a conversation with judith butler

THOMAS DUMM

Giving Away, Giving Over:A Conversation with Judith Butler

Over the course of several months, Thomas Dumm, for

the Massachusetts Review, engaged Judith Butler in an

exchange concerning her work.The format was written,

the communications occurred over the e-mail. But it

was an e-mail exchange that assumed the form of a

conversation: even as a series of questions were posed,

the spirit became one of collaboration, or as Butler

might put it, a giving away, a giving over.

MR: There is a temptation to imagine continuities and discontinuities in theworks of serious thinkers. And so we have been presented with the youngMarx, concerned with issues of alienation and dialectics, engaging directlywith Hegel, Feuerbach, and others, and the later Marx, who gives us thecritical works on political economy. Or the early Heidegger of Being andTime, overtly concerned with the question of Dasein, who then has a "turn,"becoming more and more interested with our embeddedness in language,worried about the human itself and its technological overcoming. Or theearly Foucault, the archeologist of knowledge who was concerned withepistemological breaks and the institutionalization of human sciences, themiddle Foucault, the genealogist of power and resistance, and the lateFoucault, concerned with the technologies and care of the self.

As valuable as such tracings of trajectories might be, if one engages insuch an exercise, of course, one usually misses crucial continuities in theworks of thinkers, and perhaps misunderstands them in significant ways.

Such an exercise might be attempted with the body of your work to date.One could say that there is an early Butler, the Butler who, deeply schooledin French thought, after her first book on the influence of Hegelianism ontwentieth-century French thought {Subjects of Desire, 1987), turns to thestudy of gender and in an explosive book. Gender Trouble (1990), sets a new

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THE MASSACHUSETTS REVIEW

agenda for feminist thinkers and activists. Too simply put. Gender Troubleintroduced a series of conceptual tools for the critical analysis of the politicsof engenderment, rendering new distinctions between sex and gender,introducing ideas concerning performance to the subject of identity, givingrise to new possibilities in the politics of representation. In subsequent vol-umes in the '90s, Bodies That Matter (1993), and Feminist Gontentions (1995),the representation of a 1991 through 1993 set of exchanges with SeylaBenhabib, DruciUa Cornell, and Nancy Fraser, seemed to solidify your rep-utation as a leading feminist philosopher. But then a shift seemed to occur.While your ongoing interest and concern with issues of engenderment andpohtics remained palpable and deep, especially in Excitable Speech (1997),your most explicit statement on the politics of the performative, in which,among other matters, you engage the arguments of Catherine Mackinnonconcerning speech and pornography, in that very same year you publishedThe Psychic Life of Power (1997), which while it is, as the title suggests, quiteinterested in the issue of power, approaches the question of power througha critical engagement and juxtaposition of Freud and Foucault. That study,followed up by Antigone's Claim (2000), seems to indicate a shift in yourconcern and interest, or better, a deepening of your theoretical concerns,addressing questions about melancholia and gender, the structure of familiesand states, in ways that speak directly to more traditional canonical concerns,not beyond gender, but beside it, perhaps. Followed up by your engagementwith Laclau and Zizek concerning the problematic of universality{Contingency, Hegemony, Universality [2000]) there seemed to be a movementaway from the immediacy of political engagement.

And then came the events of September 11,2001.Your political interven-tions and actions since then seem to have made you much more of a publicintellectual. For example, you have written in both the New York Times andThe Nation, venues that once were hostile to your work.You have taken onLarry Summers when he declared critics of Israel's Palestinian pohcy to beanti-Semitic "in eifect."You have been tireless in your opposition to the Iraqwar and its consequences. Your books seem to have followed this path toyour concern with the politics of war and trauma. In Precarious Life (2004)you directly address the issue of national trauma, and offer your own versionof a Levinasian ethics to inform an alternative national politics. And inGiving an Account of Oneself {2005), you further explore the question of therelation of ethics and violence, asking how we might evade the anachronisticviolence that attends the moment when an ethos begins to face and mustshore itself up with codes of morahty. These books, as their subjects seem toindicate, don't seem to focus on issues of gender, even as they explore theconstitution of subjectivity out of loss and trauma. They seem to indicate a

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An Interview with Judith Butler

turn away from where you started, a new heading for your thought thatleaves questions of engenderment behind.

How do you respond to this characterization? What does it capture con-cerning the trajectory of your thought? What continuities and concernsdoes it miss?

JB: Of course, I am very poor at giving an account of myself, and the textby that name ends on an appeal for forgiveness precisely on that score. Thatsaid, one needs to try to do something. I think it may be important to notethat the work on gender continues in Undoing Gender (Routledge, 2004),and more recently I've written an unpublished essay on "transgender" andanother on sexual politics, secularism, and debates on new immigration. SoI don't think that the work on gender is precisely over, but I am aware thatI am not theorizing gender anew. I'm commenting on new political issuesregarding gender, but I am not actively theorizing the performativity of gen-der these days. In fact, it may be that over and against a certain view of per-formativity, understood as active self-constitution, I've been compelled bymany forces (critics as well as historical and political events) to consider whatit is to be "acted on" at the same time that one is acting. I've been concernedto try and stay away from a strict polarity between passive constitution andactive self-constitution, and I've tried to find a language to describe that sit-uation of being impinged upon by norms, but also by the ethical claims ofothers, at the same time that one accounts for responsiveness, if not respon-sibility. I experience my own work as returning time and again to Hegel, toproblems of recognition and desire, and so I am not sure there is an earlyand a "later" Butler, but I do think that I have been compelled to takeaccount of that part of my work that gave rise to the voluntarist reading, andto work against some of the relentless activity of Gender Trouble. I've alsosought to extend the analysis of grief and melancholia that emerged first inrelation to foreclosed mourning within the heterosexual matrix and thenforeclosed public mourning in the early days of the U.S. AIDS crisis. Thisreflection led me to consider the prohibited mourning that one sees inAntigone, and against which she fatally struggles, but also in the media rep-resentations ofthe current U.S. wars. So there seems to be some way that Iam renewing my understanding.

I also want to consider recognition again, and to avoid the two extremesthat would say that recognition only and always confers value or that recog-nition is nothing other than a slave morality. My sense is that it is vexed,since recognition only takes place through social norms, and it can be a wayof subjugating or acknowledging, and sometimes it can be both at once.Giving an Account of Oneself returns to Hegel briefly to consider how to

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rethink that problem, and ends up suggesting that ethics and social theoryare necessarily joined through the practice of critique. I'm not sure thisanswers your question, or whether I am the one to answer it!

MR: Your struggle with the question of grief and prohibitions of mourn-ing, as you note here, and as is revealed extensively in Precarious Life, entailsa series of other questions that at least implicitly direct us to look beyondthe current war and the post-9/11 American scene. It is as though—^pleaseforgive me if this is too crude or totally off point—^you hope to illuminatea way in which there may be a certain productivity in grieving, a waythrough grieving that tarries with it, almost in an instrumental sense, for thevalue of it leading to a better poHtics. It is as though you want to recast thefamous last words of Joe Hill—"Don't mourn, organize!" But how youwould recast that call to action doesn't seem as direct or clear.

JB: These are complex questions, and I hope to begin to do some justice tothem, although I worry that I am somewhat unprepared to think themthrough more systematically. Let me explain why I have some trepidation. Ithink we have to consider a difference between monumental grieving, thekind that demands spectacle and repetition, in the context of war. So thereis a kind of spectacular public grief for those who died in the attacks onthe World Trade Center, one which has become ritualized in the media, andwhich is invoked as a rationale for security, aggression, the abrogation ofsovereignty. At the same time, there are refusals to grieve that take place inthe midst of spectacular grieving, and which might be said to be the pre-condition of this kind of spectacular grieving. First, those whose deaths aremourned (or the curtailment of w hose lives are grieved) are consistendytransformed into "grievable beings," model U.S. citizens with property anddogs and happy marriages. And those who were noncitizens or whose livescould not be transformed into ideals were certainly subject to less publicgrieving, if not a full effacement. So we have to consider whose lives are"losable" and whose lives are grievable in this context. On the other hand,I would object to any position claiming that, on the basis of an instrumen-tal and expoitative public grieving process, there should be no grieving, orthat all grieving is therefore suspect. This would be a fatal conclusion. It isone thing to exploit loss for instrumental reasons, even for the purposes ofproducing nationalist idealizations that foment war, and quite another tograsp the sudden expungibility of lives that such attacks foreground. Thoseattacks in some ways delineate the precariousness of life, the fact that it cancome into being and exit firom being in profoundly unexpected ways. Thisis not to say there are no "causes" for birth or death, but only that embodi-

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ment carries with it an exposure to sudden harm or illness that cannot befully or effectively contained. If we were able to contain or neutralize thatexposure, we would not be embodied. To be embodied is to be exposed tounwanted or unanticipated modes of address, and surely "violent attack" isone kind of'address" (one that seeks to eradicate the conditions of address),and seduction might be quite another.

In any case, I think that it is one thing to be involved in a process ofgrieving, and quite another to discern firom •within that process the condi-tions of grievability that belong to embodied life and that indicate some-thing about the precariousness of life and, consequently, its value. The refusalof grief can take many forms; there are forms of melancholy that refuse toacknowledge the loss of what is lost; there are forms of denial that seek toreassert human control over matters of Hfe and death (and violent revengecan be motivated by this aim). I'm aware as well that many people are"af&onted"by the demands of grief, since grief undoes agency in some con-sequential ways. For instance, one seeks to "act" in the face of loss, but theloss is itself a form of impingement, a confrontation with a deprivation or aviolence that is precisely against one's will or indifferent to one's will. Sogrief limits the will, and this "affront" sometimes leads people to insist uponimmediate forms of activism, not only to take revenge, but to reassert themastery or agency ofthe "I". So I guess I am somewhat opposed to the ideathat one should cease grieving and organize. In the same way, I was opposedto Bush's time-limit on grieving (ten days, I believe), after which he"resolved" on war. Maybe what needs to be "tarried wdth" is that experienceof being impinged upon in ways one never chose, and to think throughwhat this means about how profoundly affected by others' lives we are. Thiscould, in turn, lead to a different conception of intersubjectivity and even, Ibelieve, a consideration of global interdependency. One would have to "staywith" the thought of un'wanted impingement in order to get to these socialand political conclusions. Otherwise, we end up reasserting the ego and itsmastery, and the hyper-agency (perhaps manic) of hberal individualism andmasculine nationalism wins the day.

MR: Your account of a good kind of public grieving as involving " 'stayingw ith' the thought of unwanted impingement" seems to be a statement thatinitiates a new ethical project for you. (It also seems to connect to earlierquestions and concerns you have had about melancholy and gender.)Knowing of your ongoing interest in the difficult and deeply entwined fatesof the Palestinians and Israelis, I am wondering if you can think of a goodexample—even a speculative one—of how such an enactment of "stayingwith" might unfold. The reason I ask is because it seems to me as though it

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is through this process of grieving that so many of your Unes of thought cometogether, even to the point where the more constructive elements of yourrecent work entail a sort of resting at the point of dissolution, as in Givingan Account of Oneself in which you present the contrast between violenceand nonviolence this way: "If violence is the act by which a subject seeksto reinstall mastery and unity, then nonviolence may well follow firom thepersistent challenge to egoic mastery that our obligations to others induceand require." (64) Or as you eloquently put it in Precarious Life, "Let's face it.We're undone by each other.And if we're not, we're missing something." (23)

JB: I appreciate your way of putting things, and sometimes one needs areader like you in order to begin to grasp certain changes in one's work. Ithink that if one considers the theory of performativity in Gender Trouble,then there is an emphasis on activity, even relentless and repetitive activity.The sections on performativity are not fuUy thought together with the sec-tions on melancholy, and so one might refiect upon a certain gap there, onethat I have been trying to attend to ever since. If grieving is refused througha certain manic action, one that seeks to deny or magically overcome theloss one has endured or, simultaneously, the blow to one's efficacy that lossentails, then maybe one has to undergo the deprivation and the humilitythat loss requires. I am tempted to ally nonviolence with a position ofhumility. It is very hard to do, since so often violence justifies itself throughrecourse to self-preservation. This impulsive recourse to self-preservation issomewhat suspect in my view, since in its quickness and urgency, it fails toask "which self" it seems to preserve, and "at what cost." We tend to thinkof self-preservation as that w hich underwrites any ethics: I have to first sur-vive in order then to ask which Hfe I ought to live. But I think that this mis-takes the demand of ethics, which is really to ask the question of how to liveprecisely at the moment in which it appears that one's survival is at stake. Wesee this point made poignantly in the work of Primo Levi, for instance. Whathe portrayed time and again when he wrote his portraits of characters in thecamps were the kinds of decisions that are made precisely under conditionsof extreme duress. Sometimes one drinks the water at the other's expense,but other times, someone yields his or her bread to another, and these actsare to some degree ineffable. I am mindful of Hannah Arendt's remark thatonce the greatness of the Jewish people consisted in its belief in God, andnow they believe only in themselves! She said this in response to GoldaMeir, it seems, and Arendt was clearly questioning whether people seek topersist in the name of particular values. If "survival at all costs" becomes anethical norm, it is the end of all ethical norms—as Levi points out in theexperience of the concentration camps. This lesson seems to have been for-

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gotten when "self-preservation" becomes an infinitely expandable justifica-tion for all acts of violence. I am not saying that there should never be actsof violence in the service of self-defense, but I worry when self-preservationor self-defense becomes a reckless instrumentality.

The "self" at issue is, in my view, one that is always impinged upon byothers, one that is exposed to its own radical sociality in moments of loss.This may seem strange, since we think of the grieving person as wishingisolation. But if Freud is right, then the isolation is a way of harboring thelost other, and it avows the ways in which that other constitutes the self. To"undergo" grief is also to be exposed to that kind of experience that is notdirected by the ego, the kind of experience that shows up the limits of mas-tery of all kinds. And yet some other kind of "achievement" is possiblethrough such grieving, since what can become heightened is the way inwhich every being, embodied and disposed to love, is open to a transfor-mative affliction. One is transformed by the other, by the loss of the other,by the prospect of that loss, but also—and this is the part that moves beyondthe purely personal—one can come to see what "sociality" might meanwhen it is precisely not a collection of egos, but a set of relations by whichwe are, as it were, done and undone.

MR: This idea of sociality seems both richly complex, but also available to usin an immediate, almost intuitive, way. Again, in Precarious Life, you write,"Itis not as if an T exists independently over here and then simply loses a 'you'over there, especially if the attachment to 'you' is part of what composes who'I' am. Ifi lose you, under these conditions, then I not only mourn the loss,but I become inscrutable to myself.Who 'am' I, without you?... At anotherlevel, perhaps what I have lost 'in' you, that for which I have no ready vocab-ulary, is a relationality that is composed neither exclusively of myself noryou, but is to be conceived as the tie by which those terms are differentiatedand related." (22) A sociality that moves beyond the purely personal seems toput you in touch with the associated concept of impersonality, which variousthinkers, such as Emerson, Simone Weil, and others, have employed in theirattempts to develop moral ways of being in the world. You seem to be veryattracted to the thought of Levinas for reasons that touch upon this as well.Would this be a fair way of thinking of this movement in your thought?

JB: I find myself stalled in relation to the answer, but maybe because, in theend, you return to this question of "my thought" and ask me, respectfully,whether it would be fair to characterize the movement in my thinking thisway I am gratefial for the gesture, of course, but perhaps I need gently refusethe position of the one who can finally say whether such a movement

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belongs to me or not. I think that you are reading, offering something, andif what I have written prompts this in some way, then that is its own eventor consequence. It might be a mistake to return it to me, as if it were mypossession, or something I might rightfully guard. So perhaps if at thismoment I give away my thinking or, rather, recognize that it is already notmine, then we approach this question of sociality fi-om a different perspec-tive. After all, a text is not just published, but given away and given over, andthat is done without quite knowing what use will be made of it. I have norights over its use! But this means, conversely, that some kind of sociality isentered that is not quite governed by a rights discourse, and where writingbecomes the venue for that exchange. If I could recognize myself in the ver-sion of myself that you return to me, then nothing will have happened, andI will have lost the chance to be transformed by the social exchange inwhich I participate. Perhaps this question of "who am I" that takes place onthe condition of loss simply references this way in which the "I" is boundup with the other and with temporality in a way that resists the language ofindividual rights—and the modes of individualization that such a languageentails. If I am bound up with the other, that is as true by virtue of mydependency (my continuing infancy, psychoanalytically understood), as it isby virtue of my responsibility (my continuing adulthood). I think, surely,Simone Weil understood what it was to undergo dispossession of the self inthe course of an address, but I worry that for her the ethical bind of that sit-uation was unlivable (not only for her, but for anyone). I suppose I wouldsay that this situation, this bind, that we are tracing (that you have traced), isimpersonal to some extent, since it is indifferent to us personally. But it isalso personal in the sense that the ways in which we are implicated in thebind are singular, and they form some of what we might call our most per-sonal passions. So I am not sure how or whether to come down on one sideor the other of that divide. I do think that we have to begin to think aboutobligation and responsibihty fi om dispositions that are not simply resoluteand heroic, but which avow those forms of sociality and interdependencythat are perhaps offensive to our sense of individualism. Perhaps this meanslosing some pride or finding some mode of humility that stays on this sideof humiliation. Whatever it means to have or pursue a moral mode of beingin the world, it w iU not be something that is exclusively "mine" and so wiUhave to be a mode of being that is bound up with others with all the diffi-culty and promise that implies.

MR: It is strange, once you highlight it, to speak of something called "yourthought," while engaging in a conversation. Maybe the better way toapproach it is to ask the straightforward question: "What do you think?"

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As you tack from the impersonal to the personal, your response evokesfor me a sense of what the process of conversion, in its most serious andhopeful mode, might be about. Stanley Cavell, in his various readings ofEmerson, also emphasizes the continued vacillation between childhood andadulthood, how we may, as he quotes Emerson, be "reborn into this newyet unapproachable America." In a sense, while we are condemned to givean account of ourselves that will never be complete, that will always be partof the process of our becoming, that will always remind us that we haveanother turn we must make, there is some comfort in realizing that wedon't have to be doing it alone.

Many people, particularly in the world of political theory, seem dubiousabout how such a moral mode can be enacted. They would, I suppose, pointto Simone Weil as representing exactly the destructive power of such a self-challenge. They would claim that some sort of institutionalization of some-thing like Rawls's theory of justice is the best we can hope for. I myself thinksuch a claim hides a certain cynicism, but the difficulty stiU lies in trying topersuade people to think about a moral mode versus a moral code. In thatsense, I am wondering if you worry in the same way about communicatingthat difference. What you suggest evokes for me something akin to whatCavell has called the conversation of justice. Only I think that one of yourdeepest resources in drawing out such an ethics is the work of EmmanuelLevinas. I wonder if you could explain a httle bit about how Levinas hascome to inform your mode of being moral.

JB: Well, I have some question about whether I have a mode of being moral,so let's just say, perhaps more modestly, that there are certain moral questionsor concerns that drive me or that recur for me, and that these are mainlyquandaries. So I am much further fi-om the "code" than I am from the"mode" but even there I am unsure. My sense of Weil is that she offers usan understanding of what it means to address another and to be dispossessedin the course of that address. I think that this clearly resonates with Levinasand, in particular, his notion that we address another because we are calledupon to do so.This having been "called" to respond to another suggests thatthere is a bond with the other that constitutes who we "are" and that we arenot simply talking about how conversations occur, but of who webecome—and how we are undone—in the course of that address. In otherwords, once we accept that we are called upon by others, that we are boundethically to them, then we can no longer hold to a certain idea of sovereignselfhood. In that sense, a certain presumption ofthe self is "undone." But tothe extent that we respond or, rather, try to cultivate a mode of responding,then it seems we enter into a kind of practice or what you have called a

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moral "mode." I know that critics sometimes claim that Weil leads us to self-destruction and that Levinas leads us to an uncritical acquiescence to theother, but maybe those critics miss the point of the challenge. Although Weilmight be said to have destroyed herself, it is not clear to me that her reflec-tions on ethical matters lead necessarily to self-destruction. Indeed, onemight consider the particular challenge she offers as one in which a certainself-dispossession is undergone at the same time that one responds to thesufferings of others. It seems to me we've barely begun to think about this,but it would be a mode of responding that would engage humility over andagainst moral self-righteousness. Similarly, for Levinas, how does oneacknowledge that condition of being bound to others at the same time thatone thinks critically in its midst? These seem to me to be two inheritancesthat are worth thinking about. They are perhaps not "modes of being" oreven "modes of becoming" but recurrent quandaries that estabhsh the prob-lematic of ethics for us in the midst of social life.

MR: It occurs to me that you seem to be seeking an alternative to the ethicsof sacrifice, and emphasize an alternative that would be rooted in thedemands of the everyday, in a recognition of the fact that we are always inthe midst of social life, but that the ethics of sacrifice, given its long historyof attachment to the politics of domination, ought to be avoided. Hence,for you the idea of responsiveness to a call assumes great importance. Therisk would seem to be understanding when and how a call is being made,and how to respond. Perhaps that is a question of politics? Knowing whenand how we are being called upon, and when we are being manipulated orotherwise exploited?

JB: I do not know precisely, but I am thinking that perhaps you,Tom, havea way of thinking about Cavell on the "everyday" in a way that resists thepath of Simone Weil. I am perhaps a little less certain of the "everyday." Iunderstand the importance of that Wittgensteinian inheritance and certainlyit ofFers Cavell much to work with. But I am probably closer to Kafka andthe sense that the everyday carries within it so many moments of incom-municabUity and inaccessibility—I can find no grounding there, but neitheris there any other place to find a grounding. I do think we are called upon,but I am not always sure we know by whom we are called, or what we arecalled to do. I think of this moment as one of anxiety, of having to wrestlewith what one knows, and of not being ever certain that one has decodedthe demand weU enough. Of course, to think politically and even to actpolitically, we have to make demarcations, and so in effect we have to decideto what kind of call we wiU be responsible. I don't think it can only be the

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call of the ones who are most proximate, since suffering at a distance has toelicit our response as well. But to be effective or responsive really does meanlimiting the domain to which one is answerable. This is, in some ways, anarbitrary moment, but it is one that helps to make one's future actions lessarbitrary. I am not in favor of those modes of sacrifice that would paralyzeour agency for any future purpose. And I'm certainly not in favor of thoseforms of radicalism that claim that any participation in existing structures iscrude reformism and, hence, to be resisted. I don't think there is purity inthe domain of political commitment. I'd like to think that there are ways ofacting with others or, as Arendt says, acting in concert, that require neitherunity nor atomism, in which w e're neither merged with a collective norstand as "pure" individuals, contractually engaged. My sense is that this isfiraught territory, and that there is always a question of whether we are beinginstrumentalized or whether we are being called upon in w ays that demandpolitical responsibility. I'm not sure we can even know, in advance, whetherthere are sure ways of making this division, and it may be that we have tolive with not knowing—and perhaps not caring too much—^about whetherwe are instrumentalized or whether others are in solidarity v dth us.Sometimes one has to lend oneself for use, and this is not exacdy sacrifice,but a certain yielding of oneself for the purposes of social and pohtical trans-formation. How would we understand this precisely? Maybe politicalalliance always ruins one's sense of sovereignty, and this is not an altogetherbad thing.

MR: Thank you very much for sharing so generously.

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a conversation with judith butler

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