What happens to ethical discourse when it begins by interrogating the givenness of the moral subject? This question lies at the heart of Butler’s ethics. The stakes of that question emerge most saliently in Butler’s reading of Foucault in Giving an Account of Oneself, where they engage, specifically, a famous Foucauldian line from 1968: “Discourse is not life; its time is not yours.” How might we read, today, the political stakes of Butler’s ethical uptake of Foucault against the backdrop of the anti-authoritarian, anticolonial 1960s Tunisian scene that gave rise to Foucault’s comments about discourse and time? Responding to this question, this essay reframes Foucault’s antihumanism as explicitly anticolonial. In doing so, it brings to the fore crucial differences and overlaps between Foucault and Butler with regard to subjectivity, politics, and the question of the human.
Unbearable Speech
lynne huffer is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy at Emory University. She is the author of six books, including a trilogy on Foucault’s ethics of eros published by Columbia University Press: Foucault’s Strange Eros (2020); Are the Lips a Grave?: A Queer Feminist on the Ethics of Sex (2013); and Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory (2010). Her most recent book, These Survivals: Autobiography of an Extinction (Duke University Press, 2025), is an experimental collage-book composed of fragments of text and original artwork on the theme of mass species extinction. She has published academic articles on feminist theory, queer theory, Foucault, ethics, and the Anthropocene, as well as personal essays, creative nonfiction, and experimental writing. She is also the author, with Jennifer Yorke, of Wading Pool, a collaborative artists book (Vamp and Tramp, 2019) and is currently completing a collection of philosophical essays, “The Ethics of Extinction.”
Lynne Huffer; Unbearable Speech. differences 1 December 2024; 35 (3): 34–62. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-11525270
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