Senses of the Subject

by Judith Butler

This book brings together a group of Judith Butler's philosophical essays written over two decades that elaborate her reflections on the roles of the passions in subject formation through an engagement with Hegel, Kierkegaard, Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche, Merleau-Ponty, Freud, Irigaray, and Fanon. Drawing on her early work on Hegelian desire and her subsequent reflections on the psychic life of power and the possibility of self-narration, this book considers how passions such as desire, rage, love, and grief are bound up with becoming a subject within specific historical fields of power.
Butler shows in different philosophical contexts how the self that seeks to make itself finds itself already affected and formed against its will by social and discursive powers. And yet, agency and action are not necessarily nullified by this primary impingement. Primary sense impressions register this dual situation of being acted on and acting, countering the idea that acting requires one to overcome the situation of being affected by others and the linguistic and social world. This dual structure of sense sheds light on the desire to live, the practice and peril of grieving, embodied resistance, love, and modes of enthrallment and dispossession. Working with theories of embodiment, desire, and relationality in conversation with philosophers as diverse as Hegel, Spinoza, Descartes, Merleau-Ponty, Freud, and Fanon, Butler reanimates and revises her basic propositions concerningthe constitution and deconstitution of the subject within fields of power, taking up key issues of gender, sexuality, and race in several analyses. Taken together, these essays track the development of Butler's embodied account of ethical relations.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Queer, Feminism

228 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2015

About the author

Judith Butler is an American post-structuralist and feminist philosopher who has contributed to the fields of feminism, queer theory, political philosophy and ethics. They are currently a professor in the Rhetoric and Comparative Literature departments at the University of California, Berkeley.

Butler received their Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University in 1984, for a dissertation subsequently published as Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France. In the late-1980s they held several teaching and research appointments, and were involved in "post-structuralist" efforts within Western feminist theory to question the "presuppositional terms" of feminism.

Their research ranges from literary theory, modern philosophical fiction, feminist and sexuality studies, to 19th- and 20th-century European literature and philosophy, Kafka and loss, and mourning and war. Their most recent work focuses on Jewish philosophy and exploring pre- and post-Zionist criticisms of state violence.

Reviews

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

El libro es una joya. Cada vez que leo un libro de J. Butler no puedo más que confirmar algo que para muchos es ya evidente: Butler lee distinto y pregunta distinto. Ahí está la clave de las controvertidas interpretaciones que hace de los autores. El Spinoza, el Freud, el Kierkegaard, el Hegel, el Sartre, el Fanon, el Merleau-Ponty de Judih Butler no son los que aparecen en los manuales de historia de la filosofía. Me atrevería a decir que, en "Los sentidos del sujeto", los autores de filosofía son leídos como narradores, al estilo literario . Eso significa que su lectura no pretende coincidir con el marco especulativo de cada autor, sino hacer que el marco, por sí mismo, deje de coincidir con lo que propone y vaya más allá de sus propios límites. Las consecuencias de esto son muchas. Entre ellas: el rebajamiento de la autoridad del autor que reduce las posibilidades de lectura; la versatilidad de la que un texto es capaz; la ambivalencia y los vacíos de toda propuesta filosófica. Todo esto acompañado, en "Los sentidos del sujeto", de una importante propuesta que resumiré en una cita que Butler retoma de J.P. Sartre:

«Cedemos nuestros cuerpos a cualquiera, incluso más allá del terreno de las relaciones sexuales: al mirar, al tocar. Tú me cedes tu cuerpo a mí, y yo el mío a ti: existimos el uno para el otro, como cuerpo. Pero no existimos de la misma manera como conciencia, como ideas, incluso si las ideas son modificaciones del cuerpo. Si realmente quisiéramos existir para el otro, existir como cuerpo, como un cuerpo que puede presentarse desnudo -incluso si esto no lleva a suceder jamás- a los demás les parecería que nuestras ideas proceden del cuerpo. Las palabras se forman en una boca con lengua. Todas las ideas se muestran de este modo, incluso las más vagas, las más fugaces, las menos tangibles. Dejaría de existir lo oculto, el secreto que en ciertos siglos se identificó con el honor de hombres y mujeres, y que me parece una tontería». (pp. 245-246).

[Joseph Sverker]

This book is certainly aptly named. What Butler does her is to give the reader a sense of the subject, or senses. This does not, as a reader of Butler knows, accumulate into a substance or form of a subject, but rather the suggestions are tentative and, to borrow language from Paul, that subject is there as through a class, darkly.

Central to Butler in terms of the subject however, is the pronoun "You" and also the concept of touch, being touched. In the very last article Butler summarises the importance of the you very nicely in that the you is able to question the masculine subject. Furthermore, the you is part of an address, it needs a calling, another central aspect of Butler in terms of the subject.

When it comes to the touch it is Merleau-Ponty that comes to the fore. The thought of the touch as being enabled first once one has been touched is a figure of thought that returns in Butler's texts here.

What is of further interest is that this is the first publication in which I see Butler engaging directly with theology. I should have been aware that she had done this since the articles in this book has been published previously, but in this form these articles will be much more readily available. It is in particular the chapter on Merleau-Ponty/Malebranche that I find of interest as a theologian.

I am not completely sure if this book will appeal to the reader who wants to be acquainted with Butler for the first (or second time). It is however an interesting book since it covers a fairly wide time span in her production and many of the articles have interesting points to be made.

[Joni · Rating 4 out of 5]

good topics, exceptional writing. butler rollin'

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a fabulous example of Butler in it to her forehead in theory and obtuseness. To say I liked this book is probably a misuse of the term. I found the book painful to read, many of her arguments are extremely difficult to follow, and her unwillingness to explain in less academic language what she is trying to say was frustrating and challenging at best, impossible for me at worst. Still, Butler need not apologize to me for being so fucking smart that I cannot follow her writings adequately or make sense of her essays. I will say I can get a mental jolt from reading such dense scholarship, but I can say with equal assurance I hardly understand not only the meanings but also the point of diving so deep into theory that only a select few people will ever read, let alone understand, or be able to simplify these thoughts and ideas for presentation to a non-specialist audience.

Not entirely related to these essays but more to Butler's navel-gazing-ness:
I guess I am not overly interested in questioning if "I" am real - which is where this collection's jump-off point is - since I live in a reality where that is not a question that requires an answer or can be proven anyway. While this universe may in fact be a computer simulation, I couldn't care less since knowing that changes almost nothing in my opinion.

[Bill Brydon · Rating 4 out of 5]

"But where are the hands that write the text itself, and is it not the case that they never actually show themselves as we read the marks that they leave? Can the text ever furnish a certain sense of the hands that write the text, or does the writing eclipse the hands that make it possible, such that the marks on the page erase the bodily origins from which they apparently emerge, to emerge as tattered and ontologically suspended remains? Is this not the predicament of all writing in relation to its bodily origins?"

[Orianna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ensayos que abren puertas, destraban neuronas, resemantizan las palabras y la carne.
Esta lectura es de las más importantes que he hecho este año, sin duda.

[Mills College Library]

128.37 B9859 2015

[Camila · Rating 4 out of 5]

Felizmente tenho um amigo filósofo que acompanhou essa leitura, sozinha não conseguiria