Theorizing emotions with Judith Butler: within and beyond the courtroom

Abstract

Focusing upon emotion entails a potential challenge, both to hegemonic notions of the human subject and to social inquiry. That challenge consists in the opportunity afforded by research on emotion to radicalize the decentering of the subject that is at the heart of poststructuralist theorizing. An opportunity in virtue of which certain biases that continue to be instantiated in contemporary theorizations of the subject – poststructuralist ones included – could be overcome: namely, biases towards the cognitive as well as the active, as against the passive-receptive, dimensions of being alive. These biases, I argue, unproductively circumscribe our understanding of self, thereby constraining the possibilities for our ‘becoming otherwise’ (Butler 2004, 173); an endeavor I would define as being at the heart of poststructuralism qua transformative ethical project. In particular, I address several writings by Butler to argue that the increasing turn to emotions potentially confronts us with our exposure to what we cannot control; with our vulnerability. A vulnerability which the said cognitive (i.e., rationalist) and praxeological biases of contemporary theorizing – which are entailed in but not limited to poststructuralism – risk disavowing and devaluing, thereby nurturing a residual ethos of (self-)control that is contrary to the aspirations of poststructuralism, and that constitutes us as defensive, rigid, masculinist subjects. However, these ethico-political possibilities of an ‘emotional turn’ within social inquiry are unlikely to be realized as long as we understand it in terms of a mere topic for research; without opening up to its implications for what we understand to be the very point of such inquiry. The potential promise of a prospective ‘emotion studies’ thus sits side by side with the possibility that the challenge it poses will be contained in virtue of a conventional mode of conducting such research, which risks stabilizing rather than unsettling the hegemonic psycho-social order, partly in virtue of an identitarian account of the human subject.

Keywords:

• emotions
• poststructuralism
• the subject
• critique of ‘identity’
• performativity
• melancholia/melancholy

Acknowledgement

Many thanks to Benno Gammerl for his insightful comments upon earlier versions of this paper.

Notes

1. Contra Reckwitz (this issue); Eitler and Scheer (2009); Harding and Pribram (2009, 4).

2. I thank Andreas Reckwitz for sharing a formulation similar to this one, and the participants in his colloquium in Frankfurt/Oder for sharing their thoughts.

3. People v. [Shen], No. ICR-12873 (Super. Ct. Riverside County, California, 1990). For the appellate opinion, which reveals the defendant's real name, see 286 Cal. Rptr. 868 (Cal. Ct. App. 1991), depublished by order, 23 January 1992.

4. My reading of the defense strategy in this trial as a whole is developed and substantiated extensively in Braunmühl (2012).

5. People v. [Shen], op.cit., Reporter's Transcript on Appeal: 1019–20.

6. People v. [Shen], op.cit., Reporter's Transcript on Appeal: 1089–90 (my emphasis).

7. I draw this and the following quotes from Butler (1997, 143–8) – a passage largely identical to Butler (1993, 233–6) – because I find some of the formulations used in the former text more pointed.