Performing the Ethics of Conversation

Judith Butler in Conversation brings together the edited papers, responses, and transcripts of conversations from a symposium on the work of Judith Butler at the University of Western Sydney in 2005. Butler was herself present at this event, and her central involvement included leading discussions of each of the papers collected in this volume as well as delivering one of her own, “An Account of Oneself,” here printed as a shortened and adapted version of her chapter of the same name from Giving An Account of Oneself.¹ Two notable features characterize the achievement of both book and symposium, marking this volume as an important contribution to current scholarship on gender and subjectivity. First, the breadth of engagement with Butler’s work across disciplinary approaches is confirmed and harnessed in a collection that reaches beyond philosophy and gender and sexuality studies into work by scholars of education, sociology, art therapy, and performance. Second, it is the productive and lively interplay between and across disciplines that animates this project. Equally apparent in the collection is an ongoing reiteration of why Butler has such an impact: her critical commentary on each of the five papers and responses demonstrates an extraordinary insight but also a striking intellectual generosity. While the papers are necessarily informed by ideas from throughout her career, Butler takes each as a collaborative opportunity to develop new thinking on a range of issues pertinent to each topic, always asking “what kinds of translations can and must be made for this exchange to work” (2).

In these ways, the book enacts a central thematic of Butler’s work, which is taken up in many of the chapters and summarized by Bronwyn Davies in her introduction as “relationality as an indispensable resource for ethics” (xv). Butler’s own essay sets this ball in motion by investigating the “structural conditions” of an account a subject gives of itself, particularly where the very possibility of that account must be understood with regard to the relational ethics of the self-other address in which she argues it must take place (29). How can one fully account for oneself, she asks, when the moral responsibility, the narrative capacity, and other modes of self-recognition that such an account presupposes in the subject also dispossess the subject and render it partially opaque to itself? In her response to this essay, Fiona Jenkins takes up Butler’s concluding question of whether failure can be thought of as “the site of an ethical disposition” (43). Jenkins’s essay gives an expert and thoroughgoing analysis of Butler’s philosophy of the ethics of generosity and forgiveness in giving oneself away at the moment of the self-other encounter and in giving way to the inevitable failure of the idealized transparent self.

Pushing Butler’s ideas into more tangible social application, Eva Bendix Petersen’s essay interpellates herself and many of her readers by conjuring the figure of “backspace-key-pushing subject” performatively inscribing discourses of legitimate and intelligible “academicity”; the finger on the backspace key becomes “an act to mend the act of failing to reinstate a certain kind of norm,” the maintenance of which both inaugurates and threatens that subject’s existence (62). Through this close-to-home example, Petersen freshly exposes many of our own sometimes perplexing, even self-defeating “passionate attachments” to normative subjectification. And indeed in her response to this call for recognition, Sheridan Linnell offers a personal and engaging attempt to account for her own ambiguously attached academic and therapeutic subjectivities.

David McInnes’s contribution discusses the intricate “circuits of recognition” (98) at work at the moment of declarative interpellation — in this case, the violence and authentication of the naming of the “sissy-boy” as gendered other. But what is most innovative about this analysis is his use of Butler’s theory of melancholy gender and refused identification to destabilize linguistic practices of naming and to critique the sublating effects of some scholarly discourse on masculinities. Cristyn Davies uses her response first...