Giving an Account of Oneself

Judith Butler

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780823225040, 9780823225033
• eBook ISBN: 9780823225057
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory

What does it mean to lead a moral life?In her first extended study of moral philosophy, Judith Butler offers a provocative outline for a new ethical practice—one responsive to the need for critical autonomy and grounded in a new sense of the human subject.Butler takes as her starting point one's ability to answer the questions "What have I done?" and "What ought I to do?" She shows that these question can be answered only by asking a prior question, "Who is this 'I' who is under an obligation to give an account of itself and to act in certain ways?" Because I find that I cannot give an account of myself without accounting for the social conditions under which I emerge, ethical reflection requires a turn to social theory.In three powerfully crafted and lucidly written chapters, Butler demonstrates how difficult it is to give an account of oneself, and how this lack of self-transparency and narratibility is crucial to an ethical understanding of the human. In brilliant dialogue with Adorno, Levinas, Foucault, and other thinkers, she eloquently argues the limits, possibilities, and dangers of contemporary ethical thought.Butler offers a critique of the moral self, arguing that the transparent, rational, and continuous ethical subject is an impossible construct that seeks to deny the specificity of what it is to be human. We can know ourselves only incompletely, and only in relation to a broader social world that has always preceded us and already shaped us in ways we cannot grasp. If inevitably we are partially opaque to ourselves, how can giving an account of ourselves define the ethical act? And doesn't an ethical system that holds us impossibly accountable for full self-knowledge and self-consistency inflict a kind of psychic violence, leading to a culture of self-beratement and cruelty? How does the turn to social theory offer us a chance to understand the specifically social character of our own unknowingness about ourselves?In this invaluable book, by recasting ethics as a project in which being ethical means becoming critical of norms under which we are asked to act, but which we can never fully choose, Butler illuminates what it means for us as "fallible creatures" to create and share an ethics of vulnerability, humility, and ethical responsiveness.

THREE
Responsibility

The corporeality of one’s own body signifies, as sensibility itself, a knot or denouement of being… a knot that cannot be undone.

—Levinas, Otherwise than Being

So, according to the kind of theory I have been pursuing here, what will responsibility look like? Haven’t we, by insisting on something non-narrativizable, limited the degree to which we might hold ourselves or others accountable for their actions? I want to suggest that the very meaning of responsibility must be rethought on the basis of this limitation; it cannot be tied to the conceit of a self fully transparent to itself.1 Indeed, to take responsibility for oneself is to avow the limits of any self-understanding, and to establish these limits not only as a condition for the subject but as the predicament of the human community. I am not altogether out of the loop of the Enlightenment if I say, as I do, that reason’s limit is the sign of our humanity. It might even be a legacy of Kant to say so. My account of myself breaks down, and surely for a reason, but that does not mean that I can supply all the reasons that would make my account whole. Reasons course through me that I cannot fully recuperate, that remain enigmatic, that abide with me as my own familiar alterity, my own private, or not so private, opacity. I speak as an “I,” but do not make the mistake of thinking that I know precisely all that I am doing when I speak in that way. I find that my very formation implicates the other in me, that my own foreignness to myself is, paradoxically, the source of my ethical connection with others. Do I need to know myself in order to act responsibly in social relations? Surely, to a certain extent, yes. But is there an ethical valence to my unknowingness? If I am wounded, I find that the wound testifies to the fact that I am impressionable, given over to the other in ways that I cannot fully predict or control. I cannot think the question of responsibility alone, in isolation from the other. If I do, I have taken myself out of the mode of address (being addressed as well as addressing the other) in which the problem of responsibility first emerges.

This is not to say that one cannot be addressed in a harmful way. Or that being addressed is not sometimes traumatic. For Laplanche, the primary address overwhelms: It cannot be interpreted or understood. It is the primary experience of trauma. To be addressed carries with it a trauma, resonates with the traumatic, and yet this trauma can be experienced only belatedly through a second occurrence. Another word comes our way, a blow, an address or naming that suddenly, inexplicably slaughters, even as one lives on, strangely, as this slaughtered being, speaking away.

Laplanche and Levinas: The Primacy of the Other

Levinas speaks of the subjectivity of the subject. If one wishes to use this word—why? But why not?—one ought perhaps to speak of a subjectivity without a subject: the wounded space, the hurt of the dying, the already dead body which no one could ever own, or ever say of it, I, my body.

—Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster

Given that we are vulnerable to the address of others in ways that we cannot fully control, no more than we can control the sphere of language, does this mean that we are without agency and without responsibility? For Levinas, who separates the claim of responsibility from the possibility of agency, responsibility emerges as a consequence of being subject to the unwilled address of the other. This is part of what he means when he claims, maddeningly, that persecution creates a responsibility for the persecuted. Most people recoil in horror when they first hear this kind of statement, but let us consider carefully what it does and does not mean. It does not mean that I can trace the acts of persecution I have suffered to deeds I have performed, that it therefore follows that I have brought persecution on myself, and that it is only a matter of finding the acts I performed, but disavowed. No, persecution is precisely what happens without the warrant of any deed of my own. And it returns us not to our acts and choices but to the region of existence that is radically unwilled, the primary, inaugurating impingement on me by the Other, one that happens to me, paradoxically, in advance of my formation as a “me” or, rather, as the instrument of that first formation of myself in the accusative case.

Levinas considers the accusative inauguration of the moi—the “me”—in both its grammatical and ethical senses. Only through a certain accusation does the “me” emerge. In this sense, paradoxically, he is aligned with Nietzsche, for whom the accusation of guilt produces the possibility of a subject. For Nietzsche, the subject emerges through a retroactive understanding of itself as the cause of an injury and proceeds to punish itself, thus spawning a reflexivity in which the “I” first treats itself as an object, a “me.” For Levinas, though, responsibility does not emerge as self-preoccupation or self-beratement, and it requires recourse to an understanding of the ethical relation to the Other that does not rely on causal links between a doer and a deed.

In Otherwise than Being, Levinas makes clear that, before we can speak about a self who is capable of choice, we must first consider how that self is formed. This formation takes place, in his words, “outside of being [essence].” Indeed, the sphere in which the subject is said to emerge is “preontological” in the sense that the phenomenal world of persons and things becomes available only after a self has been formed as an effect of a primary impingement. We cannot ask after the “where” or “when” of this primary scene, since it precedes and even conditions the spatio-temporal coordinates that circumscribe the ontological domain. To describe this scene is to take leave of the descriptive field in which a “self” is formed and bounded in one place and time and considers its “objects” and “others” in their locatedness elsewhere. The possibility of this epistemological encounter presumes that the self and its object world have already been constituted, but such an encounter fails to inquire into the mechanism of that constitution. Levinas’s concept of the preontological is designed to address this problem.

For Levinas, no “ego” or moi is inaugurated by its own acts, which means that he fully disputes the existential account proffered by Sartre: “prior to the ego taking a decision, the outside of being, where the Ego arises or is accused, is necessary.” The sense of “accusation” here will become available to us soon, but let us consider how Levinas explains this primary moment or scene. The ego arises, he tells us:

through an unlimited susceptibility, anarchical and without assumption, which, unlike the susceptibility of matter determined by a cause, is overdetermined by a valuing. The birth of the Ego in a gnawing remorse, which is precisely a withdrawing into oneself; this is the absolute recurrence of substitution. The condition, or non-condition, of the Self is not originally an auto-affection presupposing the Ego but is precisely an affection by the Other, an anarchic traumatism [an-archic, without principle, and so assuredly, enigmatic, that for which no clear cause can be given], this side of auto-affection and self-identification, a traumatism of responsibility and not causality.2

We might accept Levinas’s claim that the primary trauma emerges through an initial impingement by the Other—surely that is Laplanche’s view—without casting this impingement as accusation. Why does this traumatism, this affection by the Other, arrive for Levinas in the form of an accusation and a persecution? When he writes that “persecution is the precise moment where the subject is reached or touched without the mediation of the logos” (S, 93), he is referring once again to this “preontological” scene in which the subject is inaugurated, as it were, through a persecutory “reach” or “touch” that works without consciousness, without cause, and according to no principle. We have to ask why this is understood as persecution or, rather, what Levinas is trying to tell us about what persecution is. A passive relation to other beings precedes the formation of the ego or the moi or, put slightly differently, becomes the instrument through which that formation takes place. A formation in passivity, then, constitutes the prehistory of the subject, instating an ego as object, acted on by others, prior to any possibility of its own acting. This scene is persecutory because it is unwilled and unchosen. It is a way of being acted on prior to the possibility of acting oneself or in one’s own name.

Just as Laplanche warns us that the story he tells about primary repression, the formation of drives and the “I,” has to be speculative, so Levinas cautions us against thinking we can find a narrative form for this preontological beginning. Levinas writes, “The upsurge of the oneself in persecution, the anarchic passivity of substitution, is not some event whose history we might recount, but a conjunction which describes the ego… subject to being, subject to every being” (S, 90). This passivity, what Levinas calls “a passivity before passivity,” has to be understood not as the opposite of activity but as the precondition for the active-passive distinction as it arises in grammar and in everyday descriptions of interactions within the established field of ontology. What cross-cuts this field of ontology synchronically is the preontological condition of a passivity for which no conversion into its opposite is possible. To understand this, we must think of a susceptibility to others that is unwilled, unchosen, that is a condition of our responsiveness to others, even a condition of our responsibility for them. It means, among other things, that this susceptibility designates a nonfreedom and, paradoxically, it is on the basis of this susceptibility over which we have no choice that we become responsible for others.

Of course, it is not easy at first to understand how Levinas moves from the claim that humans have toward others a radically unchosen “preontological” susceptibility to the claim that this susceptibility forms the basis of our responsibility toward others. He admits quite clearly that this primary susceptibility is a “persecution” precisely because it is unwilled, because we are radically subject to another’s action upon us, and because there is no possibility of replacing this susceptibility with an act of will or an exercise of freedom. We are used to thinking that we can be responsible only for that which we have done, that which can be traced to our intentions, our deeds. Levinas explicitly rejects this view, claiming that tethering responsibility to freedom is an error. I become responsible by virtue of what is done to me, but I do not become responsible for what is done to me if by “responsibility” we mean blaming myself for the outrages done to me. On the contrary, I am not primarily responsible by virtue of my actions, but by virtue of the relation to the Other that is established at the level of my primary and irreversible susceptibility, my passivity prior to any possibility of action or choice.

Levinas explains that responsibility in this instance is neither a kind of self-beratement nor a grandiose concept of my own actions as the sole causal effect on others. Rather, my capacity to be acted upon implicates me in a relation of responsibility. This happens by way of what Levinas calls “substitution,” whereby the “I” is understood as beset by an Other, an alterity, from the start. He writes,

here it is not a question of humiliating oneself, as if suffering were in itself… a magical power of atonement. But because, in suffering, in the original traumatism and return to self, where I am responsible for what I did not will, absolutely responsible for the persecution I undergo, outrage is done to me. (S, 90)

He goes on to describe the self to whom outrage is done as backed up “to the point of being substituted for all that drives you into this non-Place” (S, 90). Something drives me that is not me, and the “me” arises precisely in the experience of, and as the effect of, being driven in this way. The absolute passivity of “being driven” is a kind of persecution and outrage, not because I am treated badly, but because I am treated unilaterally; the pre-emergent “I” that I am is nothing more at this point than a radical susceptibility subject to impingement by the Other. If I become responsible only through being acted on by an Other, that is because the “I” first comes into being as a “me” through being acted upon by an Other, and this primary impingement is already and from the start an ethical interpellation.

How does substitution come into the picture? It would seem that what persecutes me comes to substitute for the “I.” That which persecutes me brings me into being, acts upon me, and so prompts me, animates me into ontology at the moment of persecution. This suggests not only that I am acted upon unilaterally from the outside but that this “acting upon” inaugurates a sense of me that is, from the outset, a sense of the Other. I am acted on as the accusative object of the Other’s action, and my self first takes form within that accusation. The form that persecution takes is substitution itself: something places itself in my place, and an “I” emerges who can understand its place in no other way than as this place already occupied by another. In the beginning, then, I am not only persecuted but besieged, occupied.

If something substitutes for me or takes my place, that means neither that it comes to exist where I once was, nor that I no longer am, nor that I have been resolved into nothingness by virtue of being replaced in some way. Rather, substitution implies that an irreducible transitivity, substitution, which is no single act, is happening all the time (OB, 117). Whereas “persecution” suggests that something acts on me from the outside, ‘substitution’ suggests that something takes my place or, better, is always in the process of taking my place. “Being held hostage” implies that something encircles me, impinging in a way that does not let me get free. It even raises the possibility that there may be a ransom for me that someone somewhere must pay (but unfortunately, in a Kafkaesque vein, that person no longer exists or the currency at one’s disposal has become obsolete).

It is important to note here that Levinas is not saying that primary relations are abusive or terrible; he is simply saying that at the most primary level we are acted upon by others in ways over which we have no say, and that this passivity, susceptibility, and condition of being impinged upon inaugurate who we are. Levinas’s references to subject formation do not refer to a childhood (Laplanche seems right that childhood would not factor for Levinas) and is given no diachronic exposition; the condition is, rather, understood as synchronic and infinitely recurring.

Most importantly, this condition of being impinged upon is also an “address” of a certain kind. One can argue that it is the voice of no one, the voice of a God, understood as infinite and preontological, that makes itself known in the “face” of the Other. That would surely conform to many of Levinas’s own claims about the primary address. For our purposes, however, we will treat the Other in Levinas as belonging to an idealized dyadic structure of social life. The other’s actions “address” me in the sense that those actions belong to an Other who is irreducible, whose “face” makes an ethical demand upon me. We might say, “even the Other who brutalizes me has a face,” and that would capture the difficulty of remaining ethically responsive to those who do injury to us. For Levinas, however, the demand is even greater: “precisely the Other who persecutes me has a face.” Moreover, the face is turned toward me, individuating me through its address. Whereas the Other’s action upon me (re)in-augurates me through substitutability, the Other’s face, we might say, addresses me in a way that is singular, irreducible, and irreplaceable. Thus responsibility emerges not with the “I” but with the accusative “me”: “Who finally takes on the suffering of others, if not the being who says, ‘Me’ [Moi]?’”3

It makes sense to assume that this primary susceptibility to the action and the face of the other, the full ambivalence of an unwanted address, is what constitutes our exposure to injury and our responsibility for the Other. This susceptibility is an ethical resource precisely because it establishes our vulnerability or exposure to what Levinas calls “wounds and outrages.” These feelings are, in his view, “proper to responsibility itself.” Importantly, the condition of substitution that brings us into being nevertheless establishes us as singular and irreplaceable in relation to the ethical demand placed upon us by others: “the oneself is provoked as irreplaceable, as devoted to the others, without being able to resign, and thus as incarnated in order to offer itself, to suffer and to give“(OB, 105).

If it were not for this exposure to outrage, we could not respond to the demand to assume responsibility for the Other. It is important to remember that our ordinary way of thinking about responsibility is altered in Levinas’s formulation. We do not take responsibility for the Other’s acts as if we authored those acts. On the contrary, we affirm the unfreedom at the heart of our relations. I cannot disavow my relation to the Other, regardless of what the Other does, regardless of what I might will. Indeed, responsibility is not a matter of cultivating a will, but of making use of an unwilled susceptibility as a resource for becoming responsive to the Other. Whatever the Other has done, the Other still makes an ethical demand upon me, has a “face” to which I am obligated to respond—meaning that I am, as it were, precluded from revenge by virtue of a relation I never chose.

It is, in some ways, an outrage to be ethically responsible for one whom one does not choose. Here, however, Levinas draws attention to lines of responsibility that precede and subtend any possible choice. There are situations in which responding to the “face” of the other feels horrible, impossible, and where the desire for murderous revenge feels overwhelming. But the primary and unwilled relation to the Other demands that we desist from both a voluntarism and an impulsive aggression grounded in the self-preservative aims of egoism. The “face” thus communicates an enormous prohibition against aggression directed toward the persecutor. In “Ethics and Spirit,” Levinas writes:

The face, for its part, is inviolable; those eyes, which are absolutely without protection, the most naked part of the human body, nonetheless offer an absolute resistance to possession, an absolute resistance in which the temptation to murder is inscribed.… The Other is the only being that one can be tempted to kill. This temptation to murder and this impossibility of murder constitute the very vision of the face. To see a face is already to hear “You shall not kill,” and to hear “You shall not kill” is to hear “social justice.” (DF, 8)

If “persecution” by the Other refers to the range of actions that are unilaterally imposed upon us without our will, the term takes on a more literal meaning for Levinas when he speaks of injuries and, finally, of the Nazi genocide. Levinas writes, amazingly, that “in the trauma of persecution” the ethical consists in “pass[ing] from the outrage undergone to the responsibility for the persecutor… from suffering to expiation for the other” (OB, 111). Responsibility thus arises as a demand upon the persecuted, and its central dilemma is whether or not one may kill in response to persecution. It is, we might say, the limit case of the prohibition against killing, the condition under which its justification would seem most reasonable. In 1971, Levinas reflects upon the meaning that the Holocaust has for his reflections on persecution and responsibility. He is surely aware that to derive responsibility from persecution echoes perilously with those who would blame the Jews and other victims of the Nazi genocide for their fates. Levinas clearly rejects this view. He does, however, establish persecution as a certain kind of ethical demand and opportunity. He situates the particular nexus of persecution and responsibility at th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• ABBREVIATIONS
• ONE An Account of Oneself
• TWO Against Ethical Violence
• THREE Responsibility
• NOTES
• INDEX