ABSTRACT
For a long time now I have been interested in what I see to be a parti-
cular tension in the work of Judith Butler. This is the tension between
her explicit commitment to producing ‘ontology itself as a contested
field’ by exposing how particular ontological claims are constructed and
then circulate (Butler in Meijer and Prins 1998: 279; see also White
2000) and Butler’s own unacknowledged ontological presuppositions. In
previous work I have explored this tension in terms of the relation
between agency and performativity-as-citationality in order to raise questions about Butler’s approach for an understanding of political
intervention and change (Lloyd 2007a). Here my focus is somewhat dif-
ferent. I am interested in the ethics that Butler has begun to develop in
writings such as Precarious Life, which will be my main focus, Undoing
Gender and Giving an Account of Oneself. In short, this is an ethics, indeed a
potentially global ethics, which issues out of a common human experience
of vulnerability, and particularly vulnerability to violence. What interests me
are the ontological assumptions that ground this ethics. My argument is two-fold: first, that Butler’s account of ethics relies
upon an idea of the ek-static subject that itself depends upon an unpro-
blematised and unexamined ontological claim concerning the desire for
existence; and, second, that even at those moments when Butler attempts
to rethink this desire in social terms, she does not go far enough. This is
because Butler fails to engage adequately with the historicity of the
social, that is, with the historical practices that constitute the social.
