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 ‘passion-
ate 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 charac-
terises it. Theirs are disposable lives.
We have already seen that precarity for Butler signals a politi-
cally 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, histori-
cal conditions of insecurity and liability faced by some. At various
176 Butler and Ethics
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 norma-
tive 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 prac-
tising ethics in conditions of precarity; how, that is, it is possible,
186 Butler and Ethics
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, physi-
cal 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’.
The Ethics and Politics of Vulnerable Bodies 187
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 com-
parison 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,
188 Butler and Ethics
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.
190 Butler and Ethics
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 exam-
ines 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 rela-
tion 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
194 Butler and Ethics
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
Subjectivation and the Social Formation 199
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 diffi-
cult to discern exactly where Althusser leaves off and Butler begins.
Butler mainly writes as if she is reading, synthesising and interpret-
ing 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 pro-
duction cannot come about without the workings of ideology, and
it is for this reason that, very near the end of the essay, he advances
202 Butler and Ethics
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)
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
208 Butler and Ethics
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 pre-
sumed reader of a text in liberal theory. Despite this truth, Butler’s
approach and her language now look and sound a lot like egalitar-
ian 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 per-
colated 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 presup-
pose 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
212 Butler and Ethics
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 sig-
nificantly) 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 politi-
cal 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 circum-
scribes 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, fol-
lowing 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’
Subjectivation and the Social Formation 215
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 pub-
lished 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
216 Butler and Ethics
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.
218 Butler and Ethics
219
220 Butler and Ethics
222
Index 223
dependency, 21, 41, 43–4, 49–50, frames, 47, 51, 68, 70, 72–3, 101,
52–3, 61, 69, 96–8, 102–3, 123, 104, 129, 130, 146, 177, 182,
130, 134, 170–1, 209 184–5
Derrida, Jacques, 35n, 129, 133 Frames of War, 7, 8, 46–8, 57, 60,
desire, 96–8, 106, 110n, 157, 171, 65, 67–71, 72–3, 77–83, 95,
194, 206 100, 103–4, 107, 127–30,
Dews, Peter, 2 134–5, 169, 172–3, 178,
Dispossession, 3, 41, 174, 182 211–14
dispossession, 101–2, 107, 183–4 freedom, 76, 83, 118, 120, 159
Douglass, Frederick, 142, 150–1 Freud, Sigmund, 87n, 97, 197, 201
drag, 20
Garber, Marjorie, Hanssen, Beatrice,
ecstasis, 102, 106, 171, 186n and Walkowitz, Rebecca, 1–2
ek-stasis see ecstasis gender, 18, 20, 25–6, 82, 147–8,
emotion see affect 151–2, 168–9, 174–7, 180
equality, 47–8, 118, 124, 126–8, 136 Gender Trouble, 3, 20, 80, 81–2,
ethics, 1–3, 25, 52 147–8, 168, 175, 177, 195–6,
ethic of non-violence, 6, 42, 45, 198, 211
73, 79, 127 Giving an Account of Oneself, 3,
ethical dispositions, 66, 72, 80, 41, 49–55, 58–9, 65, 68, 70,
83, 103 100, 103, 106, 119, 121, 131,
ethical responsibility, 5–8, 41, 49, 206–10, 214
51–6, 58, 61, 66–8, 70–1, 91–2, Gregg, Melissa, and Seigworth,
99–103, 106, 108–9, 182, 207 Gregory, 74–5, 93
ethical responsiveness, 7, 70–1, grievability, 6, 8–9, 97, 101, 103–4,
77, 79, 81, 127, 167–8, 181–2, 118, 120–1, 124–5, 127,
184–6 129–31, 135–7, 141–5, 155–7,
ethical violence, 54, 100, 119–21, 162, 172, 177–9, 181–2, 184–6,
132 187n
ethics as self-cultivation, 66, 77 Grossberg, Lawrence, 94
ethics-politics relation, 3, 5–9, Guantanamo, 82, 100, 161
15–16, 23–8, 30, 32, 60, 99, Gutterman, David and Rushing,
108, 119, 121, 130, 133–4, Sara, 5
138n, 141, 145, 157, 167
global ethics, 8, 102, 106–9 Habermas, Jürgen, 2, 131
turn to ethics, 2, 5, 24, 91, 99, Harman, Graham, 27
141, 146, 167, 193, 207, 214 hate speech, 99, 101, 212
virtue ethics, 1, 81–4 Hegel, G. W. F., 59, 96–8, 100, 106,
Excitable Speech, 18, 21, 26, 30, 81, 174, 195, 198–200, 204–5, 208,
85n, 98–9, 101, 212 210
Heidegger, Martin, 152–3
Fieser, James, 1 Hemmings, Clare, 75–6, 85n
Foucault, Michel, 1, 25, 36n, 51, 54, heteronormativity, 174–5, 177,
57, 73, 77–8, 106, 129, 131–2, 180
134, 136, 144, 151, 155, 179, HIV/AIDS, 97, 103
197–8, 200, 207–8 Hobbes, Thomas, 69
224 Butler and Ethics
Honig, Bonnie, 8, 19, 34n, 121, 125, Leys, Ruth, 74, 76–7
155–6, 159, 171–2, 186n, 216n liberalism, 210–13
mortalist humanism, 5, 17, 78, liveability, 6, 17–20, 22–3, 26, 30,
84, 200, 215 32–3, 34n, 96, 98, 103, 105,
human, the, 6, 9, 19–21, 41, 44, 107, 148
46, 49, 55–6, 66, 73, 82, 107, liveable life, 4, 6, 17, 65, 79, 83,
112n, 128, 141–63, 167–8, 171, 101, 104, 119, 124, 127, 132,
174–5, 182, 184–6 146–8, 152, 175–8, 180
dehumanisation, 9, 44, 46, 122, unliveability, 174, 176
141, 144, 149–52, 155, 160, Lloyd, Moya, 15, 30, 71, 147, 153
185 Loizidou, Elena, 2, 5–6, 183
humanisation, 18, 44, 46–7, 78,
104 Massumi, Brian, 74–7, 81
non-human, 21–2 Mills, Catherine, 5–6
human rights, 143, 145–6, 158, moral philosophy, 2, 3, 15, 100,
160–2 193, 206–7, 214
humanism, 2, 78, 81, 125 moralism, 3, 6, 16, 24, 27
morality, 1–2, 57, 132, 134–5,
intelligibility, 6, 17–18, 21, 50, 103, 183
105, 128, 147–8, 151, 153, 178, Mouffe, Chantal, 2, 108, 112n
211–12 mourning, 97, 104, 121, 129,
interdependence, 21, 41, 43, 53, 155–6, 178
55–6, 60, 67–8, 81–2, 84, 92, Murphy, Ann, 45, 78, 138n, 172
98, 128, 172–3, 181
nation-state, 60, 119, 120, 123, 125,
Jameson, Frederic, 2 130, 132, 137; see also state
nationalism, 8, 120–1, 123, 125,
Kant, Immanuel, 5, 15, 131, 135 129, 138n
Klein, Melanie, 111n Ngai, Sianne, 74
Knisely, Lisa, 188n normative violence see violence
Kroker, Arthur, 106 norms and normativity, 4, 17,
18–19, 21, 23, 44, 47, 50–1,
La Caze, Marguerite, and Lloyd, 56–8, 62n, 66–8, 72, 79–80, 82,
Henry Martyn, 74 97, 100–1, 105, 112n, 124–5,
language, 17–31, 99, 101, 133, 200 127–33, 134, 142, 144–9,
Laplanche, Jean, 50–1, 71, 102 151–5, 158–9, 161–2, 163n,
Levinas, Emmanuel, 1, 2, 4, 15–16, 170, 174–7, 182, 184–6,
19–20, 22–5, 27–32, 45–6, 50, 207–12, 214–15
53, 57–8, 60, 67, 70–1, 101,
119, 122–3, 127, 136, 182, obligation, 2, 9, 45, 48–9, 60–1,
208 67, 69, 92, 96, 102, 107, 123,
Butler’s ‘Levinasian’ turn, 4, 5, 125–8, 134–6, 138n, 182–4
15–16, 32, 53 ontology, 10, 20–1, 41, 47–8, 50,
communication, 6, 16–17, 27–32 55, 58, 60, 72–3, 99, 103, 123,
face, the, 15, 19–20, 45–6, 123, 127–8, 132, 134, 169–70, 184,
130, 136 188n, 194, 215
Index 225
subjection, 10, 98, 102, 106, 157–8, violence, 43–7, 69, 72, 79, 91–2,
193–206 99–100, 103–5, 108–9, 120,
subjectivation, 22, 201, 206 130, 144–5, 148, 152, 163n
subjectivity see subject ethical violence see ethics
Subjects of Desire, 4, 8, 71, 95–8 normative violence, 79, 152,
substitutability, 7, 42, 50, 58–9, 212–13
61 vulnerability, 6–7, 41–9, 59–61, 65,
subversion, 9, 31, 82, 141–2, 146, 67–70, 78, 80–1, 92, 97–9, 101,
153, 158, 160–2, 163n 103, 106, 121, 123, 145, 157,
survival, 17–20, 26, 30, 34n, 37n, 162, 163n, 167–8, 171–3, 175,
102, 111n, 141, 146, 157–61, 179, 181, 183–6, 200
171
cultural viability, 18 Walker, Drew, 201
war, 8, 46–7, 68–9, 72, 91, 95–6,
Thiem, Annika, 2, 4, 5 103–5, 107, 130, 132, 148
translation, 30–1, 121, 130, War on Terror, 99, 104, 112n, 120
137 West, Cornell, 193, 215
trauma, 95, 97–8, 105–6 Women of Zimbabwe Arise
(WOZA), 159–60
Undoing Gender, 18–20, 81, 102,
106–7, 145, 170, 175 Young, Iris Marion, 29
US national anthem, 118, 126–7,
137 Žižek, Slavoj, 5