Read the book: «Human Being and Vulnerability»

ibidem-Press, Stuttgart

Acknowledgments

Learning is fascinating. Take school for example. When a lesson starts, one teacher and maybe 25-30 pupils are present. If all goes well everyone will know something they didn’t know at the beginning, and if things go really well the pupils also know why they should know what they have learnt and the teacher knows what the pupils have learnt.

Steven Pinker stumbled into a rabbit hole when he studied language. It was one of those Alice in Wonderland rabbit holes where a world opens up behind it. For Pinker the verb system is an opening to the whole human mind. For Colin Gunton, in many ways it is the doctrine of the Trinity and for Judith Butler it is that some human lives are not recognized as human lives that open up vast vistas of thought and insights. For me learning in school came to be that rabbit hole that brought me to think about the whole human being.

Learning happens all the time and everywhere and it is not restricted to the classroom. Learning is to understand more, to think anew, to be able to think differently or to acquire and perfect a skill. Learning can make someone change their mind or make new decisions for life. And most of the times learning is by small steps. I will be very happy if this book can be such a small step for some reader.

As a teacher I rarely get to know if my courses have any impact on the students and I suspect that the same goes for books. Neither will my pupils and students know how much they have taught me throughout the years. I would have learnt much, much less were it not for you. So, thank you!

What I do know, however, is the people that have had an impact on me, both as teachers and – since I’m writing a preface to a book after all – for the completion of this book. I am first of all very happy for the stimulating and constructive context in which this book was conceived, the research seminar of Systematic Theology at Uppsala University. I would like to thank Mattias Martinson, Katarina Westerlund, Thomas Ekstrand, Maria Essunger, Ida Simonsson, Ulf Bergsviker and Fredrik Wenell in particular. I also want to thank Petra Carlsson especially, warmly valued colleague and friend at the Stockholm School of Theology, for many insightful conversations. An especially warm thank you to my dad, Per-Axel Sverker, for reading and commenting on my texts throughout the years. The same goes for Jonas Kurlberg, who has also been the editor of this book. It has been a pleasure to mix friendship and work over this whole process.

Many people have been willing to read separate chapters, or all of them, and given much valued comments. For that I am very grateful. Many thanks in particular to Lovisa Nyman, Mikael Lindfelt, Karin Johannesson, Kjetil Haftstad, Arne Rasmusson, Stephen Holmes and John Webster. I was deeply saddened by Professor John Webster’s passing; he encouraged me immensely the few times we had the opportunity to meet. The book is much improved by all your comments, and if it is not without faults, that only means that I can still learn more.

Considering that this book starts off with a reflection on the relation between teachers and pupils in the context of school, I want to take the opportunity to thank some of the teachers that have been especially important to me. They might never read this and some will never get to know how much they have inspired and encouraged me, but I still want to mention Staffan Södergren at Almby högstadium, Dixie Ericsson at Karolinska läroverket and Staffan Nordin at Kulturskolan Örebro. I am also particularly grateful to Lish Eves and Peter Hicks who taught at the London School of Theology. They showed that lecturers can be not only brilliant theologians, but also wonderful people with deeply caring hearts. But my primary model as a teacher is in all reality my mum, Kristina Sverker. My gratefulness to her extends way beyond that of course, but she is my greatest inspiration as a pedagogue, not only for the self-giving love she had for her pupils but also because of her passion for pedagogy and determined belief in everyone’s capacity to learn. If she would have been alive when I started to think about the questions in this book, maybe it wouldn’t have taken so long to figure these things out. This book is in memory of her.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Interactive interdisciplinarity and human lived reality

Social constructivism and biologist essentialism?

Chapter 1: From interpellated subjecthood to recognized vulnerability

On the human being, or becoming

Gendered to be human

Performativity and human identity

Relationality and the constitution of humanity

The problematic body

Actions

Judith Butler and the person

Desire and personhood

Recognition, personhood and grievability

Chapter 2: Being human nature

Language: window to human nature

Nature/nurture

Unique environment

Genes, personality and behavior

Computationalism and the individual

Webbed causality

The individual and human nature

Death of the self again?

Openness and relationality in evolutionary psychology?

Chapter 3: Persons becoming in relations

Ontology of the person

Relationality, space and freedom

Personalist and relational theological anthropology

The divine and the human

The triune Creator and the anthropological significance of Christ

Embodied human persons

“spirit,” sin and the question of ethics

Chapter 4: Going beyond: relationality, evolutionary theory and time

Establishing a weak ontology of relationality

Re-reading the theory of evolution

Evolution as performativity

Time matters

The reality of body

Chapter 5: Kenotic personalism

Primacy of “person”?

Kenosis, vulnerability and persons: the significance of self-giving relations

Relation, mediation, interpellation

Called in time

The Gift of Vulnerability

The giving between persons

Kenosis and feminism

Kenosis and resistance

The gift of freedom

The most vulnerable?

Conclusion: persons, individuals and institutions

AI: artificial individualism?

Disclosing the nature/nurture problem

Back to school

Individualism and personalism in school

A love supreme?

Bibliography

In memory of Kristina Sverker

[O]ur social personality is created by the thoughts of other people. […] We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him which we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place. In the end they come to fill so completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice that these seem to be no more than a transparent envelope, so that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is our own ideas of him which we recognise and to which we listen.

- Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

Introduction

The human being is between many things. Life takes place between birth and death, between the home and the political, between who I am and who I want to be, or, perhaps, as for Marcel Proust, between you and the idea of you. For some, the human being is also between God and creation. But the “between” that will be explored in this volume is that of biology on the one hand, and the social on the other. This particular “between” appears difficult to maintain in our contemporary society for one is often privileged over the other. There seems no easy way to reconcile the two.

I intend to constructively engage this divide between biology and the social by conversing with critical theorist Judith Butler and psycholinguist Steven Pinker. With these two divergent perspectives, another seemingly conflicting account will be brought to the table, that of Colin Gunton’s theological anthropology.

Why three such different thinkers? While it should be acknowledged that most theorists working on this question do reject simplistic binaries, much contemporary thought still maintains a dichotomy between the biological and the social. I hope that this study will shed some light as to why this division is so prominent in our society, not least in the school context. I have also chosen these thinkers because their different theories, when brought together in conversation, can inform a view of the human being in which the distinction between the biological and the social is less polarized.

As Proust illustrates in my epigraph,1 the dichotomy between nature and nurture has concrete relevance in the meeting between people and I agree. I want to argue that theoretical discussions on this issue are of practical interest, particularly in institutionalized societies, and not least in the context of school.

Teachers’ engagement with pupils is a pervasive feature of school, as it should be. And in their interaction with pupils, teachers conceptualize the pupils throughout the day. But in this conceptualization of and engagement with the pupil there is an underlying anthropology, a theory of the human being, that is rarely expressed or made explicit. When I contemplated this as a teacher in Sweden, I realized that the implicit anthropology underlying professional discussions in school was incoherent.

To clarify, when my colleagues and I conferred in what is called a pupil welfare meeting to discuss certain learning problems, such as dyslexia, we tended to switch our minds to a biological, not to say biologist, frame where the frontal and lateral lobes of the brain were in focus. But, if we instead were discussing a problem such as an eating disorder, we seemed to switch our minds to a social or cultural mode, thinking in constructivist terms of societal pressure, family situation and so on. However, when back in the classroom the teacher has to find a way to respond to the issue at hand, for in meeting the pupil the teacher needs to somehow make sense of the pupil’s biological and social sides in his or her practice. In the meeting between the teacher and the pupil a dichotomization between biology and the social is likely to be unhelpful but, as is shown here, turns out to even be problematic when coupled with wider questions of anthropology.2

One such problem that will be addressed already here is what I want to call the “addition model” of nature/nurture, where nature plus nurture equals a self as if two otherwise separate domains magically merge to create a whole. Philosopher and feminist theorist Elizabeth Grosz has similar concerns when she writes that “[b]iology is somehow regarded as the subject minus culture, as if this could result in anything but an abstraction or bare universal category.”3

This common “solution” to the nature/nurture dichotomy is unsatisfying and problematic,4 but I was not able to fully clarify why this should be so. This prompted me to look further into the question and my “school experience” worked as the entry point into the issue of the dichotomy between nature and nurture. Questions of ontology and anthropology on the nature/nurture divide are important in the school setting, but because the emphasis lies on the interaction between humans and the relation between the human being and institutions, the concerns I raise here are relevant to other areas too.

Considering that many societies are institutionalized, meaning that the state’s influence over citizens becomes materialized in particular buildings and bureaucratic structures where someone will represent the state, the role of institution demands consideration. Here the school is a particularly good place to start as an institution of learning. As I hope to show, learning itself, when institutionalized, highlights the dichotomy between biology on the one hand and the social on the other.

Thus, what follows is primarily an analysis that reveals what the foundational questions behind the nature/nurture dichotomy are. I also suggest ways in which the three thinkers can be of help to overcome that gap. My contention is that only by understanding why biology and the social consistently are pigeonholed into two distinct categories in today’s society will it be possible to move beyond a dichotomy of biologist essentialism on the one hand and social constructivism on the other.

Many others have treated this question with much insight and without polarizing biology and the social. Examples can be found in epigenetics and the postgenomic development within biology to the New Materialist development within, for example, feminist thought and critical theory.5 I will broach this as a theologian, for I want to argue that there are also valuable resources in Christian theology that are largely ignored in secular discussions about the human being.6 Aspects of theological anthropology are relevant for thinking about the human being in contemporary society, particularly as a critical resource.7 But theology will here also work constructively with the other fields of enquiry.

The purpose of this book, then, is to investigate two central issues concerning contemporary anthropological conversations. I want to bring the inconsistency in the underlying anthropological conceptions to the fore in order to return to the question of the concrete relation between the teacher and pupil. What I aim to do is to analyze the divide between a biologist essentialist and a social constructivist understanding of the human being with the help of resources from Christian doctrine and constructively elaborate a perspective on the human being where the polarization of commonly opposed explanations, such as biological, constructivist and theological, is not maintained. In this there is a connection between anthropological conceptions and ethics as well as ontology and ethics. But the ethics that need to be developed as a consequence of my work can only be hinted at here.8

Interactive interdisciplinarity and human lived reality

My contention is that the political theorist and philosopher Judith Butler, the psycholinguist Steven Pinker and the systematic theologian Colin Gunton each will in various ways help to shed light on and challenge the polarization between social constructivism and biologist essentialism. And while Butler and Pinker respectively can readily be associated with one of these positions neither can be said to belong to it in any simplistic way. They do shed light on the positions as “insiders,” but not without some qualifications.

Interestingly, both Butler and Pinker engage with the nature/culture dichotomy, but to my mind unsatisfactorily in some important ways. Thus, close attention to their respective arguments will better substantiate the constructive engagement that I aim for. The selection of these thinkers will be motivated further, but first something needs to be said about the interdisciplinary approach of this book.

Christian theology is part of the constructive suggestion in this book. My view is that Christian doctrine is a resource for critical and constructive engagement with questions of the human being even when other perspectives are more pervasive and influential in what could be called a post-Christian society.9 But this hinges upon whether theology as “[a]n explanatory language has relevance in people’s lives,” as Dennis Bielfeldt put it.10 I hope to show that this is the case.

The second part of this book will show that Christian theological language has explanatory relevance. But in terms of Christian theological content, I think it could and perhaps even should be a living11 part of a post-Christian culture, if theologians are also aware of the problems, historical and contemporary, of such claims highlighted by, for example, feminist thought.12 For what would the self-professed polyvocality of the post-Christian society be worth if non-secular voices must remain silent unless they leave all normative claims behind?

Explanatory relevance is not only a challenge for theology, however. It can be argued that the weakness of interdisciplinary studies lies in not being informed enough about any of the respective fields. Yet, if theologian Philip Hefner is correct about the interconnectedness of all reality,13 then one must at least attempt an interdisciplinary study of reality. But what reality are we talking about?

I agree here with Charles Taylor that the level of enquiry when trying to understand the human condition should be on that of lived experience, the human lived reality.14 As William Desmond argues, there is something in the immediate experience of being, or in my terms, the immediate experience of the human lived reality, that demands an explanation of the wholeness of that experience.15 This reality is no doubt a “pluralism of intermediations,” to borrow a phrase from Desmond,16 and as such it is complex. But I think it can be explained in a more holistic way than is the case in, for example, the division between the social and the biological. There is, then, something fitting and even necessary about accounts that attempt to bring different disciplines together to explore the human lived reality.

The task is not so much to make the different perspectives understandable to each other as it is to make them interact. Yet this will not happen by itself. The aim here is therefore to be, in Eugene d’Aquili’s words, “deeply interdisciplinary.” As he writes, “[b]y deeply interdisciplinary I mean that the data from various disciplines are presented in an interpenetrated manner rather than simply juxtaposed.”17

As such, I do a close reading of the material in order to bring into interaction the thinkers with each other and with the issue I am concerned with here.18 Since this interaction does not happen on its own, “interact” should be seen as an active verb so that “interacting” Judith Butler, Steven Pinker and Colin Gunton demands activity from me as the interpreter. This does not mean that I seek to force meanings onto texts that are foreign to them, only that the act of interpretation is just that, an activity.

Problems in interdisciplinary studies can occur, though, in the translation between disciplines. Translation always contains its own difficulties, as expressed in the Italian saying, traduttore, traditore: translator, traitor. In different disciplines the same term can have different meanings and one term that might be central in one discipline carries no meaning whatsoever in another. But as J. T. M. Miller points out, this should not be an insurmountable difficulty to overcome.19 What is required is for the researcher to read enough to spot these differences in terminology, understand them and then “translate” them in relation to the other discipline and “deep” interdisciplinary interaction ensues.

The point is not to “translate” everything, though. Not everything that Butler, Pinker or Gunton have written will be relevant. My interest is in what they state about the human being and, secondly, what in their thought contributes to the said goal and how. My point is to see if all three perspectives can contribute to the resolution of the problem I want to address and, therefore, the aim is to treat all three thinkers on an equal footing. I do propose that theology brings some particular insights into this, but the “lead” in the constructive argument is taken by Butler, Pinker and Gunton variously and interchangeably, which means that the final product is an interwoven net of voices difficult to disentangle from each other.

As a starting point, some central questions are posed to the thinkers. Firstly, what are the most significant features in their respective views on the human being with regards to the question of social constructivism versus biologist essentialism? Secondly, what are the inherent weaknesses, or inconsistences, in each view with regards to questions of biology and culture? Thirdly, what resources can be found in the theories in order to move beyond a division between social constructivism and biologist essentialism on the question of the human being? And lastly, how can these resources be brought together to construct a fuller conception of the human being beyond the constructivism versus essentialism dichotomy?

Social constructivism and biologist essentialism?

It is worth pointing out from the outset that neither Butler nor Pinker clearly identifies with either “social constructivism” or “biologist essentialism” as exclusive categories. Therefore, some clarification needs to be offered regarding their respective relations to, as well as a definition of, these terms even if Gunton’s position can more readily be identified as a theological anthropological view.

Despite its short history as a concept, “social constructivism” has had a widespread influence on both academic disciplines and the general public. The term came into use following Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s seminal book The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge.20 But “social constructivism” is no unified term and I follow largely the definition, as well as the distinction, of “weak” versus “strong” social constructivism advanced by sociologist Christian Smith.21

Smith defines “weak” social constructivism as the view that

[a]ll human knowledge is conceptually mediated and can be and usually is influenced by particular and contingent sociocultural factors such as material interests, group structures, linguistic categories, technological development, and the like – such that what people believe to be real is significantly shaped not only by objective reality but also by their sociocultural contexts.22

The “strong” version of social constructivism embraces the weak version in the main, yet is characterized, as Smith sees it, by an idealist and not a realist view of reality.

Reality itself for humans is a human, social construction, constituted by human mental categories, discursive practices, definitions of situations, and symbolic exchanges that are sustained as “real” through ongoing social interactions that are in turn shaped by particular interests, perspectives, and, usually, imbalances of power – our knowledge about reality is therefore entirely culturally relative, since no human has access to reality “as it really is” […] because we can never escape our human epistemological and linguistic limits to verify whether our beliefs about reality correspond with externally objective reality.23

Smith’s definition of a “strong” social constructivism moves somewhat from ontology to epistemology but provides a useful continuum within which different constructivist theories can be placed. This avoids the question of whether there are thinkers who adopt an extreme position of social constructivism, in which “everything” is understood to be socially constructed.24 Thus, “weak” and “strong” constructivism are not used here as two mutually exclusive categories. Rather, they provide a continuum in which even individual thinkers travel closer and further from the “weak” and the “strong” poles. In this view, Judith Butler is placed toward the strong end of the social constructivist spectrum, but she is no linguistic idealist.

Butler herself critiques “radical” or “linguistic” constructivism on the basis that “[t]he radical constructivist position has tended to produce the premise that both refutes and confirms its own enterprise,”25 The main question for a “position of linguistic monism,” according to Butler, where “everything is only and always language,”26 is who is the agent, who is doing the construction? This type of constructivism, for Butler, “not only presupposes a subject, but rehabilitates precisely the voluntarist subject of humanism that constructivism has, on occasion, sought to put into question.”27 Butler’s solution is instead a type of constructivism which maintains a great skepticism toward any such subject, or doer of the construction who would be temporally and spatially “prior” to construction.28

Butler might still belong within the range of a strong constructivism,29 but this needs to be developed in the next chapter since Butler’s critique of radical constructivism is closely linked with questions of the human subject.30 Even if Butler cannot be seen to represent all types of social constructivism, she is helpful for understanding problems and potentials with a social constructivist view of the human being in relation to biologist anthropologies. And considering that Butler challenges the division between sex as natural and gender as cultural, and attempts to move beyond the polarization between biology and the social herself, it is of interest to engage with her argument.

In contrast to “social constructivism,” the term “biologist essentialism” has no real wide currency. I use it as a compound of two concepts, “biologism” on the one hand and “essentialism” on the other. Cultural critic Sara Arrhenius defines “biologism” as the “confident conviction that biology can encompass the whole human being.”31 Being a worldview, biologism makes wider claims than the scientific field of biology. The distinction from the science of biology is important since it clarifies biologism as a framework within which the human being should be understood. It is not then a case of “science versus the humanities,” but rather two discourses that are compared when social constructivism and biologism confront each other.

“Essentialism” as a term is traditionally connected with the question of the soul as the essence of the human being. However, as philosopher Elizabeth Grosz points out, essentialism can also be seen as the attribution of fixed essences and can therefore be connected with biologism.32 As philosopher of science Susan Oyama points out, essentialism enters in many disguises and in biology it is found in the assumption of innate traits. Oyama writes correctly that

“[i]nnate” characters are thought to be internally generated and trebly static: immutable in individuals, uniform across generations, and/or universal in individuals. They are attributed to genetic programs “for” those features, and are frequently assumed to be either inevitable or changeable only at heavy cost.33

Thus, there is an innatist assumption in exploring internal traits of a universal human psyche or nature.34 This innatist view of the gene is by no means the only view presented by biologists,35 but it is influential within evolutionary psychology.

Evolutionary psychology, which owes much to John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, and which Pinker shares, is worked out in opposition to a particular understanding of the social sciences. Tooby and Cosmides argue that the starting point of the Standard Social Science Method (SSSM) is to state that all is culture, culture is the autonomous agent of change.36 Against this is proposed a clear actor who acts upon culture, rather than is acted upon by culture.

Further, essentialism is apparent in another main principle of evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology proposes that the human genome evolved over a long period of time in the conditions of the Pleistocene era,37 but went through a “population bottleneck […] fairly recently in evolutionary history,” as Steven Pinker puts it.38 After that “population bottleneck” there was no more significant change in the human genome to alter human psychology. Even if human nature is not unchangeable evolutionarily speaking, it is nonetheless assumed that the change is so slow in terms of the essential constituents of the universal human nature that it is insignificant for all important purposes. The essence of human nature is found in the genes of which the human body is the “vehicle.”39

To sum up, evolutionary psychology is essentialist in that all human beings share a particular and unchanging human nature. It is a biologist essentialism since it assumes that human nature is based on a shared human genome. And, from the vantage point of genes as “replicators” and the human body as “carriers” of the gene, evolutionary psychology also relies on a dualism, as theologian Conor Cunningham has argued convincingly.40

On a final note, biologism as well as essentialism, in certain traditions, are decidedly pejorative terms. It is not my intention to use them with any such undertones here. Also, if I were to transfer the terms “strong” and “weak” used for constructivism, then biologist essentialism is a weak essentialism since the proposed essence is not ontologically unchangeable or of a different essence from the body.41

Interestingly, just like Butler, Pinker argues that his understanding of the human being renders the distinction between nature and nurture obsolete. Indeed, some argue that this is an inherent feature of evolutionary psychology itself.42 My point, however, is that while this is a positive development in biology, in the end, just as with Butler, there are problems, but also indeed useful insights in Pinker’s accounts of the human being. What about theological anthropology then?

As theologian Michelle Voss Roberts succinctly puts it, treating “topics such as human nature and purpose, freedom and sin, and difference and gender, this doctrine [theological anthropology] deals with what it means to be a human being in relation to our divine source.”43 The inclusion of the divine distinguishes theological anthropology from social constructivism and biologist essentialism. This distinctly non-secular starting point of theological anthropology entails, as suggested by John Webster, “the dogmatic depiction of human identity as it is shaped by the creative, regenerative and glorifying work of the triune God.”44

But theological anthropology cannot completely be separated from its secular counterparts. For as theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg points out, theology and anthropology are inseparable and theologians “must begin their reflection with a recognition of the fundamental importance of anthropology for all modern thought and for any present-day claim of universal validity for religious statements.”45 For Pannenberg, this is not to say that theology is anthropology, the argument famously put forward by Ludwig Feuerbach,46 but rather that anthropology is a central concern for theology.47

The theological anthropology that is of most interest here is what could be called a “relational” anthropology.48 The meaning of this concept will be expounded in much greater detail in chapter 4 and also part II, but can in brief terms be said to be the view that the human being becomes who she centrally is only in and by the relations in which she finds herself.

The starting point for this anthropology is often an interpretation of the Genesis creation account together with a “social” understanding of the Trinity, but more recently there has been much critique of “social trinitarianism(s).”49 Further, Marc Cortez, a main voice within theological anthropology today, sees some problems with a relational interpretation of Genesis 1 and sides therefore more hesitantly with a relational theological anthropology. Nevertheless, he concludes that “despite criticisms about the exegetically unfounded nature of the relational imago, it remains a viable candidate for understanding this important concept,“50 if, as Cortez argues, theological anthropology is founded on christology rather than by analogy with the doctrine of the Trinity.51 This point, emphasized by many theologians also before Cortez and which is the “traditional” route to theological anthropology,52 is an important argument for this book.

Gunton rarely refers to the nature/nurture question explicitly but pays much attention to what he sees as a confused relationship between culture and nature in Modernity and late Modernity.53 Gunton views this as a theological problem due to Modernity’s, as he states, “displacement of God.”54 While Gunton’s critique of Modernity will be challenged below, certain aspects of his theological engagement with culture are helpful.

In chapter 1 Judith Butler’s theory of performativity is explained in relation to its implications for her view of the self and the subject. I argue that the human subject is constituted by norms outside of the subject’s control. For Butler, one is called, or interpellated, into subjecthood. As such, Butler develops a relational view of the human where vulnerability and precariousness become more and more significant, as does embodiment. I show how this embodied relationality even takes on an ontological meaning in Butler. Notions such as interpellation, vulnerability and “the other” will thus be discussed in some detail.

The next chapter expounds on Pinker’s understanding of evolutionary psychology and its implications. I suggest that Pinker’s interest in language provides the link between biology and culture in his account of the human being. I also argue that there is a duality to Pinker’s thinking about the human being. The prominent side of this duality is biologist essentialist with genes as “atoms” of evolution and an emphasis on innate traits. The other, less developed, side has an opening toward the relational with concepts such as “group identity” and “unique environment.”

Chapter 3 turns to Colin Gunton’s theological anthropology. For Gunton, this is linked with the doctrine of the Trinity, the doctrine of creation, as well as christology, and these notions must be dealt with to understand Gunton’s view of the human being. The idea of a relational ontology is key for his thinking and in this a strong stress is put on the concept of the person in his anthropology. I then argue that the relation between human persons and the divine is strongly linked to christology for Gunton and this has important implications for the constructive discussion between these thinkers.

In the following three chapters I bring Butler, Pinker and Gunton into interaction with one another. In particular, a relational reading of evolutionary theory, of time, materiality and the body will be advanced. Chapter 4 gathers some general aspects from the three theories to show that a polarization of relationality, nature, and the body from the three perspectives is not necessary. This is done with a particular focus on the theory of evolution, and aspects of time and materiality. What is developed is a relational ontology, but I propose a “weak” ontology in contrast to Gunton’s “strong” ontological claims.

This more general groundwork leads to a discussion focused on the human being in chapter 5. My “interactive” reading attempts to bridge the gap between nature and nurture on the one hand, and ontology and ethics on the other. If human lived reality is constituted relationally, then ethics and being are closely related, or so I argue. I present what I call a kenotic personalism that emphasizes the person as the fundamental concept for the human being, but personhood as a gift that occurs through particular and bodily relations between human beings. Considering our fundamental vulnerability, the relation that constitutes the human person is that of self-giving love, or kenosis.

Chapter 6 brings the threads together and firstly works out the relation between personalism and individualism to then return to the school example with which everything began. I argue that the question of a divide between the biological and the social in the context of school opened up a more basic issue, namely that of institutions’ individualization of fundamentally vulnerable and dependent human body-persons.

1 Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. I: Swann's Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, & D. J. Enright (London: Vintage Books, 2005), 20.

2 Fraser Watts, “The Multifaceted Nature of Human Personhood: Psychological and Theological Perspectives,” in Niels Henrik Gregersen, Willem B. Drees, & Ulf Görman (eds.), The Human Person in Science and Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000) and Sara Arrhenius, En riktig kvinna: om biologism och könsskillnad (Stockholm: Pocky, 1999).

3 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 191.

4 I am of course not alone in having this concern, nor in acknowledging the prevalence of the distinction between biology on the one hand and the social on the other. One would, for example, need to cite almost every single prominent feminist thinker from Simone de Beauvoir to Judith Butler and beyond for an extensive list. But to cite some influential thinkers, Donna Haraway and Anne Fausto-Sterling, as well as Elizabeth Grosz, should be mentioned for a particularly deep engagement with biology and the theory of evolution. See Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991); Donna J. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience (New York: Routledge, 1997); Anne Fausto-Sterling, Myths of Gender: Biological Theories about Women and Men, 2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1992); Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sex/Gender: Biology in a Social World (New York: Routledge, 2012); Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2004); Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2005); Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). From the Scandinavian side, see Toril Moi, “Vad är en kvinna? Kön och genus i feministisk teori,” Res Publica 35/36, no. 1-2 (1997): 71-158; Toril Moi, “What Is a Woman? Sex, Gender, and the Body on Feminist Theory,” in Toril Moi, What is a Woman?: And Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) and Åsa Carlson, Kön, kropp och konstruktion: En undersökning av den filosofiska grunden för distinktionen mellan kön och genus (Stockholm: Symposion, 2001).

From a more biological perspective, see Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, & John Tooby (eds.), The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Henry D. Schlinger, “The Almost Blank Slate: Making a Case For Human Nurture,” Skeptic, 11, no. 2, 2004; Judith Rich Harris, The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do, 2nd ed. (New York: Free Press, 2009); Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Penguin, 2003).

Within theology see Philip Hefner, The Human Factor: Evolution, Culture, and Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993).

5 For examples see Maurizio Meloni, Simon J. Williams & P. A. Martin (eds.), Biosocial Matters: Rethinking Sociology-Biology Relations in the Twenty-First Century (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2016) and Maurizio Meloni, John Cromby, Desmond Fitzgerald & Stephanie Lloyd, The Palgrave Handbook of Biology and Society (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Many emphasize the area of epigenetics for this question (see Samantha Frost, Biocultural Creatures: Toward a New Theory of the Human (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). Although sharing a similar interpretation of evolution (see ch. 5) I will not enter that field since my concern is in the main a discussion with evolutionary psychology.

On New Materialism, see for example Grosz, Volatile; Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Stacy Alaimo & Susan J. Hekman (eds.) Material Feminisms (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); Vicki Kirby, Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); Vicki Kirby (ed.) What if Culture was Nature all Along? (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017) and Diana Coole, “Rethinking Agency: A Phenomenological Approach to Embodiment and Agentic Capacities,” Political Studies 53, no. 1 (2005): 124-142.

Interestingly, sociologist Vicky Kirby has already pointed to how a nature/culture division is masked and maintained within a poststructuralist framework (Kirby, Quantum. See also Kirby (ed.), What if and Alaimo & Hekman (eds.), Material).

6 There are of course other theologians that relate to New Materialism in different ways than what I propose here. One difference is the starting point from a context of radical theology or process theology as seen in, for example, John Reader, Theology and New Materialism: Spaces of Faithful Dissent (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and Petra Carlsson Redell, Foucault, Art and Radical Theology: The Mystery of Things (London: Routledge, 2019) or Susan Hekman, “Feminist New Materialism and Process Theology: Beginning a Dialogue,” Feminist Theology 25, no. 2 (2017): 198-207.

7 My suggestion is not in any direct sense an attempt to correlate culture and Christian theology but rather to integrate theology with a culturally relevant question where theology has social effects (Hefner, Human, 17ff, 25f, 217ff; Mattias Martinson, Postkristen teologi: Experiment och tydningsförsök (Göteborg: Glänta Produktion, 2007), 10; Christoph Schwöbel, “Where Do We Stand in Trinitarian Theology?: Resources, Revisions, and Reappraisals,” in Christophe Chalamet & Marc Vial (eds.), Recent Developments in Trinitarian Theology: An International Symposium (Augsburg: Fortress Press, 2014), 11.

8 But important here are Alasdair C. MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (London: Duckworth, 1999); Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers, & Susan Dodds (eds.), Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Erinn C. Gilson, The Ethics of Vulnerability: A Feminist Analysis of Social Life and Practice (London: Routledge, 2014) and Sofia Morberg Jämterud, Human Dignity: A Study in Medical Ethics (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2016).

For a good overview of the relation between ethics and vulnerability, see Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers, & Susan Dodds, “Introduction: What Is Vulnerability and Why Does It Matter for Moral Theory?,” in Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers, & Susan Dodds (eds.), Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

9 Martinson, Postkristen. Whether our society is “post-Christian” or “post-secular” the position and place of Christian theology in it needs to be carefully clarified (Ola Sigurdson, Det postsekulära tillståndet: religion, modernitet, politik (Göteborg: Glänta produktion, 2009)).

10 Dennis Bielfeldt, “The Peril and Promise of Supervenience for the Science-Theology Discussion,” in Niels Henrik Gregersen, Willem B. Drees, & Ulf Görman (eds.), The Human Person in Science and Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000), 142.

11 See John Webster, “Theological Theology,” in John Webster, Confessing God: Essays in Christian Dogmatics, Vol. II (London: T&T Clark, 2016). For a critique of this position see Mattias Martinson, “Silence, Rupture, Theology: Towards a Post-Christian Interdisciplinarity,” in Heather Walton (ed.) Literature and Theology: New Interdisciplinary Spaces (Burlington: Ashgate, 2011).

12 See John Webster, “Theological Theology,” in John Webster, Confessing God: Essays in Christian Dogmatics, Vol. II (London: T&T Clark, 2016). For a critique of this position see Mattias Martinson, “Silence, Rupture, Theology: Towards a Post-Christian Interdisciplinarity,” in Heather Walton (ed.) Literature and Theology: New Interdisciplinary Spaces (Burlington: Ashgate, 2011).

13 Hefner, Human, 151. See also William H. Newell, “A Theory of Interdisciplinary Studies,” Issues in Integrative Studies 19, no. 1 (2001): 1-25.

14 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 4f; Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989). See also Christian Smith, Moral, Believing Animals: Human Personhood and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

15 William Desmond, Being and the Between (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995), 7. In Desmond’s argument, it is when our lived experience is “given” to us in this process of self-reflection that we also can receive it, a “beholding of” wholeness. That is, we become aware of it as an experience of being through self-reflection (Desmond, Being, 10).

16 William Desmond, God and the Between (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), 10.

17 Eugene d’Aquili, “Apologia pro Scriptura Sua: Or, Maybe We Got It Right after All,” Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 28, no. 2 (1993): 251-266, as quoted in Hefner, Human, 264.

18 As Dawn Youngblood points out, interdisciplinary studies are often problem-oriented, as is mine (Dawn Youngblood, “Interdisciplinary Studies and the Bridging Disciplines: A Matter of Process,” Journal of Research Practice 3, no. 2 (2007)).

19 J. T. M. Miller, “Methodological Issues for Interdisciplinary Research,” Postgraduate English: A Journal and Forum for Postgraduates in English, no. 23, Sep. 2011 (2011), 8.

20 Peter L. Berger & Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1966).

21 Christian Smith, What is a Person?: Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), 121ff.

22 Smith, Person?, 122. Smith calls the weak version of social constructivism the ‘realist’ version, linking it thus with the other essential epistemological starting point in his argument, namely, critical realism.

23 Smith, Person?, 122.

24 Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1999), 24ff. Smith’s view of ‘strong’ constructivism comes close to what Ian Hacking, in reference to John Searle’s work on social constructivism, calls ‘universal constructionism’ that would claim that ‘everything’ is socially constructed (Hacking, Social, 24). But, the term ‘strong’ is to be preferred over ‘universal’ since it indicates a continuum and with no necessary decisive point of transition from ‘weak’ to ‘strong’ versions of constructivism.

25 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the discursive limits of “sex”, Special Indian ed. (New York: Routledge, 2011), xv.

26 Butler, Bodies, xv.

27 Butler, Bodies, xvi.

28 Butler, Bodies, xvi.

29 See Lena Gunnarsson, On the Ontology of Love, Sexuality and Power: Towards a Feminist-Realist Depth Approach (PhD, Örebro University, 2013), 25, chs. 3 and 6.

However, there is no consensus on how to categorize Butler. Lois McNay, political theorist, sees Butler’s view on subject, psyche and agency as a “constructivist perspective” (Lois McNay, “Subject, Psyche and Agency: The Work of Judith Butler,” Theory, Culture & Society 16, no. 2 (1999): 175-193, 176). The political theorist Moya Lloyd, on the other hand, argues that Butler should be called a “deconstructionist” (Moya Lloyd, Judith Butler: From Norms to Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 72). However, as sociologists John Hood-Williams and Wendy Cealey Harrison point out, Butler does not use Derrida in a particularly deconstructivist way but rather uses Derrida’s ideas methodologically (John Hood-Williams & Wendy Cealey Harrison, “Trouble with Gender,” The Sociological Review 46, no. 1 (1998): 73-94, 81). And theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid, sees Butler as interrogating materiality as constructed through performativity (Marcella Althaus-Reid, “Bodily Citations: Religion and Judith Butler,” Journal of Contemporary Religion 22, no. 3 (2007): 416-418, 416. Political theorist Stephen K. White also views Butler as a constructivist thinker, but, importantly, with weak ontological assumptions (Stephen K. White, Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 85).

30 Vicky Kirby is correct, in my view, that “[t]he difficulty in Butler’s project is considerable, for she has to juggle a critique of construction while still defending its most basic tenets” (Vicky Kirby, Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal (New York: Routledge, 1997), 105). But Axel Honneth’s critique is not quite on the mark (Axel Honneth et al., Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, The Berkeley Tanner lectures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 69).

31 Arrhenius, Riktig, 20 [my translation].

32 Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies (London: Routledge, 1995), 47-49. See also Kirby, Telling, 68, 171. The problem of biologism and feminism links back to the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, according to Kirby. Here biologism, the thought that the woman is her body, was strongly established and later developed by Charcot’s colleague, Sigmund Freud (Kirby, Telling, 59).

33 Susan Oyama, Evolution's Eye: A Systems View of the Biology-Culture Divide (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 82.

34 “Universal” here is well defined by the psychologist David Buss as “[f]eatures found across cultures, races, and populations are assumed to be more part of human nature than those features that are unique to certain subgroups or individuals” (David M. Buss, “Evolutionary Biology and Personality Psychology: Toward a Conception of Human Nature and Individual Differences,” American Psychologist 39, no. 10 (1984): 1135-1147, 1138). See also Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (London: Phoenix, 1996), 45f.

35 See Sarah S. Richardson & Stevens Hallam (eds.), Postgenomics: Perspectives on Biology After the Genome (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015) and Haraway, Simians.

36 John Tooby & Leda Cosmides, “The Psychological Foundations of Culture,” in Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, & John Tooby (eds.), The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 23-26; Pinker, Blank, 30-104. Interestingly, see Christian Smith for a not dissimilar critique, but from the area of sociology itself (Smith, Person?, ch. 1). Yet Smith does not agree with theories such as Tooby and Cosmides’ that he calls “naturalistic positivist empiricism” (Smith, Person?, 4).

37 John Tooby & Leda Cosmides, “Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, Part I: Theoretical Considerations,” Ethology and Sociobiology 10, no. 1–3 (1989): 29-49, 34f.

38 Pinker, Blank, 143. For a problematization of that description, see David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past (New York: Pantheon Books, 2018).

39 For a discussion on replicators versus vehicles and ‘survival machines’, see Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 30th Anniversary ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 19.

40 Conor Cunningham, Darwin's Pious Idea: Why the Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get It Wrong (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2010), 42. See also David L. Hull, Science as a Process: An Evolutionary Account of the Social and Conceptual Development of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

41 Although, as Cunningham argues, if one maintains the replicator/vehicle dualism as part of the theory of evolution then, as he phrases it, one introduces a “pre-Darwinian essentialism” (Cunningham, Darwin's, 67) into the theory of evolution that is in conflict with, in Cunningham’s words, the “very dynamic nature of the biological world, spelled out so well by Darwin” (Cunningham, Darwin's, 58). For how this anti-essentialist understanding has emerged in the last three decades and its implications for the view of nature/nurture, see Maurizio Meloni, “How biology became social, and what it means for social theory,” The Sociological Review 62, no. 3 (2014): 593-614 and further developed in Maurizio Meloni, Impressionable Biologies: From the Archeology of Plasticity to the Sociology of Epigenetics (New York: Routledge, 2019).

42 Jaime C. Confer et al., “Evolutionary Psychology: Controversies, Questions, Prospects, and Limitations,” American Psychologist 65, no. 2 (2010): 110-126, 116. Rightly, David Bjorklund and Anthony Pellegrini state that evolutionary developmental psychology has “come to rephrase the nature-nurture issue, asking not ‘how much’ of any characteristic is due to nature or nurture but rather ‘How do nature and nurture interact to produce a particular pattern of development?’” But, as they continue, “simply restating the question in this way advances the argument little. The developmental systems approach specifies how biological and environmental factors at multiple levels of organization transact to produce a particular pattern of ontogeny” (David F. Bjorklund & Anthony D. Pellegrini, The Origins of Human Nature: Evolutionary Developmental Psychology (Washington: American Psychological Association, 2002), 335).

Similar claims were made for the theory preceding evolutionary psychology, namely that of sociobiology. There was a lively debate about the claims of sociobiology in the late 1970s and early 1980s and much attention was placed on the issue of nature and nurture. See Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975); George W. Barlow & James Silverberg, Sociobiology, Beyond Nature/Nurture?: Reports, Definitions, and Debate (Boulder: Westview Press for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1980); Michael Ruse, Sociobiology: Sense or Nonsense? (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1979); Ashley Montagu & Jerome H. Barkow, Sociobiology Examined (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980); John D. Baldwin & Janice I. Baldwin, Beyond Sociobiology (New York: Elsevier, 1982); Marshall Sahlins, The Use and Abuse of Biology: An Anthropological Critique of Sociobiology (London: Tavistock Publications, 1977); and Ullica Segerstråle, Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

43 Michelle Voss Roberts, Body Parts: A Theological Anthropology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017), xxiii.

44 John Webster, “Eschatology and Anthropology,” in John Webster, Word and Church: Essays in Christian Dogmatics, 2nd ed., vol. I (London: T&T Clark, 2016), 263; Webster, “Theological,” 24ff.

45 Wolfhart Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, trans. Matthew J. O'Connell (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1985), 16.

46 Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (New York: Harper & Row, 1957 [first published 1841]). See also Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, trans. Richard Crouter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996 [first published 1799]).

47 For this, see also John Macquarrie, Principles of Christian Theology, revised ed. (London: SCM Press, 1977).

48 See F. LeRon Shults, Reforming Theological Anthropology: After the Philosophical Turn to Relationality (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2003) and Bo Sandahl, Person, relation och Gud: Konstruktionen av ett relationellt personbegrepp i nutida trinitarisk teologi (PhD, Centrum för teologi och religionsvetenskap, Lunds universitet, 2004).

49 As only one example by a former PhD student of Colin Gunton, see Stephen R. Holmes, The Holy Trinity: Understanding God's Life (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2012).

50 Marc Cortez, Theological Anthropology: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 27.

51 Marc Cortez, Christological Anthropology in Historical Perspective: Ancient and Contemporary Approaches to Theological Anthropology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2016) and Marc Cortez, “The Madness in Our Method: Christology as the Necessary Starting Point for Theological Anthropology,” in Joshua Ryan Farris & Charles Taliaferro (eds.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Theological Anthropology (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015).

52 Kathryn Tanner is just one example, but her impressively concise book, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology, sums it up well, together with relevant historical references (Kathryn Tanner, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001)).

53 Colin E. Gunton, The One, the Three, and the Many: God, Creation, and the Culture of Modernity, The Bampton Lectures 1992 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), xiii. Gunton views “culture” as the result of “human activity” and the relationship between “culture’ and ‘nature” is that “culture takes shape in the context of what is sometimes called nature.” So that, for Gunton, “[t]he created world provides the framework within which human activity takes place” (Gunton, The One, xiii).

54 Gunton, The One, 28. Gunton’s view of Modernity is one that states that Modernity in its very definition should be understood as the rejection of God. As numerous thinkers have pointed out, the view that Modernity is anti-religious and necessarily secularist is more a part of a secularist self-understanding itself rather than an accurate description of the development of Modernity. See Taylor, Secular; Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Martinson, Postkristen, 12, 69ff; Sigurdson, Postsekulära; Jayne Svenungsson, Guds återkomst: En studie av gudsbegreppet inom postmodern filosofi (Göteborg: Glänta Produktion, 2004) and Joel Halldorf, Av denna världen? Emil Gustafson, moderniteten och den evangelikala väckelsen (Skellefteå: Artos & Norma bokförlag, 2012).

Chapter 1: From interpellated subjecthood to recognized vulnerability

“There is an ethics that is performed through her [Butler’s] mode of inquiry, which is committed to beginning from the margins and the marginalized to query the social norms and structures that condition, enable, and animate forms of marginalization.”1 These words by philosopher Annika Thiem summarize Butler’s main concern well. Throughout Butler’s work ethics and politics are difficult to disentangle,2 and the main concern for her is to make visible the processes which dehumanize, marginalize and refuse to give recognition to some humans.3 Here, Butler argues that both the idea of “nature” and “the natural” as primary concepts and the idea of an origin have to be challenged in order to give recognition to those who are now not recognized.4 As such, her main concern with the structures of recognition and misrecognition is directly linked with her anthropology.

Judith Butler (1956-) calls herself a “latecomer to the second wave,”5 and positions herself within “feminist poststructuralism.”6 She is the Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature and the Co-director of the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. But Butler does not explicitly write about either rhetoric or comparative literature. She is instead mainly a political and critical thinker and philosopher where gender, sexuality and political inequality are main concerns.7 All of these are in some sense linked to Butler’s view of the human being.

On the human being, or becoming

Precisely because “female” no longer appears to be a stable notion, its meaning is as troubled and unfixed as “woman,” and because both terms gain their troubled significations only as relational terms, this inquiry takes as its focus gender and the relational analysis it suggests. Further, it is no longer clear that feminist theory ought to try to settle the question of primary identity in order to get on with the task of politics. Instead, we ought to ask, what political possibilities are the consequences of a radical critique of the categories of identity?8

Here Butler ties together many strands central to her understanding of the human. Firstly, the critique of the concept “woman” and “female” as stable categories of identity is clear. This is also linked to a critique of universalist and essentialist categories of human identity overall. Any concept of humanity for Butler has to be formed out of a radical critique of the current categories because these limit the possible ways of being a human.

Secondly, Butler focuses on politics and performativity. There is no essence or human nature, but rather human identity is constructed and how this is done is of primary importance. Thirdly, and lastly, the quotation points to the importance of human identity as a relational concept, an idea that is developed throughout her thinking.

On the constructive side, a radical critique of the categories of human identity should, for Butler, enable further ways of being human. Yet Butler is hesitant to be normative because, as she sees it, “the range of its [the self’s] possible forms is delimited in advance” by every possible discourse.9 Or, as Sara Salih phrases it, Butler “regards resolution as dangerously anti-democratic, since ideas and theories that present themselves as self-evident ‘truths’ are often vehicles for ideological assumptions that oppress certain groups of people in society.”10 Determining what such an “unresolved” human identity might mean is the purpose of this chapter.

The question of human identity for Butler cannot be separated from the question of gender. I will, therefore, firstly deal with the connection Butler draws between gender and being human. This leads to her theory of performativity in relation to human identity and personhood. Following this, I treat Butler’s concept of the human as relationally constituted and then the question of norms before I enter into the question of the body. Lastly, the notion of relationality returns with Butler’s turn toward vulnerability in a context of actions, identity, desire and recognition.

Gendered to be human

Butler makes a strong connection between gender norms and what it is to be human in her early thinking.11 The reason for this is that for Butler gender norms “establish what will and will not be intelligibly human, what will and will not be considered to be ‘real,’ they establish the ontological field in which bodies may be given legitimate expression.”12 But, how do gender norms affect human identity more precisely?

Butler argues that “gendering” is “constructed through relations of power” and “normative constraints,” and that the “materiality of sex is constructed through a ritualized repetition of norms.”13 Gender norms construct human identity through repetition (reiteration/citation). As Butler sees it, the repetition materializes the norms in society. She writes that

[t]he practice by which gendering occurs, the embodying of norms, is a compulsory practice, a forcible production, but not for that reason fully determining. To the extent that gender is an assignment, it is an assignment which is never quite carried out according to expectation, whose addressee never quite inhabits the ideal s/he is compelled to approximate. Moreover, this embodying is a repeated process. And one might construe repetition as precisely that which undermines the conceit of voluntarist mastery designated by the subject in language.14

For Butler then, repetition of norms underlies how gender is produced which also affects how we understand sex, or “natural” identities, as will become evident. Gender is never natural nor stable since this assignment of norms through repetition “is never carried out according to expectation.” This process of “assignmentation” needs therefore to be constantly repeated or reiterated and, therefore, undermines any notion of a voluntarist, that is, a choosing and wilfully acting, subject. Instead, norms working from “outside” of the subject constitute the subject.

Sociologists John Hood-Williams and Wendy Cealey Harrison argue that, as Butler sees it, the acts that are interpreted as “gender acts” will lead to form a gender identity that, by extension, will be seen as ontological or original for what is constituted as human.15 It is not that norms are these acts, but norms decide which acts count as acceptable, and hence constitute a livable identity.16 This process in which norms become “naturalized” is, of course, Butler’s theory of performativity.

Gender identity is one example of how a “model of power,” that is, gender norms, works to constitute an identity. Butler argues that it is important to act with great care and awareness when one wants to make any parallels between how, for example, racial differences are constituted on the one hand, and gender differences, on the other.17 Different “models of power” or “vectors of power” such as race, sexuality and gender all have their own history and work in distinct ways, while, at the same time, they “deploy each other for the purpose of their own articulation.”18 This difference also comes down to how norms are established through particular performative action. So how does performativity construct identities for Butler?

Performativity and human identity

Performativity is an explanation, or a particular figure of thought for Butler, of how these norms by a repeated acting out can be constituted as “natural” or mask themselves as an “origin.” This is also how the human subject is constituted for Butler. Here sometimes the term “signification” is used,19 denoting when language assumes a willing agent of speaking or the acts.20 For Butler grammar creates the notion of an agent, a “doer” behind the deed.21 But the underlying thought or overarching concept is that of performativity.22

For example in terms of gender identity, Butler argues that “[t]here is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results.”23 For Butler, identity is constituted by the acts one might think are the result.

This sounds like lifting oneself by one’s own bootstraps; how can something be constituted by itself? Yet maybe it is easier to think of performativity along the lines of learning. With learning, once we know something previously unknown, it can be difficult to remember what it was like not to have that knowledge or skill.

To give an example: once we have learned how to ride a bike it is difficult to “not be able to ride a bike.” One could argue that in learning, as with performativity for Butler, there is a type of closure once a skill has been acquired. The how of the process of learning is no longer important for the having of the skill itself.24 But you become a “bicycle-rider” through the repeated practice of learning how to ride the bike. With bike riding, so with identity for Butler, it can appear “closed” or “settled” or “primary,” while in “reality” it is a product of the very process itself.25 After having learnt a skill, one’s perception is that the skill has always been “there.” Yet Butler’s point is that identity derives from the very process that we now use to improve our skill, but that this is the case is lost to us and we now experience it as an origin.26 The difference is that while, in terms of bike riding, most of us have a clear memory of what it was like to learn how to ride a bike, with all the falls, bruised knees and tears, when it comes to identity formation this is not a memory people tend to have.

This loss of memory is explained through a re-conceptualization of psychoanalysis for Butler by a reworking of Freud’s concept of melancholia.27 In short, this means, as Butler argues, that the primary desire in the child is to be with the parent of the same sex. When this homosexual desire in the child is repressed then it turns into a heterosexual desire due to the child’s identification with the desire of the parent of the same sex and that is now perceived as “natural.”28 If identity formation belongs to early childhood it explains why it is difficult to remember how one “learned” one’s identity.

However, this loss of memory is only true, for Butler, for those who more or less fit into the governing norms of a society. A person with heterosexual desire within a discourse of normative heterosexuality will feel as if his or her heterosexual identity is the “natural” expression of sexuality. But, in contrast, “those who understand their gender and their desire to be nonnormative” live with a “pervasive sense of their own unreality,“29 so that no “naturalness” is natural in any non-constructive or non-performative sense for Butler. Therefore all desire constantly needs to be reiterated, or re-cited, for its own “naturalness” to be established and maintained; “identifications are never simply or definitively made or achieved; they are insistently constituted, contested, and negotiated,“ as Butler puts it.30 Consequently, this apparently stable identity, for Butler, “will be at once an interpretation of the norm and an occasion to expose the norm itself as a privileged interpretation” because the very need to reiterate the norm “perpetually reinstitutes the possibility of its own failure.”31 Herein lies the reason for the incessant need to reiterate norms and acts of the normative identity: the sense of it not quite having been constituted fully the previous time.

This instability, which is also a refusal to settle in a fully formed identity, is embraced by and searched for by Butler.32 An “unsettled” identity upholds the otherness of the other since the other, who constitutes my identity, can never fully be fathomed by me. Butler writes:

[a]s we ask to know the other, or ask that the other say, finally or definitively, who he or she is, it will be important not to expect an answer that will ever satisfy. By not pursuing satisfaction and by letting the question remain open, even enduring, we let the other live, since life might be understood as precisely that which exceeds any account we may try to give of it.33

The way norms are being constituted is not dissimilar, or unrelated, to the question of human identity; rather, norms play an essential part in the constitution of the human. But, having said that, it is not possible within the scope of this book to enter into detail on Butler’s view of the regulatory function of power and norms. The question must instead be how, if human identity somehow emanates through the materialization of norms, does the performative process make that happen?

The Subject is dead, long live the subject

Butler is careful to avoid any active individualistic agency: one is not free to “choose” or “perform” one’s identity. As this point is sometimes ignored in the reception of Butler,34 she is keen to correct such misunderstandings. She writes that “performativity must be understood not as a singular or deliberate ‘act,’ but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names.”35 For Butler, the volitional and independent Subject is dead and in its place enters “the subject,” constituted in dependence on discourse and grammar. How identity is formed is instead explained by something called interpellation.

To begin with, and this is the flaw for example in Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist theory,36 the problem is that a “doer” is assumed by de Beauvoir, and many other feminists, according to Butler.37 Such an agent is impossible for Butler because, in her words, “there is no recourse to a ‘person,’ a ‘sex,’ or a ‘sexuality’ that escapes the matrix of power and discursive relations that effectively produces and regulates the intelligibility of these concepts for us.”38 This means that, and Butler quotes from Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals here, that “there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed – the deed is everything.”39 In other words, the deeds of a willing agent cannot constitute an identity since those deeds are the product of a discourse. The willing subject only exists as subordinate to the power of performativity and discourse in Butler. Choice “comes late” in the process of subjectivation.40

The becoming of a subject is the act of subjectivation, a term Butler borrows from Foucault. It is originally the term assujettissement in French, which is directly translated as subjugation but is variously translated as subjectivation, subjectification or subjection. Butler understands assujettissement in Foucault as a paradox in that, in Butler’s words, it “denotes both the becoming of the subject and the process of subjection – one inhabits the figure of autonomy only by becoming subjected to power, a subjection which implies a radical dependency.”41 For Butler, in subjectivation, the subject is created in his/her resistance to or, alternatively, acceptance of, the subjugating powers in the society and juridical law.42 Butler questions a willing agent since there is no longer anyone making any choices in the formation of the subject in subjectivation. Rather, power constructs the subject,43 which becomes the site in which identity can be formed.44 She also asks the question of how power structures not only subjectivate us but also “individuate” us, make us individuals.45 It is thus a very relevant question from Butler’s perspective whether or not the school is one institution whose subjugating powers form the identity and autonomy of the subject.

Importantly for Butler “the individual,” “the subject” and “identity” are not identical. Rather, the subject is seen as a “site.” This “site of the subject” is the result of the process of interpellation, a notion that Butler borrows from the philosopher Louis Althusser. Interpellation establishes the “site” where identity can be formed.46 This site is relational in that it comes into existence through relations and by being “called” into it.47 To form an identity, one needs to become a subject through interpellation.

It is this calling and interpellation that makes Butler focus on language rather than on volitional action in subjectivation. She argues for the “I” as a grammatical placeholder, where “I” is linguistically presumed before any “real” “I” has been established.48 Here what grammar does is that it “governs the availability of persons in language.”49 This means that, in Butler’s thinking, “I am not outside of the language that structures me, but neither am I determined by the language that makes this ‘I’ possible.”50 In other words, the “I” cannot be extracted from grammar as some property independent from language. But this does not make Butler into a linguistic idealist,51 for what it does mean is that there is, as Butler puts it, a “difficulty of the ‘I’ to express itself through the language that is available to it.”52 The primacy of the “I,” or the self, is put under suspicion by Butler’s line of argument, and what is challenged in particular is the thought of a self with an internal origin that moves outward to the external world.53

The “I” is not outside language since the only tool to express the “I” as intelligible is language. However, the “I” is never fully determined by language since norms that constitute the identity of “I”54 can never be fully materialized and never completely expressed by language.55

More recently, Butler has challenged her own priority of the grammatical by what she calls a social ontology. She writes that the grammatical “I” that I am “is already social” and that “[t]he dependency that constitutes what I am prior to the emergence of any pronoun underscores the fact that I depend on the ones whose definition of me gives me form.”56 More on this social ontology will be said later, but it emphasizes what Butler terms dispossession of our self so that we are other to ourselves. There is always a failure of comprehension and a lack of completion in Butler.57

Consequently, the “I,” rather than being constituted by the actions of its own choosing, as in de Beauvoir, is constituted by actions not of its own choosing.58 Herein lies an essential difference between Butler and much second-wave feminism.59

But if the “I” is no longer constituted by his or her own choices, how can it come to being? Has Butler answered that question by stating, with Foucault, that the subject is a product of “historically specific discursive conditions and power relations?”60 Butler is not fully content with that and that is why she takes support from Althusser’s idea of interpellation.

In Althusser, interpellation occurs when a representative of the law calls, or “hails,” an individual. In the response to that hailing the individual is constituted as a subject. Althusser writes:

I shall then suggest that ideology 'acts' or 'functions' in such a way that it “recruits” subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’61

Essential in this is the distinction made between the “subject,” on the one hand, and the “individual,” on the other.62 But one problem is obvious from the outset since “the individual” is prior to “the subject” in interpellation. Althusser’s response is to state that, “an individual is always-already a subject,” since even before someone is born they will be destined to have a name, and thus interpellated into a subject.63 For Butler this will not do and she argues instead that

the subject, rather than be identified strictly with the individual, ought to be designated as a linguistic category, a placeholder, a structure in formation. Individuals come to occupy the site of the subject (the subject simultaneously emerges as a “site”), and they enjoy intelligibility only to the extent that they are, as it were, first established in language.64

Here Butler radicalizes Althusser’s view of the individual-as-already-a-subject by stating that the individual is a consequence of the subjectivization through language.65 The individual is necessary only as a grammatical category rather than as an ontological one and emerges as a “placeholder” from the establishment of the subject. Therefore, for Butler, “[t]he grammar of the subject emerges only as a consequence of the process we are trying to describe.”66

Annika Thiem points out here that, important in Butler, “is the claim that there is no individual subject that precedes its formation through subjection. But even though there is no existence apart from discourse and power, this does not mean that norms and discourses arbitrarily and randomly give birth to subjects.”67 But not all are convinced that Butler solves the dilemma Althusser provides her with. Noela Davis makes the point that Butler, with the act of interpellation, fails to explain the constitution of the subject and states that it is “an enigmatic process, and it appears that no explanation we could devise would be adequate to explain it.”68 But here it should be pointed out that it is not that “the subject,” “the individual,” or “the body” does not exist for Butler;69 it is simply that they are unknowable in any other sense than as a linkage to the subject-to-be which occurs through interpellation.70 In some sense, Butler is simply quiet about that for which there is no language.

Importantly then, to be human, for Butler, one needs to be knowable.71 Human identity, for Butler, is the intelligibility of the subject, but the subject needs to be “an other” to “the other” and even other to itself to be knowable.72 This is achieved by reflexivity and self-reflexivity. Much in line with psychoanalytic thought, Butler concurs that in the awareness of the prohibition of one’s will there is a necessity for the subject to become an object to him- or herself to be intelligible.73 This is why interpellation is so important to Butler because self-reflexivity is enabled in the response to the call. Not only is the subject constituted by the hailing of an other as a social agent,74 the subject also becomes aware of him- or herself as a subject. Human identity must consequently be seen as a socially and relationally constituted concept for Butler. She writes:

[c]alled by an injurious name, I come into social being, and because I have a certain inevitable attachment to my existence, because a certain narcissism takes hold of any term that confers existence, I am led to embrace the terms that injure me because they constitute me socially.75

To summarize, the way performativity constitutes human subjecthood, for Butler, is through the act of interpellation, which is that process through which language constructs a social position for the subject established by recognition by the other. The calling is part of a repetitive practice of a materialization of norms that shapes the subject. It needs to be repetitive since in the recognition of a subject there is always also a failure embedded in that recognition, what Butler calls misrecogntion. In an extreme misrecognition, the human being is not a subject at all, but an abject.76 Despite the risk of abjection, human life can only be recognized by means of performativity and interpellation, at least early on in Butler’s thinking.

Relationality and the constitution of humanity

After the death of the autonomous Subject, the notion of a subject is resurrected, or interpellated, as a social and relational concept by Butler. This whole process from interpellation of a subject to the constitution of a self is expressed well when Butler writes,

[i]f I am first addressed and then my address emerges as a consequence, animated by a primary address and bearing the enigma of that address, then I speak to you, but you are also what is opaque in the act of my speaking. Whoever you are, you constitute me fundamentally and become the name for a primary impressionability, for the uncertain boundary between an impression from outside that I register and some consequent sense of “me” that is the site of that registering. Within this founding scene, the very grammar of the self has not yet taken hold. And so one might say, reflectively, and with a certain sense of humility, that in the beginning I am my relation to you, ambiguously addressed and addressing, given over to a “you” without whom I cannot be and upon whom I depend to survive.77

Interestingly and importantly, “the caller” in this instance is not a representative of the law or not necessarily so at least. Rather, the quote opens up for a more interpersonal understanding of who that interpellating other can be. The other can here be another subject, or as in Butler’s later writing, a person.78 But for now, since Butler dismisses voluntarist and essentialist views of the self, the self is established by a complex network of factors that relate to each other in such a way that a self is formed by them. At the same time, Butler maintains that “[i]t does not suffice to say that I am promoting a relational view of the self over an autonomous one, or trying to redescribe autonomy in terms of relationality. The term ‘relationality’ sutures the rupture in the relation we seek to describe, a rupture that is constitutive of identity itself.”79 In the light of what has been said about interpellation and reflexivity how is one to make sense of the latter statement?

The word “suture” is a good place to start. “Suture” means “to join,” “seal,” or “close” something. So what does Butler mean when she says that “relationality” joins, seals, or closes the rupture (breach/rift) that is constitutive of identity itself? And how should Butler’s view be understood then, if not as “promoting a relational view of the self over an autonomous one”? To understand this, it is necessary to look at Butler’s view of agency once more. After all, Butler writes that, “[i]f I have any agency, it is opened up by the fact that I am constituted by a social world I never chose.”80 One is “dispossessed” by the other.81 And this dispossession is a way of “being for another, or indeed, by virtue of another,” for Butler.82 The self, then, for Butler, must be seen as outside of our possession. In Butler’s words, that “we are impinged upon primarily and against our will is the sign of a vulnerability and a beholdenness that we cannot will away. We can defend against it only by prizing the asociality of the subject over and against a difficult and intractable, even sometimes unbearable relationality.”83 Clearly, Butler promotes a relational view of a kind, but what kind is it if she also rejects a relational view that sutures the rupture in identity that Butler wants to maintain?

If Butler offers a view of the relationality of the self, which it must be said that she does, it is a relationality in some sense located “outside” of the subject, and is one of vulnerability. What Butler rejects is use of the term “relationality” to mask or soften the unbearability of the social constitution of human life, which it could easily do in Butler’s view. The constitution of the self through relation is not neat, or safe; rather, one’s self is constituted by being dispossessed in an unbearable vulnerability. Only in an unbearable relationality and vulnerability does the corporeality of the subject emerge. Butler cannot promise any suture of the rupture that the other’s relation to me will cause. And the later we get in Butler’s writing the more she stresses how this is not merely a psychological effect. It is very much a bodily relationality too.84 This is also one of the most contested areas in Butler’s thinking: Butler and the body.

The problematic body

When writing about the body, Butler acknowledges that she “kept losing track of the subject” for she “could not fix bodies as simple objects of thought” since “bodies tend to indicate a world beyond themselves.”85 Anyone reading Butler’s early writings on the body is likely to share that sense of frustration.86 But this frustration is not necessarily due to a failure on Butler’s part, nor does it have to come down to the complexity of her language.87 Rather, in the context of Butler’s thinking, this frustration is a natural consequence of the elusiveness of the body because the “body” is situated in a particular discourse, always affected by norms.88 In Butler’s view, the body is constantly shifting the boundaries of how we can understand what it is and, as such, it is only natural that there is a sense of frustration if we want to pinpoint what the body is, since that does not allow itself to be done. Noteworthy is that while for Foucault discourse is closely related to genealogy, Butler makes discursive analyses political and ethical and not “archaeological” as in Foucault.

Butler argues that power relations in a discourse affect the formation of the body.89 She writes that “the body is not an independent materiality that is invested by power relations external to it, but it is that for which materialization and investiture are coextensive.”90 If norms and power relations constitute the body, then there is a sense that this constitution is neither solid nor unchangeable since norms and power relations always change and undermine themselves.91 But if that is the case is it possible to say what the body is for Butler?

The what of the body

For Butler, norms’ materializing power decides what can be counted as a real human body.92 The body is, in Butler’s terminology, the product of the naturalization of norms through reiteration in the process of performativity. Put differently, gender norms become concrete in the body, and norms therefore determine how we know the body. The more these norms are affirmed by our actions, the more “real” or “natural” that body will be perceived to be, even though the known body “in reality” is the product of the norms themselves. If that is the case, then it is plausible that it is the relationship between embodiment and normativity that should be our focal point for finding out about the body since the “what” of the body is to be found in the actual relation between norms and the body.

If norms govern what the body is then it will not be possible to find any “essence” of the body, particularly since there is no access to its “thereness” except through language.93 But language, to complicate matters, is never a direct mediator to the body for Butler. Butler does not deny that the body exists,94 but due to the nature of language, it is impossible to know what it is.95 This is why she writes, “[i]s there a ‘physical’ body prior to the perceptually perceived body? An impossible question to decide.”96 Language and reality are stuck in something of a “chicken and the egg” situation. For Butler, language limits what we can think about ourselves and our reality. Language, however, masks this so that we perceive language as providing access to the body; but, as Butler sees it, what we meet when we meet the “thereness” of the body are different norms.97 Language’s ability to naturalize norms is a way of expressing how norms are materialized in actual bodies and actions in human society. Consequently, for Butler, it is never possible to experience bodies and actions in a direct way outside of norms.

To complicate things further, though, Butler includes more than norms as constitutive for the body. The “psychic” also plays an important part in terms of the forming of the body. So, not unlike the quotation by [epigraph from] Proust in the introduction, in Butler’s words, “psychic projection confers boundaries and, hence, unity on the body, so that the very contours of the body are sites that vacillate between the psychic and the material.”98

This is phrased a little differently from what I explained above. In term of the psychic, the body is now that which “vacillate[s] between the psychic and the material”; but, again, the boundaries of the body are in constant flux. Yet, rather than relating norms and materiality, Butler is here concerned with “the psychic” in relation to the body and the psychic is simultaneously a unifying and a dispersing factor in the formation of the body.

While Butler primarily relates to Freud here, Foucault’s notion of power as forming the subject is also important. In Butler’s symbiosis of Freud and Foucault, power is internalized so that “power that at first appears as external, pressed upon the subject, pressing the subject into subordination, assumes a psychic form that constitutes the subject’s self-identity.”99 In that way power provides “the very condition of its [the subject’s] existence.”100 The psychic is, for Butler, power that has become internalized as mental self-understanding in the subject.

In this way, Butler uses the concept of the psychic as a way to contrast the internal and self-reflecting side of the subject with the social and external world that constitutes the subject.101 Put differently, the psychic, for Butler, is the internalization of external and social norms into the subject’s self-reflection.102 The body is the “site” in which the norms are “read” or taken in.103 “Bodily contours and morphology are not merely implicated in an irreducible tension between the psychic and the material but are that tension,” as Butler writes in Bodies That Matter.104

For Butler, the body is the tension between the psychic and the material so that the psychic is the self-reflectivity of the body’s interaction with the world. The psychic is aware of how the body is constituted by that outside and how the body is vulnerable to, firstly, the world; secondly, to the materialized norms in society; and, thirdly, to the actions of the other. And it is the body that, due to its vulnerability, both contains the sense of a self while simultaneously leaving that self “dispossessed” of itself and open to the world.105 That is why bodily contours are the tension between the psychic and the material.

The body is open to the world, so much so that Butler hesitates to call one’s body “one’s own.”106 Butler’s vacillation about the body is evident. The body is at one and the same time the site for the psyche where a self-reflective subject is developed and open to the world to such an extent that the body is dispossessed of itself and vulnerable to the other.

The latter is developed by Butler into a “social ontology” of the body.107 The social in this is fundamental. She writes that “the life of the other, the life that is not our own, is also our life, since whatever sense ‘our’ life has is derived precisely from this sociality, this being already, and from the start, dependent on a world of others, constituted in and by a social world.”108 On a further note, the social ontology of our bodies motivates Butler to develop an absolute standpoint of (aggressive) nonviolence.109

In this (later) opening toward ontology Butler acknowledges a “what” of the body in somewhat clearer terms.110 But the body, as she writes, “has to be understood […] in terms of its supporting networks of relations.”111 When this social ontology is developed, the body and materiality can play a more essential part in Butler’s thinking than it did in her early writings. She writes that “if we accept that part of what a body is (and this is for the moment an ontological claim) is its dependency on other bodies and networks of support, then we are suggesting that it is not altogether right to conceive of individual bodies as completely distinct from one another.”112 Of particular importance is then the concept of vulnerability and interdependence.113 And after Frames of War Butler starts to explore vulnerability as an ontological assumption, even if the seeds of that thinking are present much earlier, as we will see. But Butler is not developing this ontology to explain the “what” of the body. That is still elusive. Instead, what Butler is most interested in is the “how,” how the body relates to the other and how it is constituted as a body through the other.114 There will be reason to come back to this, for this social ontology is conducive to the discussion that lies ahead, but the focus on the “how” relates to Butler’s view of actions.

Actions

While for de Beauvoir the active choice constitutes oneself,115 for Butler human identity is constituted by the reiteration of actions that create a sense of an origin in that very same process. This is Butler’s idea of performativity. Here, what she calls a social temporality takes precedence over any individualist agent – against existentialism and individualism.116 She argues 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.”117 Actions and human identity belong together only in a performative way.118

Butler develops the performativity of action into what she calls a “politics of the body.”119 And since it is a politics of the body, politics and ethics collide for Butler since, as she writes, “some ethical claims emerge from bodily life.”120 This goes against Butler’s early suspicion of ethics,121 but the reason for this move is Butler’s growing emphasis on vulnerability and dispossession, as will be discussed below.

But in terms of actions the rupture in identity, mentioned above, is evident. For Butler, activity is what enables one to give an account of oneself; at the same time, when one acts one is also in danger of losing oneself as actions break the narrative thread by which one gives an account of oneself to the other. In Butler’s words, “[t]o act is immediately to break the narrative structure and so to risk losing a self over whom I maintain narrative control.”122 The self is only constituted in the “giving of an account” of oneself,123 but the narrative both constitutes and dispossesses the self due to its relation to action. Without actions there would be no narrative to tell. Yet, on the other hand, actions, at the same time, break the narrative thread of the self, making the self lose control over his or her account of him- or herself. In both cases, in acting as well as in giving an account, the self is constituted in dependence on and vulnerability to the other.

In conclusion, actions constitute the person as something that creates the occasion in which a subject is constituted by giving an account of oneself to the other as an other. Or, put another way, a subject finds him- or herself in a position where he or she is vulnerable to be formed by actions in a discourse. It is because we have a body we call our own that we are vulnerable to actions, and it is actions outside of the body’s control that constitute the human subject.124 As such, it is how that body is related to the other that is constitutive,125 which is why Butler emphasizes concepts such as vulnerability and also grief as essential for the constitution of a human person.126

Judith Butler and the person

Judith Butler is critical of “humanist conceptions [that] assume a substantive person who is the bearer of various essential and nonessential attributes.”127 The problem with “person” as a foundation for human identity is when a core, or substance, is assumed with “universal capacity for reason, moral deliberation, or language.”128 That is an individualist “phantasmogoria.”129 Instead, Butler argues that a person is “relative to the constructed relations in which it is determined.”130 Thus, “person” is a consequence, an outcome of the relations“ which exist between humans. In that way, “person” is contingent upon what she calls “specifiable contexts.”131

The relations in which the person finds him- or herself are always regulated by norms so that there can be no previous existence of a person prior to the materialization, or appropriation of norms.132 “Person” is a product of the materialization of norms or Butler. But if it is defined as such then “person” is a useful and valid concept for Butler. The person, certainly, is constituted relationally,133 but she qualifies this in important ways.

As pointed out previously, Butler has an affinity for the term “relationality,” but she wants to develop a language that can enable “a way of thinking about how we are not only constituted by our relations but also dispossessed by them as well.”134 Butler stresses how a person is never in possession of his or her self. And in doing so Butler tries not to set autonomy and community against each other, the critique made by, for example, the sociologist Richard Jenkins and the philosopher Amy Allen.135

Butler argues that community and autonomy are inextricably interlinked so that a struggle for autonomy is also a struggle for something else, namely, in Butler’s words, “a conception of myself as invariably in community, impressed by others, impinging upon them as well.”136 But for Richard Jenkins, Butler understands identity as constituted by differentiating oneself from the other. This leads to alienation rather than unity for Jenkins, so that, in his words, “knowing who I am is a matter of distinguishing and distancing myself from you and you, and from that person over there,” which is why he sees Butler as among the “theorists of difference.”137

This emphasis on difference is what informs Jenkins’ critique. He objects to having difference as a main constituent of identity since it fails to establish “any comprehension of the collective dimensions of social life.”138 A similar point is made by Allen. She asks whether it is possible to come to any community in humanity, and formulates the critique concerning social rights movements: “[o]ne consequence of Butler’s radical critique of identity and identity politics is that it becomes difficult to conceptualize such collective power. Indeed, it becomes difficult even to conceptualize collectivity at all.”139

Political theorist Rosine Kelz makes a similar critique of Butler. Kelz acknowledges that grievability might indeed create a “we” from a position of precarious and vulnerable life if persons are affectionately related, but, Kelz writes, “[t]he question is then how one would, from Butler’s position, explain an assumption of responsibility for those to whom one has no affective relationship.” It remains unclear, therefore, continues Kelz, “how to get from the personal to the political realm.”140

However, Butler stresses interdependency as a way to keep a tension between autonomy and commonality.141 Butler’s emphasis on difference in community means,142 for Butler, that imagining community in this way “affirms relationality not only as a descriptive or historical fact of our formation but also as an ongoing normative dimension of our social and political lives, one in which we are compelled to take stock of our interdependence.”143

This interdependence constitutes the self, but only as an ecstatic notion of the self, a self that is other to oneself. For the social norms that constitute the “I” and the “I” itself become, in Butler’s words, “to a certain extent unknowable, threatened with unviability, with becoming undone altogether,”144 because “the social norms that constitute our existence carry desires that do not originate with our individual personhood.”145 But it is in the realization of our interdependence that the equality of human beings can be worked out, as she argues in The Force of Nonviolence.146 Thus, while Butler wants to avoid making vulnerability the basis for political action,147 for in a certain form that invites paternalism,148 political action must still work from vulnerability as an ontological assumption of how we are constituted as human beings. If we are therefore vulnerable to the other and constituted in our distinction from the other, then norms will inform how I am constituted by the other. Norms decide who is allowed to be conceived of as a human person and who is not.149 Community is embedded in the very constitution of the human being for Butler, for one is constituted by the other even if it is also as an other.

The fact that, for Butler, different discourses of power work performatively to establish the contexts in which the person is recognized means that the struggle against exclusivist norms is a struggle for existence, a struggle to be allowed to exist as human.150 Norms are in a sense prior to personhood and will therefore affect the person’s self-understanding and the person’s sense of being a person at all. Butler writes:

[j]ustice is not only or exclusively a matter of how persons are treated or how societies are constituted. It also concerns consequential decisions about what a person is, and what social norms must be honored and expressed for “personhood” to become allocated, how we do or do not recognize animate others as persons depending on whether or not we recognize a certain norm manifested in and by the body of that other. The very criterion by which we judge a person to be a gendered being, a criterion that posits coherent gender as a presupposition of humanness, is not only one which, justly or unjustly, governs the recognisability of the human, but one that informs the ways we do or do not recognize ourselves at the level of feeling, desire, and the body, at the moments before the mirror, in the moments before the window, in the times that one turns to psychologists, to psychiatrists, to medical and legal professionals to negotiate what may well feel like the unrecognizability of one’s gender and, hence, the unrecognizability of one’s personhood.151

Here the law, but also the social, limits the options or scope for what it is possible to be as a person, both of which will heavily inform one’s self-reflection.152 The laws, but also institutions such as the school one must assume, are, for Butler, concrete manifestations of norms that regulate your self-understanding.153 Yet Butler also argues that “it would be a mistake […] to understand all the ways in which gender is regulated in terms of those empirical legal instances because the norms that govern those regulations exceed the very instances in which they are embodied.”154

Consequently, there are concretizations of gender norms in the society, as we find in the law or medicine and institutionalized forms of power for example, but the law cannot fully manifest the norms.155 Thus all manifestations (law, medicine, sexuality, et. al.) of the norms in society are always constituted by norms, yet are not complete expressions of these norms.

But the concept of personhood works as a bridge between the societal in the juridical/political and the psychic in the self-reflective for Butler.156 Norms constitute the person in a way not always desired for Butler, but the ability to reflect about oneself, to see oneself as another,157 is also an essential characteristic of personhood for Butler. This is why Butler wants to challenge the way gender norms are made manifest in heterosexual normativity, for example. For any human being outside of that norm will not only be deemed a non-person (abject) by society, but by him- or herself as well.158 As Butler writes,

[t]he staging and structuring of affect and desire is clearly one way in which norms work their way into what feels most properly to belong to me. The fact that I am other to myself precisely at the place where I expect to be myself follows from the fact that the sociality of norms exceeds my inception and my demise, sustaining a temporal and spatial field of operation that exceeds my self-understanding.159

To sum up, Butler critiques an essentialist concept of personhood and argues, with qualifications, for a relational understanding of personhood. The person is constituted by relations, not only as an “origin,” but in a continuous and “ruptured” way. The manifestations of norms not only decide who is allowed to be viewed as a person by society, but also how it is possible to think of oneself as a person. For Butler, personhood is “ecstatic” since personhood is located in the psychic as another to oneself as well as in the socially constituted materiality of oneself, called the body.160 Is there then no “inside” to the person? This is a difficult question to answer with regard to Butler, but a way into that question is to look at her view on desire.

Desire and personhood

For Butler, personhood is linked with desire, but as Moya Lloyd points out, desire in Butler is disassociated from biology and should instead be understood psychoanalytically.161 Butler’s use of psychoanalysis has been critiqued by, among others, Kirsten Campbell and John Hood-Williams and Wendy Cealey Harrison,162 but for Butler, heterosexual desire, for example, is simply the case of a heterosexual norm that has “naturalized” into heterosexual desire.163 But this sexual desire is not the most central anyhow for Butler. That is instead the desire for recognition.164 She writes that “our very sense of personhood is linked to the desire for recognition, and that desire places us outside ourselves, in a realm of social norms that we do not fully choose, but that provides the horizon and the resource for any sense of choice that we have.”165

Starting at least from Undoing Gender, the desire for recognition is foundational for the formation of human identity and personhood for Butler.166 But the focus on recognition is not a new development in Butler. The interest in recognition comes most likely, as Lloyd points out,167 from her engagement with Hegel’s section in Phenomenology of Spirit on Lordship and Bondage that was the basis of her dissertation work.168

For Butler then, the desire for recognition dispossesses the person from him- or herself and, in that dispossession, the person becomes aware of his/her vulnerability, an essential aspect of personhood, according to Butler.169 Thus, desire is the key to the sociality of the person for Butler, in that the person is made ecstatic, outside of him- or herself by the desire for recognition, and thus dependent on, and vulnerable to, the other.170 As such, desire shares much with what Butler writes about the psyche.

But desire leads to vulnerability in a double sense for Butler. We are vulnerable, on the one hand, in that we are dependent upon the other to have our desires fulfilled. On the other hand, to act on our desire is dangerous, particularly if it is not the norm, for it is essential that our desires are recognized by the other (society). Only then can one profit from society’s protection from violence.171

It is self-awareness that makes the person hold on to his or her existence, so that the desire for recognition is also a desire for persistence.172 Desire is such a strong factor in what forms the person that even if the desire for recognition threatens self-extinction, the subject will still desire it and be constituted by it. For as Butler writes, twice, “the desire to desire is a willingness to desire precisely that which would foreclose desire, if only for the possibility of continuing to desire.”173 As Butler points out elsewhere, prohibition or the extinction of desire is not an obliteration of desire.174 So vulnerability on the one hand, and persistence, on the other, are in tension. But desire is not the only aspect that makes the self an ec-static self; vulnerability to the other is also instantiated by our very bodiliness, according to Butler.175

Desire, though, is a complicated and even a sometimes inconsistent affair in Butler’s thinking. The inconsistency lies in how desire relates to norms and discourse on the one hand, and how desire relates to norms and the person’s self on the other. As for discourse, desire at times transcends discourse,176 while at other times desire, for Butler, is the expression of norms in a discourse,177 or even an expression of the self’s desires against the norms in a discourse.178 Desire acquires transcendent qualities counter to Butler’s otherwise strict discursive immanentism.179

Moya Lloyd formulates the central challenge here when she writes: “[f]or while the terms by which persistence – or survival – is made possible are social terms, that is, norms that are the contingent effects of specific power relations, the desire for existence itself, as she deploys it, appears not to be.”180 As I have intended to show, and as Lloyd states elsewhere,181 it is a valid question to ask where desire derives from for Butler considering its varied job description in Butler’s thinking.

Yet the focus here is on how the desire for recognition is linked to personhood in Butler for it is this desire that makes the person fundamentally vulnerable to the other for its being. Recognition and vulnerability are therefore closely connected for Butler and this is exemplified in, for example, the concept of grievability.182

Recognition, personhood and grievability

The literature on recognition is vast.183 Many commentators refer the concept back to Hegel as a point of departure and the same goes for Butler.184 For Butler, the concept is particularly important given how recognition works to constitute personhood and human identity.

As was stated above, recognition is essential for the constitution of the person for Butler.185 But notably, the term is not prevalent in either Gender Trouble or Bodies That Matter.186 There recognition is mainly seen as a necessity for avoiding social exclusion.187 Butler points out in Bodies That Matter that recognition might play a part and even has “enormous power” for subject formation, but what defines the human here for Butler is still “the logic of repudiation.”188 Or, put differently, one’s human identity is defined by what differentiates me from you.

Butler’s interest is here mainly on how subjecthood is constituted negatively by difference and repudiation, a kind of apophatic theory of subject formation, to borrow a term from theology. Interestingly, however, the more Butler, on the one hand, emphasizes the importance of recognition for identity formation, the less, on the other hand, she appears to stress how identity is constituted negatively. With recognition, Butler opens up for the possibility of identity to be formed positively, by what is affirmed.

Even so, recognition is rarely, if ever, completely successful for Butler. Recognition is intimately connected to the act of interpellation but in the interpellation the subject-to-be will not be recognized in his or her entirety. Rather, in every interpellation the subject is also misrecognised.189 Butler writes that a “performative effort of naming can only attempt to bring its addressee into being, but there is always the risk of a certain misrecognition, and if one misrecognizes that effort to produce the subject, the production itself falters.”190

Still, whether through misrecognition or recognition, the human person is still constituted in relation to the other. As such, recognition is that which binds together and joins people as well as acknowledges differences for Butler. Recognition is developed by Butler into a central aspect of the constitution of human personhood.191 Whether consciously or not it is a response to the critique about difference and communality outlined above. It is no longer exclusively the case that “the specificity of identity is purchased through the loss and degradation of connection” in difference, or abjection.192 Rather, abjection has, for Butler, become a consequence of the failure of recognition; abjection is the effect of misrecognition.193

Misrecognition forms identity from what was not, or what failed to be. Butler maintains a dialectical thinking concerning recognition so that rejection and renunciation still play an important part for identity, especially in terms of misrecognition. There is an element of self-subversion in recognition since it is impossible to be recognized fully for Butler. Since recognition depends upon the recognition of the other and to maintain the otherness of the other is dependent upon the distinction between you and the other, then you can only be recognized by giving an account to the other. But this account will always be disrupted by performative actions since they will inform the “account-giving.” That is why failed recognition still affects the constitution of the person for Butler.194 Recognition is in need of constant reiteration, as all performative acts are for Butler. And this need for reiteration means that one’s identity as a human person is consistently dependent on the recognition of the other for its constitution.195 Hence, personhood is founded through the precariousness and vulnerability of life.

This is very similar to how the act of interpellation works for Butler in that it makes the subject dependent upon the other. It is not surprising therefore that Butler brings interpellation and recognition together and writes that “[i]nterpellation is an address that regularly misses its mark, it requires the recognition of an authority at the same time that it confers identity through successfully compelling that recognition. Identity is a function of that circuit, but does not preexist it.”196 Recognition, then, is incorporated in the process of identity formation of the person in the interpellation, but recognition has replaced the concept of abjection in Butler’s development of this process.197

Importantly, with recognition and vulnerability Butler lays more emphasis on the bodiliness of human existence, but in a way that makes the body other to itself. While the claim that our bodies are our “own” is important to Butler,198 at the same time when, as she writes,

we struggle for rights over our own bodies, the very bodies for which we struggle are not quite ever only our own. The body has its invariably public dimension. Constituted as a social phenomenon in the public sphere, my body is and is not mine. Given over from the start to the world of others, it bears their imprint, is formed within the crucible of social life; only later, and with some uncertainty, do I lay claim to my body as my own, if, in fact, I ever do.199

It is this precariousness of the body in political action that prompts Butler’s interest in embodiment.200 Our fundamental vulnerability and desire for recognition (a vulnerability for recognition?) of which this precarity is an expression leads Butler to emphasize the sociality and communality of the human condition even more. She asks: “[f]rom where might a principle emerge by which we vow to protect others from the kinds of violence we have suffered, if not from an apprehension of a common human vulnerability?”201 As Butler puts it, “vulnerability is one precondition for humanization,“ and this “takes place differently through variable norms of recognition.”202 Thus, the social constitution of the body and vulnerability are fundamental for the human condition for Butler because of our desire for recognition.

An example of this fundamental vulnerability is what Butler calls grievability.203 Grief is a primary example of both vulnerability and recognition because even the celebration of life presupposes the loss of life, and therefore the precariousness of life comes to the fore.204 In Butler’s words, “[i]f we take precariousness of life as a point of departure, then there is no life without the need for shelter and food, no life without dependency on wider networks of sociality and labor, no life that transcends injurability and mortality,”205 and “one’s life is always in some sense in the hands of the other.”206 As such, along with life’s precariousness, grief is an effect and sign of our dependence upon the other. But it has a sinister consequence for Butler, for if one’s life is not worth being grieved, that is, if it is not grievable, then it has not been a human life at all.207 Here grievability is psychologically as well as bodily fundamental:

After all, if my survivability depends on a relation to others, to a “you” or a set of “yous” without whom I cannot exist, then my existence is not mine alone, but is to be found outside myself, in this set of relations that precede and exceed the boundaries of who I am.208

My whole self is dependent upon the other and this makes vulnerability, of which grief is an example, an ontological assumption for Butler.209 Or as she writes, “[w]e are then not only vulnerable to one another – an invariable feature of social relations – but this very vulnerability indicates a broader condition of dependency and interdependency which changes the dominant ontological understanding of the embodied subject.”210 This is strongly linked with her ambition to find ways to recognize those whose lives are not recognized as human lives at all. Lately this has developed into an exploration for Butler as to how resistance is possible given the condition of a fundamental vulnerability,211 as well as into a radical commitment to nonviolence to preserve the life of the other.212

To summarize, recognition works as an affirmative concept in the “humanization” and formation of the person. With recognition, Butler stresses how personhood is constituted relationally and socially. With recognition, Butler works out how social concepts of the human body reveal a shared vulnerability that becomes the foundation for actions such as resistance. Embodiment, particularly the body’s dependence on the other for its sustenance, is another notion stressed by Butler due to the desire for recognition. The issue of recognition and the issue of vulnerability bring this section on Butler back to where it started, to the main purpose of Butler’s thinking, namely that of making the unrecognized life recognized and the unlivable life livable.213

This type of thinking will prove to be significant for the questions of social constructivism and biologist essentialism. The core lies in the question of relationality. Butler dismisses any essentialist solutions to the question of humanity, which leaves her to work and rework the concept of identity as socially constructed. Is she successful in this attempt to work out what could be called a relational or weak ontology of the person?214 Butler does, after all, call for a development of language about identity and personhood.215 Can theology help with this?

1 Annika Thiem, Unbecoming Subjects: Judith Butler, Moral Philosophy, and Critical Responsibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 8. See also Chambers & Carver, Judith Butler, 8.

2 Whether ethics and politics should be placed in opposition or not in Butler is a complex question. See Judith Butler, “Politics, Power and Ethics: A Discussion between Judith Butler and William Connolly,” Theory and Event 4, no. 2 (2000): 24-36 where Butler purports to be disturbed by the “turn to ethics” (5). Yet, as Lloyd points out, Butler has revised that position somewhat lately (Lloyd, Butler, 154). See also Moya Lloyd (ed.), Butler and Ethics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015); Moya Lloyd, “Towards a Cultural Politics of Vulnerability: Precarious Lives and Ungrievable Deaths,” in Terrell Carver & Samuel Allen Chambers (eds.), Judith Butler's Precarious Politics: Critical Encounters (London: Routledge, 2008), 102-104. Interestingly, in Butler’s most recent work she wants to work toward “the ethical in the political,” see Judith Butler, The Force of Nonviolence: The Ethical in the Political (London: Verso, 2020).

3 Judith Butler, “Precarious Life: The Obligations of Proximity,” in The Neale Wheeler Watson Lecture (Nobel Museum, Stockholm, 2011); Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 205; Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2006), xv. See further Sara Salih, “Introduction,” in Sara Salih & Judith Butler (eds.), The Judith Butler Reader (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 3; and Saba Mahmood, “Agency, Performativity and the Feminist Subject,” in Ellen T. Armour & Susan M. St. Ville (eds.), Bodily Citations: Religion and Judith Butler (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 180.

4 See Butler, Force, based on Butler’s 2018 Gifford lectures, where this argument is sharpened even to reject the exception of self-defense in a commitment to non-violence (Judith Butler, “My Life, Your Life: Equality and the Philosophy of Non-Violence,” The Gifford Lectures (University of Glasgow, Glasgow, 2018).

5 Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 176.

6 Butler, Undoing, 194.

7 Butler has had a significant impact in a wide variety of subjects, though, from her very earliest work up until today. See for example Linda M. G. Zerilli, “Feminists know not what they do: Judith Butler’s gender trouble and the limits of epistemology,” in Terrell Carver & Samuel Allen Chambers (eds.), Judith Butler's Precarious Politics: Critical Encounters (London: Routledge, 2008), 28-29; McNay, “Subject”; Margaret Sönser Breen & Warren J. Blumenfeld (eds.), Butler Matters: Judith Butler's Impact on Feminist and Queer Studies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); Bronwyn Davies, “Subjectification: The Relevance of Butler's Analysis for Education,” British Journal of Sociology of Education 27, no. 4 (2006): 425-438; Ellen T. Armour & Susan M. St. Ville (eds.), Bodily Citations: Religion and Judith Butler (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), vii; Miriam David et al., “Troubling Identities: Reflections on Judith Butler's Philosophy for the Sociology of Education,” British Journal of Sociology of Education 27, no. 4 (2006): 421-424; Terrell Carver & Samuel Allen Chambers (eds.), Judith Butler's Precarious Politics: Critical Encounters (London: Routledge, 2008) and Samuel A. Chambers & Terrell Carver, Judith Butler and Political Theory: Troubling Politics (New York: Routledge, 2008), 3ff.

Butler came to the fore in the early 1990s and became one of the leading thinkers in queer theory, but her thinking is not limited to gender issues (Elena Loizidou, Judith Butler: Ethics, Law, Politics (London: Routledge-Cavendish, 2007), 5; Gill Jagger, Judith Butler: Sexual Politics, Social Change and the Power of the Performative (London: Routledge, 2008), 1).