Senses of the Subject

Judith Butler

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780823264674, 9780823264667
• eBook ISBN: 9780823264681
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

This book brings together a group of Judith Butler's philosophical essays written over two decades that elaborate her reflections on the roles of the passions in subject formation through an engagement with Hegel, Kierkegaard, Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche, Merleau-Ponty, Freud, Irigaray, and Fanon. Drawing on her early work on Hegelian desire and her subsequent reflections on the psychic life of power and the possibility of self-narration, this book considers how passions such as desire, rage, love, and grief are bound up with becoming a subject within specific historical fields of power.Butler shows in different philosophical contexts how the self that seeks to make itself finds itself already affected and formed against its will by social and discursive powers. And yet, agency and action are not necessarily nullified by this primary impingement. Primary sense impressions register this dual situation of being acted on and acting, countering the idea that acting requires one to overcome the situation of being affected by others and the linguistic and social world. This dual structure of sense sheds light on the desire to live, the practice and peril of grieving, embodied resistance, love, and modes of enthrallment and dispossession. Working with theories of embodiment, desire, and relationality in conversation with philosophers as diverse as Hegel, Spinoza, Descartes, Merleau-Ponty, Freud, and Fanon, Butler reanimates and revises her basic propositions concerning the constitution and deconstitution of the subject within fields of power, taking up key issues of gender, sexuality, and race in several analyses. Taken together, these essays track the development of Butler's embodied account of ethical relations.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. Although most of these essays remain in their original form, small editorial changes were made to establish consistency and to correct any former errors.

2. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, in On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, ed. Walter Kaufmann, (New York: Vintage, 1967), 15.

3. Michel Foucault, “The Politics of Discourse,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 70–72.

4. See Judith Butler, “The ‘I’ and the ‘You,’ ” in Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 65–82.

5. After the discovery of thousands of infants and children suffering from sensory deprivation and general neglect in Romanian orphanages in 1989, the year the Ceausescu regime fell, a number of studies sought to link sensory deprivation with developmental and cognitive difficulties in children. Lack of touch and containment impedes development on many different levels, including primary responsiveness. This line of thought can be traced to John Bowlby and Renee Spitz’s work on abandoned and neglected children in the early years of psychoanalytic attachment theory in the late 1940s, but these views have taken different form in more recent studies. See Kathleen McCartney and Deborah Phillips, eds., Blackwell Handbook of Early Child Development (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), and Deborah A. Frank, et al., “Infants and Young Children in Orphanages: One View from Pediatrics and Child Psychiatry,” Pediatrics 97, no. 4 (April 1996): 569–78.

6. Levinas would say that that prior susceptibility is already the ethical. See Emmanuel Levinas, “Sensibility and Proximity,” in Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 61–98.

7. Denise Riley, “Malediction,” in Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 9–28. See also Riley, “Self-Description’s Linguistic Affect,” in Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2000), 22–55.

8. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Toward an Investigation),” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press), 1971.

9. Denise Riley, Am I That Name? Feminism and the Category of Women in History, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).

10. Jean Laplanche, “Implantation, Intromission,” in Essays on Otherness, trans. John Fletcher (London: Routledge, 1999), 133–37.

11. For an important set of reflections on philosophy and its ambivalent relation to the body and touch, in particular, see Jacques Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2005), 36–65; and Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, trans. Richard A. Rand, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). In both texts, “sense” and “sensation” are not givens that stay the same regardless of context, but are always not what they are, reflexive, intentional, and opened upon other surfaces and sensations and relations, including infinite ones. Nancy’s work is most interesting to read as linking Merleau-Ponty’s late reflections on touch with the work of Jacques Derrida.

“HOW CAN I DENY THAT THESE HANDS AND THIS BODY ARE MINE?”

This essay was first presented as an invited lecture at the American Philosophical Association Meetings in December 1997, in Philadelphia. It was represented in revised version for the “Culture and Materiality” conference at U.C. Davis in April, 1998 and subsequently was revised for publication in Qui Parle.

1. Excellent work reconsidering the relationship of language and materiality in sexual difference has been undertaken by Charles Shephardson, Debra Keates, and Katherine Rudolph.

2. Interestingly, and not without reason, suspended and inscrutable limbs reemerge in de Man’s essay “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant” in ways that suggest a metonymic relation to the problem that Descartes poses. For de Man, the body within the Third Critique is understood, if we can use that word, as prior to figuration and cognition. In Descartes, it emerges as a particular kind of figure, one that suspends the ontological status of the term and thus raises the question of any absolute separability between materiality and figuration, a distinction that de Man on some occasions tries to make as absolutely as possible.

3. “II me fallait entreprendre serieusement une fois en ma vie de me défaire de toutes les opinions que j’avais reçues … me défaire de toutes les opinions.” The text was originally published in Latin in 1641 in France, although Descartes was living in Holland at the time. Descartes apparently had reasons to fear the Dutch ministers reading the text, and so he had a friend of his oversee its publication in France. It did, however, appear the following year, 1642, in Amsterdam, and the second edition includes the objections and replies. This second edition is usually referred to as the Adam and Tannery version, and it was the basis for the French translations. One of those took place that same year by the Duc de Luynes, and Descartes approved the translation, which is to say that he subjected it to various corrections and revisions. It appeared in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Half Title
• Introduction
• “How Can I Deny That These Hands and This Body Are Mine?”
• Merleau-Ponty and the Touch of Malebranche
• The Desire to Live: Spinoza’s Ethics under Pressure
• To Sense What Is Living in the Other: Hegel’s Early Love
• Kierkegaard’s Speculative Despair
• Sexual Difference as a Question of Ethics: Alterities of the Flesh in Irigaray and Merleau-Ponty
• Violence, Nonviolence: Sartre on Fanon
• Notes
• Index