Enacting a Self-limiting Practice of Cultural Translation on the Part of First World Intellectuals in Judith Butler’s Precarious Life

Abstract

This paper carefully examines Judith Butler's ideological change after Gender Trouble through reading Precarious Life. The issue of sexual autonomy emphasized in Gender Trouble is extended to thinking about relationality in Precarious Life. Even the progressive content of freedom can be violent if it is contained in a single universality that does not consider speaker’s position. This is Butler's cognitive change that demanding liberation itself cannot be understood outside of the speaker's position or relationship with others. The encounter with others due to the 9/11 incident and the American reaction to it act as a decisive moment that brought about this cognitive shift. The United States, as the First World, waged war in the name of ‘freedom’ and ‘progression’, excluding others called Islam. Precarious Life is a text that contains Butler's thoughts and reflections on her position as a first-world intellectual. How can the demand for freedom be contained in the competition between various cultural contexts and multiple cultural norms rather than a single universality? To answer this question, Butler reconstructs universality in terms of cultural translation. The universality including cultural translation is not acknowledging the diversity of each position, but is a process of breaking down the sovereign status of the subject by understanding the alterity essential to the formation of the self. This is not a process of inclusion or assimilation, but a change in the normative system of both languages. Butler explains this process of translation as ecstatic relationality. Ecstatic relationality goes beyond simple emotional empathy and shows that the other is at the root of the composition of the subject, and that we are all dependent on the social system. Butler criticizes the norms that dehumanize the other by not responding to the other's address, and argues for breaking down the privileged status of the people in the first world. The ethical responsibility shown in Precarious Life is the process of cultural translation as a self-limiting practice to change the norms of her place as a first-world intellectual.