Senses of the Subject

by Judith Butler

Overview

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 concerning the 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780823264681
Publisher:	Fordham University Press
Publication date:	03/02/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	228
File size:	329 KB

About the Author

Judith Butler is Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley. Their books include What World Is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology (2022); The Force of Nonviolence (2020); Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015); Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (2004); and Senses of the Subject (2015).

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments

"How Can I Deny That These Hands and This Body Are Mine?"
Merleau-Ponty and the Touch of Malebranche
The Desire to Live: Spinoza's Ethics under Pressure
To Sense What Is Living in the Other: Hegel's Early Love
Kierkegaard's Speculative Despair
Sexual Difference as a Question of Ethics: Alterities of the Flesh in Irigary and Merleau-Ponty
Violence, Non-Violence: Sartre on Fanon

Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

Butler concludes the Introduction to this book thus: Acted on, I act still, but it is hardly this I that acts alone, and even though, and precisely because, it never gets done with being undone. In these eloquent, passionately dialectical, and vertiginous essays, Butler relentlessly tracks our being undone by others, by language, by things, by institutions, and by the normative formations that hold us upright beyond our standing upright in the writings of, among others, Descartes, Spinoza, Hegel, Merleau Ponty, Irigaray, and Fanon. This is echt Butler: a necessity for those who already know her work, and a generous point of entry for those philosophers who have yet to find their way to her thought. —J. M. Bernstein, New School for Social Research

"In this exceptional collection, Judith Butler displays the unusually vivid, even startling insight that makes her indisputably the world's most interesting contemporary philosopher. These lucid essays climb in and out of the me, the her, the you, dream and reality, subject, object, nature and the preternatural, meaning and its deadly discontents. Butler wrestles the narratives of embodiment into language that lives."—Patricia J. Williams, Columbia Law School

"For me, Judith Butler is simply the most important philosopher of our age. This is an extremely interesting and wide-ranging collection of essays by that provide characteristically close readings of an impressive range of philosophers, some more closely associated with Butler's work (Hegel, Kierkegaard, Sartre and Irigaray) others much less so (Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza and Merleau-Ponty). What ties the whole book together is a powerful and interconnected set of concerns with the pre-conscious, sensate formation of subjectivity and the ethical valence of the experience of dependence and susceptibility."—Simon Critchley, The New School for Social Research

"Judith Butler's reading of major works on the construction of the subject, ranging from Descartes and Spinoza to Irigaray and Fanon, intertwines three projects, which prove intimately related: a symptomatic reading of texts, where the materiality of their writing reveals a permanent uncertainty about the "sovereignty" or "autonomy" that they claim; a phenomenology of the affective "third substance" which, being neither mind nor body, must also encroach on both; and a critique of normative ontological binarisms which, in particular, confuse sexual otherness with a difference of given places. In this account of the latent "sensible" mover of metaphysics, she also gives an account of herself as incarnated thinker, beautifully complex and inventive. Her book will generate admiration and continuous reflection."—Étienne Balibar, author of Equaliberty

"With this inspiring book—simultaneously a philosophical dispossession of philosophy, a paean to sensation and an affirmation of the 'radically impossible venture' of ethics and politics—[Butler] edges towards a palpable, outward-looking alternative to philosophical chest beating."-Times Higher Education

"...the essays in Senses of the Subject are also elegant, often powerful reminders of the impressive range of Butler's engagement with the philosophical tradition."—Women's Review of Books

"Senses of the Subject is eclectic without being reductive; voracious in its juxtapositions but tender enough to separate out the points of convergence and divergence between various theoretical discourses."-Symploke

From the Publisher

With this inspiring book—simultaneously a philosophical dispossession of philosophy, a paean to sensation and an affirmation of the 'radically impossible venture' of ethics and politics—[Butler] edges towards a palpable, outward-looking alternative to philosophical chest beating.

Times Higher Education

Butler concludes the Introduction to this book thus: ‘Acted on, I act still, but it is hardly this “I” that acts alone, and even though, and precisely because, it never gets done with being undone.’ In these eloquent, passionately dialectical, and vertiginous essays, Butler relentlessly tracks our being undone by others, by language, by things, by institutions, and by the normative formations that hold us upright beyond our standing upright in the writings of, among others, Descartes, Spinoza, Hegel, Merleau Ponty, Irigaray, and Fanon. This is echt Butler: a necessity for those who already know her work, and a generous point of entry for those philosophers who have yet to find their way to her thought.

The New School for Social Research - J. M. Bernstein

Judith Butler’s reading of major works on the construction of the subject, ranging from Descartes and Spinoza to Irigaray and Fanon, intertwines three projects, which prove intimately related: a symptomatic reading of texts, where the materiality of their writing reveals a permanent uncertainty about the “sovereignty” or “autonomy” that they claim; a phenomenology of the affective “third substance” which, being neither mind nor body, must also encroach on both; and a critique of normative ontological binarisms which, in particular, confuse sexual otherness with a difference of given places. In this account of the latent “sensible” mover of metaphysics, she also gives an account of herself as incarnated thinker, beautifully complex and inventive. Her book will generate admiration and continuous reflection.

author of Equaliberty - Étienne Balibar

In this exceptional collection, Judith Butler displays the unusually vivid, even startling insight that makes her indisputably the world’s most interesting contemporary philosopher. These lucid essays climb in and out of the me, the her, the you, dream and reality, subject, object, nature and the preternatural, meaning and its deadly discontents. Butler wrestles the narratives of embodiment into language that lives.

Columbia Law School - Patricia J. Williams