Giving an Account of Oneself: Twentieth Anniversary Edition, with a New Preface by the Author

"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?