Philosophy Today 

About: Philosophy Today is an academic journal published by DePaul University. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Phenomenology (philosophy) & Contemporary philosophy. It has an ISSN identifier of 0031-8256. Over the lifetime, 1569 publications have been published receiving 7578 citations.

The Politics of Vulnerability: On The Role of Idealization in Butler and Habermas

Abstract: The particular theory of meaning that Judith Butler espouses has a certain political cash value.' This presents an interesting parallel with Jurgen Habermas, who developed a universal pragmatic account of language in order to ground rational discourse. Butler's recent work suggests that she, like Habermas, is looking for something like a formal framework for political agency. However, they address the problem of meaning and the problem of agency at different levels and in different ways. Unlike Habermas, who is interested in how to attain rational (uncoerced) consensus, Butler is more interested in how to change the status quo, how to break out of what she takes to be a coerced consensus.3 This gives rise to different models of agency. Butler can be seen to supplement the Habermasian categories of communicative and strategic action with what we might call disruptive or "diremptive" action. Although Butler in Excitable Speech presents a critical reading of Habermas, I want to explore the possibility that their positions are complementary. Perhaps a successful political theory needs to find a way to reconcile the two approaches without viewing either as ontologically primary.4 For while Butler promises (or seems to promise) emancipation without idealization,5 Habermas offers a much needed notion of context-transcendence and normativity for Butler's critical project. Butler derives a conception of what is involved in the democratic process from the equivocal nature of meaning and from its disjuncture from the utterance. If meanings are equivocal, then a speaker takes the risk of "meaning something other than what [she] thinks [she] utters" (ES 87). This risk spills over into democratic politics: This risk and vulnerability are proper to democratic process in the sense that one cannot know in advance the meaning that the other will assign to one's utterance, what conflict of interpretation may well arise, and how best to adjudicate the difference. The effort to come to terms is not one that can be resolved in anticipation but only through a concrete struggle of translation, one whose success has no guarantees. (ES 87-88) On the one hand, then, she says that the risk is a feature of the empirical process of democracy: the concrete struggle of translation may not get us anywhere by the end of the day. Yet on the other hand, the risk is inherent in the nature of language-and that claim seems to be a transcendental or ontological rather than an empirical one. For this type of linguistic vulnerability presumably precedes any concrete struggle of individuals since such individuals, on Butler's account, are constituted linguistically, a point to which I shall return. The distinction between these two levels of vulnerability-let's call one, for lack of better terminology, empirical and the other transcendental, since it refers to a condition of the possibility of subjection-is crucial. Yet in her criticism of Habermas, Butler systematically blurs and transgresses it. Some might argue that Habermas neglects this vulnerability. At one level (the transcendental), this charge is legitimate. However, I shall argue that there is no danger that Habermasian discourse, as a mechanism not only of conflict resolution but also of consensus formation, preempts the struggle of translation. The principal disagreement between Butler and Habermas does not lie in their differing conceptions of universality, as Butler implies. Rather, a more interesting difference between them concerns how consensus is renegotiated and how current standards and norms can be made more inclusive. Habermasian discourse is one mechanism for this.6 Yet it is not the only one and it may not always be applicable. In the latter sorts of situations, Butler's account offers an alternative. In what follows, then, I first give an account of Butler's theory of meaning and of what I take to be her objections to the Habermasian program. I then show why these objections miss their mark and argue that Butler needs to rely on some of the very notions for which she criticizes Habermas. …