Human Being and Vulnerability

37 John Tooby & Leda Cosmides, “Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, Part I: Theoretical Considerations,” Ethology and Sociobiology 10, no. 1–3 (1989): 29-49, 34f.

38 Pinker, Blank, 143. For a problematization of that description, see David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past (New York: Pantheon Books, 2018).

39 For a discussion on replicators versus vehicles and ‘survival machines’, see Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 30th Anniversary ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 19.

40 Conor Cunningham, Darwin's Pious Idea: Why the Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get It Wrong (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2010), 42. See also David L. Hull, Science as a Process: An Evolutionary Account of the Social and Conceptual Development of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

41 Although, as Cunningham argues, if one maintains the replicator/vehicle dualism as part of the theory of evolution then, as he phrases it, one introduces a “pre-Darwinian essentialism” (Cunningham, Darwin's, 67) into the theory of evolution that is in conflict with, in Cunningham’s words, the “very dynamic nature of the biological world, spelled out so well by Darwin” (Cunningham, Darwin's, 58). For how this anti-essentialist understanding has emerged in the last three decades and its implications for the view of nature/nurture, see Maurizio Meloni, “How biology became social, and what it means for social theory,” The Sociological Review 62, no. 3 (2014): 593-614 and further developed in Maurizio Meloni, Impressionable Biologies: From the Archeology of Plasticity to the Sociology of Epigenetics (New York: Routledge, 2019).

42 Jaime C. Confer et al., “Evolutionary Psychology: Controversies, Questions, Prospects, and Limitations,” American Psychologist 65, no. 2 (2010): 110-126, 116. Rightly, David Bjorklund and Anthony Pellegrini state that evolutionary developmental psychology has “come to rephrase the nature-nurture issue, asking not ‘how much’ of any characteristic is due to nature or nurture but rather ‘How do nature and nurture interact to produce a particular pattern of development?’” But, as they continue, “simply restating the question in this way advances the argument little. The developmental systems approach specifies how biological and environmental factors at multiple levels of organization transact to produce a particular pattern of ontogeny” (David F. Bjorklund & Anthony D. Pellegrini, The Origins of Human Nature: Evolutionary Developmental Psychology (Washington: American Psychological Association, 2002), 335).

Similar claims were made for the theory preceding evolutionary psychology, namely that of sociobiology. There was a lively debate about the claims of sociobiology in the late 1970s and early 1980s and much attention was placed on the issue of nature and nurture. See Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975); George W. Barlow & James Silverberg, Sociobiology, Beyond Nature/Nurture?: Reports, Definitions, and Debate (Boulder: Westview Press for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1980); Michael Ruse, Sociobiology: Sense or Nonsense? (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1979); Ashley Montagu & Jerome H. Barkow, Sociobiology Examined (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980); John D. Baldwin & Janice I. Baldwin, Beyond Sociobiology (New York: Elsevier, 1982); Marshall Sahlins, The Use and Abuse of Biology: An Anthropological Critique of Sociobiology (London: Tavistock Publications, 1977); and Ullica Segerstråle, Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

43 Michelle Voss Roberts, Body Parts: A Theological Anthropology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017), xxiii.

44 John Webster, “Eschatology and Anthropology,” in John Webster, Word and Church: Essays in Christian Dogmatics, 2nd ed., vol. I (London: T&T Clark, 2016), 263; Webster, “Theological,” 24ff.

45 Wolfhart Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, trans. Matthew J. O'Connell (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1985), 16.

46 Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (New York: Harper & Row, 1957 [first published 1841]). See also Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, trans. Richard Crouter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996 [first published 1799]).

47 For this, see also John Macquarrie, Principles of Christian Theology, revised ed. (London: SCM Press, 1977).

48 See F. LeRon Shults, Reforming Theological Anthropology: After the Philosophical Turn to Relationality (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2003) and Bo Sandahl, Person, relation och Gud: Konstruktionen av ett relationellt personbegrepp i nutida trinitarisk teologi (PhD, Centrum för teologi och religionsvetenskap, Lunds universitet, 2004).

49 As only one example by a former PhD student of Colin Gunton, see Stephen R. Holmes, The Holy Trinity: Understanding God's Life (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2012).

50 Marc Cortez, Theological Anthropology: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 27.

51 Marc Cortez, Christological Anthropology in Historical Perspective: Ancient and Contemporary Approaches to Theological Anthropology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2016) and Marc Cortez, “The Madness in Our Method: Christology as the Necessary Starting Point for Theological Anthropology,” in Joshua Ryan Farris & Charles Taliaferro (eds.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Theological Anthropology (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015).

52 Kathryn Tanner is just one example, but her impressively concise book, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology, sums it up well, together with relevant historical references (Kathryn Tanner, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001)).

53 Colin E. Gunton, The One, the Three, and the Many: God, Creation, and the Culture of Modernity, The Bampton Lectures 1992 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), xiii. Gunton views “culture” as the result of “human activity” and the relationship between “culture’ and ‘nature” is that “culture takes shape in the context of what is sometimes called nature.” So that, for Gunton, “[t]he created world provides the framework within which human activity takes place” (Gunton, The One, xiii).

54 Gunton, The One, 28. Gunton’s view of Modernity is one that states that Modernity in its very definition should be understood as the rejection of God. As numerous thinkers have pointed out, the view that Modernity is anti-religious and necessarily secularist is more a part of a secularist self-understanding itself rather than an accurate description of the development of Modernity. See Taylor, Secular; Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Martinson, Postkristen, 12, 69ff; Sigurdson, Postsekulära; Jayne Svenungsson, Guds återkomst: En studie av gudsbegreppet inom postmodern filosofi (Göteborg: Glänta Produktion, 2004) and Joel Halldorf, Av denna världen? Emil Gustafson, moderniteten och den evangelikala väckelsen (Skellefteå: Artos & Norma bokförlag, 2012).

Chapter 1: From interpellated subjecthood to recognized vulnerability

“There is an ethics that is performed through her [Butler’s] mode of inquiry, which is committed to beginning from the margins and the marginalized to query the social norms and structures that condition, enable, and animate forms of marginalization.”1 These words by philosopher Annika Thiem summarize Butler’s main concern well. Throughout Butler’s work ethics and politics are difficult to disentangle,2 and the main concern for her is to make visible the processes which dehumanize, marginalize and refuse to give recognition to some humans.3 Here, Butler argues that both the idea of “nature” and “the natural” as primary concepts and the idea of an origin have to be challenged in order to give recognition to those who are now not recognized.4 As such, her main concern with the structures of recognition and misrecognition is directly linked with her anthropology.

Judith Butler (1956-) calls herself a “latecomer to the second wave,”5 and positions herself within “feminist poststructuralism.”6 She is the Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature and the Co-director of the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. But Butler does not explicitly write about either rhetoric or comparative literature. She is instead mainly a political and critical thinker and philosopher where gender, sexuality and political inequality are main concerns.7 All of these are in some sense linked to Butler’s view of the human being.

On the human being, or becoming

Precisely because “female” no longer appears to be a stable notion, its meaning is as troubled and unfixed as “woman,” and because both terms gain their troubled significations only as relational terms, this inquiry takes as its focus gender and the relational analysis it suggests. Further, it is no longer clear that feminist theory ought to try to settle the question of primary identity in order to get on with the task of politics. Instead, we ought to ask, what political possibilities are the consequences of a radical critique of the categories of identity?8

Here Butler ties together many strands central to her understanding of the human. Firstly, the critique of the concept “woman” and “female” as stable categories of identity is clear. This is also linked to a critique of universalist and essentialist categories of human identity overall. Any concept of humanity for Butler has to be formed out of a radical critique of the current categories because these limit the possible ways of being a human.

Secondly, Butler focuses on politics and performativity. There is no essence or human nature, but rather human identity is constructed and how this is done is of primary importance. Thirdly, and lastly, the quotation points to the importance of human identity as a relational concept, an idea that is developed throughout her thinking.

On the constructive side, a radical critique of the categories of human identity should, for Butler, enable further ways of being human. Yet Butler is hesitant to be normative because, as she sees it, “the range of its [the self’s] possible forms is delimited in advance” by every possible discourse.9 Or, as Sara Salih phrases it, Butler “regards resolution as dangerously anti-democratic, since ideas and theories that present themselves as self-evident ‘truths’ are often vehicles for ideological assumptions that oppress certain groups of people in society.”10 Determining what such an “unresolved” human identity might mean is the purpose of this chapter.

The question of human identity for Butler cannot be separated from the question of gender. I will, therefore, firstly deal with the connection Butler draws between gender and being human. This leads to her theory of performativity in relation to human identity and personhood. Following this, I treat Butler’s concept of the human as relationally constituted and then the question of norms before I enter into the question of the body. Lastly, the notion of relationality returns with Butler’s turn toward vulnerability in a context of actions, identity, desire and recognition.

Gendered to be human

Butler makes a strong connection between gender norms and what it is to be human in her early thinking.11 The reason for this is that for Butler gender norms “establish what will and will not be intelligibly human, what will and will not be considered to be ‘real,’ they establish the ontological field in which bodies may be given legitimate expression.”12 But, how do gender norms affect human identity more precisely?

Butler argues that “gendering” is “constructed through relations of power” and “normative constraints,” and that the “materiality of sex is constructed through a ritualized repetition of norms.”13 Gender norms construct human identity through repetition (reiteration/citation). As Butler sees it, the repetition materializes the norms in society. She writes that

[t]he practice by which gendering occurs, the embodying of norms, is a compulsory practice, a forcible production, but not for that reason fully determining. To the extent that gender is an assignment, it is an assignment which is never quite carried out according to expectation, whose addressee never quite inhabits the ideal s/he is compelled to approximate. Moreover, this embodying is a repeated process. And one might construe repetition as precisely that which undermines the conceit of voluntarist mastery designated by the subject in language.14

For Butler then, repetition of norms underlies how gender is produced which also affects how we understand sex, or “natural” identities, as will become evident. Gender is never natural nor stable since this assignment of norms through repetition “is never carried out according to expectation.” This process of “assignmentation” needs therefore to be constantly repeated or reiterated and, therefore, undermines any notion of a voluntarist, that is, a choosing and wilfully acting, subject. Instead, norms working from “outside” of the subject constitute the subject.

Sociologists John Hood-Williams and Wendy Cealey Harrison argue that, as Butler sees it, the acts that are interpreted as “gender acts” will lead to form a gender identity that, by extension, will be seen as ontological or original for what is constituted as human.15 It is not that norms are these acts, but norms decide which acts count as acceptable, and hence constitute a livable identity.16 This process in which norms become “naturalized” is, of course, Butler’s theory of performativity.

Gender identity is one example of how a “model of power,” that is, gender norms, works to constitute an identity. Butler argues that it is important to act with great care and awareness when one wants to make any parallels between how, for example, racial differences are constituted on the one hand, and gender differences, on the other.17 Different “models of power” or “vectors of power” such as race, sexuality and gender all have their own history and work in distinct ways, while, at the same time, they “deploy each other for the purpose of their own articulation.”18 This difference also comes down to how norms are established through particular performative action. So how does performativity construct identities for Butler?

Performativity and human identity

Performativity is an explanation, or a particular figure of thought for Butler, of how these norms by a repeated acting out can be constituted as “natural” or mask themselves as an “origin.” This is also how the human subject is constituted for Butler. Here sometimes the term “signification” is used,19 denoting when language assumes a willing agent of speaking or the acts.20 For Butler grammar creates the notion of an agent, a “doer” behind the deed.21 But the underlying thought or overarching concept is that of performativity.22

For example in terms of gender identity, Butler argues that “[t]here is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results.”23 For Butler, identity is constituted by the acts one might think are the result.

This sounds like lifting oneself by one’s own bootstraps; how can something be constituted by itself? Yet maybe it is easier to think of performativity along the lines of learning. With learning, once we know something previously unknown, it can be difficult to remember what it was like not to have that knowledge or skill.

To give an example: once we have learned how to ride a bike it is difficult to “not be able to ride a bike.” One could argue that in learning, as with performativity for Butler, there is a type of closure once a skill has been acquired. The how of the process of learning is no longer important for the having of the skill itself.24 But you become a “bicycle-rider” through the repeated practice of learning how to ride the bike. With bike riding, so with identity for Butler, it can appear “closed” or “settled” or “primary,” while in “reality” it is a product of the very process itself.25 After having learnt a skill, one’s perception is that the skill has always been “there.” Yet Butler’s point is that identity derives from the very process that we now use to improve our skill, but that this is the case is lost to us and we now experience it as an origin.26 The difference is that while, in terms of bike riding, most of us have a clear memory of what it was like to learn how to ride a bike, with all the falls, bruised knees and tears, when it comes to identity formation this is not a memory people tend to have.

This loss of memory is explained through a re-conceptualization of psychoanalysis for Butler by a reworking of Freud’s concept of melancholia.27 In short, this means, as Butler argues, that the primary desire in the child is to be with the parent of the same sex. When this homosexual desire in the child is repressed then it turns into a heterosexual desire due to the child’s identification with the desire of the parent of the same sex and that is now perceived as “natural.”28 If identity formation belongs to early childhood it explains why it is difficult to remember how one “learned” one’s identity.

However, this loss of memory is only true, for Butler, for those who more or less fit into the governing norms of a society. A person with heterosexual desire within a discourse of normative heterosexuality will feel as if his or her heterosexual identity is the “natural” expression of sexuality. But, in contrast, “those who understand their gender and their desire to be nonnormative” live with a “pervasive sense of their own unreality,“29 so that no “naturalness” is natural in any non-constructive or non-performative sense for Butler. Therefore all desire constantly needs to be reiterated, or re-cited, for its own “naturalness” to be established and maintained; “identifications are never simply or definitively made or achieved; they are insistently constituted, contested, and negotiated,“ as Butler puts it.30 Consequently, this apparently stable identity, for Butler, “will be at once an interpretation of the norm and an occasion to expose the norm itself as a privileged interpretation” because the very need to reiterate the norm “perpetually reinstitutes the possibility of its own failure.”31 Herein lies the reason for the incessant need to reiterate norms and acts of the normative identity: the sense of it not quite having been constituted fully the previous time.

This instability, which is also a refusal to settle in a fully formed identity, is embraced by and searched for by Butler.32 An “unsettled” identity upholds the otherness of the other since the other, who constitutes my identity, can never fully be fathomed by me. Butler writes:

[a]s we ask to know the other, or ask that the other say, finally or definitively, who he or she is, it will be important not to expect an answer that will ever satisfy. By not pursuing satisfaction and by letting the question remain open, even enduring, we let the other live, since life might be understood as precisely that which exceeds any account we may try to give of it.33

The way norms are being constituted is not dissimilar, or unrelated, to the question of human identity; rather, norms play an essential part in the constitution of the human. But, having said that, it is not possible within the scope of this book to enter into detail on Butler’s view of the regulatory function of power and norms. The question must instead be how, if human identity somehow emanates through the materialization of norms, does the performative process make that happen?