Judith Butler + Spahr

In Judith Butler’s Against Ethical Violence, there is a lot of discussion about the “self” in relation to the “other.” According to Butler, the “I” stands as a part of, and because of, social conditions…which implicate it in “a set of moral norms” which “have a social character that exceeds a purely personal and idiosyncratic meaning” (7). In other words, the “I” does not stand apart from the social conditions which create it, and therefore cannot be purely “personal” or distinctive. Furthermore, she argues that the “self” is transformed by its relation with “others.” (and, as it were, a relation to the self since Butler claims that it is impossible to truly know the self, making the self just as much of an”other” as…another.) For Butler, the “self” is “transformed” upon “recognition” of the other…but we cannot know that self until the transformation has already occurred and so there is never a possibility of returning to a former “self” because the transformation has already occurred.
I related this to Spahr in many ways. Not only are the original residents of the island transformed by their relation to the people who colonize the island, but the colonizers…who eventually become residents, are also transformed by their relations with the people who lived there before colonial rule. In the early pages of the book, spahr writes, “[they felt lost] because of the new patterns that the history of the island left on their relationship with others. This is mainly a story about how the history of the island changed them, the story of the huehue haole and the tree canopy. It cannot help but be a story about how they were shaped by perhaps being perhaps not being perverts, but still it is more a story about three of them who moved to an island that was not theirs […] A story of how the island made them recognize themselves as they and how this recognition caused them to write with endless qualifiers and doubts” (21). So, as Butler suggests, the Triad becomes aware of the self through their recognition of the other, and that self is transformed in a way that causes them to “write with endless qualifiers and doubts” because even though they have come to know the self, they have come to also know how it is impossible to “truly” know the self.
I also related this to Stein in a great many of ways. Stein’s piece is all about questioning human nature because a great deal of what we call “human nature” is actually learned…yet we continue to try to enforce those conditions on people. I have a more comprehensive idea concerning this but as I am speaking about it in class today I will wait to write about it.