Narrating Sensation before Subjectivity

Judith Butler’s Senses of the Subject is a collection of essays written over two decades that addresses the problem of the sensuous and affective limit that precedes the formation of the self. Here, Butler is concerned with the networks of sensation and the trajectories of affect that preexist the subject’s capacity to say “I,” as well as the methodological and ethical problems this presubjective state poses.

For Butler, in order for one to say “I,” one must already have been affected in some way, and, in fact, being affected is part of what brings about the capacity to give an account of oneself. Because language has a retroactive temporality, any account of what has happened prior to the inception of language and the formation of a conscious “I” will arrive too late. In attempting to account for this presubjective “origin,” one could certainly argue that the subject in question reconstitutes it as a fantasy, and when this happens, what is really described is the fantasy and not the preconscious conditions of being affected. Butler’s answer to this objection is that we “accept this belatedness and proceed in a narrative fashion that marks the paradoxical condition of trying to relate something about my formation that is prior to my own narrative capacity and that, in fact, brings that narrative capacity about” (2). Using language to give an account of presubjective affect might be said to be “impossible,” but this does not mean we cannot do it. It just means we must find the right method. For Butler, that method is narrative.

Paradoxically, a self cannot consent to be affected prior to its emergence as a self. And yet, the self can emerge only after it has been affected by the world in “radically involuntary” ways (7). This means that all subjectivity is the result of manifold, unwilled, and paradoxical processes that are simultaneously constitutive. Butler also makes it clear that a subject can break with this “matrix of relations” that instituted her subjectivity, and Butler uses the term “disorientation” to describe this breakage (9). Disorientation can sometimes be brought about by the agency of a subject, but Butler goes on to ask whether these breaks might be built into the matrix of relations that constitute us. She argues that this matrix may be said to have “a pattern of breakage” within it, suggesting that we can be broken or undone by the very relations that formed us (ibid.).

The book is composed of seven chapters and an introduction. Each chapter focuses on a different problem and set of thinkers and texts. For example, in the first chapter, on René Descartes, Butler offers a response to critics of constructionism who claim that constructionists reduce the body to being “all a matter of language” (17). Butler wants to show not simply that the body is constructed through language but that it is deconstructed through language. It is given through language, but never fully given. In Descartes she finds the spectral return of the hands and body that he seeks to deny; his body is undone through language, but because language and embodied sensation can never be separated once and for all, the body returns in the very words that disavow it.

While the chapter on Maurice Merleau- Ponty and the speculative and theological philosopher Nicolas Malebranche explores how touch inaugurates subjectivity through “a touch that belongs to no subject” (37), the chapter on Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics is the most sustained engagement with the ethical consequences of the relationship between sensation, affect, and subjectivity that Butler describes. In the chapter, she finds a prefiguration of the death drive in Spinoza’s thought and demonstrates that there is room for communal subjectivity in Spinoza’s ethical framework, as opposed to the singular individualism with which he is often associated.

These first three chapters establish the argument of the collection, and the remaining four chapters elaborate on these claims in provoking ways. Butler discusses particular emotions, including love and despair, in her fourth and fifth chapters on...