Subjective dispossession and objet a
Chapter IV: On not seeking Recognition in the big Other
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Chapter IV: On not seeking Recognition in the big OtherPart 1In Psychic Life of Power (1997) and Antigone’s Claim (2000) Butler made the first indications of developing a theory of subjectivation that was itself subtracted from being, that is, it contended with a de-subjectivation of the subject. At this stage of her work, as we have already touched upon, Butler seeks a different sort of interpellation. Instead of a turn towards the Law, perhaps one does not turn at all, one ignores the Law, develops a cold indifference to it. Yet her efforts to put forth a relational ontology in her later post-2001 works, particularly Giving an Account of Oneself in some ways seriously compromises this earlier more radical theory of the ethical relation. In this extended quote from her Precarious Life (2004) we can discern this tension: This ethical relation is not a virtue that I have or exercise; it is prior to any individual sense of self. It is not as a discrete individual that we honor this ethical relation. I am already bound to you, and this is what it means to be the self I am, receptive to you in ways that I cannot fully predict or control. This is also, clearly, the condition of my injurability as well, and in this way my answerability and my injurability are bound up with one another. In other words, you may frighten me and threaten me, but my obligation to you must remain firm. This relation precedes individuation, and when I act ethically, I am undone as a bounded being. I come apart. I find that I am my relation to the “you” whose life I seek to preserve, and without that relation, this “I” makes no sense, and has lost its mooring in this ethics that is always prior to the ontology of the ego. Another way to put this point is that the “I” becomes undone in its ethical relation to the “you” which means that there is a very specific mode of being dispossessed that makes ethical relationality possible. If I possess myself too firmly or too rigidly, I cannot be in an ethical relation. The ethical relation means ceding a certain egological perspective for one which is structured fundamentally by a mode of address: you call upon me, and I answer. But if I answer, it was only because I was already answerable; that is, this susceptibility and vulnerability constitutes me at the most fundamental level, and is there, we might say, prior to any deliberate decision to answer the call. In other words, one has to be already capable of receiving the call before actually answering it. In this sense, ethical responsibility presupposes ethical responsiveness. (2004b, 10) Butler cites a particular ‘mode of dispossession’ as that which makes the ethical relation possible and it is this, rather than ‘precarity’ proper, which leads to more fruitful avenues of investigation. This is because a study of the mode of dispossession from which emerges the ethical relation requires an understanding of an ethical relation outside of an intersubjective humanist starting point. Subjective dispossession is that which is prior to "subjectivation" or to use Althusser's term, ‘interpellation,’ in other words, we need to consider a subject prior to its individuation. A universal ethical position , a ‘singular universality’ that cuts through ontic particularlity, can only arise when we consider the subject formation in its deconstitution, not in its intersubjective mode as being-with-others or any such notion of relationalism. Thus the intention of this chapter is to chiefly expose the limitations of a politics of precarity that relies solely on a theory of ethical intersubjectivity. From the catacombs located deep below what is now her built foundation of precarity and performativity we will seek to disinter the remnants of her brief dalliance with a notion of ‘critical desubjectivation’ and expose it once again to the light in hopes of showing how it can be used to think a critical theory of subject formation that will bring a politics to her ethics. PrecarityStarting out from the concept of precarity, Butler builds a political approach that seeks to investigate the institutional and political preconditions of providing for sustainable lives. Her politics starts from bodily life itself, what is needed to sustain a body, what does it mean to “commit ourselves to preserving the life of the other.” Bodily vulnerability is a condition of life itself and Butler seeks to build upon this notion in a number of different ways. Bodily vulnerability in one way means an investigation into its social and political construction, its performative nature. Precarity also points to the political conditions of its sustenance, and its social preconditions: housing, healthy food, clean water, transportation etc. She asks: what are the conditions that provide a differential precarity; why are some populations more precarious than others? The major drawback of a politics of precarity, for example, is simply that it has vacated the terrain of critical subject formation, it no longer asks the question, “what are the conditions for the emergence of a radical subjectivity?” Practically however, a politics of precarity has a role to play, afterall if one wanted to draw attention to the differential precarity of populations, it would require attending to the need for infrastructural supports such as access to clean drinking water, free education and housing and security of income. To obtain these resources for precarious populations requires struggle at the level of the democratic demand. But our radical take in this question is to insist that an ethics that resolves itself at the level of democracy is an ethics of ‘servicing the goods’ which can only result in piecemeal reform. To redeem a politics of the ethical relation, change must occur at a level that disturbs this very democratic default. Change must go beyond the default ethical setting of more democracy, and instead accentuate the possibility of real change, that is, change that touches the Real.42
Subjective change occurs as a form of self-annihilation, self-dispossession. The signature example of such an evacuation of the ego, a cleaning of the slate in preparation for the new, would be the cautionary tale of the 14th century mystics, The New Spirit Movement, whose claim was that only through such a self-overcoming could one become One with God. Marguerite Porete was executed, burned at the stake as a heretic in 1310, most notably for authoring a work The Mirror that was, as Simon Critchley calls it, “an instruction manual of sorts” which describes the process of self-deification, “becoming God” (Critchley 2012, 125). Leaving aside whatever ‘becoming God’ could possibly mean, what interests us here, is the subjective transformation that took place, and the way in which this came about. Critchley points out that the process could be interpreted as an undermining of the rational ego, “undermining its authority [which then] allows a new form of subjectivity to stand in the place inhabited by the old self” (139). Figuratively one kills of the old self “in order that a transformed relation to others becomes possible, some new way of conceiving the common and being with others” (143). No doubt this sounds rather cultish, religiously harrowing in a sense that sounds foreign to a secular ear, nonetheless, the point touches on the theme we will be pursing here, that is, subjective change through self-dispossession. Why was The Mirror condemned as heresy? For the simple reason that once the Soul is annihilated, there is nothing to prevent its identity with God. ... In becoming nothing, God enters the place where my Soul was. At that point, I —whatever sense the first-person pronoun might still have here— become God. When I become nothing, I become God. Such is the logic of auto-theism. (130) Critchley`s thrust here is to trace a genealogy of radical subjective formation and its relation to faith, however what concerns us more is specifically this decreation.43 That the early mystics gave us a glimpse of a total subjective transformation entailing a destitution of the self requires a contemporary treatment that nevertheless retains faint echoes of Porete’s exemplary work of self-dispossession. It is in turning to the work of Jacques Lacan that we begin this task. Download 480.65 Kb. Share with your friends:
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