Article

Feminist Theory
11(3) 255–265
Judith Butler, incest, and the ! The Author(s) 2010
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DOI: 10.1177/1464700110376277
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Jane Kilby
University of Salford

Abstract
In contrast to Judith Herman, who understands incest exclusively in terms of power,
Judith Butler insists on the importance of the child’s love for our understanding of
incest. Butler’s thinking in this respect is suggestive but underdeveloped, while also
holding considerable implications for how we might understand the role of violence
in social life. This article develops and assesses her thinking on the child’s love and its
relation to the question of violence and trauma more generally. At issue is the question
of how we are to understand violence. Is it always motivated? Is it always destructive?
And finally are there limits to what can be understood?

Keywords
Judith Butler, child, Judith Herman, incest, love, trauma, violence

In her 1981 Father-Daughter Incest, radical feminist and psychotherapist Judith

Herman frames her understanding of incest exclusively in terms of power. Incest,
for Herman, is a ‘paradigm of female sexual victimisation’: an unimaginably
unequal relationship such that ‘there is no way that a child can be in control or
exercise free choice’ when subject to the will of adults (1981: 4, 27). At issue for
Herman, as it is for many when looking to understand the violence and trauma of
incest, is the fact that the child is compelled to meet the needs of the adult, a point
of logic she underscores when she argues that ‘When a parent compels a child to
work to support a family, that is exploitation of child labour. When a parent
compels a child to fulfil his sexual needs, that is exploitation’ (1981: 4).
Importantly, for Herman, incest is a violence because the child is exploited by
the adult, such that there is little or no analytical difference between sexual and
economic exploitation. Indeed, to the extent to which Herman characterizes the

Corresponding author:
Jane Kilby, School of English, Sociology, Politics and Contemporary History, The Crescent, University of
Salford, Salford, Greater Manchester M5 4WT, UK
Email: j.e.kilby@salford.ac.uk

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256 Feminist Theory 11(3)

father as both pimp and punter for having ‘initiat[ed] his daughter into prostitu-
tion’ (1981: 4), they are conflated. So while the father is guilty of ‘destroy[ing] the
protective bond between parent and child’, his violence, as such, is his abuse of
power. And while the child might love his or her abusing parent, it is the loss of
autonomy and self-determination which is traumatic. Understanding the violent
and traumatic reality of incest, for Herman, does not require us to understand the
‘corruption of parental love’ nor the child’s love and the intimacy, relation, recog-
nition and sociality they each imply, but more simply the exploitation of power.
But according to Judith Butler in her 1997 The Psychic Life of Power, ‘debates
about the reality of the sexual abuse of children tend to misstate the character of
the exploitation’ (1997: 7) by not taking into account the child’s love. And nor, for
Butler, can we expect to understand the trauma of incest if we do not factor in the
child’s love; indeed, Butler is emphatic that unless we consider ‘what happens to the
child’s love and desire in the traumatic incestuous relation with an adult, we [will]
fail to describe the depth and psychic consequence of that trauma’ (2004b: 155).
Importantly, for Butler, it is absolutely necessary to understand the ways in which
the child’s love complicates the reality of incest and thereby the determinism,
instrumentalism, and mechanism of accounts such as Herman’s. This said, Butler
is not looking to establish the truth of incest, for she accepts that the violence
endured is such that, in some sense, it will always escape understanding: ‘For
part of the effect of that violation’ she argues ‘is precisely to make the knowing
of truth into an infinitely remote prospect’ (2004b: 156). Incest is traumatic, in part,
because of its unknowability, its unfathomability. There is, in other words, a limit
to understanding making it, in fact, impossible to ever fully describe or, indeed,
experience, the trauma of incest.
Although Butler’s thinking is suggestive, it is, nonetheless, underdeveloped. The
aim of this article is to both develop the logic of her thinking and assess its impli-
cations for our understanding of incest, and violence and trauma more generally.
This, however, is no easy task since it is clear from the outset that Butler’s under-
standing of the child’s love is complex. So, for example, Jill Bennett argues that
‘‘‘love’’ may characterize an aspect of the relationship one has with an abuser –
particularly in an incestuous relationship where the victim has an emotional attach-
ment to the abuser, notwithstanding the pain or trauma that may accompany
abuse’ (2005: 27). For Bennett, love might be one of the many affects associated
with familial abuse and as such it may confuse and compound the suffering. And
while Butler can be read as endorsing Bennett’s argument, especially when, for
example, she maintains that the ‘child whose love has been exploited may no
longer be able to recover or avow that love as love’ (2004b: 159), her argument
goes beyond the terms set by Bennett. For Butler, that is, the child’s love is not a
question of social contingency – as that which might or might not add to the depth
of suffering felt by the child. But rather it is a question of social ontology. Thus
Butler writes ‘It is not simply that sexuality is unilaterally imposed by the adult, nor
that a sexuality is unilaterally fantasized by the child, but that the child’s love, a
love that is necessary for its existence, is exploited and a passionate attachment

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abused’ (1997: 7–8, emphasis added). For Butler, the child’s love is a priori –
something which has to be if the child is to exist. The child, in other words, has
no choice but to take the abusing adult as a love object. Clearly, there is more at
stake for Butler, but what?
Added to which, the child’s love is not as innocent as it appears. So, for example,
following her claim that those debating the reality of child sexual abuse must take
into account the child’s love – and in the context of discussing the work of Melanie
Klein – it becomes evident, for Butler, that there is a ‘desire to triumph over the
[love] object’ which ‘if pursued too far, threatens the object as a source of love’
(1997: 26). There is, it appears, a ‘desire to vanquish what one loves’, with aggres-
sion – or as Butler puts it, hate – being that ‘which always accompanies love’ (1997:
26). Love, for Butler, is not the antithesis of hate, as that which guards against
aggression and violence, but that which is the occasion for hate. Indeed, Butler is
expressly clear that the only hope of thwarting ‘the aggressive expression of love’
and thereby preserving ‘the object of love from one’s own potentially obliterating
violence’ is the guilt that we feel for desiring the destruction of the love object
(1997: 26, 25). However we read Butler, the force of her argument suggests that if
the child has no option but to establish the abusing adult as a love object (in order
that he or she might exist) then a reciprocal aggression or hate is in play. It seems,
therefore, that the child’s love makes him or her guilty in return, with the potential
for violence (if admittedly a merely psychic violence) a seemingly intractable part of
life.
This is a provocative line of reasoning both for our general understanding of the
child’s love and for feminism more specifically since it risks raising the controversy
sparked by Freud when giving importance to the Oedipal drama (with its logic of
unconscious fantasy and feared violence) for understanding the development of
both gender and sexuality. In respect of this debate, Butler’s position is clear when
she insists that incestuous desires are part of emerging childhood sexuality and as
such Butler’s thinking constitutes an ongoing riposte to the ways in which feminists
such as Herman understand incest as a ‘brute imposition on the child’s body’
(Butler, 2004b: 154): an event which has not been compromised in any way by
the child’s own sexual passions. In counterpoint to this ‘dogmatic’ formulation –
such that for ‘incest to be traumatic and real’ it must be understood as an external
event free of fantasy, Butler insists that ‘the distinction between event and wish is
not as clear as it is sometimes held to be’ (2004b: 153, 155). To clarify, Butler is not
saying that the child wishes for the abuse to happen, but rather her point, a point
reiterated by other psychoanalytic thinkers, is that ‘whatever impingement takes
place will also be registered within the sphere of fantasy’ (2004b: 155). The child, in
other words, is a psychic subject and as such it is not possible to separate the
experience and memory of the event from psychic influence. More precisely,
there can be no experience or memory without psychic mediation. This does not
imply that the event is imagined as some feminist critics have argued, but more
simply, as Butler is looking to assert, that the event can only be real to the child if
invested with psychic life. For Butler, then, the reality of incest is not simply

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258 Feminist Theory 11(3)

imposed by the aggressor, as Herman would maintain, and nor is it simply estab-
lished by the child. But rather it is a complex mix of the two; although importantly
as Butler is quick to acknowledge this ‘solution does not address the nonnarratable,
that for which there is no story, no report, no linguistic representation’ (2004b:
156). Whatever the truth, there is something which escapes our powers of repre-
sentation and this excess or limit is at the very heart of what makes violence ines-
capably real.
However, Butler complicates this debate over the reality of incest even further
when insisting on the importance of the child’s love and in doing so, I would argue,
she highlights the challenge presented by psychoanalysis to radical feminists such
as Herman, a challenge, I would add, that has not been clearly recognized by the
latter, nor, indeed, necessarily by many psychoanalytic critics. The reason why
Herman and radical feminists more generally have struggled to respond to the
challenge posed by psychoanalytic writers is not because they deny the adult’s
violence when emphasizing the child’s own fantasy life, but because they insist
on the mutual presence of both adult and child. As Butler notes, more generally,
the workings of fantasy should not be construed ‘as a set of projections on an
internal screen but as part of human relationality itself’ (2004b: 15). A psychic
subject is a social subject; a self always already in relation to others.
Psychoanalytic thinkers thus challenge the conceits underpinning Herman’s posi-
tion by underscoring that neither the adult nor the child acts, or, indeed, appears in
isolation; indeed cannot act, or, appear, in isolation. The power of the critique of
Herman turns on her insistence that there is only one subject at the scene: the adult.
For psychoanalytic writers agency is neither sovereign nor entirely absent, thus the
adult is understood as necessarily present as a compromised subject; and the child
necessarily present in some capacity, even if that capacity for agency is accentuated,
unconscious and retroactive.
By adding love to the mix, Butler merges and renders manifest the challenge of
psychoanalysis. The child’s love is evidence of what Butler understands as the
‘ontological primacy of relationality’ (2004b: 150). ‘If the child is to persist in a
psychic and social sense’, she argues, ‘there must be dependency and the formation
of attachment’ (1997: 8). For Butler, and without equivocation, the child is neces-
sarily loving toward and dependent on the other for existence, even if and when the
adult is abusive in return, for ‘there is no possibility of not loving, where love is
bound up with the requirements for life’ (1997: 8). Indeed, Butler is adamant that it
makes no difference whether infancy is an ‘extraordinary, loving and receptive’
scene or a ‘scene of abandonment or violence or starvation’, for ‘the fact remains
that infancy constitutes a necessary dependency’ (2004b: 24). The idea that the
child is attached regardless of the quality of care is not, however, unique to
Butler; indeed Herman would agree that the child is dependent on the abusing
adult for the meeting of basic needs. But what separates Butler from Herman on
this point is the fact that, for Butler, the child is a desirous, knowing agent in its
relation to the adult: dependency, for Butler, is a passionate condition. So despite
the nascent status of the child’s love, it is not blind love (as it would most likely be

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Kilby 259

for Herman) but rather it bespeaks an intimate, impassioned knowledge of the fact
that others make up our world (‘from early on there is discernment and ‘‘know-
ingness’’ of an important kind’ (Butler, 1997: 8)). The child knows of the other’s
presence and in so doing makes his or her passion for life known to the other;
unlike Herman, then, Butler understands the child to be a subject with passions and
desires, desires and passions which are both evidence of the presence of others and
evidence of its own presence; desires and passions that reveal and render the soci-
ality of being. And yet the child’s love, which signifies the very desire for life,
relationality and sociality, is exploited. The question is why? Why does Butler
argue that ‘the desire to survive, ‘‘to be,’’ is a pervasively exploitable desire’
(1997: 7)?

***
It is in an attempt to challenge the importance placed on autonomy and sovereignty
by feminists such as Herman that Butler maintains again and again that we are
attached – and given over – to others and violence cannot be explained aside from
this passionately social relationship. This is not to afford the victim of violence
responsibility for their suffering. Butler is not suggesting that the child is complicit
and thereby accountable in some way, but that the child is necessarily implicated,
with one’s enthralment to the scene and agent of violence as that which provides
the possibility of life. Thus, for Butler, violence is always a question of ‘the way in
which we are in the thrall of our relations with others’ (2004b: 19) and while this
makes us permanently vulnerable to injury and violence, it is a situation we cannot
endeavour to ‘rectify’ (2004b: 23). Indeed, Butler argues, it is ‘perhaps foolish, if
not dangerous, when we do’ (2004b: 23) since being given over to the other ‘is
essential to the possibility of persisting as human’ (2004b: 33). It is all we are.
As it stands, the idea that the child is dependent on the adult as a condition of
his or her being and becoming is certainly a situation I would hardly wish to
‘rectify’ as either an empirical reality or philosophical postulate. Butler’s endeavour
to rethink the ‘human beyond humanism’ on the grounds that ‘‘‘we’’ who are
relational do not stand apart from those relations’ (2004b: 151) is a project I
would wholly endorse. But why does the child’s dependency on the other put it
at risk of violence? And how are we to make sense of Butler’s insistence that
‘aggression is coextensive with being human’ (2007: 190)? Is the child more likely
to experience infancy as ‘a warm tissue of relations’ or is the child more likely to be
‘given over to nothing, or to brutality or to no sustenance’ (2004b: 24)? Is the
difference in likelihood only a question of contingency? Or is there prior determi-
nation? This questioning is not an attempt on my part to argue away the primary
vulnerability of which Butler speaks in order to reassert the importance of auton-
omy, but it is an attempt to understand why our exposure to others is such that it
risks, and perhaps solicits, violence, when as easily – and especially in terms of
children – we might imagine the contrary to be true. For what is important to
understand is that Butler is not simply arguing that violence reveals our

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260 Feminist Theory 11(3)

dependency on others such that ‘violence is surely a touch of the worst order, a way
in which the human vulnerability to other humans is exposed in its most terrifying
way, a way in which we are given over, without control to the will of another’
(2004b: 22). She is also arguing the opposite: our dependency on others exposes the
human propensity for violence, if not revealing the ‘will of another’ as a desire for
violence.
This reading is not easily gleaned from Butler’s phrasing which works almost
constantly, when she is discussing what Catherine Mills (2007: 140) refers to as
‘profane, if not prosaic’ violence, to suggest that the experience of violence is a
consequence only of our love for and dependency on others; it speaks only of the
exposure and vulnerability of social beings. Yet, as I have already noted, Butler
turns to Klein in order to make clear that our love for others also places them at
risk of our ‘sadistic’ desire for destruction. Our love object, according to Butler, is
that which ‘one wishes dead’ (1997: 26). In respect of incest, we might ask, then,
whether the adult registers this ambivalence, understanding it to be both an object
of love and hate. And, if yes, are we to understand his or her violence as an act of
self-defence, a way of meeting that aggression?

***
The idea that aggression is coextensive with being human is not, however, only a
function of love for Butler (or, indeed, hate). Rather it is an over-determined
relationship given the importance of Hegel and his theory of recognition to
Butler’s work. Admittedly, Butler is not uncritical of Hegel, but she accepts that
there is truth in the Hegelian view that desire, whatever its explicit aim or content, ‘is
always a desire for recognition and that it is only through the experience of rec-
ognition that any of us becomes constituted as socially viable beings’ (2004b: 2).
This said, recognition, and the promise of the social it holds, is a struggle beset by
risk. Following Hegel, that is, Butler accepts that the desire for recognition places
us in a vulnerable position, since it reveals the ‘shared power [we] have to annihilate
the Other and, thereby, destroy the condition of [our] own self-reflection’ (2004b:
149). In quite precise terms, recognition is, for Butler, the moment when destruc-
tion is held ‘in check’ and it cannot be otherwise. Recognition, Butler argues ‘is the
name given the process that constantly risks destruction and which. . . could not be
recognition without a defining or constitutive risk of destruction’ (2004b: 133).
Thus, for Butler, it is not possible to hold ‘out for an ideal of recognition in
which destruction is an occasional and lamentable occurrence’, since destruction
is the condition of possibility for recognition (2004b: 133). As a consequence, then,
there is no sociality or subject prior to or clean of (the possibility of) violence: there
is only ever the ‘impurity of the subject and its social relations’: ‘the prospects for
aggression pervade social life’ (2007: 186). So while Butler (2004b) finds consider-
able merit in Jessica Benjamin’s attempt to secure a realm of sociality beyond the
violent logic of recognition, Butler, nonetheless, takes Benjamin to task for imag-
ining that it is possible to separate violence from the question of intersubjectivity.

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Kilby 261

Importantly, for Butler, our desire for recognition, and all desire is desire for rec-
ognition, is such that violence is an aspect of ourselves that we cannot wish away.
Indeed, for Butler, there is folly in imagining that we can wish it away, since our
propensity for violence is key to her understanding of non-violence, of what we
might call peace. Writing in the wake of 9/11, Butler has turned her attention with
increasing acuity to the question of non-violence. Her meditations on non-violence
are intriguing, drawing as they do on a range of disparate thinkers and traditions
including Walter Benjamin, Frantz Fanon and Emmanuel Levinas, as well as the
aforementioned Klein (2004a, 2004b, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009). At the core, how-
ever, is her insistence that ‘The struggle against violence is one that accepts that
violence is one’s own possibility’ (2007: 186), although, critically, it is a struggle
that is only experienced in relation to, and, thereby, in recognition of the other. For
Butler, then, the question of ‘whether or not to do violence’ only emerges with
political and ethical force ‘in relation to the ‘‘you’’ who figures as the potential
object of my injury’ (2007: 195). Butler can be read, here, as making an obvious
point: violence is a political and ethical question because it is a social wrong. ‘You’
bring this wrong to bear on me and make it socially binding: ‘I’ am guilty of wrong
before ‘you’. But I would argue that Butler is making a less obvious, stronger point
given her theory of the ontological primacy of relationality, namely that ‘you’ bring
me into being so that ‘I’ can know the reality of my violence: without ‘you’, ‘I’ do
not exist as a violent being, for as Butler argues elsewhere in her discussion of
Fanon ‘there can be no invention of oneself without the ‘‘you’’’ (2008: 228).
The implications for our understanding of violence are profound, for it means
that for a subject ‘to be’ violent, it is, in fact, necessary for the victimized other ‘to
be’. This is not to say that the aggressor requires a victim, a person whose very
reality is such that it causes affront and a desire to destroy. Rather it is to suggest
the opposite: violence, for Butler, is an attempt to make the victim real, so that the
aggressor can experience desire in the first place. Violence is that which produces a
victim (in the strongest sense possible), rather than that which destroys the victim;
indeed, it must be so if the aggressor is to persist in any sense. Violence is not, in
other words, an attempt to cancel the other, but a way of confirming the other’s
presence, of ensuring its continued animation so that the aggressor can be socially
viable. The aggressor needs the victim to be. Violence, as perverse as sounds, here,
is, for Butler, a way of keeping the other alive and the way by which we establish
relationality. Violence is not a denial of the other, as Butler clearly argues when
accounting for why it is that someone might be driven to kill someone marked as
sexually and racially other (2004b: 35). But, rather, according to the, perhaps,
contradictory logic of her own writing, the means by which we must affirm the
reality of the other so that we might exist. It cannot be otherwise. Violence is not
solely (if ever) an attempt at making the other disappear but an attempt at making
the other appear so that I can exist as a social being. For Butler, the social is
necessarily contingent on there being violence between us: violence makes us real
and immediate for each other, with questions of desire, drive and motivation
secondary.

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In respect of incest, if we follow Butler, we will concede that the adult’s ‘moti-
vation’ is to render the child real, so that the adult can experience themselves as
real, with any possibility of self-conceit (which categorically is not to say that the
adult abuses the child in order to feel ‘alive’ in some facile sense or abuses the child
because they are experiencing a crisis of identity in some form or another). In
respect of seemingly racially or sexually ‘motivated’ crimes, it is likewise to concede
that the racist or homophobe’s ‘motivation’ is to render the victim real, so that the
aggressor can experience themselves as real, with any possibility of self-conceit
(which again is not to say that the racist or homophobe abuses his or her victim
in order to feel ‘alive’ or because they are experiencing a crisis of identity). It is to
concede, in other words, that violence is productive at the level of ontology, and
not just at the level of discourse and self-representation (as Gail Mason (2006)
argues for example), with violence not really ‘a touch of the worst order’ (Butler,
2004b: 22) but that which institutes social order. Violence, for Butler, is the means
of social (and psychic) engagement and for this reason the struggle for non-violence
is not only existential but ontological, and thus always fated for this reason.
Incest, for Butler, is not simply a paradigm for the ways in which we are always
given over to the other and thereby open to abuse as a matter of social contingency.
But rather it is a paradigm for the ways in which we are given over to violence so that
we can have a social world. To rephrase Butler’s argument according to the sum of
her logic concerning the concomitant ontology of self and other: the adult is given
with the child’s loving presence, and the child is given with the adult’s violence
which means that neither the child nor the adult and his or her violence precede or
follow the other. They are each a function of the other. The child, in other words,
does not find itself compelled to attach itself to what Butler strikingly calls a scene
of violence (which is less an abstraction than a way of encoding a spatial and
thereby temporal separation) but rather more precisely the child is conjured into
being by virtue of the adult’s violence, as is the adult, so that they might both exist.
Violence, for Butler, is performative: it brings into being that which it appears to
follow, namely, the aggressor and victim, and doing so at one and the same time,
which is to say in relation. So while I am keen to endorse Carine M.
Mardorossain’s critique of postmodern feminism for failing to address the reality
of sexual violence, with Butler named as the most prominent exponent,
Maradorossain misses the mark when she insists that the problem is due to an
‘overemphasis on subjectivity and interiority’ such that it reduces ‘politics to a
psychic dimension’ (2002: 747). Butler is not in any way guilty of psychological
reductionism and thereby erasing the social dimension, or otherwise downplaying
the social reality, of sexual violence, as Mardorossain implies, and others have
charged (Nussbaum, 1999). She is not guilty, in other words, of dismissing the
reality of gendered power relations or ignoring as Mardorossain puts it our
‘social inscription – that is, our physical situatedness in time and space, in history
and culture’ (2002: 755). Quite the contrary: Butler provides a very precise account
of the process of social inscription, of how social reality assumes force such that we
experience ourselves as so compellingly situated in time and space. The problem is,

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Kilby 263

as I have been arguing, social reality is compelling – and ‘real’ to us – because

violence is its condition of possibility. Violence, for Butler, gives social dimension
to our lives; which is not to say that violence distorts the social, but rather it plays a
constitutive role. For feminists concerned with the implications for understanding
incest as violence, the question of complicity would be a luxury, if not grounds for
optimism, at this point.

***
For Butler, it appears, violence is easily and necessarily to hand. And in a sense the
same appears true for Herman, if for men only. Indeed, despite their differences
violence is understood by both to enable, if not inaugurate, relations: social rela-
tions for Butler; and patriarchal relations for Herman. Violence, for both, is pro-
ductive: it has the capacity not only to do things and shape social situations, but to
bring subjects and worlds into being. Violence, for each, enacts and expresses
knowledge of the other’s presence (whether as a phobic response or will to dom-
inate). And yet there is evidence to suggest that they are both wrong. So, for
example, in his recent book Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory, Randall
Collins (2008) argues that violence is not easy and thereby not as prevalent as
we might believe. For most of the time people are not violent and, when they
are, he argues, they are more likely to be incompetent than effective and will
more likely abort violence than carry it through. Violence, according to Collins,
is a practical situational accomplishment: contingent, emergent and processual.
There are no natural-born or socially determined killers, only people acting vio-
lently when the situation is ‘right’. And those who do choose violence are for the
most part practised at it and more importantly must be practised in order to cir-
cumnavigate the social barriers to violence. People mostly shy from confrontation
and for violence to happen people have to find ways of countering the paralysing
emotion they would normally experience. The father is most likely to loiter at his
daughter’s door than enter through it; and the homophobe and racist more likely to
perform their prejudice than physically enact it; just as the soldier at war is as likely
to shoot in the air or away from the enemy: being shot by friendly fire is not an
accidental hazard of war but evidence of the aversion to it.
This is not to deny that violence happens but it is to challenge the idea, encoded
by both Herman and Butler, that violence is both generative and a potential for all
(men) in general; and it is to contest the fatalism of Butler’s argument in particular.
It is to caution against conceptualizing violence as a question of drive or motiva-
tion. It is to reject, in other words, that there is ever a need for violence, no matter
how that need is understood. And certainly it is to take seriously the idea that
violence is not ideological which is the scandal provoked by Hannah Arendt (1963)
when she refused to mythologize the evil of Nazi violence, choosing, instead, to
believe Adolf Eichmann when he said that he felt no hatred toward the Jews. There
is every chance that the adult abuses the child because it is possible and with little to
nothing in the way of unconscious or conscious desire, psychic investment, social

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264 Feminist Theory 11(3)

knowledge or ontological need. Similarly, there is every chance that the person who
sets out to harm those perceived as sexually or racially other, does so because they
can and does so with an indifference, or even a brutality, not imagined by Butler. It
is to lend weight to the idea that violence really is senseless. It is the gratuitous
nature of violence which is its greatest outrage.
Violence is something that is done, with little regard for self and other: it begins
and ends with a decision, the decision made when, and for whatever – and less
reason – than we might care to admit, but certainly opportunistically, adults decide
to exploit their children, who are as likely a substitute for another, as siblings will
as likely be in the routine of things; similarly, when ‘homophobes’ and ‘racists’
decide to attack a person marked sexually or racially as other, this person again is
as likely a substitute for a known other given that most violence is directed at those
within the perpetrator’s own community. There is turnover, but not production.
This is not to deny the trauma of victimization and of incest in particular, but it
is to caution against the idea that the victim owes the ‘depth’ of his or her expe-
rience to the aggressor. It is to deny, in other words, that the aggressor and victim
are in any way bound by violence. Trauma is a singular experience, which is not to
say that it is only the victim who understands violence. I agree with Butler that the
experience of violence is such that it places a limit on what can be understood by
critic and victim alike. Violence, in other words, is that which places ‘the know-
ability of truth into enduring crisis’, and for this reason, as Butler continues, ‘What
remains crucial is a form of reading that does not try to find the truth of what
happened, but, rather, asks, what has this non-happening done to the question of
truth’ (2004b: 156). What lesson, then, does trauma bring to bear on the question
and thereby the politics of truth?
This is a fraught question although, as Butler is quick to establish, the answer is
not silence. Critics should speak of violence but, as Butler argues, they must do so
in the knowledge ‘that whatever story and representation emerge to account for
this event, which is no event, will be subject to the same catachresis that I perform
when I speak improperly as an event’ (2004b: 156). Critics will be in error when
speaking about trauma, with the question of the adequacy always unknown. There
is no really adequate or final truth, in other words. This is an appealing answer,
since it allows Butler to recommend her story of incest as a story closer to the truth
of the matter (in that it will help to describe the depth and psychic consequence of
that trauma) while allowing for the fact that it is improper. According to Butler the
truth of what happened is a function of the child’s love, but she acknowledges the
impropriety of her claim. No-one has jurisdiction over the truth of incest, which
means that there can only be infinite interpretations, with the question of the truth
of these interpretations always, for Butler, a matter of open debate. On this count,
Martha Nussbaum (1999) is utterly wrong when accusing Butler of a ‘hip quietism’
and of ‘collaborating’ with the ‘evil’ of violence. There is politics to Butler’s
work and recognition of the wrong of violence. Where Butler differs from
Nussbaum is her desire to interrogate how we understand that ‘evil’ and its relation
to the real.

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Kilby 265

However, it is possible to argue that Butler has misunderstood the lesson that
the ‘evil’ of violence and trauma brings to bear on the question and politics of
truth. Violence, I would argue, serves to chasten the desire for knowing the truth.
As a non-happening, it requires critics to rein in their desire for interpretation and
their desire to make a happening of a non-happening, of turning a crisis into a
drama, and perhaps for this reason Nussbaum is right for the wrong reasons when
suggesting that Butler flatters the evil of violence. Violence demands that we con-
tent ourselves with a lesser understanding. As noted above Arendt provoked an
enduring controversy when she refused to mythologize the perpetrator of violence
by insisting on the banality of evil. More recently, Shoshana Felman has argued,
following Arendt, that ‘if the perpetrator must be banalized and demythologized to
be understood in his proper light, so does the victim’ (2002: 140). And so, I would
add, does the truth. In its proper light, the truth is also banal and for this reason
inadequate to our desire for knowledge and change. The truth will never be
enough, but reason enough for understanding incest.

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