Unbearable Speech

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.