Being Undone, Becoming Responsible: Judith Butler, Paul Ricœur, and the Necessity of Tragic Theory for Ethics

In this paper, I comparatively consider Judith Butler’s and Paul Ricœur’s respective engagements with Greek tragedy to claim that ethical consideration of tragedy must transform understanding about moral agency and responsibility, particularly under conditions of structural evil. In brief, structural evil refers to massive and overlapping socioeconomic structures, cultural norms, and political institutions, that create and sustain power differences between populations and that unevenly expose some to harm, exploitation, and abandonment, while generating plenty, privilege, and protection for others (see, Eleazar Fernandez 2004, Ivone Gebara 2002, Cynthia Moe-Lobeda 2013, Emilie Townes 2006). Structural evil broadly includes racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, imperialism, and speciesism, each of which have widely been identified as endemic to national and transnational institutions and culture. While these interlocking superindividual realities differentially impact individuals, they form the shared fate of “damaged life” (Theodor Adorno 1951) that all persons suffer today. The threats structural evil poses – climate destruction, mass poverty, irreconcilable polarization, state and interpersonal violence – are well-known, yet more meaningful and ameliorative ways of living amidst them, that avoid despair, nihilism, or absolutist moralism – are needed. Thus, I ask: what happens to our understanding of ethics – that is the wish to live well and the practice of continuously learning how to do so – when the worlds that form and enable living – including the pursuit of virtues and goods – are always-already corrupted by structural evils which limit free action and jeopardize truthful understanding? What changes in ethical imagination when the structural evils that (de)form our lives are centered and understood through a tragic lens? What does ethical living amid the ruins of structural evil entail? In brief, tragedy is an ancient dramatic form that vivifies the morally perplexing situation wherein a basically admirable and well-intentioned person engages in actions which inadvertently bring about evil, violence, and ultimately self-destruction. It tends to depict two kinds of situations: stories in which a character's virtue leads unexpectedly to harm and evildoing (e.g., Oedipus’ wit turned pride), and stories wherein two characters’ respective values or virtues irreconcilably conflict, or wherein a single character must choose between two competing values or virtues (e.g, Antigone and Creon’s conflict). Complicating dichotomies of innocence and victimization, guilt and responsibility, freedom and suffering, tragedy provides occasion to reflect upon the limits to human power and the futility of human struggle when that effort occurs within a dooming context. Structural evil – both in its institutional-cultural forms, as well as its manifestation as ideology – can be understood vis-à-vis tragedy as imposing an atê, which nourishes hubris and fuels hamartia in persons, even as it is also forms the conditions of our very lives. Thus, reading structural evil tragically advances discussions about ethical responsibility for structural evil – and the necessity to resist and reform these superindividual evils – without proliferating shaming narratives of totalizing guilt or falsely comforting narratives of purity and exceptionalism. Instead, it requires recognition of shared implication with and suffering under these forces and demands that the aspiration for living well be inflected by and responsive to these superindividual realities. Butler and Ricœur’s respective engagements with tragedy underlie this argument. While they take distinctive lessons from tragedy and do not directly engage one another, I find that they share an understanding that tragedy’s ethical pedagogy is not warning that tragic conflicts can and must be overcome through rational resolution (per Hegel’s influential reading of tragedy), but instead offering a theater for affectively experiencing the weight of tragic conflicts within our inner-most-being and acknowledging our common vulnerability to suffering by forces that outstrip our control. Indeed, the major problematic in both Butler and Ricœur’s extensive philosophies is grappling with the countless irresolvable tensions and conflicts that persons face as being constituted-though-not-determined by social worlds marked by violence and evil, who must nevertheless struggle for livable and meaningful lives amid these tensions. Butler does so through the well-known theory of gender performativity and the less-well known turn to (un)grievability and precarity that follows, while Ricœur does so through his narrative theory of selfhood and is contradictions and his lifelong preoccupation with the questions of evil, fallibility and finitude. In reading Greek tragedies, particularly Sophocles’ *Antigone* and *Oedipus Rex* and Aeschylus’ *Prometheus Bound* and *Oresteia* trilogy, at key moments over the course of their thought, Butler and Ricœur plumb primordial, personal, and social-historical negativity (and their intertwinement), to remind ethicists that it is in staying with unbearable suffering, irreconcilable conflicts, vexing finitude, and inevitable loss – in bearing witness to these painful truths and in providing occasions for others to bear witness – that vital changes, which makes ethical-living possible, occurs in those who do not turn away. For example, Butler invokes Antigone figure those whose lives are rendered illegible, and subsequently condemned to their own “living tomb,” today (queers, undocumented migrants, and others) and to bring critical attention to the normative structures that entomb them. Ricœur turns to Oedipus to draw attention to the destruction that comes from failing to understand oneself truthfully, and to call persons to this kind of accountable awareness. In both cases, tragedy functions to correct the blinders that are already imposed by structural evil and that non-tragic ethics wear. Ultimately, tragedy, for Butler and Ricœur, indicates that conversion by tragedy (that is the practice of re-theorizing oneself and one’s world through tragedy’s view) is necessary for nourishing ethical responsibility. Butler calls this an ethics of being undone; Ricœur calls it an ethics of fragility. Both claim that ethics, and ethicists, must be moved by keen sensitivity to vulnerability – one’s own and others’. Butler and Ricœur’s ethics of and by tragedy, chastens moralizing attempts to blame others or shore up one’s goodness through private pursuits of virtue, happiness, and purity. Instead, they direct attention to human limitations and already-extant implications with structural (and other) evils in ways that echo religious ethics’ robust traditions of theorizing negativity and invoking the need for ongoing and radical communal and personal transformation. This makes Ricœur and Butler invaluable fellow-travelers for religious ethicists, and tragedy an essential teacher.