Judith Butler and corporeal vulnerability :
A new perspective on the public dimension of education
Joris Vlieghe
Centrum voor wijsgerige pedagogiek
K.U. Leuven
In this paper I would like to reflect upon the connection between the public
and critical dimension of education on the one hand and our condition as corporeal
and vulnerable beings on the other hand. In particular I will explore this issue within
the framework that Judith Butler offers in her most recent writings1. This is of great
importance to this year’s conference theme as it might help to elucidate why social
problems can be interpreted (and therefore institutionalized) as social problems.
This question presupposes that there is some dimension within education that is
social, relational and public.
So the problem remains how to conceptualise this
public dimension. Therefore it seems interesting to deal in the following with Judith
Butler’s statement that “the body has its invariably public dimension” (PL 26). How
are we to understand the specific meaning of this body and why is it precisely our
bodily incarnation that obligates us to take responsibility for others and for the
community we belong to?
Before turning to Butler’s position I will first discuss shortly why it’s nowadays
not evident to speak about the public or critical possibilities of education. This will
help to understand the importance and originality of Butler’s contribution in
thinking about critical pedagogy. She argues that the experience of not being able
Butler, J. (2004), Violence, Precarious Life. The Powers of Mourning and Violence, Londen (Verso)
[abbreviated as PL] and Butler, J. (2005), Giving an Account of Oneself, New York (Fordham
University Press) [abbreviated as GAO]
to ground ourselves as autonomous, self-transparent and rational beings is an
experience that grants the possibility to assume critical responsibility. This
experience is inextricable bound to the corporeal condition of susceptibility, so she
argues. Consequently critique towards the existing (pedagogical, societal, political)
order should have to do more with an attitude that refers to an experience of radical
finitude than with the typical modern (Kantian, Habermasian) definition and
positioning of the self as autonomous transcendental subjectivity.
I think I should mention here that my interest shall mainly go to Butler’s
most recent writings, especially Giving an Account of Oneself and Precarious Life.
This is rather exceptional. When one considers the bulk of articles in the field of
educational theory and philosophy which are inspired by Butler, one will find only
scarcely references to these texts.
Butler has of course become one of the major referents when dealing with
problems of social emancipation and more specifically with gender-related issues
and the possibility of minorities to resist/revolt against institutionalized practices
and discourse. So it is generally accepted to refer to her important studies of the
90’s, such as Gender Trouble, Bodies that Matter and Excitable Speech2. Time and
again one invokes Butler’s interpretation of the key notions “performativity” (Austin)
and ”iterability” (Derrida). Butler is mainly appreciated for her argument that
subjectivity is dependent upon linguistic categories which are not of our own
making: they define who we are and fix our identities, because it concerns
expressions with performative qualities. We really are nothing else than the social
categories we verify in our daily life. Butler’s point at issue is a double one: (1) we
have to perform what we are in a culturally prescribed way in order to exist socially,
but (2) in a sense it is pointless to speak here about a “we”, because there exists no
2
Butler, J. (1990), Gender Trouble:Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York (Routledge);
Butler, J. (1993), Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of sex, New York (Routledge); Butler, J.
(1997), Excitable Speech: a Politics of the Performative, New York (Routledge).
subjectivity prior to the formative power of the pre-existing discourse. The
dependency upon a given order of meaning constitutes singular subjectivities in the
first place. So Butler shows that it is pointless to invoke an immaculate core of
subjectivity that would exist independent of the given identities which are
mandatory under a specific social and political regime. Consequentially political
resistance that pretends to act on behalf of such repressed essence of mankind is
doomed from the start, as it will assume a fiction that only serves the existing order
of things. Fixing man’s essence, even when trying to find a ground for resistance, is
always an act of reinstalling an arbitrary order of significations that exercises power
and forms our very subjectivity.
Nevertheless Butler also argues that societal and political order only exists by
repeating consolidated meanings. Performativity is dependent upon ritual rehearsal,
which in its endlessness is undeterminable. So precisely here, in this process of
“citation”, in re-enacting given identities, a possibility is disclosed to contestate the
existing regime. In the current discourse’s dependency on individuals who still have
to perform some prescribed identity lies at the same time the very possibility of
refusal. This line of thought has unmistakingly been fruitful within the field of
pedagogy and particularly in thinking a “no nonsense approach” towards criticality,
resistance and genuine social change.
Now, my approach departs in a double way from this current appreciation of
Judith Butler: firstly I will concentrate on her more recent writings, which I think
have as yet not met the attention they deserve.
In these texts one can find a
conception of corporeality which exceeds the Austinian and Derridian framework
that is dominant in Butler’s writings of the 90’s. Secondly I will try to broaden the
critical perspective she offers in the direction of a more general consideration with
the possibility of critique and resistance, particularly in reference to corporeal
vulnerability.
But let me first offer a sketch of the issue I think this latest work of Butler
might help to elucidate.
Why is the critical dimension of education a problem today?
For a long time pedagogy has been formulating as its central aim the
education of (young) people to become critical and enlightened citizens. This classic
ideal of Bildung (edification, cultivation) came down to the idea that the main
objective of education is the critical inquiry of the existing social order3. Students
were expected to become initiated in a cultural heritage and to acquire the
competencies needed to become bearers of social and political progress. So one
looked at the gebildeter Mensch as an autonomous citizen, who develops her
internal potentialities as far as possible so that she is willing to take the
responsibility for the optimal functioning of society, for the continual strive for a
better, more equal and harmonious community4. This continuous striving for an
ideal society ascribed a prominent critical role to the gebildeter Mensch: she, more
than anyone else, was expected to assume a critical position5. Crucial to this
ambition is the very possibility of (and willingness to) changing oneself.
This point of view is today no longer tenable. To understand what has
happened, we can find support in Adorno’s thesis that in the modern world Bildung
has become Halbbildung. Christiane Thompson comments on this idea as follows6:
3
See: Masschelein, J. (2004) How to conceive of a critical theory today?, Journal of Philosophy of
Education”38 (3), p. 351-367
4
See Biesta, G. (2006), Beyond Learning. Democratic Education for a Human Future (Boulder,
Paradigm), p. 2-4
5
For a more radical interpretation that situates the project of Bildung from its very beginning within the
existing power apparatus, see: Masschelein, J., Ricken, N. (2003), Do We (Still) Need the Concept of
Bildung? In Educational Philosophy and Theory 35 (2), p. 139-154.
6
Thompson, C. (2006), Adorno and the Borders of Experience: The Significance of the Nonidentical
for a ‘different’ Theory of Bildung, Educational Theory 56(1), p. 69-87. In this article the author tries to
“the experience of Bildung or learning does not predominantly change the students
and their points of view anymore. Rather, the prospective experiences are intended
to enhance the students’ spectrum of assets. […] Bildung has been transformed into
a measure of the individual’s capacity for adaptation. […] What is learned is ‘no
longer significant for one’s own life but forms a knowledge that is helpful for our
survival.”7 We are no longer changed by the educational process. The only thing that
happens to us is that our position gets confirmed and strengthened. We are never
out of position, so to speak. This analysis is of course I line with many studies
within the framework of governmentality-studies, which time and again show how
under the current regime of quality and efficiency educational subjects come to
identify themselves as “entrepreneurs of their own lives”, as investors who are
obsessed by a will to strive for a strengthening of their own position.
This has important consequences for the critical dimension of education.
There exists no longer a possibility to take a distance to present society and its
demands8. Of course, one could respond that the acquirement of “critical
competencies” was never before so important as today. More and more the
cornerstone of a good educational project appears to be: giving to pupils and
students capabilities that have to do with self-reflection and critical inquiry, instead
of filling their heads with contents and erudition9. Yet these so called “critical
attitudes” imply in no way distancing oneself from existing societal order. By
developing these capabilities pupils and students only see themselves once more in
terms of the will to strive for a more excellent position in our current information
society. There exists a persistent will in all of us to be critical which makes us to
develop a new and actual relevant concept of Bildung, starting from Adorno’s remarks on aesthetic
experience.
7
O.c., p. 73-74.
8
See also: Masschelein (2004).
9
One could relate this to the recent shift from the traditional “language of education” towards a
“language of (life-long) learning”. See Biesta (2006), p. 13-24.
define ourselves constantly as investors of our own lives. While exercising “critique”
we therefore fail to distance ourselves from the current regime. So it is difficult to
see how we could still be critical at all or what it could mean for education to have a
“public” voice.
The question is therefore where to look for a critical alternative that has no
reference to the reinforcing of our own position as so called critical subjects.
Perhaps we should try to assume a critical attitude, as Foucault would suggest,
rather than a position. This kind of attitude is granted by what he refers to as “limitexperience”, i.e. an experience in the most passive sense of this word10: being
vulnerable, being prepared to be exposed to something that obliges us to change
our lives. By invoking the register of experience Foucault tried to think about a form
of criticality which eludes the pitfall of contributing to the existing regime. Only an
experimental alternative counts as a real alternative. So the experience of one’s own
limits, the vivid confrontation with the existing discourse one lives with but which is
usually not put into question, grants the experiencing of distance towards the
existing societal and political order. Therefore it all comes down to an existential
move, rather than to the taking of a firm position.
Judith Butler on (corporeal) vulnerability
It’s precisely here that we can fall back on the thinking of Judith Butler, who
(at least partly) claims to be loyal to this Foucaultian stance. What links Butler’s most
recent writings to the aforementioned discussion is her critique to a prevailing line
of thought in western philosophy concerning the possibility to assume critical
responsibility towards one’s own life, the life of others and the life of community.
10
Foucault, M. (1984), What is Enlightenment?, in Rabinow, P. (Ed.) The Foucault Reader. New York:
Pantheon, pp.32-50. For a similar argumentation see also: Butler, J. (2002), What is Critique? On
Foucault’s Virtue, in Ingram, D. (Ed.), The Political, Oxford (Blackwell), p. 212-226
She states that traditionally criticality rests upon the assumption” to give a
full account of oneself”. This is because traditionally critical distance is defined in
terms of the autonomy of a critical and rational subject that seeks for an ultimate
justification for her actions. Trying to legitimate our moral obligations towards
others and the community, we tend to found these in a kind of positive essence of
what it means being human or belonging to a community. One can think here of the
Kantian or Habermasian definition of transcendental (inter)subjectivity that serves as
the starting point to legitimize a critical position towards the existing social,
political or educational order. Butler on the contrary argues that it is precisely the
negative experience of our own radical lacking of such a ground that constitutes
moral and communal bindings. Moral agency is granted by the experience that we
never reach the ground of our own origins. Being dependent upon conditions that
we cannot fully control constitutes us as moral and accountable beings. The
fundamental “opacity” that results from our constitution as singular creatures turns
us into responsible moral subjects11. “I find that my very formation implicates the
other in me, that my own foreignness to myself is, paradoxically, the source of my
ethical connection with others.” (PL 46).
Consequently, without any reference to an anthropological essence or to a
transcendental ground, it becomes possible to speak in an alternative way about
moral obligations12. Through the limit-experience of our own finitude we are
confronted with a world and with others that charge us with responsibility. Thus the
11
See GAO p. 36-40. See also PL 20 and PL 48.
12
It could be discussed whether she succeeds in this ambition. Butler formulates her critical position
by referring to a tradition that reduces valid speaking to epistemological founded discourse. According
to her we have to recognize the impossibility hereof: we have to know that we don’t know. So perhaps
her philosophy remains within the framework she tries to escape. The imperative “to know thyself” (in
our unknowingness) stays an undisputed starting point. The later Foucault precisely criticised this,
opening a radical different line of thinking, starting from the problem of “caring for oneself”. See: Gros,
F., Le souci de soi chez Michel Foucault. A review of ‘The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at
the Collège de France, 1981-1982’, Philosophy and Social Criticism 31, 5-6 (2005), p. 697-708
awareness of non-transparency does not privatize us: the strangeness within us
doesn’t make us prisoners of ourselves, but confronts us with a public dimension,
namely that we cannot escape our relations with the other13. It should be noted that
this is not a plea for a relational ontology (our essence = our relations to the
others), but on the contrary the defence of a philosophy of radical finitude. Our
“essence”, if it is still possible to use this terminology, should better be described as
a void. Not in the Sartrian sense of the nothingness of absolute freedom, but as the
exposure to a transcendence that forces us to relate to the other in a non gratuitous
way14.
In her essay Violence, Mourning and Politics Butler substantiates her
argument by evoking some convincing examples. I will deal with two of these here15.
The first case is the experience of losing someone whom one was attached to. This
confronts us with the brute fact that we are but who we are, thanks to our
dependency upon a particular other. What singularises us has to do with the
uncontrollability of our social relations. The significance of mourning, a central
theme in this essay, is that we become aware of something that escapes our own
meaning-giving control. “[O]ne mourns when one accepts that by the loss one
undergoes one will be changed possibly forever. Perhaps mourning has to do with
agreeing to undergo a transformation (perhaps one should say submitting to a
transformation) the full result of which one cannot know in advance.” (PL 21). Such
an experience could have important pedagogical consequences: we might learn to
13
See PL p. 22
14
Cfr.: “Although I am insisting on referring to a common human vulnerability, one that emerges with
life itself, I also insist that we cannot recover the source of this vulnerability; it precedes the formation
of ‘I’. This is a condition, a condition of being laid bare from the start and with which we cannot argue.”
(PL 31).
15
The third example is that of (sexual) desire: we can never give conclusive reasons why we desire
the person we long for (PL 24). Similar arguments are developed in Beside Oneself: On the Limits of
Sexual Autonomy in Butler, J., Undoing Gender, New York (Routledge) [abbreviated as UG], p. 17-39.
forsake what Adorno calls moral narcissism (GAO: 103). This narcissistic attitude
presupposes that moral obligations should be founded in the loyalty to our own
essence as rational and autonomous beings, as self-transparent and sovereign lawgivers of ourselves, as Kantian or Habermasian transcendental subjects, as
“entrepreneurs” who reposition ourselves, when acting ethically. Butler on the
contrary thinks that the experience of loss and mourning reveals the possibility of
an alternative moral responsibility and sense of community: we may find ourselves
obliged to others because of the impossibility to give a full account of who we are,
because of the impossibility to be our own ground. The striking point here is that
Butler links this to the body: “grief contains within it the possibility of apprehending
the fundamental sociality of embodied life, the ways in which we are from the start,
and by virtue of being a bodily being, already given over, beyond ourselves,
implicated in lives that are not our own” (UG 22, italics supplied). Before analysing
the reasons to link opacity, community and corporeality, I will first deal with the
second example she attends to.
This concerns the passionate resistance one may experience belonging to a
political marginalised minority. In this case one can be outside oneself with anger
and indignation. Butler makes it clear that it is wrong to reduce political
engagement to the desire for a society that safeguards the possibility for every
individual to be respected in her own subjective rights. This liberal and legalist
vision, commonly shared by feminists and advocates of homosexual’s emancipation
movements, is according to Butler very unwise. Because the longing to justice in the
situation of oppressed minorities is “[a] disposition of ourselves outside ourselves
[which] seems to follow from bodily life, from its vulnerability and its exposure.” (PL
25). In the last quote we find again this very important remark: the public sense of
resistance against the existing social order is not founded in a rationalist or
individualistic morality, but refers to the experience of human vulnerability. This
susceptibility is further described as an exposition that has to do with our bodily
incarnation, with the “precariousness of life”. Or as she states is: “the body has its
invariably public dimension” (PL 26).
This is a most innovative insight. Butler departs from the traditional
(Arendtian) definition of the “public” realm as a space of visibility, which grants
autonomy to every citizen and the possibility to defend her own rights. This
commonly shared vision “fails to do justice to passion and grief and rage, all of
which tear us from ourselves, bind us to others, transport us, undo us, and
implicate us in lives that are not our own, sometimes fatally, irreversibly.” (UG 20)
This alternative conception of “political community [which] is wrought from such
ties” (ibidem) refers to our corporeality: “to be a body is to be given over to others”
(ibidem). The bodily vulnerability one experiences constitutes the public and “opens
up a different conception of politics” (UG 21).
The connection between vulnerability and the body
The question I would like to bring to the fore is why this experience of
exposure should refer to a corporeal type of vulnerability. Butler states time and
again that the susceptibility that serves in her philosophy as the starting point for an
alternative speaking about critique and moral obligation is the susceptibility of our
bodies. I am never fully myself, as far as my body is never my own body. In the
following I would like to explore why we should accept this bold but very fascinating
statement.
This reference to corporeality is a major theme in Butler’s oeuvre16. Inspired
by the thoughts of Althusser and Foucault on subjectivization (assujettissement),
she repeatedly states that subjectivity is the effect of some discourse. We are but
who we are thanks to the identities ascribed to us (and spontaneously accepted by
16See
for instance: Butler, J. (1993), Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of sex, New York
(Routledge)
us) according to a given order of meanings. Power “subjectivates” in the double
sense of this word: (1) we become singularized beings (2) by relating to ourselves in
terms that are dominant within a given regime of truth. This is the manner in which
Butler actualises Foucault’s thesis that subjectivity can be analysed as the result of a
double bond between totalising and in individualising forms of power: we gain our
identity in subjection (in the sense of submission). Of course this view is equally
dependent on Lacan’s theory of symbolic identification. Now, as a feminist thinker,
Butler is strongly sensitive for the way power works through our bodies. We become
somebody through the acceptance of arbitrary meanings such as the definition of
masculinity and femininity.
In her more recent writings she tries to extend this insight beyond the
problems of gender studies and queer theory, in order to use this paradigm of
“subjectivation-through-the-body” as a point of departure to state something about
moral and social reality in general. This is a rather defiant line of thinking.
I should mention beforehand that Butler’s considerations on this issue are not
consistent. I will only point briefly here at some ambiguities in her thoughts on
corporeality, not so much as to question the internal coherency of Butler’s
philosophical position, but in order to find a more nuanced concept of bodily
susceptibility17.
(1) On the one hand she sometimes considers our corporeal condition as a
mere biological given. On repeated occasions she seems to adhere to what she calls
herself a “spinozistic” position, stating that we are all fundamentally driven by a
desire to persist in our own being. This preoccupation with our own survival should
explain why we become attached to identities that are arbitrary posed upon us as
inhabitants of a certain power regime: “to persist in one’s own being means to be
given over from the start to social terms that are never fully one’s own. […] Only by
17
I hope to elaborate these ambiguities further in article I am preparing
persisting in alterity does one persist in one’s “own” being. Vulnerable to terms that
one never made, one persists always, to some degree, through categories, names,
terms, and classifications that mark a primary and inaugurative alienation in
sociality.” (PLP 28)18.
(2) On the other hand Butler frequently tracks human finitude back to the
non-transparent social and cultural conditions that constitute us as singular
individuals. In the constitution of our subjectivities we are dependent upon and
therefore exposed to others who “called us into being” (Althusser), to social
meanings and norms that we must use to be intelligible for ourselves and to others,
etc. Using the expression invented by Lacan, we could term this dimension of
strangeness-within-us “extimité”: I can never control or appropriate that what
appears to be the most proper to myself. To become aware of this attachment to
uncontrollable social and cultural preconditions is then an experience of exposition
and dispossession (because we realise we didn’t and cannot ground the meaning of
our own being). “[I]f the very production of the subject and the formation of [its] will
are the consequences of a primary subordination, then
the vulnerability of the
subject to a power not of its own making is unavoidable.”19
Needless to say that this opposition cannot be found literally in Butler’s
oeuvre: this is a reconstruction for which I am responsible. Nevertheless I am
convinced that this ambiguity exists within Butler’s philosophy and that it deserves
the attention I give it here. Both approaches of vulnerability are not easily
18
Similar positions, in connection with Foucault, are defended by Mourad, R., After Foucault. A new
form of right, Philosophy and Social Criticism 29 (4), p. 451-481 and Olssen, M. , Foucault and the
Imperatives of Education. Critique and Self-creation in a Non-foundational World, in Studies in
Philosophy and Education 25 (2006), p. 245-271. Mourad e.g. speaks of the human condition of
“contention”: “Under this conception, the human being is thrust into a world largely adverse to it and
much more powerful.” (p. 466). In spite of the omnipresence of power, it is precisely the unavoidable
fragility of the flesh that grants the motivation to resist to power.
19
Butler, J. (1997), The Psychic Life of Power, Stanford (Stanford University Press) [abbreviated as
PLP], p. 20.
harmonised. Moreover each approach has to deal with specific difficulties. Let me
start with the last remark:
(1) If one identifies susceptibility in terms of the individual’s will to survive,
one reduces subjectivity to a kind of biological substance. This is quite problematic,
because in this case Butler falls back on a transcendental principle in the name of
which adherence to or, for that matter, the contestation of the existing order gets a
justified ground. But, as I just mentioned, it is precisely her ambition to think of
responsibility and criticality without this kind of presuppositions. Furthermore, this
position could be described as a case of bio-politics: this Foucaultian term refers to
the modern regime of power that owns its effectiveness to the interest for our own
survival. Therefore the assumption that we are all fundamentally obsessed with the
will to persevere in our own being can itself be analysed as the effect of a (typical
modern) power regime. We are asked to relate to ourselves as spinozistic
subjectivities. But we might realize that there is no necessity in this anthropological
self-definition. And it is precisely the experience hereof that could open a critical
distance. So perhaps we should just refuse to be obsessed with self-perseverance
(as a normative criterion, that is). In this light Butler’s argument in terms of conatus
essendi seems to legitimize exactly the position she wants to criticize.
(2) If one treats susceptibility in exclusively cultural or linguistic terms –
Butler speaks in Excitable speech of “linguistic vulnerability”20 – I think it is difficult
to see why she keeps referring to human corporeality. As I said before, the
connection between cultural code and our bodily incarnation is evident in the case
of gender identity. But what have other aspects of culturally formed subjectivity to
do with our body? So, I find it a defiant thought to state that there is no vulnerability
20
Butler, J. (1997), Excitable Speech: a Politics of the Performative, New York (Routledge). “Linguistic
vulnerability” refers here to the possibility of being hurt by hate speech as a result of our formative
dependency upon a socially and linguistically constituted order. Butler states clearly that this
dimension of being hurt by hate speech is analogous to physical vulnerability, but not identical to it.
outside of our corporeal condition, but I don’t think Butler makes it clear enough
why all experience of human finitude necessarily refers to the body.
Moreover, the linking of all sorts of vulnerability and the body becomes
especially difficult when she tends to treat corporeality as a purely biological given.
So for instance I find it very difficult to comprehend why the vulnerability which is
disclosed in mourning refers to our own desire to survive. Therefore I think it is
indispensable to reflect anew upon corporeality within a broadened Butlerian
framework. In her most recent book, Giving an Account of Oneself, which is a
reworking of her famous 2002 Adorno Lectures, I think we can find some relevant
clues that point in new direction.
Vulnerability as anonymity of the flesh
Although she repeats in this book some of the positions I criticized, she also
argues that we should think of human finitude not solely as an effect of our
initiation in the symbolic order, but first of all as related to the fact that humans
come into being as premature beings. As Jean Laplanche, a not well known
psychoanalytic who was a critic of Lacan, showed, the human being is born as a
radical fragile creature that is handed over to the care of others. As a newborn I find
myself in “a condition in which I am prior to acquiring an ‘I’, a being who has been
touched, moved, fed, changed, put to sleep, established as the subject and object of
speech. My infantile body has not only been touched, moved and arranged, but
those impingements operated as tactile signs that registered in my formation. These
signs communicate to me in ways that are not reducible to vocalization. They are
signs of an other, but they are also the traces from which an ‘I’ will eventually
emerge, an ‘I’ who will never be able, fully, to recover or read these signs, for whom
these signs will remain in part overwhelming and unreadable, enigmatic and
formative.” (GAO 70).
From the very beginning of its life the newborn child is delivered to the care
of the other, because of it being an embodied subject. As such our existence is
fundamentally marked by a dimension of radical passivity and inescapable
susceptibility that relates to the frailty of our body rather than to our dependency on
the order of language. The condition of being a premature being makes that our
body has “its invariably public dimension” (PL 26). This ontogenetic account of the
impossibility to have full control of our own existence gives Butler indeed a way to
depart from the Lacanian anthropology.
She works this intuition out in dialogue with Levinas and particulary in
relation to his analysis of the subjectivity, which is revealed in the ethical encounter.
So, whereas Laplanche gives a historical account of finitude, the same dimension is
analysed by Levinas in more structural terms: an ungraspable attachment that
predates all meaning-giving intentionality but that constitutes time and again who
we are at this very moment of speaking. Subjectivity can’t utterly be identified with
the intentionality of the subject, but refers to a deeper dimension of passiveness
that constitutes our own individualities. This dimension is first revealed when we are
appealed by the question the naked face of the other poses to me (and not to
someone else). So, in Butlers latest work the philosophy of Levinas appears as a
source of inspiration to rethink moral responsibility in terms of dispossession of
ourselves. I think she is particularly interested in his position because within
Levinas’s perspective the starting point for morality has to do with the vulnerability
of the flesh.
It seems to me that she uses Levinas here first of all because of his very
powerful description of this state of vulnerability, rather than as a companion in the
search for a ground in the name of which responsibility becomes legitimate.
Vulnerability rather refers to an experience of not being able to find this kind of
grounding principle. It even commits us to the abstinence of longing to search for
such a transcendental principle. We become deaf to this concern. In the experience
of corporeal susceptibility we may come to relate to ourselves in a way that we
forsake the will to ground our own being and the desire to find a definitive
justification for the right kind of ethics or pedagogy. The experience of bodily
susceptibility moves us literally out of position. In this light the body isn’t to be
described as a metaphysical principle or primordial force in the name of which one
should criticize existing forms of life and could ground an alternative way of living.
Thus the experience Butler refers to comes near to the concept of limit-experience I
described above: exposure through the body is not about the finding of a (forgotten
or repressed) positive essence, but confronts us with a void, with a difficulty we
cannot escape and where we nevertheless have to relate to. “If I am wounded, I find
that the wound testifies to the fact that I am impressionable, given over to the other
in ways that I cannot fully predict or control.” (GAO 84) We cannot deny that
something happens to us, that something is disclosed in spite of ourselves. In the
same experience we feel a kind of commitment we cannot justify. So, this (possible)
commitment doesn’t depend on the acceptance of a firm ground: in this sense it is
really a desubjectivizing experience.
This insight is well captured in the citation of Blanchot that Butler quotes to
introduce her chapter on Levinas in Giving an Account of Oneself: “Levinas speaks of
the subjectivity of the subject. If one wishes to use this word – why? But why not? –
one ought perhaps to speak of a subjectivity without a subject: the wounded space,
the hurt of the dying, the already dead body which no one could ever own, or ever
say of it, I, my body” (cited in GAO 84).
I think that Blachot’s remark is very much to the point. At issue is how to
interpret it. As I see it, one might give the following readings of his quote:
(1) In her own consideration of Levinas in Giving an Account of Oneself Butler
seems to fall back on the biological vision of subjectivity, i.e. the “spinozistic”
anthropology I criticised earlier. Consider the following quote: Violence […]
delineates a physical vulnerability from which we cannot slip away, which we cannot
finally resolve in the name of the subject, but which can provide a way to
understand that non of us is fully bounded, utterly separate, but, rather, we are in
our skins, given over, in each other’s hand, at each other’s mercy” (GOA 101). The
experience of dispossession that should awaken in us an alternative sense of
responsibility seems here to become reduced to the mere physical or biological
sense of vulnerability. For reasons I will not repeat here, this seems rather
problematic.
(2) One could of course, as Thomas Keenan does in his study Fables of
Responsibility, stress that Blanchot means with this anonymity first and for all a
radicalized version of Levinas’s figure of “the hostage”: the tragedy of the election
by the other is that I am not special or unique, as I realise that anyone else could
have been made responsible. Only because I was at the right place at the right time I
was addressed. The cry for help from the other was thus not specifically “addressed
to me in particular, not to anyone in particular, but to me as anyone”21. It’s precisely
this anonymity which implicates me as responsible subject. The problem with this
line of thought is of course that any reference to corporeal vulnerability is missing.
(3) Therefore I would like to give another interpretation of this quote of
Blanchot, stressing the anonymity of the body in question. What I offer here is only
an intuition which should be explored much more in depth. In this reading I am very
much indebted to the brilliant analyses of corporeal reality Alphonso Lingis offers
e.g. in his book “The Imperative”22. Firstly one might link this anonymity with
Levinas’s phenomenological analyses of pain and suffering in his earlier writings:
contrary to Heidegger, he argues that pain and the experience of approaching death
21
Keenan, T. (1997), Fables of Responsibility. Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics,
Stanford (Stanford University Press)
22
Lingis, A. (1998), The Imperative, Bloomington (Indiana University Press).
don’t awake in us a strengthened sense of singularity; these experiences rather
depersonalize us. Pain immobilizes us, we cannot react, we are the passive witness
of our own disability to react in a meaningful way. At the same time suffering gets a
political significance – as Butler would also claim : “To look upon someone who is in
pain is to know what it is. We do not simply see the pallid surfaces, the contorted
hands and fingers; we feel a depth of pain. […] Suffering is a bond with others. One
does not suffer without understanding that others suffer, understanding how others
suffer. […] We are repelled but also drawn to the pain another suffers. It awakens in
us a will to struggle with that pain. […] Then we understand that the passivity and
prostration and depersonalisation of suffering that mires me in my own substance
do not isolate me. If I suffer as one suffers, as anyone, everyone suffers, it is also
true that the others are there, to act, to help, to heal, or to stay with me when no
healing is possible.”23 I wonder whether one could relate this bodily anonymity with
Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the “flesh of the world” and his characterization of
human relationality as intercorporeality24. Of course one should refrain from falling
back on these concepts as transcendental principles in the name of which “the right
kind of pedagogy” could be legitimised.
23
Lingis, A. (2000), “To Die with Others”, Diacritics 30 (3), p. 106-113: p. 110.
24
Butler makes this link with Merleau-Ponty herself, e.g. in an endnote in one of her most recent texts
(UG: 15, endnote 7). Although she criticised Merleau-Ponty, especially in her earlier work, for his
essentialist and masculine conception of the body, he seems to stay one of Butler privileged, though
not often mentioned, dialogue partners. Merleau-Ponty states, in opposition to the Cartesian view of
man, that our body isn’t a mere instrument consciousness uses to relate to the world. We are our
body, in the sense that all meaningful phenomena are constituted in accordance with a particular
bodily perspective and its habitual schemes. This however doesn’t mean that we have a full grasp of
our body. And because we are our body, it is this corporeal condition that constitutes us as nontransparant creatures. Opacity resides in the body. Furthermore this condition grants the possibility of
intersubjectivity, as we are all in our very existence dependent upon what “the flesh of the world”. I
have no place to elaborate this considerations further here, but hope to do so in another article. See
also: Meyer-Drawe, K (1984)., Leiblichkeit und Sozialität. Phänomenologische Beiträge zu einer
pädagogischen Theorie der Inter-Subjectivität, München (Wilhelm Fink Verlag).
To conclude my reflections, I would like to relate all this to the problem of the
public dimension of education. Granted that we should look for critical possibilities
which do not relate to the strengthening of or own position, I think a more
elaborated description of corporeal vulnerability in experiential categories, and
more particular in terms of the anonymity of the flesh (or intercorporeality), might
help us to look in another way to the public dimension of education. In any case it
could contribute to a concept of “the public sphere” which is no longer to be
thought of in reference to subject-positions, be it my own position that has to be
protected at any price, or be it the position of the other which should at all cost be
safeguarded.
Consequentially it might also offer an alternative for a discourse
which is very popular nowadays: thinking of criticality in terms of the unconditional
will to respect the other in her otherness, in terms of the opening of ourselves to
the alterity of the vulnerable other (the child, the stranger, etc.). “The public” that is
at issue in Blanchot’s quote and which seems for Butler to be a most relevant
alternative for commonly accepted theories of (inter)subjectivity, seems to refer to a
dimension of vulnerability which first of all has to do with the experience of a
“subjectivity without a subject” which is experienced in the anonymity of the flesh.
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