Judith Butler - The Difference of Philosophy (2015) | Notes on Impressions & Responsiveness

I'm really pleased to to be here I attended my very first philosophy meetings were Society of women in philosophy I was getting off the ground in the United States and I'm pleased to be here I I want to say what I might remarks today are not my most political remarks I will be speaking later today on non-violence and I spoke a couple of days ago on human shields and I have many overtly political things to say but today is a different kind of reflection but I think that you can see that it lays the groundwork for a certain question of ethics ethical responsiveness and ethical relationality but because you are presumably philosophers I'm actually taking this occasion to do some thinking with you when we speak about becoming formed as a subject we invariably presume a threshold of susceptibility or impression ability that may be said to precede the formation of a conscious and deliberate I that means only that this creature that I am is affected by something outside of itself understood as prior that activates and informs the subject that I am when I make use of that first person pronoun in this context I'm not exactly telling you about myself of course what I have to say has personal implications but it operates in a relatively impersonal level so I do not always encumber the first person pronoun with scare quotes deep people have asked me do you put scare quotes about around every word you use I said no no ha ha but I'm letting you know that when I say I I mean you - and all those who come to use the pronoun or to speak in a language that inflicts the first person in a different way my point is to suggest that I am already affected before I can say I and that I have to be affected to say I at all those straightforward propositions fail though to describe the threshold of susceptibility that precedes any sense of individuation or linguistic capacity for self reference one could say that I am suggesting simply that the senses are primary and that we feel things undergo impressions prior to forming any thoughts including any thoughts we might have about ourselves that characterization would be true of what I have to say but it would not fully enough explain what I hope to show first I'm not sure whether there are certain kinds of thoughts that operate in the course of sensing something but second I want to underscore the methodological problem that emerges for any such claim about the primacy of the senses if I say that I am already affected before I can say I I am speaking much later than the process I seek to describe in fact my retrospective position casts doubt on whether or not I can describe this situation at all since strictly speaking I was not present for the process and I myself seemed to be one of its various effects further it may be that retro actively I reconstitute that origin according to whatever phantasm grips me and so you will receive an account only of my phantasm not really of my origin given how vexed they are one might think we should all remain silent on such matters avoiding the first-person altogether since the indexical function fails precisely at the moment in which we want to marshal its forces to help us describe something difficult my suggestion rather 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 in in fact brings that narrative capacity about let us follow Nietzsche's well-known remark that the bell that has boomed the 12 beats of noon startles the self-reflective person who only afterward rubs his ears and surprised and disconcerted asks what really was that which we have just experienced right so this is at the beginning of on the genealogy of morals the Bell tells us what time it is but our capacity to register that the Bell has sounded is always slightly later than the Bell itself so we missed the moment that is being marked by the Bell it may be that this kind of belatedness what Freud called not Wrigley kite as an inevitable feature of inquiries such as these inflecting the narration with the historical perspective of the present still is it possible to try to give a narrative sequence for the process of being affected a threshold of susceptibility and transfer that I might reflect upon and relay a life that did not exist and that in part accounts for the emergence of this I certain literary fictions rely on these kinds of impossible scenarios consider the rather fantastic beginning of David Copperfield in which the narrator speaks with extraordinary perspicacity about the details of ordinary life preceding and including his own birth he mentions parenthetically that he's been told the story of his birth and that he believes what he has been told but as the narration proceeds he ceases to relay the story as if it were authored by someone other than herself indeed he inserts himself as a knowing narrator at the very outset of his life a way perhaps to get around the difficulty of once having been an infant unable to speak reflect or think as an adult author does a certain denial of infancy seeps into his ever more authoritative account of when he cried and what others thought and did on that occasion indeed the opening chapter is fantastically entitled I am born and the very first line throws down the gauntlet will this narrator be authored or will he author himself the novel opens whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life or whether that station will be held by anyone else these pages must show there is of course a double irony given that the narrator is a fictional construct of Charles Dickens and so already and continuously authored even as he poses this question suggesting that he might be able to leap out of the text that supports his fictional existence even within the terms of the novel it is obvious that he could not have offered a report on his own birth with any kind of first-hand authority and yet he proceeds with this impossible and seductive undertaking precisely as if he were there looking on as it were as he enters the world narrative authority does not require being at the scene it requires only that one is able to reconstruct the scene from a position of non presence in a believable way or that one's unbelievable narration is compelling for its own reasons the story means something as he relates it since we're being introduced into his rather rather remarkable self understanding what he relates may or may not be true but it hardly matters once we understand that the story he reaches for says something about his of authorial ambitions and desires clearly meant to counter and displace the infant's passivity and the lack of motor control our resistance perhaps to needing to be in the hands of those he never chose who turn out to care for him more or less well my point is not to say that what happens in literary works such as these has a parallel in the theory of subject formation rather I want to suggest that narrative gestures such as these find their place in nearly any theory of subject formation could it be that the narrative dimension of the theory of subject formation is always to some degree impossible yet necessary inevitably belated especially when the task is to discern how the subject is initially animated by what affects it and how these transitive processes are reiterated in the animated life that follows if we want to talk about these matters we have to agree to occupy an impossible position one that perhaps repeats the impossibility of the condition we seek to describe to say that it is impossible does not mean that it cannot be done but only that we cannot quite find a way out of the constraints of adult life except by asking how those incipient passages remain within us recurring still and again to say that I am affected prior to ever becoming an AI is to deliver the news by using the very pronoun that was not yet put into play confounding this temporality with that one I personally cannot go back to that place nor can I do so in an impersonal way and yet there seems to be much we can still say for instance let us think about the language in which we come to describe the emergence or formation of the subject in a theoretical vein we can following a general Foucault diem line simply state that the subject is produced through norms or by discourse more generally if we slow down and ask what is meant by produced and to what view of production does such a passive verb formation belong we find that there is much work to be done is being produced the same as being formed and does it matter which location we use it is always possible to refer to a norm as a singular kind of thing but let us remember that norms tend to arrive in clusters interconnected and that they have both spatial and temporal dimensions inseparable from what they are how they act and how they form what they act upon a norm may be said to precede us to circulate in the world before it touches upon us when it does make its landing it acts in several different ways norms impress themselves upon us and that impression opens up an effective register norms form us but only because there is already some proximate and involuntary relation to their impress they require and intensify our impression ability norms act on us from all sides that is in multiple and sometimes contradictory ways they act upon a sensibility at the same time that they form it they lead us to feel in certain ways and those feelings can enter into our thinking even as we might might well end up thinking about them they condition and form us and yet they are hardly finished with that work once we start to emerge as thinking and speaking beings rather they continue to act according to an iterative logic that ends for any of us only when life ends though the lightlife of norms of discourse more generally continues on with a tenacity that is quite indifferent to our finitude fukuko clearly knew this when he remarked that discourse is not life it's time is not ours we tend to make a mistake when in trying to explain subject formation we imagine a single norm acting as a kind of cause and then imagine the subject as something formed in the wake of that norms action perhaps what we are trying to describe is not exactly a causal series I do not arrive in the world separate from a set of norms that are lying in wait for me already orchestrating my gender race and status working on me even as a pure potential prior to my first cry so norms conventions institutional forms of power are already acting prior to any action I may undertake prior to there being an I who thinks of itself from time to time as the seat or source of its own action my point is not to make a mockery of such moments in which we understand ourselves to be the source of our own actions we have to do that if we are to understand ourselves as agentic at all the task rather is to think of being acted on and act as simultaneous and not only as a sequence perhaps it is a repeated predicament to be given over to a world in which one is formed even as one acts or seeks to bring something new into being acting does not liberate any of us from our formations despite the protestations of gleeful existentialism our formation does not suddenly fall away after certain breaks or ruptures they become important to the story we tell about ourselves or to other modes of self understanding there remains that story about how I broke with family or religion or community but that breakage installs me in the here and now and you can hardly understand my here and now without understanding that breakage as part of my story so I am not really think about without that formation at the same time nothing determines me in advance I am not formed once and definitively but continuously or repeatedly I am still being formed as I form myself in the here and now and my own self formative activity what some would call self fashioning although I don't really use that term becomes part of that ongoing formative process I am never simply formed nor am I ever fully self forming this may be another way of saying that we live in historical time or that it lives in us as the historicity of whatever form we take we assume as human creatures my argument would hardly be complete if I did not say that the contours of an ethical relationship emerges from this ongoing paradox of subject formation I am affected not just by this one other or a set of others but by a world in which humans institutions organic and inorganic processes all impress themselves upon this me who is at the outset susceptible in ways that are radically involuntary I do think that this thought is just a deep insult to many philosophers but I think it does have to be thought the condition of the possibility of my exploitation indeed presupposes that I am a being in need of support that I am dependent given over to an infrastructural world in order to act requiring an emotional infrastructure to survive I am not only already in the hands of someone else before I start to work with my own hands but I am also as it were in the hands of institutions discourses environments including technologies and life processes handled by an organic and inorganic object field that exceeds the human in this sense I am nowhere and nothing without the nonhuman the unwilled character of what I am calling this dependency is not its self exploitation to be dependent is not necessarily to be exploited it is rather that the field of dependency to some degree makes us open to or susceptible to exploitation susceptibility is not the same as subjugation though it can clearly lead there precisely when susceptibility is exploited as often happens when we consider the exploitation of children which depends on an exploitation of their dependency and the relatively uncritical dimensions of their trust susceptibility alone does not explain passionate attachment or falling in love a sense of betrayal or abandonment yet all these ways are feeling can follow depending on what happens in relation to those who move and affect us and who are susceptible to us even susceptible to our susceptibility a circle that accounts for certain forms of affective and sexual intensity in each of these cases it is less a causal series than a form of transitivity at work in delineating a set of relations we do not always know or cannot always say who touched whom first or what was the moment of being touched and what was the moment of touching this is the consequential insight of male appointees the intertwining from the visible and the invisible it is also related to his more general account of how it is we come to sense anything at all when he considers in Malibu off that being touched first animates the sentient subject is something relate or transferred intransitive relations such as these there's only loss would claim that there are enigmatic messages that are related the earliest stage stages of infancy that they become installed as primary signifiers that launched the life of desire the drives are awakened by these strange early interpolations and that enigmatic quality persists throughout the trajectory of sexual desire what is it that I want what is this in me that wants in the way it does these are the questions that that logic formulates in a new way indeed it's it's not primarily an i who wants something it is something in me that prompts me to want which i then later reflect upon and could possibly claim as part of this I that I am but in fact it may well remain a kind of foreign foreign animating entity that is lodged in me doing its own work for Miller party and indeed with Mal approach it is only being by being acted on that any of us come to act at all and when we do act we do not precisely overcome the condition of being active acted upon being touched or handled or addressed as an infant awakens the senses paving the way for a sentient apprehension of the world and we know this of course from various studies on the sensory deprivation of infant's that that do show that that capacities for mobility and sensing are profoundly affected and forehead by the deperate deprivation of of of touch so prior to sensing anything at all I am already in relation not only to one particular other but to many to a field of alternative is not restrictive ly human those relations form a matrix for subject formation which means that someone must first sense me before I can sense anything at all acted upon quite without any consent and surely through no will of my own I become the kind of being with the capacity to sense something and to act even as I come to speak within a discourse that firmly lodges the eye at the source of its distinct action I see that this eye remains in thrall to a prior transitivity acted upon as it adds I cannot see this at all unless my ability to sense things has already been animated by a set of others and conditions that are emphatically not me this is just another way of saying that no one transcends the matrix of relations that gives rise to the subject no one acts without first being formed as one with the capacity to act of course many people do act as if they were never formed and that's always interesting to me it's an interesting posture to behold they come into the world as a fully formed adults they never needed anyone they were never handled they were never fed to posit that capacity to act as a fully independent feature of one's individuality with no account of individuation is to engage in a form of disavowal that seeks to wish away primary and enduring modes of dependency and inter dependency including those disturbed conditions of abandonment or loss registered at early ages that are not precisely overcome or transcended in the life that follows but repeat through more or less unconscious enactments of various kinds certain versions of the sovereign eye are supported by that denial which means of course that they are thoroughly brittle often displaying that brittle insistence in symptomatic ways storylines ensue when will that figure break of its own accord that figure of sovereignty or what we would have to destroy to support its image of self sovereignty so perhaps it might be said that a struggle with that form of sovereign individualism is on way to claim that a subject acts only when it is first formed as a subject with the capacity to act that is as one who is already and still acted upon might seem like a relatively conservative claim is it not possible to overcome our formation to break with that matrix that formed any of us as a subject of course it's possible to break with certain norms as they exercise the power to craft us but that can happen only by the intervention of countervailing norms and if the latter can and does happen it it means simply that the matrix of relations that forms the subject is not an integrated and harmonious network but a field of potential disharmony antagonism and contest it also means that at moments of significant shift or rupture we may not know precisely who we are or what is meant by I when we say it if the eye is separated from the you or indeed that they that is from those without whom the eye has been unthinkable then there is doubtless a rather severe disorientation that follows who is this eye in the aftermath of such a break with those constituting relations and what if anything can it still become it might be that the constituting relations have a certain pattern of breakage in them that they actually constitute and break us at the same time this makes for a tentative or more definitive form of madness to be sure what does it mean to require what breaks you if the dependency on those others was once a matter of survival and now continues to function psychically as a condition of survival recalling and recount reinstituting that primary condition then certain kinds of breaks will raise the question of whether the eye can survive I think this becomes a very important point when we're thinking more generally about subjugation and I think someone like Alabama and me has written about this and his own works on dependency and in the colonial condition what does it mean to be fundamentally dependent on those who subjugate you such that throwing off subjugation imperils your life or imperils the conditions or all the conditions that you have understood to ensure your survivability matters become more complex if one breaks one makes the break precisely in order to survive and in that sense breaking with what breaks you in such situations the eye may undergo radically conflicting responses as a consequence of its rupture with those formative relations it will not survive only with such a rupture does it now stand a chance to survive the ambiguity attests to the fact that the eye is not easily separated from those relations that made the eye possible but also to the reiteration of those relations and the possibility of a break that becomes part of its history one that actually opens up a livable future France phenol interrogate this problem of breaking with the terms of racist interpolation that Institute one's non-being in order to break into the category of the human even break it open by rejecting its racialized criteria similarly phenol underscores the conditions under which racialization establishes a kind of being who is destroyed prior to the very possibility of living and who must in order to live draw upon and develop another understanding of embodied freedom for phenol as for Spinoza interestingly the question also emerges what destroys a person when that person appears to be destroying himself or herself do we find the social within the psychic at such moments and if so how strictly speaking Spinoza believed that a person cannot take his or her own life it's always something external that is working on the person when the person takes him his or her life it's actually to some degree compatible with the durkheimian understand you suicide which is of course that the suicide isn't every suicide is an indictment of the social of course this raises the question of what is punitive Lee external becomes not only internal but can become a driving force psychic life my point here today is not to undermine any conceit we may have that we act or desire independently and to show that we are but the effects of prior and more powerful forces I'm actually very tired of that view and I wish people would cease of making it the task is to see that what we call independence is always established through a set of formative relations that do not simply fall away as action takes place even though those formative relations sometimes are banished from consciousness even arguably must be banished to some extent and I think we saw that in the David Copperfield narration where where the the narrator arrives at his birth as a fully formed adult I think that is a that is a sovereign fantasy that is the ultimate self not to see or perhaps equally equally ultimate we can speak that way as the fantasy of presiding over one's death if I can come to touch and feel and sense the world it is only because this I before it could be called an eye was handled and sensed addressed and enlivened the I never quite overcomes that primary impression ability even though it might be said to be its occasional undoing oddly but importantly if the thesis is right then the eye comes in to sentient being even thinking and acting precisely by being acted on in ways that from the start presume that non-voluntary low volatile field of impression ability already undone undone before I am done or undone from the start we are formed and has formed we come to be always partially undone by what we come to sense and to know and of course this is emphatically true in relation to the other what follows is that form of relationality that we might call ethical a certain demand or obligation impinges upon me and the response relies on my capacity to affirm this having been acted on by an ethical obligation formed into one who can respond to this or that call aesthetic relationality also follows as and is in my view related to the ethical something impresses itself upon me and I develop impressions that cannot be fully separated from what acts on me I am only moved or unmoved by something outside that impinges upon me in more or less involuntary ways oddly enough we have to be open to that fear of involuntary impingement in order to be ethically responsive this uneasy and promising relation cannot be easily denied and if denial does prove possible it comes at the cost of destroying a social and relational world I would say we must affirm the way we are already and still acted on in order to affirm ourselves but a self affirmation means affirming the world without which the self would not be and that means affirming what I could never choose that is what happens to me without my willing that precipitates my sensing and knowing the world as I do the ethical does not primarily describe conduct or disposition but characterizes a way of understanding the relational framework within which sense action and speech become possible the ethical describes a structure of address in which we are called upon to act or to respond in a specific way even at the pre verbal level the structure of address is still operative which means that ethical relationality calls upon this domain of prior susceptibility one is called a name or a just as you prior to any sense of individuation and that calling that having been called especially as it is repeated and rehearsed in different ways starts to form a subject who calls itself by those same terms learning how to shift the you to an eye or to a gendered third-person a he or a she and sometimes innovating in the course of that reiteration there's always a disturbance in that shift which is why self reference enabled by the scene of address can and does take on meanings that exceed the aims of those who introduced the terms of discourse in the first place so addressing someone as you may well solicit a recognition that it is I who is meant by that second person but that I may well resist or shift or reject the very semantics that get associated with that you in other words yes it is me but I am not the one you think I am this meant miss recognition at the heart of the scene of a dress becomes more stark when it's a matter of gender if I do not recognize myself as she or almost every day not every day certain parts of the world there's no way to sit down and eat at a table without becoming a lady that's hard ladies have a table Oh ladies we have a table for you here do I still eat after such an inter it like Rob's me of the hunger you know it's like I'm hungry then I'm interpolated okay there's another story I have that's better right I'm okay in London Mike I stayed a hotel I rushed in I had to I I had to get something professionally out for a graduate student it was struggling to get on the internet and though I just arrived I was not even unpacked and this happened last year sometime in it there's a knock on the door and a man is there and he looks at me and he says excuse me mister madam mister madam mister madam mister mister man couldn't get through it wanted to check the minibar up apparently and I was in bad mood because I was I was I was late and I felt guilty and I really needed to get this letter in and I kind of leaned forward and I said is it is it really important to determine my gender before checking in order to check the minibar and and then of course IQ Milly ated him and I felt immediately very bad and this was also a class moment right and I was not sensitive to that he's a worker he doesn't know what to do with people like me I don't know uh and then he's he said well of course not of course not that's not necessary at all mr. Madame mr. mayor mr. mayor so I felt terribly guilty about that because I had been nasty I liked making the point there was a gleeful part of me but it was nasty and then the next day same hotel I'd go to the pool I'm terribly pleased to be in the pool and having had my swim I then was in the ladies locker room changing had changed was effectively covered putting on shoes and young woman comes in she says and she looks at me she goes oh I did that to the ladies and the blokes change together and sorry my British accent sorry they taste together I said no I don't think so I think this is this is for the ladies I said and and she said oh sorry sorry oh I'm so sorry I was confused I and I then I leaned forward making up for my sin of the previous day and I said I am a lady which is the first time in my life I've ever said but I then I was trying to reassure her because that you know I'd been a disturbance to the gentleman earlier and she said oh yeah I never meant to and then she went into this big apologize said no no don't apologize this happens this happens all the time it's it's something I live with actually with a good sense of humor anyway I don't know why I had to tell you that story but it is about interpolation or misrecognition at the heart of the scene of a dress if I do not recognize myself as she does that mean that I failed to recognize that someone seeks to interpolate me with that pronoun I could act as if I'm not being addressed or I can turn around and offer the clarification of the pronoun I prefer and many people do prefer pronouns now and they state them at you I ask actually sometimes at the beginning of classes how do you want to be referred to and people let me know and I I follow that respectfully I myself don't actually have a preference which I think makes me a little bit out of sync with the times I can offer a clarification of the pronoun whatever I do I understand that that particular miss recognition was intended for me in other words even when the interpolation is wrong it still is directed toward me and sometimes when the interpolation is meant for someone else and I think it is meant for me it may be that the specific scene of a dress is misunderstood only because a more general scene of a dress is understood perhaps the cat call on the street was meant for one woman and another understood that it was meant for her the fact is is that it probably could have been met for the second woman even as she was mistaken in this particular instance such interpolations are roving and over-inclusive they take any number of objects even as they seem to be directed toward one the relatively impersonal character of the interpolation means that misrecognition is always possible further it's not just the cat call or the insult or the slur that constitutes an interpolation within the scene of a dress every pronoun has an interpretive force and carries with it the possibility of recognition you you are the person I said I love after what you've done to me or I I am the person you claim to love couldn't be me I'm worthless how does this discussion of interpolation relate to the issues of primary impression ability and subject formation well in the first instance the scene of a dress and even its linguistic structure precede any act of vocalization a dress can take place through other kinds of signifying actions through touch movement holding by turning away turning one way or another achieving and losing visual or tactile connection the question of whether someone else is present can raise the question of whether I am present as if absence or presence were transitive spaces intermediary zones between differentiated individuals a vast potential for vacillation emerges in response to the question of whether there is an AI that can be at once differentiated and dependent or is in the process of differentiating within dependency the I may feel that it is nothing without the you and that may well index a very real condition of primary dependency an early autobiographical condition relived psychically differentiation seems to thrive on the constitutive possibility of MIS recognition that exists within any interpolation although a pre verbal infant does not say is it me you're calling when you say that name there is nevertheless something enigmatic at work and being called any name or assigned a gender through pro Gnomeo pronominal reference or repeated treatment and practice before the proper name and gender must surely arrive both the proper name and gender must surely arrive as enigmatic noise that requires an interpretive response which includes a series of errors and miss recognitions perhaps some of that enigma survives into the world of adult interpolations is that me to whom you refer when you claim that I am this or that sometimes the possibility of miss recognition emerges in the midst of the most intimate relations I cannot believe you are my mother or live is this my child and I think Greek tragedy actually has an enormous number of such moments of misrecognition within and within proximity I've actually written on them on the Buckeye recently precisely on the question of how it is a mother can mistake her son for a lion cub and kill him okay although the subject usually refers to a linguistic creature already differentiated within language even capable of linguistic self reference it presupposes subject formation including an account of coming into language the fact that language precedes the subject does not obviate the need to account for how language emerges and how to account for the relation between embodiment and language in subject formation after all if the scene of address is not necessarily verbal and if it is not restrictive lis linguistic then it designates a more primary operation of the discursive field at the level of the body that said we cannot really differentiate between different levels as if they had an ontological status that exceeds their heuristic utility the body is always supported or not supported by technology structures institutions an array of others both personally and in personally related organic and life processes to mention just a few of the conditions of emergence those supports are not simply passive structures a support must support and so must both be and act a support cannot support without supporting something so it is defined as both relational and agentic so the transitive relay of agency has to be understood as happening somewhere in this zone where supports are already acting on a body with various degrees of success and failure acting on a localized field of impression ability for which the distinction between passivity and activity is not quite stable and cannot be acted on animated and acting addressed animated and addressing touched animated and now sensing these triads are partially sequential and partially chiasma and the same can be said about the relation between the body and language droll the throat and the hands signify want or frustration or pleasure prior to any linguistic form of speech giving expressions to these dispositions it's hardly controversial to claim that in infancy a great deal of bodily signifying happens prior to vocalization and speech the emergence of speech does not constitute a substitution and displacement of the body bodily significations do not become successfully converted or sublimated into speech the bodily dimension of signification does not fall away as talking begins nor does it haunt speech as a metaphysics of presence although bodies can be signifying one way and speech another the two modalities remain related to one another even if in symptomatic ways hysteria is a prime instance where you're claiming one thing but doing another at a more mundane level a public speaker must find a way to animate the throat it's not always possible I can attest to that or the person using sign language must figure out the right ways to move those hands so though we might say that bodily signifying precedes speech we would be mistaken to think that it vanishes with the speech act or indeed with the written text in its absence the body still signifies Descartes tried not to know this but according to null C his own language worked against that disavowal so I'm almost done oh I see you're worried about my throat that's a kind so just as a philosophy founders time and again on the question of the body it tends to separate what is called thinking from what is called sensing from desire passion sexuality and Relations of dependency it is one of the great contributions of feminist philosophy to call those dichotomies into question and so to ask as well whether in sensing something called thinking is already at work whether it acting we are also acted upon whether in coming into the zone of thinking and the speaking eye we are at once radically formed and also bringing something about the primary impressions we receive establish a relationship animated necessity with with the world we speak as if impressions are received or impressions are formed but if therefore but if they are formed as they are received then primary impression ability gives us a way to rethink both activity and passivity that dualism so problematically associated with gender difference even if we cannot return to primary impression ability as an originally condition except through fantastic narrative terms there's no reason to dispute its importance it just affirms that we require forms of fiction to arrive at self understanding and that verification can operate cannot operate in the usual way in this domain if one seeks to give an account of a condition in which series of a condition in which series in sequence were themselves a rather stark problem as was the distinction between active and passive then one has to find other means or allow for narrative to bespeak its own impossibility either way it seems that we can understand neither what sense the subject might have nor how the subject comes to sense its world if we do not seek to describe the chiasma conditions of its formation this is not a matter of discovering and exposing an origin or trekking a causal series but of describing what acts when I act without precisely taking responsibility for the whole show where the ethical does enter it seems as precisely in that encounter that confronts me with a world I never chose occasioning that affirmation of involuntary exposure to other Ness as the condition of relationality human and non-human acted on I still act but it is hardly this I that acts alone and or and even though or precisely because it never quite gets done with being undone thank you very much you you

Channel: UCD - University College Dublin

Views: 41,607

Keywords: UCD, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland, UCD - University College Dublin, myucd, ucddublin, Judith Butler (Author), Gender Identity (Film Subject), Gender (Quotation Subject), Gender Equality (Literature Subject), Philosophy (Field Of Study), Philosophy Of Language (Field Of Study), Professor (Job Title), UCD School of Philosophy, University College Dublin (College/University)

Id: WecaTBx64p0

Length: 45min 44sec (2744 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 06 2015