Politics, Ethics and Responsibility; a Response to Michaela and Other Thoughts

In her last post, Michaela posed very interesting questions with regards to the relationship between politics, ethics, and responsibility. These questions pushed me to think more carefully about the link between the three elements in order to be able to formulate why, in my opinion, thinking of politics and ethics separately is precisely necessary so that we be able to distinguish where our responsibilities lie. As my own emerging thesis thoughts take me towards the concept of the embassy and the role it plays in the conception of nation state and hospitality, I will not go deep into the queer aspect of Michaela’s research, but stay within the notions of nation sates and sovereign powers.

First of all, rather than agreeing with the statement that Butler uses politics, ethics and responsibility interchangeably, I would argue that she demonstrates how the three themes are deeply interconnected, and yet not the same. To say it in a few words, I would suggest that in order to be ethical, politics needs to take responsibilities. According to Butler, these responsibilities lie in the initial human need of the scene of recognition, i.e. in the fact that a subject fundamentally needs the social encounter in order to exist. This is expressed in Precarious Life (PL) in the following passage:

When we recognize another, or when we ask for recognition for ourselves, we are not asking for an Other to see us as we are, as we already are, as we have always been, as we were constituted prior to the encounter itself. Instead, in the asking, in the petition, we have already become something new, since we are constituted by virtue of the address, a need and desire for the Other that takes place in language in the broadest sense, one without which we could not be. To ask for recognition, or to offer it, is precisely not to ask for recognition for what one already is. It is to solicit a becoming, to instigate a transformation, to petition the future always in relation to the Other. (PL 44, italics mine)

If the subject can only be a subject through the scene of address, then we all have the responsibility to address our ‘neighbours’ and to participate in an ongoing scene of (mutual) recognition in order to let human beings both be subjects and become subjects. Yet, Butler also notices that “when we are speaking about the ‘subject’ we are not always speaking about an individual: we are speaking about a model for agency and intelligibility, one that is very often based on the notions of sovereign power” (PL 45). Here, Butler makes the link between the subject and politics, and thereby also the link between politics and responsibility. In fact, if the notion of sovereign power may be a subject, which is also a “model for agency and intelligibility” according to Butler, then a nation state has the duty to echo the scene of address—presupposing that its purposes is to serve the nation formed by individual subjects. For isn’t it the nation state’s responsibility to worry that its political programs echo the millions of individual subjects who constitute the nation state as a whole? In this responsibility lays also an ethical responsibility, not only towards citizens who are related to that particular sovereign power, but also towards humanity as a whole. So, in order to be truly ethical, one cannot only take into account those who are already part of a given system. The genuine ethical responsibility (and taking one leap forward I would like to suggest that this may be also one possible definition of hospitality) begins according to me in the recognition of those who do not belong to that given system, and who thus have difficulties accessing the “ritual” of the scene of address. Eventually, and following Butler’s thoughts, ethics begins with recognizing that, although the political, juridical and social system applies to a certain number of people who are pre-determined by their legal status, there still is no such thing as a system genuinely capable of uniting people, as we still preserve a degree of unknowingness both towards ourselves and towards the other; hence the difficulty to think a political system being indisputably ethical and open to perform the scene of recognition again and again.
Before drawing further on this thought, let’s look carefully at the paragraph on p.46 (PL) quoted by Michaela, which appears to reflect on the difficulty to truly bind politics, ethics and responsibility together.

I find that my very formation implicates the other in me, that my own foreignness to myself is, paradoxically, the source of my ethical connection with others. I am not fully known to myself, because part of what I am is the enigmatic traces of others. In this sense, I cannot know myself perfectly or know my ‘difference’ from others in an irreducible way. This unknowingness may seem, from a given perspective, a problem for ethics and politics. Don’t I need to know myself in order to act responsibly in social relations? Surely, to a certain extent, yes. But is there an ethical valence to my unknowingness? I am wounded, and I find that the wound itself testifies to the fact that I am impressionable, given over to the Other in ways that I cannot fully predict or control. I cannot think the question of responsibility alone, in isolation from the Other; if I do, I have taken myself out of the relational bind that frames the problem of responsibility from the start. (PL 46)

The key sentence might well be the following:
“This unknowingness [which is the unknowingness of myself and of the other] may seem, from a given perspective, a problem for ethics and politics.”
The ‘unknowingness’ expressed here seems to anticipate what Butler has later on called ‘opacity’ in Giving an Account of Oneself. Our previous discussions around Giving an Account of Oneself already gave away the difficulty to fully embrace this notion of opacity within a political system—at least in a western countries. Yet again, the acknowledgement of one’s opacity and that of the other remains the necessary pre-requisite for a true ethical encounter to take place. So, because and thanks to this unknowingness or this opacity, we encounter each other in our differences (this is eminently expressed in Giving an Account of Oneself).
Yet, the question remains why it is a problem for ethics and politics? Probably because the western political frame of thoughts still appears to be embedded in an Enlightenment-like universalism prescribing that in order to be ethical and to conduct an operational political program, one must know each-other. This might be true to a certain extend, yet the degree of unknowingness must surely remain a respected and thoroughly integrated element within the ethico-political program. For if I claim to know the other thoroughly, where does the scene of recognition still be able to take place? Am I not already beforehand filling in the unknown space of the other by pre-conceived ideas which rather belong to myself than to the other? If this happens, then where can we still locate ‘recognition’?

Let me come back to Michaela’s question.
The danger to think politics and ethics separately lies perhaps in the possibility to do politics without thinking ethically at the same time. For it is also a political responsibility to integrate ethical elements within the political frame. Yet, the degree of ethical thinking in a political program may vary considerably from one country to the other; hence also the necessity not to conflate politics and ethics in order to do justice to ethics in a broader frame. Moreover, if we do conflate political and ethical thoughts, then we might fail acknowledging the existence of those who have no access to political systems. On the other hand, if we do not integrate politics and ethics in a systemic frame, we might fail to recognize the Other’s opacity as well as our own opacity within the frame of a sovereign power.
Moreover, I would like to suggest that the tension between politics and ethics is closely related to the tension present in excitable speech and in the acknowledgement thereof. Here, I join Michaela in her question regarding the political outreach and political embedded-ness of injurious speech.
The tension which is present in the concept of excitable speech lays in its ability to give somebody the freedom not to let his/her speech be performative, while at the same time being fully embedded within a complex of power, laws and narratives. So, it both enables the speaker to escape the power of a juridico-political systemic frame, while also incorporating the speaker within that same system. The first problem arising with the notion of excitable speech is again a problem of recognition. In fact, when does an utterance fall under excitable speech? Who does take the decision, and why? Is it because the law court has recognized the other in his/her differences, or because the court precisely failed in acknowledging the other’s differences, thereby immediately categorizing the speaker as a ‘non-reliable person’? Then, where does the strength lie of an utterance that is considered excitable?
I would like to suggest that the lack of performativity of an excitable speech may be precisely that which enables the speaker to create the gap that Butler claims to be necessary for countering injurious speech. The gap then can be seen as a temporal silence, or rather even as a temporal ‘noise’, which, if we think of M. Serres’ approach to noise, enables a infinite range of information and possibilities. In this optic, an excitable utterance might well have the potential to enable a gap in the re-iteration and historicity of words, thereby also enabling to counter or to resist the wounds of injurious speech. The question remains whether the gap and/or the counter speech are political, ethical and/or responsible. Perhaps is the gap in re-iteration that which enables the political frame to transform toward a greater openness to possibilities of differences within a systemic frame. So, the gap would be an element reminding us of our ethical responsibilities within the frame of juridico-political system. It would then also be an element reminding us of the need to de-centre the narrative “I” within the (international) political domain (PL 7). In this sense, I am tempted to agree with the idea that speech which has the potential to be injurious is already veiled in some sorts of politics, as it triggers a certain political response.
On a practical level, it seems however that such a gap only may affect the narrative of a political system if it is performed collectively. To take a concrete example, had the ‘sans-papiers’ in France succeeded in putting their case on the political agenda if they all had performed individually? Or does the lesbian woman in Michaela’s example have a chance to counter the utterance of the word “dyke” that to her sounds injurious? In other words, is there a chance of effectively countering-up injurious speech individually, or do we always need some sort of community? Perhaps that the answer does not lie in the notion of community, but rather in the notion of re-iteration and history. For as Butler has it,

If a performative provisionally succeeds …, then it is not because an intention successfully governs the action of speech, but only because that action echoes prior actions, and accumulates the force of authority through repetition or citation of a prior and authoritative set of practice. … What it means, then, is that a performative “works” to the extent that it draws on and covers the constitutive conventions by which it is mobilized. In this sense, no term or statement can function performatively without the accumulating and dissimulating historicity of force. (ES 51)

Although this paragraph refers to the performativity of injurious speech, it seems to me that this applies all the same to speech that strives to effectively counter up or resist the wounds of injurious speech. But can one human being alone perform by means of accumulation against other performative utterances? Isn’t the notion of community or collectivity still a pre-requisite to a powerful resistance against the violence of injurious speech? This might well be what Butler means when she states that “an international coalition of feminist activists and thinkers … will have to accept the array of sometimes incommensurable epistemological and political beliefs and modes and means of agency that brings us into activism” (PL 48), which yet does not means that each of the activist must conform to a certain and unique system.

To finish, isn’t it that this acceptance of founding a collectivity in order to have a performative effect is in its form the embodiment of a relationship between politics, ethics and responsibilities?