Giving an Account of Oneself by Judith Butler

Published 2005 · 176 pages · 52,296 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Nonfiction, Philosophy, Ethics

How hard is Giving an Account of Oneself to read?

Giving an Account of Oneself scores 51 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 82 out of 100
Butler deploys highly specialized philosophical and psychoanalytic vocabulary throughout — 'assujettisement,' 'poiesis,' 'desubjugation,' 'nachträglichkeit,' 'interpellation,' 'normativity,' 'subjectivation,' 'enigmatic signifiers,' 'thing-representations' — alongside extensive Continental philosophy shorthand requiring familiarity with Hegel, Foucault, Levinas, and Lacan. The text presupposes fluency in both analytic and Continental philosophical traditions, placing it well above the literary vocabulary of 2666 and approaching the specialized density of Gravity's Rainbow, though without scientific jargon.
Sentence structure: 72 out of 100
Sentences regularly extend through multiple embedded qualifications and reversals, as Butler builds an argument by simultaneously affirming and limiting each position she examines. A typical sentence might run: 'Although some would say that to be a split subject, or a subject whose access to itself is forever opaque, incapable of self-grounding, is precisely not to have the grounds for agency and the conditions for accountability, the way in which we are, from the start, interrupted by alterity may render us incapable of offering narrative closure for our lives.' This Jamesian hypotaxis is demanding but more controlled than Faulkner's 1,000-word sentences or Proust's extended subordination.
Abstraction: 90 out of 100
The text operates at near-total abstraction. Concrete scenes are almost entirely absent; the brief literary examples (Kafka's Georg, Odradek) serve as philosophical illustrations rather than sustained narrative. The entire work is conducted at the level of conceptual argument — the 'I,' accountability, recognition, opacity, normativity, the scene of address — with no grounding in particular persons or events. This matches Waiting for Godot's existential abstraction in its refusal of the concrete, while exceeding it in philosophical density.
Information density: 85 out of 100
Each paragraph introduces new philosophical moves, engages a new thinker, or pivots the argument through a fresh framework. Within a single chapter Butler mobilizes Adorno, Nietzsche, Hegel, Foucault, Levinas, Cavarero, Laplanche, Winnicott, Bollas, and Lacan — tracking how each framework illuminates and limits the central question of self-accounting. Readers must hold multiple theoretical positions in view simultaneously and track how Butler's own argument relates to each. The density approaches Ulysses's encyclopedic demands, though the domain is narrower.
Narrative indirection: 40 out of 100
Butler's philosophical argument is stated with relative directness — she makes her positions explicit and signals her moves ('I will argue,' 'Let me suggest,' 'In what follows'). There is no story to infer, no hidden meaning to reconstruct. However, the argument builds through systematic engagement and partial correction of other positions, requiring readers to track what is being affirmed versus what is being modified. The indirection is philosophical rather than narrative.
Symbolic density: 30 out of 100
The text employs virtually no literary symbolism. Terms like 'opacity,' 'exposure,' 'face,' and 'address' function as theoretical concepts, not symbols with multiple resonances. The Kafka readings (Georg's suicide, Odradek's survival) are deployed as philosophical illustrations of the argument about ethical violence and survival, not as symbols generating independent meaning. This places it well below the symbolic richness of To the Lighthouse or Heart of Darkness.
Ironic distance: 25 out of 100
Butler writes throughout in earnest philosophical voice, meaning exactly what she says. There is no gap between what the text states and what it intends. The only self-reflexive moment — her acknowledgment of having 'perhaps too quickly accepted' the punitive scene of subject formation in The Psychic Life of Power — signals intellectual revision, not irony. The text's sincerity is total, comparable to Diary of a Young Girl in its absence of ironic distance.
Resolution withholding: 62 out of 100
Butler deliberately ends in constitutive openness: the central aporia — that we cannot give a full account of ourselves yet remain ethically responsible — is not resolved but affirmed as the condition for ethics itself. The book's conclusion argues that 'any effort to give an account of oneself will have to fail in order to approach being true,' leaving the ethical question permanently open. This designed irresolution is philosophically motivated rather than narratively evasive, similar to how 2666 refuses to explain its violence.
Structural complexity: 28 out of 100
The text is a straightforwardly structured philosophical monograph: introduction, four chapters, conclusion, notes, index. The argument proceeds linearly, with each chapter building on the previous one and back-references clearly signaled ('As I mentioned above,' 'I will return to this in Chapter Three'). There are no experimental formal elements, no POV shifts, no timeline disruptions. The structure is more accessible than War and Peace's epic scope and comparable to a well-organized academic lecture series.

How Giving an Account of Oneself is regarded

Giving an Account of Oneself holds a literary regard score of 74 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Where Giving an Account of Oneself sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (101 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, Giving an Account of Oneself scores 80 out of 100. A second mythos, comedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.15. About the map of stories.

Mode: Ironic
The “I” is the moment of failure in every narrative effort to give an account of oneself.
Symbol: Literal & Descriptive
Telling a story about oneself is not the same as giving an account of oneself.
Mythos: Irony and Satire iv (tragic pathos) (irony iv)
The “I” ruins its own story, contrary to its best intentions.
Genre: Anatomy + Confession
At least, let’s hope not, since, over wine usually, I tell it in various ways, and the accounts are not always consistent with one another.

Where the story of Giving an Account of Oneself takes place

  • Continental philosophy lectures, Amsterdam, Princeton and Frankfurt, 2001-2003 (2001 to 2004), the main setting
  • Socratic, Cynic and Stoic Greco-Roman scenes of parrhesia, as read by Foucault (400 BCE to 200)
  • Adorno's letter to Benjamin (1934) and Frankfurt moral philosophy lectures (1963) (1934 to 1963)

5 things that are true of Giving an Account of Oneself, with the passage for each

  1. The book grew out of lectures given at the University of Amsterdam in spring 2002.

    The chapters of this book were originally given as the Spinoza Lectures for the Department of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam in the spring of 2002.

  2. Butler illustrates Adorno's point about violent universals with President Bush's policy toward the Palestinian Authority and Iraq.

    We might, along these lines, think about President Bush’s proposal for the Palestinian Authority or his efforts to replace the government in Iraq.

  3. Georg's last words in Kafka's 'The Judgment' are an avowal of love for his parents.

    dear parents, I have always loved you, all the same [Liebe Eltern, ich habe euch doch immer geliebt]

  4. Butler reads the last sentence of 'The Judgment' as a surviving voice whose German word for traffic, Verkehr, also means sexual intercourse.

    at this moment an unending stream of traffic was just going over the bridge

  5. In Kafka's parable, Odradek answers 'No fixed abode' when the narrator asks where he lives.

    “Well, what’s your name?” “Odradek,” he says. “And where do you live?” “No fixed abode.”

Scenes in Giving an Account of Oneself that Frye would name

19 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Pathos, untitled
Already he was grasping at the railings as a starving man clutches food (die Nahrung). Georg's rushed death by drowning, the central sacrificial scene of the book's literary examples.
Senex iratus, untitled
His father condemns him to death by drowning, and Georg is rushed from the room, as if by the force of the utterance itself, and over the side of the bridge. The condemning father of 'The Judgment' is a blocking elder in its darkest, tragic form.
Epos, untitled
The chapters of this book were originally given as the Spinoza Lectures for the Department of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam in the spring of 2002. The radical of presentation is spoken lecture to a live audience.
Pathos, untitled
He dies for their sins, and the charwoman who passes him on the stairs cries “Jesus!” and covers her eyes when she sees him. Butler reads Georg's death as a sacrificial, quasi-Christological gift of love.
Lyric, untitled
I am you, If I am Celan's overheard lyric line serves as epigraph and condensed emblem of the thesis.
Sparagmos, untitled
Another word comes our way, a blow, an address or naming that suddenly, inexplicably slaughters, even as one lives on, strangely, as this slaughtered being, speaking away. The subject is figured as slaughtered by address yet surviving, a metaphoric tearing-apart of the self.

Books that share these scenes with Giving an Account of Oneself

About the author

Judith Butler