From injury and punishment to interchange and relation: Rereading Judith Butler through the dialogic principle of Martin Buber

Judith Butler's Giving an Account of Oneself, and Martin Buber's I-Thou, allow me to examine how these two philosophical works and philosophers can be read together, against each other, and ultimately how a reading of two seemingly distinct publications in distinct fields and histories, can inform each other, and create a productive conversation between what has been deemed as essentially theology (Buber), and what has been criticized as moral nihilism (Butler). I will demonstrate what an analysis of Butler's poststructuralist reading of the subject can glean from Buber's modern Jewish existentialism and establish how Butler's trajectory, although shaped in poststructuralist rhetoric, ultimately seeks to endow a non-existentialist, non-humanistic subject with potential for moral agency. I will examine Butler's account of the socially constituted subject in order to read it through Buber's idealized dialogic principle, where he posits that the self exists with an innate propensity for dynamic relationship to others.