Giving an account of oneself

Giving an Account of Oneself

Volumn , Issue , 2005, Pages 1-149

  Butler, Judith ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84894774189     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
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References (74)

1. Theodor Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 16;
2. Probleme der Moralphilosophie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 30. Hereafter cited as PMP in the text, with page numbers referring to the English translation.
3. Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and SlavojŽižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (London: Verso, 2000).
4. For a brilliant and engaging analysis of the immersion and dispossession of the "I" in social conventions, as well as its implications for both lyric poetry and social solidarities, see Denise Riley, Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).
5. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1969), 80;
6. Zur Genealogie der Moral, in Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1967-77) 5: 245-412. Hereafter cited in the text as GM, with page numbers referring to the English edition.
7. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).
8. Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, Volume Two (New York: Random House, 1985);
9. Histoire de la sexualité 2: L'Usage des plaisirs (Paris: Gallimard, 1984). Hereafter cited as UP in the text, with page numbers referring to the English translation.
10. See Judith Butler, "What Is Critique? On Foucault's Virtue," in The Political, ed. David Ingram (London: Basel Blackwell, 2002), 212-8.
11. Michel Foucault, "What Is Critique?" in The Political, ed. David Ingram, 191-211, here p. 194. This essay was originally a lecture given at the French Society of Philosophy on May 27, 1978; it was subsequently published in Bulletin de la Société Française de la philosophie 84, no. 2 (1990): 35-63.
12. Adriana Cavarero, Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, trans. Paul A. Kottman (London: Routledge, 2000);
13. Tu che mi guardi, tu che mi racconti (Milan: Giagiacomo Feltrinelli, 1997).
14. It is interesting to compare Cavarero's text not only with Riley's Words of Selves but also with Paul Ricouer, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992);
15. Soi-même comme un autre (Paris: Seuil, 1990). Ricouer, like Cavarero, makes a case both for the constitutive sociality of the self and for its capacity to present itself in narrative, though they proceed in very different ways. Riley focuses on lyric poetry and ordinary language use, suggesting a non-narrative problem of referentiality generated by the formal structure of linguistic conventions.
16. See Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981);
17. Autrement qu'être ou au-dela de l'essence (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974). Hereafter cited in the text as OB, with page numbers referring to the English translation.
18. Foucault, "What Is Critique?" 192.
19. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 111-12;
20. Werke in zwanzig Bänden, vol. 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980).
21. See Nathan Rotenstreich, "On the Ecstatic Sources of the Concept of Alienation," in Review of Metaphysics, 1963; Jean-Luc Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, trans. Jason Smith and Steven Miller (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), in French, Hegel: L'Inquiétude du négatif (Paris: Hachette Littératures, 1997);
22. Catherine Malabou, L'Avenir de Hegel: Plasticité, temporalité, dialectique (Paris: J. Vrin, 1996).
23. For a further reflection on this issue, see the final chapter, "Precarious Life," in my Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London, Verso: 2004).
24. Foucault, "What Is Critique?" 191.
25. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 183; cited partially in Cavarero, Relating Narratives, p. 20. Future references to Cavarero's book will appear as page numbers in the text.
26. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 66.
27. Michel Foucault, "The Politics of Discourse," in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 70-72.
28. Thomas Keenan, Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).
29. The narrative works as allegory, attempting to give a sequential account for that which cannot, finally, be grasped in sequential terms, for that which has a temporality or a spatiality that can be denied, displaced, or transmuted only when it assumes narrative form. Indeed, it may be that what I am perhaps boldly calling the referent here works as a constant threat to narrative authority even as it functions as the paradoxical condition for a narrative, a narrative that gives provisional and fictive sequence to that which necessarily eludes that construction. See Stephen Greenblatt, ed., Allegory and Representation: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1979-80 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).
30. Shoshana Felman, The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).
31. For a consideration of transparency and illumination along these lines, see M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953).
32. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960, ed., Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 321.
33. I consider this further in "The Desire to Live: Spinoza's Ethics under Pressure," in Victoria Kahn and Neil Saccamano, eds., Passions and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, forthcoming).
34. See my "Beauvoir on Sade: Making Sexuality into an Ethic," in Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Claudia Card (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 168-88.
35. Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis, The Penal Colony, and Other Stories, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken, 1975), 49-63;
36. Franz Kafka, Die Erzählungen (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1998), 47-60.
37. I am grateful here to Barbara Johnson, who formulates the default structure of address in writing of Baudelaire, "the mother functions as a default setting for the I-you relationship in general" (Mother Tongues: Sexuality, Trials, Motherhood, Translation [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003], 71).
38. See Shoshana Felman, The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).
39. For an account of psychoanalysis and language that in general refuses passive constitution and privileges the "I" and its actions as the building blocks of a life story, see Roy Schafer, A New Language for Psychoanalysis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 22-56.
40. For a concept of the relation to narrative structure in psychoanalysis that incorporates a notion of transference, see Peter Brooks, Psychoanalysis and Story-telling (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994).
41. See Denise Riley, Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005).
42. See also Thomas Keenan, Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 175-92.
43. For an excellent discussion of feminist autobiographical narrative and its contestation of truth-telling standards, see Leigh Gilmore, The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001).
44. Jean Laplanche, Essays on Otherness, ed. John Fletcher (London: Routledge, 1999).
45. Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).
46. See D. W. Winnicott, Holding and Interpretation: Fragment of an Analysis (London: Hogarth Press, 1986).
47. See Cathy Caruth, "Interview with Jean Laplanche" (2001), at http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.101/11.2caruth.txt, para. 92l, for a way of understanding that might situate this ejaculatory suicide in relation to masochism: "I'm very critical about the term 'death drive,' and... I have called it a sexual death drive, with the emphasis more on 'sexual' than on 'death.' For me, the sexual death drive is just sexuality, unbound sexuality, the extreme of sexuality. And more than death, I would point to primary masochism. I see more of a sense of the sexual death drive in masochism or in sado-masochism than in death. And it was not on the side of sadism, but on the side of masochism, that Freud placed the core of his death drive."
48. Franz Kafka, "Cares of a Family Man" in The Complete Stories, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken, 1976), 427-28;
49. "Die Sorge des Hausvaters," in Die Erzählungen (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1998), 343-44.
50. It would be interesting to consider the two forms of "living on" in terms of the distinction between fortleben and überleben that Benjamin develops in "The Task of the Translator" (Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn [New York: Schocken, 1968], 69-82). Clearly, both the final voice in "The Judgment" and the perpetuity of Odradek evoke the sense of nachleben, or living on. Significantly, Jacques Derrida references this difference between an afterlife (überleben) and a kind of survival or living on (fortleben) that takes place in language to the presumption of human finitude. This operation of language is at once ghostly and animated. See his final interview, Le Monde, August 18, 2004.
51. Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), 253;
52. "Prismen" in Adorno, Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft I, Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997): 10.1:9-287, here 264-65.
53. Jean Laplanche, "The Drive and the Object-Source: Its Fate in the Transference," in Jean Laplanche: Seduction, Translation, and the Drives, ed. Fletcher and Stanton, p. 191;
54. "La Pulsion et son objet-source: Son destin dans le transfert," in Laplanche, Le Primat de l'autre en psychanalyse (Paris: Flammarion, 1997), 227-242.
55. As a textual source for this position, see Sigmund Freud, "The Unconscious," The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953-74), 14:201-4, for the distinction between a word-and a thing-presentation in the unconscious.
56. Cathy Caruth, "Interview with Jean Laplanche" (2001), para. 124.
57. Laplanche, "The Drive and the Object-Source," 193.
58. Cathy Caruth, "Interview with Jean Laplanche" (2001), para. 89.
59. Jean Laplanche, "Responsabilité et réponse," Entre séduction et inspiration: L'Homme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999), 147-72. All English translations in the text are mine.
60. Thomas Keenan conducts a lucid and provocative reading of both Levinas and Blanchot on the responsibility that arises from the situation of being held hostage. In the course of his exposition, he explains that the self who would respond to the address of the other is precisely not a personal self, but an "anyone," thus situating responsibility as a prerogative of anonymity. See Thomas Keenan, Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 19-23.
61. See the 1968 version of "Substitution" in Emmanuel Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 93-94; hereafter cited in the text as S. This essay was subsequently reworked in Otherwise than Being.
62. Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Sean Hand (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 89;
63. Difficile Liberté: Essais sur le judaïsme (Paris: Albin Michel, 1976). Hereafter cited in the text as DF. I consider this text at greater length in an unpublished essay, "Prehistories of Postzionism: The Paradoxes of Jewish Universalism."
64. Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985).
65. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974), 164;
66. Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969), 216.
67. For an extended comparison of Adorno and Levinas, see Hent de Vries, Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas, trans. Geoffrey Hale (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).
68. See also Adorno's discussion of Kafka's tale in Theodor W. Adorno andWalter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, 1928-1940, ed. Henri Lonitz, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 68-70;
69. Adorno-Benjamin Briefwechsel, 1928-1940, ed. Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995), 93-96.
70. Michel Foucault, "How Much Does It Cost for Reason to Tell the Truth?" in Foucault Live, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. John Honston (New York: Semiotext[e], 1989).
71. The interview was first published as "Structuralism, Poststructuralism" in Telos 16, no. 55 (1983): 195-211, and it seems to have appeared simultaneously in German as "Um Welchen Preis sagt die Vernunft die Wahrheit," with Gerard Raulet, trans. Khosrow Nosration, in Spuren 1 and 2 (May and June 1983). The original interview, conducted in French, can be found as "Structuralisme et poststructuralisme," in Foucault, Dits et Ecrits, 1954-1988, vol. 4 (Paris: Gallimard), 431-457. The citations in the text are to Foucault Live in English as well as to Dits et Ecrits. The article in English is referred to as HM in the text; the interview in French is referred to as SP in the text. Translations of the latter are my own.
72. Michel Foucault, "About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self," trans. Thomas Keenan and Mark Blasius, Political Theory 21, no 2 (May, 1993): 198-227, republished in Michel Foucault, Religion and Culture, ed. Jeremy Carrette (New York: Routledge, 1999), 158-81. Citations in this text, from the latter volume, are referred to as H.
73. Parrhesia is a Greek term for free-spokenness and frankness, linked to "license." It has two meanings. The first is "candid speech," and the second, "begging pardon in advance for necessary candor," according to Richard Lanham, A Handbook of Rhetorical Terms (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 110. See Michel Foucault, L'Herméneutique du sujet: Cours au Collège de France. 1981-82 (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 355-78. Future citations to this volume are referred to as HDS; the translation into English is my own.
74. Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson (New York: Semiotext[ e], 2001). This text is not written by Foucault but rather consists of lectures derived from a transcription of one auditor's notes taken during a seminar called "Discourse and Truth" at Berkeley in the spring of 1983. Citations to this text are to FS. L'Herméneutique du sujet: Cours au Collège de France. 1981-82 (see the previous note) includes similar preliminary material, especially on Seneca, asceticism, and parrhesia, but also extensive discussions of Alcibiades, Socrates, the delphic oracle, Epicurean and Stoic alternatives, the care of the self, and subjectivation.