Senses of the Subject by Judith Butler (review)

Judith Butler in undoubtedly one of the most popular philosophers and critics of our time—across philosophy, psychoanalysis, political and social theory, gender studies, and more. Her scope has breadth, playfulness, confrontation, and a serious attention to performative rhetoric. Butler’s new book, Senses of the Subject, is a bastion of her oeuvre as a “poststructuralist thinker” (a term that she has provisionally accepted) and a remarkably ethical collection of essays spanning from 1993–2012 that register “some shifts in [Butler’s] views over that time” (1). Senses inscribes and lends itself to the poststructuralist tradition (a tradition she is tirelessly working with and against) but is, on my estimation, beyond an empty textualism.

Butler, who “philosophizes with the times,” records her shifting views towards the social, political, juridical and philosophical problems of the last three decades. In this book, Butler remains true to her theoretical roots as she emphasizes leaving concepts permanently open, contested, and contingent in order not to foreclose in advance any future claims for inclusion. However, in Senses there are unique accents placed upon Butler’s call for conceptual openness and the “less known—and less popular—dimensions of [her] philosophical work” (10). These accents include the role of affects, the narrative self-fashioning of subjects, belatedness (Nachträglichkeit), tropology, and impressionability in relation to the body as a site of ideological interpellation.

Before discussing Senses, let’s address one big elephant in the room: What do we mean by poststructuralism? Deconstruction(ism) and poststructuralism emerged from American academia from sometime after 1966—the former refers to Derrida’s strategy (mode, method, system?) for reading texts while the latter evokes an Anglo-American reception and commentary upon “French theory.” The ambiguity of both terms is without controversy; one need only to look at the critical deconstructionist literature culminating in 1986 with Derrida’s bulldog, Gasché. This latter term, poststructuralism, on my reading at least, is a provisional and indexical word that functions as a catachresis: a term that is not “wrong” but errs, wanders, and strays in a belated fashion that fails to pin down what it is. Moral philosophy and poststructuralism are, rather crudely, considered à la Eagleton, Callinicos, Dews, et al. as two antithetical enterprises, especially since the latter supposedly “lacks” a subject, a political theory, and an agent. But is this the case? Poststructuralism (whether we mean it as post-structuralism; or post-structuralism; or without-the-hyphen) is in actuality a profoundly ethical endeavor to rehabilitate the subject by decentering it and re-positioning it in all its historical and cultural complexity. Sometimes these endeavors “fail” but these failures are, fortunately for us readers, constitutive of philosophical discourse(s). And Senses finds itself in this trench warfare of theory aptly defending the subject from a primarily affective, and ultimately, ethical perspective.

Senses is noteworthy if we, the reader, want to follow Butler, a profound thinker of our contemporary age who evolves with the times. While the book merits reading in full, from front cover to back cover, one useful strategy is to read the essays published in chronological order—from Kierkegaard’s Speculative Despair (1993) to “To Sense What is Living in the Other: Hegel’s Early Love” (2012). Butler’s core thesis, although formulated and recast under different light with every subsequent publication (rhetorical, tropological, discursive, material, etc.) on the subject is that the “I” does not stand apart from itself; it is affected, embodied, and constituted through complex matrices of power that place it in a multiplicity of “positions,” ergo the psychic life of power. The “I” is addressed to give an account of itself which performatively constitutes the “I” within a set of norms and counter-norms. Butler’s term for this process is subject formation. More simply put, what we call the “I” is always already addressed by a “you” that affects me; and “I” must struggle with the hail of the “you” to figure out who “I” am.

Whether we are reading Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Freud...