The Political Philosophy of Judith Butler

Birgit Schippers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781135913205
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Judith Butler can justifiably be described as one of the major critical thinkers of our time. While she is best-known for her interventions into feminist debates on gender, sexuality and feminist politics, her focus in recent years has broadened to encompass some of the most pertinent topics of interest to contemporary political philosophy.

Drawing on Butler's deconstructive reading of the key categories and concepts of political thought, Birgit Schippers expounds and advocates her challenge to the conceptual binaries that pervade modern political discourse. Using examples and case studies like the West's intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in relation to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Schippers demonstrates how Butler's philosophically informed engagement with pressing political issues of our time elucidates our understanding of topics such as immigration and multiculturalism, sovereignty, or the prospect for new forms of cohabitation and citizenship beyond and across national boundaries.

A detailed exposition and analysis of Butler's recent ideas, championing her efforts at articulating the possibilities for radical politics and ethical life in an era of global interdependence, this book makes an makes an important contribution to the emerging field of international political philosophy.

1
The Politics of Subject Formation

There is, as it were, a sociality at the basis of the “I” and its infinitude from which one cannot—and ought not to escape.

(Giving an Account of Oneself)

Considering the import of Gender Trouble to the reception of Butler’s oeuvre, it is not surprising that the concept of performativity, which features so prominently in her book, is the idea most widely associated with her writings. Clearly, it is not possible to get past the notion of performativity if we want to make sense of Butler’s ideas.¹ However, in this chapter, I approach Butler’s contribution to political philosophy from a different angle: I want to suggest that her ideas and concepts furnish us with an account that conceives of the subject as ek-static, dispossessed, and relational.² Given the wide range of sources that inform Butler’s account of the subject, such foregrounding of the concepts of ek-stasis, relationality, and dispossession require some justification. As is well known, Butler offers her readers a complex narrative of subject constitution, of how the subject might come ‘to be’. She draws on existential-phenomenological narratives of becoming and doing; on accounts of subjection that, in turn, develop Foucauldian accounts of power and norms, Freudian concepts of internalization, identification, and melancholia, and Althusser’s concept of interpellation. Equally significant are Hegel’s discussion of sociality; Spinoza’s insistence on persistence; and Levinas’s concept of alterity. These sources should not be read as distinct strands or elements of Butler’s political philosophy of the subject; rather, they form complex relationships that contribute to her distinctive account of the subject.

For Butler, ‘being’ remains an unruly category, troublesome in the present and always comported towards the future and thus towards new possibilities of being. This renewed attention to the notion of ek-stasis³ and to conceptions of relationality, dispossession, dependency, and liveability (see also Chapter 2), carries existential weight: it puts forward a conception of the subject-human that anchors sheer physical survival and material bodily needs in a complex relationship to alterity. It also reformulates the idea of autonomy by undercutting those conceptions of the self that deny a fundamental dependency on alterity; in their place, Butler articulates autonomy in the context of relationality and ethico-political obligations towards others.

My aim in this chapter is to outline the steps of this development. To gain purchase on Butler’s political philosophy, I begin by considering the relationship between desire and ek-stasis; helping me to unpack this relationship further is Butler’s deployment of Spinoza and the development of his ideas in the work of Hegel. However, my concern in this chapter is not with the plausibility or originality of Butler’s respective readings of either Spinoza or Hegel; rather, my interest lies with the way that she deploys their ideas to develop her account of the subject-human. The consideration of ek-stasis and desire will be followed by an analysis of Butler’s contribution to contemporary discourses on recognition. As I already have suggested, aiding Butler’s overall undertaking into the question of the subject-human and of recognition are the ideas of the German philosopher Hegel, whose writings have significantly influenced her work. I want to explore the following question: if, as Butler asserts in Subjects of Desire ([1987] 1999), Hegel speaks to twentieth-century French philosophy, how does Butler speak to contemporary political philosophy? In other words, how does her philosophy relate to the political conditions and problems of this century?⁴ My discussion makes two moves: working through her account of desire, ek-stasis, and recognition, I present Butler’s conception of the subject as grounded in relationality. How such ecstatic relationality connects with her conception of ethics and ontology occupies me in the second part of this chapter. This latter aspect has been the subject of considerable discontent in sections of the critical commentary, pertaining to the question of whether Butler’s analysis privileges transcendental conceptions over social and historical discussion. I want to suggest that her account of subject formation is simultaneously anchored in existential questions as well as in contingent structures of power.

Desire, Ecstasy, Relationality

Much recent attention has been given to the significance of power and norms in Butler’s account of the subject and in her treatment of violence (see my discussion in Chapter 3; see also Chambers 2007; Lloyd 2007). In brief, norms are said to provide a structure of intelligibility that allows the emerging subject to assume a recognized and recognizable position within a given cultural framework. Crucially, if norms facilitate the emergence of the subject, they also, paradoxically, generate what Chambers (2007) calls ‘normative violence’. That is, norms simultaneously engender and impede possibilities of living one’s life differently, outside, or beside existing structures of intelligibility.⁵ In doing so, they subject those who do not comply with or conform to existing standards of intelligibility to violence. Butler famously illustrates such normative operation of violence in the constitution of the subject with respect to gender, specifically transgender and intersex (see Butler 1990; see also Butler 2004a), while her more recent work stresses the operation of violence in the constitution and regulation of religious and racialized subjectivities (see Butler 2004b, 2009a, 2012a). I attend to this aspect of her work in the next chapter. Here I am concerned with a different route into the problematic of the subject, which has obtained renewed weight in her recent texts: this is the route travelled, though never completed, along desire and ek-stasis. I should highlight that this is not a new problematic for Butler. In fact, some of her earliest published work draws on the ek-static structure, or reality of human beings, which Butler derives from her reading of Sartre, and which she deploys within the context of providing a phenomenological account of corporeal existence (see Butler 1986, 1987). What interests me here, and what I regard as worthy of attention, is the emphasis she places on the role of alterity and relationality in the generation of the subject. It is this facet of her account of subjectification that I want to unravel.

Although desire evokes notions of physical or sensual appetite, of craving and longing, even of sexual lust, such a formula does not fully capture how philosophy has conceived of desire. Always more than physical passion, it denotes the idea that human beings engage with the world around them, with the objects they find and create, but also with other human beings and their desires. In doing so, desire underpins an integral element of philosophical enquiry, serving the pursuit of knowledge. It is also construed as philosophy’s other: as Butler suggests, ‘[b]ecause philosophers cannot obliterate desire, they must formulate strategies to silence or control it’ (SD, 2). As I indicate in the next section, there is some debate regarding the ontological status of desire: following Foucault, desire is formed by power, and our desires are shaped and regulated in distinctive ways, in conformity with hegemonic ideas of subjectivity. For now, I want to remain with Butler’s pursuit of her discussion of desire within the context of her engagement with Hegel and Hegelian ideas. Although she is, rightly, regarded as a philosopher in the tradition of Hegel, it is essential to stress the import of the seventeenth century Dutch philosopher Spinoza to her (and indeed Hegel’s) thinking on desire, and it is to this aspect that I turn now.

As I already intimated, while the Hegelian, and indeed Foucauldian, Derridean, and Freudian roots of Butler’s political thought are well documented, less notice has been paid to her use of Spinoza.⁶ Yet her reading of Spinoza underpins key aspects of her current work. As she claims in Undoing Gender, ‘the Spinozan conatus remains at the core of my own work’ (UG, 198; italics in original). Attention to Spinoza already surfaces in Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France ([1987] 1999), and it informs her discussion in The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (1997b), but I want to draw on a recent essay that engages directly with aspects of Spinoza’s ethics and that puts forward key themes of Butler’s work, leading to an articulation of the idea of relationality. In ‘The Desire to Live: Spinoza’s Ethics under Pressure’ (2006c), Butler ponders Spinoza’s claim that the desire to live or persist is the desire to persevere in one’s being, regarded as the foundation of all desire. On the surface, such assertion invites readings that stress one’s individualistic stake in one’s own self-preservation. Butler, however, is at pains to read Spinoza for what she terms ‘possibilities for social ethics’ (111). These, according to Butler, draw on the social dimension of the desire to live, and they anchor desire in our responsibility for others. Two elements lie at the heart of this interpretation: her insistence on the plural dimensions of desire and life, and her claim, undeveloped in this essay, of the ek-static structure of subjectivity.

The assertion of sociality is central to Butler’s reading of Spinoza. With this claim she challenges not just accusations of Spinoza’s alleged individualistic streak, but, rather, she develops a theme that is key to her own work: the thesis that sociality sits at the heart of being, in fact, that sociality precedes being and the emerging sense of self.⁷ This theme underpins her discussions in Undoing Gender (2004a) and in Giving an Account of Oneself (2005), where Butler attends to questions of ethics, but for now I want to remain with the discussion of desire. As Butler (2006c) argues, although desire presupposes an ‘I’, this ‘I’ is dependent upon others who facilitate the ‘I’s’ desire in the first place. Thus, if desire, and with it, life, depend upon sociality, then desire can only ever occur under conditions of sociality and plurality, producing a ‘deconstitution of singularity’ (126) that comports the ‘I’ beyond itself. Here we have arrived at the notion of ek-stasis, which she borrows from Hegel and the existential-phenomenological tradition (see Butler 1986, 1987), and which is one of Butler’s most significant ways of capturing the concept of the subject as dispossessed yet relational.⁸ Reflecting on the role of the body in its engagement with the world, Butler (1986) contends that ‘the body is a mode of desire… a being comported beyond itself, sustaining a necessary reference to the world’; further, building on Sartre, because humans strive after possibilities not realized or not realizable, they are ‘“beyond” themselves. This ek-static reality of human beings is… a corporeal experience’ (38; italics in original).

As I intimated, Butler introduces the concept of ek-stasis into her discussion as early as 1986, but here I want to draw on one of her books from 2004, Undoing Gender, where Butler gives this concept renewed attention. Pondering the question of whose lives matter, whose lives are recognized as having been lived, and whose lives are grievable (see also Chapters 2 and 3), Butler positions the subject as relational, thereby undercutting any claims to autonomy that the subject may express. In radicalized fashion, Butler suggests that the language of autonomy is misleading, since what lies at the heart of the subject is a mode of dispossession, or being beside oneself. This ‘ethical enmeshment’ (UG, 25) has consequences for the life of the subject, because it makes us vulnerable to the actions of others, including those actions that are violent (see my discussion below and Chapter 3). The language Butler uses to articulate such vulnerability is indicative of her claim regarding the openness of the subject: she talks about ‘being dispossessed’, ‘being undone’, ‘being beside oneself’, ‘given over to the other’, ‘being a porous boundary’, and ‘being outside myself’. Such modes of dispossession, however, do not ring the death of the subject; rather, as Butler suggests, ‘the ec-static character of our existence is essential to the possibility of persisting as human’ (UG, 33; italics in original). With the notion of ek-stasis, which emerges initially via her theory of the subject, Butler formulates a notion of the subject as dependent upon, or given over to an other. In Undoing Gender (2004a), this idea is captured with her expression of ‘being undone’: this means that the connection, or ties, we have with others constitutes our sense of self (UG, 18). And while, as I want to suggest, this concept has intrinsic value as the foundation for a conception of ethics, it can be put to use in the formulation of an international political theory that challenges conceptions of sovereignty, that is orientated, both ethically and politically, towards conditions of otherness, and that can begin to conceive of community as a project of cohabitation, responsibility, and liveability. Moreover, it is grounded in conceptions of grievability and precariousness that add force to the ethico-political ambition of Butler’s wider political thought. Dispossession further underwrites the paradoxical nature of the subject. But while this paradox was initially formulated exclusively in relation to subjection to norms (see Butler 1997b), it is now developed in relation to the existence of the other.

The subject’s relationality and sociality portend its vulnerability to the actions of known and unknown others. This claim implies that ethical obligations towards the other occur ‘under pressure’ (Butler 2006c, 127): I am comported towards the other, possibly against my wishes. In fact, such comportment constitutes the ‘I’, it deconstitutes singularity and disorientates the subject. This is a central theme in Butler’s recent work that deserves separate attention in a later section of this chapter (see also Chapter 2). Yet sociality also enables forms of community that sustain the subject. Crucially, Butler is at pains to stress two aspects: first, community does not presuppose communitarian forms of collective life, understood as the unity or singularity of the group. Second, modes of dispossession and ethical obligation transcend national boundaries, and must therefore consider international or global conditions of relationality and interdependence, including the creation of global communities and global forms of solidarity (see Chapters 4 and 5). This claim is central to her overall argument, and it is worth quoting her at length (see also Chapter 3):

[I]f my survivability depends on a relation… to a “you”… without whom I cannot exist, then my existence is not mine alone, but is to be found outside myself, in this set of relations that precede and exceed the boundaries of who I am. If I seek to preserve my life, it is not only because I seek to preserve my own, but because who “I” am is nothing without your life, and life itself has to be rethought as this complex, passionate, antagonistic and necessary set of relations to others.… If I survive, it is only because my life is nothing without the life that exceeds me, that refers to some indexical you, without whom I cannot be.

(FW, 44)

By insisting on an account of ek-static subjectivity, Butler further foregrounds the idea of the decentred subject. Under what conditions such ek-static subject obtains recognition will be explored in the next section, but before I do so, I want to identify a key question that should be put to Butler’s account of ek-static subjectivity: what kind of norms, or what operation of power is at play in the constitution of the ek-static subject? This question, I suggest, is indeed central to the appraisal of Butler’s political philosophy.

The Politics of Recognition

While we may all experience, or rather undergo, desire, we do not do so in isolation; rather, following Hegel, our desire clashes with the desire of an other, culminating in a struggle for recognition that, potentially, provides us with a sense of self. Thus, the significance of the concept of desire for modern philosophy is at least twofold: for one, it brings corporeality, antagonism, and passion into politics, while it also establishes sociality as a fundamental feature of politics. Importantly, though, desire is more than a private embrace of two desiring individuals who come to recognize one another. Rather, it has ramifications for our understanding of rights, citizenship, and identity. In other words, what appear on the surface as existential needs, as physical or emotional cravings, have profound implications for politics, law, and the state. There is a caveat, though, and this point (essentially a Foucauldian insight) is stressed by Butler repeatedly: having one’s desire recognized does not release desire from regulation and normalization. As some scholars have pointed out, desire, recognition, and identity do not unfold outside time and space; they are not abstract categories. Rather, they obtain their meaning in concrete contexts, framed by norms, by dominant views that determine who deserves recognition and who does...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The Politics of Subject Formation
• 2 The Political Philosophy of the Human
• 3 The Paradox of Violence
• 4 Towards a Post-secular World?
• 5 Undoing the State? Radical Politics beyond Sovereignty
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index