S
Judith Butler’s rethinking of the human
Inge Arteel
Inge Arteel is germanist Duits-Engels en
werkt als postdoctoraal onderzoeker van
het FWO aan de Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
Ze is lid van RHEA, het VUB-onderzoekscentrum voor gender en diversiteit, en coredactrice van de Tweespraak Vrouwenstudies 5 (over literatuur) en 6 (over islam,
beide VUBPress 2007). Ze schreef een
doctoraat over ‘strategieën van subjectwording’ in het proza van de Oostenrijkse
schrijfster Friederike Mayröcker (Bielefeld : Aisthesis Verlag 2007). Haar huidige
project onderzoekt ensceneringen van geweld en pijn in de hedendaagse Duitstalige
literatuur en hun relatie tot het begrip van
‘het menselijke’. Haar onderzoeksthema’s
zijn hedendaags Duitstalig proza en theater, subjecttheorie en gendertheorie.
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Inge Arteel est germaniste allemand-anglais. Elle est chercheuse postdoctorale du
FNRS à la Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Elle
est membre de RHEA, le centre de recherche de la VUB pour le genre et la diversité.
Elle a co-édité les numéros 5 (sur la littérature) et 6 (sur l’islam, tous deux VUBPress
2007) de Tweespraak Vrouwenstudies. Elle
a écrit une thèse de doctorat sur les «stratégies de la naissance du sujet» dans la prose
de l’auteure autrichienne Friederike Mayröcker (Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag 2007).
Son projet actuel étudie les mises en scène
de la violence et de la souffrance dans la
littérature germanophone contemporaine
et leur relation avec le concept d’humain.
Ses thèmes de recherches sont la prose et
le théâtre contemporains en allemand, les
théories du sujet et les théories de genre.
“butler’s view on the human tries to provide a basis for a non-violent
In my short talk I would like to briefly comment on a notion
which I consider to be central not only in this paper but in
most of your work, that is the notion of the human subject
and your endeavor or project to rethink the concept of the
human.1
In my opinion, we might describe this project as your attempt to rethink the human without returning to a strictly
humanist conception of the subject – that is, the subject as
rational, independent being, with a mind that is in control
of the body and that can exercise a free will and moral judgment. But your project can be situated even less in a deterministic or nihilistic climate which does away with responsibility. Indeed, your view on the human tries to provide a
basis for a non-violent ethics of human encounters, be it on
a personal, intimate level or on the level of global exchanges
between states. This concept of the human is not meant to
be universally applicable but does aspire, I would say, to be
universally negotiable.
Traces of this project can be found throughout your work.
I will point to some of them in your earlier books and conclude with the thoughts you developed in the essay “Beside
Oneself”, published in 2004.
In Gender Trouble, the book that made you famous and
that most people here today might be familiar with, you analyze the performative production of “discrete”, “intelligible”
genders – that is genders that can be identified or recognized as either feminine or masculine within the heterosexual
matrix. In the dominant symbolic order, only these genders
are considered to be human genders; this gendering is “a
part of what ‘humanizes’ individuals within contemporary
culture” (Butler 1990: 139). In your book Bodies that matter
you elaborate on this normative process of humanizing, in
your analysis of examples of gender discourse that “orchestrate, delimit, and sustain that which qualifies as ‘the human’” (Butler 1993: 8). Establishing the normative category
of the human always implies the production of its ‘outside’,
the less human, the inhuman, the humanly unthinkable
(Butler 1993: 8). And it is in this ‘outside’ of abjected bodies
that you situate the force for a radical rearticulation of that
what qualifies as human (1993: 16), a rearticulation that has
taken place for instance in the queer movement.
In your book Excitable Speech you analyze how speech
acts and language in general can dehumanize and you offer
examples of what you call “insurrectionary speech” (Butler
1997: 163), rebellious speech that can counter linguistic violence with its own means, in a reappropriation, recontextualisation or contestation of the violent, injuring speech acts.
The analysis of what counts as a human life from a Western perspective and what is considered less human is the
main subject of your most recent books Precarious Life and
Undoing Gender. I will mention only two key concepts here,
that is the notion of grievable lives and the recognition of
vulnerability.
What counts as human is in your analysis closely connected to what counts as grievable. Lives that are considered
worth grieving for count as human lives. Only the dead we
can mourn publicly, the bodies we are allowed to bury, count
as human. You take your examples for these thoughts from
the AIDS crisis, from 9/11 and from the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict.
As a basis for a non-violent ethics you propose the notion
of vulnerability, the understanding of the precariousness
of life, of how easily human life is destroyed (Butler 2004a:
xvii). This implies the recognition of one’s own vulnerability and of the vulnerability of the other (Butler 2004a: 134).
Only when you let go of your own supposed autonomy, and
acknowledge your fundamental dependency on others, can
you prevent your fear, injury or anger from turning into aggression.
In the essay “Beside Oneself” you draw attention to the
historical character of the human. The definition of the human has changed in the course of time, as have the inhuman
minorities which the category has produced. That means
that it is not and need not be an absolute category, a foundation. You propose the human as an open and unpredictable category, open to future changes in the name of non-
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ethics of human encounters […]”
violence and without us knowing or controlling what form
it will take.
The openness of the human allows for fantasy. Fantasy
you define as the articulation of the possible, that is the
imagination of what other forms of lives and bodies could
count as human (Butler 2004b: 28). Fantasy thinks possibilities beyond the norm, beyond the limits of reality. You refer
here especially to transgender, transsexual and intersexual
people, people who are by the laws of culture and language
considered impossible, and for whom becoming possible is a
matter of survival.
The openness of the category of the human acknowledges the fact that we cannot know the other and cannot know
ourselves. In the field of international human rights you therefore argue in favour of cultural translation (Butler 2004b:
38). Translation is a process of mutual affecting and changing: both the self and the other are changed. It is a process
that resignifies and confounds supposedly fundamental categories and questions the exclusionary effects that these
categories inevitably produce.
Instead of letting itself be used in a restrictive way and
in the service of state violence – as some of the examples in
your lecture have made clear – sexual politics, with its struggle for a broader notion of what is humanly possible, might
well have a very important role to play here.
Judith Butler (1993). Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”.
New York: Routledge.
Judith Butler (1997). Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New
York: Routledge.
Judith Butler (2004a). Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso.
Judith Butler (2004b). “Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy.”
In Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge.
Notes
1
This brief presentation, held before the discussion with the public, was
meant to situate Judith Butler’s paper in the whole of her oeuvre.
References
Judith Butler (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
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