The Post-Structural Effect on the Life-World: Re-Thinking Critical Subjectivity and Ethics through Existential Performance and the Constitutive Power of Performativity

Abstract

In this essay, I analyze and discuss how Judith Butler's concept of performativity works as a critique of critical existential conceptions of subjectivity as well as a corrective in regards to understanding and delimiting how ethical questions of individual responsibility and agency can be understood. In line with the fundamental insights of Emmanuel Levinas's post-humanist philosophy of the Other, Butler seeks to approach the conditions under which subjectivity unfolds, relying primarily on a critically oriented conception of discourse and the need to break ties with the narcissism of an ontologically grounded subject. Particularly I analyze the concept of existential performance, as understood through a critical appropriation of intentionality and facticity as found in traditional existential phenomenology. In so doing, I display how the post-structural concept of performativity deconstructs the ontological assumptions of critical existential performance, displaying fundamental problems imbedded in existential philosophy. By illuminating an uncritical assumption imbedded in existential thinking about the simple "thereness" of the subject, and by analyzing the conditions under which the subject is produced, it will be seen that the task of existential phenomenology needs to be radically re-evaluated. In the vein of Levinas's shifting of the grounds of phenomenology, this essay will make clear that the concept of performativity does not eradicate the agency of the subject, but rather works to explain how, due to the nature of history and discourse, the agential subject of humanism has been normatively assumed in our day to day lives. By critiquing and contrasting critical existential performance with the constitutive power of performativity, this essay works to establish the need for a post-humanist attitude of humility, one that can guide us in thinking through the possibilities of ethical subjectivity without installing an uncritical awareness of the very tools of our inquiries.