Subjective dispossession and objet a

Chapter VII: Conclusion

Placing the objet a in Judith Butler’s Relational Ontology

This dissertation began with Judith Butler’s Hegelian displacement of the self-sufficient “I” of subjectivity. By tracing her development of a relational ontology the focus increasingly became her insistence 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.”⁶³ That relationality occurs prior to any formation of an “I” is shown throughout her work in 1990s. In particular, Butler holds to a version of subjectivation, or subject formation that emphasizes the need for a radical re-constitution of subjectivity via a subjective displacement, a re-writing through a radical act such as Antigone’s refusal to heed the public Law.

Thus the subject emerges through a fidelity to a logic that falls outside and beyond the law, and is accomplished without rehearsing, restaging or otherwise repeating the coordinates of the socio-symbolic space of the big Other. To this Butler adds, “My point is not to rehabilitate humanism, but rather to struggle for a conception of ethical obligation that is grounded in precarity.” (2011c) The challenge here it seems is that although the category of “precarity” points in the direction of inequality as such, its anti-humanist credentials do not stand out. Butler seeks to insert a relation to Otherness that clearly stands outside a meeting of two fully fledged autonomous egos, but her account of a relational ontology, and specifically the genesis of the subject from such an ontology is under-theorized. For Butler it is not a process of addition, she is against simply reworking the current norms to make room for the forgotten others, or adding the abject to a re-normalized Symbolic space. We have seen that Butler hints at a more radical de-subjectification of the normative subject. And this is what she moves towards in her work on Antigone.

The over-arching claim of this dissertation has been to draw together her work on Antigone with a theory of the subject aided and abetted by Lacanian theory. What is the relation of precarity to Antigone’s suicidal pure desire? Butler politics consists of a re-writing of the Symbolic so as re-define, re-signify what it is to be human. She begins the political task of re-signification through her concept of precariousness. For Butler precariousness marks every bodily being both human and non-human, and with regard to humans her notion of differential precarity separates populations out between an industrialized, globalized capitalist ‘we’ and those struggling outside this ‘club’. On a more local level, there are strident material separations between the urban poor and the “white flight” into the suburbs. The new divisive landscape groups together high-finance and industrial parks along with a technological matrix of immaterial labour on one side and, on the other, those who do not count in this situation, the part of no-part. It is a differential precarity between bodies that are valued, adorned, and given to regimes of pleasure and consumption, and those who fall outside of this competitive landscape: the urban aboriginal population of young men and women who have moved off the desperate situation of the reserves, the homeless and mentally ill, the trans-sexed, working poor, refugees, the poor immigrants and those without proper papers of landing, all of whose lives are rendered of less value, rendered easily expendable and when lost or dead, go ungrieved. If this part of no-part were to truly figure in a politics of emancipation, what would this formation look like and how would it come about? Butler asks much the same question about Antigone, in that

she is prohibited from speaking, and yet she is compelled by the sovereign law to speak. So, when she does speak, she defies that law, and her speech exceeds the law that governs acceptable speech. To what extent, then, can Antigone figure for us in the position of the speaker who is outside of the accepted discourse, who nevertheless speaks, sometimes intelligently, sometimes critically, within and against that discourse? (Butler 2009a)

Butler points to the contradiction between a law that bans female speech and yet forces Antigone to speak, and when Antigone does speak she speaks beyond the bounds of the current rationality. She is “between two deaths” that is, between biological death and symbolic death (Lacan Sem. VII). In other words, Antigone is still physically alive, but she, like the part of no-part, no longer signifies in the prevailing rationality of the situation. How would something like a new signification emerge out of a placid complacency of the old? What does Antigone represent that could offer possible clues as to how to think a radical subjectivity that breaks into something that is radically heterogeneous to the present situation? If one were to think of a theoretical intervention that grasps how a new subjectivity emerges from the redundancy and repetitiveness of the same, what would this look like? An answer to this question requires first that the general “lay of the land” be established. In this concluding chapter we will summarize our findings with regards to a specific mode of subjective dispossession that makes an ethical relationality possible. Our starting point will be a rather peculiar film released in the early 1990s that illustrates a logic of the subjective change required to break out of a repetitive cycle of the same.