Unbecoming subjects [Elektronische Ressource] : subject formation and responsibility in the context of Judith Butler's thinking / vorgelegt von Annika Thiem

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Théologie
• Soziologie

Informations

• Publié par: eberhard_karls_universitat_tubingen
• Publié le: 01 janvier 2005
• Nombre de lectures: 17
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

Unbecoming Subjects

Subject Formation and Responsibility
in the Context of Judith Butler’s Thinking










Inauguraldissertation
zur Erlangung des Grades eines Doktors
der Theologie
der Katholisch-Theologischen Fakultät
der Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen











vorgelegt von
Annika Thiem
Berkeley, USA


im Wintersemester 2003/2004






























Gedruckt mit Genehmigung der Katholisch-Theologischen Fakultät
der Universität Tübingen

Hauptberichterstatter: ......................... Prof. Dr. Dietmar Mieth
Mitberichterstatter: ............................. PD Dr. Mangus Striet
Dekan: .............................................. Prof. Dr. Ottmar Fuchs

Tag der mündlichen Prüfung: 15. Juni 2004 i
Table of Contents
Approaching Subject Matters.................................................................................1
1 Self-consciousness, Desire, Body—Hegelian Subjects................................... 28
1.1 Desire and the Emergence of Self-consciousness ............................................... 29
1.2 Self-consciousness and the Ineluctability of Bodies and Desires....................... 41
2 Desire and the Unconscious—A Psychoanalytic Intermezzo ........................ 61
2.1 The Unconscious, Desire, Responses, and Responsibilities ............................... 65
2.2 Intractable Subjects, Disavowed Desires—Never Loved, Never Lost .............. 81
3 Conscientious Subjects of Conscience—............................................................
Nietzsche, Althusser and Circles of Passionate Attachments........................ 96
3.1 Conscience, Violence, and Responsibility.......................................................... 98
3.2 Nietzsche, “Promise,” “Guilt,” and “Bad” Conscience ................................... 108
3.3 Althusser and Interpellation as Performative Subject Formation..................... 121
4 Facing Levinas.............................................................................................. 138
4.1 The Face and Substitution................................................................................... 143
4.2 The Third and Asymmetries ............................................................................... 158
5 Subject Formation, Materiality, Discursiveness, and Resistance ............... 171
5.1 Signification, Discursive Enactment, and the Production of the Body ............ 177
5.2 Unruly Subjects—Norms, Gaps, and Necessary Resistances........................... 194
5.3 The Butlerian Conceptualization of Agency...................................................... 206
ii
6 Subject Formation, Self-concept, and Enacted Emplotment...................... 217
6.1 Tracing Paul Ricoeur’s Theory of Emplotment................................................. 219
6.2 Desires and Bodies in Enacted Emplotment ..................................................... 236
6.3 Re-Enacting the “Arelational Master-Subject”? ................................................ 245
7 No End to Subject Formation—No Mercy in Subject Formation?............ 254
Bibliography........................................................................................................ 293
List of Abbreviations........................................................................................... 304
Acknowledgments ............................................................................................... 305

1

Approaching Subject Matters

Why the subject? Why subject formation? Why subject formation and
responsibility? Why Judith Butler? What does it mean to begin with these questions
and not with others? It is necessary to begin, one way or another. But this beginning
will never be the actual beginning—the story has long begun. The beginning can only
become the beginning belatedly. The beginning always comes too late. And the
beginning—or, rather, the choice of where to begin—remains irrecuperably
contingent, insofar as there is no absolute or necessary beginning for such a study. Yet
where one begins and how one begins does matter, as it crucially sets the path for the
entire study and traverses it. The question “why” puts us on a very different path than
the question “how.” “Why” and “how” both operate as addresses, demanding
responses, and by doing so they also enable the emergence of theoretical inquiries.
But they operate differently in implying and delimiting how responses must perform
in order to work as adequate responses. “Why” seems to address by calling into
question the validity and value of a certain inquiry and seems to set us up for a
response that will somehow justify why the subject, why subject formation, why
subject formation and responsibility, and why Butler. What, then, would happen if we
began instead with these questions: How the subject? How subject formation? How
subject formation and responsibility? How Butler? How to theorize subject formation
and responsibility? How to read Butler? To ask “how” interrupts and suspends the
demand for justification of a theory’s or theorist’s value. To offer a response that
begins with “because” remains at odds with the desires the “how” has voiced. This
does not mean that one might not or ought not in the end have reason or reasons to
turn away from particular theories or theorists and to turn to others. In undertaking the
encounter that is prompted by the question how to read this or that particular theory or
theorist, the interest propelling the inquiry becomes that of finding out what it means
to read them and how to read them productively. Reading someone then means
finding ourselves addressed, allowing ourselves be addressed by thoughts and
questions, listening and deferring a rash response, and letting beliefs, values, and
predilections be called into question and opened up. And so alongside the question
2
“how” has emerged the question of what it means to do something, to ask questions in
a specific way, to think a thought in a certain way.
What does it mean to read Butler as theorist of subject formation and
responsibility? It might mean disrupting the association of her work as that almost
exclusively dedicated to feminist and queer theory. As Sara Salih points out in her
introduction to Judith Butler in Routledge’s Critical Thinkers Series, Butler’s thinking
is mostly thought of in terms of “gender” and “gender performativity.” But Salih is
quick to emphasize that it is not quite that easy to categorize Butler and her thinking
quite so neatly and that such an attempt would be in fact “an endeavour which would
1work against the Butlerian grain, if there is one” (2). To call for reading Butler’s
thought as not only feminist or queer is not to deny Butler’s importance for these
fields and in her influence in initiating a wide theoretical and political discourse far
beyond the boundaries of these fields on questions of sex, gender, sexuality and other
2identity categories, as well as on questions of identity politics more generally. The
attempt here is also not to defend Butler as a philosopher or theorist of the subject and
to prove her significance for philosophy of the subject and moral philosophy. The
intention with which this study sets out is to ask what happens when one engages
carefully and rigorously with Butler’s work, interrogating its offers to thinking about
subject formation and responsibility. The hope of this study is that it will allow us to
read for and engage with the ways in which Butler’s thinking might make theorizing
the subject and responsibility by undergoing productive crises and transformations.
If we begin to think about the questions of subject formation and responsibility
and ask about the nexus between them, one way of approaching is to think about the
root of responsibility as response. The question of responding is ethical at its core and
brings about the subject as an “ethical agent” insofar as the demand of a response is

1 Sara Salih, Judith Butler (London: Routledge, 2002). Interestingly, this remark is part of the
introductory chapter entitled “Why Butler?” For an interview touching on a wide range of Butler’s thinking
see Judith Butler, “Changing the Subject: Judith Butler’s Politics of Radical Resignification,” Gary Olson
and Lynn Worsham, JAC 20.4 (2000): 727-765.
2 Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990) and Bodies
That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993) are perhaps the most famous
and influential books by Butler on these subjects. Even in her later work, Butler has certainly not turned
away from questions of sex, gender, and sexuality, but has continued to engage with them in Antigone’s
Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (New York: Columbia UP, 2000) and Undoing Gender (New York:
Routledge, 2004). 3