Giving an Account of Oneself - 2nd Edition by Judith Butler (Paperback)

About the Book

A pathbreaking account of ethics beyond the classically imagined subject, reissued with a new preface.

Book Synopsis

What does it mean to lead a moral life?

In their first extended study of moral philosophy, Judith Butler offers a provocative outline for a new ethical practice--one responsive to the need for critical autonomy yet grounded in the opacity of the human subject.

Butler takes as their starting point one's ability to answer the questions "What have I done?" and "What ought I to do?" They show that these questions can be answered only by asking a prior question, "Who is this 'I' who is under an obligation to give an account of itself and to act in certain ways?" Because I find that I cannot give an account of myself without accounting for the social conditions under which I emerge, ethical reflection requires a turn to social theory.

In three powerfully crafted and lucidly written chapters, Butler demonstrates how difficult it is to give an account of oneself, and how this lack of self-transparency and narratibility is crucial to an ethical understanding of the human. In dialogue with Adorno, Levinas, Foucault, and other thinkers, they eloquently argue the limits, possibilities, and dangers of contemporary ethical thought.

Butler offers a critique of the moral self, arguing that the transparent, rational, and continuous ethical subject is an impossible construct that seeks to deny the specificity of what it is to be human. We can know ourselves only incompletely, and only in relation to a broader social world that has always preceded us and already shaped us in ways we cannot grasp. If inevitably we are partially opaque to ourselves, how can giving an account of ourselves define the ethical act? And doesn't an ethical system that holds us impossibly accountable for full self-knowledge and self-consistency inflict a kind of psychic violence, leading to a culture of self-beratement and cruelty? How does the turn to social theory offer us a chance to understand the specifically social character of our own unknowingness about ourselves?

By recasting ethics as a project in which being ethical means becoming critical of norms under which we are asked to act, but which we can never fully choose, Butler illuminates what it means for us as "fallible creatures" to create and share an ethics of vulnerability, humility, and ethical responsiveness.

From the Back Cover

"A brave book by a courageous thinker."--Hayden White, author of Metahistory

"Hailed when it was first published, Giving an Account of Oneself is all the more significant for us now. Butler elegantly executes a double helix of argument that thinks sexuality as dispossession and, at the same time, the ethical demands of this dispossession--against settler-colonial statecraft, against occupation, and toward a political relationality for which we are still fighting."--Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox

A pathbreaking account of ethics beyond the classically imagined subject, reissued with a new preface.

What does it mean to lead a moral life? In their first extended study of moral philosophy, Judith Butler offers a provocative outline for a new ethical practice--one responsive to the need for critical autonomy yet grounded in the opacity of the human subject.

Butler offers a critique of the moral self, arguing that the transparent, rational, and continuous ethical subject is an impossible construct that seeks to deny the specificity of what it is to be human. We can know ourselves only incompletely, and only in relation to a broader social world that has always preceded us and already shaped us in ways we cannot grasp. If inevitably we are partially opaque to ourselves, how can giving an account of ourselves define the ethical act? And doesn't an ethical system that holds us impossibly accountable for full self-knowledge and self-consistency inflict a kind of psychic violence, leading to a culture of self-beratement and cruelty? How does the turn to social theory offer us a chance to understand the specifically social character of our own unknowingness about ourselves?

By recasting ethics as a project in which being ethical means becoming critical of norms under which we are asked to act, but which we can never fully choose, Butler illuminates what it means for us as "fallible creatures" to create and share an ethics of vulnerability, humility, and ethical responsiveness.

Judith Butler is Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley. They are the author, most recently, of Who's Afraid of Gender?

Review Quotes

"A brave book by a courageous thinker."---Hayden White, Author of Metahistory

"Hailed when it was first published, Giving an Account of Oneself is all the more significant for us now. Butler elegantly executes a double helix of argument that thinks sexuality as dispossession and, at the same time, the ethical demands of this dispossession--against settler-colonial statecraft, against occupation, and toward a political relationality for which we are still fighting."---Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox

"A powerful exploration of the intersection of identity and responsibility, Giving an Account of Oneself shows us Judith Butler at their best, in dialogue with some of the foremost thinkers of our age: Adorno, Foucault, Levinas, and Laplanche. Confronting the problem of identities that emerge only in relation to social and moral norms they may seek to contest, Butler proposes a rethinking of responsibility in relation to the limits of self-understanding that make us human."---Jonathan Culler, Cornell University

"In a time when moral certitude is used to justify the worst violence, Butler's nuanced reworking of what it means to be ethically responsible to ourselves and to others is welcome indeed."---Drucilla Cornell, Rutgers University

"In stunningly original interpretations of Adorno and Levinas, Judith Butler compellingly demonstrates that questions of ethics cannot avoid addressing the moral self's complicity with violence. By laying out the premises of a creative rereading, this study proves that the discussion of these two authors and their future legacy has, in a sense, barely begun. Butler writes in a truly Spinozistic spirit, mobilizing the greatest forces and joys of philosophical intelligence to counteract and redirect the cruelest and most destructive of human passions. Brilliantly argued and beautifully written, Giving an Account of Oneself is destined to become a classic, a must read for philosophers and students of present-day culture and politics alike."---Hent de Vries, New York University

About the Author

Judith Butler is Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley. Their books include Who's Afraid of Gender? (2024), What World Is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology (2022), The Force of Nonviolence (2020), Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015), Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009), Giving an Account of Oneself (2005), Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (2004), and Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990).