On Giving an Account of Oneself

(Excerpt from forthcoming book, Copyright 2009 by Christine M. Skolnik)

Ultimately, Giving an Account of Oneself affirms the importance of the narrative mode to developmental and therapeutic processes while questioning the “health norm” and medical ethics of requiring patients to give coherent accounts (53, 63-65). Butler observes that “hyper-mastery” can be as unhealthy as “radical fragmentation” (52). She also argues that the structure of address, in effect, undermines the coherence of the narrative account:

I would suggest that the structure of address is not a feature of narrative, one of its many and variable attributes, but an interruption of narrative. The moment the story is addressed to someone, it assumes a rhetorical dimension that is not reducible to a narrative function. It presumes that someone, and it seeks to recruit and act upon that someone. Something is being done with language when the account that I give begins: it is invariably interlocutory, ghosted, laden, persuasive, and tactical. It may well seek to communicate a truth, but it can do this, if it can, only by exercising a relational dimension of language. (63)

The “addressed” account of oneself is both a representation and “falsification” of life—an attempt to render in the terms of a coherent spatio-temporal logic precisely that which cannot be contained in such a medium. The language and stories which make us also have the capacity to break us if we are held accountable for telling “what cannot be narrated,” or confessing that to which we cannot bear witness because of our “partial blindness about ourselves” or because we are “ethically implicated in the lives of others” (Butler, Account 41, 54 , 64).

The following passage foregrounds the epistemological incapacity and emotional vulnerability involved in an ethic which requires us to risk becoming “undone”:

Perhaps most importantly, we must recognize that ethics requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness, when what forms us diverges from what lies before us, when our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human. To be undone by another is a primary necessity, an anguish, to be sure, but also a chance—to be addressed, claimed, bound to what is not me, but also moved, to be prompted to act, to address myself elsewhere, and so to vacate the self-sufficient “I” as a kind of possession. If we speak and try to give an account from this place, we will not be irresponsible, or, if we are, we will surely be forgiven. (Butler, Account 136)

Giving an Account of Oneself illustrates the relationship between narrative production and subjectivity, while cautioning against an ethos of hyper-mastery. Butler’s critical perspective of the unconscious also foregrounds the dual role of language as a technology that enables communication, as well as a trained incapacity that may inhibit psychological growth. Finally Butler’s thesis supports my concept of the unconscious as an aporia, as well as the pitfalls of ignoring this primary source of ignorance.