“You can’t critique the subject”

‘“You can’t critique the subject”’ draws upon the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler to show that philosophical critique has aimed not merely to reformulate subjectivity but to both elucidate its normalizing and therefore harmful effects and unsettle its uncritical acceptance as a necessary ground for intelligibility and meaningful action. The chapter fully elaborates the normalizing character of subjectivity by turning to Foucault’s 1980 and 1982 courses, On The Government of the Living and The Hermeneutics of the Subject, which reveal subjectivity to be grounded in and consequently characterized by the self-relation established during the early Christian era. Forged by way of the practices of baptism, penance, and (especially) confession, this mode of self-relation possesses the normalizing characteristics of obedience, conformity, individuation, and internalization; ultimately, it promotes the renunciation of self. Foucault also shows that despite its harmful effects and lack of ontological necessity, human beings have forged deep attachments to subjectivity as a mode of self-relation. I conclude the chapter by discussing why, as Butler puts it, “loosening” these attachments is especially fraught from a feminist perspective and arguing that doing so enhances feminist efforts toward countering sexual violence and sexual humiliation.