“What Shall We Do Without Exile,” Judith Butler at The American University in Cairo
“What would the articulation of the national look like that begins with rights of refugees?”
"Those forms of co-habitation characterized by equality and minimized precarity become the goal to be achieved by any struggle against subjugation and exploitation, but also the goals that start to be achieved in the practices of alliance that assemble across distances to achieve those very goals. We struggle in, from, and against precarity. Thus, it is not from pervasive love for humanity or a pure desire for peace that we strive to live together. We live together because we have no choice, and yet we must struggle to affirm the ultimate value of that unchosen social world, and that struggle makes itself known and felt precisely when we exercise freedom in a way that is necessarily committed to the equal value of lives. We can be alive or dead to the suffering of others, they can be dead or alive to us, depending on how they appear and whether they appear at all; but only when we understand that what happens there also happens here, and that ‘here’ is already an elsewhere, and necessarily so, that we stand a chance of grasping at the difficult and shifting global connections in which we live, which make our lives possible—and sometimes, too often, impossible."
—
Judith Butler, Precarious Life and the Obligations of Cohabitation
Delivered at the Nobel Museum, Stockholk, May 2011.
Dang I rly like this lecture.
"If I am bound only to those who are close to me, already familiar, then my ethics are invariably parochial, communitarian, and exclusionary. If I am only bound to those who are ‘human’ in the abstract, then I avert every effort to translate culturally between my own situation and that of others. If I am only bound to those who suffer at a distance, but never those who are close to me, then I evacuate my situation in an effort to secure the distance that allows me to entertain ethical feeling. But if ethical relations are mediated—and I use that word deliberately here—confounding questions of location such that what is happening ‘there’ also happens in some sense ‘here’ and if what is happening ‘there’ depends on the event being registered in several ‘elsewheres,’ then it would seem that the ethical claim of the event takes place always in a ‘here’ and ‘there’ that are fundamentally bound to one another. In one sense, the event is emphatically local, since it is precisely the people there whose bodies are on the line. But if those bodies on the line are not registered elsewhere, there is no global response, and also no global form of ethical recognition and connection, and so something of the reality of the event is lost."
—
Judith Butler, Precarious Life and the Obligations of Cohabitation
Delivered at the Nobel Museum, Stockholk, May 2011.
"The term ‘human’ is constantly producing a doubling that exposes the ideality and coercive character of the norm: some humans qualify as human; some humans do not, and when I use the term in the second of these utterances, I do nothing more than assert a discursive life for a human who is not the same as the norm that determines what and who will count as a human life, and what and who will not."
—
Judith Butler, Torture and the Ethics of Photography
(which became part of Frames of War)
Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?—Judith Butler
Formats Available
I would recommend reading Butler’s Torture and Ethics of Photography before reading Frames of War. It’s a fantastic read about photography and American torture cells (Abu Ghraib) and its dehumanization.
It would seem that photographing the scene can be a way of contributing to the scene, providing a visual reflection and documentation for it, giving it the status of history in some sense. Does the photograph or, indeed, the photographer, contribute to the scene? Act upon the scene? Intervene upon the scene? Photography has a relation to intervention, but photographing is not the same as an intervening. There are the photos of bodies bound together, of individuals killed, of forced fellatio, or dehumanizing degradation, and they were taken, unobstructed. The field of vision is clear. No one is seen lunging in front of the camera to intercept the view. No one is shackling the photographer and throwing him or her in the bin. This is torture in plain view, in front of the camera, even for the camera. After all, it is centered action, and the torturers regularly turn toward the camera to make sure their own faces are shown, even as the faces of those they torture are mainly shrouded. The camera itself is ungagged, unbound, and so occupies and references the safety zone that surrounds and supports the persecutors in this scene. And we do not know how much of this torture is actually done for the camera, to `show’ what the US can do, as a sign of military triumphalism, sadistic control, the ability to effect a nearly complete degradation of the putative enemy, an effort to win the clash of civilizations and subject the ostensible barbarians to our civilizing mission which, we can see, has rid itself so beautifully of its own barbarism. To the extent that the photograph communicates the scene, potentially, to newspapers and media sources, and the torture is, in some sense, for the photo- graph, it is, from the start, meant to be communicated; its own perspective is in plain view, and the cameraman or woman is referenced by the smiles that the torturers offer him or her: as if to say, thank you for taking my picture, thank you for memorializing my triumph. And then there is the question of whether the photographs were shown to those who might be tortured, as a warning and a threat. It is clear that the photo- graphs were used to blackmail those depicted there with the threat that their families would see their humiliation and shame, especially sexual shame.
Judith Butler, Torture and the Ethics of Photography
READ THIS BOOK.
(via ebookcollective)
"The ethical dimension is what persists in a chain of successive events in so far as the latter are seen as something which is split from their own particularity from the very beginning. Only if I live an action as incarnating an impossible fullness transcending it does the investment become an ethical investment; but only if the materiality of the investment is not fully absorbed by the act of investment as such—if the distance between the ontic and the ontological, between investing (the ethical) and that in which one invests (the normative order) is never filled—can we have hegemony and politics (but, I would argue, also ethics)"
— Ernesto Laclau in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality
"The way Arendt defines it, action is the name to be given to that which defies conventional limits and establishes new meanings or inspires new stories. Action is not predictable behavior, the stuff upon which Foucauldian governmentality depends. Arendt thus constructs a different kind of knowledge, one in which there are actors who are potentially unique and unpredictable—always a threat to the fixity of norms, to the despair of disciplinary apparatuses. As subjected subjects we behave in a predictable fashion, but at the same time, are never fully predictable. Acting means inscribing oneself in the course of events in such a way as to modify the initial circumstances under which we act…As Zizek would certainly agree, this is of ethical significance. Speech act theory, as appropriated by Arendt, doesn’t imply a self-understanding or reasoned action, but it does imply a commitment to a certain construction of the public self: not a ‘subject position’ but a willful ‘stance’ whose content, form, and consequences are not entirely foreseeable by anyone."
— The Agent is the Void! From the Subjected Subject to the Subject of Action, Zeynep Gambetti
Giving an Account of Oneself, Judith Butler
"A theory of subject formation that acknowledges the limits of self-knowledge can serve a conception of ethics, and indeed, responsibility. If the subject is opaque to itself, not fully translucent and knowable to itself, it is not thereby licensed to do what it wants or to ignore its obligations to others. The contrary is surely true. The opacity of the subject may be a consequence of its being conceived as a relational being, one whose early and primary relations are not always available to conscious knowledge…If we are formed in the context of relations that become partially irrecoverable to us, then that opacity seems built into our formation and follows from our status as beings who are formed in relations of dependency."
— Giving an Account of Oneself, Judith Butler
bus thoughts
I find it strange that poststructuralist thought is still treated as if it has committed some injury against the field of ethics.
There remains, decades into the poststructuralist moment, a tendency to speak of the breaking or the fracturing of the subject as something that has undone (or undoes or is undoing) ethics. After all, throughout the Western Liberal tradition, the locus of ethics (as both a discipline and as an incitement to thought) has stubbornly remained on the thinking, acting, willing, rational, and above all, coherent subject. It has long been accepted that the site of action must be the individual, and following this acceptance, that the question of what constitutes ethical action—a resistence to or rejection of wrongdoing, a life lived right by the world, and so on—must fall on that same individual.
How disruptive and injurious poststructuralism must be, then. What hope is there for preserving a compulsion toward ethical human practice when the very subject capable of animating that compulsion is relentlessly pushed towards dissolution and fragmentation (taking with it the radical decomposition of normative ontological principles).
This is why the work of writers like Judith Butler continues to be understood as some kind of sweeping “challenge” to ethics. Her persistent questioning of where we might locate a ground upon which to build an ethics in the absence of the I still feels radical. The very attempt to imagine a subject-less ethics seems to demand the undoing of even the possibility of ethics in advance. The result being that we are led, once again, into the murky quandaries of postmodern inquiry; in our rush to disavow the normative, we lose sight of its real ontological and practical weight.
It seems to me, though, that the relationship between ethics and poststructuralism should be viewed in a way precisely opposite to this tendency. The displacement of the subject has not “injured” ethics such that we must now sanctimoniously rescue, recover, or revive it. No, I think that the idea of a subject-less ethics is a necessary and long overdue rejoinder to the real injury done to the concept of ethical practice by the historical fixation of the subject at its center.
The idea of an ethics of the subject, for me, is impossible from the outset. How can we even think of a way to do right and well by the world, to live by overlapping codes of practice and convention and construction, to reprimand and be reprimanded, to safeguard against wrongdoing and violence, if we insist upon preserving the superior status of the individual subject? It seems impossible to think about ethics as anything other than an extensive, relational concept, concerned first with the forces that regulate the constitution (and severing) of bonds between beings. The term ethics, for me, never stops suggesting that my survivability is as much in the hands of others (whom I may or may not or may never know) as it is in my own; to understand my position(s) in the world, I must constantly be incomplete, looking for myself in others and others in myself. Ethics, in this sense, seems to preemptively circumscribe and even suppress the very idea of the coherent subject as the site of action.
Any attempt to position that coherent subject as the ‘mover’ of ethics, then, is doomed to undermine whatever hope we have of acting ethically. To grant the coherent subject some kind of superior ability to access ‘the ethical’ is to commit a violence against the overlapping, eminently social, constantly incomplete space of relationality that ultimately sustains ethics itself. It is to sacrifice the very substance of the ethical to the subject-worship of the Western Liberal tradition.
An ethics of the subject makes ethics impossible.
So it is not, I think, correct (or at the very least, helpful) to say that we must recover ethics in the wake of poststructuralism. It seems better to say that poststructuralism was the recovery; its fixation on brokenness, on the void of subjectivity, is what stops ethics from being consumed by the violence of the subject.
At least that’s what seemed to make sense on the bus home from work today.
