What does it mean to lead a moral life?In her first extended study of
moral philosophy, Judith Butler offers a provocative outline for a new
ethical practice-one responsive to the need for critical autonomy and
grounded in a new sense of the human subject.Butler takes as her
starting point one's ability to answer the questions What have I
done?and What ought I to do?She shows that these question can be
answered only by asking a prior question, Who is this 'I' who is under
an obligation to give an account of itself and to act in certain
ways?Because I find that I cannot give an account of myself without
accounting for the social conditions under which I emerge, ethical
reflection requires a turn to social theory.In three powerfully crafted
and lucidly written chapters, Butler demonstrates how difficult it is to
give an account of oneself, and how this lack of self-transparency and
narratibility is crucial to an ethical understanding of the human. In
brilliant dialogue with Adorno,
Levinas, Foucault, and other thinkers, she eloquently argues the limits,
possibilities, and dangers of contemporary ethical thought.Butler offers
a critique of the moral self, arguing that the transparent, rational,
and continuous ethical subject is an impossible construct that seeks to
deny the specificity of what it is to be human. We can know ourselves
only incompletely, and only in relation to a broader social world that
has always preceded us and already shaped us in ways we cannot grasp. If
inevitably we are partially opaque to ourselves, how can giving an
account of ourselves define the ethical act? And doesn't an ethical
system that holds us impossibly accountable for full self-knowledge and
self-consistency inflict a kind of psychic violence, leading to a
culture of self-beratement and cruelty? How does the turn to social
theory offer us a chance to understand the specifically social character
of our own unknowingness about ourselves?In this invaluable book, by
recasting
ethics as a project in which being ethical means becoming critical of
norms under which we are asked to act, but which we can never fully
choose, Butler illuminates what it means for us as fallible creaturesto
create and share an ethics of vulnerability, humility, and ethical
responsiveness. Judtith Butler is the Maxine Elliot Professor of
Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California,
Berkeley. The most recent of her books are Precarious Life: The Power of
Mourning and Violence and Undoing Gender.
