Unbecoming Subjects: Judith Butler, Moral Philosophy, and Critical Responsibility

Introduction

Introduction While it is a commonplace to begin with the question of how to live well, it seems to me that we still run up against this question time and again—this question that Socrates posed as the central question for philosophy. Living with others as we do, this question also means how to live well given the social circumstances we find ourselves in. How to live well? How to know what to do? What resources can aid and guide us in our personal and social life? These questions, perhaps generally considered as questions of ethics and morality, have ambivalent histories. Moral and ethical codes as part of social codes of conduct do not always make life more livable; they can also be socially restrictive. In particular, it seems to me that Nietzsche’s criticism of morality for relying on feelings of guilt and bad conscience continues to be an important caution. Moral conduct cannot be reduced to what we owe others, to duties and obligations, and also not to virtues, which can have equally restraining effects. When, for example, critical opposition is devalued in the name of humility, then humility silences and becomes a 1 2 Unbecoming Subjects questionable virtue that restricts us rather than enabling us to undertake the difficult labor of learning to live together well. Living together is never conflict-free, and how to know what to do is also another name for how to learn to sustain and negotiate conflicts well, both personally and socially. We are thus constantly embroiled in moral quandaries as much as in political ones, and often the two are not easily separable. These dilemmas of knowing how to respond and what to do are also difficult because of the complexity of the societies that we live in. In our globally interrelated world, environmental destruction, poverty, and violence are only three pervasive problematics that defy easy analysis or straightforward solutions, either on the global or on the local level, levels that in the age of the Internet can no longer be easily separated anyway. In the face of these challenges, hopes for moral certainty and for individual agency to change the world very quickly retreat into either defeatism or dogmatism. Against these alternatives, a wide variety of thinkers have responded to help us rethink contemporary ethical and political problematics and to renew the moral resources to address them. Among these philosophical responses have also been increasingly more poststructuralist ones, even though poststructuralism has been denounced, because of its trenchant criticisms of traditional moral philosophy and its centering on rational subjects and universal norms, as a philosophy of nihilism that has contributed to a perceived erosion of the ‘‘moral fabric’’ of society. These so-called ‘‘turns’’ to ethics have not settled, but rather have reinvigorated, philosophical debates over how to live well and how best to enable ethical life. While theorists drawing on poststructuralism have been rediscovering ethics for several years now, the normative aspect of ethics seems to remain beyond what can be easily reappropriated.1 Instead, what is ethical is often located in practices and commitments that are neither normatively arguable nor normatively enforceable. In return, moral philosophers have tended to view poststructuralism with great suspicion at best, and for the most part appear to have chosen to ignore it entirely. Until now, poststructuralism and moral philosophy seem to have remained two mutually exclusive endeavors . In this book, I am turning to the work of one particular poststructuralist theorist, Judith Butler, to articulate a rethinking of moral philosophy through the challenges posed to it by Butler’s work, especially on subject formation. My main aim in this book is to articulate responsibility and critique as key concepts in moral philosophy. Introduction 3 Through this reformulation of moral philosophy as both responsibility and critique, this book also critically engages the poststructuralist embrace of ethics as an ethos of responsibility and ethical self-formation. The book aims to trouble and complicate the debate by insisting on the term ‘‘moral philosophy’’ and on the critical value of the problematics this term produces .2 By approaching moral philosophy as an indicator for ethical problematics and by not assuming that moral philosophy already resolves the problematics it makes graspable, my argument in this book is aligned with poststructuralist and other lines of thought that find in moral philosophy the problem rather than the solution. Nevertheless, I side with moral...