Butler's Account Research Articles

Ontology as ideology: A critique of Butler's theory of precariousness

Ontology as ideology: A critique of Butler's theory of precariousness

Towards a performative understanding of deservingness: Merit, gender and the BBC pay dispute

Drawing largely on a high‐profile case of unequal pay at the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) as an illustrative example, this conceptual article considers differences and interrelationships between merit and deservingness, where the latter captures how, through appropriate performances, merit is given recognition and value. We propose a performative understanding of deservingness that highlights its gendered and embodied dimensions. Informed by Judith Butler's account of gender performativity, we show that, while merit is conventionally conceptualized as a relatively fixed set of attributes (qualifications, skill) 'attached' to the individual, deservingness captures how, in gendered terms, value and recognition are both claimed and conferred. As we argue, a gendered, deserving subject does not pre‐exist but is performatively constituted through embodied practices and performances of what is seen as worthy in a particular time and place.

Ayotzinapa

Abstract This article offers an analysis of some of the reasons why the unveiling of the truth in the Ayotzinapa case, in which forty-three students enrolled in a rural teaching school in Mexico were forcibly taken and then disappeared, must not be postponed. To make a strong case for mourning as a political right, the article first analyzes Hannah Arendt's argument according to which only forgiveness can change a violent course of action, but in order for forgiveness to be offered, the crime to be pardoned must be precisely named. The article then shows how Judith Butler's politics of mourning crosses paths with Arendt's valorization of truth in politics, because both argue for the centrality of reality testing in mourning. In order to add to Butler's account of collective mourning, the article concludes by returning to Freud's psychoanalytic account of the work of mourning, where factual truth proves indispensable to the construction of any history.

Poetry as a way of life: aesthetics and askesis in the German eighteenth century

Trop, Gabriel. Poetry as a Way of Life: Aesthetics and Askesis in the German Eighteenth Century. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2015. 388pp. $89.95 (hardcover).Poetry as a Way of Life rereads the works of Holderlin, Novalis, and various rococo poets (e.g., Gleim, Uz, von Hagedorn, Brockes) through a methodological lens that takes each poem as an aesthetic exercise or ensemble of such exercises. Most generally, these exercises stimulate processes of cognition and imagination in the reader as well as retraining her perception of sensuous particulars. An opening discussion of Baumgarten's aesthetic reclamation of the sensuous modalities of knowing allows Trop to isolate various malleable dispositions of mind and body opened up and reconfigured by the aesthetic exercises staged in and as every poem. Such dispositions include inner sensibility, or attentiveness to one's own perceptual processes, the imagination as rendering the absent present, and memory as a cognitive operation involved in the retrospective generation of coherence from seemingly discrete, unrelated past events.This suggestive reconstruction of Baumgarten's aesthetics in terms of a typology of aesthetic exercises forms the starting point for a rich theoretical discussion, in which Trop distinguishes his notion of the aesthetic exercise from other paradigms of performativity, such as Sloterdijk's idea of anthropotechnics, Hadot's spiritual exercise, and Butler's account of performance. Aesthetic exercises for Trop are neither instrumental (directed at a desired end-state or habit, the instilling of a new capacity such as bicycle-riding or arrow-shooting) nor teleological (oriented toward an immanent end, such as eudaimonia or the virtuous life). Unlike pragmatically oriented exercises, aesthetic exercises possess no immanent telos. Unlike the second paradigm of the spiritual exercise as discussed in Pierre Hadot's studies of ancient philosophy, Trop's aesthetic exercises are not characterized by any claim to universal validity, for they do not seek to convert their reader/listener via her guided restaging of an uncontestable epistemic insight or truth-event. A third paradigm consists in socio-discursive practices of subjectformation, such as those described by Butler's notion of performance, Foucault's care of the self, and Bourdieu's habitus, which similarly revoke any claim to universal validity for all subjects, instead accounting for how the dynamics of subject-formation may be hijacked or reinvented by subjects themselves. Trop notes that such accounts of socio-discursive self-fashioning nonetheless remain parasitic on historically given normative codes of conduct. Unlike these practices, aesthetic exercises are not dependent on given normative codes, their normative horizon instead projected (and perturbed) by the poems themselves.When Trop provocatively asks, sort of self does this text call into being, what practices of life does it invoke? (11), he thus introduces a paradigm of poetic performativity that brackets questions of poetic performance's pragmatic orientation or immanent telos, the epistemic validity of its truth content or truth-event, as well as its normative status. The payoff achieved through this bracketing is primarily methodological, allowing Trop to sidestep productively questions of how form relates to content (whether functioning as its mimetic enactment or its performative contradiction), instead interpreting each poem as a dynamic bundle of operations that interlock, reinforce or even undermine one another, and ultimately affect the reader. Indeed, an implicit aesthetics of reception seems to underlie the idea of an aesthetic exercise, one in which the reader's reception of a poem is an essentially active posture of receptivity, a willed openness to be reconfigured in one's sensorium and cognitive apparatus.The heart of the book lies in its richly sophisticated yet clear close readings. In three core chapters on Holderlin, Novalis, and rococo poets such as Gleim, Uz, and Brockes, Trop not only devotes close attention to individual poems and poetic lines, but integrates systematic investigation of philosophical and poetological theories into the minutiae of close reading. …

‘Pedagogy of discomfort’ and its ethical implications: the tensions of ethical violence in social justice education

This essay considers the ethical implications of engaging in a pedagogy of discomfort, using as a point of departure Butler's reflections on ethical violence and norms. The author shows how this attempt is full of tensions that cannot, if ever, be easily resolved. To address these tensions, the author first offers a brief overview of the notion of pedagogy of discomfort and discusses its relevance with Foucault's idea of ‘ethic of discomfort’ and the promise of ‘safe classroom.’ Then, he focuses on Butler's account of ethical violence and norms to show how the subject's constitution and regulation are inextricably linked to violence in several ways. In the final part of the paper, the author turns more specifically to the ways in which a pedagogy of discomfort might entail ethical violence, suggesting how the turn to a nonviolent ethics might become possible or whether the ethical resonances of that challenge will always entail a degree of ambivalence.

Worldmaking and Worldbreaking: Pussy Riot's ‘Punk Prayer’

This article critiques Nelson Goodman's seminal account of worldmaking on the basis that it focuses on the abstract at the expense of the concrete and therefore over-emphasises rightness and coherence in the creation of world versions. Suggesting that his account ought not to be abandoned altogether, Goodman's five worldmaking processes are used in conjunction with Judith Butler's account of gesture as event. The article suggests that worldmaking inevitably involves worldbreaking not simply in the sense of transforming already existing world versions but in terms of the co-existence of world versions within a single location. Pussy Riot's action ‘Mother of God, Chase Putin Away’ in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour forms the case in point, drawing out the dynamic between worldmaking and worldbreaking and showing how it is inevitably and powerfully bound up with performance and context.

Gender, Dissenting Subjectivity and the Contemporary Military Peace Movement in Body of War

This article considers the gendered dynamics of the contemporary military peace movement in the United States, interrogating the way in which masculine privilege produces hierarchies within experiences, truth claims and dissenting subjecthoods. The analysis focuses on a text of the movement, the 2007 documentary film Body of War, which portrays the antiwar activism of paralyzed Iraq veteran Tomas Young, his mother Cathy and wife Brie. Conceptualizing the military peace movement as a potentially counter-performative reiteration of military masculinity, drawing on Butler's account of gender, subjectivity formation and contestation, and on Derrida's notion of spectrality (the disruptive productivity of the “present absence”), the article makes visible ways in which men and women who comprise the military peace movement perform their dissent as gendered subjects. Claims to dissenting subjecthood are unevenly accorded within the productive duality that constitutes the military peace movement, along gendered lines that can reproduce the privileges and subordinations that underpin militarism.

Resilience, normativity and vulnerability

Does the critical discourse about resilience reiterate the problematic dichotomy between suffering and agency that the concept of resilience inscribes? In this discussion piece, I engage with Brad Evans' and Julian Reid's reflections on resilience in a recent issue of this journal. Although I share with Evans and Reid a normative critique of the concept of resilience, I am cautious about their ontological critique of vulnerability and am critical of their identification of finitude with learning how to die – a position which overlooks the significance of natality. Rather than arguing that vulnerability precludes political transformation as Evans and Reid do or that vulnerability enables political coalition as in Judith Butler's account of precarity, one should ask: how is vulnerability framed? I argue for framing vulnerability through a critical theory of the victim which explores the interconnections between injurability and agency, rather than treating them as oppositional terms.

Undoing attitudes: subjectivity and ethical change in the Go Back to Where You Came From documentary

In the context of Australian debates about refugees and asylum seekers, this article examines the relationship between attitude, as a performative articulation of selfhood, and ethics of non-violence and welcome. Exploring how attitude change has been represented in the narrative of the Go Back To Where You Came From documentary, it is argued that attitude is a concept indelibly fixed within discourses of refugee arrivals in Australia and attitude change regularly posited as the process towards ethics. An example of attitude change in the documentary is discussed through Butler's ethics of non-violence and the ways in which recognition and the recognizability of the other operate to promote or stem an ethical responsiveness or welcome. This is followed by looking at how the Butler's account of frames as the social and political mechanisms that can prevent the recognition of the other as human or worthy of hospitality can be expanded to show how the production of an ethical relationship is aided by a disturbance in selfhood such that a subject can recognize his or her own vulnerability and hence the vulnerability of the other. How an expanded theory of ethics and hospitality plays out through attitude change is highlighted.

The Problem of Names and Subjectivity in Corneille’s Rodogune

Imprisoned in the Bastille, Voltaire's Ingenu is introduced by his cellmate to French theater. After Racine's Iphigenie, Phedre, Andromaque, and Athalie have sent the young Huron into tearful rapture, the Jansenist recommends another tragedy: Lisez lui dit Gordon; on dit que c'est chefd'oeuvre du theatre; les autres pieces qui vous ont fait tant de plaisir sont peu de chose en comparaison. Corneille's favorite of his own tragedies, (1) however, leaves the Ingenu perplexed: Apres avoir lu tres attentivement la piece, sans autre dessein que celui d'avoir du plaisir, il regardait son ami avec des yeux secs et etonnes, et ne savait que dire. (2) The bafflement, or perhaps indifference, of Voltaire's fictional reader differs enormously from the response of early modern theater audiences, terrified by Corneille's portrait of evil in the tragedy's undoubted heroine, Cleopatre. (3) Mlle Dumesnil's performance, for instance, was so powerful that le parterre tout entier, par un mouvement d'horreur aussi vif que spontane, recula devant elle, de maniere a laisser un grand espace vide entre ses premiers rangs et l'orchestre. On the same occasion, the actress was apparently punched in the back by an old soldier crying, Vas, chienne, a tous les diables, an action she took as the most flattering praisa she had ever received. (4) The response of Voltaire's character, particularly when contrasted with that of the theatre audience, perfectly illustrates Serge Doubrovsky's description of Rodogune as une enigme pour la critique; (5) for if scholars have debated the problem of evil in the tragedy, (6) its analysis of power, (7) religion, (8) and providence, (9) and its depiction of gender relations, (10) one of its fundamental problems--that of the heroine's name--remains unresolved. By employing various theoretical paradigms, particularly Judith Butler's account of naming and subjection, this article proposes a solution to that problem and, by demonstrating that Rodogune is concerned with the formation and integrity of the self, it also aires to show that Cornelian tragedy has metaphysical rather than exclusively political dimensions. (11) The public display of the name is, as Jean Starobinski has argued, fundamental to the nature of the Cornelian hero: Chez Corneille, l'ostentation et defi prendront souvent la forme d'une exhibition du nom. Il suffit que heros reaffirme son nom, et se proclame fidele a celui-ci: il se sera ainsi 'decouvert tout entier' aux yeux d'un temoin universel. (12) Certainly names are central to Rodogune's plot, which hinges on two acts of naming by the two principal female characters. While the play's dedication to the prince de Conde values warfare and political action as honorable occupations for a man, within the tragedy itself a woman can hold no lasting political power in her own right: Le peuple epouvante, qui deja dans son ame / Ne suivait qu'a regret les ordres d'une femme, / Voulut forcer la reine a choisir un epoux (1.1.47-49). Cleopatre can now no longer rule as regent, (13) and so must reveal the name of her eldest son and heir: Un seul mot aujourd'hui maitre de ma fortune / M'ote, ou donne a jamais sceptre, et Rodogune, says Antiochus (1.1.75). Cleopatre is aware that her power derives from this act of nomination (the giving of a proper name that identifies and constitutes a character) as she tells Ne saurais-tu juger si je nomme un Roi, C'est pour commander, et combattre pour moi? J'en ai choix en main avec droit d'ainesse, J'userai bien du droit que j'ai de nommer. (2.2.493-98) In the secondary plot, the royal princes and Laonice would have the taciturn Rodogune disclose the name of the man she loves: Garde-toi de nommer mon vainqueur (1.5.385). Both Cleopatre and Rodogune are thus compelled to perform acts of predication in that they must attach to preexisting names a title (of heir or lover) that would clarify the identity of another character. …

The Uses and Abuses of Joseph Butler's Account of Forgiveness: Between the Passions and the Interests

The Uses and Abuses of Joseph Butler's Account of Forgiveness: Between the Passions and the Interests

Performative Bengali Masculinity: The Rhetoric of Becoming in Bengali Popular Cinema of the 1950s

This article seeks to engage with the notion of performativity and Bengali masculinity in the popular Bengali cinema of the 1950s. I refer to the popular Bengali film Sare Chuattor/Seventy Four and a Half (1953) to consider, along the lines of Judith Butler's account of performative identity, Bengali popular cinema's representation of Bengali middle-class masculinity in the 1950s as a complex, coercive and regulatory normative ideal that tended not only to serve culturally conservative aims, but also to constitute an exclusionary practice. Using the film as a case in point, this article attempts to show how popular Bengali melodramas foregrounded the rhetoric of becoming that was conspicuous in the Bengali male in the immediate post-independence period. The basic argument is that if indeed there is a notion of hegemonic Bengali masculinity, then it is always marked by a constitutive contingency a failure of complete determination that ensures its permanent instability, and, at the same time, its internal and positive condition of possibility.

Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (review)

Reviewed by: Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? Larry S. McGrath Judith Butler . Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?New York: Verso, 2009. 193 pages. The release of Judith Butler's most recent work, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?, marks the expansion of the author's already expansive theoretical corpus by employing the critical models developed therein to explore how modern warfare represents certain lives as more or less worthy of grief. The question of how grievability undergoes framing is politically pertinent. She begins by briefly acknowledging that the election of Barack Obama, which occurred after the book's completion, poses future possibilities (we hope ameliorating) for which she cannot account. This, coupled with the diminishment, though by no means termination, of America's occupation of Iraq may seem to subdue the importance of Butler's inquiry: through what frames are lives registered as recognizable, warranting solidarity or protection, and whose loss spurs mourning? Not only does the salience of Butler's analysis [End Page 1232] outlast Iraq's occupation, the intensification of America's intervention in Afghanistan demands such critical reflection more than ever. News media frame the conflict as a question of whether to escalate troop commitments and what regional authorities to endorse. The logics of military security, national interest, and territorial sovereignty, shroud how Western audiences recognize Afghani lives. It is the project of Butler's work to demonstrate how these frames differentiate what lives appear more and less valuable; they secure not only the interpretive schemes through which some lives appear more like human lives than others but also determine what makes the lives at stake distinctly human lives. At stake, for Butler, is the 'precariousness' of lives. Certain lives do not appear in danger, their precariousness does not warrant recognition, because they are not recognized as lives at all. Such lives share their mutual precarity, and Butler seeks out the possibilities for recognizing them as precarious. Butler crafts the notion of the frame by reflecting on the practices through which American audiences comprehend the human costs of war. The first chapter posits the frame outside Marxist models of ideology and against epistemologically loaded schemes of interpretation. Media representations and political discourse of life put frames into operation by differentiating "the cries we can hear from those we cannot, the sights we can see from those we cannot, and likewise at the level of touch and even smell" (51). Butler's account of the frame here focuses on its affective dimension; its sensation impacts viewers of America's conflicts viscerally and immediately. The second chapter builds on this treatment of sensation's framed reception by considering its transmission via eyewitness accounts, particularly war photographs. Butler contends that photographs' affect, traversing the ensemble of content, perspective, and context of reception, frames Iraqi life. Photographs themselves advance the argument that the lives they depict are precarious, and deserve to be recognized as such, prior to or independent of an overtly discursive form of argument. Following what is arguably the most incisive, and poignantly delivered chapter, the third turns to the cultural framing of the inter-relation of the rights of different minority groups: specifically, how antagonism informs the relation between religious and sexual minorities. Butler pursues a strategy by which a leftist politics can confront homophobia and anti-Islamic dogma alongside each other. Considering a case in Holland as a primary example, she examines the ways in which the Dutch government mobilizes homosexuality as an emblem of modernity to exclude presumptively pre-modern Muslim communities. By delicately situating seemingly disparate cultural instances in dialogue, from the Dutch Civil Integration Exam to the French PACS (pacte civil de solidarité), Butler demonstrates the possibilities of differently-framing liberal models of hegemonic exclusion that render struggles against religious and sexual recognition incompatible. The frame is thus shown to be a site of political negotiation: it both orients war's representation and is subject to critical reorientations. The fourth chapter, an earlier version of which was published in The British Journal of Sociology, pursues this question of political [End Page 1233] strategy further by revisiting the Hegelian dimensions of her earlier work. Taking the framing of cultural antagonism...

Written in Skin: SuicideGirls

Suicidegirls.com is a website which is both an online community, but also a softcore pin-up site, where the models feature extensive body modifications in the form of tattoos and piercings. The website promotes a democratic approach to the photo shoots, as the models remain in control, not the photographer. Marked by their body modifications, the Suicide Girls (as they call themselves), they actively attempt to subvert the typical pin-up conventions, by transgressing mainstream standards of beauty. In what seems remarkably similar to Judith Butler's account of subversive bodily acts, the pin-up shoots of the Suicide Girls mount a critique of a culture's view of the body as a natural entity. Cultural borders are crossed, as the bodies of the Suicide Girls embed ink into their bodies in the form of tattoos, and gender is played as a subversive game against the expectations of pin-up conventions. Acting as different and impure bodies, the Suicide Girls represent a threat to conventional conceptions of the body.

Philosophy of Education and the Gigantic Affront of Universalism

Universalism in philosophy, argue Penny Enslin and Mary Tjiattas, tends to be regarded as an affront to particular affiliations, an act of injustice by misrecognition. While agreeing with criticisms of some expressions of universalism, they take the view that anti-universalism has become an orthodoxy that deflects attention from pressing issues of global injustice in education. In different ways, recent reformulations of universalism accommodate particularity and claims for recognition. Defending a qualified universalism, they argue, through a discussion of the Education for All campaign, that the present focus on recognition should be widened to address redistribution and representation as elements of global justice in education. In her response to Enslin and Tjiattas, Sharon Todd expresses sympathy for their aspiration towards a ‘qualified universalism’, but she seeks to go beyond the dichotomy of universalism versus anti-universalism by way of a discussion of aspects of the work of Judith Butler. Butler's emphasis on cultural translation offers a way, it is claimed, to think about the universal that transcends the oppositional relation between culture and commitment to universals. In the light of this she advocates an approach that involves neither universalism nor anti-universalism but ‘critique of universality’. Thus, the task of translation, on Butler's account, prevents universality from being a standard or home-base from which we can judge the world and turns it instead into an ongoing struggle for intelligibility. In their rejoinder, Enslin and Tjiattas reject any charge that their own account has fallen into a simple dichotomisation of universalism and anti-universalism, and reaffirm their commitment to a form of universalism in which (a) partial or contextual considerations count in ethical deliberations, and (b) values and principles are subject to reflexive renegotiation in democratic deliberations, which provides the means of their justification and the source of their legitimacy. This yields, they claim, a non-standard form of contractualism that is both culturally sensitive and open-ended. They suggest in conclusion that the debate between themselves and Todd raises questions about whether the analytical and continental traditions can concede one another's place in the philosophy of education.

The Unaccountable Subject: Judith Butler and the Social Conditions of Intersubjective Agency

Judith Butler's Kritik der ethischen Gewalt1 represents a significant refinement of her position on the relationship between the construction of the subject and her social subjection. While Butler's earlier texts reflect a somewhat restricted notion of agency, her Adorno Lectures formulate a notion of agency that extends beyond mere resistance. This essay traces the development of Butler's account of agency and evaluates it in light of feminist projects of social transformation.

The Unaccountable Subject: Judith Butler and the Social Conditions of Intersubjective Agency

Judith Butler's Kritik der ethischen Gewalt1represents a significant refinement of her position on the relationship between the construction of the subject and her social subjection. While Butler's earlier texts reflect a somewhat restricted notion of agency, her Adorno Lectures formulate a notion of agency that extends beyond mere resistance. This essay traces the development of Butler's account of agency and evaluates it in light of feminist projects of social transformation.

The Unaccountable Subject: Judith Butler and the Social Conditions of Intersubjective Agency

Judith Butler's Kritik der ethischen Gewalt1 represents a significant refinement of her position on the relationship between the construction of the subject and her social subjection. While Butler's earlier texts reflect a somewhat restricted notion of agency, her Adorno Lectures formulate a notion of agency that extends beyond mere resistance. This essay traces the development of Butler's account of agency and evaluates it in light of feminist projects of social transformation.

Inverting History in Octavia Butler's Postmodern Slave Narrative

Beyond of the historical slave narrative, Octavia Butler's 1988 may also be deemed a contemporary science fiction novel, though the author herself claims that is fantasy.... There is no science Kindred (Kenan 495). (1) Butler's vision the novel is certainly not utopic. Whatever its narrative context, Butler's novel looks to the antebellum slave narrative form as a background for exploring issues of literacy opposition to the reality of possession, oppression, and violence. Content and form intersect the novel as the veiling of temporal boundaries blurs the notion of slavery transcended. By zigzagging the time frame of the novel from past to present, points to ways which past and present become interchangeable. She also writes of plausible historical actions and relationships, filling in possible gaps that may be evident classic slave narratives. assumes a non-Western conceptualization of history--one which history is cyclical, not linear--in order to demonstrate ways which certain forms of race and gender oppression continue late into the twentieth century and beyond. She incorporates postmodern fiction literary techniques to critique the notion that historical and psychological slavery can be overcome. Unlike other contemporary revisions of the traditional slave narrative--most famously, Charles Johnson's Middle Passage, Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose, and Toni Morrison's Beloved--Butler's neo-slave narrative, at least part, takes place the relative present. As such, it more clearly blurs history and the present (though the neo-slavery novel by convention imposes the past onto the present). The novel liberally borrows from very modern and postmodern ideas concerning time and continuity. Like John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor or E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime, attempts a contemporary re-write of an historical or plausibly historical event. Thus, she reclaims control over text and ideas, significant postmodern concepts. This drive to contain and to define one's personal or communal history can be seen many contemporary novels. Ultimately, Butler's novel remains part contemporary postmodern text, part historical slave narrative. One might label a sort of inverse slave narrative. Born into freedom herself 1950, its protagonist Dana becomes enslaved on her twenty-sixth birthday 1976, the bicentennial year of US independence, and, as many actual slave rebels reported, she must prepare for a dangerous, consequential escape. Dana's escape, with its trials, pitfalls, and obstacles--including capture by her white owner-ancestor Rufus and his slave overseer Weylin--parallels numerous slave narrators' accounts of flight from bondage. It is not simply Butler's account of Dana's enslavement and escape that resemble antebellum slavery narratives', but also her novel's concentration on rhetorical strategies of subterfuge, its record of resistance and oppression, and its concentration on the separation of families. Underscoring the novel's slave narrative conventions, Sandra Y. Govan claims that Butler treats the recurring themes of casual brutality, forcible separation of families, the quest for knowledge, the desire to escape, the tremendous work loads expected of slaves as efficiently as any of the narrators or documentary histories discussing the slavery experience (Homage 91). (2) By assuming the form of the slave narrative and by shifting its focus from past to present to past, Butler's novel stresses the ways which present-day African Americans might suffer from the markings of the past. Adapting genres is, of course, a very postmodern concept. Both John Barth and Thomas Pynchon have taken the form of the 18th-century novel to write contemporary updates of their own. Butler's agenda, however, is much less playful than theirs--and much more political. Of course, to be reminiscent of a slave narrative, must present a world of intense and implacable oppression, possession, and violence. …

Body and Language: Butler, Merleau-Ponty and Lyotard on the Speaking Embodied Subject

In this article three viewpoints on the relation of body and language are discussed: the poststructuralist viewpoint of Judith Butler, the phenomenological viewpoint of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the postmodernist viewpoint of Jean-François Lyotard. The reason juxtaposing for these three accounts is twofold. First, the topic requires a combination of post-structuralist and phenomenological insights, and second, the accounts are supplementary. Butler's account raises questions that can be answered with the help of Merleau-Ponty's work. Lyotard's anthropology of the inhuman offers a perspective of finitude that is missing in the other two. The aim of the article is to outline the necessary ingredients of an adequate conception of the speaking embodied subject.