Book, Reporting to Oneself: Criticism of Ethical Violence[LS]

Language: Brazilian Portuguese. What does it mean to have an ethical life? In her first broad study of moral philosophy, Judith Butler offers us the outline for a new ethical practice, which responds to the need for critical autonomy and which is based on a new sense of what the subject is. Butler's starting point is our ability to answer questions like: “How should (I) act?” or “What should (I) do?” She shows that these questions can only be answered if we first ask who this self is that sees itself as obliged to give a certain type of account of itself and to act in a certain way. As the subject discovers that he cannot narrate himself without taking responsibility, at the same time, for the social conditions in which he arises, ethical reflection requires a social theory. Butler shows us in this book how difficult it is to report on oneself and how this lack of self-transparency and narrativity is crucial for an ethical understanding of the human being. In a brilliant dialogue with Adorno, Lévinas, Foucault and other thinkers, Butler offers us a critique of the moral subject, arguing that the transparent and rational ethical subject is an impossible construct that seeks to deny the specificity of what it is to be human. We can only know ourselves incompletely, and only in relation to a larger social world that has always preceded and shaped us in ways we are not able to fully grasp. If we are opaque to ourselves, how can the ethical act be defined by the explanation we give of ourselves? Doesn't an ethical system that holds us responsible for our full self-knowledge and our internal consistency inflict a kind of ethical violence on us, leading to a culture of self-censorship and cruelty? By reframing ethics as a project in which being ethical means becoming critical of the norms we never choose but that guide our actions, Butler illuminates what it means for us, fallible creatures, to create and share an ethic of vulnerability, humility, and of responsibility.