ABSTRACTThe Fence in Its Thousandth Year (2005), a startlingly complex moral exploration with an extraordinary rich text unique to Howard Barker’s unconventional dramatic aesthetic, makes a show of how self-opacity is built into our formation as a subject and how we emerge and transform in the context of our encounters with others. Analyzing this enigmatic play within the prism of Judith Butler’s theories on recognition and identity construction in the context of moral philosophy, this essay offers original observations around subject formation in relation to Barker’s particular way of constructing characters outside the bounds of normative morality. While Butler corroborates the impossibility of giving an exhaustive account of the self and emphasises the narrative identity to be essentially fictional, Photo, Barker’s blind character in The Fence, occupies the impossible position of being present at the scene of his birth as he makes a phantasmal regression to the infantile to give a first-hand account of his own emergence. The characters’ pursuit of ecstasy gets ethical as they are compelled outside themselves to dramatise the reciprocity of giving and taking recognition. They cannot survive unless they provide a narrative account of themselves, and they mature as they give their accounts up. The Fence is a story of struggling to reach the other through physical and emotional fences and reveals unknowingness about oneself as a fundamental vulnerability in the condition of being a human.