I would like to consider how we could read Butler's theorization of the speaking "I" and address particularly how she appropriates, and requires, a self-reflective "I" before any account of oneself can begin. As we had discussed in class, if we are to give an "account" of ourselves we must become social theorists. We must not only give an account of ourselves in relation to the social powers that act on us, but also recognize the opacity to ourselves that derives, as an effect, from a powerful social matrix whose origin is not transparent and necessarily exceeds us. As she states in the first chapter of Giving an Account of Oneself:
The reason for this is that the “I” has no story of its own that is not also the story of a relation-or set of relations-to a set of norms. Although many contemporary critics worry that this means there is no concept of the subject that can serve as the ground for moral agency and moral accountability, that conclusion does not follow. The “I” is always to some extent dispossessed by the social conditions of its emergence. This dispossession does not mean that we have lost the subjective ground for ethics. On the contrary, it may well be the condition for moral inquiry, the condition under which morality itself emerges. Pg.8
If this is true, then the intersection of ethics and the subject can only come about if the speaking “I” can recognize/reflect on his/her own opacity. This is also to insist that one’s own “opacity” is at once not opaque, but paradoxically transparent to oneself. One’s opacity can be recognized or reduced from the seamless appearance of the mind’s eye (consciousness). Second, the collective ethos, or the Foucaultian “norms” Butler presupposes, must also demonstrate a reflective nature that can recognize how it dispossesses its subjects through the production of its morals. In short, Butler requires us to concede that, either ‘we must know that we don’t know ourselves’ or ‘we must also know that we can’t completely know ourselves'-culturally, personally, socially. I do not wish to reduce Butler’s treatment of the subject to a “pure opacity” or that we cannot ever know ourselves at all, but rather, there is a part of ourselves that is formed outside the self. And it is this “part” that is necessarily unrecoverable because it was shaped and conditioned by the cultural norms that dispossess us from our birth.
Therefore, the condition of the speaking “I” that Butler puts forth is still contingent on a metaleptical interpolation where subjects, self-reflectively, recognize the other’s opacity to each other and themselves. This of course would be the grounds for the recognition of a Butlerian ethics. In her ethical model, if this does not happen then a questioning of ethics cannot progress or reformulate itself through time. How, then, could we read Butler for conditions of a speaking “I” that cannot give a linear account of themselves nor can recognize their own opacity to themselves nor recognize their interpollation through an ethos? In short, what of those who are foreclosed upon as subjects in advance because their subjecthood has been defined and pathologized in advance w/o concent? I am thinking of those who are deemed psychologically abnormal, the others to our others. Or, how, exactly, does an ethos (cultural norms) recognize it’s agency in dispossessing subjects, whose conditions, in turn, are not opaque to itself ? What would an ethics for the conditions of a speaking “I” be that can recognize its "power" to dispossess in advanced ? Can we be ethical and expect an address of ethics that anticipates the foreclosed life that cannot give an account nor be self-reflective?
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