The Pathologized Subject and Deferment

Christopher’s post Butler’s Ethics and Non-Reflective Subjects raises a number of interesting questions regarding ethical approaches toward the other (and the self) within the context of Butler’s “An Account of Oneself” chapter. For Christopher, the other which preoccupies his inquiry is one that is pathologized, and medically (or legally) defined as ‘abnormal’ in advance. He argues that ethical approaches toward subjectivity occur when the “I” can recognize and reflect upon both the opacity of the self and the opacity of the other simultaneously. This is where his title (self-reflexivity) comes into question as well as the subsequent issue of ‘abnormal pathologized subjects.’ It seems to me that Christopher is not suggesting that some subjects face some sort of primordial limitation wherein the subject simply cannot give an account of oneself (in Butler’s context). Rather, at what I think Christopher might be hinting are the myriad truth matrices which decide in advance the subject’s inability to give an account of oneself. It is not that the subject is necessarily unable to give an account of oneself, but rather that the subject is prohibited, perhaps, to give an account of oneself. How we perceive and work with those prohibitions might move us nearer to answering his initial inquiries. I understand Christopher’s question in this way because he employs words and phrases such as ‘foreclosed’, ‘defined and pathologized in advance’, and ‘without consent’ in situating the subject in question. I welcome his response to my reading of his question in the comments section of my post.

After reading Christopher’s post, I immediately thought of Butler’s chapter “Doing Justice to Someone: Sex Reassignment and Allegories of Transsexuality” in Undoing Gender. Although in this essay she writes more intensively on the issue of intelligibility, I find these meditations incredibly helpful in thinking about giving an account within the context of the ‘abnormal pathologized subject.’ The essay brings me back to thinking about the regulating and prohibiting discourses which circumscribe particular subjects. In “Doing Justice to Someone” she writes,

When we ask, what are the conditions of intelligibility by which the human emerges, by which the human is recognized . . . we are asking about conditions of intelligibility composed of norms, of practices, that have become presuppositional, without which we cannot think the human at all . . . And it is not just that there are laws that govern our intelligibility, but ways of knowing, modes of truth, that forcibly define intelligibility . . . What counts as a person? What counts as a coherent gender? What qualifies as a citizen? Whose world is legitimated as real? (57-58).

This last question, ‘Whose world is legitimated as real?’, in particular, reminds me why this essay supplements my response to Christopher’s question within the context of Giving an Account of Oneself. The level of ‘real-ness’ put into question relates back to the regimes of truth and the coded norms which both construct and exceed each subject’s account of oneself. Beyond these powerful regimes of truth, what becomes interesting for both Butler and, in this case, the ‘abnormal pathologized subject’, are the actual limits of normative codes of conduct, the limits of intelligibility. In “Doing Justice to Someone,” Butler poses this very question of limits; she cites Foucault and describes instances where there is no place for a given subject within the dominant regime of truth as a ‘desubjugation of the subject in the play of the politics of truth” (58).

Although this particular essay discusses gender norms within the context of the infamous “Joan/John” (Brenda/David) gender case, the idea of turning to legal/medical truths for some level of recognizably links itself directly to Christopher’s question. Butler traces two opposing ideologies which influenced the upbringing and transformation of David (gender essentialism and social constructivism). She argues, however, that there is something occurring beyond the tension between the two ideologies which sought to determine David’s gender. At this point, Butler asks how we can do justice to such a subject, and I am instantly reminded of this question of ethics explicit in Giving an Account of Oneself. She writes, “There was an apparatus of knowledge applied to the person and body of Brenda/David that is rarely, if ever, taken into account as part of what David is responding to when he reports on his feelings of true gender” (67). Butler suggests that there was a certain level of violence done unto the body/subject of David while he was under constant medical, legal, and psychological power. She concludes that to do justice to David is to take him at his word though (as always), she problematizes this approach as well. She writes,

But how are we to understand his word and his name? Is this the word he creates? Is this the word that he receives? Are these the words that circulate prior to his emergence as an “I” who might only gain a certain authorization to begin a self-description within the norms of this language? So what when one speaks, one speaks a language that is already speaking, even if one speaks it in a way that is nor precisely how it has been spoken before. So what and who is speaking here? (69).

Asking these questions, Butler comes to a point of decision; she concludes that justice, perhaps demands that we wait to decide and that justice implies “a certain deferral. . . [because] too many have rushed to judgment” (71). It seems that this deferral is an acknowledgment of the limits of intelligibility and offers a certain level of ethics/justice which questions how rigidly we might perceive those regimes of truth.

In the case of David, Butler argues that he neither becomes one with the norm nor does this foreclose his subjectivity (even if he risks a certain level of desubjugation first). She writes, “He is still someone, speaking, insisting, even referring to himself” (72). Here again, I can return to Christopher’s question. The passage Christopher cites from ‘An Account of Oneself’ omits the sentence which immediately follows in the text. It reads,

If the ‘I’ is not at one with moral norms this means only that the subject must deliberate upon these norms, and that part of deliberation will entail a critical understanding of their social genesis and meaning (8).

This ‘deliberation’ is precisely what occurs even within the myriad regimes of truth. David’s insistence, and the ‘abnormal pathologized subject’s’ exposure of the limits of intelligibility both foster some level of ‘critical understanding.’ In “Doing Justice to Someone” Butler writes,

And we cannot precisely give content to this person at the very moment that he speaks his worth, which means that it is precisely the ways in which he is not fully recognizable, fully disposable, fully categorizable, that his humanness emerges. And this is important because we might ask that he enter into intelligibility in order to speak and to be known, but what he does instead, through his speech, is to offer a critical perspective on the norms that confer intelligibility itself (73).

Therefore (and perhaps a leap), it seems that as long as the subject speaks within a certain regime of truth, those instances wherein the subject does not fit normative codes confer the limits of intelligibility in such a way that not only does justice to the subject, but also allows ‘the speaking “I”’ to speak in the first place. This speaking fosters deliberation, risks desubjugation and, perhaps, provides a subsequent ‘critical understanding.’ If the ‘abnormal pathologized subject’ is prohibited from speaking, or worse, only allowed to speak in one way, perhaps, then, we have another scenario where deferment was not enacted, and the regimes of truth were too quickly lured into judgment, yet again.