Mills, Catherine. Review of Annika Thiem's UNBECOMING SUBJECTS. NDPR (December 2008).

Thiem, Annika. Unbecoming Subjects: Judith Butler, Moral Philosophy, and Critical Responsibility. New York: Fordham UP, 2008. Annika Thiem's exploration of Judith Butler's work in the context of moral philosophy provides an insightful interpretation along with a provocative argument for a rapprochement of sorts between post-structuralism and normative philosophy on the question of ethics. Rather than repeating their supposed opposition because of moral philosophy's emphasis on problems of normativity, and post-structuralism's oft-claimed failure to address such questions, Thiem wishes to maintain a focus on normative claims while taking on the revision of subjectivity offered by Butler. She argues that Butler's recent work presents a number of productive challenges to moral philosophy, challenges which Thiem extends and fleshes out through the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Jean Laplanche, both of whom Butler also draws upon. The key claim that she makes throughout this discussion is that ethical responsibility cannot simply be thought of as a matter of response to another, but must also entail the question of responding well. Thus, questions of value are inherent to ethics but, at the same time, ethics must be predicated on a primary demand for response. Ethics, then, emerges in the tensions between living and living well. She further argues that ethics necessarily entails critique, since the future-oriented question of how to live well requires attention to the productive constraints of subject formation, along with contestation of the presuppositions entailed in ideas of the good life and justice. The book is divided into three parts, the first dedicated to developing an interpretation of Butler's work on subject formation, the second extending her reflections on responsibility and the third articulating the role of a particular conception of critique in ethics. The engagement with Butler's work is sympathetic, perhaps overly so. The book is largely dedicated to drawing out the ways that Butler has attempted to re-theorise subjectivity and related concepts of agency, desire and will through highlighting the constitutive operations of social norms and the implications of this for ethics. While referencing much of Butler's work, Thiem engages most thoroughly with Butler's recent book, Giving an Account of Oneself, which is her most explicit theorisation of ethical responsibility to date. In this text, Butler mobilizes the work of Levinas and Laplanche (among others) to theorise responsibility as stemming from the recognition of a fundamental vulnerability in the condition of being a subject. Thiem also traces Butler's engagement with figures such as Nietzsche, Freud, Foucault and Lacan among others. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=14826.