Human Being and Vulnerability

Actions

While for de Beauvoir the active choice constitutes oneself,115 for Butler human identity is constituted by the reiteration of actions that create a sense of an origin in that very same process. This is Butler’s idea of performativity. Here, what she calls a social temporality takes precedence over any individualist agent – against existentialism and individualism.116 She argues that “the ‘I’ has no story of its own that is not also the story of a relation – or set of relations – to a set of norms.”117 Actions and human identity belong together only in a performative way.118

Butler develops the performativity of action into what she calls a “politics of the body.”119 And since it is a politics of the body, politics and ethics collide for Butler since, as she writes, “some ethical claims emerge from bodily life.”120 This goes against Butler’s early suspicion of ethics,121 but the reason for this move is Butler’s growing emphasis on vulnerability and dispossession, as will be discussed below.

But in terms of actions the rupture in identity, mentioned above, is evident. For Butler, activity is what enables one to give an account of oneself; at the same time, when one acts one is also in danger of losing oneself as actions break the narrative thread by which one gives an account of oneself to the other. In Butler’s words, “[t]o act is immediately to break the narrative structure and so to risk losing a self over whom I maintain narrative control.”122 The self is only constituted in the “giving of an account” of oneself,123 but the narrative both constitutes and dispossesses the self due to its relation to action. Without actions there would be no narrative to tell. Yet, on the other hand, actions, at the same time, break the narrative thread of the self, making the self lose control over his or her account of him- or herself. In both cases, in acting as well as in giving an account, the self is constituted in dependence on and vulnerability to the other.

In conclusion, actions constitute the person as something that creates the occasion in which a subject is constituted by giving an account of oneself to the other as an other. Or, put another way, a subject finds him- or herself in a position where he or she is vulnerable to be formed by actions in a discourse. It is because we have a body we call our own that we are vulnerable to actions, and it is actions outside of the body’s control that constitute the human subject.124 As such, it is how that body is related to the other that is constitutive,125 which is why Butler emphasizes concepts such as vulnerability and also grief as essential for the constitution of a human person.126

Judith Butler and the person

Judith Butler is critical of “humanist conceptions [that] assume a substantive person who is the bearer of various essential and nonessential attributes.”127 The problem with “person” as a foundation for human identity is when a core, or substance, is assumed with “universal capacity for reason, moral deliberation, or language.”128 That is an individualist “phantasmogoria.”129 Instead, Butler argues that a person is “relative to the constructed relations in which it is determined.”130 Thus, “person” is a consequence, an outcome of the relations“ which exist between humans. In that way, “person” is contingent upon what she calls “specifiable contexts.”131

The relations in which the person finds him- or herself are always regulated by norms so that there can be no previous existence of a person prior to the materialization, or appropriation of norms.132 “Person” is a product of the materialization of norms or Butler. But if it is defined as such then “person” is a useful and valid concept for Butler. The person, certainly, is constituted relationally,133 but she qualifies this in important ways.

As pointed out previously, Butler has an affinity for the term “relationality,” but she wants to develop a language that can enable “a way of thinking about how we are not only constituted by our relations but also dispossessed by them as well.”134 Butler stresses how a person is never in possession of his or her self. And in doing so Butler tries not to set autonomy and community against each other, the critique made by, for example, the sociologist Richard Jenkins and the philosopher Amy Allen.135

Butler argues that community and autonomy are inextricably interlinked so that a struggle for autonomy is also a struggle for something else, namely, in Butler’s words, “a conception of myself as invariably in community, impressed by others, impinging upon them as well.”136 But for Richard Jenkins, Butler understands identity as constituted by differentiating oneself from the other. This leads to alienation rather than unity for Jenkins, so that, in his words, “knowing who I am is a matter of distinguishing and distancing myself from you and you, and from that person over there,” which is why he sees Butler as among the “theorists of difference.”137

This emphasis on difference is what informs Jenkins’ critique. He objects to having difference as a main constituent of identity since it fails to establish “any comprehension of the collective dimensions of social life.”138 A similar point is made by Allen. She asks whether it is possible to come to any community in humanity, and formulates the critique concerning social rights movements: “[o]ne consequence of Butler’s radical critique of identity and identity politics is that it becomes difficult to conceptualize such collective power. Indeed, it becomes difficult even to conceptualize collectivity at all.”139

Political theorist Rosine Kelz makes a similar critique of Butler. Kelz acknowledges that grievability might indeed create a “we” from a position of precarious and vulnerable life if persons are affectionately related, but, Kelz writes, “[t]he question is then how one would, from Butler’s position, explain an assumption of responsibility for those to whom one has no affective relationship.” It remains unclear, therefore, continues Kelz, “how to get from the personal to the political realm.”140

However, Butler stresses interdependency as a way to keep a tension between autonomy and commonality.141 Butler’s emphasis on difference in community means,142 for Butler, that imagining community in this way “affirms relationality not only as a descriptive or historical fact of our formation but also as an ongoing normative dimension of our social and political lives, one in which we are compelled to take stock of our interdependence.”143

This interdependence constitutes the self, but only as an ecstatic notion of the self, a self that is other to oneself. For the social norms that constitute the “I” and the “I” itself become, in Butler’s words, “to a certain extent unknowable, threatened with unviability, with becoming undone altogether,”144 because “the social norms that constitute our existence carry desires that do not originate with our individual personhood.”145 But it is in the realization of our interdependence that the equality of human beings can be worked out, as she argues in The Force of Nonviolence.146 Thus, while Butler wants to avoid making vulnerability the basis for political action,147 for in a certain form that invites paternalism,148 political action must still work from vulnerability as an ontological assumption of how we are constituted as human beings. If we are therefore vulnerable to the other and constituted in our distinction from the other, then norms will inform how I am constituted by the other. Norms decide who is allowed to be conceived of as a human person and who is not.149 Community is embedded in the very constitution of the human being for Butler, for one is constituted by the other even if it is also as an other.

The fact that, for Butler, different discourses of power work performatively to establish the contexts in which the person is recognized means that the struggle against exclusivist norms is a struggle for existence, a struggle to be allowed to exist as human.150 Norms are in a sense prior to personhood and will therefore affect the person’s self-understanding and the person’s sense of being a person at all. Butler writes:

[j]ustice is not only or exclusively a matter of how persons are treated or how societies are constituted. It also concerns consequential decisions about what a person is, and what social norms must be honored and expressed for “personhood” to become allocated, how we do or do not recognize animate others as persons depending on whether or not we recognize a certain norm manifested in and by the body of that other. The very criterion by which we judge a person to be a gendered being, a criterion that posits coherent gender as a presupposition of humanness, is not only one which, justly or unjustly, governs the recognisability of the human, but one that informs the ways we do or do not recognize ourselves at the level of feeling, desire, and the body, at the moments before the mirror, in the moments before the window, in the times that one turns to psychologists, to psychiatrists, to medical and legal professionals to negotiate what may well feel like the unrecognizability of one’s gender and, hence, the unrecognizability of one’s personhood.151

Here the law, but also the social, limits the options or scope for what it is possible to be as a person, both of which will heavily inform one’s self-reflection.152 The laws, but also institutions such as the school one must assume, are, for Butler, concrete manifestations of norms that regulate your self-understanding.153 Yet Butler also argues that “it would be a mistake […] to understand all the ways in which gender is regulated in terms of those empirical legal instances because the norms that govern those regulations exceed the very instances in which they are embodied.”154

Consequently, there are concretizations of gender norms in the society, as we find in the law or medicine and institutionalized forms of power for example, but the law cannot fully manifest the norms.155 Thus all manifestations (law, medicine, sexuality, et. al.) of the norms in society are always constituted by norms, yet are not complete expressions of these norms.

But the concept of personhood works as a bridge between the societal in the juridical/political and the psychic in the self-reflective for Butler.156 Norms constitute the person in a way not always desired for Butler, but the ability to reflect about oneself, to see oneself as another,157 is also an essential characteristic of personhood for Butler. This is why Butler wants to challenge the way gender norms are made manifest in heterosexual normativity, for example. For any human being outside of that norm will not only be deemed a non-person (abject) by society, but by him- or herself as well.158 As Butler writes,

[t]he staging and structuring of affect and desire is clearly one way in which norms work their way into what feels most properly to belong to me. The fact that I am other to myself precisely at the place where I expect to be myself follows from the fact that the sociality of norms exceeds my inception and my demise, sustaining a temporal and spatial field of operation that exceeds my self-understanding.159

To sum up, Butler critiques an essentialist concept of personhood and argues, with qualifications, for a relational understanding of personhood. The person is constituted by relations, not only as an “origin,” but in a continuous and “ruptured” way. The manifestations of norms not only decide who is allowed to be viewed as a person by society, but also how it is possible to think of oneself as a person. For Butler, personhood is “ecstatic” since personhood is located in the psychic as another to oneself as well as in the socially constituted materiality of oneself, called the body.160 Is there then no “inside” to the person? This is a difficult question to answer with regard to Butler, but a way into that question is to look at her view on desire.

Desire and personhood

For Butler, personhood is linked with desire, but as Moya Lloyd points out, desire in Butler is disassociated from biology and should instead be understood psychoanalytically.161 Butler’s use of psychoanalysis has been critiqued by, among others, Kirsten Campbell and John Hood-Williams and Wendy Cealey Harrison,162 but for Butler, heterosexual desire, for example, is simply the case of a heterosexual norm that has “naturalized” into heterosexual desire.163 But this sexual desire is not the most central anyhow for Butler. That is instead the desire for recognition.164 She writes that “our very sense of personhood is linked to the desire for recognition, and that desire places us outside ourselves, in a realm of social norms that we do not fully choose, but that provides the horizon and the resource for any sense of choice that we have.”165

Starting at least from Undoing Gender, the desire for recognition is foundational for the formation of human identity and personhood for Butler.166 But the focus on recognition is not a new development in Butler. The interest in recognition comes most likely, as Lloyd points out,167 from her engagement with Hegel’s section in Phenomenology of Spirit on Lordship and Bondage that was the basis of her dissertation work.168

For Butler then, the desire for recognition dispossesses the person from him- or herself and, in that dispossession, the person becomes aware of his/her vulnerability, an essential aspect of personhood, according to Butler.169 Thus, desire is the key to the sociality of the person for Butler, in that the person is made ecstatic, outside of him- or herself by the desire for recognition, and thus dependent on, and vulnerable to, the other.170 As such, desire shares much with what Butler writes about the psyche.

But desire leads to vulnerability in a double sense for Butler. We are vulnerable, on the one hand, in that we are dependent upon the other to have our desires fulfilled. On the other hand, to act on our desire is dangerous, particularly if it is not the norm, for it is essential that our desires are recognized by the other (society). Only then can one profit from society’s protection from violence.171

It is self-awareness that makes the person hold on to his or her existence, so that the desire for recognition is also a desire for persistence.172 Desire is such a strong factor in what forms the person that even if the desire for recognition threatens self-extinction, the subject will still desire it and be constituted by it. For as Butler writes, twice, “the desire to desire is a willingness to desire precisely that which would foreclose desire, if only for the possibility of continuing to desire.”173 As Butler points out elsewhere, prohibition or the extinction of desire is not an obliteration of desire.174 So vulnerability on the one hand, and persistence, on the other, are in tension. But desire is not the only aspect that makes the self an ec-static self; vulnerability to the other is also instantiated by our very bodiliness, according to Butler.175

Desire, though, is a complicated and even a sometimes inconsistent affair in Butler’s thinking. The inconsistency lies in how desire relates to norms and discourse on the one hand, and how desire relates to norms and the person’s self on the other. As for discourse, desire at times transcends discourse,176 while at other times desire, for Butler, is the expression of norms in a discourse,177 or even an expression of the self’s desires against the norms in a discourse.178 Desire acquires transcendent qualities counter to Butler’s otherwise strict discursive immanentism.179

Moya Lloyd formulates the central challenge here when she writes: “[f]or while the terms by which persistence – or survival – is made possible are social terms, that is, norms that are the contingent effects of specific power relations, the desire for existence itself, as she deploys it, appears not to be.”180 As I have intended to show, and as Lloyd states elsewhere,181 it is a valid question to ask where desire derives from for Butler considering its varied job description in Butler’s thinking.

Yet the focus here is on how the desire for recognition is linked to personhood in Butler for it is this desire that makes the person fundamentally vulnerable to the other for its being. Recognition and vulnerability are therefore closely connected for Butler and this is exemplified in, for example, the concept of grievability.182

Recognition, personhood and grievability

The literature on recognition is vast.183 Many commentators refer the concept back to Hegel as a point of departure and the same goes for Butler.184 For Butler, the concept is particularly important given how recognition works to constitute personhood and human identity.

As was stated above, recognition is essential for the constitution of the person for Butler.185 But notably, the term is not prevalent in either Gender Trouble or Bodies That Matter.186 There recognition is mainly seen as a necessity for avoiding social exclusion.187 Butler points out in Bodies That Matter that recognition might play a part and even has “enormous power” for subject formation, but what defines the human here for Butler is still “the logic of repudiation.”188 Or, put differently, one’s human identity is defined by what differentiates me from you.

Butler’s interest is here mainly on how subjecthood is constituted negatively by difference and repudiation, a kind of apophatic theory of subject formation, to borrow a term from theology. Interestingly, however, the more Butler, on the one hand, emphasizes the importance of recognition for identity formation, the less, on the other hand, she appears to stress how identity is constituted negatively. With recognition, Butler opens up for the possibility of identity to be formed positively, by what is affirmed.

Even so, recognition is rarely, if ever, completely successful for Butler. Recognition is intimately connected to the act of interpellation but in the interpellation the subject-to-be will not be recognized in his or her entirety. Rather, in every interpellation the subject is also misrecognised.189 Butler writes that a “performative effort of naming can only attempt to bring its addressee into being, but there is always the risk of a certain misrecognition, and if one misrecognizes that effort to produce the subject, the production itself falters.”190

Still, whether through misrecognition or recognition, the human person is still constituted in relation to the other. As such, recognition is that which binds together and joins people as well as acknowledges differences for Butler. Recognition is developed by Butler into a central aspect of the constitution of human personhood.191 Whether consciously or not it is a response to the critique about difference and communality outlined above. It is no longer exclusively the case that “the specificity of identity is purchased through the loss and degradation of connection” in difference, or abjection.192 Rather, abjection has, for Butler, become a consequence of the failure of recognition; abjection is the effect of misrecognition.193

Misrecognition forms identity from what was not, or what failed to be. Butler maintains a dialectical thinking concerning recognition so that rejection and renunciation still play an important part for identity, especially in terms of misrecognition. There is an element of self-subversion in recognition since it is impossible to be recognized fully for Butler. Since recognition depends upon the recognition of the other and to maintain the otherness of the other is dependent upon the distinction between you and the other, then you can only be recognized by giving an account to the other. But this account will always be disrupted by performative actions since they will inform the “account-giving.” That is why failed recognition still affects the constitution of the person for Butler.194 Recognition is in need of constant reiteration, as all performative acts are for Butler. And this need for reiteration means that one’s identity as a human person is consistently dependent on the recognition of the other for its constitution.195 Hence, personhood is founded through the precariousness and vulnerability of life.

This is very similar to how the act of interpellation works for Butler in that it makes the subject dependent upon the other. It is not surprising therefore that Butler brings interpellation and recognition together and writes that “[i]nterpellation is an address that regularly misses its mark, it requires the recognition of an authority at the same time that it confers identity through successfully compelling that recognition. Identity is a function of that circuit, but does not preexist it.”196 Recognition, then, is incorporated in the process of identity formation of the person in the interpellation, but recognition has replaced the concept of abjection in Butler’s development of this process.197

Importantly, with recognition and vulnerability Butler lays more emphasis on the bodiliness of human existence, but in a way that makes the body other to itself. While the claim that our bodies are our “own” is important to Butler,198 at the same time when, as she writes,

we struggle for rights over our own bodies, the very bodies for which we struggle are not quite ever only our own. The body has its invariably public dimension. Constituted as a social phenomenon in the public sphere, my body is and is not mine. Given over from the start to the world of others, it bears their imprint, is formed within the crucible of social life; only later, and with some uncertainty, do I lay claim to my body as my own, if, in fact, I ever do.199

It is this precariousness of the body in political action that prompts Butler’s interest in embodiment.200 Our fundamental vulnerability and desire for recognition (a vulnerability for recognition?) of which this precarity is an expression leads Butler to emphasize the sociality and communality of the human condition even more. She asks: “[f]rom where might a principle emerge by which we vow to protect others from the kinds of violence we have suffered, if not from an apprehension of a common human vulnerability?”201 As Butler puts it, “vulnerability is one precondition for humanization,“ and this “takes place differently through variable norms of recognition.”202 Thus, the social constitution of the body and vulnerability are fundamental for the human condition for Butler because of our desire for recognition.

An example of this fundamental vulnerability is what Butler calls grievability.203 Grief is a primary example of both vulnerability and recognition because even the celebration of life presupposes the loss of life, and therefore the precariousness of life comes to the fore.204 In Butler’s words, “[i]f we take precariousness of life as a point of departure, then there is no life without the need for shelter and food, no life without dependency on wider networks of sociality and labor, no life that transcends injurability and mortality,”205 and “one’s life is always in some sense in the hands of the other.”206 As such, along with life’s precariousness, grief is an effect and sign of our dependence upon the other. But it has a sinister consequence for Butler, for if one’s life is not worth being grieved, that is, if it is not grievable, then it has not been a human life at all.207 Here grievability is psychologically as well as bodily fundamental:

After all, if my survivability depends on a relation to others, to a “you” or a set of “yous” 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.208

My whole self is dependent upon the other and this makes vulnerability, of which grief is an example, an ontological assumption for Butler.209 Or as she writes, “[w]e are then not only vulnerable to one another – an invariable feature of social relations – but this very vulnerability indicates a broader condition of dependency and interdependency which changes the dominant ontological understanding of the embodied subject.”210 This is strongly linked with her ambition to find ways to recognize those whose lives are not recognized as human lives at all. Lately this has developed into an exploration for Butler as to how resistance is possible given the condition of a fundamental vulnerability,211 as well as into a radical commitment to nonviolence to preserve the life of the other.212

To summarize, recognition works as an affirmative concept in the “humanization” and formation of the person. With recognition, Butler stresses how personhood is constituted relationally and socially. With recognition, Butler works out how social concepts of the human body reveal a shared vulnerability that becomes the foundation for actions such as resistance. Embodiment, particularly the body’s dependence on the other for its sustenance, is another notion stressed by Butler due to the desire for recognition. The issue of recognition and the issue of vulnerability bring this section on Butler back to where it started, to the main purpose of Butler’s thinking, namely that of making the unrecognized life recognized and the unlivable life livable.213

This type of thinking will prove to be significant for the questions of social constructivism and biologist essentialism. The core lies in the question of relationality. Butler dismisses any essentialist solutions to the question of humanity, which leaves her to work and rework the concept of identity as socially constructed. Is she successful in this attempt to work out what could be called a relational or weak ontology of the person?214 Butler does, after all, call for a development of language about identity and personhood.215 Can theology help with this?

1 Annika Thiem, Unbecoming Subjects: Judith Butler, Moral Philosophy, and Critical Responsibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 8. See also Chambers & Carver, Judith Butler, 8.

2 Whether ethics and politics should be placed in opposition or not in Butler is a complex question. See Judith Butler, “Politics, Power and Ethics: A Discussion between Judith Butler and William Connolly,” Theory and Event 4, no. 2 (2000): 24-36 where Butler purports to be disturbed by the “turn to ethics” (5). Yet, as Lloyd points out, Butler has revised that position somewhat lately (Lloyd, Butler, 154). See also Moya Lloyd (ed.), Butler and Ethics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015); Moya Lloyd, “Towards a Cultural Politics of Vulnerability: Precarious Lives and Ungrievable Deaths,” in Terrell Carver & Samuel Allen Chambers (eds.), Judith Butler's Precarious Politics: Critical Encounters (London: Routledge, 2008), 102-104. Interestingly, in Butler’s most recent work she wants to work toward “the ethical in the political,” see Judith Butler, The Force of Nonviolence: The Ethical in the Political (London: Verso, 2020).

3 Judith Butler, “Precarious Life: The Obligations of Proximity,” in The Neale Wheeler Watson Lecture (Nobel Museum, Stockholm, 2011); Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 205; Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2006), xv. See further Sara Salih, “Introduction,” in Sara Salih & Judith Butler (eds.), The Judith Butler Reader (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 3; and Saba Mahmood, “Agency, Performativity and the Feminist Subject,” in Ellen T. Armour & Susan M. St. Ville (eds.), Bodily Citations: Religion and Judith Butler (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 180.

4 See Butler, Force, based on Butler’s 2018 Gifford lectures, where this argument is sharpened even to reject the exception of self-defense in a commitment to non-violence (Judith Butler, “My Life, Your Life: Equality and the Philosophy of Non-Violence,” The Gifford Lectures (University of Glasgow, Glasgow, 2018).

5 Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 176.

6 Butler, Undoing, 194.

7 Butler has had a significant impact in a wide variety of subjects, though, from her very earliest work up until today. See for example Linda M. G. Zerilli, “Feminists know not what they do: Judith Butler’s gender trouble and the limits of epistemology,” in Terrell Carver & Samuel Allen Chambers (eds.), Judith Butler's Precarious Politics: Critical Encounters (London: Routledge, 2008), 28-29; McNay, “Subject”; Margaret Sönser Breen & Warren J. Blumenfeld (eds.), Butler Matters: Judith Butler's Impact on Feminist and Queer Studies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); Bronwyn Davies, “Subjectification: The Relevance of Butler's Analysis for Education,” British Journal of Sociology of Education 27, no. 4 (2006): 425-438; Ellen T. Armour & Susan M. St. Ville (eds.), Bodily Citations: Religion and Judith Butler (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), vii; Miriam David et al., “Troubling Identities: Reflections on Judith Butler's Philosophy for the Sociology of Education,” British Journal of Sociology of Education 27, no. 4 (2006): 421-424; Terrell Carver & Samuel Allen Chambers (eds.), Judith Butler's Precarious Politics: Critical Encounters (London: Routledge, 2008) and Samuel A. Chambers & Terrell Carver, Judith Butler and Political Theory: Troubling Politics (New York: Routledge, 2008), 3ff.

Butler came to the fore in the early 1990s and became one of the leading thinkers in queer theory, but her thinking is not limited to gender issues (Elena Loizidou, Judith Butler: Ethics, Law, Politics (London: Routledge-Cavendish, 2007), 5; Gill Jagger, Judith Butler: Sexual Politics, Social Change and the Power of the Performative (London: Routledge, 2008), 1).