Selfhood through Dispossession

from J. Aaron Simmons’ review of Judith Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself, JCRT 7.2, Spring 2006, pp. 85-87:

Counter to the predominant tradition in ethical theory — which claims that it is on the basis of a self-sufficient and free subject that we are able to assign agency, expect responsibility, and exact punishment for moral failure — [Judith] Butler argues that “what we often consider to be ethical ‘failure’ may well have an ethical valence and importance that has not been rightly adjudicated by those who too quickly equate poststructuralism with moral nihilism.” If Butler is right, then the basis for morality is not self-identity, but the exposure to others; not self-recursion, but constitutive incompleteness; not a final subjective narrative, but the continual desire and attempt to not close down the task of narrative itself.

…sociality, as Butler demonstrates drawing upon the work of Adriana Caverero, need neither be primarily conceived according to “the model of reciprocal recognition” (Hegel) nor the “view of life [that is] essentially bound up with destruction and suffering” (Nietzsche). Rather, selfhood is possible only as a dispossession from oneself in relation to the other. I am not my own and this fact is what lies behind the call to give an account of myself in the first place. “It is only in dispossession that I can and do given any account of myself,” Butler writes. Crucially, this constitutive sociality is not a problem for ethics, but the very wellspring from which problems can be viewed as ethical. As Butler asks in order to then answer in the affirmative, “is the relationality that conditions and binds this ’self’ not, precisely, an indispensable resource for ethics?”

Opacity as an ethical resource? Seeming ethical failure as the very strength of the ethical relationship? Butler suggests that because there is no possibility of a complete account of oneself, we begin to see the way in which a “new sense of ethics” can emerge from the “willingness to acknowledge the limits of acknowledgement itself.” Humility would be the cornerstone of this new sense of ethics and constant critique would be the walls that are built upon it. The project of recognition would become a continual ethico-political task and one that we constantly have to renegotiate and repeat. Butler’s point here is remarkably profound in a world in which technology has made other people from around the world “present” in a seemingly immediate way. This immediacy, Butler reminds us, is always itself mediated by the social norms and linguistic frameworks in which we “see” the other person. Butler is not too far from Walter Lippmann’s point that we do not first see and then define, but instead “we define first and then we see.” Prior definition is inescapable, but constantly revisable. Butler’s claim is that the attempt to critique our institutions and our preconceptions ought not to be conducted with the arrogance of assuming that we could actually “see” the other as she is. Instead, Butler argues, we ought to begin with the humbling realization that recognition itself presupposes structures that cover the singularity of the other we are trying to “see.”

Going beyond Adorno and Foucault, Butler draws on Levinas’s notion of “preontological” relationality and Laplanche’s psychoanalytic description of childhood development in order to support the way in which “the ‘I’ cannot give a final or adequate account of itself because it cannot return to the scene of address by which it is inaugurated.” Although in different ways, Levinas and Laplanche both describe the way in which the “I” emerges from the “primary experience of having been given over from the start.” The conclusion that Butler draws from her engagement will all four of these thinkers is that “the very meaning of responsibility must be rethought on the basis of this [self] limitation; it cannot be tied to the conceit of a self fully transparent to itself.” Further, she continues on to say that “my very formation implicates the other in me… my own foreignness to myself is, paradoxically, the source of my ethical connection with others.” Butler thus proposes that humility is an expression of self-opacity, recognition is a task because of the other’s opacity, and responsibility is the reality of the relation between the two.