Moya Lloyd - Butler and Ethics (2015, Edinburgh University Press)

But l er
a n d E thics
Edi ted by M oya L l oy d
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Butler and Ethics
Edited by Moya Lloyd

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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction 1
Moya Lloyd
1. Signifying Otherwise: Liveability and Language 15
Nathan Gies
2. Undoing Ethics: Butler on Precarity, Opacity and
Responsibility 41
Catherine Mills
3. Butler’s Ethical Appeal: Being, Feeling and Acting
Responsible 65
Sara Rushing
4. Violence, Affect and Ethics 91
Birgit Schippers
5. Sensate Democracy and Grievable Life 118
Fiona Jenkins
6. Two Regimes of the Human: Butler and the Politics
of Mattering 141
Drew Walker
7. The Ethics and Politics of Vulnerable Bodies 167
Moya Lloyd
8. Subjectivation, the Social and a (Missing) Account
of the Social Formation: Judith Butler’s ‘Turn’ 193
Samuel A. Chambers
Notes on Contributors 219

Index 222
Acknowledgements
For the invitation to put together this volume for the Critical
Connections series, I would like to thank series editors Ian
Buchanan and James Williams. Thanks are also due to Carol
Macdonald and her colleagues at Edinburgh University Press for
their patient assistance with and support for this volume.
I would also like to say a big thank you to all the contributors to
the edited volume itself. It’s been a real pleasure to work with all
of them. I especially appreciated their always prompt responses to
emails, and openness to suggestions for chapter alterations.
Finally, I need to thank Andrew and Daniel for distracting me
when I needed distracting, allowing me to lock myself away in my
study when I needed to write, and providing plentiful cups of tea
to keep me going while I was in there.
Chapter 8 is a revised and shortened version of Chapter 1 of
Samuel Chambers, Bearing Society in Mind: Theories and Politics
of the Social Formation, London and New York: Rowman &
Littlefield International, 2014. Thanks to the publisher for permis-
sion to use this material.
vi
Introduction
Moya Lloyd
As Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen and Rebecca Walkowitz

write: ‘From Aristotle and Kant to Nietzsche and Hegel to
Habermas and Foucault to Derrida and Lacan and Levinas . . .
the concept of ethics and the ethical has been reconceptualized,
reformulated, and repositioned’ (2000: viii). Originating from the
ancient Greek word ethos, used to denote the customs or character
of the polis and its citizens, ethics, it has been suggested, consists
in the study of ‘what is morally good and bad, right and wrong’
(Singer 2014); and the ‘systematizing, defending, and recommend-
ing concepts of right and wrong behavior’ (Fieser 2012). Jacques
Rancière offers a different formulation, however, classifying ethics
as a mode of thinking in which ‘an identity is established between
an environment, a way of being and a principle of action’ ([2006]
2010: 184). Conventionally, ethics, often distinguished as ‘nor-
mative ethics’,1 has been sub-divided into three fields: deontol-
ogy, which takes duties that are obligatory, irrespective of their
consequences, as the focus of ethics; consequentialism, of which
utilitarianism is the most influential form, and which stresses the
results of actions, as in the maximisation of happiness; and virtue
ethics, which focuses on moral character or ‘the virtues’, such as
generosity or compassion.
Not all recent accounts of ‘ethics’, however, conform easily or
neatly to the three approaches listed. Levinas, for example, defines
ethics as ‘first philosophy’ (1984), and understands it in terms of a
relation to – and an impingement by – the other that precedes the
formation of the self. Within poststructuralism broadly conceived,
ethics has been theorised variously as a mode of self-fashioning or
‘care of the self’ (Foucault 1985, 1991, 2000), and as an ‘ethos of
critical responsiveness’ (Connolly 1995: xvi) or of ‘generosity’ (for
example, Connolly 2002a, 2002b). Just as ethics was once seen as
1
2 Butler and Ethics
the province of ‘an ideal, autonomous and sovereign subject’ and

a universal humanism (Garber et al. 2000: viii), so too of late the
subject has come to be regarded as the ‘problem’ of ethics, not its
ground (Loizidou 2007: 46).
Troubling definitional matters do not end there. Paradoxically,
ethics has been seen simultaneously as ‘the philosophical study of
morality’ (Deigh 1999: 284); as a synonym for both morality (Deigh
1999) and for ‘moral philosophy’ (Singer 2014); and as conceptu-
ally distinct from morality. Thus, according to thinkers such as
Jürgen Habermas, ethics addresses questions about the ‘good life’
while morality focuses on the rules or norms that ought to govern
human interaction, such as principles of justice. Alternatively,
ethos is understood by Theodor Adorno as commonly accepted or
collective ideas, interpreted by Annika Thiem as meaning ‘habitu-
ated frameworks and rationales for action’ (2008: 233),2 whereas
morality, by contrast, is conceived of as a ‘practice of reflection
and deliberation’ (Thiem 2008: 233), of questioning and inquiry
(Adorno 2000; see also Menke 2004; Butler 2005: 3–6).
During the last decade or so of the twentieth century a ‘turn’, or
perhaps more accurately a ‘return’ to ethics took place. It is this
return that sets the context for Butler and Ethics. According to
Peter Dews, this reappearance of ethics was marked by a number of
features, including a re-centring of questions of obligation, respect,
recognition and conscience that ‘not so long ago would have been
dismissed as the residue of an outdated humanism’; an increased
focus on the work of Levinas; and a growing curiosity about ques-
tions of ‘radical evil’ (2002: 33; see also Garber et al. 2000; Davis
and Womack 2001; Myers 2008; Rancière [2006] 2010).
Not everyone greeted the return to ethics positively. Chantal
Mouffe considers it to be a retrograde step signalling the ‘triumph
of a sort of moralizing liberalism’, and producing a ‘moraliza-
tion of society’ (2000: 86). Ethics, that is, as a ‘retreat from the
political’ (Mouffe 2000: 85). Frederic Jameson views ‘the return to
ethics . . . and its subsequent colonization of political philosophy’
as ‘one of the most regressive features’ of postmodernity (2010:
406). Intriguingly, amongst these critics is Judith Butler, who, in a
now much-cited conversation with the renowned political philoso-
pher William Connolly, remarks:
I confess to worrying about the turn to ethics, and have recently

written a small essay that voices my ambivalence about this sphere.
Introduction 3
I tend to think that ethics displaces from politics, and I suppose for
me the use of power as a point of departure for a critical analysis
is substantially different from an ethical framework. (2000; see, for
instance, Lloyd 2007, 2008; Chambers and Carver 2008; Rushing
2010; and Schippers 2014)
Butler is, of course, best known for Gender Trouble (1990), the
book that helped inaugurate queer theory, shifted the course of
debates within feminism by challenging its conventional wisdom
about the relation between sex and gender, and introduced the idea
of gender performativity. Since Gender Trouble, Butler has pub-
lished another nine books: Bodies that Matter in 1993; Excitable
Speech and The Psychic Life of Power in 1997; Antigone’s Claim
in 2000; Undoing Gender and Precarious Life in 2004; Giving an
Account of Oneself in 2005; Framing War in 2009; and Parting
Ways in 2012. To this can be added several co-authored volumes,
including Contingency, Hegemony, Universality with Ernesto
Laclau and Slavoj Žižek in 2000; Who Sings the Nation State?
with Gayatri Spivak in 2007; Is Critique Secular? with Talal Asad,
Wendy Brown and Saba Mahmood in 2009; and Dispossession
with Athena Athanasiou in 2013, as well as chapters, interviews
and journal articles too numerous to mention.3 It is the publica-
tion of one of those works, however, that is the main prompt for
this edited volume.
Given Butler’s public reservations and confessed ‘ambivalence’
about the return to ethics, it surprised many when in 2005 Giving
an Account of Oneself appeared, a book described on its dust
jacket as ‘her first extended study of moral philosophy’, in which
Butler is said to elaborate ‘a provocative outline for a new ethical
practice’. Could it be that Butler had overcome her doubts and
was now actively embracing – turning to – ethics? Did she no
longer regard the return to ethics as ‘an escape from politics’ or
as entailing a ‘heightening of moralism’ (Butler 2000b: 15)? Was
there, perhaps, another explanation for the publication of this
tome? Could it even be that ethical considerations were never, in
fact, fully absent from Butler’s work to this point?
Certainly Giving an Account of Oneself is something of a depar-
ture from her other work insofar as it takes moral philosophy as
its starting point. However, Butler’s explicit embrace of ethical
considerations occurs before its publication, with, for example,
the ‘small essay’ mentioned above, ‘Ethical Ambivalence’ (Butler
4 Butler and Ethics
2000b), as well as with Precarious Life (Butler 2004a), the volume

of essays written in response to the events of 9/11 and its after-
math. I say explicit embrace here deliberately for two reasons.
Firstly, these texts mark the start of Butler’s ongoing critical reflec-
tions on Levinas (see, for instance, Butler 2013) – regarded with
disquiet by some of her interlocutors, who consider her ‘turn’
to Levinas as provoking a regretful and problematic shift in her
thinking, but viewed by other readers as simply emblematic of
a change of focus to matters ethical.4 Secondly, there is an unre-
solved debate amongst her critics, shared by the contributors to
this volume, as to whether Butler’s interest in ethicality is, in fact,
a new development in her thinking or whether it is, instead, a per-
sistent feature of her thought.
A brief mapping of the terrain will help to give a flavour of
this debate. On the one side there are those who propose that, in
one form or another, ethical considerations have been an ever-
present theme in Butler’s oeuvre.5 Sara Salih was one of the first
commentators to contend that ‘Butler’s work as a whole’ may be
defined by ‘its ethical impetus’, which she construes in terms of
an extension of ‘the norms by which “humans” are permitted to
conduct liveable lives’ (2004: 4). Annika Thiem likewise proposes
that ethical considerations have ‘characterized her [Butler’s] work
all along’. For Thiem this is evident in its focus on the norms and
structures that ‘condition, enable, and animate forms of margin-
alization’ (2008: 9, 8). Equally Samuel Chambers and Terrell
Carver, in their co- authored book Judith Butler and Political
Theory, maintain that ‘Butler has raised questions concerning
ethics throughout her writings.’ This is discernible, for them, in
Butler’s ‘distinct and considered concern with the way in which
a theory of subjectivity, or an ontological formulation, shapes,
enables, constrains or produces particular sorts of ethical rela-
tions’ (2008: 94, original emphasis). Acknowledging that Butler’s
interest in ethics has certainly ‘intensified’ since 9/11, Hannah
Stark concludes that this has only rendered ‘explicit . . . what has
always been implicit’ (2014: 89) in her thought. Together with
Chambers and Carver, Stark dates Butler’s initial exploration of
ethicality to her first major published work, Subjects of Desire
(Butler 1987). In marked contrast to those who trace the ethical
dimension of Butler’s thought to her exploration of Levinas, Stark
ties it to Butler’s enduring concern with the Hegelian theme of
recognition.
Introduction 5
Other critics, however, disagree that the entire compass of

Butler’s writing is ethically oriented. Some discern a ‘definitive
turn’ in Butler’s work ‘toward ethics’ (Mills 2007: 133) after
9/11,6 a reorientation that a number regard as highly problematic,
particularly because her alleged ‘turn’ to ethics is seen as occasion-
ing a flight away from politics.7 Jodi Dean, for instance, contends
that Butler’s ‘ethical sensitivity’ is bought at ‘the cost of politics’;
indeed, she avers, ‘Butler presents ethical resources as avail-
able only under conditions of the denial of politics’ (2008: 109).
Plotting changes in Butler’s work in the decade and a half follow-
ing Gender Trouble, Lynne Segal declares her scepticism about
‘what might be read as her substituting ethical abstractions for
political analysis’, which Segal locates in ‘some’ of Butler’s ‘recent
Levinasian and Arendtian turns’ (2008: 384; see also Gies in this
volume); a position echoed by Diana Coole, who worries about
the ‘more abstractly normative Kantian – and more recently,
Levinasian – aspect’ of Butler’s thinking ‘[p]ulling against the
possibility’ of ‘political engagement’ (2008: 27). Lauren Berlant
likewise expresses reservations that Butler’s account of ethical
commitment not only eliminates the unconscious, but ends up
assuming an intentionalist subject who is able consciously to
‘short-circuit foundational affective attachments in order to gain a
better good life’, thus displacing politics (2007: 294).
This concern about the link between ethics and politics in
Butler’s work – whether ethics supplants politics, subtends poli-
tics, is itself politically inflected or involved in an agonistic duel
with it – is something that several authors in this volume explore,
and, as might be expected from the foregoing discussion, in rela-
tion to which they adopt a variety of divergent positions.
For all their differences, however, there is one matter that all
commentators more or less agree upon: that Butler – whether
always or belatedly – advances an ethical discourse of some kind.
The question is: what kind? The appellations abound. Annika
Thiem talks of Butler’s ‘ethics of critical inquiry’ (2008: 8); Slavoj
Žižek describes Butler’s ethics as an ‘ethics of finitude’ (2013:
137); while David Gutterman and Sara Rushing, focusing on
Precarious Life, explore her ‘ethics of grief’ (2008). Bonnie Honig
aligns Butler’s work with what she calls an ‘ethics of mortality
and suffering’ fastened to ‘mortalist humanism’ (2010: 1, original
emphasis). Elena Loizidou cautions that Butler does not ‘offer an
ethical code for action’, but rather a ‘philosophical account of
6 Butler and Ethics
ethical responsibility’ (2007: 14, 76). Butler describes her own

project in terms of an ‘ethic of non-violence’ (in Stauffer 2003),
while contributors to this volume characterise it variously as ‘an
ethics of failure’ (Mills), an ‘ethics of grievability’ (Walker) and an
‘ethics of vulnerability’ or ‘precariousness’ (Rushing).
In spite of the different lexical terms used to describe Butler’s
ethical discourse, there are nevertheless a number of common
themes that normally come to the fore in these discussions – some
of them newer additions to Butler’s theoretical vocabulary, others
of longer standing. They include the body, corporeal vulnerability,
precariousness and precarity, grief and grievability, together with
notions of the ‘human’, intelligibility, liveability, and the possibil-
ity of a liveable life, as well as questions of violence, and particu-
larly in the context of this book, of ‘ethical violence’ (see Jenkins,
Mills and Schippers, this volume). In addition, scholars have also
begun to draw attention to the language of affect that has begun
to seep into Butler’s writings of late (see Rushing and Schippers,
this volume).
Butler and Ethics opens with a chapter by Nathan Gies that
takes as its starting point Butler’s engagement with the work of
Levinas and its role in understanding the relationship between
ethics and politics in the former’s work. In particular, Gies con-
fronts head-on the charge that Butler’s encounter with Levinas has
resulted in both a certain moralism and flight from politics in her
work. Instead, Gies asserts that Butler’s reading of Levinas enables
her to build on and develop the themes of ‘liveability’ present in
one form or another in her work since Gender Trouble. It is Gies’
argument that Butler’s use of Levinas thus extends her thinking in
significant ways, enabling her to develop and ‘politicise’ Levinas’s
apprehension of ‘the ethical’. In the final part of the chapter, Gies
turns the tables and offers a Levinasian reading of Butler, focused
on Levinas’s discussion of communication, which Gies regards
as offering both a useful supplement to Butler’s ethico-political
approach and a corrective for some of its limitations. Far from
her encounter with Levinas resulting in a retreat from politics, for
Gies, it enables Butler to produce work on liveability that is more
radical, and by implication more open to politics, than her earlier
work.
In Chapter 2, Catherine Mills explores the idea of vulner-
ability in the construction of Butler’s ethics, tracing its evolu-
tion as a concept from Precarious Life (Butler 2004a) onwards.
Introduction 7
Vulnerability has been a common concept in feminist discussions

of ethics, including the ethics of care and discussions of relational
autonomy. While some of these accounts construe vulnerability
primarily in terms of contingent social factors, Butler, according
to Mills, offers a different approach. Without totally disregarding
situational vulnerability (or what Butler calls ‘precarity’), Butler
understands vulnerability primarily as a constitutive condition
of subjectivity which has a certain ‘normative force’. Turning to
Butler’s encounter with Levinas, Mills argues that although she
is often read as advancing an ‘ethics of relationality’ drawn from
the latter’s work, in fact, Butler’s ethics displays little similarity to
his. Hers is rather an ethics that sites responsibility in the subject’s
opacity to itself; as such, it is an ‘ethics of failure’. For Mills, Butler
never fully addresses the problem of responsibility for the other.
Rather her discussion of substitutability (in the context of discuss-
ing the normative force of shared human vulnerability) results in
Butler’s ethics foundering on what Mills calls ‘the twin of sover-
eign conceptions of subjectivity’, namely ‘community conceived as
commonality’ (p. 43).
The next two chapters explore the role of affect in Butler’s
ethical work. In Chapter 3, Sara Rushing returns to her paper
‘Preparing for Politics’ (2010), to raise questions about the nature
of Butler’s ethics in the light of her references in Frames of War to
‘feelings’ and sensations. In the earlier piece, Rushing character-
ised Butler’s ethics as not requiring affinity between participants
in an ethical encounter, what she describes in this chapter as ‘an
ethics without affect’. With the shift in Butler’s language, however,
Rushing wants to know: ‘What is the relationship . . . between
being responsible, feeling responsible and acting responsible?’
(p. 69). She begins by reflecting on the affective turn in political
and social theory in order to help determine what kind of work
‘affect’ is doing – or might do – in Butler’s ethical theory, and how
Butler conceives affect. A number of critics have drawn attention
to what might be called a motivational deficit in Butler’s work:
that is, how it is possible to cultivate ethical responsiveness in con-
ditions of precarity when the vulnerability of the other is not per-
ceptible to us (see, for instance, Lloyd and Schippers, this volume).
Rushing indicates that Butler’s discussion of affect as a political
and ethical resource has the potential to help here, though at
present her account is too thin to do so satisfactorily. A ‘construc-
tive engagement’ with virtue ethics, she proposes, might provide
8 Butler and Ethics
Butler with the conceptual resources to better connect being,

feeling and acting, and to link ethics affectively with politics.
Like Rushing, Birgit Schippers is interested in the link between
affect and ethics, and like Rushing she situates Butler’s discussion
in connection to the ‘affective turn’. However, what concerns
Schippers in Chapter 4 are the connections between affect, vio-
lence and ethical responsibility in Butler’s discussions of conflict
and war, and what Butler’s account of global ethics looks like (see
also Schippers 2014). In contrast to Rushing, who draws a quali-
tative distinction between Butler’s earlier references to affective
language and her treatment of affect in Frames of War, Schippers
contends that the affective dimension of political and social exist-
ence form an ‘integral part’ of her work from the beginning.
Specifically, she proposes that affect appears in three modes in
Butler’s writings: first as desire in Subjects of Desire (1987), next
as trauma in The Psychic Life of Power (1997b) and finally as
excitability in Excitable Speech (1997a). The precise link between
affect and ethics, however, is less well developed in Butler’s texts.
While Schippers charges that a focus on affect ought to be part
of any conception of ethics, including especially global ethics, she
also notes that at the moment it is not entirely clear from Butler’s
thought ‘how ethical responsibility becomes an affective demand’
or in what contexts ‘I feel ethically responsible’ for the other
(pp. 102–3, original emphasis).
Perhaps one of the most discussed features in Butler’s work
since 9/11 has been the idea of grievability. In Chapter 5, Fiona
Jenkins takes up this theme.8 Rejecting an understanding of griev-
ability as simply charting the ‘prohibitive or censorial power’
(p. 125) to withhold recognition from particular populations,
Jenkins contends that for Butler grievability is tied to the idea of a
pluralising critique directed at contesting dominant norms; a con-
testation that Jenkins sees as immanent to Butler’s idea of ‘sensate
democracy’ and to ethics, itself understood as critique. Against
those such as Bonnie Honig who have suggested that Butler’s
recent emphasis on grief and mourning portends a depoliticising
‘universal humanist ethics of lamentation’ (Honig cited by Jenkins,
p. 121), Jenkins argues that Butler’s interest in what she refers to as
the ‘nationalism of grieving’ (p. 121) is political, and that what is
important about her work is precisely the significance for politics
of the ethical framework she outlines. Like Gies, Jenkins thus sees
Butler as advancing an ethico-politics. For Jenkins, however, this
Introduction 9
ethico-politics is concerned with contesting ethical violence as ‘an

anachronistic nationalist violence’ (p. 132), with the ‘obligation
of dissent’ (p. 135) that characterises a living practice of critique,
with demands for pluralisation, and with what she suggests Butler
regards as the potential of post-nationalist political formations.
In Chapter 6, Drew Walker also attends to grievability. His
focus is the place of the ‘human’ in Butler’s thought. It is Walker’s
contention that ‘both before and after her “ethical turn” ’ (p. 141),
Butler has deployed two distinct images of the human, each align-
ing with a different theme in her work. The first, tied to the idea
of survival, entails a politically problematic view of the human as
a subject position necessary for persons to count – or to ‘matter’
as he puts it – and is detectable in her discussions of grievability,
dehumanisation and abjection. Walker suggests that this under-
standing operates within a ‘framework of recovery’ (p. 145) and
is the basis for ethics. The second image, tethered to the notion
of subversion, construes the human more dynamically, and to
Walker in more radical political terms, as an entity always ‘in the
flux of reiteration’ (p. 142). Invoking Stanley Cavell and Jacques
Rancière, and exploring various examples including the AIDS
crisis in the USA and the activities of the Zimbabwean women’s
movement, he argues contra Butler that the lives that are seen to
be problematic – dangerous, deviant or the like – matter intensely
because they are always already human. Politically, for Walker,
the issue is not whether people are grievable or not; the issue is to
contest the unjust and brutal conditions within which humans live.
We return in the next chapter to the theme of vulnerability,
first introduced by Mills in Chapter 2, though the focus this time
is on the idea of corporeal vulnerability and ecstatic relationality.
Readers often equate Butler’s account of vulnerability with a sense
of injurability, harm or propensity for suffering. In Chapter 7 I
argue, however, that to focus exclusively on vulnerability as injury
is to overlook a second sense of vulnerability at work in Butler’s
writings: vulnerability as impressionability, which, I commend,
is central both to Butler’s understanding of ethics and politics.
For me, as for Gies and Jenkins, ethics and politics are complexly
intertwined. What I am concerned with, however, is the question
of how it is possible to practise politics and ethics in concrete
conditions of precarity. That is, where certain lives are produced
historically as less protected or more impoverished than others,
and where certain bodies are unrecognisable as human; when to
10 Butler and Ethics
borrow from Butler, a ‘vulnerability’ can be neither ‘perceived or

recognized’ and thus cannot ‘come into play’ (2004a: 43). What,
I inquire, if anything, may be done in such a context to facilitate
ethical responsiveness, given Butler’s own assertion that ethical
solicitations cannot be prepared for in advance?
The final chapter of the volume takes us in a new direction.
Critical interpreters of Butler have supposed that her puta-
tive ‘ethical turn’ is a response to a gap in her writing. Samuel
Chambers advises otherwise. For him, what is missing from her
earlier work is not ethicality but rather an account of the social
formation that furnishes the condition of possibility for all sub-
jects. To explore this, he turns to the theory of subjection outlined
by Butler in The Psychic Life of Power (1997b), homing in on her
evaluations of Hegel and Althusser in that text. Chambers claims
that the ‘Hegelianised’ reading of Althusser she advances here
divests Althusser’s account of the social formation of its complex-
ity. As a result, the theory of subjection that she allegedly derives
in part from Althusser lacks an adequate concept of social order.
Chambers suggests, however, that in her so-called ethical writ-
ings after 9/11, Butler introduces an alternative conception of ‘the
social’, tied to an ontology of finitude and vulnerability. This is an
attempt, he proposes, to respond to the deficit in her earlier work.
The problem with her new account, however, is that it offers, at
best, ‘little more than a liberal conception of the social’ (p. 210).
For Chambers the end result is that ‘something significant has been
lost’ in Butler’s writing: namely, the radicalism of her earlier work
(p. 215).
Notes
1. For Fieser this might entail exploring where ethical principles derive
from and what they connote (metaethics); examining the moral
standards that determine what constitutes wrong or right behaviour
(normative ethics); or deciding what the morally appropriate response
or course of action might be in specific areas, such as abortion, capital
punishment or animal rights (applied ethics) (2012).
2. An ethos that for Adorno might, in certain contexts, ‘acquire repres-
sive and violent qualities’ (2000: 17).
3. She is also the author of Subjects of Desire in 1987, which was her
first book, the published version of her doctoral thesis.
4. For competing assessments of Butler’s debt to Levinas in this volume
Introduction 11
see the chapters by Gies, Mills and Rushing. Interestingly, in ‘Ethical

Ambivalence’ Butler dates her own reading of Levinas to a point in
the 1990s – the same period, in other words, when the resurgence of
interest in his writings roughly began, at least ‘among the deconstruc-
tively minded’ (2000: 19).
5. In addition to those noted here, see also Loizidou 2007 and Rushing
2010.
6. Although Mills spots a certain continuity in Butler’s concerns from
Bodies that Matter, Excitable Speech and The Psychic Life of Power
to Precarious Life and particularly Giving an Account of Oneself, to
do with her ‘critical ontology of subjectivity and materialization’, she
argues that where initially this centred on ‘political resistance and
agency, her recent reflections . . . are turned more specifically toward
the ethical dimensions of social existence’ (2007: 133, 134).
7. On the displacement of politics in Butler’s more ethically-oriented
writings, see also Shulman 2011; Benhabib 2013; and Walker, this
volume.
8. Grievability is also discussed by Lloyd, Schippers and Walker, this
volume.
References
Adorno, Theodor (2000), Problems of Moral Philosophy, ed. Thomas
Schröder, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Stanford: Stanford University
Press.
Asad, Talal, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler and Saba Mahmood (2009), Is
Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech, The Townsend
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1
Signifying Otherwise: Liveability and

Language
Nathan Gies
. . . although his words wound us here or, perhaps precisely because
his words wound us here, we are responsible for him, even as the rela-
tion proves more painful in its nonreciprocity. (Butler 2012: 47)
Deformed and ill-understood? Perhaps. At least this deformation will

not have been a way to deny the debt. (Levinas 1998a: 189 n. 28)
Has Judith Butler been ‘duped by morality’?1 Although I doubt

even the most sceptical among them would put the question in
such stark terms, many of Butler’s readers have expressed a sense
that her work may have taken a wrong turn. Such readers worry
that, in her engagement with moral philosophy, and in particular
with the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Butler has retreated from
some of the important political insights of her earlier work in
feminist and gender theory. For instance, Lynne Segal finds Butler
‘substituting ethical abstraction for political analysis in some of
her recent Levinasian and Arendtian turns’ (2008: 384). For her
part, Diana Coole provides a more positive evaluation of Butler’s
recent work, going so far as to argue that it offers a possible
‘renewal of political engagement’, but quickly adds that ‘pulling
against this possibility there is also . . . the more abstractly norma-
tive, Kantian – and recently, Levinasian – aspect of her thinking’
(2008: 27). Moya Lloyd likewise contends that, although Butler
departs from Levinas on certain points, ultimately, ‘instead of
subjecting to critical scrutiny the [Levinasian] idea of the face as
the means by which others make ethical demands on us, Butler
simply concurs with it’, to deleterious effect (2008: 103). Levinas
himself often contrasts the ethical and the political,2 and so one
can understand the suspicion evinced by many of Butler’s readers
upon encountering the name Levinas in her work. For these critics,
15
Butler’s recent writing has become weighed down by the gravity

of moralism.
I read Butler’s recent work differently. Certainly, critics have
voiced important reservations about Butler’s recent work distinct
from a concern over its ‘Levinasian’ aspects; however, taking
Butler’s readings of Levinas as a kind of case study, I use the
encounter between these two thinkers as a starting point for recon-
sidering the relationship between ethics and politics in her work
and beyond. To advance the debate over Butler’s ethics, we will
need to move beyond simply calling her recent work Levinasian
and more carefully consider how she reads Levinas. In my first
three sections, I therefore situate and explicate the work Butler has
done as a reader of Levinas. The first section shows how Butler
draws on Levinas as part of her career-long exploration of the
role of practices of representation in enabling and constraining life
conditions. My second section details how Butler’s deployment
of Levinas pushes her own thinking beyond an exclusive focus on
socially mediated practices of representation. In the third section,
I consider Butler’s use, development and politicisation of Levinas’s
sense of ‘the ethical’ In the final two sections, I move beyond
Butler’s reading of Levinas to offer my own Levinasian reading of
Butler. I highlight ways Levinas’s work on communication, which
has so far received little attention from Butler herself, comple-
ments the strengths (and avoid some of the limitations) of Butler’s
ethico-political position.
Moving between Butler and Levinas, I explore the relational
modes that might attend a non-deliberative theory of communi-
cation less structured by the drive to decipher the intentions of
discrete individuals and less motivated by the aspiration to sym-
metrical exchange. This perspective on communication emphasises
ambivalent activities of individual and collective transformation at
work as meanings shift unevenly and things come to signify other-
wise. This process is ambivalent in part because, as my epigraphs
suggest, attempts to communicate often generate considerable
damage and loss. However, my epigraphs also suggest an ethos
of communication that, instead of disavowing the possibility of
misunderstanding or even injury in communicative life, moves
through these distortions to find a shared but differentiated mode
of existence. Weaving together themes drawn from Butler and
Levinas, I thus problematise a number of received views regarding
the relationship between ethics, politics and language; at the same
Signifying Otherwise: Liveability and Language 17
time, I affirm alternative coalitional modes of political community

and communication.
Speech and survival

Throughout her career, Bonnie Honig has developed an impor-
tant critique of political visions that focus myopically on survival,
understood in terms of ‘mere life’. She has urged readers to trans-
form discussions framed in terms of matters of survival into strug-
gles over issues of sur-vivance or ‘more life’ (see Honig 1993: 114;
Honig 2009: 10). Honig’s position here is necessary, but I think
this argument misses its mark when used, as Honig has recently
used it, to articulate a critique of Butler (Honig 2010, 2013).
Nevertheless, Honig’s reading articulates many readers’ discom-
fort with Butler’s recent work in compelling and original terms.
For Honig, Butler’s recent work evinces a ‘mortalist humanism’
that reductively defines humans in terms of ‘the ontological fact of
mortality’ or ‘vulnerability to suffering’ (2010: 1). In this section, I
work to rebut this reading by exploring Butler’s arguments about
the connections between what she calls ‘livability’, or a liveable
life, and language. Tracing the development of these arguments
across Butler’s work, my reading of Butler emphasises that the
links between liveability and language are neither natural nor
spontaneous: they emerge through ethical changes and political
struggles.
Much of Butler’s work departs from the premise that, in order
to have one’s words heard and understood, one needs to appeal
to certain norms and conventions. No one needs to explicitly
articulate or consciously take up these norms; indeed, we rarely
confront norms so directly. Nevertheless, those who go beyond
such norms, who are the occasion of ‘an irruption of the unspeak-
able’, find the relevance (or even the intelligibility) of their speech
discounted (Butler 1997: 136). Butler finds such an operation of
norms at work in, for example, the appeals to ‘purity’ still all
too often required for survivors of sexual abuse or assault to be
recognised as such; attempts to affirm simultaneously that one is
a sexual being and that one has experienced a sexual violation fre-
quently encounter only derision and dismissiveness (Butler 1997:
136–7). For those thus unable to have their words heard, the result
may often be psychically ‘falling apart’, physical incarceration or
‘dissolution’ as any self at all (Butler 1997: 136).
In Excitable Speech, Butler presents this argument in terms of a

‘link between survival and speakability’ (1997: 136). She character-
ises this idea as a development of the claim, made by ‘political theo-
rists from Aristotle to Arendt’, ‘that it is as linguistic [beings] that
humans become political kinds of beings’ (Butler 1997: 179 n. 9).
Departing from Aristotle and Arendt, though, Butler gives this view
a decidedly tragic cast, insofar as she places greater emphasis on the
unhappy implication that, if our speech makes us the kind of beings
we are, then ‘to move outside of the domain of speakability is to
risk one’s status as a subject’ or one’s ‘viability’ (Butler 1997: 133).
The roots of this argument connecting speech and survival
reach back to Butler’s earliest work in feminist theory. That work
derives theoretical energy and political impetus from its convic-
tion that the system of sex determination and sexual intelligibility
is a system for distributing violence. For Butler, gender is best
understood ‘as a strategy of survival’, insofar as ‘discrete genders
are part of what “humanizes” individuals within contemporary
culture; indeed, those who fail to do their gender right are regu-
larly punished’ (1988: 522). Butler’s writing throughout the 1990s
continues to build on and refine this problematic. In Bodies that
Matter, what Butler previously referred to as ‘survival’ is articu-
lated in terms of ‘cultural viability’, and she places new emphasis
on the fact that viability for some is often secured at the expense
of the viability or vitality of other lives by means of ‘a repudiation,
a subordination, or an exploitative relation’ (1993: 114, 117–18).
Here again, Butler describes a process whereby lives that fail to
take shape in ways that neatly overlap with normative forms of life
struggle to sustain themselves. While in these works Butler consid-
ers a range of embodied modes of self-presentation rather than
focusing on speech per se, she persistently connects historically
constrained capacities for representation with questions about the
ability to live and live well.
The genealogy of this argument can be read forward as well as
backward: the themes of viability and survival seem contiguous
with the concept of liveability elaborated in Butler’s more recent
work.3 The just- cited formulations from Excitable Speech, for
example, return in parallel, if now slightly more accessible, terms
in Undoing Gender:
The ‘I’ that I am finds itself at once constituted by norms and depend-
ent on them but also endeavors to live in ways that maintain a critical
and transformative relation to them. This is not easy, because the ‘I’
becomes . . . threatened with unviability . . . when it no longer incor-
porates the norms in such a way that makes this ‘I’ fully recognizable
. . . I may feel that without some recognizability I cannot live. But I
may also feel that the terms by which I am recognized make life unliv-
able. (Butler 2004b: 3–4; see also Butler 2004a: xix–xx)
In this passage and throughout her work, Butler’s invocations of

‘life’ not only concern themselves with whether or not a being will
physically endure, but in what form and on terms how far from
what that being aspires to be. Thus, Butler’s discussion of viability
and survival already pulses with ‘more life’. Inverting Honig, I find
more liveliness in Precarious Life and subsequent work, where
Butler gives pride of place to the term ‘livability’, than in Butler’s
earlier writing, where one often encounters the language of viabil-
ity and survival. The term liveability accommodates, more easily
than viability or survival, a broader sense of the stakes. Liveability
refers not only to the mere possibility of existence, but also to
conditions for life’s ‘flourishing’ (Butler 2004b: 4, 88, 92, 100; see
also Butler 2009: 2, 23, 28, 133).4
As I receive it, Butler’s reading of Levinas does not retreat from
but philosophically elaborates these arguments. In Precarious
Life, for example, Butler begins her engagement with Levinas
with the claim that, as Levinas uses it, ‘“face” is always a figure
for something that is not literally a face’ (2004a: 133). This figure
thus notably fails a basic requirement of figuration: ‘it fails to
capture and deliver that to which it refers’ (Butler 2004a: 144).
For Levinas, this failure is necessary, because he believes that no
system of meanings, no totality of references, could fully delimit
the human. Through what Butler reads as a generative tension or
a telling failure, ‘the face’ provides a way of indexing this unindex-
able dimension of humanity:
There is something unrepresentable that we nevertheless seek to rep-

resent, and that paradox must be retained in the representation we
give. In this sense, the human is not identified with what is represented
but neither is it identified with the unrepresentable; it is, rather, that
which limits the success of any representational practice. The face is
not ‘effaced’ in this failure of representation, but is constituted in that
very possibility. Something altogether different happens, however,
when the face operates in the service of a personification that claims to
‘capture’ the human being in question. For Levinas, the human cannot
be captured through representation, and we can see that some loss
of the human takes place when it is ‘captured’ by the image. (Butler
2004a: 144–5)
The problem Butler here calls ‘capture’ recalls the paradox of rec-
ognition and liveability detailed in Undoing Gender: what I need
to live (in this case, recognition as human) may also qualify or
even foreshorten my life. As in that book, this negative or threat-
ening condition simultaneously offers a site of critical leverage.
Levinas’s notion of ‘the face’ shows how critique might become
possible by means of a reference that ‘not only fail[s] to capture
its referent, but show[s] this failing’ (Butler 2004a: 146). In this
startling but carefully elaborated use of Levinas, then, his notion
of ‘the face’ comes to serve exactly the function of drag in Gender
Trouble. Drag gains its denaturalising power and critical potential
in Butler’s earlier work from the precisely parallel way its status
as a ‘failed copy’ reveals the ‘constitutive failure of all gendered
enactments’ (Butler 1999: 186). Rendered in the bluntest terms
possible, Butler’s recent work thus suggests that the Levinasian
face acts as a kind of ‘human drag’. The face shows the instability
of all attempts to offer ‘the human’ as a clearly defined category
in the same way drag points to the instability of normative gender
categories. What characteristics are ‘essentially human’? How
do we know an ‘original gender’ when we see one? As styles of
reference that invite critical questions about the unity and coher-
ence of their objects, the slippery Levinasian language of ‘the
face’ and the amusing impersonations of the drag queen trouble
the assumptions of these questions. Giving face, in both senses,
becomes something other than itself when it merely reproduces
that which it figures.5 But both figures can also work critically to
help us to ‘know and feel at the limits of representation as it is
currently cultivated and maintained’ (Butler 2005: 151). At least
in this instance, then, Butler’s use of Levinas works to extend her
ongoing concern with the link between modes of representation
and possibilities for living well.
Conditions and capacities

In Butler’s recent work, she often couches this link between speech
and survival in terms of a ‘social ontology’ of bodies; through the
framework of ‘social ontology’, Butler both reaffirms and reworks

her earlier thinking. To think of bodies in terms of a ‘social ontol-
ogy’ means, for Butler, to affirm that bodies ‘invariably come [. . .]
up against the outside world’, and that ‘“coming up against” is
one modality that defines the body’ (2009: 34). This argument
echoes a claim made by Butler in the opening pages of Bodies
that Matter: ‘bodies tend to indicate a world beyond themselves’
(Butler 1993: iii). In that book and in other earlier work, Butler
describes this ‘beyond’ primarily as the inter- human world of
language, culture and norms, and she understands the process of
‘indicating’ primarily as a ‘citing’ of those norms. In other words,
bodies are not self-sufficient; rather, as detailed in the previous
section, bodily viability requires making reference to and conform-
ing with certain conventions and structures of intelligibility. This
argument persists even in Butler’s most recent work. Butler still
argues that a body will struggle to endure unless it appeals to some
social norms, unless it finds some cultural recognition.
However, she now emphasises, bodies also need more than cul-
tural recognition through social norms. Butler now argues, contra
her formulation in Excitable Speech, that it is not merely or pri-
marily ‘as linguistic’ that our intelligibility and survival are negoti-
ated. While Butler still argues that ‘a life is produced according to
the norms by which life is recognized’, she now rejects the implica-
tion that ‘everything about a life is produced according to such a
norm’ (2009: 7; my emphasis). When Butler writes that ‘there is
no life without the conditions that variably sustain life, and those
conditions are pervasively social, establishing not a discrete ontol-
ogy of the person, but rather the interdependency of persons’,
she appears well within the terms of Bodies that Matter: bodies
indicate a world beyond themselves. But we step beyond the terms
of that book when she adds, completing the same sentence, that
that ‘interdependency’ also involves ‘relations to the environment
and to non-human forms of life, broadly considered’ (Butler 2009:
19). Butler now offers ‘a conception of the body as fundamentally
dependent on, and conditioned by, a sustained and sustainable
world’, where the meaning of ‘world’ seems to have expanded
to cover both the inter-human world and the non-human world
(Butler 2009: 34).
Even as it gestures beyond the human world, this ‘social ontol-
ogy’ does not depend on a dehistoricised assertion of what is and
must be, ‘a description of fundamental structures of being that
are distinct from any and all social and political organization’
(Butler 2009: 2). Butler insists that her account of liveability does
not require positing life as some ‘raw’ essence, ‘stripped bare of
all its usual interpretations, appearing to us outside all relations
of power’, awaiting cultural cooking (Butler 2009: 51).6 In other
words, ‘life’ here does not hold the status ‘sex’ held in the variants
of feminist theory criticised by Butler’s earlier work.7 The life for
which liveability is a problem does not appear as an apolitical
substance or biological facticity awaiting political determina-
tions (Butler 2009: 1; Butler 2004a: 43). In her recent attempts
to articulate a theory that focuses less exclusively on bodily expo-
sure to socio-linguistic norms, Butler has not suddenly converted
to the position that ‘construction [is] something which happens to
a ready-made object;’ instead, she has more fully elaborated her
earlier insight that linguistic attempts to capture, circumscribe or
refer to bodies always fail, and that this failure, ‘while in language,
is never fully of language’ (Butler 1993: 11, 67, original emphasis).
Norms cannot of themselves fully explain why some lives flourish
and others fail, but the environments and non-human forms of
life on which human life also depends are not posited as existing
simply ‘outside of’ linguistic norms.
This argument is informed by and exemplified in Butler’s
reading of Levinas. As Butler reads him, Levinas suggests that,
before I can act or forgo action, there will have first been a ‘sub-
jectivation’, a series of acts and events that enables me to emerge
as an ‘I’ in the first place, which Levinas calls ‘a passivity prior to
passivity’ (Butler 2005: 77). For Butler, this ‘non-narrativizable
exposure’ in the process of subject formation complements, but is
not reducible to, the operations of ‘norms that facilitate my telling
about myself’ familiar from her earlier work (Butler 2005: 38–9,
original emphasis). Norms work co-constitutively upon, but do
not fully saturate, other factors that condition and constitute our
existence.
Even as she retains a focus on norms, Levinas thus helps Butler
moderate a certain ‘anthropologistic’ tendency that some critics
have persuasively argued haunts her earlier work on norms. If
read to simply expose everything taken to be ‘natural’ as merely a
sedimentation of human norms, Butler’s early work would tend to
reproduce a traditional theory of agency that reduces everything
inhuman to a mere ossification of human activity which the dyna-
mism of human existence might overcome (Cheah 1996: 129–30;
see also Mahmood 2012). Her reading of Levinas, by contrast,

helps her to emphasise that ‘not every condition of the subject is
open to revision, since the conditions of formation are not always
recuperable and knowable’ (Butler 2005: 134). In other words,
when Butler points to aspects of subjectivity irreducible to the
operation of norms, she does not retreat to but further displaces a
traditional account of agency. Yet, as seen in the previous section’s
discussion of ‘the face’, for Butler the recognition of limits, inco-
herence and failure is not a qualification of the project of expand-
ing possibilities for life but a goad to it: ‘new modes of subjectivity
become possible . . . when the limiting conditions by which we are
made prove to be malleable and replicable’ (Butler 2005: 133).
Thus, if the forces (irreducible to the force of norms) Butler now
draws our attention to are not open to being reworked just as we
see fit, neither are they simply givens, imposed on us with a brutal
and incontestable finality. This attempt to find a space between
determinism and voluntarism has been an important ongoing task
of Butler’s work. It remains a point of emphasis in Butler’s more
recent texts (2005: 133). But now, Butler will add that linguistic
norms, social norms and cultural norms are not the only ‘limiting
conditions’ we face, and thus do not of themselves exhaust the
possible sites of replicability and malleability (see especially Butler
2004a: 16; 2005: 19). By thus extending the logic of her earlier
arguments, Butler has radicalised, not hedged on, her earlier work.
Butler’s recent work on liveability does not represent an insidious
naturalism creeping into her theory at the expense of her politics.
Rather, the theme of ‘liveability’ works to open up new sites for
political engagement, intervention and transformation.
The language of ethics

On this reading of Butler’s ongoing and emerging concerns, her
work constitutes an invitation to think through the specific and
variable interactions among the many forces that afford, condi-
tion and constrain bodily persistence and flourishing. In her recent
work, Butler has conceived of this exploration of liveability as
a political and ethical problem. As shown in the introduction,
several of Butler’s readers see ethics as ‘substituting’ for or ‘pulling
against’ politics; in this section, I explore Butler’s own distinc-
tive way of understanding the relationship between these two
domains.
Butler is keenly aware that moralism often moves quickly into

the space opened by ethical questions (2009: 87, 51), and so her
engagements with ethics begin and remain in ambivalence. Indeed,
Butler opens an essay on ‘Ethical Ambivalence’ by claiming that
she doesn’t have much to say about ‘why there is a return to ethics,
if there is one, in recent years, except to say that [she has] for the
most part resisted this return’. She then proposes to offer ‘a map
of this resistance and its partial overcoming’ (Butler 2000: 15). I
want to underline here both the scepticism Butler expresses about
the very idea of an ‘ethical turn’ (or even ‘return’) in the first place,
as well as the ambiguity of her own ‘partial overcoming’. She
explains her resistance by noting that a ‘return to ethics’ frequently
involves ‘an escape from politics’ (Butler 2000: 15). Nevertheless,
Butler makes clear that this need not be a reason to desist from
engaging in ethical analysis, only a reason to proceed carefully,
map in hand. Butler concludes the essay by describing a scene in
which ‘there is no innocence, only the navigations of ambivalence’
(Butler 2000: 26). This step away from innocence and purity, this
insistence on sticking with ambiguity and ambivalence, informs
Butler’s understanding of both the content of ethics and the cat-
egory of ‘the ethical’. For Butler, the ethical is not a category with
clearly delimited boundaries, and so is not something we can con-
fidently turn either towards or away from; she suggests ethics itself
may involve a capacity for uncertainty.
Although many critics (and some acolytes) associate Levinas’s
name with the highly non-ambivalent, all-too-certain stance of
moralising, this is not Butler’s Levinas. Her rejection of an ‘inno-
cent’ stance in this essay is not a check on her own Levinasianism;
on the contrary, it derives from a reading of Levinas. Butler’s
account of Levinas in this short essay is sophisticated, but a bit
sketchy, and so a return to Levinas’s own texts can help illustrate
the ‘navigations of ambivalence’ emerging from his ethics. As
Levinas himself stresses, he does not use the term ‘ethics’ to desig-
nate anything ‘moral’ (1987: 116). His work ‘resorted to’ ethical
language because that language provides the most ‘adequate’
way to describe a mode of approaching the world otherwise than
through ‘knowing’ (Levinas 1998a: 120; see also Davies 1995).
‘Ethical’ is thus, in the first place, Levinas’s way of indicating ‘a
relation between terms . . . where they are bound by a plot which
knowing can neither exhaust nor unravel’ (Levinas 1987: 116 n.
6). Ethics describes a ‘reversal of certainty’, a ‘relaxation of virility
without cowardice’ (Levinas 1998a: 56, 185). In its most primary

sense, then, ‘the ethical’ names a mode of relationality less struc-
tured by a need for certainty, and so less motivated by an anxiety
about being ‘duped’.8
This sense of the ethical moves in the same direction as Butler’s
‘navigations of ambivalence’. She calls for ‘a new sense of ethics’
that begins in an experience of ‘the very limits of knowing’ (Butler
2005: 42). She is especially interested in ‘a disposition of humil-
ity and generosity’ (Butler 2005: 42). ‘Disposition’ is a key term
in this formulation of ethics. As I read Butler, her sense of ‘the
ethical’ has little to do with a lofty, quasi-transcendental domain.9
Her use of the language of ethics comes closer to a more mundane
sense of ‘ethics’ derived from Greek sources by way of Michel
Foucault. In this tradition, ethics refers to the crafting of character
and habit, of an ethos or disposition. But Foucauldian ‘ethics’ and
Levinasian ‘ethics’ might have something to say to each other,
and both might have something to say to ‘politics’. I take Butler’s
recent work to be exploring the questions that follow from this
wager. What happens to an ethics of ‘self-fashioning’ when we
highlight (more insistently than Foucault did in his later work) the
way the self is fashioned all along by forces that exceed its will,
forces that paradoxically fashion the very will that later fashions?
What sort of practices might cultivate and follow from a capacity
for uncertainty, a ‘relaxation of virility’ distinct from apathy?
I insist on calling these questions ethical and political or ethico-
political because, despite the careful and varied attention Butler
has given in recent years to conditions and histories of subject
formation, her interest remains in the future – in the ways the
future might differ from the past and not merely reproduce it
(cf. Edelman 2004). On Butler’s account, ‘precisely at moments
of unknowingness, when what forms us diverges from what lies
before us’, we find opportunities to ‘risk ourselves’ in the creation
of something new. Although she notes that such divergences or
undoings can be both ‘a primary necessity’ and ‘an anguish’, she
refuses to rest in any naturalism or mortalism, arguing that such
moments of uncoupling also present ‘a chance – to be addressed,
claimed, bound to what is not me, but also to be moved, to act, to
address myself elsewhere, and so to vacate the self-sufficient “I” as
a kind of possession’ (Butler 2005: 136).
This move through action beyond the ‘I’ develops arguments
present in Butler’s earliest work in gender theory. While she
roposes thinking of gender as a kind of act, in light of ‘the scale

p
and systemic character’ of sex determination and sexist oppression,
Butler also emphasises a need to think of what ‘acts’ in terms other
than those of ‘individual action’ (Butler 1988: 525). The action
that establishes and sustains gendered embodiment is always a
‘public action’ or an ‘acting in concert’ (Butler 1988: 526). In order
to facilitate this transformation of our understanding of ‘action’,
Butler draws on an analogy with theatrical performance.10 Just
as actors in a theatrical context freshly interpret and enact a pre-
existing script, and those collective acts of interpretation shape and
reshape our sense of what a particular play is or does, ‘so the gen-
dered body acts its part in a culturally restricted corporeal space
and enacts interpretations within the confines of already existing
directives’ (Butler 1988: 526). Although these latter ‘interpreta-
tions’ may often be neither deliberate nor fully conscious, they
might become sites for critical intervention and transformation.
Butler refers to this process as ‘a difficult labor of forging a future
from resources inevitably impure’ (Butler 1993: 241). I take this to
be perhaps the central preoccupation of Butler’s large and varied
corpus: acting with others to do something with what has been
done to you, making something of the ways you have been made,
and, in so doing, making alternative modes of collective life possi-
ble. If Butler has ‘turned to ethics’, then, she has turned to an ethics
that shares these same concerns: ethics imagined as an impure or
ambivalent activity of individual and collective transformation.
The ethics of language

The way we use and are used by words is one important site for
ethico-
political activity in the sense described in the previous
section. Pursuing this thesis involves asking what role language
might play in shaping and expanding liveability once language
has been de-centred from its organising place in providing for
those possibilities. How might the conjunction of elements Butler
pointed to in Excitable Speech – speakability and survival – be
further developed in light of the new concerns raised by her more
recent work? Taking up these questions through Levinas’s writing,
I consider Levinasian themes that push Butler’s exploration of
the connections between speech and survival further away from
questions of individual persistence and towards modes of political
action and relationality.
My reading of Levinas takes energy from Graham Harman’s

suggestion that ‘the narrowly ethical reception of [Levinas’s]
thought seems to be one-sided’, and too easily dissolves into ‘an
abstract piety’ (2007: 21, 22). What Harman here calls ‘the nar-
rowly ethical’, I have been calling the moralistic or moralising.
Rather than suggest that there are moments in Levinas’s thought
that are something other than ‘ethical’, I want only to temporar-
ily set aside the now all too familiar intensity of his formulations
of infinite responsibility, the face and the Other (cf. Sparrow
2013). Instead, I focus on Levinas’s fresh take on ‘one of the
forgotten central problems of modern philosophy: communica-
tion’ (Harman 2007: 26). Because Butler has not so far explored
this theme through Levinas’s thought, here I depart from Butler’s
explicit engagements with Levinas to offer my own interpretation
of his work.
In what sense does Levinas consider communication a ‘for-
gotten problem’ for philosophy? Certainly, philosophy has not
forgotten language. Indeed, on Levinas’s view, the philosophical
tradition takes language as both its origin and its end. For the
mode of thought Levinas calls philosophy, everything can be said
– explicated and explained – and what can be said can always be
said in terms of what has already been said. Levinas thus defines
philosophy as ‘speech directed upon the present’ (1996: 66). But
here Levinas draws a surprising conclusion: if language functions
as an indexing of whatever appears in terms of the already appar-
ent, it seems that communication is superfluous, or at best redun-
dant, a mere ‘circulation of messages’ (1987: 115, 109). Within
the Western philosophical tradition as Levinas understands it, pre-
cisely because of its narrow focus on questions of language, com-
munication thus appears as an unfortunate detour in an ongoing
process of disclosure in which all possibility for genuine novelty or
real surprise are strictly foreclosed (Levinas 1996: 100).
Yet, while he considers language to be a traditional locus of the
unbroken circle of philosophical thought, Levinas also notes that
language gives us one of the best examples of those possibilities
otherwise than philosophy, otherwise than knowing, which he
calls ethical.11 While the philosophical tradition has focused on the
linguistic function of reference – that is, the capacity of language
to thematise anything whatsoever as something in particular by
relating it to something else already known – language is also
for someone. Regardless of what one says, in saying anything,
l anguage produces something available ‘for others’ and not merely

‘about something’. By focusing on the for rather than the as,
Levinas thus finds ‘the source of a meaning signifying otherwise’,
a communicative dimension of language irreducible to the ‘already
said’ and the ‘already present’ (Levinas 1996: 101). There are two
dimensions of Levinas’s alternative account of communication I
wish to emphasise and put in conversation with Butler’s work:
non-intentionality and non-reciprocity.
Even when I say something ‘as simple as hello’ (Levinas 1996:
103), the meaning of what I say for you may often correspond to
the meaning it has for me, but nothing guarantees that it will. This
non-intentional element of communication not only follows all
words I might happen to say, but also comes prior to any words
I might ever say (Levinas 1998a: 48). Before I offer ‘my opinion’
or say ‘as for me’, I have a meaning ‘for others’ that I do not
control or will or intend (Levinas 1998a: 180). One’s meaningful-
ness is ‘despite oneself’ (Levinas 1998a: 74). This does not mean
that meaning is somehow natural rather than cultural: the despite
oneself of meaning ‘cannot be converted into an “inward need” or
a natural tendency’ (Levinas 1998a: 53).12 Nevertheless, Levinas
insists that, regardless of what I intend, and irrespective of how
closely my behaviour conforms to those intentions, I am not only
what I intend. I am, significantly, despite my intentions, without
my consent, and beyond my control. When I speak carefully, wil-
fully and consciously, I do not terminate but underline this non-
intentional element of communication. Perhaps my words will not
be heard as I intend them. Perhaps I won’t be understood. Perhaps
there is not even any ‘other’ there to see or hear me (Levinas 1998a:
120). ‘The for-the-other’ always risks becoming ‘for nothing’, the
communication of sense always risks becoming ‘pure non-sense’,
but at least by this risk avoids the circular logic of a philosophy
for which everything is always already said (Levinas 1998a: 50).
For Levinas, meaning not only exceeds my intentions but also
any possibility of reciprocity. When significance is for others,
it will be for them in a way it cannot be for me. Moreover, my
‘meaningfulness’ is never exhausted. For Levinas, meaning is
always characterised by ‘a for of total gratuity’, ‘outside of any
correlation and any finality’ (Levinas 1998a: 96). I am never finally
‘for’ one thing but always possibly ‘for’ something more. Even
hundreds of years after I die and am completely forgotten, my
unknown bones might be studied by some future anthropologist
or be used as fuel by some enterprising new explorer. My meaning

for them could not be correlated with or returned back as some-
thing meaningful to me, since ‘I’ will have been long gone from the
scene.13 For Levinas, all meaning, or at least an aspect of all that is
meaningful, is similarly accomplished only in ‘a time without me’,
a ‘world without me’ (Levinas 1986: 349). Fundamentally non-
reciprocal, Levinasian communication is thus irreducible to any
sort of intersubjective exchange (Levinas 1998a: 48). Meaning for
is ‘a one-way action’ that cannot be ‘inverted into a reciprocity’ or
‘absorbed again in calculations of deficits and compensations, in
accountable operations’ (Levinas 1986: 349).
Can there be a politics that neither originates from subjec-
tive intentions nor aims at intersubjective reciprocity? Levinas
himself thought not: he persistently understood politics on liberal
terms, as a contract among equal individuals, and explicitly set
the de‑subjectification and non-reciprocity of the ethical against
such a politics. Many political theorists, even those who depart
from orthodox liberalism, would likely agree that politics requires
either a strong theory of individual subjectivity or a normative
foundation in reciprocity, if not both. For example, Lynn Sanders
(1997) offers a non-Levinasian theory of political testimony that
comes close to what I call Levinasian non-reciprocity, insofar as
she draws attention to forms of talk not anchored or oriented
by ‘the pursuit of commonality’, ‘seeking communal dialogue’,
‘finding a common aim’ or ‘the resolution of a community
problem’. However, unlike Levinas, Sanders seems to reassert a
direct and authoritative subjectivity or interiority, insofar as she
is interested in ‘telling one’s own story’, contributing one’s own
‘voice’, ‘views’ or ‘perspective’ (1997: 371–2; cf. Levinas 1996:
98–107). Iris Marion Young, on the other hand, draws on many
of the less subjective features of Levinas’s theory of communica-
tion that I am also highlighting but she nevertheless remains com-
mitted to ideals of reciprocity (2000: 59–61). However, Butler’s
work provides a space for revising this understanding of politics.
She points to a politics less oriented by either the individual voice,
on the one hand, or the correlation and coordination of needs and
desires, on the other.
For Butler, as for Levinas, language fundamentally exceeds our
intentions and ‘is always in some ways out of our control’ (Butler
1997: 15). The words we speak or write ‘continue to signify in
spite of their authors, and sometimes against their authors’ most
precious intentions’ (Butler 1993: 241). Following what Butler

calls a ‘not owning of one’s words’, or what Levinas might call
the ‘for’ aspect of signification, ‘the hope of ever fully recognizing
oneself in the terms by which one signifies is sure to be disap-
pointed’ (Butler 1993: 242). To say that we do not find ourselves
in language or return to ourselves through language, however,
is not to say that nothing can be found there. Butler figures this
possibility in explicitly political terms, insisting that ‘the taking
up, reforming, deforming of one’s words does open up a dif-
ficult future terrain for community’ (1993: 241). There is a link
between language and liveability here, but I now place emphasis
on the constitution of a relation, rather than, as in the reading of
Excitable Speech traced above, on the ways that an ability to have
one’s words heard conditions one’s own chances of persisting and
flourishing. Reading Butler with a Levinasian accent, and Levinas
with a Butlerian twist, suggests an ethico-political model of lan-
guage in which ‘my’ survival is quite precisely ruled out, but ‘our’
vitality is – not secured but – at least made possible.14
Although the vocabulary of an ‘us’ or a ‘community’ often
serves to naturalise and depoliticise, Butler mitigates this ten-
dency by describing the ‘we’ in coalitional terms. A coalitional
politics, in Butler’s sense, involves thinking beyond ‘some kind of
reciprocal relationship and future harmony’ (2009: 162). Rather
than ‘agreed-upon identities or agreed-upon dialogic structures,
through which already established identities are communicated’,
Butler characterises a coalition as ‘an emerging and unpredict-
able assemblage of positions’ (1999: 21, 20). Speech and com-
munication are vitally important here, but their dynamics cannot
be reduced to ‘an ideal form’ asserted in advance. For Butler,
efforts to ‘determine what is and is not the true shape of dialogue,
what constitutes a subject-position, and, most importantly, when
‘unity’ has been reached’ are neither the preconditions of poli-
tics nor goals sought in politics, but a foreclosure in advance of
potent spaces for politics (1999: 20). In a politics of coalition,
the emergence, convergence and divergence of forms of commu-
nication helps to sustain alternative modes of liveability, and the
flourishing of new shapes of vitality prompts new representational
practices.
Lloyd has persuasively argued that ‘translation’ is a basic term
and practice in Butler’s conception of politics (2007: 150–4).
Effectively, the reading of Butler’s ethico-political project I am
proposing re- describes the ‘subversive resignification’ famously

elaborated in her work from the 1990s not as the image of
politicality, but as one practice among several gathered under the
umbrella of ‘practices of translation’.15 Translations are modes of
‘signifying otherwise’, now meant in a sense informed by but not
quite reducible to Levinas’s sense of that phrase. Any translation
plainly confronts issues of power and plurality, but translation
allows ways of negotiating power and plurality otherwise than
through subversion or simple reduplication. Practising translation
well requires one to tarry with the possibility of misunderstand-
ing, working through languages that one may not fully possess or
command, to find some possibility of a shared but differentiated
existence.
This process cannot be neatly charted or precisely controlled,
but Butler has tried to find ways of living with, by and through
our non-ownership of words. Levinas complements these efforts
insofar as he offers an ethos of communication that does not seek
to secure itself in advance against ‘the risk of misunderstanding’,
‘the risk of lack of and refusal of communication’ (1998a: 119–20;
see also 1986: 349). For Levinas, communication becomes com-
municative only to the extent that it runs the risk of going awry,
beset by the possibility that it might blunder or break. This is not
to deny the harm that may be done to us by the misuse, misrep-
resentation, or misunderstanding of our words. It may, however,
mean that we need ways of talking about those harms and ways
of imagining remedies beyond those that merely attempt to reas-
sert control, ownership and authority.16 It may also mean that we
cannot focus on harms alone but must also push ourselves to think
and feel the ‘promise’ to be found in those ‘incalculable effects of
action’ (Butler 1993: 241). As words move between us, wounds,
pains, deformations and misunderstandings may take place. But,
as my epigraphs suggest, those apparent failures to relate may in
themselves contain potent forms of relationality. Even as I have
taken distance from the overly familiar Levinasian themes of
responsibility and debt emphasised by Butler, I have been trying
with Butler and Levinas to make space to conceive of modes of
connection which might similarly ‘admit a difference between
oneself and the others’, an ‘inequality, in a sense absolutely
opposed to oppression’ (Levinas 1998a: 177).
Personal and political

Butler’s reading of Levinas has so far attracted little attention
from those more singularly focused on explicating and expanding
on Levinas’s work, and it has been a point of marked scepticism
among many readers who have aligned themselves with other
aspects or eras of Butler’s work. Here I have shown that both sets
of readers would benefit from giving Butler’s ‘Levinasian turn’
another look. Butler’s engagement with Levinas, and with ethical
questions more broadly, is not some regrettable turn or detour
which she would do well to correct. Rather, her encounters with
Levinas represent the ongoing trajectory of her writing striking
out into a new domain, one that has already sent back powerful
contributions to our understanding of Levinas as a thinker and
ethico-political thought more generally. The ethico-political here
names the diffuse set of problems and puzzles involved in posi-
tioning oneself among the various forces that enable, condition
and constrain liveability. Practices of communication remain one
– though only one – site where liveability is so negotiated.
The well-known mantra of second-wave feminism, ‘the personal
is political’, offers an example of the kind of politics that might
take shape there. This phrase still surges with a life that has not
been deadened by cliché or zombified by appropriation. But to
appreciate this ongoing vitality, one needs to take care to recog-
nise the ways politicality here differs from ‘politics as usual’.17
The feminist community formed under the banner ‘the personal
is political’ does not merely shore up the subjectivity of feminist
activists as they have known it so far or provide those activists
with resources for a course charted in advance, but rather initiates
a process that ‘enables and empowers . . . in certain unanticipated
ways’ (Butler 1988: 523, my emphasis).18 Butler herself draws out
certain analogies between her project and this familiar feminist
claim: ‘the personal is political’, she argues, ‘suggests, in part, that
. . . my pain or my silence or my anger or my perception is finally
not mine alone, and that it delimits me in a shared cultural situa-
tion’ (Butler 1988: 523). This sentiment finds a little-noticed echo
in a well-known passage from Butler’s more recent work: although
‘many people think that grief is privatizing, that it returns us to
a solitary situation’, she will claim that ‘it exposes the constitu-
tive sociality of the self’ (Butler 2004b: 19). While the claim ‘the
personal is the political’ has often been appropriated for a priva-
tised, depoliticised account of individual lifestyles and consumer

choices, Butler’s work pushes in the opposite direction: my percep-
tion and my anger in the 1980s, no less than my grief in the 2000s,
might at first appear merely private, but in fact suggests a complex
political relation.
The claim that ‘the personal is political’ points to a coalitional
mode of politics which involves ‘not just “one’s own” struggle or
the apparent struggle of “another” but precisely the dehiscence
at the basis of the “we” ’ (Butler 2009: 183). A dehiscence takes
place here because the original impetus for transformation cannot
be neatly located either here or there, on ‘my side’ or on ‘your
side’. On Butler’s account, the claim that ‘my’ feelings are never
mine alone involves neither a simple recognition of what I feel in
another (‘we feel the same’) nor a mere sympathetic identifica-
tion with the feelings of others (‘what you feel is like what I once
felt’). To name and claim a personal feeling as a political relation
is, rather, to situate individual projects and experiences within
‘invariably collective’ forms of ‘acting in concert’ (Butler 2004b:
4; Butler 1988: 526). This form of political action also involves
a set of ethical tasks: the formation of habits and sensibilities
through experiences of difference. The shaping and crafting of
‘ties that bind and unbind’, ‘the forming and unforming of such
bonds’, takes place here in an unsteady rhythm, as one comes to
feel the limits of what had felt most obvious and certain (Butler
2009: 182). These moments of ethico-political dehiscence move
us to cede our most cherished comforts and certainties as we act
with and are interrupted by others in efforts at expanding possible
forms of life, at nourishing those for whom liveability has been
violently foreclosed, at dismantling and replacing systems that
secure survival for some only through the disavowal and exploita-
tion of what might otherwise be vibrant and vital.
Notes
1. I have adapted this first sentence from the first sentence of Totality
and Infinity: ‘Everyone will readily agree that it is the highest impor-
tance to know whether we are not duped by morality’ (Levinas
1969: 21). My title is also drawn from Levinas (1996: 101). The
paper greatly benefited from the generous editorial guidance of
Moya Lloyd, thoughtful readings from Samuel Chambers and
Timothy Vasko, and years of agonal exchange with Drew Walker.
2. For a concise elaboration of this position, see Levinas 1998b:

100–1. For her part, however, Butler has suggested that in his more
practical writings Levinas sometimes helps himself to an illicit blur-
ring of the ethical and the political (2005: 91–6; see also Butler
2012). Crucially, although Butler has been critical of these moments
of slippage in Levinas, she has not articulated that critique in terms
of a need to shore up the boundary between the ethical and the
political.
3. Although some have seen ‘a concern with “livability” ’ as one of the
distinctive features of Butler’s writing since 2000 (Mitchell 2008:
418), my arguments here build on those of Vicki Bell, who traces
the genealogy of ‘livability’ in Butler’s fundamental concern with
‘matters of survival’ (Bell 2008).
4. Moreover, Butler’s critique of Giorgio Agamben suggests that she
does not consider ‘mere life’ in itself a coherent or promising politi-
cal ideal, and thus remains quite far from positing the undifferenti-
ated ‘common humanity’ Honig ascribes to her (see Butler 2004a:
67–8; Butler and Spivak 2007: 40–3). Finally, contra Honig’s sug-
gestion that Butler’s writing since Precarious Life adopts a limited
‘affective repertoire’ (Honig 2013: 44), I find that ‘a wide range
of affects’ flows through Butler’s recent work (Butler 2009: 33–4).
Indeed, Butler faults Levinas for his failure to account for the
‘range of affective response’ that might accompany subject forma-
tion (Butler 2005: 98). None of this is exactly news to Honig. In
Antigone, Interrupted (2013), Honig does not moderate her argu-
ment about Butler’s recent work, but is more careful to say where the
distinctions drawn between her position and Butler’s are differences
of emphasis rather than kind. This is fair enough as far as it goes;
an attention to tone and emphasis may draw out important features
of an argument missed by other modes of analysis. However, I have
found it productive to suggest ways we might read Butler with a dif-
ferent set of accents and underlinings.
5. See Butler 2004a: 145–6, Butler 1993: 128–31. In the case of gen-
dered embodiment, this does not mean that those who aim at or
convincingly approach normative gender presentations are somehow
‘bad’ or ‘merely hegemonic’, only that those practices would have
to be thought in their specificity. Engagements with Butler’s work
motivated by trans and lesbian- femme concerns have helpfully
underlined this point (see Halberstam 2005: 50–3, Samuels 2003).
6. The language of the raw is drawn directly from Frames of War,
while my invocation of ‘cultural cooking’ is meant to suggest a link
between this ‘raw’ and Butler’s earlier analysis of the ‘raw’ of Claude
Lévi-Strauss (Butler 1999: 47).
7. The central and provocative claim of that work was that, while
earlier feminist theorists had productively contested ‘naturalistic
explanations of sex and sexuality’, the most common tool for doing
so, ‘distinguishing sex and gender’, recapitulated the very naturalism
that it was intended to interrupt (Butler 1988: 520). Distinguishing
sex from gender helped to contest the idea that having a certain
kind of sexed body necessitated doing certain gendered actions, but
tended to shore up an understanding of sex as a ‘biological factic-
ity’ (Butler 1988: 522). By reducing the body to ‘a predetermined
or foreclosed structure, essence or fact’, these naturalistic models
of sex constrain political imagination (Butler 1988: 523); Butler’s
work, by contrast, considers sex, just as much as gender, in terms
of action rather than as ‘a substantial core’ that exists ‘prior to the
various acts, postures, and gestures by which it is . . . known’ (Butler
1988: 528). See Chambers 2003, Lloyd 2008 and Honig 2010. Each
of these authors, in different ways and in some cases quite persua-
sively, have argued that certain elements in Butler’s thought since
Gender Trouble have come to function as pre-discursive and apo-
litical essences awaiting cultural elaboration and thus are analogous
to ‘sex’ in the feminist theories of sex/gender rejected above. What
I elaborate in the main text, drawing primarily on a book by Butler
that appeared after their essays were initially published, is not meant
to ‘disprove’ their arguments so much as show that she remains
attentive to such concerns.
8. In this way, his famous question about morality, with which I
opened, might be read as a ‘trick question’: we have not been ‘duped
by morality’; rather, we are ‘duped’ by an endless concern about
being duped, by the endless quest for lucidity and enlightenment
that has defined the philosophical tradition’s self-interpretation as
‘a break with naivety’ or a departure from mere opinion. Levinas
situates even someone as ‘up-to-date’ as Jacques Derrida within that
tradition, and ventures to ask whether there might ‘be something
misguided about these dreams of a unnaive beginning’ (Davies
2002: 166, glossing Levinas 1996: 20). One way for otherwise
sceptical readers to appreciate the radicalism of Levinas’s work is
to note the striking parallels between Derrida’s critique of Michel
Foucault’s History of Madness and the questions he puts to Levinas’s
Totality and Infinity, and the even more surprising continuities
in the responses by the respective authors of those works. In both
of his essays, Derrida is centrally concerned with the moral and

methodological difficulties inherent in trying to gesture towards ‘a
certain silence’, which he takes to be the project of both Levinas and
Foucault. How can we point to what philosophy has silenced except
by way of philosophical language? Wouldn’t the only alternative
be to simply pass over that silence in silence, and thus to repeat the
violence of silencing? (Derrida 1978: 35–6, 117, 148). Like Levinas,
Foucault will respond in part by suggesting that Derrida’s questions
make him the best and most recent representative of a philosophical
anxiety about naivety, and Foucault too sought to step back from or
relax that anxiety (2006: 576, 589–90). I point out this parallelism
not necessarily to take cheap shots at Derrida, Derrideans and/or
philosophers (after all, ‘some of my best friends are . . .’), but in the
service of my general mission to make Levinas a more appealing and
radical figure for readers of Butler who might otherwise be inclined
to dismiss him.
9. In other words, Butler does not exactly follow more orthodox
readers of Levinas, who remain within the frame of thinking ‘ethics
as the infinite responsibility of the face-to-face relation’ (Critchley
2004: 173).
10. In her initial formulation, Butler is explicit that the language of
‘“performative” itself carries the double- meaning of “dramatic”
and “non-referential” ’ (1988: 522). This deliberate exploitation of
a conceptual proximity between ‘performance’ and ‘performative’
is humorously mirrored in an apparently unintentional editorial
slippage between the two: the first page of the essay announces its
title as ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in
Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’, but the header that runs
across the top of the article’s subsequent pages reads ‘Performance
Acts and Gender Constitution’. Butler wavers on the usefulness of
the theatrical understanding of performance in Bodies that Matter
(Butler 1993: 12). However, she subsequently reaffirms the earlier
formulation (Butler 1999: xxv).
11. For Levinas, this insistence that it is possible to interrupt or get
beyond the closures of philosophy is the central difference between
himself and Derrida. He characterises Derrida’s critical response
to Totality and Infinity as follows: ‘“Not to philosophize is still to
philosophize.” The philosophical discourse of the West claims the
amplitude of an all-encompassing structure or of an ultimate com-
prehension. It compels every other discourse to justify itself before
philosophy’ (Levinas 1996: 129). In his own voice, however, Levinas
will conclude that the modes of signification he attends to make it

possible to imagine a way in which ‘not to philosophize would not
be “to philosophize still” ’ (Levinas 1996: 148). While, again, more
robust readings of Derrida are certainly possible, I take this differ-
ence to be an important one, and it has guided my choice of Levinas,
rather than Derrida, as a figure to read alongside Butler’s work on
liveability, language and ethics.
12. Underlining this theme might push Butler’s thought away from the
Spinozist theme of a ‘desire for life’ flagged by Chambers and Lloyd
as especially problematic. Note, however, that other readings of
Spinoza, and Butler’s Spinozism, are also possible. For example, in
relation to Butler, Gordon Hull offers readers a ‘tragic Spinoza’ who
insists on contingency, who is a critic of the ‘tendency to naturalize
and/or ontologize’, and for whom conatus is not so much stable
‘bedrock’ but an insistent ‘principle of deconstitution’ (Hull 2012:
158, 154).
13. That I might in some way continue to confront existence after my
death is figured by Levinas as something not so much impossible as
it is horrifying. Aligning horror with the ‘return of presence in nega-
tion’, Levinas suggests that ‘Hamlet recoils before the “not to be”
because he has a foreboding of the return of being (“to dye, to sleepe,
perchance to Dreame”)’ (Levinas 1978: 57).
14. This need not mean that I physically die, of course, only that I cease
to exist as the I that I have been until now. Despite the differences
I am playing up here, both physical survival and the possibility of
community are crucially important and importantly linked: ‘We
should not underestimate what the thought of the possible does for
those for whom the very issue of survival is most urgent’ (Butler
2004b: 29; see also Butler 1999: viii).
15. Reading somewhat with and somewhat against Butler 2004b, 38.
For four very different accounts of the limits of an exclusive focus
on ‘resignification’, see Sedgwick 1993, Cheah 1996, Edelman 2004
and Mahmood 2012.
16. My dissertation contributes to the development of such a vocabulary
and imaginative repertoire through a different line of thinkers and
themes.
17. For a recent account of both the origins of the phrase and the trajec-
tory of its diminution, see Hesford 2013: 119–30.
18. Although these formulations obviously tilt a bit more towards Butler
than Levinas, consider that another way Levinas designates the ‘for’
element of meaning is with the Greek word leitourgia, a ‘liturgy’
that Levinas understands in etymological rather than religious

terms. A leitos ergos is a work among the people, a ‘public service’
perhaps not so different from the ‘public action’ Butler associates
with performative agency (Levinas 1996: 50, 176 n. 52; Butler 1988:
526). To provide an example of such a ‘liturgy’, Levinas draws on
words written by the French politician Léon Blum from within a
Nazi prison: ‘We are working in the present, not for the present.
How many times in meetings have I repeated and commented on
Nietzsche’s words: Let the future and the things most remote be the
rule of all the present days!’ (Levinas 1996: 50–1).
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2
Undoing Ethics: Butler on Precarity,

Opacity and Responsibility
Catherine Mills
Introduction
The concept of vulnerability has been an important point of refer-
ence for recent feminist interventions in ethics and political phi-
losophy. Arguments have been made for the necessity of a concept
of vulnerability in diverse fields, and there have been several recent
books and collections on the concept. While different approaches
have been proposed, one core aspect of this turn to vulnerability is
a deep interest in the idea of a universal vulnerability that is char-
acteristic, if not definitional, of the human. Judith Butler’s reflec-
tions on the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center
in Precarious Life (2004a) and recent works such as Dispossession
(Butler and Athanasiou 2013) provide one particularly significant
and influential articulation of this idea. In these works, Butler pre-
sents a case for the ethical and political importance of recognising
the vulnerability that necessarily attends subjectivity insofar as the
subject is given over to others from the start. The ethical implica-
tions of this vulnerability are most clearly elaborated in Giving
an Account of Oneself (Butler 2005), where she argues that it is
by virtue of the fundamental opacity of the subject to itself that
ethical responsibility is incurred and sustained. Whether identified
as precariousness or opacity, for Butler, universal vulnerability
is always tied to the corporeal interdependency or fundamental
relationality that grounds subjectivity, figured in part through
the status of the infant in its radical dependency on others for its
survival. Thus, she simultaneously reworks the terms of bodily
ontology and ethics.
What is interesting about Butler’s account, then, is the way that
she attempts to build an approach to ethics on the basis of a uni-
versal vulnerability that emerges in a revised bodily ontology. That
41
the condition of vulnerability has a normative force is not in itself

a new claim, as it has been of central – though not uncontested
– importance to various approaches to vulnerability as a moral
concept. However, other theorists have generally sought to elabo-
rate the normative implications of vulnerability in terms of situ-
ational vulnerability or the unjust distribution of social goods. For
Butler, the universal vulnerability that attends being human itself
has a kind of normative force. That is, it is the primary vulner-
ability that arises from our relational corporeality that provides
the essential motivation for an ethics. This is not simply because
primary vulnerability predestines us to a more situational vulner-
ability, though it may do that, but because our vulnerability as
humans is indicative of the way that each of us is given over to
others from the start. This common condition of being given over
entails that the subject is never able to attain the moral ideal of a
self-directed, rationally motivated and wholly self-knowing agent.
But rather than stymieing efforts towards ethics, this ‘failure’ is
ultimately generative of ethics, insofar as one recognises these
limits as the shared predicament of oneself and all others.
In this chapter, I will examine the nature of this failure, to ques-
tion whether it is adequate to the task of generating a new way
of thinking about ethics, one which Butler argues should be ‘non-
violent’. I am not going to be concerned here with the question of
whether such an ethics can rightly be described as ‘non-violent’ –
or whether a non-violent ethics is possible within Butler’s theoreti-
cal framework, and at what theoretical cost it might be achieved.
I have addressed these questions in another article (Mills 2008),
to which the current discussion can be seen as something of a
companion piece that investigates more closely the conceptuali-
sation of vulnerability that Butler is proposing. Throughout this
investigation, I will trace the development of Butler’s approach to
ethics, arguing throughout that this cannot strictly be understood
as an ethics of relationality, since responsibility is for her primarily
a responsibility for oneself. As I will show, this opens a problem
in terms of the normative status of the other, or in other words,
of the ‘ought’ of ethics. I suggest that this problem is resolved in a
turn to the thematic of substitutability. But this ultimately means
that her emphasis on the common, on what we humans share with
one another, ties her efforts more strongly to traditional ethical
thinking than she may really wish. That is, we are capable of
an ethical relationship with another because of what we have in
Undoing Ethics 43
common, of what we share. Thus, her ethics founders on the twin

of sovereign conceptions of subjectivity – community conceived as
commonality.
Towards an ethics of failure

Although vulnerability has long been important within Butler’s
work,1 it is in her work from about 2004 onwards that she devel-
ops this theme most systematically, particularly with an eye to dis-
closing its ethical and political implications. As the various claims
that she makes of vulnerability are not always consistent across
the relevant texts, I want here to provide a brief summary of each
of the major discussions, not in order to impress overall coherence
upon them, but to bring out the stepwise development of Butler’s
thinking on vulnerability and ethics.
The first major text to consider is Precarious Life, in which two
essays are of particular importance for this discussion – ‘Violence,
Mourning, Politics’, and ‘Precarious Life’. Butler poses Precarious
Life, published in 2004, as a response to the post-9/11 political
climate in the US – the ‘conditions of heightened vulnerability
and aggression’ (Butler 2004a: xi) that followed these attacks on
American soil – and asks whether a different form of political
reflection might emerge if injurability and aggression are taken as
departure points. In ‘Violence, Mourning, Politics’, Butler takes
up the problem of injurability through the prism of a fundamental
dependency on others and the vulnerability that this necessarily
entails. In the midst of arguing for the political valency of grief, she
posits that loss and vulnerability ‘follow from our being socially
constituted bodies’, whereby the attachment to another always
threatens us with loss, and exposure to others threatens us with
violence (Butler 2004a: 20). This brings out the double edge of
what one can call relationality2 – we are not only constituted by
and through relations with others, but also dispossessed by those
relations. In a sense, relationality is necessarily ecstatic in that it
always renders one ‘beside oneself’, both constituted and undone
by one’s attachment to another. This emerges, in part, from the
physical or corporeal dependency of one upon another, a depend-
ency that yields a normative aspiration insofar as it compels us
to ‘take stock of our interdependence’ (Butler 2004a: 27). At
times, this physical dependency is understood through the radical
dependency of the infant, who is fundamentally and radically
exposed to the care and touch of others insofar as he or she could

not survive without that care and touch. But this does not mean
that the relational dependency that Butler is working with is
limited to that figuration; infancy is not a period of dependency
that we ‘grow out of’ but entails a primary dependency that we
cannot escape and that will ultimately provide the impetus for an
ethics in its ineluctability and irrecoverability.
Perhaps what distinguishes Butler’s account of vulnerability
most in this text is the way that she entangles it with questions of
humanisation and dehumanisation, that is, with a kind of consti-
tutive violence that shapes what can even appear as an appropri-
ate subject of ethical response. Certainly, Butler concedes that
there is differential vulnerability to prosaic violence, but this is not
her principal concern. Rather, she focuses on the way that norms
regulate the social field, and thus the ethical encounter, such that
the very recognition of the vulnerability of another may be fore-
closed, shut out of the possibilities of discourse and of grief. She
writes:
[a] vulnerability must be perceived and recognized in order to come

into play in an ethical encounter . . . if vulnerability is one precondi-
tion for humanization, and humanization takes place differentially
through variable norms of recognition, then it follows that vulnerabil-
ity is fundamentally dependent on existing norms of recognition if it is
to be attributed to any human subject . . . [thus,] norms of recognition
are essential to the constitution of vulnerability as the precondition of
the ‘human’. (Butler 2004a: 43)3
Butler’s formulation here is somewhat contorted, in that it is never

really clear whether the attribution of vulnerability allows for rec-
ognition of the human as human, or whether humanisation allows
for the recognition of vulnerability. One way to read this is to say
that neither the human nor vulnerability can be posited as prior to
the other, but are instead intertwined in a way that is mediated by
the force of regulatory norms, such that at times they are mutually
constitutive and at other times, mutually destructive. But there is
also a tension or hesitation in Butler’s theorisation here, whereby
vulnerability is posited as both a precondition of humanisation,
and an attribute of the human. Thus, we can ask, in what sense is
a precondition an attribute? Or, what kinds of vulnerability are at
stake here – and what is the cost of conflating them?
Undoing Ethics 45
I will return to this question later, but first, let me continue

tracing the development of Butler’s thought on vulnerability. The
eponymous essay of Precarious Life (Butler 2004a) extends on
this initial theorisation to consider the obligation that arises in the
encounter with the other, and in particular, its imbrication with
aggression or violence. Her central claim, derived in large part
from Levinas, is that moral obligation does not emerge from one’s
autonomy, but from heteronomy – that is, from the address of the
other, figured in the Levinasian notion of the ‘face’. Of interest
to Butler is Levinas’s linking of the face with the commandment
‘thou shalt not kill’, where the face simultaneously appears as
an incitement to killing, thereby tying questions of responsibil-
ity for the other together with the provocation for their destruc-
tion. For Butler, Levinas’s philosophy offers two possibilities for
thinking about vulnerability and its relation to ethics: he opens a
way firstly to think the relationship between representation and
humanisation, and secondly to consider the relationship between
ethics and violence in a manner that may help to generate a non-
violent ethics. The first of these concerns preoccupies Butler in the
remainder of this essay, with the latter concern more deeply mined
in later works.
Before I turn to these works, let me briefly note that in this
essay Butler refers to ‘precariousness’ as a synonym or substitute
for vulnerability, a term that Levinas uses as well. But, as with
the previous essay, she does not allow for the differentiation of
different kinds of precariousness, such as what we might call the
ontological and ontic, or universal and situational. Thus, ques-
tions about whether all lives are precarious or whether some are
more precarious than others, and moreover, the relation between
these conditions, are somewhat obscured.
It is worth noting at this point that Butler is here less interested
in the recognition of the vulnerability of the other, than she is in
the recognition of the potential injuriousness of oneself – an inju-
riousness that emerges from the denial of one’s own vulnerability.
We can postulate that this emphasis is supposed to place a limit
on the potential violence that emerges when confronted by the
vulnerability of the other. As Ann Murphy astutely analyses, there
is nothing internal to the recognition of the vulnerability of the
other that entails that responses to the other will not take the form
of violent aggression. In fact, it may be precisely that vulnerability
that generates violence (Murphy 2012: 74). This, of course, is the
central tension of the Levinasian approach that Butler is working

within, and she is well aware of the insuperable connection
between violence and vulnerability. However, it is perhaps Butler’s
hope that recognising, and further, ‘abiding with’ one’s own vul-
nerability will help to curb one’s more aggressive and destructive
tendencies; learning to live with one’s vulnerability, and the incipi-
ent grief and loss it entails, may be requisite for the new forms of
community that Butler gestures towards. As we will see later, ulti-
mately for Butler community emerges out of the recognition that
vulnerability is a mode of existence not only for oneself but for all
others as well, that new forms of community emerge through the
avowal of a ‘common human vulnerability’ (Butler 2004a: 31).
As this reveals, though, what is missing from Butler’s analysis at
this point are the ethical motifs of empathy and forgiveness, which
would allow one to move from avowal of one’s own vulnerability
(and related propensity to violence), to the recognition of the vul-
nerability of the other.
Frames of War (Butler 2009a) consists of essays written between
2004 and 2008, and while Butler rarely explicitly engages Levinas
in this text, it can nevertheless be read as taking up the provoca-
tions of Levinas’s philosophy that she identified in Precarious Life.
As such, it recasts and to some extent deepens her earlier reflec-
tions on vulnerability, grief and representation. The key leitmotif
that carries across Precarious Life and Frames of War is that of the
relation between representation and humanisation. In the first of
these books, Butler drew on Levinas to initiate a study of the way
that the framing of images of war plays into the normative schemes
that establish humanisation or dehumanisation, and involves a
suspension of the precariousness of life (Butler 2004a: 143). She
here identifies two forms of occlusion of the human – first, the
‘symbolic identification of the face with the inhuman’ such that the
human cannot be discerned in the image, and second, the radical
effacement of the human, such that ‘there never was a human’ and
the realm of appearance is constituted on the basis of this exclu-
sion (Butler 2004a: 147). This analysis is extended in Frames of
War, where the framing of the image is tied more explicitly to the
social mobilisation of affect. She argues, with and against Susan
Sontag, that the ‘transitive affectivity’ of the photograph neither
numbs nor determines a particular response; rather, unlike in
previous war photography, the state now ‘works on the field of
perception and, more generally, the field of representability, in
Undoing Ethics 47
order to control affect – in anticipation of the way affect is not

only structured by interpretation but structures interpretation as
well’ (Butler 2009a: 72). This can happen because the frame of
the image enacts norms of humanisation and delimits what or
who can appear as the victim of violence, rightfully entitled to
protection from (state-sanctioned) violence. However, though it
is difficult to see the frame and the exclusions enacted therein,
these frames and norms are not inscrutable. The critical task, she
suggests, is to ‘learn to see the frame that blinds us’, in order to
develop a ‘sensate opposition to war’ (Butler 2009a: 100; also see
Jenkins 2013).
While many of Butler’s reflections in Frames of War follow on
from Precarious Life, she also introduces several innovations that
shift the terrain of her discussion. For one, she now introduces a
distinction between precarity and precariousness, where the latter
is a ‘more or less existential concept’ and the former is ‘more
specifically political’. Further, she claims that it is the differential
allocation of precarity that should provide the departure point
for ‘both a rethinking of bodily ontology and for progressive or
left politics’ (Butler 2009a: 3). Outlining the distinction further,
she writes that precariousness and precarity are ‘intersecting’
concepts, where ‘lives are by definition precarious’ since they are
subject to mortality and their persistence is not in the least guaran-
teed, and ‘precarity designates that politically induced condition in
which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic
networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury,
violence and death’ (Butler 2009a: 25). She then reasserts the
political priority of precarity, writing that ‘[t]his work [Frames of
War] seeks to reorient politics on the Left towards a considera-
tion of precarity as an existing and promising site for coalitional
exchange’ (Butler 2009a: 25). However, even given this priority
Butler also asserts, ‘[t]he recognition of shared precariousness
introduces strong normative commitments to equality and invites
a more robust universalizing of rights that seeks to address basic
human needs’ (Butler 2009a: 21–2). What are we to make of this?
In drawing the distinction between precariousness and precarity,
Butler appears to be moving close to a standard analytic distinc-
tion between a universal vulnerability characteristic of human
life by virtue of our embodiment (which entails finitude and a
fundamental sociality), and a situational vulnerability that renders
some humans more at risk than others of exploitation, injustice
and violence.4 Further, she keeps company with many other

philosophers of vulnerability in asserting the political priority of
situational vulnerability, or what she calls precarity. What sets her
apart somewhat, though, is the linking of normative commitments
to equality and justice to the recognition of universal vulnerability,
or the ‘existential’ condition of precariousness. This places an onus
on her to provide some explanation of the relationship between the
normative force of precariousness, and the political import of pre-
carity. Moreover, some explanation of why precariousness has this
normative force should also be forthcoming. Now, it is conceiv-
able that precariousness does give rise to obligation – that the exis-
tential condition of our ‘predestination’ to loss, grief and death, as
well as our primary entanglement in the lives of others, means that
we are always bound to others in a way that can be understood as
entailing obligation. But while precariousness may thus give rise
to an obligation, it does not determine the shape of that obliga-
tion, or tell us what it is. Thus, Butler’s claim that the recognition
of precariousness entails a commitment to egalitarianism and the
universalisation of rights appears to be without justification.
To be fair, however, one needs to be mindful of the specific
terms that Butler uses to limn the relation that she sees between
precariousness and normativity. For she does not commit herself
to the view that normative commitments are necessarily generated
by precariousness – but only to the idea that they are ‘invited’ or
‘introduced’ by it. Further, in examining this problem in more
depth, she writes that ‘[t]he postulation of a generalized pre-
cariousness that calls into question the ontology of individualism
implies, although it does not directly entail, certain normative
consequences’ (Butler 2009a: 33, emphasis added). Butler’s point
here is subtle, but by this, one can understand that normative con-
sequences do not necessarily flow from precariousness or universal
vulnerability; that is, the concept is not intrinsically normative.
Nevertheless, it may be that normative consequences do, at least
in certain circumstances, follow from such vulnerability. In other
words, normativity is entangled with vulnerability – or it is signi-
fied by it – but is not intrinsic or necessary to it. I will return to this
question of the entanglement of vulnerability and normativity in
the following section. For now, I wish to note one further aspect of
the distinction between precarity and precariousness.
Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of reading Frames of War
is Butler’s apparent failure to abide by the distinction she draws
Undoing Ethics 49
between precariousness and precarity. For instance, she speaks

of the ‘differential distribution of precariousness’ (Butler 2009a:
31) or the need and obligation to ‘minimize precariousness in
egalitarian ways . . . Precariousness grounds such positive social
obligations . . . at the same time that the aim of such obligations
is to minimize precariousness and its unequal distribution’ (Butler
2009a: 22). Here, precariousness is conflated with precarity,
since, one would assume, the point of precariousness as a uni-
versal or common feature of the human is that it is not unequally
distributed. Of course, precarity is unequally distributed – and a
commitment to egalitarianism may be a commendable (though
not necessary) response to that unequal distribution. Now, there
is certainly a strong practical relationship between precarity and
precariousness, insofar as greater exposure to the former allows
the latter to predominate in some lives in ways that it does not in
others. Further, there is a conceptual relation insofar as both may
be said to arise in some way or another from conditions of human
plurality. But this still does not mean that precarity and precari-
ousness are interchangeable. At times, then, it appears as if the
distinction Butler has drawn is overwhelmed by the limitations in
her approach in fully reckoning with precarity.5
At this point, I would like to turn to another work of Butler’s,
namely Giving an Account of Oneself, since while the term ‘vulner-
ability’ rarely appears in the text itself, this book can nevertheless
be read as the most systematic account of the ethical implications
of this notion that Butler offers. The guiding hypothesis of this
book is summarised in Butler’s statement that
[i]f it is precisely by virtue of one’s relations to others that one is

opaque to oneself, and if those relations to others are the venue for
one’s ethical responsibility, then it may well follow that it is precisely
by virtue of the subject’s opacity to itself that it incurs and sustains
some of its most important ethical bonds. (2005: 20)
Several things should be briefly noted about this claim. First, the
vulnerability that takes hold by virtue of our dependency upon
others is here rendered in a more obviously epistemological order
than previously, under the term ‘opacity’. This is not to say that
vulnerability is simply a matter of unknowability or ignorance; it
is that, but not simply that, since the epistemological and onto-
logical are always imbricated in Butler’s work.6 But there is a
terminological, and hence theoretical, difference between this

text and those already discussed. Second, while Levinas’s work is
again a significant theoretical resource in Giving an Account, this
statement already marks some of Butler’s distance from Levinas
– there is no conception of responsibility as an infinite demand
here. Third, it is significant that it is the subject’s inability to know
itself, that is, its failure to achieve the status typically required to
the moral subject, that ultimately founds an ethics for Butler – that
is, it is ultimately from failure that Butler’s conception of ethics
emerges. Let me now elaborate Butler’s claim in more detail.
The first step in Butler’s argument is to provide a revised
ontology of ethical subjectivity that establishes the fundamen-
tal dependency of the subject on others for its existence, and
by virtue of that, its necessary opacity to itself. Butler’s starting
point is the view that narrating oneself or giving an account of
oneself is prompted by an encounter with another – it is always
in a condition of relationality, the condition of being addressed
by another, that one seeks to elaborate who one is. Within this
scene of address, two conditions necessarily limit the capacity of
the subject to give a complete account of itself and to render itself
transparent to itself and to others. First, Butler postulates that our
‘primary relations are formative in ways that produce a necessary
opacity in our understanding of ourselves’ (2005: 20–1). Second,
social norms also confound the narrative of the subject, lending
the very terms of intelligibility and forming a ‘domain of unfree-
dom and substitutability within which our “singular” stories are
told’ (Butler 2005: 21).7
The first of these claims is elaborated in reference to Jean
Laplanche’s psychoanalytic account of the emergence of infantile
subjectivity in the face of the overwhelming demand made upon
the infant by its carers and the world. For Laplanche, infantile life
is characterised not only by helplessness but also an ‘opening to the
world’ that requires a primary repression of the ‘messages’ of the
adult world that he or she is incapable of handling. This primary
repression ultimately means two things: first, affect originates
from the outside, and it always maintains this external character,
and second, this primary repression through which subjectivity
emerges lies outside the articulable. As Butler writes, the ‘origin of
affect cannot be recovered through proper articulation, whether in
narrative form or in any other medium of expression . . . no subject
can narrate the story of a primary repression that constitutes the
Undoing Ethics 51
irrecoverable basis of his or her own formation’ (Butler 2005: 72).

Laplanche thus gives a psychoanalytic priority to the other, which
means that attachment is ‘overdetermined from the start’ and the
emergence of the ego is necessarily tremulous – it is a ‘struggle that
can have only limited achievement’ (Butler 2005: 74).8
Adding to this scene of being necessarily outside of oneself,
dependent on the other for one’s own formative desires, Butler
circumscribes the encounter with the other in the scene of address
within the operation of ineluctable social norms, a view she arrives
at through a combination of Foucault and Hegel. The import of
this is threefold. First, the terms through which one can give an
account of oneself are always already foreign to oneself – they
precede and exceed the time of one’s being, thus rendering the
account that one gives of oneself not exactly false, but impersonal.
Second, this entails that the ethical encounter itself is cut through
with norms that regulate the possibility of recognisability, includ-
ing the recognition of the other as other. Butler writes,
[i]n asking the ethical question ‘How ought I to treat another?’ I am

immediately caught up in a realm of social normativity, since the other
only appears to me, only functions as an other for me, if there is a
frame within which I can see and apprehend the other in her separate-
ness and exteriority. (2005: 25)
Third, the ‘normative horizon’ of recognition may be subject to

rupture and critical transformation, in the Foucauldian sense,
when a demand or desire for recognition is not easily accommo-
dated within existing norms.
Having thus established the relation between opacity and
relationality – the subject is opaque to itself because of its primary
dependence on others and its dependence on social norms that are
shared with others for recognition – we can now begin to con-
sider the link that Butler is postulating between relationality and
responsibility. In the quote above, Butler refers to relationality as
the ‘venue’ of responsibility. What might this mean? Interestingly,
this would appear to mean that relationality is not the cause or
source of ethical responsibility as it is often supposed – we are not
responsible for the other because of our fundamental entangle-
ment with them on this account. Rather, casting relationality as
the ‘venue’ of responsibility means that relationality is the place in
which responsibility happens – it is the place of its taking place.
Relationality allows responsibility to take place, but it does not

cause it as such. It neither grounds nor generates it, though it does
make it possible in some sense. Perhaps similarly, a concert hall
is the place for a concert to happen, but is not strictly the cause
or source of that concert. The concert could conceivably take
place elsewhere, though it would then necessarily be a different
concert. To summarise, then, relationality itself does not give rise
to responsibility; rather, it is the opacity of the subject that yields
responsibility, and relationality is the place or occasion of the
realisation of that responsibility.
Instead of locating the source of responsibility in relational-
ity, Butler locates it in the opacity of the subject to itself. As she
writes in the quote above, ‘it is precisely by virtue of the subject’s
opacity to itself that it incurs and sustains some of its most impor-
tant ethical bonds’ (Butler 2005: 20). Or, more directly, ‘my own
foreignness to myself, is, paradoxically, the source of my ethical
connection with others’ (Butler 2005: 84). Granted, this opacity
or foreignness in part derives from our primary dependency on
and entanglement with others, but for reasons that become clearer
later, Butler nevertheless refrains from positing relationality as
the fundamental source of responsibility in Giving an Account of
Oneself. This identification of the opacity of the subject to itself
as the source of responsibility places Butler’s account of ethical
responsibility in direct contrast with theories of ethics that make
autonomy a prerequisite of responsibility. It also short-circuits the
attempt to maintain the moral priority of autonomy, while arguing
that autonomy is only achieved in contexts of social relations with
others. For Butler, it is not the achievement of autonomy – whether
against or with others – that matters in ethics; rather, it is precisely
the failure to achieve a condition approximating autonomy that is
of primary significance. And notably, this failure is not occasional
or circumstantial – it is a necessary feature of ethical subjectivity.
The upshot of this is that her ethics are less an ethics of relation-
ality than they are an ethics of failure. In Butler’s account of ethics,
it is in the failure or incapacity to provide a full account of our-
selves that our accountability emerges. Further, Butler contends
that this requires a rethinking of the ‘very meaning of respon-
sibility’, since ‘to take responsibility for oneself is to avow the
limits of any self-understanding, and to establish these limits not
only as a condition for the subject but as the predicament of the
human community’ (2005: 83). The emphasis here on the limits
Undoing Ethics 53
of self-knowledge links the problem of responsibility with that of

critique, such that taking responsibility for oneself is ultimately a
form of critique. Several questions emerge from this: perhaps most
obviously, if it is the case that a certain unknowingness – a lack
of transparency of oneself to oneself – gives rise to responsibility
for oneself understood as critique, whither responsibility for the
other, or others? This question returns us to the matter of the role
that Levinas plays in Butler’s account of ethics.
The pre-eminence given to the work of Emmanuel Levinas in
Butler’s turn to questions of ethics predisposes her work to be read
as an ethics of relationality, primarily concerned with the respon-
sibility for others. In fact, however, Butler takes distance from
Levinas in various ways, such that the approach to ethics that she
outlines ultimately bears little resemblance to his. This is not the
place to undertake a full analysis of Butler’s position in relation
to Levinas, but it is worth mentioning several points. First, while
Levinas understands the encounter that allows for the emergence
of the subject, and with it responsibility, as synchronic, Butler
favours a diachronic approach adopted from psychoanalysis that
privileges the primary dependency of the infant and its develop-
mental implications. Further, while both cast dependency on the
other as foundational for the emergence of the subject, Butler
rejects Levinas’s accusative characterisation of this interdepend-
ency and of responsibility. Butler is very clear in her rejection of
Levinas’s characterisation of primary impingement by the other as
a matter of accusation, and the related construal as ethics as per-
secution, and further, the association that he draws between this
and Judaism. In addition, there are aspects of Levinas’s characteri-
sation of the ethical encounter that Butler is less explicit about,
but nevertheless rejects. Recall her formulation that it is by virtue
of the opacity of the subject to itself that it ‘incurs and sustains’
its ethical bonds. To ‘incur’ is to run or fall into something, or
to bring something upon oneself – to make oneself liable. Thus,
it entails a form of agency on the part of the responsible subject,
albeit one that is limited and problematised in various ways. For
Levinas, in contrast, the ethical encounter is characterised by a
profound passivity in relation to the Other. Responsibility, on this
account, is experienced as a demand from the Other, one which
the ethical subject can neither recuse itself from nor fulfil.
In fact, the question of whether the subject can fulfil its respon-
sibilities is an interesting one in relation to Butler too – for, on
the one hand, the subject is never able to give a full account of
itself and its actions, suggesting that it is unable to live up to
the requirements of responsibility; but, on the other hand, the
limits of self-knowledge that undermine full accountability them-
selves become the basis for responsibility, suggesting that one
fulfils one’s responsibilities by abiding by those limitations and
the opacity that they entail for the subject. This ‘abiding by’ the
limitations of self-knowledge takes the form of something like an
ethics of the self, inspired by the later work of Foucault, in which
critique becomes a central vector of responsibility. Butler empha-
sises the way that for Foucault, telling the truth of oneself always
comes at the cost of other historical possibilities and requires the
denial or obfuscation of the historicity of the regime in which that
truth is presented. The relation to oneself entailed in practices that
exhort one to tell the truth of oneself – such as in confessional sce-
narios – thus necessarily entails a limit to knowledge as much as
self-examination in the interests of self-knowledge. Self-reflexivity
cannot be a matter of perfect reflexivity, since it always entails a
kind of failure, that is, an ‘open-ended and unsatisfiable’ attempt
to ‘“return” to a self from a situation of being foreign to oneself’
(Butler 2005: 129). Further, this means that truth-telling is always
implicated in matters of power, thus generating questions about
the conditions of truth, as well as of how the truth can be told, by
whom and why. Thus, the self-reflexivity of the subject – which is
predicated on the subject’s estrangement from itself while allowing
for self-knowledge – is tied to critique.
From this, Butler concludes that the question of responsibility
must be returned to the question of the social formation of the
subject. That is, if narcissistic forms of moral enquiry find support
in a theory of the subject that accepts ‘socially enforced modes of
individualism’, and if those modes of inquiry lead to an ethical
violence that excludes self-acceptance and forgiveness – particu-
larly, we can presume, the acceptance of opacity and vulnerability
– then it becomes obligatory and perhaps urgent to ‘return the
question of responsibility to the question of “How are we formed
within social life, and at what cost?” ’ (Butler 2005: 136). Ethics,
she claims:
requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness,

when what forms us diverges from what lies before us, when our will-
ingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance
Undoing Ethics 55
of becoming human. To be undone by another is a primary necessity,

an anguish, to be sure, but also a chance – to be addressed, claimed,
bound to what is not me, but also to be moved, to be prompted to
act, to address myself elsewhere, and so to vacate the self-sufficient ‘I’
as a kind of possession. If we speak and try to give an account from
this place, we will not be irresponsible, or, if we are, we will surely be
forgiven. (Butler 2005: 136)
I have quoted these concluding words of Giving an Account at

length because I find them both provocative and puzzling. They
are puzzling because the final sentence simultaneously asserts a
necessary relation between opacity and responsibility, and under-
mines it by raising the question of forgiveness. Why, if we speak
from a position of opacity, would we not be irresponsible? Even if
recognising or abiding within the limits of self-knowledge and the
interdependency it entails is a precondition of responsibility, does
it ensure that we are henceforth acting or speaking responsibly?
And why, then, would there be a need for forgiveness, and further,
why would that forgiveness be assured? In the following section, I
wish to address these questions and related ones through a deeper
examination of three particular axes within Butler’s account
of an ethics of failure; these are normativity, responsibility and
commonality.
Undoing ethics
The question of how responsibility may be reconceptualised on the
basis of the revised ontology of the subject that Butler is proposing
is a more difficult question than I can take up in any detail here.
Further, it should be said that Butler’s comments on responsibility
do not constitute a theory of responsibility – at best, they point
towards a possible direction for theorising ethical responsibility,
but they are as yet schematic and suggestive. In other words, while
she indicates the necessity of rethinking responsibility, that task
has yet to be undertaken in a significant way. Nevertheless, I do
want to make several points about the shape that Butler’s concep-
tion of responsibility seems to be taking so far. First, a predomi-
nant way of thinking about moral responsibility in contemporary
philosophy conceives of responsibility in terms of actions (done
or not done) for which an agent may be considered blamewor-
thy or praiseworthy, that is, in terms of ‘reactive attitudes’. This
approach also involves the provision of reasons for an action or

the failure to act appropriately – the agent may provide justifica-
tions or excuses for acting in particular ways, or failing to act in
ways deemed appropriate. Butler’s approach works to sabotage
this hegemonic conception, insofar as she rejects the individual-
ism upon which it is predicated and reworks the conditions under
which an agent may provide an account of him or herself.9 While
there are nuances throughout her comments on responsibility, in
general, this is achieved first by emphasising the ethical salience of
embodiment and the relationality that this entails, and second, by
undoing the very capacity to provide an account – and by dint of
that, the legitimacy of the demand to provide one. This is not to
say that giving an account is impossible, but rather, that its pos-
sibility is limited in various ways, such that one always and neces-
sarily fails to give a complete account.
Perhaps what sets Butler’s approach to responsibility apart even
further, though, is the attempt to conceptualise the role of heteron-
omy within ethics within the frame of a thoroughgoing sociality.
Butler follows the Continental tradition of moral philosophy in
emphasising the necessity of relationality or the interdependency
of the subject and the other in the emergence of ethical responsi-
bility. But the novelty of her approach is to thoroughly circum-
scribe this encounter within the horizon of social normativity. As
we have seen, there are a number of aspects to this insistence on
the social circumscription of the ethical encounter. The upshot
of these aspects is that ‘the social’ cannot simply be taken as a
context for the ethical encounter, along the lines, for instance, of
the popular view that social circumstances can mitigate or attenu-
ate responsibility. Rather, the ethical subject itself only emerges
through the operation of social norms, can only give an account
of itself in terms given by those norms; and the very possibility
of an ethical encounter with another or others is delimited by the
exclusions and inclusions of the normative horizon of the human.
So central is the matter of sociality to ethics that the question of
how to rethink responsibility becomes one of how to rethink the
social constitution of the subject. Thus, the central ethical ques-
tion becomes, ‘How are we formed within social life, and at what
cost?’ (Butler 2005: 136).
Whether or not one is wholly convinced by Butler’s conflation
of the question of responsibility with that of the social constitution
of the subject, what becomes clear at this point is that normativity
Undoing Ethics 57
cannot be a straightforward matter for her. This is reinforced by

the fact that the key theorists for her in developing her ethics of
failure are themselves extremely wary of normative thinking –
from Levinas’s reformulation of ethics as first philosophy that
apparently divorces it from prescriptive morality, to Foucault’s
refusal to tell others ‘what to do’. I have elsewhere made a case
for understanding the kind of critical activity proposed and under-
taken by Foucault as philosophy in an interrogative key (Mills
2010). Not far removed from this approach, Butler makes a case
in Frames of War for the deferral of judgement in favour of under-
standing, which entails examining the ways in which descriptive
accounts are already shot through with normative commitments
(2009a: 151–63). Importantly, this approach does not constitute
an alternative to normative thinking for Butler, but a reformula-
tion of what normative thinking might amount to; she does not
reject the project of normative thinking, but instead reworks
what might be considered to be normative thinking. Nevertheless,
worries remain: for how long do we defer judgement? How much
understanding is enough? And what about when judgements must
be made in circumstances of uncertainty and ignorance, as, argu-
ably, they always must? If the subject is characterised by opacity,
and certain and complete knowledge is unattainable, how, then,
are judgements to be made and justified? Is the deferral of judge-
ment necessarily infinite? These questions deserve more atten-
tion, but they are not my primary concern here. Rather, I want
to explore two other aspects of Butler’s approach to normativity:
first, the relation between norms and normativity, and second, the
matter of singularity and substitutability.
As I have said, the distinctive feature of Butler’s approach to
ethics is the central place that she gives to social norms in the cir-
cumscription and constitution of the ethical encounter. Norms are
for her an ineradicable part of social life, and thus of the life of the
subject.10 However, given this centrality of norms, Butler herself
refrains from elaborating desirable norms for acting. Again, this is
not simply a reluctance to engage in normative thinking along the
lines of Foucault; rather, Butler explicitly reinscribes normativity
within the order of the ontological. To engage in normative think-
ing is to engage in a form of world-making, and in order to do
that with a good conscience, we must first engage in a process of
understanding. Put simply, we must understand the world as it is
before we engage in the process of making it what we wish it to be.
This is all well and good, but what are its implications for the
project of developing an ethics of failure? For a start, it means that
Butler is wary of attempts at ‘prescriptivism’, or the positing of
prescriptions for ‘what ought to be done’. Even more interestingly,
Diane Perpich has characterised Levinas’s approach to ethics as
a ‘normativity without norms’, insofar as he is able to provide
an account of ‘how we come to be bound to respond to other’s
claims’ but refuses to provide norms of action (2008: 126).
Perhaps the opposite can be said of Butler, in that she can give an
account of why we act in certain ways, because of the regulatory
force of norms, but cannot give an account of why we are com-
pelled to respond to the claim of others. Recall here that Butler’s
account of ethics is primarily concerned with responsibility for
oneself, and responsibility for the other is epiphenomenal upon
that primary concern with oneself. Thus, Butler does provide us
with an account of the fundamental sociality of the subject – that
is, she outlines an ontology of the subject wherein it is necessarily
bound to others for the duration of its life. But what is less clear is
just how this ontology is tied to any moral concern for those others
upon whom we depend for our existence. This problem is deep-
ened when we consider the matter of singularity and substitution.
One of Butler’s more pointed critiques in Giving an Account is
directed towards Adriana Cavarero’s discussion of a ‘relational
ethics of contingency’ (Cavarero 2000: 87), which centralises the
notion of singularity in the context of mutual exposure. She argues
that others are necessary for the appearance of who one is, since
it is only in the disclosure made possible by the presence of others
that the uniqueness of oneself is apparent. For Cavarero, the
condition of mutual exposure grounds an ‘ontological altruism’
wherein one cannot give an account of oneself but – contra Butler
– must rely upon others for that narration. While Butler is sympa-
thetic to aspects of Cavarero’s approach, she also takes issue with
the emphasis on singularity, arguing that the constitutive role of
norms in the formation of the subject renders the singular always
substitutable. Further, in a Hegelian vein, she points out that the
‘this’ of singularity cannot specify without simultaneously gener-
alising, from which she concludes that singularity is necessarily
substitutable. She writes,
[i]nsofar as ‘this’ fact of singularizing exposure, which follows from

bodily existence, is one that can be reiterated endlessly, it constitutes a
Undoing Ethics 59
collective condition, characterizing us all equally, not only reinstalling

the ‘we’, but also establishing a structure of substitutability at the core
of singularity. (Butler 2005: 35)
The apparent paradox that we are all singular, and therefore sub-
stitutable, may appear as something of an aside within Giving an
Account, but I think it actually has a greater significance. This is
because, ultimately, substitutability becomes the mechanism by
which we are morally bound to others. And part of this substitu-
tion is that as humans, we have certain characteristics – most sig-
nificantly, vulnerability – in common. Thus, it is by virtue of this
‘collective condition’ of being substitutable that we are morally
beholden to others, not just to ourselves.
There is much more to the question of substitution than I can
possibility take up here, but let me pose one possible interpretation
of its significance within Butler’s ethics. This is that the Hegelian
emphasis on generality and substitutability at the heart of singu-
larity carries the risk of tying Butler’s ethics to the reintegration of
otherness within the order of the same. Her emphasis on the col-
lective condition or the common attribute, the vulnerability that
we all share as humans, as the basis for being bound morally to
another arguably risks a kind of totalisation that says, despite our
differences, we are all human, that is, vulnerable. In this, it seems
to embed her formulation of ethics more firmly in the standard
tradition of Western moral philosophy than one might ordinarily
imagine. Of course, the terms of her ethics are juxtaposed with
those of the philosophical tradition: not happiness, but grief;
not rationality, but opacity; not autonomy, but vulnerability.
Nevertheless, the fundamental structure whereby moral agents
are bound to others by virtue of shared characteristics remains the
same. This means that Butler’s project to reformulate ethics away
from ‘self-grounding’ conceptions of subjectivity appears yet to
founder on the counterpart of that concept of subjectivity, that is,
on community understood as commonality.
Arguably, Parting Ways (Butler 2012a) can be read as a strug-
gle with this dynamic of singularity and substitutability, and at
points it suggests at least a partial escape from it. Butler’s termi-
nology in Parting Ways indicates a curious convergence of terms
that she has previously distinguished: in the index, vulnerability
is cross-referenced to precarity; but the term precarity is only
used minimally in the text, in the claim that ‘a different social
ntology would have to start from this shared condition of pre-

o
carity’ (Butler 2012a: 174). The terms used instead throughout
the text are ‘precarious’ and ‘vulnerable’ or ‘vulnerability’. Thus,
precarity is no longer conceived as a specifically political concept,
but has become a capacious term that also encompasses both vul-
nerability and precariousness. This shift in terminology may be
associated with a shift in focus from ethics to politics, determined
by the specific problem of Zionism and the purported necessity
of a Jewish nation-state therein that she addresses in the book.
More specifically, it may be said to arise from the effort to think
about the way in which the ethical demand articulated by Levinas
emerges or comes to have meaning within specific political con-
figurations and conflicts. This effort sees her re-read Levinas in
the frame of conflicts between Jews and non-Jews, and leads to
a sharp critique of his designation of some as faceless, as impos-
ing no ethical obligation or making no ethical demand. If this
signals a more definitive move away from Levinas, Butler then
appears to move instead towards a conception of cohabitation
that draws firmly on the work of Hannah Arendt (though Butler
is not without criticism of her work as well). For example, there
are indications of a certain distance being taken from some of
the previous formulations of vulnerability as a constitutive aspect
of subjectivity. For instance, in reference to the interdependency
characteristic of subjectivity analysed in Frames of War, Butler
ruminates that this may be ‘less our common condition, conceived
existentially, than our convergent condition – one of proximity,
adjacency, up-againstness . . .’ (2012a: 130). What, then, are the
implications of cohabitation?
The notion of cohabitation points to the essentially unchosen
plurality of others amongst whom we must abide. In short, to be
born is to be born into a world of others, a world that precedes
us, makes our existence possible, and which we cannot there-
fore choose. Plurality is the sine qua non of human existence,
which Butler also reads as entailing normative obligations. She
writes,
we must actively preserve and affirm the unchosen character of inclu-

sive and plural cohabitation: we not only live with those we never
chose and to whom we may feel no social sense of belonging, but we
are also obligated to preserve those lives and the plurality of which
they form a part. (Butler 2012a: 125)
Undoing Ethics 61
No doubt there are questions to be asked about this formulation

and the assertion of obligations flowing from plural cohabitation,
but the recognition of plural cohabitation as the starting point for
such obligations has some potential advantages over the emphasis
on vulnerability in previous formulations. For one, it allows for a
more nuanced analysis of the kinds of dependency and vulnerabil-
ity that may take hold in the mutual exposure to others that con-
stitutes plurality. For instance, while it may be that subjectivity is
formed in conditions of radical dependency, it does not follow that
all relations with others will therefore take the shape of depend-
ency. Similarly, obligations arising from cohabitation may allow
for greater recognition of the contextual variances of vulnerability,
wherein the same person or group of persons may be constituted
as vulnerable in one context and not another. To be sure, feminist
analysis of the centrality of dependency and vulnerability have
been crucial to developing more expansive conceptions of ethical
subjectivity; but just as we should avoid the idealisation of autono-
mous self-realisation and invulnerability, so we should also avoid
the idealisation of vulnerability.
Conclusion
Throughout this chapter, I have discussed Butler’s conception
of a universal vulnerability, variously understood as precarious-
ness or opacity, and her positing of this as the starting point for
rethinking the central terms of ethics, primarily responsibility and
normativity. In tracing the development of Butler’s ethics over
several texts, I have been interested in the way that relationality
is treated, and relatedly, how others are figured within the sphere
of normativity. I have argued that Butler is primarily concerned
with responsibility for oneself, though it is true that relationality is
central to her ethics insofar as it provides the ‘venue’ for responsi-
bility. I have suggested, though, that Butler does not quite broach
the question of responsibility for the other. Moreover, in consid-
ering the question of the normative force of the other, that is, the
‘ought’ of ethics, I have suggested that Butler turns to the theme
of substitutability in a way that is ultimately problematic for a
project that seeks to undo the hegemonic conceptions of ethics
tied to visions of a ‘self-grounding’ subject. It is problematic as it
means that Butler’s ethics founders on the conceptual counterpart
of that vision of the subject, that is, community understood as
c ommonality. Finally, then, I suggested that her most recent turn

to the concept of cohabitation may provide an avenue for the kind
of reworking of substitution and singularity required for a genu-
inely new conception of ethics to emerge.
Notes
1. It is, for instance, central to Excitable Speech (Butler 1997a), and the
politics of resignification that Butler proffers herein. See Mills (2000)
for a closer discussion of her usage of the concept here.
2. The term ‘relationality’ is not entirely adequate here, and on occasion
Butler herself rejects it. However, I use it throughout this chapter for
two reasons – first, because at other times, Butler does use this term
herself, and second, because it is less theoretically committed in the
sense of being tied to a particular theoretical/philosophical approach
than alternative terms such as ‘exposure’.
3. To be more pointed in one’s response, the conclusion that the attribu-
tion of vulnerability to the human is dependent on norms does not
actually follow from the premises that vulnerability is a precondition
of humanisation, and humanisation is dependent on norms. That vul-
nerability and norms are conditions of humanisation does not mean
that norms are a condition of vulnerability. To be clear, I broadly
agree with the claim that norms shape the recognition of vulnerability,
but this statement of her argument does not do justice to that claim.
4. For a useful discussion of this distinction and its normative force, see
Rogers, Mackenzie and Dodds 2012a and 2012b.
5. Notably, the notion of ‘precarity’ does not seem to appear within
the text beyond the introduction. It is also interesting that Butler
does not engage with the literature on precarity as a political
concept (see especially Neilson and Rossiter 2008). That said, it is
laudable that Butler’s use of precarity, while remaining somewhat
suggestive, expands the concept from discussions of labour and
economic relations to structures of subjectivity such as gender. On
this see Butler 2009b. Note that Butler reiterates this distinction in
Dispossession (Butler and Athanasiou 2013). However, in ‘Can one
lead a good life in a bad life?’ (Butler 2012b) Butler uses the term
‘precarity’ but not ‘precariousness’ which is instead encompassed
within the term ‘vulnerability’.
6. On vulnerability and ignorance, see Gilson 2011. However, while
important, this analysis risks a kind of idealisation of vulnerability
as the counterpart of its critique of the ideal of invulnerability.
Undoing Ethics 63
7. Note that it is unclear exactly who the target of Butler’s critique
in Giving an Account is, for it is not clear who thinks that a self
must be ‘fully transparent to itself’ (2005: 83) in order to be
responsible.
8. It is well worth considering the account of subjectivity that Butler
is proposing in Giving an Account of Oneself alongside that devel-
oped in earlier work such as The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in
Subjection (Butler 1997b). In my article ‘Normative violence, vul-
nerability and responsibility’ (Mills 2008), I initiate an examination
of the integration of Butler’s later work on ethics with her earlier
approaches to subjectivity.
9. Even so, it is not entirely clear which account of responsibility Butler
takes as her target, for it is not obvious that even hegemonic con-
cepts of responsibility require complete self-knowledge in order for
an agent to be held responsible, though they would clearly require
some degree of cognitive competency.
10. This is a consistent theme in Butler’s work, but for her most explicit
discussion of norms see Undoing Gender (Butler 2004b).
References
London: Routledge.
Butler, Judith (2004b), Undoing Gender, New York and London:
Routledge.
Butler, Judith (2009a), Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?,
London: Verso.
Butler, Judith (2009b), ‘Performativity, Precarity and Sexual Politics’,
Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana (AIBR), 4: 3, i–xiii.
Butler, Judith (2012a), Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of
Butler, Judith (2012b), ‘Can one lead a good life in a bad life? Adorno
Prize Lecture’, Radical Philosophy, 176, 9–18.
Cavarero, Adriana (2000), Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood,

trans. Paul A. Kottman, London and New York: Random House.
Gilson, Erinn (2011), ‘Vulnerability, Ignorance and Oppression’,
Hypatia, 26: 2, 308–32.
Jenkins, Fiona (2013), ‘A Sensate Critique: Vulnerability and the Image
in Judith Butler’s Frames of War’, SubStance, 42: 3, 105–26.
Mills, Catherine (2000), ‘Efficacy and Vulnerability: Judith Butler on
Reiteration and Resistance’, Australian Feminist Studies, 15: 32,
265–79.
Mills, Catherine (2008), ‘Normative violence, vulnerability and respon-
sibility’, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 18:2,
133–56.
Mills, Catherine (2010), ‘A Manner of Speaking: Declaration, Critique
and the Trope of Interrogation’, Law and Critique, 21: 3, 247–60.
Murphy, Ann V. (2012), Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary,
Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Neilson, Brett, and Ned Rossiter (2008), ‘Precarity as a Political Concept,
or, Fordism as Exception’, Theory, Culture & Society, 25: 7–8, 51–72.
Perpich, Diane (2008), The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas, Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Rogers, Wendy, Catriona Mackenzie and Susan Dodds (2012a),
‘Introduction’, International Journal of Feminist Approaches to
Bioethics, 5: 2, 1–10.
Rogers, Wendy, Catriona Mackenzie and Susan Dodds (2012b), ‘Why
Bioethics Needs a Concept of Vulnerability’, International Journal of
Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, 5: 2, 11–38.
3
Butler’s Ethical Appeal: Being, Feeling

and Acting Responsible
Sara Rushing
In this essay I return to certain questions raised in my 2010 article

‘Preparing for Politics: Judith Butler’s Ethical Dispositions’. I
examine Butler’s continued articulation of a politics and ethics
of precariousness, particularly in her most recent book Frames of
War, and specifically the role of the concept of ‘affect’ in that text.
Affect did not play an explicit part in Butler’s analysis throughout
Giving an Account of Oneself or Precarious Life. Indeed, as I
explain below, though the word appears in those texts occasion-
ally (and in Undoing Gender, to the extent that it overlaps with
Precarious Life), I interpreted the ethics Butler articulates there as
inhering specifically between people who did not necessarily know
each other, recognise and identify with each other, or have any
particular feelings for each other. Absence of affinity was obvi-
ated as an obstacle to ethical bonds to others. In Frames of War,
however, Butler makes frequent recourse to the term affect, and
though the precise substance and implications of the term remain
underdeveloped, this shift suggests some change in her thought
regarding the role of what I shall call for the moment ‘feelings’.
This essay seeks to gain some purchase, then, on what, whether
and how feelings matter for the ethical appeal that Butler is
mounting across her recent body of work.
Butler before ‘affect’

In ‘Preparing for Politics’ I argued that in order to fully compre-
hend the political implications of Butler’s work it was necessary to
grasp the relationship and distinction between four vectors of her
thinking: her diagnosis of the human condition as fundamentally
exposed and vulnerable, or precarious; her expression of norma-
tive aspirations for liveable life and a more inclusive conception of
65
‘the human’; her defence of a particular ethical comportment that

grew out of, not despite, our basic aggression when confronted by
the Other; and her theory of a new kind of political engagement
defined by responsiveness to the claim of non- violence. While
acknowledging that the four vectors of her thought were in fact
not neatly separable, and that the order of priority among them
was complex, and not linear or progressive, I nonetheless main-
tained that these dimensions of her thought were not reducible to
each other. Such reductions, I argued, are what have led numerous
critics of Butler to misread her as anti-normative, apolitical and
ethically silent.
Looking back over Butler’s body of work, it is clear that only
through a very narrow definition of normative theory and of ‘the
political’ can she be called anti-normative and apolitical. It has
perhaps been easier to miss the distinct ethical thread running
through her work. In this vein, ‘Preparing for Politics’ constituted
an effort at reconstructive theory that aimed to bring into relief
Butler’s persistent concern with ethics as a form of self-cultivation
that can be seen as preceding and informing – i.e. ‘preparing’ us for
– the contingent, contestatory political interactions that she will
never describe in advance for us.1 I sought to distil out what I saw
as the key ethical dispositions informing particularly Butler’s post-
9/11 work, namely generosity, humility, patience and restraint. By
way of conclusion, I argued for understanding the ‘entirely differ-
ent politics’ she gestured towards in terms of ‘unsatisfaction’, a
term that captures multiple dimensions of Butler’s work.
In part, unsatisfaction got at how Butler’s political theory fre-
quently leaves her readers unsatisfied. In a more substantive sense,
unsatisfaction was meant to capture Butler’s ultimate commitment
to the importance of a cultivated, insurrectionary practice of not-
doing as a way of challenging traditional modes of ‘doing’ that are
immediate and often gratifying despite their frequent unintended
consequences. Finally, unsatisfaction was intended to capture
Butler’s persistent critique of the project of recognition, wherein
others must make themselves intelligible to me within existing
social norms of identity that I comprehend in order for me to
grasp my ethical responsibility to them. This traditional ‘mode of
ethicality’ – predicated on the question, ‘Who are you, and thus
how must I treat you?’ – fails, and is implicitly violent, in Butler’s
account. Not demanding that an other give an account of herself
that satisfies me is conceived then as a form of generosity, an
Butler’s Ethical Appeal 67
ethical disposition we can cultivate through humility and patience

towards others we have a responsibility to but may never fully
grasp or have anything like traditional moral sentiments towards.
As she puts it in Frames of War, ‘it is to the stranger that we are
bound, the one, or the ones, that we never knew and never chose’
(2009: xxvi). We must then always ask, ‘What is our responsibility
toward those we do not know, toward those who seem to test our
sense of belonging or to defy available norms of likeness?’ (Butler
2009: 36).
Butler’s notion that we ‘have’ a responsibility to others, whether
we recognise or embrace it or not, emerges largely from her
engagement with Levinas. For Levinas, our ethical responsibility
to others reads like something of a fact. We are not born, do not
attain subjectivity, and then develop relationships within which we
consent to ethical obligations to others. We come into the world in
relations with others, impinged upon by the world from the start,
and thus always already responsive to others and responsible for
how we act on that. This moral (pre)ontology of the impinged
subject is not wholly satisfying to Butler, because Levinas fails to
appreciate how social conditions inform the norms through which
we come into subjectivity as well. For Butler, this sociality also has
something of the status of fact. She writes in Precarious Life about
the ‘interdependence we can’t argue with’ (Butler 2004a: 22). She
describes relationality in community with others as ‘a descriptive
or historical fact of our formation’ (Butler 2004a: 27). We are
given over to others and to norms, without contract or consent,
and as such ‘there is no living being that is not at risk of destruc-
tion’ (Butler 2009: xvi). In short, precariousness, as a ‘generalized
condition’ of all humans, is ‘undeniable’ (Butler 2009: xxvi; 22);
a ‘timeless feature’ of subjects (Butler 2009: 178). While these
assertions, on their own, seem to be truisms, when paired with
Levinas’s theory of ethical subjectivity they lead to the norma-
tive claim that ‘the precarity of life imposes an obligation on us’,
which exists whether we know or understand it or not. The fact
of our material existence – our corporeal and psychic exposure to
others, our vulnerability to destruction, and the capacity of even
the weakest and the injured among us to respond with violence or
aggression to another person – implies an ethical demand from the
outset.
I interpreted Butler here as attempting to ground a theory of
ethics in the absence of affinity. This is an account not reliant on
the usual modes of recognition, but on dispositions cultivated in

their stead. Another way of putting this point is to say that in
Precarious Life and Giving an Account of Oneself I took Butler
to be gesturing towards something like an ‘ethics without affect’.
Implicit in this account is the belief that feelings are a poor guide
for our ethical relations with others. Feelings are often unreliable
impulses (for example, of threat, of aggression or of the desire
for certain knowledge of the other, or the desire to shore up our
autonomy and sense of self-mastery), which produce demands on
others that we must resist the urge to satisfy. In Frames of War,
for example, Butler is deeply critical of how readily the state and
society work on our emotional being, often by way of our material
bodily existence, to inculcate us as the kinds of citizens that will
acquiesce to violent political agendas. She writes of the ‘righteous
coldness cultivated over time through local and collective practices
of nation-building, supported by prevalent social norms as they are
articulated by both public policy, dominant media, and the strate-
gies of war’ (Butler 2009: xxiv). While not exactly claiming that
citizens of the United States are unthinking pawns, Butler is dis-
turbed by the increasingly diminished space for critique in public
discourse, specifically discourse about war. Absent the ability to
grasp how norms of recognition are generated and deployed – how
such norms are mediated by the powers that be, and how those
interpretive frames function to naturalise as reality relations that
are in fact politically and ethically contingent – Butler fears we
will simply default to a ‘cultural reflex’ (2009: 36) whereby our
narcissistic/nationalistic emotional responses seem preconscious,
authentic, universal, and thus correct.
So, feelings are tricky. Yet an effective ethical appeal requires
more than just work at the cognitive level, or recourse to the
facticity of it all. For despite emphasising the fact of our interde-
pendence and vulnerability, and the fact of ethical responsibility
to the other, Butler readily acknowledges how adept we are at not
knowing these facts. Throughout Frames of War she makes this
point. Referring to the relationship between Israel and Palestine,
she writes, ‘[t]his undeniable situation of proximity and interde-
pendency, of vulnerability, is nevertheless denied’ (Butler 2009:
xxvi). More generally, precariousness is handily ‘disavowed in
particular political formations’ (Butler 2009: 30). War, in particu-
lar, ‘seeks to deny the ongoing and irrefutable ways in which we
are all subject to one another’ (Butler 2009: 43). The US ‘national
subject’, in so far as that subject does violence to others to prevent

violence to itself, suffers from cognitive dissonance that ‘consti-
tutes the disavowal of dependency’ (Butler 2009: 54). Over and
over again we ‘fail to understand that the life of the one is bound
to the life of the other, and that certain obligations emerge from
this most basic social condition’ (Butler 2009: xxx). And this disa-
vowal has serious political consequences in Butler’s account – not
the least of which is moral sadism: a ‘violence that righteously
grounds itself in an ethics of purity wrought from the disavowal
of violence’; ‘a mode of persecution that passes itself off as virtue’
(Butler 2009: 177).
So what kind of failure is this failure ‘to understand’? Is this
denial a matter of rejecting as fact the claim that ‘we are all pre-
carious lives’ (Butler 2009: 43), or that ‘all the potential actors in
[a] scene are equally vulnerable’? (Butler 2009: 181). Does Butler
find herself here facing the same kind of challenge as Hobbes?
Leviathan builds from the undeniable fact that even the strongest
can be killed in the state of nature. Recognising that mere cogni-
tion of this fact was insufficient, Hobbes invoked vivid imagery
to induce the experience of corporeal vulnerability necessary to
activate the fear required for his theory to compel. That is, he
worked on his readers by interweaving rational argumentation
and affective appeal. Yet while Hobbes revolutionised the way we
think about the power of a people to construct an artificial entity
like the state for mutual self-preservation, his dream of an abiding
peace guaranteed by a social contract remained (and perhaps
remains) unfulfilled. Knowing that, in theory, the basic reality of
our bodies makes us all susceptible to violence or destruction does
not adequately counter our frequent disavowal of, or failure to
understand, that fact in practice. So the question remains: does
being exposed to each other and thus being obligated to each other
matter, or must we feel exposed in order to feel responsible to each
other? What is the relationship, in other words, between being
responsible, feeling responsible and acting responsible?
Affect and responsibility: facticity vs. feeling

Butler acknowledges this question when she writes in Precarious
Life that ‘a vulnerability must be perceived and recognized in order
to come into play in an ethical encounter, and there is no guaran-
tee that this will happen’ (2004a: 43). This fundamental dilemma
continues to drive her inquiry in Frames of War, where she delves

deeper into the conditions for moral responsiveness. But is there
a shift or reframing between Precarious Life and Frames of War?
Where the vocabulary of Precarious Life, regarding the perception
and recognition of the undeniable fact of our vulnerability, dwells
in the realm of the cognitive, in Frames of War a vocabulary not
particularly evident before emerges, including apprehension, per-
ception, the senses and, importantly, affect. Moreover, in the final
chapter of that book Butler addresses the issue I outlined above,
regarding Levinas and the fact of responsibility, by noting that
It is not enough to say, in a Levinasian vein, that the claim is made

upon me prior to my knowing and as an inaugurating instance of my
coming into being. That may be formally true, but its truth is of no
use to me if I lack the conditions for responsiveness that allow me to
apprehend it in the midst of this social and political life. Those ‘condi-
tions’ include not just my private resources, but the various mediating
forms and frames that make responsiveness possible. (2009: 179–80)
What Butler means by ‘mediating forms and frames’ becomes

tangible over the course of Frames of War. But what does she mean
when she talks about one’s ‘private resources’ for ethical respon-
siveness? Are the private resources she has in mind our ‘affects’,
or something else? Perhaps she means our bank accounts, our citi-
zenship status, our social network, our racial and sexual privilege,
our educational level, and the like. This comment is nebulous. But
it goes to the heart of the question of what Butler’s ethics is all
about. In addition to the social – the normatively regulated and
mediated categories and concepts through which we encounter the
world (and in terms of which we make moral judgements about
what lives count as lives) – there is some implicit conception of
the subject, the ‘I’, who encounters that world and the ‘private’
resources that attach to that ‘I’. In what follows, I explore this
question of what affect is, for Butler, and how it informs ethics.
The word affect appears almost not at all until Precarious Life
(2004a) (and, as noted above, a bit in Undoing Gender (2004b)),
and Giving an Account of Oneself (2005). The terminology of
affect emerges where Butler takes up the question of the represen-
tational practices through which the human, and human suffering,
are framed. Precarious Life ends with a call ‘affectively, to reinvig-
orate the intellectual projects of critique, of questioning . . .’ and
specifically to question ‘what media will let us know and feel at the
limits of representation’ of human frailty (Butler 2004a: 151). In
Giving An Account of Oneself Butler writes about the body as a
site of impingement by the other, the emergence of an ‘I’ through
its dependence on the primary address of the other, and the range
of affective responses that happens at the moment of impingement
(2005: 70, 98). Drawing on Laplanche and his account of infant
love, Butler notes that, ‘the other is, as it were, the condition of
possibility of my affective life’ – that which ‘gives rise to the drives
and desires that are mine’ (2005: 77). She quickly returns here,
however, to Levinas, and the persecutory scene of address that
constitutes the structural condition of responsibility. While Butler
notes the importance, for Levinas, of the ‘outrage’ we experi-
ence in response to our exposure to the other (an outrage that
can feel ‘horrible’, and a desire for murderous revenge that feels
‘overwhelming’) (2005: 92), she nonetheless explains that ‘respon-
sibility is not a matter of cultivating a will, but of making use of
an unwilled susceptibility as a resource for becoming responsive
to the Other . . . meaning that I am, as it were, precluded from
revenge by virtue of the relation I never chose’ (2005: 91). As
Moya Lloyd has characterised this tendency, Butler remains here
in the ‘quasi-Derridean impulse to explore ontological conditions
of possibility’ (2008: 104) of ethical responsibility, which, to draw
on the language I used above, makes responsibility to the other a
fact regardless of how I feel about it.
Of course, the presence of the word ‘affect’ is not required
for Butler to be addressing this dimension of life. If by affect
she merely means something like passionate attachments or our
‘drives and desires’, then such a concern can be traced back
through The Psychic Life of Power (Butler 1997b) and Subjects
of Desire (Butler 1987), and arguably be shown to inform aspects
of all of her work.2 In terms of something more specific we might
point, as discussed earlier, to certain dispositional tendencies or
‘comportments’ (including generosity, humility and patience)
that have emerged as significant in her work, and that seem to
acknowledge an affective register. Yet Lloyd’s point above is apt.
Though terms like desire, melancholia, loneliness, anxiety, fear,
aggression, grief and even hope and love appear throughout her
body of work, they generally shape up more as structural condi-
tions (or ‘sites’) of possibility for the emergence of the subject, and
not as affective dimensions of that socially constructed subject’s
experience of the world.3 Admittedly, Butler has tended to focus

on how the very idea of a boundary between the interiority and
exteriority of the subject has been constructed within psychic and
social formations of power (1997b: 19; 1999: xv). So perhaps it
is not surprising that she has not given more explicit attention to
the inner emotional life of subjects and how that affective register
can be worked in the service of ethical relations. Similarly, though
a focus on the body pervades Butler’s work, she admits that she
is ‘not a very good materialist’, noting that whenever she writes
about the body she ends up writing about language (Butler 2004b:
198). The body, too, has typically featured as a formal condition
or site and not, as Diana Coole puts it, ‘an active, expressive body
with the visceral capacities sometimes to resist the constraints
imposed upon it’ (2008: 17).
Coole’s insights are instructive and I shall return to them below,
particularly her suggestion that Butler has traditionally offered
‘merely structural opportunities, not capacities, for agency’; that
she has theorised subjects ‘that require scare quotes and lack any
interiority’ (2008: 25). To the extent that affect comes to the fore
in Frames of War, does it indicate a shift for Butler, perhaps away
from the conditions of subjectivity and towards the experiences of
vulnerable subjects?
Frames of War begins with the claim that ‘every war is a war
upon the senses’ (2009: xvi). Reality is produced and popular
assent cultivated through the deployment of technologies of war
on ‘the field of the senses’ (Butler 2009: ix) (including media
framing, photography, discursive framing). Butler asserts that this
solicitation to acquiescence operates on our ‘act of passive recep-
tion’ (2009: xii) and thus the book focuses on exposing ‘cultural
modes of regulating affective and ethical dispositions through a
selective and differential framing of violence’ (2009: 1). What, she
wants to know, are the ‘conditions for breaking out of the quo-
tidian acceptance of war’? (Butler 2009: 11). The main condition
seems to be the disruption of the normative frames that function
to produce the field of ontology within which certain lives can be
perceived or ‘apprehended’ as lives – a field of normativity that has
deep ‘implications for why, when and for whom we feel politically
consequential affective dispositions such as horror, guilt, righteous
sadism, loss and indifference’ (Butler 2009: 24).
The concept of apprehension is offered here as a replacement for
‘the stronger term’ (Butler 2009: 5) of recognition. ‘Apprehension’,
she writes, ‘is less precise, since it can imply marking, registering,
acknowledging without full cognition. If it is a form of knowing,
it is bound up with sensing and perceiving, but in ways that are
not always – or not yet – conceptual forms of knowledge’ (Butler
2009: 5). Though at times apprehension has an almost mysti-
cal quality of moral wisdom, akin to someone’s simply ‘getting’
something, it functions as an important form of ethical knowledge
for Butler because of the way it combines the cognitive and the
affective – the relevant socially produced concepts and categories
that frame the intelligibility of the world for our mental percep-
tion, as well as the sensory impressions that occur on and through
the body, and give our encounters with normative ontology an
emotional resonance. Butler’s long engagement with Foucault has
led her to consider over and again the epistemological question of
how power-saturated normative social frames condition what we
can know. In Frames of War she expands this consideration to
the affective question of how such frames produce sensation and
feeling; how they regulate the interpretive structures that mediate
what we might mistakenly think are innate emotional responses
‘of the universal human that supposedly resides in us all’ (Butler
2009: 159). Thus her point, stated at the outset, is that we must
examine ‘what restructuring of the senses’ is required for an affec-
tive ethics of non-violence (Butler 2009: xii).
These questions and comments notwithstanding, affect remains
relatively under- theorised in Butler’s work. For that reason, I
pause here to consider the so- called ‘affective turn’ underway
in the humanities and social sciences in recent decades, and the
rapidly growing secondary literature that aims to formulate, clas-
sify and assess this turn (Ahmed 2004; Clough 2007; Clough
2010; Connolly 2011; Gregg and Seigworth 2010; La Caze and
Lloyd 2011; Leys 2011; Pedwell and Whitehead 2012; Smith
2011). While the finer points of the detailed debates within or
about the affective turn might be beyond the scope of Butler’s
comments, the categories and concepts articulated therein may
help situate and illuminate her recent work.
The turn to affect

Within the recent turn to affect, scholars distinguish between
various strains of thought that reject or aim to transcend the more
traditional account of affect. This traditional approach focused on
subjective ‘emotion’ as consciously apprehended and codified by

a rational individual manifesting personal beliefs and intentions.
Emotions are regarded as feelings that, as Sianne Ngai puts it, are
perceived to originate in and thus belong to an ‘I’, are labelled
and unified in a narrative structure and are object-oriented (I feel
mad at you) (2007: 26). In contrast, contemporary affect theory
posits embodied affective experience as ‘non-signifying autonomic
processes that take place below the threshold of conscious aware-
ness and meaning’ (Leys 2011: 437). Thus as Marguerite La Caze
and Henry Martyn Lloyd articulate it, the turn to affect is broadly
‘construed as a turn away from minds, towards bodies’ (2011: 6).
This tension – between affect as consciously apprehended subjec-
tive emotion, feeling or mood versus unconscious and impersonal
vital/viral bodily experience that is not (or not yet) identifiable as
a nameable feeling – characterises debates in philosophy and psy-
chology, of course, but also cultural, feminist and literary studies.
Attempting to map this terrain, Gregg and Seigworth inventory
‘eight of the main orientations that undulate and sometimes
overlap in their approaches to affect’ (2010: 6). Other theorists,
of course, map the affective turn differently. My point in noting
this is that there is a broad range of concepts and commitments
indicated by invoking affect, in terms of the subject required, the
mind-body-world connection indicated, how educable affects are,
and what being affected entails, feels like, means and does.
At one end of the continuum, for example as conceptualised by
Brian Massumi (drawing on Deleuze, drawing on Spinoza, who
claimed in Ethics IIIP2 that ‘men are conscious of their actions
and ignorant of the causes by which they are determined’), affect
as registered bodily intensity follows an entirely different logic
than emotion. Affects are vital forces that originate outside of the
individual, in contexts of cultural relations, and are transmitted
via our always porous and impingeable bodies in ways we are
generally not aware of. This approach contrasts, for example, with
Ngai’s in Ugly Feelings, which takes affect as ‘less formed and
structured than emotions, but not lacking form or structure alto-
gether’ (2007: 27, original emphasis). For Massumi, in contrast to
emotion, affect is ‘the unassimilable’ (2002: 33); it is ‘not ownable
or recognizable and is thus resistant to critique’ (2002: 28). If
emotion is about appraisal and meaning, affect is unqualified and
non-signifying sensation; it is pre-personal, socially constructed
and contracted, autonomous from the subject, and escapes ‘con-
finement in the particular body whose vitality, or potential for

interaction, it is’ (Massumi 2002: 35).
One point of these insights is that it is the non-conscious bodily
affective resonances that move us more than the consciously
grasped messages by which we think we are being rationally
guided. And yet as mobilising as affect is, because it operates
largely unconsciously it is characterised by what Gregg and
Seigworth call ‘an intense and thoroughly immanent neutral-
ity’ (2010: 10). What this means is that affect in itself cannot be
relied on for ‘somehow producing always better states of being
and belonging’ (Gregg and Seigworth 2010: 10). In response to
conclusions such as this, Rachel Greenwald Smith notes that,
‘[i]f affect is, in its preconscious form, unqualified, the social and
political stakes are very high for who and what masters the nar-
ratives by which affect is intensified, directed and codified’ (2011:
431). This is a point Butler fully grasps, and which drives her focus
on framing as well as her acknowledgement that apprehending
the precariousness of life could ‘lead to a heightening of violence’
(2009: 2) and not the opposite. While other affect theorists also
seem to grasp this point, many nonetheless betray optimism about
the positive transformative potential of affect.
Clare Hemmings notes, for example, that while recognising
the possibility of ‘bad affect’, both Massumi and Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick (2003) invoke affect as a counter to the pessimistic deter-
minism they identify with poststructuralism (including references
to Butler).4 In Hemmings’ words, ‘one of the main reasons affect
has been taken as the hopeful alternative to social determinism is its
positioning of the individual as possessing a degree of control over
their future’ (2005: 552). As Massumi put it in a 2002 interview:
Experiencing this potential for change, experiencing the eventfulness

and uniqueness of every situation, even the most conventional ones,
that’s not necessarily about commanding movement, it’s about navi-
gating movement. It’s about being immersed in an experience that is
already underway. It’s about being bodily attuned to opportunities in
the movement, going with the flow. It’s more like surfing the situation,
or tweaking it, than commanding or programming it. (in Zournazi
2002: 212)
Because affect is outside of narration and unpredictable in how it

attaches to and relates bodies, it implies potentiality – a capacity to
affect and be affected in endless, contagious, ways. Thus Massumi

says, ‘I guess “affect” is the word I use for “hope” ’ (in Zournazi
2002: 212).
There are (at least) two issues here. One is that affect is taken
to open up possibilities for agency that social constructivism seem-
ingly forecloses. The other is that, even when figured as impersonal
intensities that ‘assert nothing’ (Massumi 2010: 64), affect tends
to connote optimism about the potential for progressive social
change to the extent that affect theorists often focus on ‘the good
affect that undoes the bad’ (Hemmings 2005: 551). In analysing
what is at stake in ‘invoking affect’, Hemmings expresses scepti-
cism about the implicit faith in something outside of culture or the
social, and about how freely (and transformatively) affect really
circulates, given how its investment varies for differently gendered,
raced and sexualised bodies.5 Lauren Berlant similarly cautions
that ‘shifts in the affective atmosphere are not equal to chang-
ing the world’ (2010: 116). The question of what kind of agency
affective potentiality gives rise to, or what kind of transformative
potential it has, is an important one. On the question of agency,
Ruth Leys’ critique of the affective turn goes so far as to argue that
a defining trait of recent affect theory is a deep anti-intentionalism
(2011: 443) that suggests only the most minimal form of agency: a
‘layer of preconscious “priming to act” such that embodied action
is a matter of being attuned to and coping with the world without
the input of rational content’ (2011: 442 n. 22). ‘Going with the
flow,’ as Massumi puts it.
In this same interview, however, Massumi explores affective
experience through the metaphor of ‘walking as controlled falling’,
or the interplay between constraints on freedom (for example,
gravity) and the room to manoeuvre or to ‘navigate’ the fields
of potential we find ourselves always already in. Here Massumi
presses the point that others make as well, which is that the turn to
affect is not reflective of a theoretical preference for freedom over
determinism, but a challenge to that dichotomy itself. William
Connolly has thus responded critically to Leys’ account of affect
theory’s anti- intentionalism, noting that consciousness ‘arrives
at a late point in the consolidation of intention’ (2011: 795).
Meaning: affect theory does not reject all intentionality, per se, but
rather sees agency as already deeply informed by work done on
the affective register, or by ‘affect-imbued tendencies that nudge
us in different directions’ (Connolly 2011: 795). Yet the ques-
tion remains (and I take this to be Leys’ concern): when Massumi

likens affective ethical responsiveness to controlled falling, what is
the nature of that control?
Connolly gives some attention to the question of how we might
work with, or on, affect – channel, educate or at least develop
practices to prime it ourselves, or to cultivate a certain ethos,
instead of just being unconsciously worked over at the infra-
sensible level. Other scholars similarly venture into the territory of
the ‘how’. Teresa Brennan has written about the role of medita-
tion in managing affect and cultivating responsive ‘discernment’
instead of reactive ‘judgment’ (2004). Elena Cuffari takes up the
question of ‘habits of transformation’ through analysis of Dewey
and Beauvoir, both of whom explore practices of ethical education
and self-cultivation, and see habit (both of affective attitude and
of action) as the constraining and enabling condition for ethical
responsiveness and adaptation (2011). Cuffari ends by considering
Ladelle McWhorter’s take on what transformative habits might
look like, including, drawing on Foucault’s work on self-care,
the use of bodily pleasure cultivated through digging in the dirt
(i.e. gardening) and dancing (Cuffari 2011: 546–7). All of these
accounts theorise a kind of engagement with affect and ethical
practice that does not lapse back into the sovereign subject, but
does at least gesture towards what one might do if one wanted to
build some affective ethical muscle by which to be fortified when
one’s responsiveness and responsibility are at stake.
So what about Butler? A set of questions emerges from this brief
foray into affect theory, the answers to which would help clarify
the work that ‘affect’ is doing or could do in Butler’s ethical theory.
Most basically, what is affect? Does she use the term in a consist-
ent and precise way – as unconscious emotion; pre-discursive and
asocial vital bodily intensities; the capacity to affect and be affected;
conscious emotion albeit of a contingent subject; feelings; drives?
Is affect importantly different from emotion, and if so, how does
this matter for Butler (as it matters for Massumi insofar as emotion
requires a subject and involves interpretation, and affect does not)?
What kind of knowledge does affective experience produce (what
is the ‘intelligence of the flesh’, in Brennan’s words (2004: 139)),
and how does that knowledge inform ethical judgement and politi-
cal action? In other words, why does Butler invoke ‘affect’?
I do not think the references to affect in Frames of War yet allow
full answers to these questions. So far, it is not clearly the case that
Butler intends any ‘thick’ meaning by the word itself. Nonetheless,

its use cannot be incidental – it features in the title of the first
chapter of Frames of War. Furthermore, the preponderance of the
evidence to date does not suggest that she sees affect as impersonal
bodily intensities that ‘assert nothing’. Rather, her recourse to
affect has the effect, and arguably the intention, of personalising
precariousness, imbuing it with meaning-making power that moti-
vates one to perceive and sense the ontological vulnerability that
relative political privilege so easily obscures.6 Most basically, then,
‘affect’ evokes some kind of embodied experience of a porous and
interdependent yet also bounded corporeal being, who is moved
some way or other by what they have undergone or could undergo
– moved ethically, insofar as embodied understanding of our pre-
cariousness might lead us to identify and feel solidarity with vul-
nerable peoples around the globe; and moved politically, insofar
as this identification spurs action aimed at collective life.
Still, I want to resist suggesting that Butler is engaging in a dis-
tinct ‘turn’ to affect, particularly if this would be taken to signal
a break with her past trajectory, or indicate a late-career de facto
acquiescence to standard humanism. We know this line of argu-
mentation well from work on Foucault, about whom numerous
scholars have alleged his ultimate capitulation to humanism,
human rights and the subject (O’Leary 2002; Paras 2006; Wolin
2006; for a critique of this interpretation, see Golder 2010).
Regarding Butler, Ann Murphy has recently pointed to a ‘new
humanism’ underlying her attention to corporeal vulnerability,
Bonnie Honig has identified her with a form of ‘mortalist human-
ism’, and in this volume Drew Walker raises this question in terms
of the tension between ‘two regimes of the human’ that he discerns
in her work. Below I pursue this issue a bit more by considering
Diana Coole’s analysis of Butler, which addresses the phenom-
enological legacy of her early work that haunts her recent work
(suggesting, perhaps, a return to humanism, or at least the lived
experience of humanisation or becoming-human).
What motivates me to want answers to the suite of questions I
raised above, however, is less this question of Butler’s humanism,
and more the desire to understand whether and how the ‘affect’
emergent in her recent texts is susceptible to being worked with,
channelled, or directed. In other words, how does reading Butler
help us think about what to ‘do’ with affect? And here I do not
mean politically, in terms of specific collective action she indicates
we should undertake to move the world in the direction of more

room for liveable life. As I articulated in ‘Preparing for Politics’,
I acknowledge (and more or less accept) Butler’s resistance as a
philosopher to supplying any so-called action items or road map
to political transformation. In Frames of War she gestures towards
areas that collective action might target, such as ‘concrete social
policy regarding issues such as shelter, work, food, medical care
and legal status’ (Butler 2009: 13), but they are general enough
to leave readers seeking specific directives unsatisfied. So when I
ask here what possibilities or actions her work opens up, I mean
ethically: how does she think we can restructure our senses, effect
the significant shifts she calls for in disposition and thus in our
relation to norms, or cultivate the kind of emotional comportment
she values? Insofar as she equates ethics with a kind of personal
struggle (the ‘struggle of a single subject’ (Butler 2009: 167)), is
that struggle only ever against social norms and with our psychic
aggression?7
To the extent that the struggle Butler has in mind is one against
social norms that forcibly craft our subjectivity, that struggle
would be to critically embody and perform norms differently,
and would thus be a fundamentally social and relational endeav-
our of engaging with the exterior world. But to the extent that
it is a struggle with our innate tendency towards aggression as
a response to impingement, is the work to be done work on the
self? Does the subject craft its own interiority at all, for Butler – is
this what ‘affect’ opens up? If the struggle for non-violence is ‘not
about finding and cultivating a non-violent region of the soul’
or some ‘purified’ or ‘beautiful’ soul, is it about ‘the soul’ at all?
(Butler 2009: 171, 178). If ‘our affect is never merely our own’
(Butler 2009: 50), and ‘the body does not belong to itself’ (Butler
2009: 53), then in what sense do we have any ‘private resources’
for ethical responsiveness?
At the end of Frames of War Butler asks, ‘[c]an one work with
such formative violence against violent outcomes and thus undergo
a shift in the iteration of violence?’ (Butler 2009: 170). She links
this question directly to clinical psychoanalysis, so it is clear she
has our interior life at least partly in mind, both in terms of the
psychic or normative violence through which our subjectivity is
forged, and in terms of how one might ‘work’ that violence against
violent outcomes. But she never answers this question. Can one?
What kind of practices of the self might be involved in such work?
And what kind of revised theory of the subject might be required

to answer this question? When Butler invites us to develop a ‘point
of identification with suffering itself’ (Butler 2004a: 30), what is
the nature of that identification? If she is precisely not counselling
empathy with others we do not necessarily know or recognise, but
rather ‘apprehension’ of a shared condition of precariousness, is
identification a matter of undergoing the affective experience of
suffering – feeling vulnerability, loss and dispossession?
As I mentioned above, Coole raises this question of the centrality
of experience for Butler, suggesting that Butler is returning to the
thread of existential phenomenology that ran through her earliest
work and then got lost in the high-poststructuralist, anti-humanist
constructivism of Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter, in par-
ticular (Coole 2008: 22). For Coole, this question of experience
and the interiority of the subject matters for understanding the
capacity for resistance, but also for understanding the motivation
for resistance. The formal possibility, or site, for resistance may
always exist, but what leads us to enter that space? To put this
question in Butler’s language, under what conditions do we heed
the solicitation to resistance? Writing with a focus on Undoing
Gender, Coole calls for ‘a level of sociological and experiential
analysis that still seems to be lacking in Butler’s work’ (2008: 22),
but which Coole thinks is there to be embraced. While Precarious
Life and Frames of War may show Butler moving slightly more in
that direction, she still seems hesitant to theorise agency beyond
resistance to the repetition of violent and exclusionary norms;
agency as working our potentially dangerous affects against them-
selves (cultivating ‘aggressive vigilance over aggression’s tendency
to emerge as violence’ (Butler 2009: 170)). In addition to offering
an explicit conception of the subject of lived experience, if Butler
is to move further in this direction she must do more to develop
certain affects that are latent in her recent work: not only generos-
ity, humility and patience (and versions of those dispositions that
do not reduce to restraint), but also love, care, hope, humour,
courage and solidarity.8 Grief may provide an important ethical
and political resource (Gutterman and Rushing 2008; McIvor
2012; Lloyd 2007: 141), and destructiveness may be ‘lived and
directed’ in a way that ‘seeks to protect the other against destruc-
tion’ (Butler 2009: 177). But the question of the motivation to
dwell in vulnerability, resist aggression and keep ambivalence
alive demands, I think, something more. This is not a call for a
full-blown care ethics, or a return to the ‘voluntarist subject of

humanism’ (Butler 1993: 7) that Butler has persistently interro-
gated. But it is a recognition that, for all of the appeal of Butler’s
ethics of vulnerability and interdependence, her ethical appeal falls
short without more of an answer to the question of how one can
cultivate the ‘private resources’ that make responsiveness possible,
and what those private resources are, such that they move ethics
from the refusal to react and towards the capacity to respond.
Being, feeling and acting responsible

Of course, it need not be Butler that provides this supplement.9 In
‘Preparing for Politics’ I asked whether there might be an uncon-
ventional virtue ethics emerging in Butler’s work. I think now that
the answer to that question is no. Butler invokes the terminology
of virtue in ‘What is Critique: An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue’
(2002) and she takes up the question of how life and the good life
go hand in hand for Spinoza in ‘Ethical Ambivalence’ (2000). But
in Frames of War she clearly equates virtue with a pure, peace-
ful and harmonious soul that bears no resemblance to the messy,
opaque and aggressive subjects she presumes. I believe, though,
that the conceptual vocabulary of virtue ethics may have some
useful resources to offer Butler.10 By way of conclusion, then, I
shall suggest a few points for constructive engagement, which
might provide the opportunity to return to the question I asked
above: what is the connection, for Butler, between being, feeling
and acting responsible?
First, ‘character’. Though character has acquired distinctly
puritanical connotations in contemporary discourse, it is a per-
formative concept that allows for the cultivation of some ethical
agent that need not be an essential, re-metaphysicalised sovereign
or atomistic subject. You do, do, do and become, and the doing
is always relational and the becoming is always provisional.
Though with Excitable Speech performativity became for Butler
primarily a discursive concept, in Undoing Gender she returns to
a key point of Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter, namely
that ‘performativity is not just about speech acts. It is also about
bodily acts’ (Butler 2004b: 199). These bodily acts are not the
intentional doings of the voluntarist subject, but they may indicate
the kind of agency that Massumi suggests, and which fits well with
Butler’s normatively conditioned, constrained and thereby enabled
‘subject’. In other words, in making a habit of performing the

ethical human (the human who fights for ‘the human’?), what is
consolidated is some kind of doer, but one effected by the deeds.11
Character is not nature, but rather a set of cultivated dispositions
that we can work to habituate ourselves to, and which, when
repeated over time, can become something like ‘second nature’.
Of course, the question, again, is what kinds of deeds Butler
might have in mind. In Gender Trouble, she famously articulated
the critical force of parodic subversion enacted by non-normative
gender performances. Her more recent work has explored the
force of the act of deferring to the non-act as a way of perform-
ing critique and resistance. In Frames of War, however, we might
see the beginnings of a more ‘positive’ account, in the form of the
affective ethical appeals we can actively make to each other.
In her analysis of the poetry produced by prisoners at Guantanamo
Bay, for example, Butler describes the longing and rage conveyed
in their words as ‘appeals’ – as efforts to establish a social connec-
tion to a world within which such a connection seems impossible
(Butler 2009: 49). Quoting from Ariel Dorfman’s epilogue to a
published collection of some of the few surviving poems, Butler
notes how ‘the body breathes, breathes itself into words, and finds
some provisional survival there. But once the breath is made into
words, the body is given over to another, in the form of an appeal’
(2009: 61). I would argue that much of Butler’s recent body of
work also has the status of an appeal. In Precarious Life she says
at one point, ‘I am arguing, if I am “arguing” at all . . .’ (Butler
2004a: 24), which suggests to me that she is not making argu-
ments, but rather is working on us affectively, through her words,
by repeatedly invoking a vocabulary of affect, vulnerability, inter-
dependence, loss, grief and, somewhat, love and care. This body of
words has aesthetic appeal, a certain poetry to it, which is meant
not so much to communicate ideas to us as to induce an experience
of precariousness, or to perform it iteratively across multiple texts
and talks, and to solicit a community of solidarity. To return to
the concept of character, Butler seems to be calling us to at least
desire to become a certain way – to value the fragility of corporeal
existence for the ethical potential it has, even if she won’t explicate
what she thinks one must do to perform that being.
Similarly to Aristotle’s, then, Butler’s appeal can be read as
an invitation to a certain ethical value structure (practising non-
violence, risking oneself to live in critical resistance to norms,
extending care to others who suffer, all in the name of inclusion

and liveable, or flourishing, life). But also like Aristotle, Butler
offers no formal rules or specific guidelines. I suggested above that
‘apprehension’ takes on a sort of mystical quality in Frames of
War, much like phronesis does in the Nicomachean Ethics. And
yet, it is not the case for Aristotle, or for Butler, that you either
have it or you don’t. Critical understanding of relevant social and
historical formations and relations, careful attention to the details
of any unique context and event, and certain external resources
(money, a community, security, education) are required in order to
practise practical wisdom, as they are for apprehension.
Second, a few comments on ‘virtue’ or virtues. While Aristotle
offers ‘Virtue’ (with a capital V) as the target at which we aim,
he nonetheless makes clear that most of us only ever achieve con-
tinence. So, not the pure and perfect soul that Butler rejects, but
rather a (more or less) consistent practice of resisting or struggling
against the impulse to do wrong. But an ethos of anxiety and
struggle does not define Aristotle’s approach, as one might argue it
has Butler’s. For Aristotle, pleasure is a central dimension of moral
conduct. The analogy here is limited, of course, because this aspect
of Aristotle’s theory is directly linked to his teleological concep-
tion of the human being (i.e. a virtuous person takes pleasure in
the objectively right things, namely exercising the virtues, because
doing virtuous actions for the right reasons means living closer to
the nature of objective human excellence, and thus flourishing).
But the idea that it might be what feels good (for lack of better
words) that leads us to consistently practise ethical action seems
important.
For example, Butler notes that the affect of outrage is not nec-
essarily ‘transformed into a sustained political resistance’. Thus
she asks, ‘Is there another way to act upon the senses, or to act
from them . . .?’ (2009: xiv) A sense of fear and paranoia seems
like a reasonable response to apprehending that all life is precari-
ous and vulnerable to destruction, but clearly this is not what she
has in mind either. So what are the desired dispositions of the
provisional doer or agent that Butler’s ethical appeal solicits us
to? Underlying the appeal she makes is something much more
pleasurable – connective or generative affects including a sense
of humour at life’s absurdity and uncontrollableness, a sense of
care for and solidarity with people who suffer, a sense of freedom
or possibility that comes with ‘talking back’, and a sense of hope
for and love of the world. Drawing out these dimensions would
trouble Bonnie Honig’s characterisation of Butler as a ‘mortal-
ist humanist’, focused on finitude and suffering as the source
and extent of human commonality. Honig argues that mortalist
humanism’s focus on the universality of human finitude problem-
atically displaces politics, because ‘such solitary affects and shared
vulnerabilities are not themselves a rich basis for the democratic,
concerted, or oppositional politics’ that she seeks (Honig 2010:
4). Butler’s work has the potential to challenge this claim. But
she must confront the claim directly by fleshing out what work
affect is doing for her. In particular, she might clarify the extent
to which ‘affect’ returns her to questions of embodiment, builds
on what she has already articulated regarding relationality and
interdependence, and provides the material through which we
can cultivate virtues of responsiveness to suffering itself. In short,
Butler might address Honig’s critique by showing how affect, far
from indicating a retreat from politics, functions as a synapse
firing between being and acting, or ethics and politics.
Notes
1. My title builds on Butler’s statement in a 1999 interview: ‘I do think
that political decisions are made in that lived moment and they can’t
be predicted from the level of theory – they can be sketched, they can
be schematized, they can be prepared for . . .’ (Butler in Bell 1999:
166).
2. Even if we push beyond passionate attachments, drives and desires to
‘feelings’, there may be gestures towards this concern in earlier texts.
In the preface to the 1999 edition of Gender Trouble, for example,
Butler notes that one objective of the text was ‘to understand some
of the terror and anxiety that some people suffer in “becoming
gay” ’ (Butler 1999: xi). Notably, though, she does not articulate
this concern in terms of the feelings such people experience. And as
Chapter 1 of Gender Trouble makes clear, Butler is more interested
in how regulatory practices produce a façade of ‘internal coher-
ence of the subject’ who might be susceptible to such experiences;
a constructed and then naturalised and invisibilised metaphysical
‘unity of experience’ (1999: 30) that reveals less about the person
than about how binary gender norms function in the production of
and as the conditions for that subjectivity. In Bodies That Matter,
Butler’s focus is even more on the scene of production of categories
of sex and gender. And feminist social theory’s assumptions about

the materiality of the body (let alone lived affective bodily experi-
ence) create the problematic that she seeks to respond to. Moreover,
the experience of ‘despair’ (Butler 1993: 117) driving many forms
of identity politics is something she is specifically seeking to evade.
Thus Bodies That Matter aims to ‘rethink the terms that establish
and sustain bodies that matter’ (Butler 1993: 240), but not to inquire
into the experience of mattering or not. Finally, in Excitable Speech
Butler is overtly critical of the role of feelings, citing the tendency in
literary and cultural studies at the time towards a ‘nearly compulsory
production of exorbitant affect as the sign of proof that the forces
of censorship are being actively and insistently countered’ (1997a:
144).
3. For example, abjection is a key concept for Butler from early on, but
as Lloyd notes, abjection is figured as a discursive process (2007:
75). Butler describes ‘the domain’ or ‘zone’ of abjection – it is a loca-
tion of exclusion, but not a feeling that a subject has in experiencing
such exclusion.
4. Hemmings’ main target is the uncritical use of ‘affect’ as a rhe-
torical device, whereby affect is ‘mentioned or celebrated but
rarely explained either as a critical tool or object’ (2005: 551). In
her analysis of Massumi and Sedgwick, she notes how ‘bad affect’
comes to mean deterministic and pessimistic about change, thus
affirming the dominant social order, and ‘good affect’ comes to
mean whatever shakes loose the hold of that order in the name
of freedom. Hemmings summarises the impulse of Massumi and
Sedgwick in terms of ‘a new academic attitude rather than a new
method, an attitude or faith in something other than the social and
cultural, a faith in the wonders that might emerge if we were not so
attached to the pragmatic negativity’ (2005: 563). Though in-depth
consideration of the question of ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ affect is outside
the scope of this paper, I want to acknowledge Sara Ahmed’s point
about what amounts to a social injunction to so-called good affects
like happiness (and her desire to show how the distinction between
good feeling and bad feeling fails to hold) (2010: 14). Attention to
how ‘good emotions’ normalise and regulate ‘good subjects’ has
informed a number of inquiries that seek to resist this injunction,
which is traceable in part to positive psychology but with deeper
roots, I would argue, in a general Puritan ethic. Such a resistance
informs Ngai’s turn to ‘ugly feelings’ (2005), Diana Tietjen Meyers’
focus on ‘rancorous emotional attitudes’ (1997), Lisa Tessman’s
consideration of the critical moral function of anger (2005), and

other philosophical and empirical social science examining the
importance of ‘negative emotions’ (Rodriguez 2013).
5. Sara Ahmed has similarly explored how the objects of emotions
like fear or disgust can get ‘stuck’ with over-determined affective
baggage, which can lock bodies into relationships that they are not
free to simply feel differently (2004: 62).
6. At the very end of Frames of War Butler writes, ‘[a]ll this is just
another way of saying that it is most difficult when in a state of pain
to stay responsive to the equal claim of the other for shelter, for con-
ditions of livability and grievability’ (2009: 184). But in fact, it does
not seem like a state of pain is the hardest condition for responsive-
ness. It seems like it is ‘most difficult’ when in a state of distraction,
oblivion, self-righteousness or hubris.
7. Aggression is certainly foregrounded in Butler’s most recent work,
both as a primary dimension of psychic and social production and
a quality of violent actions against others. This is partly due to
her concern with literal geopolitical military violence after 9/11.
However, the violence of the norm is a tenet across her body of work,
and the subject is forged, for her, as it responds to normative violence
by turning against its own will and desire through aggression in the
form of self-berating and self-regulation. As she makes clear in The
Psychic Life of Power, however, ‘love and aggression work together’
(Butler 1997b: 26), so in suggesting that aggression is innate, I do
not mean to suggest that it is the only or the primary affect of sub-
jects. My concern here, then, is whether the facticity of our primary
aggression – the belief that it is always with us, and not something we
transcend – ultimately limits how we can direct our energies beyond
working aggressively against aggression’s tendency to do violence,
and towards something more creative and constructive.
8. Per note 4, I am grasping for a precise way to characterise the affects
I have in mind. While calling them ‘positive’ or ‘good’ affects begs
the questions raised above, I nonetheless want to suggest that there
is something positive I am after, in the sense that we use that word,
for example, when talking about positive and negative liberty.
Negative liberty involves not doing (a person is free to the extent
that external restraints are removed), while positive liberty involves
doing (a person is free to the extent that supportive conditions are
actively created). So here I have in mind affective dispositions to
act in certain ways, not only to resist acting in certain ways. While
the theories of restraint and resistance that Butler offers are norma-
tive ones, theorising which affects we should cultivate in the service

of a more liveable life requires a different degree of normative
constructivism.
9. I agree, though, with David McIvor (2012) when he argues that the
ethico-political promise of her work is compromised by some of her
current investments (for McIvor, in melancholia).
10. I confess to sharing Butler’s concerns about how notions of ‘virtue’
can be deployed to exclude, stigmatise and discipline, as well as to
frame one’s justification in lashing out against the so-called vicious,
evil or deviant. My nagging desire to put Butler into conversation
with virtue ethics has much to do with my goal of finding ways
to save virtue ethics from essentialists, absolutists and moralisers;
though I also think Butler’s ethical theory could be strengthened by
this engagement.
11. In addition to this point, Gender Trouble also takes up the question
of what a ‘disposition’ is. Butler examines Freud’s remarks about
masculine and feminine dispositions, and, contra Freud, urges the
recognition of how dispositions are not original or causal but rather
are the ‘effects or productions of a series of internalizations’ (1999:
77, original emphasis). While in the context of Freud and sexuality
this may constitute a radical challenge, in the context of Aristotle
and ethics it makes perfect sense.
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4
Violence, Affect and Ethics

Birgit Schippers
Why do we respond with empathy and compassion to some forms

of human suffering and loss of human life, yet react with indif-
ference or loathing to other forms of human suffering, and other
losses of human life?1 This question, raised in Judith Butler’s recent
writings on violence, war and ethics,2 connects her work with two
current developments in humanities and social science discourses:
these are the so-called ‘affective turn’, and the turn towards ethics.
In her work, Butler intimates that affect plays a central role in the
differential structuring, or framing, of human experience, and in
responses to the vulnerability and suffering of others. However,
although her writings are peppered with references to affect and its
impact on our responses to, and responsibility for the other, she has
not given this feature of her work the kind of focus that I believe it
deserves. And while Butler’s ventures into the field of ethics have
already received considerable critical attention,3 there has, as yet,
been little discussion of her deployment of affect.4 Considering the
enormous output of scholarship that her writings tend to generate,
this oversight is remarkable, and it is one of my aims in this essay
to review and evaluate Butler’s deployment of affect in more detail.
My main objective, though, is to unravel the connection
between affect and ethics, and to establish its import for under-
standing our responses to violence and war. It is my contention
that the linkage between affect and ethics in Butler’s writings is of
significant explanatory and critical value: it contributes notably
towards an understanding of the differentiated visceral reactions
and responses to the suffering of others, specifically in the context
of war. Her construal of ethics as enmeshed with affect (see Butler
2009: 34) is noteworthy for two further, and related, reasons: first,
it conveys how ethical responsibility is not inherently at odds with
the notion of the decentred subject. Rather, ethical responsibility
91
is anchored in the subject’s constitution as relational. Thus, at

the heart of Butler’s account lies her assertion of an affective rela-
tionality, or interdependency, out of which ethical obligations are
said to arise: responsibility becomes grounded in relationality and
in our vulnerability towards and dependence upon the actions of
known and unknown others. Second, Butler’s affective underpin-
ning of ethics contributes to the development of a conception of
global ethics that takes seriously the visceral dimension of global
dependence and interdependence, and of our responses towards
intimate and distant others.
Building on my exposition of what I call Butler’s affective con-
ception of ethics, I present a broadly sympathetic interpretation
of her ideas. As I argue, her emphasis on the visceral dimensions
of social and political life makes an important contribution to a
still neglected topic in the fields of ethics and political philosophy.
Furthermore, her account is particularly helpful in understand-
ing the affective dimension of violence. However, whilst Butler’s
rendering of the relationship between affect and ethics carries sub-
stantial explanatory force and normative ambition, it lacks, in my
view, normative plausibility: although she tells us why we should
respond ethically towards others, she cannot tell us why we should
feel ethically disposed towards others. As I argue, this connection
between ethical obligation and ethical feeling, or affect, is not
finally resolved in her work.
The first two sections of my chapter are mapping exercises. To
contextualise my discussion, I offer a brief exposition of the main
themes associated with the so-called affective turn; this exposi-
tion will be followed by an outline of Butler’s treatment of affect,
which I track through several of her pre-9/11 publications.5 The
linkage between affect, ethics and violence occupies me in the
remainder of this chapter, where I focus on two aspects: first, I
attend to the linkage between affect, violence and ethical respon-
sibility in Butler’s moral philosophy and in her writings on war,
and second, I draw on Butler’s discussion of relationality and com-
munity in order to sketch the broad parameters of her conception
of global ethics.
The affective turn

The notion of affect has generated substantial interest in recent
humanities and social science research.6 Notwithstanding dif-
Violence, Affect and Ethics 93
ferences in thematic focus, methodological orientation or disci-

plinary background, scholars of affect tend to agree that social
life, broadly conceived, cannot be studied through the prism of
rationalism alone, or by attending to cognitive processes only.
Rather, affect is said to play a central role in the way we relate
to others, how we experience social life or how we engage in col-
lective action. Furthermore, what unites this turn to affect is an
expressed intention to overcome the distinction and barriers that
are said to stand between the natural sciences on the one hand,
and the social sciences and humanities on the other; and, more
broadly, to connect visceral life with social or political life. Still,
affect scholarship is a diverse and richly textured field. As Gregg
and Seigworth point out, the concept of affect has accumulated ‘a
sweeping assortment of philosophical/psychological/physiological
underpinnings, critical vocabularies, and ontological pathways’
(2010: 5). These, as they continue, are said to turn on a variety
of political ends and purposes. Regardless of the multiplicity of
origins and investigative directions, four major sources surface
regularly within affect scholarship. These are (1) philosophi-
cal traditions associated with the ideas of Spinoza, Bergson and
Deleuze; (2) modern popular culture; (3) psychoanalytic theories
of the drives and intersubjectivity; and (4) the insights of neurosci-
ence for research in the humanities and social sciences. Interest in
affect has achieved particular prominence in recent work in politi-
cal studies, a discipline traditionally less open to the idea of affect.
Much of this work considers the significance of affective display to
the study of politics, such as anger and rage, passion and compas-
sion, fear and hope, joy and sadness, as well as shame, guilt and
disgust (see for example Clarke, Hoggett and Thompson 2006;
Hoggett 2009; McManus 2011; Thompson and Hoggett 2012).7
One of the key challenges facing affect scholarship to date has
been the task of providing conceptual clarity. As the French psy-
choanalyst André Green declares, as early as 1977, affect eludes
clear meaning and definition. More than thirty years later, Gregg
and Seigworth proclaim that there is ‘no single, generalizable
theory of affect’ (2010: 3). Not surprisingly, there is no agreed
definition of what the concept of affect denotes. Much of the
definitional efforts turn on affect’s relationship to emotion. While
some commentators make no distinction between the two (see for
example Neuman, Marcus, Crigler et al. 2007), others deploy the
extent of cognitive evaluation as a distinguishing criterion: affects
are said to be automatic physical responses that require limited

cognitive evaluation, and that communicate changes in physiologi-
cal reactivity. Emotional responses, on the other hand, are said to
require higher-order cognitive processes that establish a plan of
action (see Stein, Hernandez and Trabasso 2008). A different way
to distinguish between affect and emotion references the logical,
or chronological, priority of affect over emotion. Lawrence
Grossberg, for example, argues that ‘our emotional states are
elicited from within the affective states in which we already find
ourselves. Unlike emotions, affective states are neither structured
narratively nor organized in response to our interpretations of
situations’ (1992: 81). Thus, whereas emotions are said to be iden-
tifiable sets of feelings such as fear, hate or love, affect is regarded
as more diffuse, indicating what cannot be clearly named, and
what tends to be linked to pre-discursive or pre-ontological bodily
excitations.8 Furthermore, Grossberg insists on the articulation of
affect through ideological narratives, which, he suggests, produce
different forms of emotional responses and involvements.
As stressed frequently in the critical commentary, affect oper-
ates in an equivocal or ambiguous manner. Thus, how affect is
experienced, how, and to what extent, we are affected, and how
particular affects work in particular situations cannot be pre-
determined (see also Grossberg 1992).9 Following Cvetkovich,
such ‘queer approaches’ to affect are said to ‘value the many
feelings that people can experience, including feelings of confu-
sion and ambivalence that don’t fit into neat models of anger and
grief’ (Cvetkovich 2003: 284). Considering the equivocal nature of
affect may also lead to a reorientation of affective responses, and
towards a different formulation of affective ethics. I attend to this
discussion further below, where I argue, with respect to Butler,
that affect’s equivocal qualities constitute the promise of an affec-
tive ethics aimed at political transformation. This brief excursion
into some of the definitional struggles of affect studies illuminates
an aspect of the debate that Butler addresses unequivocally: this is
her assertion that affect lies within the realm of discourse or sig-
nification. Put differently, while affect is discursively produced, its
workings are often disguised as pre-discursive operations. In this
respect, the distinction between affect and emotion is of limited
significance to my discussion: to discriminate between raw, bodily
or pre-social affect on the one hand, and socially, culturally or
cognitively worked-over emotion on the other, would entrench the
binary between body and mind that affect studies seeks to counter.
How Butler conceives of affect, and how affect relates to her con-
ception of ethics, will occupy me in the next section.
The affective subject: desire, trauma and excitability

As I alluded above, Butler has yet to provide her readers with a
systematic exposition of affect that would be comparable to her
work on ethics. To be fair, references to affect surface regularly
in her writings, beginning with some of her earliest publications,
such as Subjects of Desire, and extending to her more recent work
published in the wake of 9/11 and the US interventions in Iraq and
Afghanistan, such as Precarious Life and Frames of War. However,
affect’s import to her conception of ethics has, so far, only been
presented in rudimentary form. This absence of a detailed exposi-
tion mirrors the relative neglect of this element of her ideas in the
critical commentary on her work, and in the coverage of Butler in
the wider field of affect studies. Although scholars engaging with
Butler’s ideas reference her attention to the visceral dimension of
social and political life,10 her work does not feature prominently in
the field of affect studies. Of course, this lack of attention does not,
in itself, lessen the import of affect to Butler’s ideas in general, and
on ethics in particular; neither does it diminish the significance of
her contribution to the scholarly study of affect. My concern is not
with affect studies’ deployment of Butler, though; rather, I want to
think through her treatment of affect and its significance for ethics
under conditions of war and violence. Admittedly, the concept of
affect may not carry the same weight in Butler’s critical thought
as her discussion of performativity or her intervention in debates
on recognition or universality; however, I want to suggest that
her attention to the affective dimensions of social and political life
constitute an integral aspect of her work that deserves closer criti-
cal scrutiny. The relevance of affect, as I discuss below, turns on its
centrality to Butler’s articulation of the subject, to her theorisation
of the intersubjective conditions of social and political life, and to
her recent work on war and violence. As I outline in this section,
affect construes the subject as both affective and affected, and it
surfaces in three forms: as desire, as trauma and as excitability.
In Subjects of Desire, Butler sets herself the task of tracking
philosophy’s treatment of impulse, specifically ‘the philosophical
effort to domesticate desire as an instance of metaphysical place’
([1987] 1999: 15). Implicitly contained within this aim is her

critique of the project of philosophy, which, she contends, either
juxtaposes desire to philosophical reason, or domesticates desire
in the name of such reason. As she argues, ‘[t]o desire the world
and to know its meaning and structure have seemed conflicting
enterprises’ ([1987] 1999: 1). Yet, as Butler seeks to demonstrate,
desire continues to haunt the philosophical project as its constitu-
tive outside that cannot be willed away. Criticising philosophy’s
efforts to abject or discipline desire, Butler’s philosophical think-
ing develops as a sustained interrogation of the importance of
the visceral dimension of social and political life in general, and
of its import to the emergence and persistence of the subject in
particular. Such visceral dimension is said to stem from desire’s
association with an animal appetite for the sensuous and percep-
tual world.11
Central to the philosophical acknowledgement of desire is, in her
view, the tradition inaugurated in the wake of Spinoza and Hegel.
Of particular import to the development of Butler’s thinking is the
Spinozan assertion of the desire to persist.12 It is out of this desire
to persist, or the desire for life, that ethics emerges: persistence, as
Butler suggests, is only possible if we acknowledge our fundamen-
tal dependency upon others. This relation to an other lies at the
heart of Butler’s conception of ethics. As she argues, ‘the question
of ethics is always a question of an ethical relation, that is, the
question of what binds me to another and in what way this obli-
gation suggests that the “I” is invariably implicated in the “we” ’
(Butler 2013: 107). Below I outline how the desire for persistence,
and the structures of dependency that enable such persistence, are
modulated by the specific conditions of liveability that we find our-
selves in, leading Butler to posit the existence of differentiated sets
of human life and liveability. Thus, it is in the context of her post-
9/11 writings on war that the question, ‘what kind of world makes
desire possible?’ (Butler [1987] 1999: 24) obtains renewed poign-
ancy. Underpinning Butler’s discussion of desire is her considera-
tion of the famous passage on lordship and bondage from Hegel’s
Phenomenology, which provides her with one of the key concepts
of her political thought: that of recognition. As she argues: ‘desire
creates a distinctively human subjectivity through recognition of
and by another desire’ (Butler [1987] 1999: 78, original emphasis).
The significance of desire, and its relation to recognition,
obtains renewed attention in the Preface to the paperback edition
of Subjects of Desire, published in 1999, where Butler contends

that ‘the constitution of the subject entails a radical and constitu-
tive relation to alterity’ ([1987] 1999: xiv). This struggle for recog-
nition configures human desire and subjectivity, where emergence
as a subject requires emergence into those structures of alterity
that are sustained by desire and recognition. Thus, it is through
the figure of the Other that a rudimentary ethics emerges. Hegelian
themes, specifically the significance of alterity, desire and recog-
nition, re-emerge in The Psychic Life of Power (Butler 1997a)
and later work (see Butler 2004b; 2009), where Butler reformu-
lates this desire for the Other in two related directions: first, she
stresses the emergence of the subject in relation to the operation of
norms; second, she avers the subject’s vulnerability and potentially
‘unwilled dependency’ on others (see 2009).
After Subjects of Desire, these Hegelian themes receive an
altogether more sobering response. Unlike the almost exuberant
journey of the Hegelian subject in Subjects of Desire, The Psychic
Life of Power narrates the story of a subject whose traumatic
emergence is the result of disavowed loss, and who is deeply
entrenched in its melancholic attachments and turns. Key to this
shift in emphasis in Butler’s ideas is her consideration of Freudian
psychoanalysis, specifically her deployment of Freud’s concept
of melancholia and its constitutive role in the generation of the
subject. Her claim, that the subject emerges as a result of disa-
vowed loss, traces the vicissitudes of desire and affect in a culture
that is deeply heterosexist.13 Heterosexist cultural imperatives
create, regulate and police affective responses, at times with dev-
astating effects. As Butler illustrates, we can only understand the
wider cultural inability to mourn the losses from HIV/AIDS if we
put this incapacity in the context of the panic and fear triggered
by the figure of homosexuality, conceived as an abject sexuality,
and the preceding internalisation of the prohibition of a moral
principle that comes to form conscience.14 Several years later, in
Precarious Life, she makes a similar argument in relation to the
disavowed losses and the ‘flamboyant mourning’ undertaken by
the Bush administration in the wake of 9/11 (Butler 2004b: 149),
and she continues to return to the topic of grievability, to the
regulation and policing of mourning and of the affective responses
to loss. Before I develop this argument further, I want to remain
with the influence of Hegelian ideas on her work after Subjects of
Desire.
Key to Butler’s discussion of the subject, of ethics and of affect

is her insistence on what she terms ‘ontological ek-stasis’ (2004a:
150). This idea refers to the subject’s fundamental dependence
on the figure of the Other; it displaces conceptions of an autono-
mous and sovereign self, and it posits the subject as relational,
dependent and vulnerable. I have already intimated above that
Butler’s renewed attention to Hegel, this time in the context of
the framework of a passionate attachment of the subject to its
own subjection, is significant to her conception of relationality
and dependence, and its implications for ethics. To unpack her
argument briefly, in The Psychic Life of Power, Butler avers that
the subject must attach itself in order to persist. Such need for
attachment arises because the subject is dependent upon the care
it receives from others: care forms the condition of the subject’s
sustainability and, quite literally, its liveability. It is, as she puts it,
‘the formation of primary passion in dependency’ (Butler 1997a:
7). However, such dependency and attachment to others leave the
subject vulnerable to those who may not attend to our needs in a
sufficient or good enough way; thus attachment may, paradoxi-
cally, undermine the subject’s chances to flourish. Furthermore,
she contends that in order to persist, it is necessary to submit to
subjection, or, as she puts it, ‘to desire the conditions of one’s
own subordination’ (Butler 1997a: 9). This emphasis on submis-
sion should be seen in the context of Butler’s insistence on the
dependence, or interdependence, of subject constitution. To quote
again from The Psychic Life of Power: as she argues, ‘no subject
emerges without a passionate attachment to those on whom he or
she is fundamentally dependent’ (Butler 1997a: 7). Thus, passion-
ate attachment delineates the condition and indeed the limits to
progressive politics and resistance; as she states, there are limits
to liberation that constitute the condition of the emergence of
the subject (Butler 1997a: 33). Moreover, as she continues, these
limits are experienced in one’s subjection to the norms and ideals
of ethical laws – in other words, the moral principles of ethical life.
If Subjects of Desire and The Psychic Life of Power track the
subject’s emergence through the affective structures of desire and
trauma, Excitable Speech turns on the affective capacity of linguis-
tic interpellation. In fact, although the term is rarely mentioned,
Excitable Speech constitutes one of Butler’s most explicit forays
into the topic of affect.15 Frequently considered as her contribution
to the debate on free speech, the book could profitably be read as a
map into the topic of affect, and as an effort to document the con-
crete instantiations of affect’s workings. Significantly, Excitable
Speech prefigures much of Butler’s more recent work on vulner-
ability, injurability and the question of ethical responsibility. As
Butler outlines, hate speech plays on the excitability of language
and its capacity to work on, and to interpellate, the addressee.
Hate speech also structures the subject’s responses to unwelcome
forms of language. Injurious terms have the potential to produce
affective responses that, as Butler alleges, constitute the subject (as
subjugated) in the first place. As she argues, name-calling emerges
from a scene of ‘enabling vulnerability’ (Butler 1997b: 2) that
can be derogatory and demeaning, yet paradoxically provides
the possibility for social existence.16 Whereas Excitable Speech
discusses the circulation of hate speech as it moves from speaker
to addressee, pondering the interpellative emergence of, and
potentially injurious effects on the subject, Butler’s recent work,
especially her texts published since 2004, offers a detailed account
of the ontology of the subject in and through injurability and
vulnerability.17 To develop my discussion of Butler’s deployment
of affect further, I will now attend to her more recent writings on
violence and ethics in the context of the War on Terror.
Affect, violence and ethical responsibility

Although it is not my aim to plot the development of Butler’s think-
ing on ethics, it is worth highlighting that her acknowledgement
of ethics’ import, which features prominently in her recent work,
stands in contrast to her initial resistance to ethics. This resistance,
articulated in an interview with William Connolly, conveys her
concern that a focus on ethics may detract attention from politics
(see Butler and Connolly 2000).18 As is well known, Butler’s think-
ing has undergone a remarkable turn towards the acknowledge-
ment that ethical considerations matter to politics. This position,
articulated in her writings published since 2004,19 centres on a
concern for existential questions, which in turn inform her discus-
sion of the concept of liveability. At the core of this account sits
her claim that life is precarious, vulnerable to the actions of others.
To briefly unpack this assertion, Butler distinguishes between pre-
cariousness, which refers to the existential condition of vulnerabil-
ity, and precarity, which articulates the contingent allocation and
differential distribution of vulnerability, based on social cleavages
such as sexuality, ethnicity or class (2009: 3). Butler pursues the

significance of life’s precarity/precariousness in two related direc-
tions: the emphasis of Giving an Account of Oneself, her book
on moral philosophy, lies with tracing ethical responsibility in
the ontological structure of alterity, while Precarious Life and
Frames of War develop a critique of the political fall-out of 9/11,
the ensuing military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the
controversies surrounding the conduct of US military personnel
in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. In this section I map the
linkage between affect, violence and ethical responsibility through
a discussion of Butler’s moral philosophy; as I aver, it is through
her moral philosophy that she establishes, more explicitly than
perhaps elsewhere, the connection between affect, violence and
ethics. I also begin to explore Butler’s attention to the conditions
of war and violence (I continue this discussion in the final section
of my chapter), where affective ethics is played out.
Butler opens her discussion in Giving an Account of Oneself by
introducing the notion of ethical violence, a concept she borrows
from Adorno: following Adorno, Butler suggests that moral prin-
ciples exert a form of violence, which they impose, through the
application of normative ideals, onto the subject. This idea, by no
means Butler’s first foray into the field of moral philosophy, devel-
ops several key themes already presented in The Psychic Life of
Power, specifically in relation to her discussion of Hegel’s concept
of the unhappy consciousness. There, as in Giving an Account of
Oneself, Butler ponders the emergence of the subject via its sub-
jection to ethical demands and norms. As she suggests, while the
Phenomenology’s famous section on lordship and bondage has
been mined for its liberationist narrative, such a reading overlooks
how fear, in fact terror, already looms large in the constitution and
the life of the subject. Thus, a central tenet of The Psychic Life of
Power is the insight that Hegel’s story of lordship and bondage
does not end with the mutual recognition of two consciousnesses.
Rather, the subject must submit to ethical principles, or norms,
which produce and regulate affective behaviour as well as, more
broadly, normative conceptions of human life. Ethical principles,
and the norms that govern intelligible life, generate affective struc-
tures, including fear and terror, which come to regulate the subject,
and which contribute to the development of guilty conscience. In
her recent work (Butler 2004b; 2005; 2009), Butler articulates
the ethical–affective ordering of the subject with the notion of the
frame. Frames, as she avers, are interpretative structures that regu-

late recognition, including the recognition of life and loss; frames
categorise the norms that govern the structures of recognition,
they mould those lives that are recognised as liveable, and hence
grievable, and they order our affective responses to others.
One of Butler’s central claims is her assertion that the sub-
ject’s ethical agency operates in the dark, under conditions of
opacity, specifically the opacity in relation to its own emergence.
What, though, are the implications for ethical responsibility? As
Butler asks, ‘[d]oes the postulation of a subject who is not self-
grounding, that is, whose conditions of emergence can never fully
be accounted for, undermine the possibility of responsibility and,
in particular, of giving an account of oneself?’ (2005: 19). Already
in Excitable Speech, she ponders the question of the responsibility
for injurious language. As she argues, whilst the speaker of hate
speech is responsible for his/her utterances, such language must be
understood in the wider context of its circulation, which does not
originate with the utterances of individual speakers. Thus, respon-
sibility becomes displaced, but it does not release the decentred
subject from its ethical responsibility towards others. Likewise,
opacity does not release the subject from ethical responsibility.
Rather, as she insists, responsibility is grounded in relationality,
specifically in our vulnerability towards, and dependence upon,
the actions of known and unknown others.
Much of Butler’s thinking on ethical responsibility is influenced
by the writings of Emmanuel Levinas and Jean Laplanche, both
of whom posit the figure of the Other at the origin of being. As
Butler argues, drawing on Levinas, we are, ‘in a primary way . . .
impinged upon by otherness, and . . . this defines us as receptive
and relational from the start’ (Butler in Butler and Athanasiou
2013: 95).20 To unpack this claim briefly, pondering the question
of whose lives matter, whose lives are recognised as having been
lived, and whose lives are grievable, Butler positions the subject as
relational, thereby undercutting any claims to autonomy that the
subject may express. As she suggests, 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’
(Butler 2004a: 25) has consequences for the life of the subject,
because it makes us vulnerable to the actions of others, includ-
ing those actions that are violent. 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’, ‘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’ (2004a: 33,
original emphasis). As I already indicated above, 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, this idea is captured
with her expression of ‘being undone’: this is the idea that the
connection, or ties, we have with others constitutes our sense of
self (Butler 2004a: 18). And, to briefly highlight a point I argue
below, while this concept has intrinsic value as the foundation for
a conception of ethics, it also serves the formulation of a global
ethics that is orientated towards conditions of otherness, and that
can begin to conceive of community as the project of responsibility
and liveability. Moreover, it is grounded in conceptions of griev-
ability and precariousness that add force to the ethico-political
ambition of Butler’s wider critical thought. Dispossession further
underwrites the paradoxical nature of the subject. But while this
paradox was initially formulated exclusively in relation to subjec-
tion to norms (see Butler 1997a), it is now developed in relation
to the existence of the other. For Butler, as we have already seen,
survival and persistence are only possible because of the sustain-
ing actions of an other; hence, she concludes that ‘my existence is
not mine alone’ (2009: 44). Drawing on Laplanche’s claim that
‘[t]he other is prior to the subject’ (Laplanche 2001; Butler 2005:
73), she concludes that the ‘I’ is ‘authored by what precedes and
exceeds me’ (Butler 2005: 82). Such rendering of the subject as
ecstatic or dispossessed undercuts any claims to sovereignty, estab-
lishing the subject instead in and through its relations to others.
I am sympathetic, on normative grounds, towards Butler’s con-
ception of ethical responsibility, and I welcome her attention to
the ethical agency of the decentred subject. I remain unconvinced,
though, by the way she conceives of ethical responsibility as an
existential category, deduced from the ‘fact’ of dependence.21
Further, what is missing in Butler’s account is an explanation of
how ethical responsibility becomes an affective demand; that is,
why should my ethical obligations towards others be affectively
underpinned? In what contexts, and under what conditions, do I
feel ethically responsible? And, as I outline below, how can such

affective ethics withstand the selective and differential framing of
ethical feelings along racial or gendered lines? Regardless of my
reservations towards these aspects of Butler’s theorising, I want
to suggest that her pursuit to establish ethical responsibility in the
absence of transparency and (self-)knowledge, in other words, in
the context of being decentred, acquires a particular poignancy
and urgency under the conditions of post-9/11 politics, articulated
in Precarious Life and Frames of War. What concerns Butler in
these texts are ‘cultural modes of regulating affective and ethical
dispositions through a selective and differential framing of vio-
lence’ (2009: 1). The ontologically anchored injunction towards
ethical responsibility, as articulated in Giving an Account of
Oneself, is undercut by political and cultural practices that, in a
best-case scenario, nurture and care for the subject, and in doing
so, ensure the subject’s survivability and liveability. However, in
a worst-case scenario, under conditions of violence and war, these
practices absolve from responsibilities towards others, resulting in
death and destruction. To unpack this aspect a little further: build-
ing on earlier assertions articulated in Precarious Life, Frames of
War grounds the ontology of the subject in its precariousness. In
other words, as subjects, we are dependent on, but also vulnerable
to the – potentially injurious – actions of others. However, while
such precariousness is said to be an existential condition of human
life, it manifests itself differently, dependent upon the (geopo-
litical) location of the subject and its framing in accordance with
hegemonic conceptions of human intelligibility.
Central to the further development of Butler’s discussion in
Frames of War is the connection she establishes between affect,
violence and ethics under conditions of war. One of the concerns,
articulated in this book, pertains to the regulation of our responses
to the losses emerging as a result of war and conflict. The question
of grievability is indeed at the heart of much of Butler’s work, and
it poses the question of how the state is involved in the planning
and organisation of commemorative events, and in the allocation
and use of public spaces that facilitate commemoration, as well as,
more fundamentally, in the generation, regulation and policing of
affective responses to loss. As I intimated above, Butler has previ-
ously attended to the issue of our affective engagement with loss in
the context of HIV/AIDS. Her recent work focuses on grievability
and the recognition of loss in the context of the so-called War
on Terror, and the conflict in Israel/Palestine. As I have already

intimated, she criticised the Bush administration’s ‘flamboyant
mourning’ (Butler 2004b: 149) after 9/11, and she challenged
the differential treatment of the victims of the attack on the Twin
Towers according to their sexuality, ethnicity and citizenship
status. One noteworthy example, also discussed in Precarious
Life, refers to the death of two Palestinian families killed by Israeli
military. An obituary submitted to the San Francisco Chronicle
was refused by the paper on the grounds that no proof of death
was provided. The paper invited the submission of memorials, but
rejected these on the grounds that the paper did not wish to offend
anyone (see Butler 2004b: 35). As Butler has argued persistently,
such public regulation of loss, and its recognition or misrecogni-
tion, forms an integral part of the discourse of humanisation:
it determines whose lives are grievable, and who is recognised
as having lived a liveable life, and it regulates which affective
responses are recognised as legitimate.
The question of grievability, and of the public recognition of
loss, remains significant in the ongoing responses to the loss of
life as a result of the War on Terror, where civilian casualties,
especially victims of the growing number of drone attacks, remain
unnamed losses of this conflict (see also Butler 2009: 38–40).22 In
Frames of War, Butler draws on Talal Asad’s On Suicide Bombing
(2007) to question our differentiated responses to violence, war
and loss. In his book, Asad ponders the differentiated responses to
different forms of violence. Specifically, he asks why the Western
public reacts with horror to representations of suicide bombing,
yet does not display the same sense of dread and revulsion at the
dispensation of state-directed or state-legitimised forms of vio-
lence. In Frames of War, Butler responds to Asad’s question by
referring back to the notion of the frame. As she argues, affective
responses are framed differentially; hence, we respond differently
to different lives, and this distinction demarcates liveable, and thus
grievable, from non-liveable and non-grievable lives, that is, those
lives which are not, or not fully, recognised as human. Violence
already persists in the frame of what can be seen, and what is
shown (Butler 2004b: 5; see also 2009). Affective responses are
thus implicated in the normative power of the frame, but they can
also be put to work in the service of a politics of outrage (Butler
2009: 40; see also next section). Of particular significance to the
issues raised by Butler is, in my view, the development of Asad’s
argument in a later article. In ‘Thinking about terrorism and just

war’ (2010), Asad suggests that ‘terrorists’ and liberal states share
the same space of violence, where the lines between war and peace
are not properly demarcated (see also Asad 2007: 39). In this
space, terror is normalised; its practices include suicide bombing
and the beheading of hostages, but also aerial warfare and what
he terms ‘individualized terror’ (2010: 7), such as the use of violent
practices in the interrogation of prisoners that have become part
of the repertoire of the liberal security regime (see also Butler
2004b, 2009). In fact, violence, Asad suggests, lies at the origin
of the liberal state. As he continues, ‘[l]iberal powers have used
massive force and liberal arguments to make, unmake, expand and
dissolve states violently’ (Asad 2010: 19). In his view, the crea-
tion of modern France out of revolutionary wars, the emergence
of nation-states out of the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire, or the destruction of the Ottoman Empire and the crea-
tion of new political entities in the Middle East all emerge out of
the practice of violence deployed by liberal states.
As we have already seen, like Asad, Butler also subscribes to the
notion of violence as constitutive or productive: the submission
to moral principles, and the crafting of bodies in accordance with
hegemonic norms of cultural intelligibility feature prominently
in her discussion. Such constitutive violence, however, produces
what she terms an ‘ethical quandary’: that is, ‘how to live the vio-
lence of one’s formative history, how to effect shifts and reversals
in its reiterations’ (Butler 2009: 170). How we respond to vio-
lence, how we deploy the terminology of violence, including terms
such as ‘terrorism’ or ‘terrorist’, is subject to ‘moral affect’ (Butler
2009: 159), and its differential distribution and framing within
the interpretative structures of hegemonic conceptions of liveabil-
ity. Further, while the violence emanating from war may trigger
traumatic responses, this outcome is by no means certain. What is
crucial is the response to such trauma. That is, the response to vio-
lence can either be further violence, or, as Butler counsels, a sus-
pension of violence.23 Reflecting on how to engage with trauma,
and how to respond to violence, has significance beyond national
boundaries.24 Butler thus cautions strongly against what she terms
‘nationalistic triumphalism’, and, as I discuss in the next section,
to account for the transnational and global effect of trauma she
advocates the formation of global communities, and the adherence
to a global ethics.
Affect, communal bonds and global ethics

In his recent book, Arthur Kroker claims that Butler’s insistence
on the inherent failure of interpellation keeps her attentive to
the subject’s passionate attachment to subjection (2012: 7). Such
attachment, as we have seen, foregrounds Butler’s rendering of the
subject as paradoxical, indebted equally to the traumatic experi-
ence of melancholic loss, and the capacity to enter into community
with others. As I intimated, this paradox also underpins her recent
work, specifically her engagement with 9/11 and the ensuing mili-
tary campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond. What interests
me in this final section is Butler’s consideration of affect and its
connection with relationality and community, her conception of
ethical responsibility, and the context for the formulation of a
global ethics. The elements of this thinking can be located in some
of her recent writings, especially in Undoing Gender and Giving
an Account of Oneself, but before I inspect the claims contained
in these books further, I want to return briefly to her discussion of
affect in The Psychic Life of Power.
Towards the end of her reflection on attachment and subjection
in The Psychic Life of Power, Butler establishes a linkage between
Hegel, Freud and Foucault, which she traces back to Spinoza’s
conception of the conatus.25 As she argues, ‘the capacity of desire
to be withdrawn and to reattach will constitute something like
the vulnerability of every strategy of subjection’ (1997a: 62).
Desire’s capacity to withdraw, to reattach or to attach differently
opens affective ethics to possibilities of change and transforma-
tion. Exploring the prospects for such transformation informs
Butler’s discussion in Undoing Gender, a collection of essays on
the so-called New Gender Politics that puts forward a distinctly
relational account of the subject (2004a). As I outlined above, key
to this discussion is the notion of ek-stasis, which Butler deploys
to articulate the human’s capacity to being undone by an other
(hence the title of her book). Thus, the capacity to enter into com-
munity with an other becomes an ontological precondition of the
subject’s ethical relationship with others, and its ethical respon-
sibility towards others. Such capacity for community should be
understood in a non-communitarian sense: it does not refer to
the creation of bounded entities. Rather, community, for Butler,
signifies the subject’s debt towards others, but it is not confined
to cultural or physical space. This stress on relationality carries
particular significance because it provides a way of conceiving of

Butler’s work as a global ethics.
In Frames of War, Butler asks what happens to the ‘we’ during
times of war, and how we can consider the ‘we’ in global terms
(2009: 39), but already in Undoing Gender, she alludes to the
prospect of a global community that is responsive to the surviv-
ability and liveability of distant others. As she outlines there, this
sense of community arises in the context of the ecstasy, passion and
grief experienced by LGBT communities and their subjection to
violence.26 Political community, as Butler suggests, is thus wrought
from the ties that emerge as a result of grief, rage and passion (see
2004a: 20). Given the equivocity of affect, it is important to recog-
nise that affective impingement of and by the other remains ambig-
uous. This equivocity is already captured with Butler’s vocabulary
of affect: ecstasy, passion or dispossession point to the dissolution
of the subject, to a state of ‘social death’ (Patterson 1982), where
life is no longer, or not yet, liveable. However, affect also points
towards the possibility of creating sensate communal relationships
that enable the conditions for the formation of democracy, and
for the articulation of ethical relationships with distant others (see
Butler 2004b, 2009).
Although Butler’s take on universalism is complex,27 it is fair, I
believe, to argue that Precarious Life and Frames of War articulate
a moral cosmopolitanism or a set of ‘cosmopolitan sentiments’
(Brassett 2010) that constitute important building blocks in the
development of a global ethics.28 Conceptually, this global ethics
draws on Butler’s critical reworking of universalism and her atten-
tion to differentiated conceptions of the human (see 2004a; 2006),
while it also unfolds in a critical encounter with the politics of 9/11
and its aftermath. However, neither of the two books offers much
insight into what such a community would look like, what its
institutional structures could be, whether it maps onto particular
geographical spaces, what, precisely, our global ethical obligations
towards others are, or where its limits lie. To gain better purchase
on the way Butler conceives of community, it is helpful to look at
what she terms ‘politics in the street’ (see Butler 2011a). Reflecting
on the protest movement located in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, Butler
considers how attention to bodily needs, and to the question of
a division of labour, constitute a significant aspect of a radical
democratic body politics that engages in processes of political
transformation.29
To further flesh out the affective register of such a politics of

radical democracy, I want to briefly consider Chantal Mouffe’s
depiction of what she refers to as a politics of passion (2000).30 As
Mouffe argues, passion is a place-holder for all those things that
cannot be reduced to interest or rationality (Mouffe in Zournazi
2002). More specifically, passion, according to Mouffe, becomes
an alternative way of mobilising affect, different from those affec-
tive registers that sustain the politics of the New Right and anti-
immigration movements. Such passion, according to Mouffe, is
therefore necessary for emancipatory politics. The task of political
theory, Mouffe suggests, is to recognise the dimension of passion,
and to mobilise the affects of imagination mobilised in the service
of democratic politics. As I outlined above, passion is central to
Butler’s ethics and politics, and its articulation of the subject’s
desire to persist. However, as I sought to demonstrate, Butler
conceives of passion as always ambivalent: it sustains the subject’s
attachment to others and in doing so, contributes to existence;
but it does so by building on a disavowed loss, which keeps the
subject in the thrall of a melancholia it cannot recognise. In other
words, passionate attachment generates the ecstatic structure
of the subject that leaves the subject undone in both ‘good’ and
‘bad’ ways. What’s more, knowledge of the causes of melancholia,
and of the subject’s debt and ethical connection towards others,
remain barred (see Butler 1997a). It becomes the task of politics
to spell out the conditions of the emergence of the subject, and of
articulating its ethical debt towards the other.
What, then, is the significance of Butler’s affectively underpinned
ethics? My aim in this chapter was to outline Butler’s account of
affect, and to explore its relation to ethical responsibility in the
context of violence. As I suggested, even though affect plays a
significant role in Butler’s writings, to date it has been largely over-
looked in the critical commentary on her work. Yet, as I sought to
argue, it deserves critical attention because it enhances our under-
standing of our responses to violence, and of the way we relate
ethically to others. Affect bears on our feelings of ethical responsi-
bility towards others. Thus, attention to affect should be an inte-
gral element in any conception of global ethics. In fact, one of the
most significant and exciting aspects of Butler’s recent writings is
the global orientation of her conception of ethical responsibility,
and its effort to articulate global structures of affective relational-
ity. Such relationality, as we have seen, derives from an ontological
vulnerability that exploits our dependence on the actions of close

and distant others. It is in light of these assertions that Butler’s
counsel towards reflection and the disruption of cycles of violence,
articulated in response to the actions of the US government in the
wake of 9/11, takes account of the interconnected way of living
(see Butler 2004b and 2009; see also Rushing 2010).
Whilst I remain broadly sympathetic to Butler’s wider ethico-
political project, and to her rendering of the significance of an
affectively formed conception of ethical responsibility, I have
also raised questions about the conditions that trigger a feeling
of ethical responsibility towards others. Thus, regardless of my
ecstatic enmeshment with others, under what conditions should I
feel ethically responsible towards others, including distant others?
And how, precisely, do affective attachments work in global con-
texts? I am yet to be convinced of the plausibility of Butler’s ethical
pronouncement.
Notes
1. I wish to thank Moya Lloyd for her helpful suggestions and com-
ments on an earlier version of this essay. I would also like to thank
the participants at the SWIP Ireland Spring Conference 2013 for
engaging with me on the issue of affect and ethics.
2. Butler’s two best-known and most widely discussed texts on this
topic are Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence
(2004b) and Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (2009). For
Butler’s other post-9/11 texts that engage the topic of violence and
ethics, see for example 2005, 2006, 2012, 2013.
3. Although ethical considerations can be found in some of Butler’s
texts published prior to 2005, her most systematic foray into the
field of moral philosophy to date is Giving an Account of Oneself
(2005). Ethical themes also feature significantly in her work pub-
lished since 2005. For a discussion of Butler’s treatment of moral
philosophy see Thiem 2008. See also Chambers and Carver 2008;
Dean 2008; Lloyd 2008; and Rushing 2010.
4. See Lloyd 2010 for a consideration of Butler in the context of her
discussion of the work of William Connolly.
5. I draw on Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-
Century France ([1987] 1999), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories
in Subjection (1997a) and Excitable Speech: A Politics of the
Performative (1997b).
6. For useful introductions into the topic see Blackman and Venn 2010;
Clarke, Hoggett and Thompson 2006; Clough 2007; Greco and
Stenner 2008; Gregg and Seigworth 2012; Hemmings 2005; Hoggett
2009; Protevi 2009; Wetherell 2012.
7. For a useful survey on the range of affective displays and their effects
on politics, specifically in relation to mass political behaviour, see
Neuman, Marcus, Crigler et al., 2007.
8. Defining affect via its relation to bodily excitation does not imply
that emotions lack a corporeal dimension. Rather, their corporeal
aspects are said to be already cognitively worked over, and have
entered the realm of signification, whereas affect, according to this
classification, precedes signification and discourse.
9. See Cvetkovitch 2003 on affect’s ambiguities, and Ngai 2005 on the
equivocal status of what she terms negative feelings.
10. See for example Ahmed 2004; Brassett 2010; Crociani-Windland
and Hoggett 2012; Cvetkovitch 2007; Greco and Stenner 2008;
Hemmings 2005; Lloyd 2010; McManus 2011; and Ngai 2005.
11. Butler connects such animal appetite to the German translation of
desire as ‘Begierde’ (see [1987] 1999: 33), and she juxtaposes the
association of desire with animal hunger, which she associates with
the German connotation, to desire’s alleged anthropocentric mean-
ings in French and English. I would suggest that the German word
‘Begierde’ is more ambiguous than Butler’s discussion in Subjects of
Desire implies: desire connotes both animal appetite and longing for
the other.
12. For a critique of Butler’s reading of Spinoza, see Lloyd 2008.
13. As Butler avers, the loss of a same-sex love object becomes enforced
through the cultural compulsion for heterosexuality (see Butler
1997a; see also 1990).
14. For a consideration of the affective structures within ACT UP (AIDS
Coalition to Unleash Power) see Gould 2012.
15. An extract of Excitable Speech is included in Emotions: A Social
Science Reader as Butler’s contribution to the study of compassion,
hate and terror (Greco and Stenner 2008: 467).
16. And, it should be added, for ‘talking back’ or ‘resignification’,
Butler’s term for forms of critical agency that undercut the ostensible
sovereignty of the speech act.
17. For a discussion of Butler’s ontology, see Chambers and Carver
2008 and Lloyd 2008.
18. This same concern, that ethics displaces politics, is now articulated
by some of her critics, who worry about Butler’s turn towards
ethics. See for example Dean 2008. There is also some debate as
to the status of Butler’s ethics prior to the publication of Giving an
Account of Oneself (2005). For opposing readings, see Lloyd 2008
and Chambers and Carver 2008.
19. Apart from Precarious Life, Giving an Account of Oneself and
Frames of War, they also include Undoing Gender (2004a) and her
two most recent books, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of
Zionism (2012) and Dispossession: The Politics in the Performative
(2013; co-authored with Athena Athanasiou).
20. See also Butler’s discussion of Melanie Klein, specifically of the
importance Klein accords to the affective development of the child,
and to the distinction between aggression and violence. Klein’s
influence on the development of Butler’s wider ideas is not as sub-
stantial as that of Hegel, Foucault, or even Freud, but she serves as
a significant interlocutor in Frames of War, where Butler ponders
the question of survivability, the role of affect and its relationship to
violence. Following Butler’s reading, Klein posits self-preservation
as a primary instinct that shapes our subsequent interactions with
others. Thus, the survival of the subject is always bound up with the
survival of an other, on whom my survival depends. Yet, murderous
impulses interfere, which, following Klein, become transformed into
guilt. This guilt, as Butler suggests, arises because of the destructive
impulse to destroy the bond necessary for one’s own survival (see
2009: 45). What Klein does not consider, according to Butler, is the
sense of the Other and its significance for the subject. Thus, against
Klein, Butler insists on the dispossessed or ecstatic structure of the
subject.
21. For a similar criticism of Butler’s Levinasian formulation of ethics, see
also Coole 2008. As I argue in Judith Butler and Political Philosophy
(2014), Butler’s recent reflections on cohabitation go some way
towards fleshing out her claims regarding ethical responsibility.
22. At a recent briefing of US Congress, which included Pakistani victims
of US drone attacks, only five members of Congress were in attend-
ance. Military repatriation funerals in Britain are a good example
for the public recognition of loss. Until 2011, these funerals passed
through the town of Wootton Bassett, where, following initial
organisation by the Royal British Legion, the public lined the streets
to show their respect. Wootton Bassett was subsequently renamed
Royal Wootton Bassett in recognition of its support for fallen British
military personnel.
23. On Butler’s discussion of violence and its relationship to non‑violence,
see her exchange with Catherine Mills and Fiona Jenkins in the
journal differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies (Butler
2007; Jenkins 2007; Mills 2007).
24. See Ann Cvetkovitch’s call, made with reference to 9/11, that trauma
culture be constructed along transnational, not national lines (2003:
284).
25. See above footnote 12.
26. Butler’s discussion of the so-called John/Joan case is testament to her
continued insistence on the violent operation of norms. In Undoing
Gender, Butler narrates the life of David Reimer, better known as
the child in the John/Joan case. Following a failed circumcision
procedure that led to the burning of his penis, David underwent a
series of psychological, surgical and hormonal treatments that were
meant to aid his/her transformation into a girl. This experiment in
implementing a norm of gender failed, however, and David wished
to return to a male body. Tragically, in 2004, David took his life.
As Butler argues in the postscript to her essay on David Reimer, it
is difficult to determine the reasons for his suicide. However, as she
repeatedly points out, normative conceptions of human morphology
have profound implications for the way we conceive of and recog-
nise the human: they generate normative conception of the human.
Thus, ‘embodiment denotes a contested set of norms governing who
will count as a viable subject within the sphere of politics’ (Butler
2004a: 28). This argument, though made in relation to her discus-
sion of the new gender politics in Undoing Gender, is not restricted
to the politics of gender, broadly conceived. As she argues, with
reference to the War on Terror, racial embodiment plays an equally
significant role in conception of human intelligibility, ‘[undergirding]
the culturally viable notions of the human, ones that we see acted
out in dramatic and terrifying ways in the global arena at the present
time’ (2004b: 33).
27. See for example her critique of Nussbaum (Butler 1996).
28. Undoing Gender’s critical interrogation of the concept of the human
should also be considered here.
29. For further reflections on Tahrir Square see Butler and Athanasiou
(2013).
30. According to Mouffe, passion and affect are crucial in fostering iden-
tification with democratic values, and in creating democratic indi-
viduals. Mouffe fears that affect and passion have been monopolised
by the right, whereas much of the centre-left democratic discourse
subscribes to a rational consensus. As Mouffe argues, ‘the prime
task of democratic politics is . . . to mobilize those passions towards

democratic designs’ (2000: 103).
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5
Sensate Democracy and Grievable Life

Fiona Jenkins
The ungrievable gather sometimes in public insurgencies of grief,

which is why in so many countries it is difficult to distinguish the
funeral from the demonstration. (Butler 2012b)
The limit on what can be remembered is enforced in the present

through what can be said and what can be heard – the limits of the
audible and the sensible that constitute the public sphere. (Butler 2011)
There is a moment that Judith Butler several times alludes to in

illustration of how she thinks about sensate democracy (see Butler
2012a: 14; and Butler in Butler and Spivak 2007: 59–63). Illegal
immigrants to the US, gathered in 2006 to protest at their precari-
ous and unliveable situation, start singing the national anthem of
the United States in Spanish; and in the middle of this comes the
line ‘somos equales’, we are equal. The affirmation of equality of
the stateless within the nation, and the performance of song in
Spanish, transgress the boundaries of what it is thinkable for the
nation to be. President George W. Bush declared in response that
the national anthem of the USA cannot be sung in Spanish. But for
all the power of his sovereign declaration, he does not ‘make the
anthem less sing-able’; indeed, what he responds to here is ‘already
out of his control’ (Butler in Butler and Spivak 2007: 60–9).
Enacted as performative contradiction, the singing is demand-
ing a move beyond the present legal articulation of rights, pressing
against both sovereign and public understandings of what can and
cannot ‘be’ (Butler in Butler and Spivak 2007: 69). A freedom is
asserted that is without prior legitimation, and an equality per-
formed that concerns, Butler tells us, ‘a state of the social that
takes form in discourse and other modes of articulation, including
song’ (Butler in Butler and Spivak 2007: 65). The right to rights so
118
Sensate Democracy and Grievable Life 119
claimed sets up the problem of the ‘we’ of democracy, and the enti-
tlement to protection the nation-state confers, as a perpetually and
critically open question. Singing as a plural act, merging voices
that remain different, ruptures the mono-lingualism of the nation,
putting in motion the task of translation (Butler in Butler and
Spivak 2007: 61). Moreover, this demonstration emerges from
conditions of precarity – unreliable conditions of life, the absence
of the political and legal rights and protections that would make
life ‘liveable’; and there is something important pertaining to that
about the singing itself, which is presenting plurality and embodi-
ment in a performative form that cannot quite be spoken – belong-
ing less to discursive language than to its limits, bearing traces of
the living body as the social demand for protection and support.
It is possible, perhaps, to link this set of democratic gestures to
a story about ethical violence that is at the heart of Butler’s Giving
an Account of Oneself (2005): a violence that arises from the
impossibility of appropriating or taking up a relation with univer-
sal precepts. Ethical violence (in a formulation that is drawn from
Adorno) arises from:
an operation of universality that fails to be responsive to cultural

particularity and fails to undergo a reformulation of itself in response
to the social and cultural conditions it includes within its scope of
applicability. When a universal precept cannot, for social reasons, be
appropriated, or when – indeed for social reasons – it must be refused,
the universal precept itself becomes a site of contest, a theme and
object of democratic debate . . . [It] loses its status as a precondition of
democratic debate. (Butler 2005: 6)
In what follows I shall suggest we think about this diagnosis

of ethical violence primarily in terms of the need it implies for a
continual remaking of spatio-temporal relations and social bonds
in contemporary polities; and within this, the active appropriation
of sacred ‘universals’ into the space of democratic contestation. In
Butler’s most recent books, the relevance for politics of the ethical
framework she develops out of a critique of the subject – a critique
that leads her to engage Adorno, Foucault, Levinas, Benjamin and
Arendt – is increasingly evident. In particular, a preoccupation
with the potentials of post-nationalist political formations guides
much of her recent work. When she writes of Israel in Parting
Ways – but equally, when she writes of the USA in Precarious
Life – a p rofound criticism is directed at forms of nationalism

that reject every limitation imposed by international law (Butler
2012b: 177; Butler 2004: 98). Such nationalism, moreover, is
animated by a defensive ethos that interprets all criticism as threat-
ening sovereignty and the entitlement of the nation to existence
(Butler 2012b: 19). Thus in post-9/11 America, Butler tracks how
public criticism of the War on Terror was heard as a repetition of
that terror (Butler 2004: 1). In the case of Israel, she marks how
questioning the violent dis- appropriation of Palestinians from
their lands is heard as abusing the memory of the Holocaust,
casting doubt upon the right of Israel to exist, and thereby threat-
ening Jews with a repetition of genocide (Butler 2012b: 25).
Universal values of freedom and democracy, the right of a people
to self-determination, here enter into the legitimation of military
violence, unconstrained by international law and inflicted on a
population that is ‘ungrievable’. The question becomes how the
claim to embody the universal can be negotiated democratically, or
translated into a mode of contestation and a problem of address.
A key term Butler will use to think through this is ‘pluralization’.1
The nation-state, attached to a sovereignty that is defined by
militarily defended supremacy, exemplifies an ethical violence
that finds hyperbolic expression in the imposition of unilateral
terms on peoples who are either stateless or treated as if they were
so, and are exposed to a re-iterative violence (Butler 2004: 33).
Such action, in an exemplary way ‘decides’ who or what will be
a human subject, a decision that often takes the form of bureau-
cratic license for legally unaccountable practices of detention, in
a context where a lack of recognised national citizenship corre-
sponds to exposure to the full violence of the nation-state.2 One
way to parse Butler’s analysis of what the stakes are here would
be to say that a universality that is invoked as self-justificatory
(often in a nationalist form) fails to recognise its specific mode of
answerability – which is to reformulate itself in terms of the sphere
of its applicability, that is, to be open to the historical and contin-
gent sphere of its address. Hence on Butler’s account, universal
precepts must be understood as being addressed to those they
would bind, and must enter into a political space of contestability
when the question arises as to whether they can be appropriated or
whether they must be refused (see Butler 2012a: 14). If that politi-
cal space is not active, then universal precepts congeal into imposi-
tions. Law is undergone as a deathly thing, an ethical violence. A
key political question thus becomes who is addressed by universal

precepts, for instance the precepts associated with ‘humanity’; and
whether social conditions support that precept being appropriable
by particular subjects (Butler 2005: 5). In this sense, maintain-
ing a sphere of application for universals will reflect their critical
deformability by the social and cultural conditions they encoun-
ter. Butler’s term for this process of rupture and interruption,
as aspects of a temporalised political task of universalisation, is
‘translation’ (2012b: 8, 22–3).
Butler’s reflection on ethical violence as an aspect of nationalism
is precisely where Giving an Account of Oneself begins – a text
often taken alongside Precarious Life as marking Butler’s ‘ethical
turn’ away from politics. Butler’s discussions of the nationalism of
the obituary have also been taken to signal a turn away from poli-
tics, most recently by Bonnie Honig, who argues that in Precarious
Life, Butler endorses a
universal humanist ethics of lamentation in which the focus is on suf-

fering. Sensitivity to shared vulnerability and exposure, Butler argues,
can move us to cross the merely political lines of friend/enemy and
inspire us to treat all lives as grievable and human. (Honig 2013: 42)
But this reading ignores the politics that, I argue here, is embed-
ded in Butler’s concern with the nationalism of grieving.3 Indeed,
nationalism, on the account Butler draws from Adorno, will be
anti-political precisely to the extent that it reflects an imaginary
unity, an idealised collective ethos, which postulates a ‘false unity
that attempts to suppress the difficulty and discontinuity existing
within any contemporary ethos’ (Butler 2005: 3–4).
The analysis of ethical violence that Butler articulates speaks
against Honig’s reading of her post- 2001 work on nationalis-
tic forms of mourning as offering a universalism premised on
common humanity. Here Honig overlooks a crucial aspect of
the politics of obituaries that Butler describes. For instance, one
story Butler tells in Precarious Life is of a Palestinian citizen of the
United States who submitted to the San Francisco Chronicle obitu-
aries for two Palestinian families killed by Israeli troops. Informed
by the paper that the obituaries could not be accepted without
proof of death, he is told that a statement ‘in memoriam’ could
be accepted. Yet upon submission of the memorial, this record
was again rejected on the grounds that the newspaper did not
wish to give offence (Butler 2004: 35). The sense of offence seems
to assume a monopoly on suffering, the inadmissibility of com-
parative terms, reflecting not merely the exceptional and singular
character attributed to national suffering (Butler 2011: 75, 90),
but the feeling that universal conditions of justice are at stake in it.
The newspaper’s response could be said to generate the prohibi-
tion on content – which does not exist in any written form of law
– insofar as it recites a given understanding of some established
norms of national recognition, seeking to confirm them retroac-
tively as absolutes. In a fine illustration of what Butler means by
the ‘anachronism’ of the collective ethos (Adorno cited in Butler
2005: 3–4), the ‘offensiveness’ thereby recited is one that presumes
a given knowledge of what the culture of the United States is,
what it must exclude or cannot tolerate, and aims to re-iteratively
consolidate that understanding. Regarded as a gesture of contes-
tation, however, the submission by the Palestinian citizen of the
USA brings into the democratic sphere a question about who can
be remembered – who counts – that evidences changes that are
already underway in the composition of the membership of the
United States, and even more fundamentally in the set of relations
in which the nation is globally enmeshed. 4 It is as just such a dis-
turbance of the ‘we’ that the request for an obituary meets with
opposition. Its import, then, cannot be analysed simply as a reflec-
tion of parochialism and partiality, set over against a given norm
of ‘universal humanity’. Rather the attempt to enforce what can
be heard or seen, and so to limit what can be remembered, arises
from rejecting a certain ‘practice’ of remembrance, one bound
up with addressing and rethinking terms of co-belonging (Butler
2011: 89).
I shall return to this politics of remembrance at the end of my
discussion. For now, I am interested in tracking how ethics and
politics are entwined in the argument Butler is making. According
to Butler, something on the order of ‘event’ is foreclosed when
an obituary is refused: ‘In the silence of the newspaper there was
no event, no loss . . .’ (Butler 2004: 36). The dehumanisation it
effects is bound up with the ‘unspeakable’ limits of discursive life,
rather than any positive content of discourse: ‘There is less a dehu-
manizing discourse at work here than a refusal of discourse that
produces dehumanization as a result’ (Butler 2004: 36). What is
meant by the ‘refusal of discourse’? ‘Discourse’ is a weighty term
for Butler, who stresses a phrase she takes from Levinas, that the
encounter with the other’s face is the ‘situation of discourse’. In

her discussion of that phrase she notes that this ‘situation’ is both
a scene of address and a scene of conflict, in which the temptation
to destroy the Other, to annul all relation, is thwarted at the level
of responsibility by an irreducible dependency, a dimension of
relationality – discourse – that exceeds the will (Butler 2004: 139).
The way in which the ‘situation of discourse’ thus limits powers of
decision, of agency or of prohibition, even limits the very capacity
to kill the ‘face’, is vital to the account of obligation that Butler
gives in this work (which is not, I think, based ultimately in ‘onto-
logical facts’ of common precariousness or vulnerability5 even
though it enfolds these).
When Butler writes that where there is no life, no loss, there
also will have been ‘no common bodily condition, no vulnerability
that serves as the basis for apprehension of our commonality . . .
no sundering of that commonality’ (2004: 36), it would be very
easy to understand this as making reference to a universal human
fragility, a common human condition which a parochial and
exclusionary nationalism fails to heed. But I am suggesting that
the ‘refusal of discourse’ is perhaps something different, something
more immediately political. If we think about what happens when
discourse is refused as beginning from the response to an event of
contestation, an address initiated when the request was made by
a Palestinian citizen of the United States that Palestinian lives be
marked and mourned in the public sphere, then the salience of a
dynamic and plural social ontology that subtends this scene might
become more evident. A foreclosure, of the kind the San Francisco
Chronicle engaged in, perhaps can be understood as seeking to
disavow a new spatial configuration of the nation-state and an
interruptive temporality that is always-already thwarting powers
of sovereign decision to determine what can and cannot be (just as
the demonstration by illegal residents of the USA introduces such
disruption). In the refusal to acknowledge deaths as important,
the newspaper is attempting to maintain a law of identity, bound-
ary or self-sameness that anachronistically refuses new forms of
potentiality, arising from emerging relations, or new possibilities
of discourse.
To the extent that gestures in the public sphere can effect this
mode of ‘de-realization’ of a life, then at issue is ‘not just that a
death is poorly marked but that it is unmarkable’ (Butler 2004:
35). The ‘unmarkable’, however, so Butler tells us, is shadowed
by its ‘ontologically uncertain double’, that which troubles our

sense of reality. This ‘double’ that a foreclosure reacts to or
‘apprehends’ (meaning ‘senses’, but also ‘seizes’ – apprehends as a
criminal is apprehended) exceeds what can be contained by estab-
lished norms of appearance in the public sphere (Butler 2009a: 5,
11). In such phrases as ‘unmarkable’ or ‘ungrievable’ we should
therefore note and try to understand in Butler’s text a shift she
is in effect performing from the censorialism of a sovereign pro-
hibition on marking death (as in Creon’s edict in Antigone) to a
quasi-transcendental register. This is a register in which the prohi-
bition ceases to function as the manifestation of law and is re-read
as gesture, as sign and as reaction to conditions experienced as
threatening to the project of maintaining a presumptively univer-
sal ethos. In the tension between these two gestures we might come
to see the prohibition placed upon events that must not be seen,
heard or known, as a response to the emergence of conditions that
in fact challenge or trouble the confident application of the norm.
Here demonstration or contestation enters to render the scene one
of a potentiality residing within ‘impossibility’. Thus the quasi-
transcendental ‘haunted’ or spectral dimension of prohibition
should be taken seriously as registering the question of ‘recogniz-
ability’ in ways that open towards a politics of contestation. As
Butler puts the political question that follows:
The problem is not merely how to include more people within existing
norms, but to consider how existing norms allocate recognition dif-
ferentially. What new norms are possible, and how are they wrought?
What might be done to produce a more egalitarian set of conditions
for recognizability . . . to shift the very terms of recognizability to
produce more radically egalitarian results? (Butler 2009a: 6)
Here, I suggest, Butler’s critique and its concern for more ‘equally
grievable’ and thus ‘liveable’ lives integrates these terms with the
forms of provocation or questioning from which such equality
might emerge – not as a moral and universal given whose proper
subjects are already known, but as a provocative claim arising
from material and social conditions of existence brought into
tension with social practices reflecting the mode of their articula-
tion as systemic inequalities. These contestatory claims find one
kind of model in the scene of demonstration from which I began.
Thus in a sensate democracy, it is not only established authority,
such as that of the nation-state, which gives meaning to what is

‘grievable’ or ‘recognizable’, but also what escapes it – the emer-
gent claim, or the performativity of address, whereby the question
of how to ‘take up’ a norm in a critical way becomes salient.
The temptation to be avoided here is to read such terms as
‘grievability’ as though they simply tracked the prohibitive or
censorial power to withhold recognition – to mark certain lives as
mattering, while refusing that status to others. The countervail-
ing desire to extend recognition in more inclusive ways, without
offering a critique of the social and political conditions under
which inequality and difference are established (as in the universal
humanism Honig argues Butler now leans towards) would also fail
to offer a critique of the mode of power expressed in the nation-
state, and of the forms of social relation that a nationalism posing
as the universal facilitates. A pluralising critique must instead
aim to open up a relation with dominant norms that defies their
presumptive status as necessary schemas for the recognition of
value. This project, I am arguing, is at the core of what Butler calls
‘sensate democracy’. The persistent shift from discussion of recog-
nition to discussion of the ‘recognizable’, or indeed, from grief to
the ‘grievable’ in Butler’s texts, thus register a plural and dynamic
space of relations, a potentiality and conditionality, not simply a
unilateral operation of power. How is that potentiality and condi-
tionality to be interpreted? How do we challenge the way in which
a normative ideal of recognition (perhaps a nationalist one) comes
to colonise recognisability?
Pluralisation and obligation

Contrasting with the nation-state-centred work of the normative
division of life, in her essay ‘Is Judaism Zionism?’6 Butler out-
lines an account of a pluralising process. This implies marking
how identity always remains in relation to that which is placed
‘outside’, thus to an alterity that not only can never be assimi-
lated, but disrupts and interrupts any established understanding
of who ‘we’ are (be that the universalised ‘we’ of humanity, of a
religious community or of the nation-state). Pluralisation is not
pluralism in the sense of respecting fidelity to some pre-given cul-
tural particularity; nor is it fidelity to the legitimating universality
claimed by the nation-state. Plurality, Butler tells us, can have no
given or established form; it is antithetical to the work of creating
oundaries in establishing an inside and an outside, for plurality

b
‘cannot be exclusionary without losing its plural character’ (Butler
2011: 84). Pluralisation is a process that always invokes a poten-
tial condition as well as an actual one (Butler 2011: 84, compare
Connolly 2005). Citing Arendt approvingly in support of this
idea, Butler suggests we might take from her the thought of man
(subject of universal rights) not as individual but as a ‘situation
of community and equality, both of which are preconditions of
change and building agency . . . this notion of man doesn’t define
a priori features or properties of an individual but actually des-
ignates a relation of equality among beings’ (Butler in Butler and
Spivak 2007: 57, my emphasis).
Political action, according to this conception, is action that first
and foremost seeks to establish equality in the sense of plurality,
as the ‘minimal condition’ for being politically efficacious. An
ontological condition is in this way bound to a political aspiration
towards equality in relations. The ontological condition (which in
a key sense is conditionality, as I explain further below) might be
thought to signal the being of potentiality that is at stake in the
performativity of the process of pluralisation (see Butler in Butler
and Spivak 2007: 57). Singing the US anthem in Spanish might be
one demonstration of what this means as political action.
On this pluralising understanding of politics, ‘equal protection,
or indeed equality, is not a principle that homogenizes those to
whom it applies; rather, the commitment to equality is a com-
mitment to the process of differentiation itself’ (Butler 2011: 85).
Differentiation might itself be thought of as the way in which the
‘event’ or singularity is brought to appearance; so that a process
of differentiation does not begin with the categorical statement of
a universal (‘everyone’) but rather makes the ‘every-one’ appear,
as aspects of a co-habiting plurality, or as relationality. The impli-
cation of the ‘I’ in social relations is critical here, as is the ethical
problem of how the ‘I’ takes up those relations, a question central
to Butler’s ethics, which I discuss more fully in the final section.
Self-differentiation – the bringing to appearance of the ‘one’ or the
event – also fractures the collective subject or ‘we’. As I develop
this argument, I will also suggest that Butler puts this thought
precisely in terms of obligations that derive from our ‘unchosen’
ways of being in relation with one another, impinged upon and
dependent, ‘precarious’. Such obligations, she argues, cannot be
captured by speaking of what ‘we’ owe to others, since that ‘we’ is
from the start ‘interrupted’ by the alterity it would (or would not)
recognise. And thus she concludes, again aligning her thought with
that of Levinas, ‘the obligations “we” have are precisely those that
disrupt any established notion of the “we” ’ (Butler 2009a: 14).
This account of obligation will resonate with how Butler
follows but also critically departs from Levinas in rendering the
‘situation of discourse’ (Butler 2004: 139) by locating the situa-
tion of discourse within the sphere of appearances, and thereby in
the contested spatio-temporality of the public sphere. In Frames
of War Butler specifies that her use of the term ‘ontology’ refers
to what it is to be a body that is ‘given over to others’ in a world
that is socially and politically organised in differential terms to
‘maximize precariousness for some and minimize precariousness
for others’ (Butler 2009a: 2–3). Sensate democracy requires the
cultivation of ‘conditions of responsiveness’ that transgress this
form of organisation. If there is to be a claim of non-violence (as
Levinas proposes) that is not ‘meaningless’ (a criticism, this hints,
that he may be exposed to) Butler argues that there must be an
essential alliance between generating the conditions under which
the apprehension of the ethical claim of precarious life becomes
possible, and criticism of the work of norms that work to perform
a division, structuring the field of appearance so as to differenti-
ate the lives that are ‘liveable’ and ‘grievable’ from those that are
not (Butler 2009a: 180). Politically, it becomes vital to support
‘those modes of representation and appearance that allow the
claim of life to be made and heard’ (Butler 2009a: 181). But the
kind of political work this is understood to be will depend upon
how in turn we understand the structure of the field of appearance,
and of agency with respect to its hegemony.
I have suggested we find one exemplar of this politics in the
performativity of singing the US anthem in Spanish, as it manifests
plurality in an act of claiming equality. Obligation is generated
here in a sense that tracks the points made above – an obligation
to see and hear that breaks with a prohibitive framework. It is
important that insofar as the ethical claim of non-violence is also
registered within this act, it falls as obligation upon the disrupted
‘we’ (Butler 2009a:14); and so it will reveal its ‘subject’ (the one
to whom the claim is addressed) less as an individual who must
independently decide on a course of action, than a part of that
sociality from which the ‘we’ arises, that is, as ‘a being bound
up with others in inextricable and irreversible ways, existing in
a generalized condition of precariousness and interdependency,

affectively driven and crafted by those whose effects on me I never
chose’ (Butler 2009a: 180).
The ontology elaborated by Butler in this way reflects that
sociality from which a ‘we’ arises, including the sense of this as
a dynamic and fractured space of iterability. Sociality structures
norms as imperfect, incomplete, temporal and heterogeneous,
thus contestable and deformable. Here it is also worthwhile to
consider how Butler specifies the meaning she lends life’s ‘pre-
cariousness’ in terms of a modality of being, not a property of
beings – a way of thinking that aligns what the term means for her
with this temporalised and dynamic social ontology of normative
life. For precariousness, Butler tells us, is simply the ontological
condition of being conditioned, and this can be posited as a gener-
alised c ondition – indeed, as the very mode of equality – precisely
because it is not ‘proper’ to one individual or another (Butler
2009a: 23). Precariousness – and here Butler parts company with
Arendt – traverses the boundary between the human and the
animal, the social and the environmental conditions of sustainable
and liveable life. It is not ‘proper’ to the human. It cannot properly
be recognised (Butler 2009a: 13). Rather, ‘it can be apprehended,
taken in, encountered, and it can be presupposed by certain norms
of recognition just as it can be refused by such norms’ (Butler
2009a: 13). It is in this sense ‘inassimilable’ (Butler 2012b: 23).
Far from being what we already recognise as the ‘common condi-
tion of humanity’, under political conditions that press us to ‘a
dissolution and reformulation of the process of universalization’
precarious life is the very site of the ‘inassimilable’ that perpetually
bears the potential to break norms apart. And only thus, by regis-
tering and engaging the inassimilable, does ‘universalization renew
itself within a radically democratic project’ (Butler 2012b: 23).
It is important, then, to notice how conditions and relations are
thematically linked to life and to obligation in Butler’s account,
and drive the sense of contestability. The ‘a priori’ of recognisabil-
ity (in the ‘sovereign’ sense) becomes temporalised, as conditions
of intelligibility for what counts as a ‘life’ emerge as politicised and
contestable (Butler 2009a: 6). We saw earlier how this shift plays
out in the demand for a Palestinian obituary. But it also explains,
I think, why in Frames of War, Butler strongly emphasises the
way her argument moves between epistemological and ontologi-
cal registers. Whereas at the epistemic level, operations of power
aim to ‘delimit the sphere of appearance itself’ even if they fail to

‘unilaterally decide it’ (Butler 2009a: 1), at the ontological level
it seems we touch on or apprehend the precarious ‘being’ of a
life; mortality, vulnerability but also temporality and potentiality.
Although it is impossible to refer to this life without reliance on
the rubrics of power, life nonetheless exists at ‘a limit internal to
normative construction itself, a function of its iterability and het-
erogeneity’ (Butler 2009a: 4). Life is thus both the condition of the
norm bearing its ‘crafting’ power and that which ‘limits the finality
of any of its effects’ (Butler 2009a: 4).
In this context, Butler stresses two political dimensions of the
‘recognizability’ that precedes recognition. First, as Foucault
argued and as I discuss further below, the norms that prepare or
establish a subject for recognition, making recognition possible,
also ‘induce a subject of this kind’ (Butler 2009a: 5) – that is,
a subject who takes up a certain relation with normative life, a
relation that is at once compelling and critical. Secondly, a con-
testation in and around the normative framing of life is constantly
taking place, indeed, the ‘taking place’ of life and death – the
eventfulness we might say, of existence, itself – ‘calls into ques-
tion the necessity of the mechanisms through which ontological
fields are constituted’ (Butler 2009a: 7). In this way the normative
inscription of life is ‘haunted’; a thought we might be inclined to
read ‘ontically’ in terms of what is excluded from recognition, but
that may be better registered ontologically (or better again, ‘haun-
tologically’ in Derrida’s phrase) as concerning the apprehension of
foreclosed potentials, indeed of the very temporality that means
that ‘every normative instance is shadowed by its own failure’
(Butler 2009a: 7). If the normative framing of life is only given
temporally, then this temporality is that of a living relation with
norms (Butler 2005: 5) – the critical space in which the norm is
‘taken up’ or refused. Moreover, insofar as the modality of power
of norms is re-iterative (that is to say, the norm must be re-instated
by those who live within its frame), this ‘uptake’ of relationality
can be construed as implying a dynamic space of perception, and
one in which the ‘unrecognizable’ fleetingly appears.
We might return again from this analysis to the question of the
politics at stake in the attention Butler pays to the nationalism of
mourning. If, as Butler tells us, the ‘apprehension of grievability
precedes and makes possible the apprehension of precarious life’
(2009a: 15), then we should hesitate before assuming that such
‘grievability’ is only or always the individualised logic of recogni-

tion that Butler’s example of the obituary might at first seem to
suggest. Rather, it may be helpful to think of the way that Butler
engages together the themes of grievability (which risks seeming
like a nation-state sanctioned attitude) and precariousness (which
risks seeming like a given bodily condition, or ‘ontological fact’) as
aspects of a process of pluralisation opposed to the divisive work
‘grievability’ does in the nation-state. Cast as the ethico-political
work she is herself practising, we might consider how her discus-
sion of the obituary tarries with the limit of recognition – with
those who are ‘unburied, if not unburiable’; those we apprehend,
rather than ‘know’, perhaps as we apprehend the ‘gaps’ in public
record (Butler 2004: 34) without necessarily seeking thereby
to fill them with content. Such apprehension becomes the basis
for a critique of given norms of recognition (Butler 2009a: 5).
She is insisting here on the historical and political production of
‘recognizability’ over and against the sense of these norms as a
priori conditions of appearance (as a nationalist frame, posing as
universal, may well seem to be). Where ‘grievability’ is thought
in the mode of critique, the plural conditions of social existence
become activated within her account, conditions that open a life
to ‘exposure’ – that is, our exposure and dependency before others
as well as their dependency upon and exposure to us.
Ethics as critique
In the Acknowledgements to Frames of War, Butler directly speci-
fies her project as one of critique, with a particular focus on social-
ity as what binds and connects us. She writes:
The critique of war emerges from the occasions of war, but its aim is
to rethink the complex and fragile character of the social bond and to
consider what conditions might make violence less possible, lives more
equally grievable and hence, more livable. (2009a: viii)
What does it mean for this project of re-thinking the ‘social bond’
to be one of critique? In the concluding pages of Precarious Life,
critique is tasked with creating a sense of the public in which
oppositional voices of dissent can flourish, alongside practices of
cultural translation that work against the consignment of the face
of the other to the sphere of the unintelligible – as the ‘ungrievable’
or ‘already dead’ (Butler 2004: 151). An intimate link is pro-

posed between the discourse that comes to audibility in the public
sphere, and the legal, social and material conditions that support
and protect life. The ‘life’ in question, I have been arguing, is
‘relational’ – in relation to others, to an environment, to norms,
to itself – thus conditional and conditioned. Here, I suggest, Butler
engages in a critique that, like Kant’s, examines conditions of pos-
sibility of appearance, but also goes beyond him in asking how
denying the conditionality of action, or foreclosing acknowledge-
ment of relationality, becomes a mode of doing violence; asks,
indeed, how the elements that stabilise Kant’s notion of ‘condi-
tions’ by reference to a subject who is an ‘I’ might mis-locate the
proper terms of a social critique. Here again we are on territory
mapped out as ethical in Giving an Account of Oneself.
Butler, indeed, devotes considerable attention to describing
critique as an ethical and political practice in Giving an Account
and elsewhere. Thus in an essay on Foucault, for instance, Butler
first recites how Foucault, like Adorno, diverges from Kant in
refusing to assimilate critique to a practice that would secure
judgement. For Adorno, if the critic is not to be separated from
the social world, critique must operate as part of a praxis that
would not simply apply already constituted categories to particu-
lars but ‘apprehend the ways in which categories are themselves
instituted, how the field of knowledge is ordered, and how what
it suppresses returns, as it were, as its own constitutive occlusion’
(Butler 2002: 213, compare 2005: 133). In alignment with these
gestures, the question Foucault addresses in his own well-known
essay – ‘What is critique?’ – does not in fact simply ask what cri-
tique is, but ‘enacts a certain mode of questioning which will prove
central to the activity of critique itself’ (Butler 2002: 215). Over
against Habermas, who finds that critique cannot deliver the kind
of normative orientation we need if we are to make judgements
about social conditions, Foucault insists upon an engagement in
critique that is no less Kantian in interrogating epistemological
limits. Here Butler suggests that Foucault’s particular way of
approaching ethics displaces the question Habermas insists upon
as the locus of normative judgement – ‘what are we to do?’ – in
favour of paying attention to a prior set of questions, examin-
ing the very formation of the ‘we’, and thus the sense in which
the ‘we’ might be considered to be known or its action possible
(Butler 2002: 214).
The question, Who are we? is posed in this conception of critique

that is indebted to Foucault, as prior to the question, What should
we do? As such it articulates the question of the social bond and of
the ‘action in concert’ that Arendt delineated as political. ‘Who are
we?’ is not an abstract question, yet the temptation will always be
to answer it in identitarian terms, as though the ‘we’ were simply
looking for a particular to give it content, or as though it conjured
a given membership (subsumed under the categories provided by
the nation-state, say).
How might an ethics respond? If, as Foucault holds, critique
seeks not to evaluate its objects, but to bring into relief the frame-
work of evaluation itself, it induces what we might think of as a
reflection on the conduct of evaluation. Critique is formulated
as a virtue, in the sense that it belongs to an ethics that cannot
be fulfilled by following objectively formulated rules or laws,
but requires being in excess of them, demanding that a critical
relation to norms is practised. Experiences can then be properly
described as ‘moral’ not simply because they prohibit or command
but because they open the very relation to law that the practice of
critique as questioning enacts (Butler 2002: 216). What critique
interrogates are ‘settled domains of ontology’ which constrain
our understanding of what is possible; and it does so insofar as a
living relation to given codes of conduct implies the formation and
transformation of the self: ‘To be critical of an authority that poses
as absolute’, Butler writes, ‘requires a critical practice that has
self-transformation at its core’ (2002: 218). Again, the point can
be adapted to speak to the account of ethical violence as an anach-
ronistic nationalist violence, and thus to the demand for a thinking
that is post-nationalist or inter-nationalist. But this is on particular
terms: social critique construed thus is a mode of questioning that
dislodges the moral primacy of passing judgement, and interro-
gates something prior to that – the living (in)stability of discourse
that supports, sustains, but also undermines normativity. In the
same way, I will suggest, the questions Butler poses when she initi-
ates a critique of war have precisely this concern for transforma-
tion at their core, a transformation – or transformability – that
enters the very conditions of existence, and that we should hear at
work in the ambition to render life ‘more liveable’.
In the term ‘sensate democracy’, an openness to transforma-
tion is perhaps already registered; we may hear in it at once the
idea of attention to what is felt, experienced or lived – the world
that appears or is ‘apprehended’ as living; and that which is itself

feeling, experiencing, living – the plural subject or ‘we’ of democ-
racy, and this ‘we’ perhaps conceived less as a subject than as an
openness to a world in transformation, sensing and sensed. This
broadening of the ‘sensate’ to connote what is living, and thus
sensing and sensed, suggests a need to be wary of any suggestion
that Butler is somehow concerned with a politics of feeling or
sentiment alone, as if her idea is simply that these might be mobi-
lised to widen the circle of regard for fellow human beings. There
is a deeper ontological concern at work in Butler’s reflections, a
concern with the ‘crafting’ of the subject or of the body, as that
which can be ‘felt’ or can ‘feel’ (or ‘cannot’ be felt, cannot feel) in
iterations of the normative that may be deformed and reworked
by their medium. We might indeed name the ‘sensate’, rather than
any more abstract notion of temporality, as the ‘limit internal to
normative construction itself’ (Butler 2009a: 4). If ‘life’ always
exceeds the normative conditions of its recognisability, as Butler
claims, it is perhaps because life is the locus of a crafting that is at
once active and passive, an iteration by which a temporality is in
play that does not begin with the subject but disorientates and dis-
possesses it, limiting the finality of any of the effects of normative
construction – a precarious life.
Likewise the renewal of the social bond described by Butler as
‘sensate’ is not abstract; it emerges at specific sites, as we might
imagine in the reclaiming of the street and in the articulation of
plurality in a song that by virtue of containing a pressing con-
tradiction, can operate as a mode of address. The importance of
the ethical for Butler as it emerges in her discussion of Derrida is
that it marks a critical temporality, one that gives the rhythm to
any project of collective self-making. At stake in this is the spe-
cific futurity that Derrida marks with the ‘to come’, which Butler
glosses as inaugurated by the ‘fact of linguistic address and this
way of offering the future’; and as the foundation not only of law,
but politics, insofar as the ‘gift of speech makes possible the emer-
gence and sustainability of the “we” ’ (Butler 2009b: 303). As the
relation of address, the ethical ‘inaugurates, time and again, the
political’ – and thus the ‘to come’ is the condition of possibility of
politics itself (Butler 2009b: 304):
The unrealizable is also the condition of possibility (what Derrida

might call the ‘impossible condition of possibility’) for events and
for persons, and in this sense, what is ‘to come’ is already there, even
always, as the condition of possibility for what exists. (Butler 2009b:
305)
The questions of what or who we are in relation with, and how

or whether we take up a relation with norms, are at the core of
this ethico-politics. This is a point that Butler makes particularly
clearly in her Adorno Prize Lecture of 2012. When Butler turns in
Frames of War to elaborate a ‘bodily ontology’ to defend a claim
about the obligations she holds are imposed upon us by the ‘pre-
carity of life’, she is careful to specify how the term ‘ontology’ is
for her located within a ‘political organization and interpretation’
(Butler 2009a: 2). In her lecture, Butler likewise embeds a vital set
of considerations about the need to attend to life in its dependency
on material and social conditions of survival within an equally
insistent responsibility for invigorating the socio-political sphere
where moral reflection arises. If ‘morality from its inception is
bound up with biopolitics’ this is because the moral question is:
‘how do I live this life within the life, the conditions of living, that
structure us now?’ (Butler 2012a: 10) The question, which like
Foucault’s is concerned with the conduct of evaluation, seeks to
render moral reflection inseparable from the categories, power dif-
ferentials and structures in which my ‘living’ is embedded. A moral
reflection that takes account of what it is to be living, implicates
the subject who asks ‘how to live a good life?’ in a social inquiry
into the sustaining contexts precisely of reflection and action. To
ask, with Adorno, ‘how to live a good life in a bad life’ – that is, in
a world whose categories and structures produce effacement and
inequality (Butler 2012a: 11) – is to allow the problem of how I
affirm my own life as a life, to resonate with the question of how
the affirmation of life occurs and is distributed socially. Moreover,
it is to accept that reflection is inseparable from dependencies,
or that its very form has to do with conditionality, with being-
conditioned. Reflection is in this sense itself ‘precarious’. It is the
way in which my life is bound up with others, the way in which my
life ‘is and is not my own’, that makes critique of the biopolitical
order a ‘living issue for me’:
This practice of critique is one in which my own life is bound up with

the objects I think about. My life is this life, lived here, in the spatio-
temporal horizon established by my body, but it is also out there,
implicated in other living processes of which I am but one. Further, it

is implicated in the power differentials that decide whose life matters
more, and whose life matters less . . . (Butler 2012a: 11)
At the same time, relationality bears an irreducibly discursive

aspect, and constrains and enables reflexivity – ‘the only terms by
which this “I” grasps itself are those that belong to a discourse
that precedes and informs thought without any of us being able to
fully grasp its working and its effect’ (Butler 2012a: 11). Indeed,
it is in a sense towards an order of discourse that is inseparable
from the material conditions of life that Butler invites us to turn in
practising critique. When a life is ‘ungrievable’ it is because there
is ‘no present structure of support that will sustain that life, which
implies that it is devalued, not worth supporting and protecting as
a life by dominant schemas of value’ (Butler 2012a: 10). For this
reason, we are led to critique as a relationship with those schemas,
as a problem of how we live them. Our obligations, accordingly,
are not to this or that life, but to the ‘generalizable conditions’
of life (Butler 2009a: 22–3) – that is, to the ‘condition of being
conditioned’ (Butler 2009a: 23) or ‘precariousness’. This in turn
implies an ongoing process of universalisation (a pluralisation)
which might well be contrasted with the universalising form of
Kantian moral law.
Thus when Butler writes ‘the precarity of life imposes an obli-
gation on us’ (Butler 2009a: 2), I have taken it that a crucial part
of that imposed obligation is the obligation of dissent; that is, of
living a practice of critique, ethically and politically, which as such
engages the excess of life over given epistemological limits, and
moreover suspends the ontological grounding of the subject in
and by initiating transformation. Obligation arises from the very
texture of dependency and sociality, and is ‘constitutive obligation’
in the sense that such dependency and sociality, far from being
facts or givens by which the necessity of certain actions would be
morally entailed, instead themselves immediately demand to be
‘lived’. Conditionality is a ‘living issue for me’ because I cannot
escape taking up some relation with it, be it to re-establish existing
conditions, or to open them to critique (Butler 2012a: 11).
Illustrating this thought leads to a vital insight into the con-
ditional limitation ethics imposes on every sovereign decision.
Reading Arendt’s account of Eichmann’s crime, Butler condenses
it to this precept, which chimes closely with her rendering of
Levinas’s account of the ‘face’ as that which I am unable to

kill:7 ‘no one has the right to decide with whom to co-habit thus
everyone has the right to cohabit with equal degrees of protec-
tion’ (Butler 2011: 85, my emphasis). If we thought about this
precept in terms of the problem of the conduct of evaluation, we
might notice the critical role played in the argument by the limita-
tion Butler follows (and adapts) Arendt in placing on the right to
decide (it is analogous to the limitation imposed by the Levinasian
face – that it cannot be killed).8 This claim, ‘No one has the right
to decide with whom to co-habit’ is not simply articulated as a
free-standing axiom. Rather, it is cohabitation itself that limits
decision. The limitation on decision reflects conditionality; and
to seek to choose where there is no choice is to seek to destroy
the conditions of social and political life. In deriving from this
the ‘right to cohabit’, Butler is performing a pluralisation, which
involves circumscribing the unilateral right to decide through
reference to its own conditionality – its existence within a plural
space.9 Also in play here is the sense that there must be room
made for the ‘conduct’ of evaluation itself, the relation with the
norm. Thus we are obligated not only to preserve the lives of the
others with whom we cohabit, but ‘the plurality of which they
form a part’ (Butler 2011: 85), and this transforms the principles
by which we act into a ‘speaking for’ plurality – a political gesture
of equality – which contrasts with simply deriving the universal
from a given understanding of who properly belongs in the set (all
rational human beings, for instance).
In this sense the process of differentiation does not begin
from the universal category ‘everyone’ but rather makes ‘every-
one’ appear, the ‘one’ whose relation with the norm invites, in
Foucault’s terms, a conduct of evaluation, and who thus practises
critique as a virtue. The obligation to preserve plurality is then an
obligation that binds us in the absence of properly ‘belonging’ to
a normative field populated by the universal truth of a common
humanity, moving along a teleologically established path of pro-
gress. That is why it can be characterised by Butler both in terms
of proximity, adjacency, up-againstness – a ‘convergent’ condi-
tion, rather than a ‘common’ one (Butler 2011: 88); and in terms
of an interruptive temporality, the interruption of one time by
another – precisely where a time ‘cannot be’ (Butler 2011: 88). The
‘measure of a life’ proper to grievability involves this struggle, as
Butler remarks, reading Benjamin:
Remembrance attends to the ways that history works now as well as

what opens up within that reiterated history to reclaim the history of
the oppressed. The measure of a life is the way that history continues
to act in the present which means, of course, that the presence of those
contingent moments accumulate, chances or wagers, flash upon flash,
a struggle for the past which is the only way to transform the present
. . . (Butler 2012b: 113)
The singing in Spanish of the US national anthem does not only

contest the limits defining citizenship; it also, one might think,
practices a certain politics of remembrance of loss and of the
potentialities of realising loss that can be directly aligned with the
political demand for an obituary. The question of how the limit of
what can be remembered is enforced in the present (Butler 2011:
89; 2004: xx) provides one schema by which to analyse contempo-
rary, yet anachronistic, formations of the nation-state – and it runs
throughout Butler’s discussions of ‘grievability’ and of whose life
is grievable under contemporary conditions. But I have argued that
there is another, countervailing politics at stake in every account
she gives of the ‘gaps’ in public record of lives lost. Here, rather
than simply seeking to fill in the gaps, we should apprehend the
emergence of a contest, a demand for pluralisation. This demand
is given as a living history that does not ‘enforce the present’, but
conversely ‘acts in the present’. A politics of remembrance, then,
poses the democratic questions of translation, and of the appli-
cability of law to life, reminding us of the necessary interruption
of one space of appearance, one sense of space–time continuum
with another that disrupts it. To practise remembrance in the
Benjaminian sense might give rise to a new concept of citizenship,
Butler tells us – one that arises from, but is against dispossession
and precarity (Butler 2011: 90). Such remembrance insists upon
registering the ‘impossible’ co-habitation of peoples that is already
taking place, and that demands acknowledgement, mourning, and
affirmation in the company of those plural others who make up
the political world.
Notes
1. William Connolly’s account in The Ethos of Pluralization (2005) is
an important source, but so too is a reading of Arendt developed in
Parting Ways, chapters 5–6.
2. See ‘Indefinite Detention’, chapter 3 of Precarious Life (Butler 2004).

The political situation that makes Guantanamo possible thus already
has a background that finds its diagnosis in Arendt’s formulation of
what placed nationalism above the law: that ‘the same nation was
at once declared to be subject to laws which would supposedly flow
from the Rights of Man, and sovereign, that is bound by no univer-
sal law and acknowledging nothing superior to itself’ (Arendt 1951:
230).
3. Honig is not alone. There are many readings highly critical of Butler’s
‘ethical turn’, such as those offered by Slavoj Žižek (2006), Lauren
Berlant (2007), Catherine Mills (2007) or Jodi Dean (2009), as well
as more sympathetic readings, such as that of Ann Murphy (2011).
Butler’s demand in her works since 2001 that grief become a resource
for non-violence, her apparent belief that we might derive norma-
tive claims from a common bodily condition of vulnerability, and
her mobilisation of aspects of a Levinasian ethics of the face, have
all led to charges of political naivety, which Dean labels as Butler’s
‘prescriptive niceness’, the demand of ethical openness to the other.
Dean’s objections to this ‘niceness’ are in no way offset by Murphy’s
sympathetic account of what the ethics might be. Murphy argues that
we find in Butler’s work a re-invented humanism that would combine
the ‘ontological truism’ of corporeal vulnerability with a response to
the ethical provocation of unequally distributed precarity, implying
we might learn to perceive the generalisability of precariousness (see
Murphy 2011: 582). The resulting ethic is exactly that attacked by
Dean as apolitical. Here I seek to offer an alternate account of the
‘ontological’ obligation Butler relies upon in these arguments.
4. Compare Butler’s discussion in Is Critique Secular? (2009c: 133).
5. Ann Murphy, for instance, argues that the sense of ethical obligation
that would call us to remedy the conditions of unequal distribution
of grievability rests on affirming precariousness as a common condi-
tion; the key claim is that ‘ontological facts about the human body
– particularly its vulnerability and exposure to violence – might be
read as indicating certain obligations’ (2011: 577). Murphy thus sug-
gests that Butler is proposing the obligation to ‘ameliorate suffering’,
arising from the common condition of precarious life, and that it is
this ‘common condition’ that renders the egalitarian dimension of her
argument the primary normative claim (2011: 581). This is an apoliti-
cal reading of Butler that would fit very well with the sort of criticisms
that Honig levels.
6. This essay appears in The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere
(Mendieta and VanAntwerpen 2011), and is largely reproduced in

Parting Ways (Butler 2012b).
7. Parting Ways (Butler 2012b), Chapter 2 passim.
8. Butler writes: ‘An obscure point of contact between Levinas and
Arendt guides me here’ (2012b: 23).
9. There is a parallel discussion of the ‘right to life’ in the introduction
to Frames of War (Butler 2009a: 20) which argues that there is no
‘decision’ without a field of its application, conditions of validation
and authorisation; discursive props that are sedimented in material
arrangements.
References
Arendt, Hannah (1951), The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Berlant, Lauren (2007), ‘Nearly Utopian, Nearly Normal: Post-Fordist
Affect in La Promesse and Rosetta’, Public Culture, 19: 2, 273–301.
Butler, Judith (2002), ‘What is Critique?: An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue’,
in David Ingram (ed.) The Political, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 212–26.
Butler, Judith (2004), Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and
Violence, New York: Verso.
Butler, Judith (2009a), Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, New
York: Verso.
Butler, Judith (2009b), ‘Finishing, Starting’, in Pheng Cheah and Suzanne
Guerlac (eds), Derrida and the Time of the Political, Durham, NC and
London: Duke University Press, pp. 291–306.
Butler, Judith (2009c), ‘The Sensibility of Critique: Response to Asad
and Mahmood’, in Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler and Saba
Mahmood, Is Critique Secular?: Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech:
The Townsend Papers in the Humanities, No. 2, Berkeley, Los Angeles
and London: University of California Press, pp. 101–36.
Butler, Judith (2011), ‘Is Judaism Zionism?’ in Eduardo Mendieta and
Jonathan VanAntwerpen (eds), The Power of Religion in the Public
Sphere, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 70–91.
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Prize Lecture’, Radical Philosophy, 176: 9–18.
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Seagull Books.
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Dean, Jodi (2009), Democracy and Other Neo- Liberal Fantasies:
Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics, Durham, NC and
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6
Two Regimes of the Human:

Butler and the Politics of Mattering
Drew Walker
Despite the continual displacement of nearly every established

conception of the human, the figure of the human remains a pow-
erful idea for political and ethical theorising. In the era of human
rights, the language of dehumanisation has become a dominant
frame for accounting for and criticising a wide range of abuses
and social harms: from the crimes of slavery to indefinite detention
to the torture of ‘enemy combatants’ to the indiscriminate use of
drone attacks. Likewise, the human has come to mark a status that
promises protection from the ‘dehumanising’ effects of violence,
discrimination and other modes of injustice. Judith Butler’s recent
work on the concepts of precarity and grievability have contrib-
uted to this discussion by providing an important analysis of the
conditions that we call human and by pointing towards an ethical
grounding for politics. As such, Butler’s ethical turn towards
the precariousness, vulnerability and grievability of life has been
simultaneously praised for its perspicacity as an analysis of current
state practices and condemned for depoliticising these conflicts
in favour of the assertion of a ground for ethics (see Dean 2008;
Honig 2010 and 2013).1
Instead of retreading the depoliticising perils of this ethical turn,
this essay argues that Butler – both before and after her ‘ethical
turn’ – presents two distinct images of the human that track com-
peting drives for subversion and survival that mark all of her work.
These conceptions of the human – and of subversion and survival
– carry with them very different political effects. First, in her recent
focus on ‘grievability’ and the precariousness of human life, Butler
offers a view of the human as a subject position necessary for one’s
life to matter and bear political agency. With this image, Butler
participates in the now-familiar discourse that presents the victims
of violence, oppression or the denial of human rights as inhabiting
141
a space in which they are rendered inhuman, invisible, spectral or

derealised. This figure of the human, I suggest, tends to obscure
as much as it reveals and to exclude as much as it promises to
include. It risks overstating the power of the ‘human’ to protect
us from state and social violence, and it tends to overlook, and
thus undervalue, the agency and worth of lives that fall outside
the dominant norms of the ‘human’. Second, Butler presents an
image of the human as a more dynamic field of contestation that is
always in the flux of reiteration and subversion, where the terms of
the human can be debated and put to the test. This second image
of the human comes closer to realising the potential of Butler’s
notion of performativity to trouble the terms of the human and
provoke a politics of difference.
To illuminate the consequences of these two images of the
human, I examine Butler’s many theorisations of the human and
then consider several moments that dramatise the uncertainty of
‘the human’ as a power both to redeem and to abject: Stanley
Cavell’s claim that we cannot fail to see the other as human
alongside Frederick Douglass’s self-description of the experience
of the American slave, responses to the American AIDS epidemic,
and finally a contemporary Zimbabwean women’s movement.
Instead of focusing on the potential grievability of the subjects
of these experiences as necessary for their coming to matter in
the public arena, I suggest that their lives, and their forms of life,
mark a devious, dangerous expression of the human, one that
matters intensely as a potential disruption of normative orders of
the human through perhaps aberrant, but very human, modes of
race, gender and sexuality. In so doing, I develop a politics of the
human that is both indebted to and in tension with Butler’s work
on ‘the human’. This politics of the human resists the language of
the dehumanised, the spectral, the inhuman in order to dramatise
those moments where the human – and human agency – expresses
itself in spite of attempts to stifle it or snuff it out.
Two regimes of the human

Carrying out this task of tracing ‘the human’ in Butler’s work is
perhaps more complex than it would seem, for the figure of the
human plays an important, but deeply ambiguous, role through-
out her work. This ambiguity is clearly demonstrated in Precarious
Life, a text that, Butler asserts, begins and ends with ‘the question
Two Regimes of the Human 143
of the human’ (2004a: 20). As she writes, ‘We start here not
because there is a human condition that is universally shared –
this is surely not yet the case’ (Butler 2004a: 20, my emphasis).
Given that this is ‘not yet’ the case, the central questions of this
text are, then, ‘Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives?
And, finally, What makes for a grievable life?’ (Butler 2004a: 20,
original emphasis). Implied in the not yet of a universal human
condition, it seems to me, is the wish for or fantasy of such a
condition, one that presumably depends on the universal griev-
ability of all (human) lives. This appeal to universality may strike
readers of Butler as strange given her own criticisms of universality
(2000), her advocacy of William Connolly’s concept of pluralisa-
tion in her most recent work (2012), and, perhaps most starkly,
her theory of performativity, which so clearly rejects a concept
of a single human condition (1990). My claim is not that Butler
herself desires this universal human condition, but that the logic
of her argument points towards such a wish, and this position has
important consequences for politics and ethics.
Thus, even as Butler suggests the possibility for a shared human
condition, she calls the possibility (and desirability) of such con-
ditions into question. Later in Precarious Life she suggests, ‘We
make a mistake, therefore, if we take a single definition of the
human, or a single model of rationality, to be the defining feature
[of the human]’ (Butler 2004a: 90). In this discussion Butler
is working to undermine a common definition of the human
that would be based on a determinable set of cultural features
or standards of rationality – features and standards that might
demarcate the limits of what would be considered human, and
therefore, grievable life. For Butler, the limits of the human that
are revealed in the rhetoric of politicians and pundits wishing
to determine a field of insiders and outsiders can (and should)
unsettle taken-for-granted notions of what counts as human. To
take up the ‘challenge to rethink the human,’ then, is ‘part of the
democratic trajectory of an evolving human rights jurisprudence’
(Butler 2004a: 90). In this way, Butler presents the problem of the
human as a central aspect of political, and specifically democratic,
life. Yet she immediately returns to the logic of the universal by
elaborating that ‘an ongoing task of humans rights’ is ‘to recon-
ceive the human when it finds that its putative universality does
not have universal reach’ (Butler 2004a: 90). My point here is not
that Butler is simply contradicting herself. Instead, I am trying to
make the – perhaps obvious, but too often overlooked – point that
how we theorise the figure and subject position of the human has
critical consequences for our conceptions of the possibilities for
life, and for a politics of difference.
To interrogate this tension in Butler’s use of the human, we need
to look closely at how Butler theorises the making of the ‘human’
and the meaning of dehumanisation. Following a certain reading
of Foucault, Butler has consistently argued that normative cat-
egories like the human are constructed in a ‘field of discourse and
power that orchestrates, delimits, and sustains that which qualifies
as “the human” ’ (1993: 8). For Butler the key to this process of
defining a category like the human is that it occurs through ‘exclu-
sionary means’ that begin not only with what counts as human
and inhuman, but with that which must both be excluded, and
more powerfully, not allowed to be spoken or to exist. Thus, as
she writes, ‘the human is not only produced over and against the
inhuman, but through a set of foreclosures, radical erasures, that
are, strictly speaking, refused the possibility of cultural articula-
tion’ (Butler 1993: 8, original emphasis). As such, the category
of the human is defined against a ‘constitutive outside’ that is not
merely the inhuman, but a form of life that is ‘derealized’, ‘spec-
tral’, ‘deconstituted’ (see Butler 2004a: 34, 91). Dehumanisation,
then, takes on a function in Butler’s work that differs from the
common trope that reads dehumanisation as an effect of violence
and injustice. Instead, for Butler ‘dehumanization occurs first’: the
very defining of the human requires the production of a zone of
dehumanisation that then makes possible the practice of violence
and injustice against those who already find themselves ‘dereal-
ized’ or ‘deconstituted’ by the normative category of the human
from which they are excluded (Butler 2004a: 34). As she writes,
‘dehumanization becomes the condition for the production of the
human’ (Butler 2004a: 91).
Butler’s understanding of the human and the dehumanised then
makes possible her now well-known account of ‘grievability’. In
Precarious Life she presents a case in which the San Francisco
Chronicle in 2002 refused to publish obituaries for two Palestinian
families who had been killed by Israeli troops. For Butler, this
refusal marks the unwillingness, or perhaps inability, of the West
to recognise these lives as grievable, and thus human, lives. Their
exclusion from the public realm (at least in the form of this par-
ticular newspaper) is, for Butler, a result of the prior dehumanisa-
tion of Palestinian lives in the very construction of the normative

definition of the human, which blocks our ability to connect to
them in a shared experience of vulnerability and grievability. That
is, they simply do not show up for us, and thus they do not matter.
Butler argues that:
if there were to be an obituary there would have had to have been a

life, a life worth noting, a life worth valuing and preserving, a life that
qualifies for recognition . . . It is not just that a death is poorly marked,
but that it is unmarkable. (2004a: 35)
The key to overcoming these conditions, then, would be to recog-

nise and respond to the vulnerability and grievability of the other –
to see that we share in the condition that she calls ‘precarious life’.
On its face, Butler’s insistence on the grievability of all lives as
an ethical ideal for politics seems difficult to dispute. But as I am
arguing here, the problem with this perspective arises from the
way that Butler accounts for the relationship between the human
and its others. This image of the human relies upon a model of
visibility and invisibility, of the real and the derealised. In this
way, Butler’s position presumes that the solution to the problems
of violence and injustice depends upon the recovery, recognition
and making-visible of the humanness of the other. The result,
however, is that Butler overlooks, for instance, both the ways that
her ‘dehumanized’ others do in fact appear in the public realm,
and the possibility that this analysis itself devalues the struggle of
those whose lives are read as derealised and spectral.2 As such, the
power to determine these conditions appears to rest with a domi-
nant, or even hostile, other.
However, from another perspective, Butler also offers a view
of the ‘human’ as a more contested field where the political and
ethical terms of the human are dramatised and played out. Here
Butler’s call to ‘rethink the human’ provides inspiration for chal-
lenging ‘the normative notion of the human, a normative notion
of what the body of a human must be’ (2004a: 33). Drawing upon
the impulse of her development of the concepts of iterability and
citationality, in Undoing Gender Butler moves towards a language
and understanding of the human that exceeds the framework of
recovery and that turns instead on the contestation of the norma-
tive use of the ‘human’. There she considers what it would mean
to disrupt the language of the human and human rights, which
she reads as masculinist and racial constructions, by resignifying

human rights as, for instance, ‘women’s human rights’ or ‘lesbian
and gay human rights’ (Butler 2004b: 38). Her response moves
out of the normative frame of the human: ‘It says that such groups
have their own set of human rights, that what human may mean
when we think about the humanness of women is perhaps differ-
ent from what human has meant when it has functioned presump-
tively as male’ (Butler 2004b: 38). Here Butler’s mode of political
contestation depends not on the acts of recognition and making
visible a shared condition, but in contesting the notion of a shared
condition as the basis for politics and for human rights in the first
place.3 In moments like these, the notion of the human serves as
the ground of subversive political action, but it also, paradoxically,
promises to be a safe harbour from the vicissitudes of that very
political life. This tension drives Butler’s work – a tension between
a focus on survival and a desire for subversion as the primary aim
of feminist and queer politics and theory. The focus on survival
has come to mark the starting point for ethics, whereas the ori-
entation towards subversion motivates the more radical political
dimensions of Butler’s thought. But if the figure of the human can
truly remain politically salient, I argue, this latter dimension of
dynamism and contestability – of the human at the limits – must
be our focus. If there is to be a rethinking of the human as Butler
suggests, it must arise here, where settled concepts of the human
are already being challenged by lives no less human for not being
called human.
What is a liveable life?

The rhetoric of universal rights, in which Butler’s ethical turn is
rooted, contains within it an assumption that we can fail to see
others as humans, or at least that we are able to dehumanise others
in order to allow for their being treated as other than human.
However, I contend that to defend this claim, as Butler (at least
implicitly) does, runs the risk of foreclosing the question of the
human by turning the issue of particular practices and their effects
into a general problem of recognition or recovery. To make this
point clear, it is helpful to return to the discussion begun above
on the construction of the figure of the human to see what Butler
and her interlocutors see as missing in the ‘extra-human and extra-
juridical sphere of life’ (Butler 2004a: 91). Addressing the question
of the human in Butler requires that one take up a constellation of

key concepts that appear in various forms throughout her work. In
the 1999 Preface to Gender Trouble Butler writes that her attempt
to denaturalise gender came from ‘a desire to live, to make life pos-
sible, and to rethink the possible as such’ (1999: xx). Throughout
her work, she variously characterises the fulfilment of this possible
life as ‘livable’ (Butler 1999: xxii) and ‘intelligible’ (1999: 22).
Conversely, an unliveable life is ‘foreclosed’ (Butler 1999: xx),
‘false unreal, and unintelligible’ (Butler 1999: xxiii), ‘illegible’
(Butler 2004b: 5) and ‘less than’ (Butler 2004b: 2) or ‘not human
at all’ (Butler 2004b: 2).
For Butler, then, the less-than-human or unintelligible primar-
ily lack recognition and visibility, or categories of recognition
in which to realise oneself that are not already characterised by
repressive norms (see Butler 2004b: 3). From this perspective
this lack of visibility, in turn, seems to imply that those who fall
outside recognised norms simply do not matter. As Chambers and
Carver explain this point, the unintelligible lack the agency of a
subject because they are not received into intelligible discourse.
They write, the ‘terms of intelligibility’ that grant one visibility
and legitimacy as a subject may not allow ‘the “I” that appears
in deviant gender, racial or sexual form . . . to “appear” at all’
(Chambers and Carver 2008: 88). On Moya Lloyd’s reading, the
lack of social, legal and political validity means that those who
fall outside normative recognition ‘simply will not matter’ (2007:
33). Conversely, a liveable life, according to Lloyd, is one having
‘value and legitimacy’ (2007: 33). Similarly, Chambers and Carver
construe a liveable life as being dependent on being a ‘recognis-
able subject . . . thought through the idea of a “received subject”’
that involves being recognised as intelligible (2008: 78). Thus, it
appears that in order to matter, one must be able to appear in the
realm of intelligibility and the human, even if the intelligible is
already determined by the terms of exclusive norms.
All of these perspectives focus on the repressed (or the impos-
sibility of) visibility of lives and forms of agency that fall outside
established norms and practices, thus allowing for their systematic
exclusion and repression. The question, then, is how to account
for norms that can be simultaneously totalising in the exclusion
of non-normative lives and open to contestation by these very
inhuman, unintelligible, unliveable lives. Butler has provided
answers to this question throughout her work, even as she has
simultaneously undermined and covered over that position by

reifying the power of norms and the violence of the subject forma-
tion. As Butler argues through her development of the concept of
citationality, the bounds of the unintelligible and the invisible are
always already being challenged. In her discussion of the category
of gender in Gender Trouble Butler contends that normative
categories are always incomplete; thus, they are always open to
being filled in by contestable meanings (1999: 21). Likewise, the
notion of personhood as regulated by gender and sexuality norms
of intelligibility is always already contested by persons who fail
to conform to these norms (Butler 1999: 23). Because of these
discontinuities and the overflow of subjectivity from the bounds
of intelligibility, breaking or expanding these boundaries is always
a possibility already in play (Butler 1999: 40). She further argues
that the making invisible of both dominant norms and those they
exclude requires performative repetition from the subjects of these
(gender) norms, and because the performance of norms is always
incomplete and unsuccessful, norms always remain open to con-
testation. Deviant expressions, then, may promise to expand the
range of legitimacy to more kinds of subjects, but they do not do
so easily. Obviously, the visibility of deviant expressions is one of
the primary instigators of violence against marginalised people.
Yet, the incompleteness and boundlessness of categories and
expressions of gender, sexuality and the human has important
effects for thinking about the liveability and intelligibility of lives
and the possibilities for political agency.
Always, already human

Much of this argument turns on the central, but often unasked,
question here of whether we (can) really fail to see some humans as
human – whether we can render, as the common trope goes, some
humans inhuman, dehumanised, spectral. I am inclined to say that
we cannot, or that we do not. I draw inspiration for this claim from
a reading of Stanley Cavell’s contention in The Claim of Reason that
we cannot fail to see other humans as human (see Cavell 1979: Part
IV). Cavell challenges the familiar argument that atrocities from
slavery to war crimes to abortion (from the perspective of those
who oppose it) can be attributed to some humans seeing or treating
some other humans as less than or not at all human. In making this
argument Cavell is not suggesting that people never claim to fail to
see some others as human. Instead, he, on my reading, is making

two other, related points. First, Cavell argues that when we claim
to fail to see the other as human we can mean ‘nothing definite’ by
this claim (1979: 376). That is, claiming to fail to see some other as
human can only be meant relatively or perspectively. The effects of
this way of seeing may be disastrous for some lives, but from this
Cavellian perspective, it does not saturate or fix the scene of possi-
bilities for those other lives as Butler’s theory of norms seems to do.
The ‘nothing definite’ of Cavell’s argument challenges the power
of norms to determine the limits of the human in a way that even
Butler’s notion of the incompleteness of norms does not; for though
she continually returns to the subversive power of citationality, she
does so only after ceding the grounds of determining the limits of
the human to the norm in the first place.
Cavell continues this argument by suggesting that the moral or
ethical response to the other is not a matter of knowledge or rec-
ognition, particularly of their humanity. Responding to another,
for Cavell, is not a matter of knowledge or recognition in which
I might be shown something about the other that might make me
come to see her humanity. If there is something missing here, it is
not the recognition of the other’s humanness. The ethical dilemma,
then, of slavery, torture and so on is not that we fail to see some
others as humans. On the contrary, ‘[t]he anxiety in the image
of slavery [we could include other atrocities that fall under the
banner of abuses of human rights] is that it really is a way in which
certain human beings can treat certain others whom they know,
or all but know, to be human beings. Rather than admit this we
say that the ones do not regard the others as human beings at all’
(Cavell 1979: 377). Attributing the violence and harm we do to
others to their dehumanisation, instead of sharpening our view of
these practices, relieves us of the anxiety we might feel about what
some humans are capable of doing to others they ‘all but know’
to be humans. The appeal to a failure to see the other as human
marks an evasion of these actual conditions and practices. Cavell,
thus, offers a different conception of what it means to respond to,
or acknowledge the human:
What is implied is that it is essential to knowing that something is

human that we sometimes experience it as such, and sometimes do
not, or fail to; that certain alterations of consciousness take place, and
sometimes not, in the face of it. (1979: 379)
This experience of the human as something that attempts to

acknowledge the uncertainty and inconsistency of how we under-
stand and respond to the other is much closer to Butler’s second
image of the human – one that depends on the notion of per-
formativity, not spectrality, and that always puts ‘the human’ just
beyond our grasp.
Here Cavell radically inverts the typical logic of the human by
suggesting that even our experiences of failing to see the other as
human (and our processes of dehumanisation) are part of what it
means to know and respond to the human. That is, Cavell’s analy-
sis reveals that the violence we do one another, far from erasing
the humanness of the other, can (and should) provoke us to see
that the humanness of the other is what is at stake at every turn.
Take, for example, Frederick Douglass’s description of the rela-
tionship between the slave and the slaveholder. Certainly, in his
autobiography, he often highlights the experience of slavery as an
attempt to undermine or deny his humanness. However, in ‘What
to the Slave is the Fourth of July’, he argues that his humanness
was never in question, even to the slaveowners, and thus puts into
question a reading of slavery as an institution built upon some-
thing like a prior zone of dehumanisation:
Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? That point is

conceded already. Nobody doubts it. The slaveholders themselves
acknowledge it in the enactment of laws for their government. They
acknowledge it when they punish disobedience on the part of the slave.
There are seventy-two crimes in the State of Virginia which, if commit-
ted by a black man (no matter how ignorant he be), subject him to the
punishment of death; while only two of the same crimes will subject a
white man to the like punishment. What is this but the acknowledg-
ment that the slave is a moral, intellectual, and responsible being?
(Douglass [1852] 2000: 195)
In these lines Douglass calls attention to the fact that slaves and
blacks are abused not because they are subject to a kind of erasure
or derealisation that then allows for their being abused. Instead,
in this reading, Douglass points out that the institutions of slavery
and oppression are in fact violent, cruel responses to an expression
of the human itself. These institutions might aim to undermine,
or even eradicate, the agency of these ‘other’ humans, but they
ultimately cannot. In fact, the institution itself reinforces that the
humanness of the other is always at stake, even when it is read as

dangerous and worthy of control or even death. This reading of
slave laws challenges Butler’s view that dehumanisation comes
first; for here Douglass reads these laws as a response to the very
humanness of the other. Butler’s view of the human as a kind of
norm of recognition constructed upon the dehumanisation and
derealisation of marginalised groups then misses the political
point that arises from Cavell’s reading of the human and from
Douglass’s self-description. For her argument takes for granted
that to remain outside dominant orders of recognition or a posi-
tion of abjection will mean that one’s agency and worth will be
denied. But the examples from Cavell and Douglass bring this
image of the human into question.
Returning to Butler’s account of the functioning of norms in
these terms makes clear that far from making invisible those who
do not conform to norms, their lives make them more visible as
aberrations from and threats to dominant normative practices.
Consider the reciprocal, reiterative process that works to make
invisible (always incompletely) both norms and those who conform
to them. In describing the working of gender norms, Butler argues
that ‘gender is the effect of a regulatory practice that seeks to
render gender identity uniform through compulsory heterosexual-
ity’ (1999: 42). This attempt at uniformity works to restrict and
regulate aberrant expressions of sexuality, thus exposing such
expressions all the more. If we look from the other direction at this
description of normativity, we see the Foucauldian point that these
discursive practices, rather than aberrant expressions of them, are
precisely what are always being covered over; when dominant
norms are enforced, awareness of their normative function can
slip out of view. Thus, Chambers and Carver can claim, follow-
ing Butler, that ‘to do gender “right” is to remain unmarked by
societal gender norms’ (2008: 89). Read this way, it appears that
if there is a place where some subjects fail to see others as human,
it is within the functioning of norms of intelligibility themselves.
To be able to be unmarked by societal gender norms is to be able
to forget the contingency and incompleteness of these normative
practices (and one’s own identity insofar as it remains within safe
distance of norms of behaviour). The regulative practices of the
normative system take over the responsibility of relationship that
would be demanded of us if contingency were made visible. As
with Cavell’s reading of the language of the human, the relative
invisibility of norms (so long as things are going smoothly) allows

us to forget, or ignore, the contingency, and at times arbitrariness,
of normative practices.
If conforming to norms makes one less visible, then, we can
see that the possible disruption of a given normative order is the
very reason that deviance from these norms (including claims
for justice, equal treatment and so on, where such claims are not
welcome or are even forbidden) is so dangerous – it reveals our
anxiety about our practices and marks deviance for violence. As
Chambers and Carver put the point, ‘[t]o do our gender “wrong”
is to open ourselves up to normative violence because we mark
our gender and sexuality as potentially non- normative’ (2008:
89). That is, we have made ourselves visible or spoken up in the
face of normative order that knows, or all but knows, that we
are already present and human, even if it wishes for things to be
otherwise. The response of normative violence is not the result
of dehumanisation or a life rendered unintelligible, but rather a
response to the very expression of the human itself. Expressing
oneself deviantly seems to be the very thing that marks, or reveals,
one as human, that is, as a contingent, discontinuous, overflowing
expression of subjectivity in relation, but not in lockstep, with a
set of norms. Deviant expression makes visible the contingency of
normative structures in/on the body of the subject. We cannot fail
to see that human as human. The punishment for this expression
may be swift and harsh, but it cannot be because we fail to see you
as human. Your life is too liveable; your life matters too much. In
it we see the unpredictable ways humans are capable of living.
Like a moment of Heideggerian breakdown, these moments
of disruption of normative practices reveal our involvement with
the world and with others. When things break, or fall out of their
ordinary role in everyday ways of being, they stand out and reveal
our relationship to them (Heidegger 1962). Heidegger’s discussion
of ‘breakdown’, though staged in the context of the ‘equipmental-
ity’ of Dasein’s existence, can provide a helpful lens for examining
the functioning of norms. For this purpose, we can consider two
forms of breakdown that Heidegger discusses: the broken tool and
the obstinate tool. In both cases, Heidegger argues that the break-
down of the everyday context allows us to become aware of our
‘normal’ relations by disrupting them. In the case of the broken
tool, the implement becomes conspicuous as an unworkable tool
that must either be repaired or be replaced in order to return to
‘normal’ relations. The obstinate tool, on the other hand, gets in

the way of work and stands out as an impediment to the normal
functioning of the everyday. In the context of norms, I suggest,
we can read the aberrant expression of the human as somewhere
between the broken and the obstinate. Deviant expressions appear
both as unworkable in terms of established norms and as obstinate
refusals to go along with accepted ways of being. These expres-
sions produce trouble because they threaten both the functioning
of established orders and the contingency of these orders that their
smooth functioning covers over.
Moments of breakdown – as deviant or unacceptable perfor-
mances of identity, and as eruptions of resistance to and violence
against such expression – reveal the anxiety that we feel about the
real possibilities for the human as various subjects push against
established norms and their limits. For as always already human
(in deviant forms), marginalised subjects are always already
engaged in the logic and mechanism of subversion.4 Butler, too,
turns to Heidegger in a similar way in Antigone’s Claim, noting
that for Heidegger, ‘participation in what is non-living turns out
to be something like the condition of living itself’ and that ‘prox-
imity to being involves estrangement from living beings even as it
is the ground of their very emergence’ (2000: 92–3, n. 4). Norms
seem to operate in this experience of estrangement at the ground
of experience, which makes them both powerfully violent as
attempts to cover over this anxiety, and powerfully modifiable as
always already contestable. The human is revealed at this moment
of uncertainty at the limits of the norms and zones of intelligibility
that give shape to our subjectivity. As Butler writes, ‘we cannot
precisely give content to this person at the very moment that he
speaks his worth, which means that it is precisely the ways in
which he is not fully recognizable, fully disposable, fully categoriz-
able, that his humanness emerges’ (2004b: 73).
The political salience of this emerging humanness is at least
twofold. Negatively, it can be addressed violently as an aberrant
articulation to be punished in the name of reinforcing the norm.
Positively, as Lloyd points out, Butler uses this kind of moment
to show how challenges to the norm are intrinsic to the norm
itself (2007: 152). Thus, we can begin to provide an answer to
Butler’s question of how to think of ‘the one with no place who
nevertheless seeks to claim one within speech, the unintelligible as
it emerges in the intelligible’ (2000: 78). This emergence, on the
account I have been trying to give here, is not from invisibility to

visibility or from not mattering to mattering. The limits of norms
are always contestable sites where the human – the one we can
accept and the one that we try to cover over – is always at stake.
How this emergence occurs – and how it is presented and received
– will determine whether it shows up as a kind of ethical recogni-
tion of a common humanity or as a political intervention into the
order of dominant norms.
The human, politics and ethics in the AIDS crisis

To illustrate this point more fully, consider Leo Bersani’s reading
of the response to the AIDS epidemic in ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’
(1987). Bersani begins by pointing out the apparently obvious
claim that the US government’s (specifically, the Reagan admin-
istration’s) lack of response to the growing epidemic and the
increasing number of deaths of homosexual men illustrates that
the life, suffering and death of gay men did not matter and failed
to warrant intervention. But Bersani goes on to show how this
logic of not mattering is actually evidence of its opposite. Bersani
argues that in investigating the (now seen as early) responses to the
AIDS epidemic we must pay attention to the ‘fantasmatic logic’
that attends it. As evidence he points to a report in the New York
Times that attributed to the mayor of Arcadia, Florida, where a
family’s home was torched because three boys who lived there
were rumoured to have AIDS, the following position: ‘a lot of local
people, including himself, believed that powerful interests, prin-
cipally the national gay leaders, had pressured the Government
into refraining from taking legitimate steps to help contain the
spread of AIDS’ (Nordheimer cited in Bersani 1987: 210). Bersani
points out both the fantastical argument (at that time) that any gay
leaders were powerful enough ‘to pressure the federal government
to do anything at all’ and that somehow those ‘hit most heavily by
AIDS want nothing more intensely than to see it spread unchecked’
(1987: 211). More powerfully he shows how this assumption
implies that ‘those being killed are killers’ (Bersani 1987: 211).
Further, ‘the presumed original desire to kill gays may itself be
understandable only in terms of the fantasy for which it is offered
as an explanation: homosexuals are killers’ (Bersani 1987: 211).
Here the fear of the spread of HIV/AIDS figures gay men, not
as lives that do not matter, but as larger-than-life perpetrators of
sexual deviance and carriers of disease and death. Gay men appear
on the scene of the HIV/AIDS crisis as an expression of the human
that the social order cannot process or handle. If their lives were
not yet grievable in Butler’s terms, it was not because their lives
did not matter, nor that their lives have been marked as inhuman
in the constitution of the human norm. Instead, their lives mat-
tered intensely, and it is only as human that their lives show up
as deviant and dangerous. Following Foucault, we might say that
their lives must be disallowed to the point of death (Foucault
[1978] 1994: 138). But we must not read this disallowing of life
as a response made possible by a prior process of dehumanisation,
for that risks forgetting the politics of the social order that made
such suffering possible by turning a specific political conjuncture
into a generic process of dehumanisation.
Bersani’s portrayal of the AIDS crisis and of queer responses to
it additionally warns against an easy amelioration of these damag-
ing conditions through expanded social recognition of identities
and practices. Bersani worries about what he calls the ‘redemptive
reinvention of sex’ that has arisen from ‘contemporary discourse
that argues for a radically revised imagination of the body’s capac-
ity for pleasure’ (1987: 215, original emphasis). Bersani is par-
ticularly concerned that a celebration of the pleasures of the body
that might arise out of a particular reading of Foucault will cover
over our ongoing anxieties about various sexual practices. That
is, a quick move to a generic pluralist embrace of multiplicity can
overlook the importance of the specificity of lives and practices.5
The political ends to which Bersani directs this critique are differ-
ent from my own here, but his criticism is important nonetheless.
For if we make the AIDS crisis and the response to it into a simple
story of the recognition of the vulnerability, the grievability, and
thus the humanity of gay men and their sex practices, which has
led to their redemptive admission into the world of political mat-
tering and agency, then we lose sight of the political salience of
their lives, and their agency, before, during and after the gay rights
revolution. This story would become an ethical one of recovery,
rather a political one that required the reconfiguration of norms
through the disruption of and intervention in the normative order.
The turn to the ethical task of mourning, as Honig points out
in her reading of Douglas Crimp, ‘was unavoidable in the face of
devastating losses [of so many lives to AIDS] but it was also dan-
gerous: it threatened to absorb the much-needed political energies
of a nascent movement’ (2013: 75). The work of mourning, as

Honig points out, does not necessarily stifle the movement’s politi-
cal energy, though it can too easily slide in that direction. In her
discussion of the controversy of the AIDS Names Project quilt,
Honig juxtaposes the more political response of Crimp’s ambiva-
lent attitude towards the quilt with Butler’s embracing of it as
‘exemplary, ritualizing and repeating the name itself as a way of
publically avowing limitless loss’ (Butler cited in Honig 2013: 61).
Crimp, as Honig writes, ‘worries that the quilt undoes the passion
and anger of activism’. Further, ‘[m]aking gay male deaths griev-
able, Crimp worries contra Butler avant la lettre we might say, is
less an achievement than making gay male lives acceptable’ (Honig
2013: 62, original emphasis).
To put the point a bit differently: the issue here is not to make
gay men grievable so that they might matter, but to make gay
men matter in such a way that their deaths may cause us grief and
also provoke us to anger (or even rage). This shift in emphasis
from Butler’s concept of grievability more clearly foregrounds the
way that, in this case, gay men mattered (and mattered intensely)
politically before the widespread mourning of their suffering and
deaths. Further, the political movement provoked by the outrage
over their suffering focuses attention on the specific ways that
they were actively ignored and excluded: not because they did not
matter or were considered inhuman, but because their expression
of humanness threatened the given order. The move to public
grief over the AIDS crisis, most notably in the AIDS quilt and the
red ribbons campaign, threatens to obscure the responsibility we
bear for the violence and harm caused by the social order. Our
anxiety over these conditions, in the act of mourning, can be too
easily ameliorated by the ability to mourn publicly together. We
need only see the act of holding vigils and announcing our grief on
social networking sites as evidence of the depoliticising power of
these kinds of acts of mourning. For once the grief and outrage has
been expressed collectively via these collective acts of mourning, it
often quickly fades from view. Thus, Honig can write, ‘[t]he risk
is that we let go of the rage and righteous anger that feed political
protest, activism, and self-organization. “We Have Turned Our
Anger into a Piece of Quilt and Red Ribbons” read one ACT UP
poster’ (2013: 62).
Subversion or survival?
The tension in responses to the AIDS crisis between mourning and
activism parallels the dichotomy in Butler’s work between a poli-
tics of subversion and an ethics of grievability. This tension mani-
fests itself perhaps most starkly in Butler’s theory of the subject,
particularly as it is articulated in The Psychic Life of Power
(1997a). There Butler wants to interrogate what pre-subjective
entity or drive might cause us to turn to becoming subjects, to
give ourselves over to terms of existence that we do not author.
The basic answer for Butler is survival. That is, there must be
some kind of Spinozan conative drive for existence and persistence
that pushes us to accept the (mostly unhappy on Butler’s reading)
terms of becoming a subject (Chambers 2003: chapter 5 and
Lloyd 2007: 102). This drive reinforces the vulnerability of the
human because, as she argues, ‘the desire to survive, “to be”, is a
pervasively exploitable desire’ (Butler 1997a: 7). To be a subject,
then, originally means to be vulnerable, manipulable and repress-
ible because our desire to be forces us to take up the conditions
of existence that we do not determine. The factical story behind
this condition, for Butler, is the fact that we all begin as children
and, thus, are always at the mercy of another. For Butler, the basic
terms of subjectivity, then, involve an originary vulnerability and,
indeed, ‘unfreedom’. Moreover, to be a subject is to be caught
in ‘the bind of self-expression’ (Butler 1999: xxiv), in which the
subject is never able to speak in her own voice, but only in the
terms by which she has been conferred subjectivity.
Even so, Butler argues that, again, the phenomenon of iteration
makes it possible that the agency that comes along with subjection
can to some extent outrun the terms of our subjection. Further,
she suggests that we can loosen the knot of subjection, even if we
cannot untie it or break the (apparently vicious) circle. One way
to loosen these binds is to form a kind of passionate attachment
to the terms of our subjection that grants some increased agency
in determining which ways of life we live (Butler 1997a: 66). This
account of the subject, then, requires an ability to manipulate
‘the gap between the originating context or intention by which an
utterance is animated and the effects it produces’ (Butler 1997b:
14), which the notion of the conative drive works to provide. The
problem here is that for Butler the possibility of escaping these
terms of subjectivity themselves requires a new form of spectral
existence. She suggests that turning away from the normative

forms of existence calls for a form of agency that can resist the
norm’s ‘lure of identity, an agency that outruns and counters the
conditions of its emergence. Such a turn demands a willingness not
to be – a critical desubjectivation – in order to expose the law as
less powerful than it seems’ (Butler 1997a: 130). This turn to des-
ubjectivation as an alternative to the binds of subjectivity, in this
way, parallels Butler’s understanding of the human in relation to
the power of norms. For on Butler’s account the alternative to rec-
ognition or inclusion in dominant norms is a life of spectrality or
unreality from the perspective of the dominant normative order.
The difference here is that the unreality, which previously featured
as an unhappy condition of abjection and invisibility, now shows
up as a potentially felicitous condition for the reclamation of the
terms of subjectivity (and perhaps of subversion of dominant
norms as well).
Despite the ‘spectrality’ of this state of being, in Antigone’s
Claim Butler argues that there is an important, if peculiar, form
of agency here. She suggests that the body of the abject exists in
an ontologically suspended mode where it persists ‘in spite of its
foreclosure’ by dominant norms (Butler 2000: 78). In this way, the
human always exceeds the terms of normative recognition and its
attendant images of human identity. Therefore, it marks the site
of desire that can exceed and persist in spite of repressive norma-
tive practices. This ecstatic persistence serves as a fecund source of
political agency because even in this basic persistence, the subject
has the possibility to subvert and recast the possibilities open to it.
As Butler suggests, this persistence allows for the possibility of an
‘aberrant unprecedented future’ through the possibility of fantasy
(Butler 2000: 82; see also Butler 2004b: 27). From this perspec-
tive the agency of the human emerges in the fantastical ability to
make the ‘impossible claim’ of acting and speaking ‘as if you were
human’, in spite of the foreclosure of those possibilities in reality
(Butler 2004b: 27–30).
Here Butler’s example of ‘women’s human rights’ comes into
view as an ‘impossible claim’ that has become a reality as a call to
political action against the injustices done to women in our mas-
culinist social order. By putting together these terms together in an
apparently ‘inappropriate’ way, the possibility of disrupting the
normative force of ‘women’, ‘human rights’ and a whole constella-
tion of terms is put into play. Agency emerges, then, in spite of its
foreclosure by the normative image of the human and intelligibility.

As Butler writes, ‘[i]f there is an operation of agency, or, indeed,
freedom in this struggle, it takes place in the context of enabling
and limiting field of constraint. This ethical agency is neither fully
determined nor radically free’ (Butler 2005: 19). It is uncertain
whether some readers would find this ‘ethical agency’ sufficient
for the task of politics, but I find in its emphasis on a potential for
agency (one that lies between determinism and radical freedom)
an important recasting of the figure of the human and the agentic
possibilities open to it. I hold on to the significance of this recast-
ing despite the fact that Butler herself slides back towards a focus
on the unhappy conditions of being a subject when she notes that
this freedom ‘is made possible, paradoxically, by the persistence of
this primary condition of unfreedom’ (Butler 2005: 19). We come
closer to capturing the experience of the human agency, I suggest,
when we remain with the notion of agency between determinism
and freedom. When we turn back to an abstracted initial condition
of unfreedom, then we risk returning to a project of recovery of, or
at least melancholy for, a primary freedom that cannot be.
A politics of the human

Given the ethical and normative pull of the concept of the human,
it remains an open question whether we can have a politics of the
human. Honig’s response to this dilemma is to call for an ‘ago-
nistic humanism’ that privileges natality and contestation over
vulnerability and mortalism (Honig 2010: 4). The presumption of
agonism, however, is that one can simply struggle. The ambiguity
(and, indeed, inconsistency) of Butler’s treatment of the human
calls into question the presumption of struggle by privileging the
problem of survival that surely attends the lives of the abject.
Must struggle and survival, and the political and ethical, remain
opposed? The question might be whether there are also forms of
mattering and agentic capacities that can emerge from the need
for and the conditions of survival, those in which we are always
given over to (and potentially undone by) others. The persistent
mattering of the human that I have been advocating in this essay
offers the possibility of seeing the kinds of agency and potential
for politics that endures in the concept of the human. Here I offer
one more example of human expression that is suspended between
the drives for struggle and survival. In recent years, a Zimbabwean
women’s movement, Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA), has

developed in response to the abuses of the Mugabe regime. The
women often demonstrate in the streets even though they are
typically quickly arrested, detained and intimidated. One way of
theorising these conditions might be to read them as a result or
practice of dehumanisation in which these women are being made
invisible by the ongoing repression of the Mugabe regime. But I
think it is crucial to listen to their own self-description here. In an
interview on Public Radio International one woman described the
protests as an expression of the human: ‘When we go to the street
and demonstrate, we are human beings enjoying our freedom.
They will never take away the beauty, the joy, and the celebration
of those moments when we are on the street’ (The World, 22 April
2013). As witnesses of experiences like these, it is crucial that we
not take them as lives that have been rendered derealised, spec-
tral, unintelligible, caused not to matter. These protests and other
like expressions of subversion present a complex of the human as
a form of life that at once is free and restrained, oppressor and
oppressed, and perhaps even human and inhuman. In the case of
the WOZA women, subversion and survival are intimately linked.
To frame this last point, I consider Jacques Rancière’s reading of
‘the rights of man’ in which he offers a criticism of the rhetoric of
the rights that parallels my account of the human here (Rancière
2004).6 Rancière resists Arendt’s claim that there are those who are
rendered inhuman and, thus, denied human rights, and in so doing
he pushes the claim of the universalism of human rights to its limit.
Against the idea, put in Butler’s terms, that the putative universal-
ism of human rights is ‘not yet the case’, Rancière offers the fol-
lowing provocative restatement of the logic of human rights: ‘The
Rights of Man are the rights of those who have not the rights that
they have and have the rights that they have not’ (2004: 302). That
is, the putative universalism of human rights necessarily implies
that everyone already possesses them. Therefore, in their inabil-
ity to enact these rights, the excluded illustrate the limits of the
power and accessibility of human rights, for they ‘possess’ them
but cannot utilise them. In this way, Rancière refuses the logic that
those people who fall outside of a given regime of ‘the human’ are
simply dehumanised or are somehow excluded from the possible
universality of human rights. As he notes, ‘this attempt [at dehu-
manisation] depopulates the political stage by sweeping aside the
always-ambiguous actors’ (2004: 301). Against the logic of dehu-
manisation, Rancière affirms the universalism of human rights in

a very particular way by showing that those who are denied these
rights can and do continue to claim them, drawing upon the uni-
versality of human rights that putatively extends to everyone. As
he suggests, ‘[t]he Rights of man are the rights of those who make
something of that inscription who decide not only to “use” their
rights but also to build such and such a case for the verification of
the power of the inscription’ (Rancière 2004: 303). Human rights
on Rancière’s account are universal only insofar as anyone can
claim them and attempt to make use of them. The human, and
human rights, then, cannot be determined in advance by a set of
norms and the limits that they draw. ‘Politics,’ as Rancière puts it,
‘is about that border’ (2004: 303). The possibilities for politics,
dissensus and agonism become less available when we accept or
affirm in advance what counts as human, as mattering, as strug-
gle, or even as the political or ethical. The desire and struggle for
survival itself may contain within it certain modes of politics that
we might be able to locate alongside given regimes of the human
and of ethics and politics.
There is another way to frame my question of the always-already
human: lives persist in spite of being closed out, and their persis-
tence, even if they do not know what they are doing, continues to
challenge the hegemony of dominant social and normative orders.
In continuing to live lives even outside the normative structure of
the police, these lives are always already beginning to construct
a new scene for the human and its possibilities (Rancière [1995]
1999 and 2001). Despite the ontological suspension of this state
of being, in Butler’s terms, these humans are nonetheless never
completely wiped out or covered over. A ‘human’ politics of sub-
version might work this way: take the prisoners at Guantanamo
Bay who were systematically named ‘detainees’ in order to cover
over their claims for basic human rights. From one perspective the
state has worked to strip them of humanity in order to indefinitely
detain and even torture them. But on the account I have been
trying to give, the state and its norms of the human cannot fully
determine the situation, for there is an ever-ongoing contestation
of the prisoners’ status. As Rancière puts it, ‘[t]hese rights are
theirs when they can do something with them to construct a dis-
sensus against the denial of rights they suffer. And there are always
people among them who do it’ (2004: 305, my emphasis). Despite
the foreclosure of the detainees’ right to speak, many of them
through their hunger strikes and other acts of resistance, along

with their lawyers and outside voices of families, communities and
activists, continue to deviate and attempt to establish a new scene
for their staging of ‘the wrong’ of these practices. The persistence
of deviant forms of life requires a constant revision of limits of the
human and the practices these limits allow.
On Butler’s terms, the issue at stake here is whether we can come
to recognise the vulnerability and grievability of these people, and
whether they can come to matter to us as persons of ethical and
political concern. But the central political issue is not that people
may or may not be grieved, or whether we can come to terms with
the precariousness of our lives. Politics and ethics do not begin nor
end with vulnerability and our recognition of it. Instead, the task
is to illuminate and contest both these unjust conditions and the
persistence of people in spite of these injustices. The movements
of humans at the borders of what we might call human work
to subvert – sometimes slowly eroding, and sometimes violently
challenging – the power of certain norms to regulate our lives.
This account works to relieve the problem of accounting for those
who might be considered unintelligible or inhuman to find a way
to cross the seemingly impossible epistemological, agentic gap into
the terms of the liveable, the intelligible and the human. For, if
the deviant is part of the structure of the norm itself, subversion is
always already in play. In Butler’s words, ‘[i]t [the norm] is over-
come, in part, precisely through the repeated scandal by which the
unspeakable nevertheless makes itself heard through borrowing
and exploiting the very terms that are meant to enforce its silence’
(2000: 78). To realise this latter impulse, then, requires a politics
of the human that prioritises the experience and expression of
struggle over the desire for a common essence through which the
‘mattering’ of all human beings will be made visible. The human,
as one expression of difference in the world, is not a question of
loss and recovery; instead, the human is always-already a process
of a difference and repetition, human and inhuman, acknowledg-
ment and betrayal. If we are to ameliorate the often brutal condi-
tions of human life, then it cannot be a matter of moving from the
inhuman to the human, the spectral to the visible, but a matter of
responding to the human and all that we are capable of doing to
one another.
Notes
1. This criticism of the role of vulnerability in Butler’s work is not
exactly new. The weight of the role of wounding, mourning and mel-
ancholy on her theories of the subject and of agency has long been
criticised, even by her most sympathetic readers. It has been variously
criticised for dragging down the creative potential of performativity
(Phillips 1997), for contributing to an overly dramatic and indi-
vidualised concept of performativity (Sedgwick 2003), for reifying
the dichotomy between subversion and subjection in her models of
agency and subjectivity (Mahmood 2005), and, now most recently,
for contributing to a ‘new humanism’ as part of the ongoing ethical
turn in political theory and philosophy (Honig 2010). In a different
mode, David McIvor (2012) suggests a reorientation of the politics
of mourning by moving from Butler’s Freudian-inspired project to a
Kleinian approach to mourning.
2. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick makes a related argument in a discussion of
alternatives to a hermeneutics of suspicion. She writes: ‘While there
is plenty of hidden violence that requires exposure there is also, and
increasingly, an ethos where forms of violence that are hypervisible
from the start may be offered as an exemplary spectacle rather than
remain to be unveiled as a scandalous secret. Human rights contro-
versy around, for example, torture and disappearances in Argentina
or the use of mass rape as part of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia marks,
not an unveiling of practices that had been hidden or naturalized, but
a wrestle of different frameworks of visibility’ (2003: 140).
3. My thanks to Moya Lloyd for help in clarifying this position.
4. It is important not to suggest a glorified image of the work of subver-
sion or downplay the suffering of those who do not conform to heter-
onormativity, who are the subject of indiscriminate bombings, or who
are tortured in the name of national security. As Butler convincingly
argues: ‘to veer from the norm is to produce the aberrant example
that regulatory power may quickly exploit’ (2004a: 52). Indeed, to
deviate from the norm marks one for violence, and the regulatory
power of the norm can ‘foreclose the thinkability of its disruption’
(Butler 2004a: 43).
5. It should be noted that it was much easier to imagine a more generic
pluralism in 1986, when Bersani wrote this essay, than it is today,
given the development of theories of pluralism. Of particular impor-
tance to this development is William Connolly’s notion of pluralisa-
tion as an ever-ongoing process of working for a more plural world
(Connolly 1995). Butler turns to this concept of pluralisation in her

critique of Zionism in Parting Ways.
6. For a discussion that focuses more particularly on the relationship
between Arendt and Rancière’s reading of her concept of ‘the right
to have rights’, see Schaap 2011. Many words have been written on
Arendt’s conception of human rights. Those that have been important
for my work here include Ingram 2008, Michelman 1996 and Honig
2005. Joe Hoover (2013) has, likewise, taken up an analysis of the
language of the ‘human’ in human rights, focusing on the ambiguity
of the ‘human’ through the work of William Connolly and Bonnie
Honig.
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7
The Ethics and Politics of Vulnerable

Bodies
Moya Lloyd
In an essay from 2000, Judith Butler confesses her worry that

the ‘return to ethics has constituted an escape from politics’ (15).
In a published conversation with the political theorist William
Connolly from that same year, she makes a similar claim, com-
menting that ‘I tend to think that ethics displaces from politics.’
The nature of the problem as she sees it is that ‘the use of power
as a point of departure for a critical analysis is substantially dif-
ferent from an ethical framework’ (Butler in Butler and Connolly
2000). How ironic, therefore, that several critics see Butler’s own
engagement with ethics in the same way: as a turn to ethics that
heralds either a turn away from politics or its displacement. (See,
for example, Dean 2008; Honig 2010, 2013; and Shulman 2011.)
Using this debate as the backdrop for this chapter, I want to plot
a different route through Butler’s discussion of ethics and politics,
by way of the vulnerable body. As I see it, it is not that her ethical
considerations lead her to abandon politics; in fact, she is at pains
throughout her work to emphasise how power operates to regu-
late and determine who counts as human, to shape and condition
the scene of recognition, and to circumscribe the types of ethical
encounter that might take place there. Butler is thus fully aware
of the ‘ethical stakes’ in ‘political encounters’ and of the ‘political
modalities’ shaping ‘ethical questions’ (in Butler and Athanasiou
2013: 74), of the ways that politics and ethics are inter-imbricated.
The difficulty is rather that there is a tension in her work between
ethical responsiveness as an abstract potentiality arising from
ecstatic relationality and existential precariousness and the actu-
alisation of ethics and politics in specific contexts of politically
induced precarity. Central to my discussion will be a considera-
tion of the ambivalent way that the idea of corporeal vulnerability
operates in her work.
167
The body has been a core idea in Butler’s work from her very
earliest writings through to the most recent; however, her charac-
terisation of it has been far from static or straightforward. She has,
at various points, posited a phenomenologically-informed account
of the body as an ‘historical idea’ (Butler 1989); an understanding
of ‘sex’ and the sexed body as the effect of a binary ‘gender appa-
ratus’ such that sex was ‘always already gender’ (Butler 1990: 7); a
revised understanding of sex as a regulatory norm of embodiment
related to, but different in its operations from gender (Butler 1993);
and, in what appeared to be a quite distinct and even unexpected
turn in 2004 (Butler 2004a, 2004b), she offered a conceptualisa-
tion of the body as vulnerable, precarious and what she has more
recently termed ‘socially ecstatic’ (Butler 2011a). In fact, the theo-
retical antecedents of this conceptualisation can be found in The
Psychic Life of Power (Butler 1997). It is this relational account
of the body that I will focus on in this chapter. I am particularly
interested in the paradox inherent in Butler’s contention that the
very circumstance that renders certain bodies unrecognisable as
‘human’ – namely their precariousness, albeit mediated through
states of express precarity – is simultaneously the condition for
embodied political action and ethical responsiveness.
In the first section of the chapter, I examine Butler’s most recent
thinking on the body, outlining the main characteristics of that
thought and setting out the dualistic approach to vulnerability that
I contend that Butler adopts here. This is followed by a discussion
of the distinction that she draws between precariousness and pre-
carity, and their relation to the politics of vulnerability. In the final
two sections of the chapter, I consider first how it is possible to
perform politics in conditions of precarity, exploring in particular
Butler’s debt to Hannah Arendt, and second what practising ethics
in those same conditions might entail, focusing on whether Butler
is able to explain what needs to be done to encourage ethical
responsiveness in contexts where we are unable to ‘see’ particu-
lar persons as ‘human’ or ‘hear’ their address. Throughout the
chapter, I will relate my discussions to Butler’s work on gender.
Towards a ‘new body politics’

After 9/11 Butler started to make repeated calls for what she vari-
ously described as a ‘new body politics’ (2012a: 14), ‘a different
kind of bodily politics’ (2012a: 13), and the basis for a revised
The Ethics and Politics of Vulnerable Bodies 169
‘progressive or left politics’ (2009a: 2). Sometimes she couched

this call in terms of the need for ‘a new bodily ontology’ (Butler
2009a: 2) or its ‘rethinking’ (Butler 2009a: 3); at others, she for-
mulated it as a broader need to ‘conceptualize the body in the field
of politics’ (Butler 2011a: 385) or, at least, to ‘reconsider’ how it
is conceptualised (Butler 2009a: 52). Her avowed hope was that
a reorientation of this kind might open up ‘another kind of nor-
mative aspiration within the field of politics’ (Butler 2004a: 26)
and ‘a different conception of politics’ (Butler 2004b: 21). Why
was this necessary? What was wrong with, or deficient about, the
prevailing conceptualisation of corporeal politics that it required
revising? Indeed, what according to Butler did this prevailing con-
ceptualisation look like? In Frames of War, she provides a partial
answer: ‘We have to consider’, she remarks, ‘whether the body is
rightly defined as a bounded kind of entity’ (Butler 2009a: 52; see
also 2011a: 385).
The idea of ‘bounded’-ness, as Butler describes it, is intimately
connected with two politically salient ideas:1 corporeal autonomy,
where the capacity to demand rights over (the disposal of) our
bodies depends on the sense that, in some way, we own them,
that they are ours to control;2 and the ability to make anti-
discriminatory claims on behalf of ‘a group or a class’, when, she
declares, it is necessary to ‘present ourselves as bounded beings –
distinct, recognizable, delineated, subjects before the law’ (2004a:
24). These ideas are, of course, integral to many political cam-
paigns and to the movements that espouse them, from feminist
calls for reproductive freedom, access to contraception and abor-
tion, through demands for the right of ‘intersex people . . . to make
their own decisions affecting own (sic) bodily integrity, physical
autonomy and self-determination’ (Third International Intersex
Forum, 2013), to gay and lesbian demands for sexual freedom.
Corporeal integrity and self-determination are seen to go hand
in hand. One cannot live one’s life as one chooses if someone or
something else – another person, institution or the state – controls
one’s body, including both what is done by it and to it.
Butler is certainly sympathetic to the need to campaign for
certain rights – she talks, for example, of the need to continue
to ‘maximize the protection and freedoms of sexual and gender
minorities, of women, and of racial and ethnic minorities’ (2004a:
26). Additionally, she acknowledges that it is nigh on impos-
sible to make such demands without deploying the language of
autonomy, and specifically corporeal autonomy (Butler 2004b:

21). Nevertheless she discerns a problem with the way that ‘certain
notions of autonomy’ have ‘made us think about individuals as
self-motored’ (Butler in Butler with Taylor 2009: 210). In Undoing
Gender, she indicates why: autonomy is problematic when it is
assumed to signify ‘a state of individuation, taken as self-persisting
prior to and apart from any relations of dependency on the world
of others’ (Butler 2004b: 32). The difficulty, she explains, is that
‘the body does not belong to itself and never can’ (Butler 2011a:
385). To survive, bodies depend from birth on what is outside or
beyond them.
When Butler calls for the development of a ‘new’ conceptu-
alisation of the body and a new bodily politics, based on a ‘new’
corporeal ontology, therefore, she is not calling simply for a dis-
missal of (bodily) autonomy and its associated claiming of rights;
bodily autonomy, as she sees it, is ‘a lively paradox’ (Butler 2004b:
21; see Chambers and Carver 2008: 71), something that must be
claimed just as it needs to be disclaimed. Her goal, rather, is to
champion their rethinking on the assumption of the body’s funda-
mental dependency.
Questioning whether it is possible to talk of the ‘being’ of the
body, Butler speculates that if it is, then this ‘being’ is that the
corpus is ‘always given over to others, to norms, to social and
political organizations’ (2011a: 382; see also 2004b: 21). For
Butler this emphasis on the sociality of the body is important
ontologically. As indicated, in her terms the body is never simply
one’s own. It is always impinged upon from outside: by others,
known and unknown, distant and proximate; by social norms;
by historically specific conditions of embodiment; by social and
political organisations; and by environmental factors. Bodies, in
fact, exist ‘not only in the vector of these relations but as this very
vector’ (Butler 2011a: 385, my emphasis). Consequently, the flesh
is always already public and social – both the individual’s corpus
and yet not its own at the same time, bounded yet simultaneously
unbounded, impermeable yet permeable. As such, Butler reasons,
the body has no essence per se. Rather the ontology of the body,
as she apprehends it, is a ‘social ontology’ (Butler 2011a: 382,
original emphasis; see also Butler 2009a: 3).
Although it might appear that Butler is advancing a relational
account of the embodied subject, she is not merely contending that
fleshy selves ‘have’ relations with other fleshy selves that somehow
define them, affect them or shape them into the embodied enti-
ties they are. As her discussion of the body-as-vector intimates,
her claim is rather that the corporeal self ‘“is” ’ its ‘relation to
alterity’ (Butler 2004b: 150, my emphasis); it is constituted in
and by these relations. Without the ‘forming and unforming’ of
‘bonds’ with others (Butler 2009a: 182) there would be no subject.
These bonds are the very condition of possibility for subjectivity,
socially, affectively and psychologically. It is its relation to alterity
that enables the corporeal subject to desire, to experience passion,
to be affected by and to affect others, and to act; in short, to exist.
As I have argued elsewhere (Lloyd 2007), Butler is indebted
in her thinking here to the idea of ecstasy or ek-stasis, which she
construes as ‘to be transported beyond oneself by a passion’ or
to be ‘beside oneself’ (2004b: 20, original emphasis).3 For Butler,
ecstasis is ontological (2004b: 150): the embodied subject is
beyond itself from the beginning. In The Psychic Life of Power,
she explores this in terms of psychic subjectivity. The subject
first emerges, Butler suggests, as a result of its ‘passionate attach-
ment’ to those on whom it depends for its survival, such as its
initial carers (1997: 7; for further discussion see Lloyd 1998–9), a
dependency that must be disavowed if the subject is to attain full
subjectivity.4 The subject’s ecstatic existence continues as it experi-
ences desire, passion, grief, rage or love, experiences that ‘undo’
it, and as its body is dispossessed through the senses, as tactile,
visual, auditory, haptic, olfactory capacities ‘comport us beyond
ourselves’ (Butler in Hark and Villa 2011: 200; Butler 2012a: 16;
see Butler 2004a: 24). Being ‘undone’ or dispossessed by another
is not just a source of ‘anguish’, however; potentially at least,
it is ‘also a chance’ of transformation, ‘our chance of becoming
human’ (Butler 2005: 136; see also Stark 2014. I will return to the
significance of this claim shortly). The relationality Butler talks of,
therefore, is ‘ecstatic relationality’ (Butler in Hark and Villa 2011:
200).
Butler’s reconceptualisation of the body also rests on the idea
of vulnerability; indeed, it is precisely corporeal vulnerability
that makes possible ecstatic relationality, and thence ethics and
politics. Butler is usually read by critics as equating vulnerability
primarily, even exclusively, with susceptibility to harm or injury.
Bonnie Honig’s characterisation of her as a ‘mortalist humanist’,
for example, rests precisely on the contention that Butler privileges
the ‘ontological fact of mortality’ and ‘vulnerability to suffering’
(2013: 17; see also Honig 2010) while simultaneously neglecting

a natalist emphasis on pleasure, desire and hunger. Ann Murphy,
who defines Butler as a ‘corporeal humanist’, describes her as
figuring the body ‘as an entity that is – above all else – vulnerable
to injury and suffering’ (2011: 577).5 George Shulman talks of
Butler’s emphasis on ‘mortal vulnerability’ or ‘mortal precarious-
ness’, and of her ethics as ‘oriented by a finitude that binds us to
(the suffering and mortality) of others’ (2011).
Reading Butler’s last few books, it is easy to see why critics
might stress suffering and mortality. Precarious Life was com-
posed in response to the terrible events of 9/11, and Frames of
War is explicitly concerned with questions of grievability. Yet the
assumption that detrimental effects necessarily flow from corpo-
real vulnerability means that another, admittedly less prominent,
aspect of Butler’s argument is overlooked. This is what corporeal
vulnerability makes possible.
The discussion of ecstatic subjectivity demonstrated that to be
vulnerable for Butler is to be exposed to what is beyond or outside
the self; indeed the body, for her, is ‘vulnerable by definition’
(Butler 2009a: 33). Vulnerability, however, is not synonymous
with or reducible to injurability (Butler 2009a: 34, 61).6 In fact
‘[a]ll responsiveness to what happens’, she declares, ‘is a function
and effect of vulnerability’ (Butler 2012a: 16, my emphasis), includ-
ing ‘all the various ways in which we are moved, entered, touched,
or ways that ideas and others make an impression on us’ (Butler
in Hark and Villa 2011: 200). Vulnerability in this sense is also
the condition of possibility for love, desire, care, hope and life, the
very natalist features that Honig largely fails to discern in Butler’s
work.7 To make sense of Butler’s wider discussions of agency and
resistance and of politics and ethics, we have to acknowledge this
more expansive apprehension of vulnerability – as the ecstatic
capacity to be affected by and to affect others (Gilson 2011).
Butler’s revised account of corporeality as vulnerability thus
brings to the fore a number of features: that because of their rela-
tionality, bodies are ‘invariably in community’ with other bodies,
that relationality is ‘a descriptive or historical fact’ of subject for-
mation, and, most importantly given the concerns of this chapter,
that relationality is an ‘ongoing normative dimension of our
social and political lives’, one that requires us to take account of
our interdependence (Butler 2004a: 27). For my purposes here,
however, there is one final feature of Butler’s reconceptualised
account of corporeality that needs addressing; this is the concept

of precarity.
From precariousness to precarity and precaritisation

Butler’s focus on the body in sociality has the effect, as we have
seen, of drawing attention to the vulnerability of somatic life.
Simply pointing to the existence of a generalised condition of
shared somatic vulnerability says little, however, about the body
in politics or the political body. In her earlier discussions, Butler
spoke primarily of corporeal ‘vulnerability’ or of ‘precariousness’
(2004a, 2004b). In Frames of War, however, she introduces a
distinction that seems to me to be designed to capture the politics
of vulnerability. Whether it does so or not is moot. This is the dis-
tinction between ‘precariousness’ and ‘precarity’. Butler designates
‘precariousness’ as a ‘more or less existential conception’ (2009a:
3) or ‘general feature of embodied life’ (Butler in Kania 2013: 33),
signalling a common vulnerability shared by all bodies.
This is in contrast to what she describes as the ‘more specifically
political notion of “precarity” ’ (Butler 2009a: 3), or the way that
‘precariousness is amplified and made more acute under certain
social policies’ (Butler in Kania 2013: 33). Precarity thus references
the differential condition whereby some lives are rendered more
insecure, unequal or destitute than others.8 Calling on Foucault,
in the essay ‘Can one lead a good life in a bad life?’, Butler thus
explicitly tethers precarity to biopolitics, ‘those powers that organ-
ize life’ and that ‘establish a set of measures for the differential
valuation of life itself’ (2012a: 10). In contrast to her more general-
ised notion of precariousness, therefore, ‘precaritization’, Butler’s
term for the ‘process of acclimatizing a population to insecurity’
(Butler in Butler and Athanasiou 2013: 43), involves the social and
political organisation of corporeal need and bodily interdepend-
ency in specific, concrete and historically delimited ways.
Precarity and precaritisation are interesting terms for Butler to
deploy given their recent lexical history.9 As a political concept,
the term ‘precarity’ has been deployed, mainly in a European
context, to denote ‘the financial and existential insecurity arising
from the flexibilisation of labor’ under post-Fordism (Brophy and
de Peuter 2007: 180).10 ‘Precarisation’, an English neologism of
the French term ‘précarisation’, refers to what Pierre Bourdieu in
1998 described as a ‘mode of domination of a new kind, based on
the creation of a generalized and permanent state of insecurity’

for workers (Bourdieu cited in Brophy and de Peuter 2007: 183);
while a third term, the ‘precariat’, is used to designate a ‘new
kind of political subject’ (Neilson and Rossiter 2008: 52). This is
a vocabulary embedded in political economy. There are certainly
echoes of these meanings in Butler’s employment of this lexicon:
she often mentions, for instance, a ‘disposable’ or ‘dispensable’
workforce (Butler 2012a; Butler in Puar 2012; Butler in Kania
2013); she attends more to economic questions in Dispossession;
and she appears aware of their context-specific usage (see particu-
larly Butler in Hark and Villa 2011; and Butler in Kania 2013).
But Butler uses precarity and precaritisation in a somewhat
different, and potentially more ambitious way, to encompass
not only the insecurities arising from changing labour conditions
but as a way to register the diverse ‘modes of “unliveability” ’
(Butler 2012a: 12) that scar the contemporary scene, described
by Athena Athanasiou in terms of ‘socially assigned disposability’
and ‘various modalities of valuelessness’ (Athanasiou in Butler
and Athanasiou 2013: 19). One way to understand this emphasis,
I propose, is to see it in terms of what I call the political problem
of the human.
Cast in terms of Butler’s own philosophical language, this
problem centres on the recognition–recognisability nexus. Drawing
from Hegel, she proposes that recognition be understood as ‘an act
or practice undertaken by at least two subjects’ that ‘constitutes a
reciprocal action’, whereas recognisability is her term to delineate
‘those general conditions on the basis of which recognition can and
does take place’ (Butler 2009a: 6). Thus ‘norms of recognizability
prepare the way for recognition’ (Butler 2009a: 7). Her point, as
I have discussed elsewhere, is that norms of recognisability deter-
mine who is eligible for recognition (Lloyd 2007: 147): who, that
is, is ‘intelligible’ as ‘human’. For Butler there is, as such, a direct
connection between the recognition/recognisability couplet and
precarity, which is that ‘the differential distribution of norms of
recognition directly implies the differential allocation of precarity’
(Butler in Butler and Athanasiou 2013: 89). Those who are not
recognisable as ‘human’ are more precarious than those who are.
From her earliest writings on gender, Butler has always been
interested in the dangers attaching to those enactments of gender
that contest or deviate from reigning heteronormative norms. In
an essay from 1988 she observes how the presence of a ‘transves-
tite on the seat next to us on the bus can compel fear, rage, even
violence’ (Butler 1988: 527). In Bodies that Matter (1993), she
retells the story of Venus Xtravaganza, a pre-operative Latina
trans(sexual) woman whose murder in 1988 has never been
solved. In the 1999 Preface to Gender Trouble she highlights, for
instance, the violence of gender norms against those with anatomi-
cally anomalous bodies (Butler 1999). Undoing Gender is replete
with further examples: the killings of Brandon Teena, Mathew
Shephard and Gwen Araujo;11 the use of surgical intervention to
‘correct’ intersexed conditions; the story of David Reimer;12 and
psychiatric diagnoses of gender disorders. In all of these diverse
and usually briefly documented cases, Butler’s goal is to show
the hazards faced by – or what she comes to call the ‘precarity’
of – corporeal figures who do not fit neatly into (hetero)normative
categories of sex, gender and sexuality, and who thus ‘fall outside
the human’ (Butler 1990: 111).
The theory of performativity disclosed that gender is enacted in
relation to norms. The idea of ecstatic relationality makes more
explicit how this norm-governed enactment takes place in relation
to others (widely conceived). As she puts it, gender is a ‘passion-
ate comportment, a way of living the body with and for others’
(Butler 2009b: xii). In this sense, ‘no one gets to have gender all
on their own . . . We can’t – we don’t, actually – make radical or
self-sufficient decisions about who we want to be or how we are
perceived or recognized’ (Butler in Butler with Taylor 2009: 208).
Rather, how we appear to others is conditioned by gender norms.
To be eligible for recognition, an embodied being has first of all
to be intelligible to others as gendered – that is, gendered in a way
that makes sense according to dominant gender norms. Those
who are unintelligible in these terms are unrecognisable – they
do not appear in public as legible subjects in their own right, in
other words – and as a result, have no ‘place in the social order’
(Butler in Butler with Taylor 2009: 208). Their lives are not worth
protecting, sheltering or sustaining; not ‘liveable’ as Butler charac-
terises it. Theirs are disposable lives.
We have already seen that precarity for Butler signals a politi-
cally generated condition of heightened risk, jeopardy and threat
for specific populations. It is thus used by her to distinguish
between primary vulnerability, the ontological condition of being
given over to others shared by all, and concrete particular, histori-
cal conditions of insecurity and liability faced by some. At various
junctures in her work, Butler furnishes examples of conditions

that qualify as precarity: conditions of arbitrary state violence
or failing social and economic support networks (2009a: 25–6;
2009b: ii; 2011a: 383); situations of war, occupation, imprison-
ment and forced emigration (2012a: 12); exposure to unemploy-
ment or being part of an ‘expendable’ labour force (2012a: 12;
in Butler and Athanasiou 2013: 43), all of which she describes
as ‘clearly aims and effects of neoliberal forms of social and eco-
nomic life’ (in Butler and Athanasiou 2013: 21).
While gender is a cleavage that cuts across all of the above,
Butler also identifies specifically gendered examples of precarity in
the condition of sex workers threatened by police harassment and
‘street violence’, those whose intimate and kinship relations are
not recognised by the law, and populations whose nonconformity
to gender norms means they are at ‘heightened risk’ of aggression
and assault (2009b: ii). She even goes as far as to suggest that pre-
carity is a ‘rubric that brings together women, queers, transgender
people, the poor, and the stateless’ (Butler 2009b: xiii). In none
of these discussions, however, does Butler ever explore in detail
the actual mechanisms that give rise to the concrete precaritisa-
tion of a particular population beyond referring to it as a general
‘political’ process induced by ‘police actions, economic policies,
governmental policies, or forms of state racism and militarization’
(Butler in Butler with Taylor 2009: 33). She appears to consider
it sufficient for argumentative purposes simply to note that bodies
are made precarious – or precaritised – politically in a variety of
different ways.
Of course, it might be questioned whether it is viable to use a
single word, precarity, to describe the distinctive and even radi-
cally dissimilar ways in which fleshy lives are rendered unrecognis-
able and thus unliveable; particularly since this risks eliding the
very significant differences in experiences of precarity undergone
by diverse populations (Thobani 2007), and in overlooking the
plural conditions of unliveability operative at any one time. I want
to set aside these concerns in this chapter, however, in order to
focus on how precaritised bodies are able to act politically and eth-
ically. In the next section I explore how politics materialises both
within and against precarity (Butler 2012a: 14), before turning in
the final section to the question of the relation between precarious-
ness, precarity and ethics.
Performing politics in conditions of precarity

In a number of places in her work, Butler draws attention to the
interplay between two factors: precarity and performativity (see,
for example Butler 2009b; and Butler 2012a). She is particularly
concerned with what happens to performativity politically when
precarity is the starting point. In one of these discussions, Butler
indicates that performativity is for her ‘an account of agency’,
while precarity refers to the conditions ‘that threaten life in ways
that appear to be outside of one’s control’ (2009b: i). Her inter-
est in performativity in conditions of precarity might be recast,
therefore, as a question about how it is possible for precaritised
populations to act politically.
From previous work, we know that Butler regards the reproduc-
tion of gender as entailing what she has latterly defined as ‘a nego-
tiation with power’ (Butler 2009b: i): a doing of gender norms
that has the potential to re-do the norm in unanticipated ways or
even, in some unspecified circumstances, to un-do the norm and
thus (to borrow from Gender Trouble) to ‘disrupt the categories of
the body, sex, gender and sexuality and occasion their subversive
resignification and proliferation beyond the binary frame’ (Butler
1990: xxxi). The performativity of gender thus holds out the pos-
sibility, as Butler writes in 2009, of ‘remaking . . . gendered reality
along new lines’ (2009b: i); not an easy task, to be sure, given that
performative agency inheres in reiterating the same norms that
sustain the very thing in need of transformation, heteronormativ-
ity. Butler’s discussion of precarity adds significantly to this discus-
sion of performative agency.
In her Adorno lecture, she asks a particularly pertinent question:
‘When being dispossessed in sociality is regarded as a constitutive
function of what it means to live and persist, what difference does
that make to the idea of politics itself?’ (2012a: 16). Her answer,
given later in the lecture, is that democratic struggle requires politi-
cal resistance that is ‘plural’, ‘embodied’ and that will, in addition,
‘entail the gathering of the ungrievable in public space’ to demand
liveable lives (Butler 2012a: 18, original emphases).
‘Grievability’ is something of an ambivalent term in Butler’s
work. The concept emerges from her discussion of deaths that
have not been publically mourned or acknowledged, such as
deaths from AIDS in the US in the 1980s, or those at the hands
of American forces in Afghanistan and elsewhere after 9/11.
Although Butler exhibits some interest in the role of obituary

writing in regulating national identity (2004a), and in the report-
ing of deaths in the media, by and large she is not concerned with
the specific practices that comprise the politics of grief and mourn-
ing (Honig 2013). ‘Grievability’ for her is, rather, shorthand for
referring to liveable lives, lives that are supported economically,
politically and socially (Butler 2012a). As she explains in Frames
of War, grievability ‘precedes and makes possible the apprehen-
sion of the living being as living’ (Butler 2009a: 15). A grievable
life is a recognised life. Conversely, a life that is not recognised as
a life, a life that is devalued or unsupported, is, as Butler character-
ises it, a life that is ‘ungrievable or dispensable’ (Butler 2012a: 11).
‘Grievability’ thus functions in Butler’s work in much the way that
abjection (1993) and unintelligibility (1990, 2004a, 2004b) did
previously: as a way to differentiate between lives that are eligible
for rights, support and recognition (grievable lives) and those that
are not (ungrievable lives).13
Butler explains further how ‘the ungrievable’ are able to act
politically by turning to Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition,
from which she draws two ideas: politics as concerted action and
the scene of appearance. ‘When people gather to rally against
induced conditions of precarity, they are acting performatively,’
Butler writes, ‘giving embodied form to the Arendtian idea of
concerted action.’ At such times, the ‘performativity of poli-
tics’ emerges from, and in opposition to, conditions of precar-
ity (2012a: 14). Political struggle is not on this quasi-Arendtian
reading reducible to individual action; rather action is ‘concerted’
(or in concert) because it happens between participants in a strug-
gle; and it occurs when ‘bodies appear together’ (Butler 2011b).
This has a bearing on how Butler understands public space.
Calling (loosely) on Arendt, Butler surmises that public space
as such does not exist. Instead, when the ‘new social movements’
(2012a: 18) fighting against precarity demonstrate on the square or
rally in the street they ‘reconfigure the materiality of public space’
(Butler 2011b); by laying claim to that space, they constitute it as
public. Public space – the polis in Arendt’s discussion (1958: 198)
– is not a physical location; it is the organisation of people acting
in concert. This links with Arendt’s idea of the ‘space of appear-
ance’. Arendt defines this as ‘the space where I appear to others
as others appear to me’ (1958: 198). So, politics necessitates the
space of appearance; and that space facilitates politics. For Butler,
in contrast to Arendt, this space is irreducibly corporeal (2011b):

a space where bodies appear to other bodies.14 It is vulnerability
understood as sensate impressionability that enables this, that
allows the corpus of the other to appear to us (and vice versa).
According to Arendt, however, certain categories of persons
(slaves, barbarians and foreigners) were excluded from the space
of appearance in the classical polis; indeed, their very exclusion
defined that space. Pondering this, Butler asks, ‘how do we make
sense of those who can never be part of that concerted action’?
Are the ‘destitute outside of politics and power, or are they in fact
living out a specific form of political destitution?’ (Butler 2011b).
The answer to this question is important because to concede
Arendt’s point is to construct certain forms of political agency
and action as either pre- or extra-political. An example of such
reasoning may be found, she suggests, in the work of Giorgio
Agamben (1998) when he construes the excluded in terms of ‘bare
life’. Butler worries that this depoliticises the plight of those so
described and denies a way to discuss the modes of agency and
action engaged in by them, for to her mind such populations are
‘more often than not, angered, indignant, rising up, and resisting’
(Butler 2011b).
In contrast, Butler proposes that the precarity of the ungrievable
is biopolitically regulated; it is ‘a state actively produced, main-
tained, [and] reiterated’ (Butler in Butler and Spivak 2007: 10),
often by governments, though not exclusively. It is thus a state
internal to politics and power. This is an important qualification
for Butler because it allows exclusion to be considered as a politi-
cal problem and it makes visible the forms of agency and resistance
associated with and facilitated by it. While the ungrievable may be
excluded from ‘established and legitimate political structures’, that
is, while they may be unrecognisable as ‘subjects’, they are not ipso
facto excluded from politics per se. Preferring Foucault’s biopoliti-
cal account to Agamben’s discussion of bare life, Butler contends
not only that a life without rights is still ‘within the sphere of the
political’ but that far from being ‘bare’, the life of the stateless,
the occupied and the disenfranchised is, in fact, ‘mired’ in power
(Butler in Bell 2010: 149).
Butler invites us to think about how it is possible for the
ungrievable to lay claim to the public sphere – to (re)constitute
it – by turning to another of Arendt’s concepts, this time from
The Origins of Totalitarianism, namely the ‘right to have rights’
([1951] 2004). This is a right that comes into existence as it is

exercised by persons acting in concert. It is the means, I suggest,
by which performativity and precarity are conjoined. By way of
illustration I want to examine an example alluded to briefly by
Butler in ‘Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street’ (2011b).
This is the annual ‘Walk against Homophobia and Transphobia’
that takes place in Ankara, Turkey.15
Routinely fined for appearing in public, often beaten, including
by the police, and with trans murders occurring on average once
a month, the situation of trans persons in Turkey is, as Butler
notes, highly insecure.16 In this context, occupying public space,
both singly and collectively, is incredibly risky for members of this
precaritised population; it exposes them – renders them vulnerable
– to threats of routinised punishment, violence and even death.
Following Butler (following Arendt), we might thus conclude that
trans persons are, in effect, denied the right to have rights. As
effaced and delegitimated persons, they are precluded from the
space of appearance and from the plurality that inaugurates that
space.
This is important: they are precluded from that space but not
permanently excluded from it. It is possible, politically, for trans
persons, en masse, to lay claim to public space and to performa-
tively enact the right to have rights – rights ‘to place and belong-
ing’ and to ‘appear as the gender we already are’ (Butler 2011b),
and to do so in ways that contest the heteronormative ontology
that pathologises them by the way it regulates corporeal and mor-
phological appearance.17 Physically occupying space (marching
through carrying flags and placards) is, as Butler notes elsewhere,
a form ‘of critique that take[s] shape as bodies amass on the street
to articulate their opposition to contemporary regimes of power’
(2012a: 17); a ‘living practice of critique’ (2012a: 11) oriented
towards the assertion of the idea that persons, ‘no matter how
they are gendered . . . are free to move without threat of violence’
(2011b).18 The occupation of public space is thus a way not just
to render trans persons publicly visible and audible, or to dispute
the precarity of their gendered position; it is, at the same time, a
demand for a liveable life.
There are, of course, several issues raised by this discussion that
warrant further attention, but the one I want to foreground con-
cerns the relation between ethics and politics. Butler’s discussion
of the space of appearance, action in concert and the right to have
rights illustrates how the ‘ungrievable’ might disrupt the field of

power in order to make political claims, and to become political
subjects (see Butler in Butler and Athanasiou 2013: 101). Notably,
she does not say, however, that bodies must first be recognised
for politics to occur. And, indeed, she cannot. For politics arising
in conditions of precarity is precisely politics that seeks, amongst
other things, to contest the terms of recognisability that position
certain lives as precaritised and unintelligible. Instead, she charges
only that the body has to appear sensately to someone else.
The primary focus of these discussions is on those demanding
political rights or contesting the terms of recognition. What this
leaves unanswered, however, is the place of the other in respond-
ing to these demands. In particular, what is it that disposes sub-
jects, especially those constituted as protected or valued subjects,
to ethical responsiveness? In what ways is the capacity for an
ethical response impacted on by precarity? What enables the other
to recognise as ‘human’ a person who was previously invisible to
them as such?
Practising ethics in conditions of precarity

Precarity, as we have seen, is construed in terms of historically
instantiated modes of vulnerability that produce certain popula-
tions as exposed; bodies that are biopolitically constituted as at
risk – of violence, death, starvation, incarceration and deprivation.
Vulnerability as receptivity to what is outside us, what I see as the
second sense of the term at play in Butler’s work, is by contrast
the basis of political agency and, as we will see, ethical responsive-
ness. Part of what conditions our political and ethical receptivity
in situations of precarity is an acknowledgement of existential
precariousness. There is, however, a paradox here, for while
Butler argues that ‘precariousness has to be grasped not simply as
a feature of this or that life, but as a generalized condition whose
very generality can be denied only by denying precariousness itself’
(2009a: 22), she also contends that ‘as soon as the existential claim
[that everyone is precarious] is articulated in its specificity, it was
never existential. And since it must be articulated in its specific-
ity [namely, as precarity], it was never existential’ (Butler 2012c:
148). In other words, even as she proposes that existential precari-
ousness is an effect of corporeal interdependence shared by all, she
simultaneously avers that, in fact, precarity, unevenly distributed,
is all there is, for every articulation of precariousness is already an

articulation of precarity.
This has a bearing on ethics. For if precariousness is precisely
what is supposed to enable ethical responsiveness; in fact, is also
what we are also ethically obligated to affirm (see Jenkins 2009),
and if we are always impinged upon, and may even be conditioned
by, the operation of social norms and ways of differentiating
between grievable and ungrievable lives, then it suggests to me
that in practice we may be less open to some ethical demands than
others. Especially, as Butler remarks in Dispossession, because of
the way ‘vectors of power get registered at the level of primary
sensibility, taking hold in spite of us, animating us, and forming
a near involuntary dimension of our somatic lives’ (in Butler and
Athanasiou 2013: 96). So, what interests me here is the tension
between the moment of ethical solicitation, when an ethical
demand impinges on the subject from the outside, and the capac-
ity to respond to that impingement in determinate circumstances.
This returns us to the question of ‘appearing’, which in Butler’s
understanding is ‘always to appear for another’ (2011b). In par-
ticular, I am concerned with how the normative frames defining
who is human govern or encroach upon the ethical scene.
Distancing herself from Emmanuel Levinas, who according to
Butler suggested that the ethical demand is ‘framed and restricted
in advance by certain notions of culture, ethnicity and religion’
(2012b: 39) – his way of contending that the Palestinian had no
face – Butler charges that the ‘life of the other . . . is also our life’
(2012c: 140). Ethics on her understanding is always an issue of
an ethical relation: that is, all persons, whether we know them or
not, are from the very beginning implicated in the lives of others,
such that the ‘“I” is invariably implicated in the “we” ’ (Butler in
Butler and Athanasiou 2013: 107). Ethical obligations, for Butler,
are thus ‘prior to any individual sense of self’ (2012c: 141). The
ethical relation precedes individuation and ethical responsive-
ness precedes ethical responsibility. Ethical obligations, including
towards those who frighten or threaten us, are an ineluctable
feature of unwilled cohabitation, another idea she derives from
Arendt,19 and as such they are ‘precontractual’ and ‘nonconsen-
sual’ (Butler 2012c: 143, 137). Ethical obligations, in other words,
arise without our consent or without being willed by us, extend
to those whom we may not know, and rest on modes of recep-
tiveness that can neither be fully predicted nor controlled (Butler
2012c: 141–2). This is where, to my mind, matters get a bit more

troublesome.
The starting point for an ethical response when some form of
ethical demand is made is thus not ‘individual disposition’ or ‘per-
sonal morality’; ethics is not, in this sense, a private or individual
matter. Rather it begins from ‘the presumption of a constitutive
sociality’ (Butler in Butler and Athanasiou 2013: 107). To act ethi-
cally is to avow that ‘I am my relation to “you” ’ (Butler 2012c:
142). Ethics is thus an effect of dispossession, of ecstatic relation-
ality. The ability to receive a call (possible because the respondent
is ‘already answerable’ to the other) does not in itself guarantee a
response, however. Rather we need to be ‘moved’ to act (Butler
2012c: 136). It is, she observes, ‘only when we are sufficiently
impressed by the injustice of some situation in the world that we
are moved to change it’ (Butler in Hark and Villa 2011: 198).
Here some comments Butler makes in relation to the process of
politicisation might point the way to what facilitates such move-
ment. Politicisation, she commends, might be understood as ‘moti-
vated by an intelligent vulnerability’ that transforms receptivity
into action (Butler in Hark and Villa 2011: 198). It is openness to
the world that enables us to demand change; when that demand
is made, receptivity is sustained as ‘a condition and font of intel-
ligence for social and political action’ (Butler in Hark and Villa
2011: 199). Elsewhere she describes ethical obligation similarly:
receptivity is not merely the precondition for ethical action; it
is one of its ‘constituent features’ (Butler 2012c: 136). At first
sight, the objection might be made that one of the shortcomings
of Butler’s investigation of ethics is that she does not make clear
what kinds of ethical or affective work are necessary to be able to
respond ethically to those who do not immediately ‘appear’ to us.
Indeed, this is what I initially thought.
A closer reading of her work, however, suggests that in refusing
to conceptualise ethics as the province of a ‘ready-made subject’
(Butler 2012b: 9), Butler is also jettisoning the idea that it is pos-
sible to ‘prepare’ in advance for, or to ‘anticipate’, the moment of
ethical solicitation. The point is that ethical solicitation happens
‘in spite of ourselves and quite apart from any intentional act’, it
is ‘beyond our will’, ‘not of our making’ (2012c: 135); when we
respond ‘despite’ our egos (Loizidou 2007: 53). Ethical receptiv-
ity, furthermore, is largely non-consensual. This insinuates that
it is precisely when we are ‘moved’ – overwhelmed, outraged or
impassioned – to act that it is possible to discern ‘the working

of an ethical obligation on our sensibilities’ (Butler 2012c: 136).
Ethics, in this sense, might therefore be taken to signify the acts
by which others (‘those who are “not me” ’) are acknowledged as
having a ‘place’ in the world (Butler 2012b: 9). The implication
of this reasoning is that the evidence of ethical responsiveness is
ethical action but that it is impossible to know, categorically, what
triggers that responsiveness in the first place beyond the general
existential propensity for dispossession.
Vulnerability-as-
impressionability is the wellspring for ethics
but, to reiterate, ethical encounters only arise in specific, delim-
ited, historical contexts, contexts structured by normative frames.
These precaritised situations are conditions of inequality, in which
specific populations, as Butler has it, are produced as ungrievable.
Given her comments about the ways that the subject is constitu-
tively opaque to itself (Butler 1997, 2005), and her remark, cited
earlier, that social norms and ways of discriminating between
grievable lives comprise a ‘nearly involuntary dimension of our
somatic lives’ (Butler in Butler and Athanasiou 2013: 96), this
implies that subjects might be in the unconscious grip of, for
example, certain normative bodily ontologies that render them
unable to recognise as human those particular bodies produced as
unintelligible and ungrievable by that ontology. Consequently, at
times, subjects might not be able to respond ethically to an unrec-
ognisable other because they are unable to see the body before
them or to hear its address.
In this context, it is surely not enough to contend that a shared
experience of, for instance, loss, might be a sufficient (though
it might perhaps remain a necessary) resource to overcome this
block – recall that in Precarious Life Butler remarks that ‘Despite
our differences in location and history, my guess is that it is pos-
sible to appeal to a “we”, for all of us have some notion of what it
is to have lost somebody’ (Butler 2004a: 20) – for this immediately
dislocates, dehistoricises and elides the very specific experiences of
loss undergone by different groups or persons.20 While an occa-
sion of loss might help us acknowledge that ‘we’ are vulnerable
(whoever ‘we’ are), there is nothing in this experience per se that
necessarily guarantees that ‘we’ will be able to ‘see’ or ‘recognise’
another’s loss as a loss. We have only to refer to an example Butler
herself supplies of a failure to acknowledge loss to see this, the
refusal of the San Francisco Chronicle to publish either the obitu-
aries of, or memorials for, two Palestinian families killed by Israeli

soldiers (2004a). Or, we might consider the campaign ‘Humanize
Palestine’, designed to try to ‘restore the humanity that is often
stripped away when Palestinians are reduced to calculative deaths,
forgettable names, and burned and mutilated bodies, rather than
people who shared loved ones, stories, dreams and aspirations’
(Humanize Palestine, n.d.).21 These are deaths that in given set-
tings do not register as deaths, losses that do not count as losses.22
My point is not that Butler is unaware of the mechanisms
whereby particular populations are dehumanised or, to borrow
her terminology, ‘derealized’ (Butler 2004a), or that this impedes
the ability to recognise or respond to loss. Quite the contrary. It
is rather that she appears to rest her hopes for practising ethics in
precaritised situations on the abstract potentiality for ethical open-
ness that emerges from ecstatic relationality and existential pre-
cariousness. The problem is that it is not apparent exactly what,
if anything, might be done to enable or encourage ethical action
in conditions of precarity where the actual prospects for ethical
responsiveness appear to be foreclosed.23
Conclusion
Butler’s more intense preoccupation with ethics certainly does not,
in my view, supplant or neutralise her concern with politics as some
critics insist. As her discussions of grievability, and who counts as
‘human’ testify, she is acutely aware of the ethical factors at work
in political interactions and of the politics that shapes ethical
questions. This is visible in her discussion of the relation between
recognition and recognisability. Nevertheless, there is a qualitative
difference in her approach to the two. Although both share her
dualistic account of vulnerability as both susceptibility to harm and
an openness to the other, when she discusses politics, Butler attends
to specific, historically instantiated biopolitical regimes or norma-
tive frames (such as the ‘heterosexual matrix’); in short, she focuses
on precaritisation, on the actual conditions within which political
action (of whatever kind) takes place, including the material harms
that attend certain modalities of embodiment and how bodies
appear to one another in ways that facilitate concerted action.
When she turns to ethics, however, her analysis shifts. To be
sure, her primary concern is with what I have referred to as prac-
tising ethics in conditions of precarity; how, that is, it is possible,
for instance, to respond ethically to those whom normative

corporeal ontologies constitute as unintelligible or ungrievable.
Nevertheless, her theorisation of the conditions of ethical respon-
siveness tends to emphasise ecstatic relationality and primary
vulnerability in the abstract; that is, it stresses existential precari-
ousness rather than lived precarity. The effect of this abstraction
is that it is not clear how in determinate conditions it is possible,
if at all, to overcome the normative constrictions that prevent us
receiving an ethical address from a body we cannot ‘see’, or in an
idiom we cannot ‘hear’, or to experience corporeal vulnerability
in a way that opens up, rather than closes down, the chance for
transformation that Butler characterises as the chance to become
human (2005: 136).
Notes
1. There is a third idea that she is seeking to combat, which is that of
invulnerability and sovereign mastery, which I do not explore in this
chapter. See, however, Gilson 2011.
2. The classic political theory text here is, of course, C. B. Macpherson’s
The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (1962).
3. Butler notes that she derives the idea of ek-stasis ‘to point out, as
Heidegger has done, the original meaning of the term as it implies a
standing outside of oneself’ (2004b: 258 n. 7).
4. In The Psychic Life of Power, Butler argues that the result of this
disavowal is that the subject is constitutively opaque to itself; there
are aspects of who it ‘is’ that are unknown and unknowable to it.
5. To be fair to Murphy, she does note in passing that vulnerability
makes bodies available not only for violence but also for care (2011:
579), though she does not pursue this insight.
6. In addition, the body might itself be an instrument of violence, physi-
cal harm, threat or death-dealing against others.
7. In Antigone, Interrupted Honig acknowledges that Butler ‘mentions
in passing’ that passion and love share a similar ecstatic ‘structure’ to
mourning, and that she also ‘thematizes the idea of a “livable life” ’;
Honig nevertheless concludes that Butler’s ‘affective repertoire . . . is
largely oriented to loss’ (2013: 44).
8. Although as Catherine Mills (this volume) shows, Butler is not
always consistent in her usage of this distinction.
9. In much of this wider literature, reference is made to ‘precarization’
rather than to Butler’s preferred ‘precaritization’.
10. Precarity has also been linked to political protests designed to ‘make
visible’ forms of labour (and the labourers) rendered invisible by
dominant modes of capitalist production, the most cited of which
are the EuroMayDay parades that have taken place annually in
various venues across Western Europe since 2001 (see, for instance,
Brophy and de Peuter 2007: 184–5).
11. Brandon Teena, a trans man, was murdered in Nebraska in 1993;
Mathew Shephard, a gay man, was murdered in Wyoming in 1998;
and Gwen Araujo, a trans woman, was killed in California in 2002.
For a discussion of the Araujo case that examines themes pertinent
to those discussed in this chapter, see Lloyd 2013.
12. David Reimer, whose story is probably better known as the ‘John/
Joan case’, was born a biological male but, as a result of a bungled
circumcision operation when he was eight months old, was raised
female under the supervision of psychologist John Money at Johns
Hopkins University. It was Money’s contention that a person’s
gender identity was the result of cultural conditioning. Further,
Money claimed that provided sex (re)assignment was completed by
the time a child was two and a half years old, it ought to be able to
be socialised into a gender different from the one assigned at birth
without adverse effects. The evidence from Reimer, who eventually
spoke out about his experiences, and who began living as a man, was
that Money was wrong. Reimer committed suicide at the age of 38.
13. The concept of grievability, I want to suggest, is better understood
in relation to precarity, and in particular to how specific populations
are disposed to it, rather than to either mortalism or finitude per
se, as for instance championed by Honig (2010, 2013) or Shulman
(2011). To read Butler as a mortalist humanist or as advancing an
ethics of finitude risks sidelining her interest in the conditions of
liveability, and neglecting the dualistic nature of vulnerability as the
condition for suffering and deprivation but also for politics (and
ethics).
14. Although it is beyond the scope of this chapter to pursue the com-
parison any further, Butler is endeavouring here to distinguish her
understanding of the space of appearance from Arendt’s (see Butler
2011b; 2012a). For Butler the space of appearance is ‘a necessarily
morphological moment’ where the corpus appears, not just to act
and speak (as for Arendt), but also to suffer, to labour, to move,
to gesture, to join with others and ‘to negotiate an environment on
which one depends’ (2011b). So where Arendt consigned particular
features of corporeal life (to do with survival) to the private sphere,
separate from the political, Butler regards them as pertinent politi-

cal considerations when they point to the precaritisation of whole
populations. This latter point is important because it is often the
government of corporeal appearance that is at stake for precaritised
groupings.
15. It was not only trans individuals that appeared on the street, of
course. Another example Butler cites more than once concerns the
singing, in Spanish, of the American national anthem by ‘illegal’
immigrants in California in 2006; see, for instance, Butler and Spivak
2007; Butler 2009; also Beltran 2009; and Jenkins (this volume).
16. According to the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights
Commission, in March 2005 the Law of Misdemeanors (No. 5326)
was introduced, which allows the police ‘to fine or otherwise penal-
ize Turkish citizens on a variety of charges, none of which are defined
explicitly under the law’. This has resulted in transgender people in
Ankara allegedly being fined 140 lira, and then being physically bru-
talised while in custody (2009). See also Human Rights Watch 2010.
17. It is not enough for the ungrievable merely to refuse a particular way
of life or to seek to assimilate to existing norms, what she describes
in Precarious Life as ‘a matter of a simple entry of the excluded into
an established ontology’ (Butler 2004a: 33). What is required is ‘an
insurrection at the level of ontology’ (Butler 2004a: 33).
18. For further consideration of the idea of critique in Butler’s work see
Jenkins, this volume.
19. The basis for this idea is Arendt’s contention in Eichmann in
Jerusalem ([1963] 1977) that Eichmann believed he could choose
with whom to co-habit the earth, a view Arendt disputed; for her,
according to Butler’s reading, cohabitation was not a choice, it was
an inescapable condition of social and political existence. See Butler
2011c, 2012b.
20. There is not space to pursue this discussion here, but I think that Lisa
Knisely is right to raise questions about the ways in which Butler
‘runs the risk of reinscribing the specifics of a particular historical
and political context’, namely that of 9/11, a time when ‘so many
people were arguing for the kind of political response . . . that was
built specifically on the denial’ of vulnerability and interdependence,
into ‘an oppressive ethical command’ operative at all times and in all
places (2012: 154, original emphasis).
21. I am current engaged in studying this campaign as part of the research
project ‘Who counts? The political problem of the “human” ’, funded
by the Leverhulme Trust.
22. In the case of the San Francisco Chronicle, the setting is the US; in
the case of ‘Humanize Palestine’, according to the campaign website,
the setting is the Western media. For an important discussion of
the way that Butler’s work appears to foreground the experience of
the (white) American subject in terms of loss and grief see Thobani
2007; see also Gregory 2012.
23. This is where Thobani’s (2007) discussion has particular purchase.
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8
Subjectivation, the Social and a

(Missing) Account of the Social
Formation: Judith Butler’s ‘Turn’
Samuel A. Chambers
Cornel West has recently called Judith Butler ‘the leading social
theorist of our generation’ (West 2011: 92), and while I agree
completely with the spirit of West’s claim, here I plan to dissent
from the specific content of his laudatory description. Doubtless
Butler takes her place today as one of the foremost theorists and
public intellectuals; her work is widely recognised as helping to
reshape a number of fields across the humanities; and she speaks
with a powerful voice to a variety of national and international
political contexts. Nonetheless, I contend that precisely a social
theory – or better, a richer account of what I call the social
formation – is lacking in Butler’s work. In order to defend this
claim and to show why it matters, the core of this chapter exam-
ines the location in Butler’s corpus where, I argue, she expunges
a conception of the social formation from her very own sources,
thereby calling more conspicuous attention to its absence in her
own work. I also articulate the significance of this move in rela-
tion to her broader intellectual trajectory, particularly in terms of
her post-20011 writings. I read Butler with the working hypothesis
that her putative turn to ethics has little to do with the questions
of moral philosophy per se. Rather, while something is missing
in Butler’s early work, that something is not ethics, but rather an
account of the social formation.
Butler’s early fascination (indeed, at times, a fixation) with the
problem of subject-formation produces, within The Psychic Life
of Power (1997a), a series of blind spots concerning the larger
question of society, of the social whole; Butler’s intense focus
on producing a ‘theory of subjection’ leads her to purge a viable
account of the social formation from the very texts she draws
from. This subtraction of the social formation in Butler’s reading
helps to explain her explicit efforts in recent works to offer an
193
account of ‘the social’ – an account, I argue, that merely falls back

on a liberal, aggregative model (one that Butler would otherwise
eschew).
The chapter focuses on a close engagement with Butler’s self-
named ‘theory of subjection’. Butler derives that theory from
her readings of Freud, Foucault, Lacan and Althusser, but here
I centre my analysis specifically on Butler’s reading of Hegel and
Althusser. I demonstrate that Butler’s appropriation of Hegel
frames and limits her encounter with Althusser: ultimately Butler
gives us what we might call a ‘Hegelianised Althusser’, one
stripped of the rich understanding of the social formation that
Althusser himself was trying to delineate. Butler’s focus on desire
and the theory of subject gives her no way to grasp or make sense
of the social formation that provides the conditions of possibility
for all subjects. I close by suggesting that Butler’s ontology of vul-
nerability and finitude, as it emerges in her most recent writings,
serves the purpose of standing in for a more rigorous account of
the social formation. And this substitution, I suggest, proves to be
a poor one, since it reduces Butler’s work to the terms of liberal
political philosophy.
A philosophical theory of subjection

The Psychic Life of Power (hereon PLP) lacks a preface or
any other personalising apparatus; it opens instead with a very
general and generalising claim: ‘As a form of power, subjection is
paradoxical’ (Butler 1997a: 1). This sentence places readers of the
book onto philosophical terrain. Butler’s first two major books
contained subtitles that situated them squarely within the terms
of feminist politics and feminist debate, whereas PLP’s subtitle is
the broadly abstract ‘theories of subjection’. It is not just that this
book asks more sweeping questions than Butler’s first two, but
that Butler herself seeks to shift the work of this book out of the
fields (the confines?) of feminist theory and politics and onto the
stage of the discipline of philosophy. This book specifically focuses
on questions of theory; it draws from and directs itself towards
philosophers. To see what is at stake in PLP, and to see it as a
part of the development of Butler’s thought, it helps very much
to mark the genre (i.e. the discipline of philosophy) in which it is
written. In PLP Butler retains a singular focus on questions about
the philosophical category of the subject, about the process of sub-
Subjectivation and the Social Formation 195
jection, and above all about the workings of power in relation to

the subject. I frame my reading of this text in terms of this issue of
genre, because the turn to a discourse of philosophy in PLP high-
lights the absence in Butler’s work (in all her writings up to this
point, but magnified in this particular text) of a richer account not
just of ‘the social’ as a virtual space of plurality, but of society, of
the political order – of the social formation.2
The differences between an account of ‘the social’ or a social
theory on the one hand, and a conception of the social formation
on the other, cannot be delineated by way of an abstract, analytic
set of definitions of each entity. I aim to bring these distinctions
into sharper relief by way of my reading of Butler’s texts for their
failure to account for the social formation, and I do not wish to pre-
empt that discussion here by trying to define terms. Nevertheless,
to elucidate the stakes of the argument, I can offer a more polemi-
cal formulation of the gap between the two: the social formation
is itself a political form, a politicised structure, whereas ‘the social’
may well be a sphere separate from ‘the political’ domain. We
understand that ‘society’ or ‘the social realm’ (or Gesellschaft) can
easily be seen as a virtual domain, a space in which individuals
interact with one another. Hegel offers this sort of account of the
social in terms of a dyadic relationship of recognition, and social
contract theory depends on understanding ‘society’ as formed by
the consent of free and equal individuals. The social formation, on
the other hand, points towards the always specific yet constantly
shifting arrangement of practices; ‘social formation’ names the
simultaneously lateral and vertical arrangement of relationships
between diverse activities. Butler has clearly maintained a constant
concern with the signifying and resignifying of particular practices
from within the realm of ‘the social’. But an understanding of the
social formation focuses on the way that such practices are struc-
tured from without, as part of an overall system.
While I do not attend in detail to Butler’s most famous early
texts, Gender Trouble ([1990] 1999) and Bodies that Matter
(1993), I claim that, like the later texts that I will discuss in more
detail below, those early works contain no developed conception
of the social formation. Butler’s early writings do indeed use the
word ‘social’ quite frequently. Often the word functions simply as
a modifier, e.g. ‘social context’, ‘social power’ and ‘social norms’
(Butler 1999: 20 and ff.). More frequently, ‘social’ appears within
a chain of terms such as ‘cultural’, ‘historical’ or ‘political’, all
of which function as contrasts to terms such as ‘natural’ or ‘pre-

discursive’; here Butler makes her well-known arguments about
how to understand the distinction between sex and gender as
itself a product of historical discursive practices (Butler 1999; see
Chambers 2007). Above all, Butler’s earlier arguments always
work against the idea of a ‘presocial’ (1999: 38; 1993: 202).
As with her more recent books, and as I will discuss in my final
section below, Butler’s early works use the word ‘social’ mainly as
a descriptor to indicate relationality, to mark contextuality and to
suggest a basic sense of plurality. Overall, Butler has no interest in
developing a social theory in these early books, much less in offer-
ing an account of the social formation.
To defend my claim that PLP lacks an account or understand-
ing of the social formation puts me in something like the position
of trying to prove the negative. Yet my aim is not to fault Butler
for not having a ‘theory of’ anything, not even the social forma-
tion. The form of critical theory that I subscribe to, and to which
I think Butler subscribes as well, does not require that a thinker
have a ‘theory of’ every concept that they discuss, nor does the
failure to have a ‘theory of X’ indicate, on its own, anything at all
about their work. Indeed, important critical work today proceeds
by eschewing the very notion of producing more ‘theories of . . .’
(Rancière 2009; Chambers 2013). Thus, my charge against Butler
is distinctly different. Unlike much of Butler’s work, especially her
early work, in PLP Butler attempts to develop just such a ‘theory
of’, in this case, as the book’s subtitle makes clear, a ‘theory of
subjection’. And in order to create her own theory of subjection,
Butler erases elements, concepts and articulations of the social for-
mation that are present in the authors she herself is reading. Put
differently, just because Althusser has a concept of the social for-
mation (probably, in his case, a full theory of the social formation)
does not mean that Butler must do so as well, but in her reading of
Althusser she expunges his account of the social formation – and
it is this erasure that has significant implications for Butler’s work,
and for any effort to understand politics and history. I focus on
PLP because in that text the absence of a concept of the social
formation becomes palpably visible, and has meaningful effects.
Hence, in the remainder of this section I offer a broad overview
of the main argument in Butler’s book, and then, in the section
that follows, I work closely through two of the key interpretive/
philosophical readings that she uses to support this argument.
Butler’s central (philosophical) claim in PLP can be delineated

both with and without the proper (philosophical) names. Starting
with Foucault, Butler moves towards Freud, with particular read-
ings of Hegel, Nietzsche and Althusser designed to help her on
the journey. To start with Foucault means to begin with the claim
that the process of subject-formation always proves double: to
form a subject capable of exercising power (the capacity of agency
itself) is always simultaneously to subject to power.3 ‘Subjection’
connotes both ‘becoming- subject’ and ‘being subordinated to
or dominated by’. Thus we see subject formation as a vexed
and complex process of turning: the subject turns in response to
power, but the subject only comes to be through the turning, and
power only really flows through the turning. We might think of
this process as a very odd sort of dance between power (the music)
and the subject (the dancer); hence, the (solo) dancer only comes
into being by responding to the music (there is no dancer prior
to the music), operating to some extent autonomously yet still
somehow always subject to the terms of the music, while the music
itself only plays when the dancer dances (there is no music without
the dancer). Now, to move towards Freud, for Butler, means
insisting on something much more than a contingent connection
between the subject and power; it is to indicate the ‘passionate
attachment’ of the subject to the very power that forms him/her/
it. And for Butler this means an attachment not only to the agency
made possible by subjection, but also to the subordination at the
heart of subjection (1997a: 6). The psyche (or the psychic) is one
name for this stubborn tie that binds the subject to the power of
domination.
Thus Butler wants to go beyond – or better, to somehow go
inside – the dance, so as to find out what links the dancer to
the music, not just as a mutual condition of possibility (neither
exists without the other) but as a fundamental and unbreakable
link that somehow transcends any particular dance. What per-
sists before or after the music? What makes the dance possible?
Butler offers various responses to this question, e.g. guilt, or the
Spinozan conatus,4 but the general answer always remains the
same – namely, the psyche. In just her second paragraph Butler
poses the central and overriding question of the book: ‘what is
the psychic form that power takes?’ (1997a: 2). But the question
proves to be loaded, since to ask what psychic form power takes
is to presume that power does indeed take psychic shape. It is to
presume that a full account of the process of subject formation

cannot be given without the psyche. Butler’s formulation of this
point is pregnant with particular meaning and significant implica-
tions for her overall project: ‘an account of subjection, it seems,
must be traced in terms of psychic life’ (Butler 1997a: 18). Given
this framing logic, Butler ‘naturally’ (my quotation marks) devotes
this book to tracing that psychic form, to showing within particu-
lar readings of nineteenth and twentieth century philosophers how
power might ‘take psychic form’. In each case it will be a matter of
showing how there is something more to the relationship between
power and the subject, something sticky that makes power and the
subject whirl around one another and get the twofold process of
subjection underway.
My primary interest lies less with this general argument that
Butler positions ‘between Freud and Foucault’, and more with the
movement away from Foucault (clearly Butler’s starting point) as
well as with the important use of Hegel and Althusser in helping
Butler to carry out this shift. While ‘between Freud and Foucault’
points to the general location of Butler’s ‘theory of subjection’,
it can be shown that the reading of these other thinkers does the
bulk of the work. And it is in Butler’s apparent engagement with
Althusser, as framed by her interpretation of Hegel, that we can
start to feel the presence of the absence of the social formation.
That is, in order to trace the psychic form of power, Butler must
simultaneously read out of Althusser the very account of the social
formation that otherwise proves so central to his project. In the
following sections I will track the movement that Butler takes
away from Foucault as she works through Althusser, at the same
time as I make my own case for the palpable absence of an account
of social order in Butler’s reading – and all of this despite the clear
presence of those accounts in the actual texts of Althusser (and
Nietzsche as well).
Hegelianising Althusser
Butler’s academic career begins with her dissertation on Hegel,
but significantly, in her first two major books (Gender Trouble
and Bodies that Matter) Hegel plays almost no role whatsoever.
As I have noted above, this may be because both of those books
are more situated political encounters. In any case, with PLP
Butler not only returns to Hegel but returns to the beginning with
Hegel, as Butler places her reading of Hegel at the foundation

of the book (in the first substantive chapter). Butler’s exegesis of
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit targets the section on ‘unhappy
consciousness’. This concept, Butler will stress, starkly expresses
the key dimension of ‘self-subjection’ that makes up a part of
any and all forms of subjection. Butler uncovers this dimension
through a close reading of the ever-famous, infinitely-read lord
and bondsman section of the Phenomenology. I will not rehearse
the details of that subtle and sophisticated reading here. What
matters most to me is not the substance of Butler’s reading of the
lord and bondsman passages, but the very structure, the shape and
the form of this, one of the most famous passages in the history
of philosophy. The story of ‘the Lord’ and ‘the Bondsman’ is a
story of Subjects (with a capital ‘S’) relating to one another. The
philosophical narrative says little to nothing about context, about
institutions, about the history that brought about these subject
categories (clearly categories of feudalism) in the first place. For
Hegel the lord and bondsman are not social creatures, enmeshed
in social context; they are figures that help account, philosophi-
cally, for subjectivity itself. The subjectivity that is established,
interrupted and reconstituted in the lord and bondsman narrative
never interrogates the material conditions that might underlie or
be intertwined with the process of recognition that Hegel deline-
ates, and in a certain sense – that is, subject to the terms of Hegel’s
discourse – such conditions ought not be investigated, since these
subjects are not historical subjects but philosophical subjects.
Butler’s reading of Hegel’s famous passages always proceeds by
descriptions of the actions and reactions, feelings, emotions and
senses, of the two main characters in a philosophical tale of sub-
jectivity. One can see clearly why Butler would start here in an
effort to write on ‘theories of subjection’, and at the same time one
can easily note that there is no social formation here, no political
order.
I offer this possibly obvious reflection not as a criticism of either
Hegel or Butler’s reading of Hegel, but as a frame for making
sense of Butler’s interpretation of Althusser. Butler leaves nothing
obvious out of her elucidation of Hegel, but the same cannot be
said for her exegesis of Althusser. Butler approaches Althusser as
if he, like Hegel, were describing relations among abstract philo-
sophical subjects. For Butler, Althusser’s ‘theory of interpellation’
is clearly a ‘theory of subjection’, one that illuminates the twofold
process of subject-formation by establishing an abstract relation

between language and the subject. Indeed, Butler highlights and
foregrounds the role of ‘language’ to such a strong degree that a
reader unfamiliar with Althusser’s own texts might mis-recognise
the Marxist Althusser as a philosopher of language (in dialogue
with J. L. Austin). Hence she opens her chapter on Althusser with
the following: ‘Althusser’s doctrine of interpellation . . . offer[s]
a way to account for a subject who comes into being as a con-
sequence of language’ (Butler 1997a: 106, my emphasis). Butler
reads Althusser as symmetrical with Hegel: where Hegel has two
subjects (lord and bondsman) relating to one another through a
process of recognition, Althusser has two subjects (passer-by and
policeman) relating to one another through hailing.
Given this relatively empty framework – one that only con-
tains subjects and a power relation between them – Butler must
provide, in her account of Althusser, an explanation for why
the subject responds to the hail. She sees this as the fundamental
limitation or stumbling block with Althusser’s own account. She
writes: ‘Significantly, Althusser does not offer a clue as to why the
individual turns around’ (Butler 1997a: 5). For just this reason,
Althusser’s account of interpellation provides Butler with the
perfect example for her argument that we must move away from
a Foucauldian account of subjection as somehow produced only
by disciplinary power itself. Precisely what we need, for Butler,
is to answer this missing question in Althusser: the subject turns
to respond to the hail, and in turning becomes a subject while
also being subjected to power. But why does the subject turn at
all? Butler’s answer is guilt: ‘subject formation . . . take[s] place
only on the acceptance of guilt, so that there is no “I” who might
ascribe a place to itself, who might be announced in speech,
without first a self-attribution of guilt’ (1997a: 107, my emphasis).
The subject – who is not a subject before he turns – turns because
he is a guilty subject.
In a move that anticipates her post-2001 work on precarious
lives and her development of a mortalist humanism, Butler rereads
the Althusserian scene of interpellation in such a way as to identify
(or construct) a set of universal features, what she calls ‘an open-
ness or vulnerability to the law’, that precede the very response
to that law (1997a: 108).5 Butler’s answer to why we respond to
the call of the law is that we are somehow always already subject
to its terms, vulnerable to its force. Our vulnerability ‘before the
law’ appears in the form of a guilt that precedes the law. ‘Guilt’,
Butler contends, ‘is prior to knowledge of the law’, and guilt
therefore constitutes a ‘prior desire for the law’ (Butler 1997a:
108, my emphasis). Why do we turn when we hear the call of the
law? Because we already want to turn; because we desire the law;
because the call of the law triggers the guilt we already possess.
I have called this a ‘rereading’ of Althusser, but perhaps that
description proves overly nominalist. In Chapter 4 of PLP it is diffi-
cult to discern exactly where Althusser leaves off and Butler begins.
Butler mainly writes as if she is reading, synthesising and interpret-
ing Althusser. Hence one might easily presume that the notion of
‘guilt’ plays a central role in Althusser’s account of subjectivation.
At the same time, Butler does suggest in her Introduction (and as I
quote above) that Althusser fails to provide any answer as to why
the subject, who is hailed, turns. And for this reason one might
instead assume that Butler seeks to supplement Althusser’s account
with her own concept of guilt (which she borrows from Freudian
thought). However, neither sense is really quite right. The reasons
prove multiple: first, contrary to Butler’s explicit claim, Althusser
poses to himself the very question of why the individual turns,
and he goes on to give a response. As Drew Walker puts it, contra
Butler, ‘Althusser has an answer’ (2010: 3). Second, Althusser’s
answer excludes the very idea of guilt or bad conscience. Althusser
makes both of these moves at the very centre of the brief passages
on the scene of interpellation, the passages that Butler suggests she
is reading in her account but which she never cites.6 Let me unpack
these claims by turning to Althusser’s actual text.
I should begin by emphasising a point that Butler elides: the
famous ‘scene of interpellation’ – Butler’s term, not Althusser’s
(see also Butler 1997b: 30) – appears quite late in Althusser’s
long essay on the particular question of ideology, and as part of a
broad discussion of Marx’s and Marxist conceptions of the social
formation. Althusser’s own project is quite different from Butler’s:
he wants to ask how the material conditions of production are
themselves reproduced (Althusser 1971: 124). What is the status,
the structure and the dynamics of power within a social order such
that it can recreate the conditions for material production? This
is Althusser’s way of asking the question of the social formation.
Althusser contends that the reproduction of the conditions of pro-
duction cannot come about without the workings of ideology, and
it is for this reason that, very near the end of the essay, he advances
a few speculative theses towards a theory of ideology. In this

context Althusser seeks to show that we cannot understand any
concept of ‘ideology’ without first grasping it as fully material, as
embedded within practices that are themselves embedded within
the material structures of a social formation. I use italics here to
try to capture Althusser’s own emphasis in an essay marked by
heavy usage of italics in the original. Thus, in the page just before
the account of interpellation, Althusser claims that whenever we
try to deal with a ‘single subject’ – apparently isolated, in much
the way the subject is for Butler throughout PLP – we must always
remember that ‘the existence of the ideas of his belief is material in
that his ideas are his material actions inserted into material prac-
tices governed by material rituals which are themselves defined by
the material ideological apparatus from which derive the ideas of
that subject’ (Althusser 1971: 158).
Althusser’s so- called ‘scene of interpellation’ appears almost
directly after this argument, and I would insist that Althusser’s
thesis about interpellation, that ‘ideology interpellates individuals
as subjects’, must be understood as situated in exactly this context
(Althusser 1971: 160). Althusser refines the general thesis into the
more focused claim that ideology hails ‘concrete individuals as
concrete subjects’ (Althusser 1971: 162). I read this line as echoing
and emphasising the fact that ideology only functions (and inter-
pellation is a function of ideology in Althusser’s account) in con-
crete cases. It is in this light that Althusser says we might ‘imagine’
the workings of ideology along the lines of ‘everyday’ hailing,
by the police or by anyone else. In response to ‘hey, you there!’
a concrete individual responds, turns around, and in so turning
becomes (what he/she already is) a concrete subject. Butler would
have us believe that Althusser has nothing to say about why the
individual turns: ‘Althusser does not offer a clue’ (Butler 1997a:
5). But Althusser offers much more than a clue to the question
Butler wants to pose, since he himself raises the same question,
and then answers it. And he does so at the exact centre of the
discussion of the ‘scene of interpellation’, the scene that Butler is
putatively reading throughout Chapter 4 of PLP. I say ‘putatively’
since, again, Butler never quotes from these passages nor even cites
them at any place in her text. Had she done so, she would have
found Althusser asking her own question for her. Althusser says
that the individual will turn around, will make, in response to the
call, a 180-degree ‘physical conversion’. He continues:
Why?
Because he has recognized that the hail was ‘really’ addressed to him,
and that ‘it was really him who was hailed’ (and not someone else).
Experience shows that the practical telecommunication of hailings
is such that they hardly ever miss their man: verbal call or whistle,
the one hailed always recognizes that it is really him who is being
hailed. And yet it is a strange phenomenon, and one which cannot
be explained solely by ‘guilt feelings’, despite the large numbers who
‘have something on their consciences’. (Althusser 1971: 163)
There is a great deal to unpack in this passage, particularly

as it relates to Butler’s project – both in PLP and more broadly.
Althusser explains the ‘reflexivity’ of the individual/subject not
in terms of any inherent internal dimension or capacity of that
subject, but rather in relation to the overall scene of ideological
hailing. Put differently, for Althusser, the social formation itself
provides an account of why the subject turns. He responds to the
call because he hears it as a call, and as a call for him. Hailings
work – they almost never miss their mark – because ideology
works. After the famous passage with the policeman and the
passer-by, Althusser goes on to argue that the temporality of the
logic in the example is all wrong, since it presumes that there is
first a hailing and then a response. However, there really is no such
succession: ‘ideology has always-already interpellated individuals
as subjects’ (Althusser 1971: 164). The ‘individual’ is, in fact, the
abstract idea, since in practice, in reality – that is, in ideology – we
always find concrete subjects.
It is in this sense that I read Althusser as demonstrating that the
turn, the reflexivity of the subject, comes about strictly in terms
of the social formation itself and without recourse to an interior
psyche or conatus that would offer a separate, causal explana-
tion for why the subject turns. When we understand the scene of
interpellation as taking place within a concrete social formation,
we then see that the response to the call happens ‘naturally’, i.e.
thoroughly ideologically. For Butler, of course, Althusser’s expla-
nation for ‘why the individual/subject turns’ will seem inadequate;
it may not sound like an explanation at all, since one might hear
Althusser’s answer as, ‘it just works’. Nonetheless, the appar-
ent hollowness of this answer is not intrinsic to the Althusserian
account, but is rather a product of Butler’s hollowing out of
Althusser’s thick, detailed and lengthy argument. Butler has taken
away the account of the social formation that Althusser offers

in the more than thirty pages that precede the famous ‘scene of
interpellation’. Hence, she reads that scene as an abstract account
of two entities (policeman and passer-by) relating to one another
within a field of power. And when taken in that way, the account
lacks an explanation for how subjective reflexivity comes about.
The culmination of this series of logical moves gives us the
Hegelianised ‘Althusser’ that appears in PLP – an Althusser shorn
of his account of the social formation. Thus we see in Butler’s
book that without that account, Althusser has little to offer. Yet
in jettisoning Althusser’s account of the social formation, Butler
strips any concept of social order out of her own theory of subjec-
tion. Ultimately, a philosophically abstract theory of subjection,
one disconnected from any historico-political conjuncture, is not
worth very much: it tells us something thin and vague about a
relation between so-called subjects and so-called power, but it fails
to grasp that individuals in the world always take up subject posi-
tions in the world, and these always exist within a concrete social
formation.
Therefore the ‘scene of interpellation’ that Butler describes
turns out to be Butler’s own scene, a product of her philosophical
discourse, not Althusser’s. Into that scene, Butler injects a descrip-
tion and theory of guilt, a story of a bad conscience that precedes
the hailing and therefore allows the hailing to work. For Butler,
guilt serves as a substitute for the social formation; she must
project guilt into the philosophical narrative she offers, for no
other reason than the fact that she had already removed the social
formation from that narrative. However, I must emphasise what
Althusser states directly in the passage above, in the only place in
the entire text that he mentions the word guilt: Althusser directly
rejects Butler’s narrative, and he refuses the psychoanalytic sup-
plement. Interpellation, for Althusser, has nothing whatsoever to
do with guilt or bad conscience. One is therefore led to ask why
Butler turned to Althusser in the first place?
The turn to guilt gives Butler’s argument within PLP a real con-
sistency, since it links up the reading of Althusser with her work
on/in psychoanalysis; it renders the engagement with Althusser’s
text consistent with Butler’s move away from Freud. Perhaps most
of all, Butler’s reconstruction of the so-called Althusserian ‘doc-
trine’ of interpellation bridges the enormous – some would say
unbridgeable – gap between Hegel and Althusser. At the heart of
Althusser’s political and theoretical project, and across the range

of his writings, lies his emphasis on the fundamental difference
between a Hegelian understanding of the social ‘totality’ and a
Marxist conception of the social ‘whole’ (Althusser 1976: 181).
Althusser defends the seemingly semantic distinction because it
points to a fundamental difference between, on the one hand,
understanding a totality as containing an ‘essence’ or core that
would always remain the same, or, on the other, grasping the
whole as complex, overlapping, discontinuous and yet still ‘struc-
tured in dominance’ (Althusser 1976: 181). ‘The social formation’
is a name that Althusser borrows from Marx but emphasises in a
way that Marx did not: it allows him to highlight and leverage the
difference between a thin, idealist concept of society and a thick,
rich, materialist conception. He writes:
For Hegel, society, like history, is made up of circles within circles, of

spheres within spheres. Dominating his whole conception is the idea
of the expressive totality, in which all the elements are total parts,
each expressing the internal unity of the totality which is only ever, in
all its complexity, the objectification-alienation of a simple principle.
(Althusser 1976: 182)
Hegel’s philosophy cannot account for the social formation as

formed by contradictions that are not necessarily resolved in
the march of history towards its inevitable telos. Marx offers
a concept of the social formation that has no essence, no core;
society is held together by material practices that contain contra-
dictions and tensions. What marks any particular social formation
is not its ‘essence’ or core idea, but relations of complexity and
unevenness. According to Althusser, the social formation ‘holds
together’ not through simple and pure contradiction (Hegel),
but through ‘overdetermination and contradiction’ (Marx). This
distinction indicates clearly that Althusser gives a very different
reading of Engels’ potentially determinist account of ‘determina-
tion in the last instance’, since, according to Althusser, the ‘last
instance’ is surely not the ‘first instance’, not a causal ground or
fundamental overarching principle, but a structure of domination
maintained only in and through historical practices and structures
(Althusser 1969: 111–13).
We can see, then, that this concept of a social formation provides
the context for what appears (wrongly, I am arguing) in Butler’s
account to be Althusser’s attenuated answer to why the individual/

subject responds to the hail. The figure Althusser describes is not
an ‘abstract’ individual who only becomes a subject after the turn.
Althusser describes a figure who is always-already interpellated by
ideology – a concrete subject, situated within a social formation,
itself structured in dominance. This means that the individual is
always already a subject of a particular social formation – a ‘lord’
in feudalism, a ‘worker’ in capitalism or a ‘mother’ in the family.
When I pose a question in class and a student responds by raising
her hand, the response should be explained, for Althusser, not
through an internal investigation of the individual’s conscience,
but by the structure of the ideological apparatus, the dispositif in
which the call and response occur: the ‘professor-subject’ asks a
question, and the ‘student-subject’ responds to this call.
Althusser’s discussion of hailing provides readers with a politi-
cal account of subjectivation and/or a historical account of subject
formation and subjection, but it does not really provide what
Butler hopes to offer – namely, a philosophical ‘theory of subjec-
tion’. In other words, Althusser’s work on interpellation does
not fit the frame that Butler builds and works with throughout
PLP. (Here we see clearly why and how the genre of philosophy
matters in this book.) Having started with Hegel and then worked
through Freud, Butler reads what she calls Althusser’s ‘doctrine’
of interpellation as very much a ‘philosophy’ of interpellation. But
to do so she must Hegelianise Althusser, strip away his own rich
understanding of the social formation, and in its place substitute a
psychic account of guilt or desire to persist in one’s being.
‘The social’ without a social formation: Butler’s liberal

political philosophy
In her writings post-2001, Butler has introduced a markedly dif-
ferent understanding of ‘the social’ – a move that might be read
as an effort to overcome problems I have identified above. Thus,
while others have noted Butler’s turn towards international politi-
cal concerns, and many have focused on Butler’s tendency towards
posing questions of ethics and calling on the framework of moral
philosophy, in this, my final section, I read these later texts in the
context I have now established. That is, I explore her later usage
of ‘the social’ to again ask the question of the social formation.
Butler’s argument in Giving an Account of Oneself (2005) – one
of her first major works after PLP and the first that appears after
2001 – certainly operates within, even itself emphasises, this
frame.7 The book repeatedly recurs to the idea of the ‘the social’
and of the relevance of ‘social theory’ (perhaps explaining West’s
description of Butler as a social theorist). In this text the social
emerges persistently (and much more richly than in the past),
appearing as an element that no moral theory can eliminate: it
proves impossible to account for the ‘I’, and the responsibility of
that ‘I’ without recourse to something beyond the ‘I’. Butler gives
a few different names to this ‘something more’, this element that
always exceeds the ‘I’: sometimes she calls it ‘ethical norms’ and
‘moral frameworks’, while at other moments she describes it in
the language of ‘the social’. ‘Ethics’ she states early on in the text,
‘finds itself embroiled in the task of social theory’ (Butler 2005: 7).
Hence it might appear that Butler’s so-called ‘turn to ethics’ goes
hand in hand with a turn to a thinking of the social.
But what does Butler mean here by ‘the social’? She uses the term
pervasively throughout the first chapter of Giving an Account, but
the usage proves somewhat curious. Perhaps the clearest way to
bring this odd usage to light is to show how Butler mobilises her
idea of ‘the social’ to link Foucault with Arendt. In simple terms,
she does so by faulting Foucault and praising Arendt. Butler starts
with Foucault’s concept of regimes of truth so as to deepen her
point that no moral account (no moral philosophy) can proceed
without reference to norms, to context. Butler reads Foucault as
establishing the fact that the critique of a discursive regime, ‘a
regime of truth’, must always also be an auto-critique, since any
given regime of truth provides conditions of possibility for the ‘I’
who would launch the critique. Here, however, Butler opens her
own line of criticism of Foucault, and she does so by way of a
series of ‘as if’ postulates that echo her mode of criticism in PLP.
Butler’s critique takes shape in one paragraph, wherein Butler
moves from asking a question of Foucault, to presuming that he
cannot answer it, to concluding that this failure marks a significant
limit for his project. She writes, and I comment in brackets:
What are these norms . . . [and] where and who is this other . . . ? It
seems right to fault Foucault for not making more room explicitly
for the other in his consideration of ethics. [Is seeming right to find
fault with Foucault somehow equivalent to mounting a critique of
him?] Perhaps this is because the dyadic scene of self and other cannot
describe adequately the social workings of normativity that condition

both subject production and intersubjective exchange. [Yet Foucault
does not work with a dyadic scene of self and other; Hegel does.
Foucault works with a rich understanding of historical epistemes, with
a concrete and material understanding of social and political orders
through which power relations flow.] If we conclude that Foucault’s
failure to think the other is decisive [Wait, now we are not only coming
to a decision that there is a failure here, but we are concluding that
such a failure proves decisive in our reading of Foucault, even though
the entire logical move is premised on the first ‘if’] we have perhaps
overlooked the fact [who is the ‘we’ here, given that the failure was
attributed to Foucault] that the very being of the self is dependent, not
just on the existence of the other in its singularity [Butler cites Levinas
for this claim about singularity, but I note that the logic and grammar
of the passage actually attributes this failure to Foucault, since it is he
that Butler is undertaking a critique of here], but also on the social
dimensions of normativity that governs the scene of recognition. This
social dimension of normativity precedes and conditions any dyadic
exchange [This might well be a valid claim, but who is it refuting?
Surely not Foucault. In any case, this last move again begs the question
of the status of ‘the social’ in Butler’s discussion.] (Butler 2005: 23)
Butler goes on to explain that norms are never the possession

of an individual; they have a certain sociality. Again, the func-
tion of ‘social’ in this discussion seems rather vague, since Butler
says nothing about concrete social orders, invokes no theories of
society or the social. The consistent function of ‘the social’ in this
text is to point to something that is more than one, more than
merely the ‘I’. Something is social because it is not merely me. This
sense of the social comes into clearer focus when Butler refers to
the social not just as what is missing from a dyadic account (Butler
2005: 28), but as something positive in itself.
She does the latter with her reading of Arendt (or at least her
reading of Cavarero’s reading of Arendt). The first reference to
the social as something that one might theorise (and not just an
idea that points to the more than one) comes at the opening of
this section, when Butler mentions ‘an Arendtian conception of
the social’ (Butler 2005: 31). It seems essential to emphasise here
that Butler is not referring to the (in)famous Arendtian argument
about the ‘rise of the social’ and its encroachment on the sphere of
action (and politics). Instead, Butler seems to be gesturing towards
the Arendtian account of plurality, but using the language of ‘the

social’ to describe it. Hence, immediately following the above-
quoted reference, Butler cites Cavarero citing Arendt on the neces-
sity of action and speech as a response to the question, ‘who are
you’ (Butler 2005: 30, citing Cavarero 2000: 20, citing Arendt
1958: 183). But to my knowledge no Arendtian scholars use this
idea in Arendt to develop a counter-concept of ‘the social’ – that
is, one that would cut against the grain of Arendt’s well-known
understanding of the social realm. Instead, Butler’s point here, as
in earlier sections in the text, seems mainly to be about moving
past solipsistic accounts and towards a relation to, and depend-
ency on, the other (Butler 2005: 32). And therefore, once again
Butler displaces any answer to a question of what she means by
the social.
I contend that the first positive answer to this question – as
opposed to Butler’s repeated negative uses of the social to contrast
with the pre-social – emerges gradually throughout this text and
takes sharper shape towards the end of this first chapter, when
Butler rehearses the argument of the book as a whole. The thesis
of Giving an Account of Oneself might best be captured in this
line from Butler: ‘the account of myself that I give in discourse
never fully expresses or carries this living self’ (2005: 35). There
can be no exhaustive account given of the self, and the self can
never be a sovereign subject that would self-authorise the account.
An account of oneself is always an account given in discourse,
which means that the ‘I’ who gives an account is always already
given over to the other, and the account given can never exhaust,
determine or even fully authorise the self (that gives it). I am not
objecting to anything in this broad set of claims. Rather, my focus
lies with the way in which Butler inserts an incipient idea of ‘the
social’ into this account. Immediately following the quote above,
Butler writes: ‘there is the operation of a norm, invariably social,
that conditions what will and will not be a recognizable account’
(Butler 2005: 35, my emphasis). What does the italicised phrase
add to Butler’s argument? Butler insists that the norm is ‘social’,
but as opposed to what? Non-social?
Based on a broader reading of the text as a whole, and consist-
ent with Butler’s otherwise strange references to an ‘Arendtian
conception of the social’, I submit that for Butler the exhortation
of/to ‘the social’ is an insistence on plurality. Norms cannot be
possessed, controlled or contained by the individual who gives an
account. Norms ‘belong’ to no one, and they arise in the context of

everyone. In this sense they are ‘social’ in that they are not private,
and they are ‘social’ in that they are not individual. Butler has
therefore implicitly defined ‘the social’ as two subjects relating to
one another; ‘sociality’ describes the space or scene in which the
dyadic philosophical relation occurs (Butler 2005: 23). This seems
fair enough, so far as it goes, though clearly from the perspective
I have been articulating throughout this chapter, such a notion of
‘the social’ as this cannot stand in for a fuller concept of the social
formation. And in a peculiar way, Butler actually has a sense of the
limitations of her own theory, since, later in Giving an Account,
Butler suggests that even in Hegel ‘recognition’ exceeds a dyadic
structure because what ‘eventually follows from th[e] scene’
of recognition is a ‘social account of norms’ (Butler 2005: 28).
However, this claim indicates the full extent to which Butler builds
her theory of the social on top of, or out of, her Hegelian theory of
dyadic recognition. She thereby first evacuates the social–historical
context so that she may construct a philosophical account of rec-
ognition, and then she turns recognition itself into the context for
the emergence of her new, thin account of ‘the social’. Therefore,
it is not so much that Butler has it upside down as that she has it
inside out: starting from a de-historicised theory of recognition,
she builds an abstract account of ‘sociality’ that turns out to be
nothing more than plurality.
Ultimately what we are left with in Butler’s own theorisation of
‘the social’ is little more than a liberal conception of the social. Let
me unpack this claim. For Butler, the social simply means more
than one individual; thus, it functions very much as an aggregative
term. Just as we see that the formation of political society, within
a liberal social contract theory, depends upon the shift from the
individuals within a state of nature to ‘the social’ formed through
consent, so we see Butler pivot from the ‘I’ who gives an account to
the social norms in which such accounts must invariably be given.
The move to Arendt thereby makes a sort of sense, not because
Butler really means to invoke Arendt’s understanding of the social,
but because she (Butler) needs to draw from her (Arendt’s) notion
of plurality. Of course, Arendt’s account of human plurality is
decisively not a liberal one, but Butler is not taking up Arendt’s
larger political philosophy. Instead, she rests with the idea of ‘the
social’ as more than one, and it is exactly this notion that I am
claiming resonates with liberalism. Liberalism’s commitment to
individualism means that ‘the social’ can never be much more than
a ‘more than one’, an aggregation of individuals.
It is not that Butler explicitly adopts a liberal theory, but that
despite her own occasional resistance to liberalism, she winds
up with a liberal account of the social. One might protest – as I
myself have done with Butler, above – that I make this final move,
towards a liberal concept of the social, too quickly. After all,
Butler never invokes social contract theory – never cites Locke or
Rawls, or anyone else of that ilk. Indeed, I have previously argued
that the strategies of denaturalisation practised in Butler’s earlier
work can effectively be read against the social contract tradition
(Chambers and Carver 2008: 21, 27, 41). Nonetheless, here I wish
to defend this very different claim, and to back it up by showing
that, over the years, Butler’s work has grown closer and closer
in proximity to that of standard liberal political philosophy. Her
logic looks more like that of a liberal mode of theorising, and even
more, the language she adopts sounds more and more like that
of liberal theory. To make this case, I turn to a more recent text,
Frames of War (Butler 2009), where I am most interested in the
framing structures for, and language used in, Butler’s arguments.
Butler has doubtless built a wide and interdisciplinary audience
over the years, one far broader and more diverse than the pre-
sumed reader of a text in liberal theory. Despite this truth, Butler’s
approach and her language now look and sound a lot like egalitar-
ian political philosophy, and we can see this starkly in Frames of
War’s Introduction, where Butler makes the case for the overall
philosophical and political contribution of her essays.
Butler’s fundamental project in this text is to generalise a set of
arguments about recognisability and intelligibility that have per-
colated throughout her previous writings.8 Butler shows that the
act by which one subject recognises another depends upon prior
conditions. This ontic act rests upon epistemological conditions
of ‘recognizability’ – the possibility of apprehending a subject in
the first place – while those very conditions themselves presup-
pose prior conditions of intelligibility, which Butler describes as
historical ‘schemas that establish the domain of the knowable’
(Butler 2009: 6). Butler, of course, has written about ‘norms of
recognizability’ and ‘schemas of intelligibility’ before, and at great
length (2009: 7). The problem of intelligibility lies at the centre
of Butler’s understanding of the heterosexual matrix in Gender
Trouble; it captures the logic of materialisation that she delineates
in Bodies that Matter; it underlies the articulation of hate speech

in Excitable Speech; and most powerfully, it forms the philosophi-
cal and political crux of Butler’s now well-known re-reading of
Antigone in Antigone’s Claim (Butler 1999; Butler 1993; Butler
1997b; Butler 2000). In this text, however, Butler lays out her phi-
losophy of recognisability and intelligibility at the beginning of the
text, and she does so specifically in order to show that this philo-
sophical structure serves as ‘an historical a priori’ (Butler 2009:
6). That is, the philosophical account is both grounding and gen-
eralising; it is tethered not to immanent critique (in the tradition
of critical theory) but to philosophising in a more universal voice.
Let me offer an example of the subtle but distinct difference in
Butler’s recent approach. In the middle of Butler’s introduction to
Frames she turns the argument away from her broad account of
how recognisability and intelligibility function, towards the politi-
cal dimension of the work. In a line that restates the argument
from the preceding dozen pages, Butler writes, ‘to say that a life
is precarious requires not only that a life be apprehended as a life,
but also that precariousness be an aspect of what is apprehended
in what is living’ (Butler 2009: 13). Again we witness Butler’s
emphasis that the problematic of precarity goes beyond that of
recognisability since precarity turns on bringing into view not just
subjects, but the problem itself of recognising subjects. Butler then
twists this argument markedly, even calling attention to the turn
she makes by explicitly indicating that she seeks to reinterpret her
own claims. She writes: ‘normatively construed, I am arguing that
there ought to be a more inclusive and egalitarian way of recog-
nizing precariousness, and that this should take form as concrete
social policy’ (Butler 2009: 13, my emphasis). The claim is suc-
cinct and non-opaque, but I think there is a great deal at stake
here – perhaps much more than there might at first appear to be.
First, Butler takes her account of intelligibility and says she
will construe it ‘normatively’. This constitutes an explicit gesture
towards the language of liberal political philosophy, and a signifi-
cant move away from Butler’s earlier arguments. Butler’s earlier
work showed decisively that the question of intelligibility could
never be considered ‘non-normative’, since intelligibility remains
indelibly tied to the problem of ‘normative violence’. There would
be no such thing as a ‘non-normative construal’ of unintelligibility
(or precariousness), for the reason that Butler explicitly conceptu-
alises intelligibility as tied up with norms. Here, however, Butler
uses ‘normative’ in a way very much distinct from those earlier

writings on normative violence (see Rushing 2009). With the ref-
erence to ‘normative’, this passage invokes the language of liberal
political theory, i.e. ‘normative theory’. The very idea of ‘norma-
tive theory’ can be traced back to the behaviouralist attempt to
redefine political theory as unscientific, and thereby to create a dis-
tinction between on the one hand, ‘positive theory’ that addresses
the world and discovers facts and laws about it, and on the other,
‘normative theory’ that tells us what we ‘ought’ to do or what
an ‘ideal’ world might look like. It is clear that Butler borrows
that language here, not only because her use of the word ‘norma-
tive’ marks such a departure from her previous writings, but also
because she signals the link to so-called normative theory directly
by going on to tell her readers what ‘ought’ to happen. And finally,
she answers the very question that empiricists have always asked
of their ‘normative’ counterparts: how does your ‘theory’ translate
into concrete policy recommendations? Butler emphasises that if
she can give a general normative theory of precariousness then it
will, in fact, lead to ‘concrete social policy’.
This is liberal political philosophy. It follows the playbook that
says to start with a priori or generalised philosophical claims,
and then bend them towards policy claims. And I must add that
Butler’s move in this section is not isolated; quite the contrary, she
repeats it (or moves like it) throughout Frames. Butler seems either
to have embraced liberal theory or at least tacitly to have accepted
its terms. She reiterates those terms throughout the introduc-
tion, consistently gesturing towards the idea of ‘generalizing’ her
account, of giving it a universal status (Butler 2009: 18, 20). In the
process, Butler also ends up adopting much of the language and
the limitations of the liberal mode of writing and thinking. Worse
than this, Butler winds up speaking in flat and obvious tautologies.
For example, she describes the condition of the world with which
her work engages, in this language: ‘precarity also characterizes
that politically induced condition of maximized precariousness’.
Similarly, she articulates part of the goal of her philosophical
project in these words: ‘to sustain life as sustainable’ (Butler 2009:
26, 23). Quoting these passages might seem like picking nits, but
I point to these examples not as a critique of Butler’s writing style
and not even to question her logic. My point is that the circularity
of this logic resonates decisively with that of much liberal theory
today.
Conclusion
Added together, these scenes from Giving an Account and Frames
offer a clearer sense of the status and shape of Butler’s writings
since 2001. As I specified at the outset, my aim in this chapter has
not been to trace influences on Butler or to explain, internal to her
own thinking and intentions, why Butler’s work shifts (often sig-
nificantly) from her earliest texts to her most recent ones. But the
architecture of Butler’s argument in PLP indicates one plausible,
structural explanation for her recent turn towards work in moral
theory and in the direction of producing writings that look more
like that of a liberal public intellectual than a social and politi-
cal theorist. In the absence of an account of the social formation,
exactly that which Butler purges from the thinkers she interprets in
PLP, Butler shifts towards normative political philosophy.
In showing how Butler has implicitly eschewed a concept
of the social formation, I am not accusing Butler of not being
Althusserian enough. Nor am I trying to play the ‘structure’ card
to Butler’s emphasis on agency (or on post-structuralism). To the
contrary – and perhaps surprisingly – in demonstrating that Butler
has made a series of mistakes in grasping the social formation, I
am suggesting that she fails to account for the dynamics of the
force of normativity. I would argue that this force operates across
the entirety of the social formation. But Butler leaves herself with
an overly narrow concept of normativity, because she circum-
scribes normativity within a dyadic field of ‘recognition’. It is as
if Butler comes to see normativity as itself a ‘structure’, and while
she grasps the structure of normativity as incapable of accounting
for everything – because, as she so often shows, every structure
always and necessarily fails in its efforts at structuration – Butler
misses out on the failure of any structure to account for its own
historicity.
Althusser proves important, therefore, not only to the extent
that Butler reads his concept of the social formation out of his own
texts, but also because, unlike Butler, Althusser was a philosopher
not of the subject, but of structures themselves. Therefore, fol-
lowing Marx, Althusser insists on the historicity of a structure as
itself that which makes determinist closure always impossible (and
thereby opens up spaces for agency). Thus, my engagement with
Butler in this chapter should not be reduced to or confused with
a standard sort of so-called ‘Marxist critique’ that plays ‘history’
or ‘structure’ as a trump card against philosophy. Rather, I am

trying to trace an internal and essential logic in Butler’s work that
plays itself out with particular consequences for how she construes
certain political concerns. There can be no doubt, as West indi-
cates, that Butler’s voice as a public intellectual proves robust and
important. That voice is heard widely and has a real force; witness
Butler’s recent winning of the Adorno prize and the important
debate that emerged around this public event (Butler 2012). I have
no intention whatsoever of deprecating this crucial work.
These achievements notwithstanding, something significant has
been lost in Butler’s recent writing – particularly when read in the
context of social and political theory. Butler’s early books had a
dramatic and transformative impact on a number of fields, and
much of this strength was tied to the theoretical radicality of those
texts – their ability to think something new – which was itself
linked to their concrete critical political engagement. Butler forced
a dramatic reconsideration of how we understand sex, gender and
the materiality of the body; she permanently reshaped our sense
of the relation between sex and gender; and her work served as a
sustaining resource for two decades of feminist and queer politics.
The power of Butler’s political theory was linked, I suggest, to her
commitment to ‘troubling’ established norms, ways of thought
and patterns of action (Chambers and Carver 2008). In contrast
to this earlier work, what Honig calls Butler’s ‘mortalist human-
ism’ serves as a general philosophical position – an insistence on
fundamental human finitude – with which few would disagree and
which many can admire (Honig 2013). While the general ‘truth’
of this ontology can surely be linked to a set of ‘normative claims’,
what goes missing in these works is Butler’s previously remarkable
ability to inspire and particularly to incite.
Notes
1. Although there is surely nothing definitive or fixed about it, I use
the year 2001 as an inflection point in the trajectory of Butler’s pub-
lished works for at least two reasons. First, at the time of my writing
in 2013, the year 2001 splits the time period of Butler’s published
works almost perfectly in half, since (if we leave out the publication
of her dissertation as a book [Butler 1987], which Butler herself often
seems eager to do) Butler’s first important chapters and articles, pre-
Gender Trouble, appeared in 1989, giving us 12 years until 2001 and
12 years after. Second, Butler published two books in 2000, both of

which remain clearly caught up in debates coming out of her work in
the 1990s, while her first book after 2001, Precarious Life (2004a),
just as clearly responds not to the terms of those earlier debates but
to the events of 9/11 and after. This periodising remains tentative and
nominalist, and will likely shift and disintegrate in the future, but at
the current moment it offers a helpful way to think about the ‘turn’ in
Butler’s work since 2001.
2. For a much earlier critique of Butler’s use of ‘the social’, see Laclau in
Butler et al. 2000: 183.
3. For a great deal more on this process, and for clarification of the terms
that Butler uses to translate (and mistranslate) Foucault’s French
terms, see my discussion in Chambers 2013.
4. Butler’s odd insistence on the supposed universality of the Spinozan
desire to persist in one’s being – ‘odd’ not only in its apparently trans-
historical nature, but also insofar as Butler wrongly attributes a com-
mitment to this force to authors such as Nietzsche, who had explicitly
rejected it – has been roundly criticised by readers of PLP (Lloyd
2007; Chambers and Carver 2008).
5. I see my analysis here as a complement to Honig’s critique of Butler’s
‘mortalist’ position (Honig 2013; see also Honig 2010). Honig shows
that Butler’s articulation of ‘precarious lives’ can clearly be under-
stood as another version of a philosophy of human finitude. In turn,
I am showing how such a philosophy might develop from the posi-
tion Butler takes up earlier, in PLP, when she erases an account of
the social formation. Without a concept of the social order, all that
remains are general philosophical statements about the subject (e.g.
concerning its finitude).
6. Both in the entirety of this chapter in PLP and also in the entirety
of Butler’s earlier article on Althusser (Butler 1995) on which the
chapter was based, Butler provides the following references: three
total citations of Althusser’s essay, only one of them substantive, and
zero citations of the key, famous passages on hailing and ideology.
7. As noted in the text above, Excitable Speech (Butler 1997) is pub-
lished in the same year, and at around the same time, as PLP and
therefore does not come ‘after’ it. Antigone’s Claim (2000), which I
would indeed describe as a major text in Butler’s oeuvre, appears prior
to what I am marking as the 2001 turn, and while I have discussed it
in the past I do not address it here. Precarious Life (2004a) proves to
be a very different kind of text, since it contains a collection of essays
and occasional pieces originally produced for specific political and
non-academic contexts. Hence the book comprises a much more frag-

mentary and focused set of essays and does not add up to the sort of
systematic philosophical project that we see in either PLP or Giving
an Account. Similarly but distinctly, Undoing Gender (2004b) also
collects together a variety of disparate, focused engagements on sex,
gender and sexuality. In this final section I focus mainly on Giving an
Account and Frames of War (2009), the two most important system-
atic books that Butler has published since 2001.
8. Elsewhere and previously I have tried to provide a non-generalising
reading of Butler’s earlier texts through the concept of (un)intelligibil-
ity (Chambers and Carver 2008; Chambers 2009).
References
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Notes on Contributors
Samuel A. Chambers teaches political theory and cultural politics

at Johns Hopkins University. His interests are broad and inter-
disciplinary – ranging from central issues in social and political
theory, to engagements with contemporary feminist and queer
theory, to contributions to critical television studies. He has
authored five books, edited four more, and published more than
two dozen journal articles, along with numerous chapters and
essays. His most recent book is Bearing Society in Mind: Theories
and Politics of the Social Formation (Rowman & Littlefield
International 2014).
Nathan Gies is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political

Science at Johns Hopkins University. His dissertation makes a case
for candour as a contemporary political virtue through readings
of Rousseau, Nietzsche and Whitman informed by feminist and
queer theory. More broadly, his research interests include theories
of the public and the private, phenomenology and its afterlives,
and jurisprudence and legal studies.
Fiona Jenkins teaches and researches in the School of Philosophy,

Australian National University, and is Convenor of the ANU
Gender Institute. Her current research covers two projects, one on
Judith Butler, which focuses on questions of political legitimacy,
violence and non-violence; the other on gender equity in academic
disciplines, including an interest in gender representation and how
feminist perspectives are integrated into research. Recent publica-
tions include several co-edited volumes: Women in Philosophy:
What Needs to Change? (Oxford University Press 2013); a special
issue of Australian Feminist Studies, ‘Gendered Excellence in the
Social Sciences’ (June 2014); and Allegiance and Identity in a
219
Globalising World (Cambridge University Press 2014). Her work

on Butler has appeared in journals including Angelaki, differences
and SubStance.
Moya Lloyd is Professor of Political Theory at Loughborough

University. She has published mainly in the areas of feminist
theory and contemporary social and political thought. Her books
include Beyond Identity Politics: feminism, power and politics
(Sage 2005), Judith Butler: from norms to politics (Polity 2007),
and with Adrian Little (eds), The Politics of Radical Democracy
(Edinburgh University Press 2009). She is currently the recipient
of a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for the project ‘Who
Counts? The political problem of the “human” ’.
Catherine Mills is Associate Professor of Bioethics and the

recipient of an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship
(FT120100026) in the Centre for Human Bioethics, Monash
University. Her current research explores issues at the intersection
of reproductive ethics, feminist philosophy and Continental phi-
losophy. She is the author of Futures of Reproduction: Bioethics
and Biopolitics (Springer 2011) and The Philosophy of Agamben
(Acumen and McGill/Queens University Press 2008).
Sara Rushing is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Montana

State University in Bozeman. Her work brings classical and con-
temporary political theory into dialogue to explore the intersection
of politics and ethics as well as dispositions of critical democratic
citizenship. She is currently at work on a book project that uses
contexts of corporeal vulnerability – including giving birth, facing
death, navigating mental and physical illness, and grieving – to
develop revitalised concepts of humility and autonomy.
Birgit Schippers is Senior Lecturer in Politics at St Mary’s

University College Belfast. She is the author of Julia Kristeva
and Feminist Thought (Edinburgh University Press 2011) and
The Political Philosophy of Judith Butler (Routledge 2014). Her
current research focuses on war, human rights and post-humanist
perspectives.
Drew Walker is Visiting Assistant Professor of Politics at Whitman

College. He completed his PhD in political theory at Johns
Notes on Contributors 221
Hopkins University, and his work centres on feminist and queer

political theory, politics of sexuality and political ethics. He is cur-
rently completing a book manuscript entitled Humanism at the
Limits: Alienation and the Politics of Difference. He has publica-
tions forthcoming in The Comparatist, Contemporary Political
Theory and Das Staatsverständnis von Judith Butler.
Index
Adorno, Theodor, 2, 100, 119, 122, Bersani, Leo, 154–5

131, 134 Bodies that Matter, 18, 21, 80–1,
affect, 6–8, 46–7, 50, 65, 68–84, 175, 195, 198, 211–12
84n, 91–109, 128, 171, 183 body, 6, 9, 21–2, 26, 43, 71–2, 79,
affective turn, 73–7, 92–5 105, 127, 134–5, 167–92,
emotion, 68, 73–4, 77, 93–4, 215
110n body politics, 107, 168–9
Agamben, Giorgio, 179 Bourdieu, Pierre, 173–4
Ahmed, Sara, 86n Brennan, Teresa, 77
AIDS crisis, 9, 154–7, 177
AIDS Names Project quilt, 156 Cavarero, Adriana, 58, 208–9
Althusser, Louis, 10, 194, 196, Cavell, Stanley, 9, 142, 148–52
198–206, 214 Chambers, Samuel and Carver,
guilt, 200–1, 203–4, 206 Terrell, 4, 147, 151–2
ideology, 201–3 cohabitation, 60–1, 136, 182
interpellation, 199–204, 206 community, 7, 29–30, 32, 43, 46,
Antigone’s Claim, 153, 158, 212 59, 61, 82, 102, 106–7, 126
appearance, 46, 58, 124, 126–7, Connolly, William, 1, 2, 76–7,
129, 130–1, 137, 146–7 143
apprehension, 51, 70, 72–3, 80, 83, Coole, Diana, 5, 15, 72, 78, 80
123–4, 127–30, 133, 211–12 corporeal vulnerability see
Arendt, Hannah, 18, 60, 126, 128, vulnerability
132, 135–6, 160, 178–80, 182, Crimp, Douglas, 155–6
187n, 207–10 critique, 8–9, 20, 52, 54, 68, 70–1,
space of appearance, 178–80, 82, 125, 130–6, 180, 207–8
187n Cuffari, Elena, 77
Aristotle, 18, 82–3 Cvetkovich, Ann, 94
Asad, Talal, 104–5
Athanasiou, Athena, 174 Dean, Jodi, 5, 138n,
autonomy, 45, 52, 68, 101, 169–70 democracy, 84, 107–8, 112n,
119–20, 122, 128, 143, 177
Benjamin, Walter, 136–7 sensate democracy, 8, 118, 124–5,
Berlant, Lauren, 5, 76 127, 132
222
Index 223
dependency, 21, 41, 43–4, 49–50, frames, 47, 51, 68, 70, 72–3, 101,
52–3, 61, 69, 96–8, 102–3, 123, 104, 129, 130, 146, 177, 182,
130, 134, 170–1, 209 184–5
Derrida, Jacques, 35n, 129, 133 Frames of War, 7, 8, 46–8, 57, 60,
desire, 96–8, 106, 110n, 157, 171, 65, 67–71, 72–3, 77–83, 95,
194, 206 100, 103–4, 107, 127–30,
Dews, Peter, 2 134–5, 169, 172–3, 178,
Dispossession, 3, 41, 174, 182 211–14
dispossession, 101–2, 107, 183–4 freedom, 76, 83, 118, 120, 159
Douglass, Frederick, 142, 150–1 Freud, Sigmund, 87n, 97, 197, 201
drag, 20
Garber, Marjorie, Hanssen, Beatrice,
ecstasis, 102, 106, 171, 186n and Walkowitz, Rebecca, 1–2
ek-stasis see ecstasis gender, 18, 20, 25–6, 82, 147–8,
emotion see affect 151–2, 168–9, 174–7, 180
equality, 47–8, 118, 124, 126–8, 136 Gender Trouble, 3, 20, 80, 81–2,
ethics, 1–3, 25, 52 147–8, 168, 175, 177, 195–6,
ethic of non-violence, 6, 42, 45, 198, 211
73, 79, 127 Giving an Account of Oneself, 3,
ethical dispositions, 66, 72, 80, 41, 49–55, 58–9, 65, 68, 70,
83, 103 100, 103, 106, 119, 121, 131,
ethical responsibility, 5–8, 41, 49, 206–10, 214
51–6, 58, 61, 66–8, 70–1, 91–2, Gregg, Melissa, and Seigworth,
99–103, 106, 108–9, 182, 207 Gregory, 74–5, 93
ethical responsiveness, 7, 70–1, grievability, 6, 8–9, 97, 101, 103–4,
77, 79, 81, 127, 167–8, 181–2, 118, 120–1, 124–5, 127,
184–6 129–31, 135–7, 141–5, 155–7,
ethical violence, 54, 100, 119–21, 162, 172, 177–9, 181–2, 184–6,
132 187n
ethics as self-cultivation, 66, 77 Grossberg, Lawrence, 94
ethics-politics relation, 3, 5–9, Guantanamo, 82, 100, 161
15–16, 23–8, 30, 32, 60, 99, Gutterman, David and Rushing,
108, 119, 121, 130, 133–4, Sara, 5
138n, 141, 145, 157, 167
global ethics, 8, 102, 106–9 Habermas, Jürgen, 2, 131
turn to ethics, 2, 5, 24, 91, 99, Harman, Graham, 27
141, 146, 167, 193, 207, 214 hate speech, 99, 101, 212
virtue ethics, 1, 81–4 Hegel, G. W. F., 59, 96–8, 100, 106,
Excitable Speech, 18, 21, 26, 30, 81, 174, 195, 198–200, 204–5, 208,
85n, 98–9, 101, 212 210
Heidegger, Martin, 152–3
Fieser, James, 1 Hemmings, Clare, 75–6, 85n
Foucault, Michel, 1, 25, 36n, 51, 54, heteronormativity, 174–5, 177,
57, 73, 77–8, 106, 129, 131–2, 180
134, 136, 144, 151, 155, 179, HIV/AIDS, 97, 103
197–8, 200, 207–8 Hobbes, Thomas, 69
Honig, Bonnie, 8, 19, 34n, 121, 125, Leys, Ruth, 74, 76–7
155–6, 159, 171–2, 186n, 216n liberalism, 210–13
mortalist humanism, 5, 17, 78, liveability, 6, 17–20, 22–3, 26, 30,
84, 200, 215 32–3, 34n, 96, 98, 103, 105,
human, the, 6, 9, 19–21, 41, 44, 107, 148
46, 49, 55–6, 66, 73, 82, 107, liveable life, 4, 6, 17, 65, 79, 83,
112n, 128, 141–63, 167–8, 171, 101, 104, 119, 124, 127, 132,
174–5, 182, 184–6 146–8, 152, 175–8, 180
dehumanisation, 9, 44, 46, 122, unliveability, 174, 176
141, 144, 149–52, 155, 160, Lloyd, Moya, 15, 30, 71, 147, 153
185 Loizidou, Elena, 2, 5–6, 183
humanisation, 18, 44, 46–7, 78,
104 Massumi, Brian, 74–7, 81
non-human, 21–2 Mills, Catherine, 5–6
human rights, 143, 145–6, 158, moral philosophy, 2, 3, 15, 100,
160–2 193, 206–7, 214
humanism, 2, 78, 81, 125 moralism, 3, 6, 16, 24, 27
morality, 1–2, 57, 132, 134–5,
intelligibility, 6, 17–18, 21, 50, 103, 183
105, 128, 147–8, 151, 153, 178, Mouffe, Chantal, 2, 108, 112n
211–12 mourning, 97, 104, 121, 129,
interdependence, 21, 41, 43, 53, 155–6, 178
55–6, 60, 67–8, 81–2, 84, 92, Murphy, Ann, 45, 78, 138n, 172
98, 128, 172–3, 181
nation-state, 60, 119, 120, 123, 125,
Jameson, Frederic, 2 130, 132, 137; see also state
nationalism, 8, 120–1, 123, 125,
Kant, Immanuel, 5, 15, 131, 135 129, 138n
Klein, Melanie, 111n Ngai, Sianne, 74
Knisely, Lisa, 188n normative violence see violence
Kroker, Arthur, 106 norms and normativity, 4, 17,
18–19, 21, 23, 44, 47, 50–1,
La Caze, Marguerite, and Lloyd, 56–8, 62n, 66–8, 72, 79–80, 82,
Henry Martyn, 74 97, 100–1, 105, 112n, 124–5,
language, 17–31, 99, 101, 133, 200 127–33, 134, 142, 144–9,
Laplanche, Jean, 50–1, 71, 102 151–5, 158–9, 161–2, 163n,
Levinas, Emmanuel, 1, 2, 4, 15–16, 170, 174–7, 182, 184–6,
19–20, 22–5, 27–32, 45–6, 50, 207–12, 214–15
53, 57–8, 60, 67, 70–1, 101,
119, 122–3, 127, 136, 182, obligation, 2, 9, 45, 48–9, 60–1,
208 67, 69, 92, 96, 102, 107, 123,
Butler’s ‘Levinasian’ turn, 4, 5, 125–8, 134–6, 138n, 182–4
15–16, 32, 53 ontology, 10, 20–1, 41, 47–8, 50,
communication, 6, 16–17, 27–32 55, 58, 60, 72–3, 99, 103, 123,
face, the, 15, 19–20, 45–6, 123, 127–8, 132, 134, 169–70, 184,
130, 136 188n, 194, 215
Index 225
Parting Ways, 59–60, 119–20 recognition, 2, 4, 20–1, 44, 51, 66,

passionate attachment, 71, 98, 106, 68, 95, 96–7, 100–1, 104, 122,
108, 157, 171, 197 124–5, 128–30, 145–7, 149,
performativity, 36n, 81, 118–19, 151, 155, 158, 167, 174–5, 178,
126–7, 143, 148, 163n, 175, 181, 184–5, 195, 199–200, 208,
177–8, 180 210, 214
performance, 26, 36n, 82 Reimer, David, 26n, 175, 187n
Perpich, Diane, 58 relationality, 7, 25, 41–3, 50–3, 56,
personal is political, 32–3 61, 67, 92, 98, 101, 106, 108–9,
pluralisation, 8–9, 119–20, 125–30, 123, 126, 129, 131, 135, 168,
135–7, 143, 163n, 180 170–2, 175, 183, 196
plurality, 31, 49, 60–1, 119, 123, representation, 18–20, 30, 45–6,
125–7, 133, 136, 180, 195–6, 70–1, 127
209–10
politics, 23, 29–33, 43, 47, 65–6, Salih, Sara, 4
78–9, 83–4, 98, 104, 107–9, San Francisco Chronicle, 104,
121–4, 126–7, 129–30, 133–4, 121–3, 144, 184–5
137, 141–2, 146, 148, 153–6, Sanders, Lynn, 29
158–62, 167–81, 185, 215 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 163n
politics of grief, 32–3, 43, 80, 107, Segal, Lynne, 5, 15
118, 156 sex and gender, 3, 18, 35n, 168,
power, 54, 72–3, 125, 128–9, 196, 215
134–5, 148, 167, 177, 179, 182, sexuality, 97, 148, 151–2, 175
197–8, 200–1, 204, 208 Shulman, George, 172
Precarious Life, 4, 19, 41, 43–5, Singer, Peter, 1, 2
46–7, 65, 67–71, 80, 82, 95, 97, slavery, 149–51
100, 103–4, 107, 121–2, 130, Smith, Rachel Greenwald, 75
142–4, 172, 184 social, the, 10, 56, 70, 194–5,
precariousness, 6, 41, 45–9, 60–1, 206–11
65, 67–9, 78, 82–3, 99–100, social formation, 193–6, 197,
103, 123, 126–30, 135, 141, 201–6, 210, 214
162, 167–8, 173–4, 176, 181–2, social order, 10, 155–6, 158, 175,
185–6, 212–13 201, 204, 208
precarity, 6–7, 47–9, 59–60, 62n, speech see language
67, 99–100, 119, 134–5, 137, Spinoza, Baruch, 37n, 74, 96
141, 167–8, 173–82, 185–6, conatus (desire to persist), 37n,
212–13 96, 106, 157, 197, 203, 216n
precaritisation, 173–4, 176 Stark, Hannah, 4,
Psychic Life of Power, The, 71, state, 46, 68, 103–5, 141–2, 161,
97–8, 100, 106, 157, 168, 171, 176; see also nation-state
193–207, 214 subject, 4, 7, 10, 18, 22–3, 25, 29,
41–4, 49–62, 67–9, 71–2, 77,
Rancière, Jacques, 1, 160–1 79–81, 91–2, 95–103, 106–8,
recognisability, 9–10, 19, 51, 69, 129, 131, 133, 148, 157–9,
124–5, 128–30, 133, 147, 170–1, 184, 193–204, 206,
174–5, 176, 181, 211–12 208–10
subjection, 10, 98, 102, 106, 157–8, violence, 43–7, 69, 72, 79, 91–2,
193–206 99–100, 103–5, 108–9, 120,
subjectivation, 22, 201, 206 130, 144–5, 148, 152, 163n
subjectivity see subject ethical violence see ethics
Subjects of Desire, 4, 8, 71, 95–8 normative violence, 79, 152,
substitutability, 7, 42, 50, 58–9, 212–13
61 vulnerability, 6–7, 41–9, 59–61, 65,
subversion, 9, 31, 82, 141–2, 146, 67–70, 78, 80–1, 92, 97–9, 101,
153, 158, 160–2, 163n 103, 106, 121, 123, 145, 157,
survival, 17–20, 26, 30, 34n, 37n, 162, 163n, 167–8, 171–3, 175,
102, 111n, 141, 146, 157–61, 179, 181, 183–6, 200
171
cultural viability, 18 Walker, Drew, 201
war, 8, 46–7, 68–9, 72, 91, 95–6,
Thiem, Annika, 2, 4, 5 103–5, 107, 130, 132, 148
translation, 30–1, 121, 130, War on Terror, 99, 104, 112n, 120
137 West, Cornell, 193, 215
trauma, 95, 97–8, 105–6 Women of Zimbabwe Arise
(WOZA), 159–60
Undoing Gender, 18–20, 81, 102,
106–7, 145, 170, 175 Young, Iris Marion, 29
US national anthem, 118, 126–7,
137 Žižek, Slavoj, 5

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Notes on Contributors 219

As Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen and Rebecca Walkowitz

the province of ‘an ideal, autonomous and sovereign subject’ and

I confess to worrying about the turn to ethics, and have recently

2000b), as well as with Precarious Life (Butler 2004a), the volume

Other critics, however, disagree that the entire compass of

ethical responsibility’ (2007: 14, 76). Butler describes her own

Vulnerability has been a common concept in feminist discussions

Butler with the conceptual resources to better connect being,

ethico-­politics is concerned with contesting ethical violence as ‘an

borrow from Butler, a ‘vulnerability’ can be neither ‘perceived or

see the chapters by Gies, Mills and Rushing. Interestingly, in ‘Ethical

Butler, Judith (1997b), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection,

Butler’s Precarious Politics: Critical Encounters, London: Routledge,

Mouffe, Chantal (2000), ‘Which Ethics for Democracy?’, in Marjorie

Signifying Otherwise: Liveability and

Deformed and ill-­understood? Perhaps. At least this deformation will

Has Judith Butler been ‘duped by morality’?1 Although I doubt

Butler’s recent writing has become weighed down by the gravity

time, I affirm alternative coalitional modes of political community

Speech and survival

In Excitable Speech, Butler presents this argument in terms of a

In this passage and throughout her work, Butler’s invocations of

There is something unrepresentable that we nevertheless seek to rep-

Conditions and capacities

framework of ‘social ontology’, Butler both reaffirms and reworks

see also Mahmood 2012). Her reading of Levinas, by contrast,

The language of ethics

Butler is keenly aware that moralism often moves quickly into

without cowardice’ (Levinas 1998a: 56, 185). In its most primary

­ roposes thinking of gender as a kind of act, in light of ‘the scale

The ethics of language

My reading of Levinas takes energy from Graham Harman’s

l­ anguage produces something available ‘for others’ and not merely

or be used as fuel by some enterprising new explorer. My meaning

precious intentions’ (Butler 1993: 241). Following what Butler

proposing re-­ describes the ‘subversive resignification’ famously

Personal and political

tised, depoliticised account of individual lifestyles and consumer

2. For a concise elaboration of this position, see Levinas 1998b:

of his essays, Derrida is centrally concerned with the moral and

will conclude that the modes of signification he attends to make it

that Levinas understands in etymological rather than religious

Critchley, Simon (2004), ‘Five Problems in Levinas’s View of Politics and

(ed.) Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy, Chicago:

Undoing Ethics: Butler on Precarity,

the condition of vulnerability has a normative force is not in itself

common, of what we share. Thus, her ethics founders on the twin

Towards an ethics of failure

exposed to the care and touch of others insofar as he or she could

[a] vulnerability must be perceived and recognized in order to come

Butler’s formulation here is somewhat contorted, in that it is never

I will return to this question later, but first, let me continue

central tension of the Levinasian approach that Butler is working

order to control affect – in anticipation of the way affect is not

and violence.4 Further, she keeps company with many other

ethico-politics is concerned with contesting ethical violence as ‘an

Deformed and ill-understood? Perhaps. At least this deformation will

roposes thinking of gender as a kind of act, in light of ‘the scale

l anguage produces something available ‘for others’ and not merely

proposing re- describes the ‘subversive resignification’ famously

terminological, and hence theoretical, difference between this

of self-knowledge links the problem of responsibility with that of

ntology would have to start from this shared condition of pre-

c ommonality. Finally, then, I suggested that her most recent turn

full-blown care ethics, or a return to the ‘voluntarist subject of

consideration of the critical moral function of anger (2005), and