Giving an Account of Oneself by Judith Butler

Author:Judith Butler [Butler, Judith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-02-17T05:00:00+00:00

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Against Ethical Violence

This consideration of a Copernican revolution in the conception of the human being leads Laplanche to a brief discussion of Levinas.

There he writes that Levinas’s early work on Husserl interested him, but that what follows could not be said to have influenced him (162). He states his major difference with Levinas: ‘‘the Copernican decentering holds not only for the autocentric perceptive subject and for the cogito, but also for the subject who is considered autocentric in time; centered in his adult being’’ (163). He believes that Levinas, like Heidegger, failed to decenter adult experience or, rather, failed to see that adult experience is decentered by infantile experience all along: ‘‘If one seeks to take this seriously, according to Freud, the primacy of infancy decenters us as irremediably—and as without reflexivity—as the unconscious or the id’’ (163). The primary question toward the other that emerges from the perspective of infancy is: ‘‘Who is this person who speaks to me? [ Quelle est la personne qui me parle? ]’’ (163). The other who speaks to me is not in a ‘‘reciprocal’’

exchange or balanced communication. The situation is, from the start, asymmetrical, and the ‘‘I’’ finds itself disarmed and passive in its relation to the message from the other. Under these conditions, the infant can make only an inadequate translation and response.

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