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

1. Subjects in Subjection: Bodies, Desires, and the Psychic Life of Norms

o n e Subjects in Subjection: Bodies, Desires, and the Psychic Life of Norms That our bodies, our desires, and even our psychic lives are not separable from the way that norms and social power act on us is not just an uncomfortable thought or a theory that adequately seems to sum up experiences that we might have had. If we think about it a bit longer, then this concept puts our commitments to the test about how we think about our capacity to decide and act independently from these norms. The subject of moral philosophy is often cast as that of an agent who breaks with the power of these norms in rational deliberation. Yet this capacity of rationality and its scope are called into question when we consider precisely how this subject of rationality is continuously formed and sustained through its subjection to social norms. When we deliberate ethically, this deliberation is traversed by the social and psychic life that norms and our past take on. We are never completely reflectively aware of our own desires and of how we were formed through traditions, interactions with others, and our cultural contexts. So in terms 21 22 Unbecoming Subjects of the subject of moral deliberation and conduct, the problematic is that rational reflection on desires and inclinations cannot be taken to establish the subject’s ability to deliberate what to do at a distance from social norms. If bodies and desires as well as our capacity to consciously reflect on them are formed through normalization, then neither the facticity and materiality of bodies and desires nor the nonspecified assertion of their existence can be critical vantage points from which to evaluate the effects of social norms. The desire for the good life as a traditional resource for ethical thought becomes problematic if one takes seriously how this desire and the kind of good life that one can desire are socially formed and how the norms that determine what can be desired as good can make lives and bodies less rather than more possible. By examining how the subject is continuously formed in subjection to social norms and hence through social normalization, Judith Butler’s work takes the subject as a presupposition and vantage point of moral philosophy critically into view. Subjects and bodies, so Butler argues, are far from being settled entities whose nature we could ascertain ontologically, anthropologically , or biologically in distinction from being formed through social and cultural practices. As Butler contends, we have no access to what subjects or bodies are outside frameworks of social norms and the consequent plight of subjects and bodies as material effects of normalization, although subjects and bodies are not reducible to these processes of normalization. Equally, desires and passionate attachments are not retrievable outside or beyond normalization, while at the same time not being therefore fully reducible to social norms. The first challenge—Butler’s account of the subject as emerging through subjection to norms—delimits a predicament of interest to moral philosophy insofar as this subjection is more specifically understood to constitute the subject as a bodily subject. So the body, knowledge that we might gather about bodies, or the ‘‘factum’’ of bodily experience cannot simply be claimed as a backdrop for critiques of social norms and practices. The second challenge that ensues from Butler’s argument is that the subject not only emerges through subjection and the formation of the unconscious but that the subject is also passionately attached to this subjection. For moral philosophy this account implies the quandary that passionate attachments and desires surreptitiously and unconsciously bind us to social norms and others in ways that we can never become fully aware of, so that the desire Bodies, Desires, and the Psychic Life of Norms 23 to live and to live well do not simply stand apart from prevailing social norms and the demands that others make on us. For some approaches to moral philosophy, in particular approaches of virtue ethics, this means that the desire to live and the desire to live well can no longer unquestionably serve to ground ethical theory and reflection. Further, with the unconscious and its social formation and continued insolent existence, Butler introduces us to a constitutive unknowability of the subject, a constitutive opacity that none of us can ever escape because the scenes of one’s becoming can never be fully...