Before the law? vulnerability and legal recognition

In Precarious Life, Butler turns to the Hegelian struggle for recognition in the context of her own meditations on vulnerability. Posting vulnerability as a resource for apprehending and producing commonality, Butler considers the ways that norms condition how it is that we perceive or recognize vulnerability. That is to say, vulnerability is a primary condition of being human. Yet, this vulnerability is itself posited, recognized, and constituted as vulnerability. Thus, we may fail to recognize others or ourselves as vulnerable. We may fail to recognize others at all. Vulnerability, then, has to be recognized and constituted and norms are one of the vehicles for this recognition and constitution. So, we have to think about vulnerability from within the field of power and the differential operation of norms of recognition. She writes:

When we recognize another, or when we ask for recognition for ourselves, we are not asking for an Other to see us as we are, as we already are, as we have always been, as we were constituted prior to the encounter itself. Instead, in the asking, in the petition, we have already become something new, since we are constituted by virtue of the address, a need and desire for the Other that takes place in language in the broadest sense, one without which we could not be. To ask for recognition, or to offer it, is precisely not to ask for recognition for what one already is. It is to solicit a becoming, to instigate a transformation, to petition the future always in relation to the Other. It is also to stake one's own being, and one's own persistence in one's being, in the struggle for recognition. This is perhaps a version of Hegel that I am offering, but it is also a departure, since I will not discover myself as the same as the "you" on which I depend in order to be.

To my mind, this encounter might also be thought as a scene of law, as a form of petitioning or coming before the law. Becoming here does not imply restoration or finality. It does imply the possibility of relation and change, of acknowledgement and responsiveness. Coming before the law changes the law. The law does not remain steadfast and impermeable. Rather, each application, each interpretation and extention, implies a 'this not that' that was not present prior to the encounter.

Comments

[Amish Lovelock]

The vulnerable human is a central trope of liberalism, right?

[Jodie]

I don't know, Amish, I always thought liberal theorists had no belly buttons.

[old]

last comment mine, not my wife's. sorry.

[Jodi]

My own comments aren't making it on the blog. Weird. Anyway, Amish, I'm glad you made this point. Butler writes as if this were not the case, but Judith Shklar's account of a liberalism of cruelty is premised on this notion.

[Keef]

Yes, Butler is vulnerable: that academic vulnerability is now the standard operating procedure of most postmodernist academics--as Nietzsche said years ago of liberals, they make a virtue out of their weakness. Indeed, that vulnerable academic liberalism-- a sort of ersatz vulnerability, since most Butlerites are ensconced in nice universities, protected by the entire state structure, really--is not even leftism of the partisan or worker sort; it's more like Vichy liberalism, the liberalism and quasi-melancholy of the libertine and socially successful parasite.