Book: Senses of the Subject

Overview
Judith Butler examines how subjects are formed through perceptual practices and the shared conditions that make sensing meaningful. Attention to perception shifts questions about identity and agency from fixed inner cores to processes of becoming that depend on relational and normative frameworks. Butler treats senses not only as empirical faculties but as modalities through which intelligibility, obligation, and exposure to others take shape.

Phenomenology and the Body
Drawing on phenomenological thinkers such as Husserl and Merleau-Ponty alongside continental theorists, Butler reads perception as inherently social and embodied. The body figures as both a perceiver and a medium of perception: sensing is always an event in which the sensing body is already shaped by histories, languages, and material relations. Perception therefore cannot be isolated as a private act; it discloses a field of intersubjective relations that constitute subjects.

Norms of Intelligibility and Subject Formation
Butler argues that what counts as a recognizable subject depends on norms of intelligibility that govern how bodies are seen, heard, and felt. These norms make some bodies legible as persons while rendering others unrecognizable or marginal. Sensation and perception participate in the regulation of personhood because they provide the very means whereby a body becomes readable or dismissed. Thus study of sense becomes a study of power: the modalities of sensing are implicated in exclusion, recognition, and the production of social life.

Intercorporeality, Vulnerability, and Ethics
A sustained concern is the ethical import of shared vulnerability and exposure. Intercorporeality, the mutual embodiment of subjects, reveals how sensing ties one to others and how bodily exposure creates moral obligations. Butler attends to how touch, proximity, and responsiveness register claims that call for recognition and care, and how normative frameworks can either enable or foreclose those claims. This ethical dimension reframes political questions about responsibility, injury, and reparative response in terms of perceptual relations.

Language, Affect, and Perceptual Mediation
Perception is mediated by language and affective registers that shape what sensations become meaningful. Words, cultural narratives, and discursive frames both enable and limit the intelligibility of sensations; affective economies, moods, feelings, and atmospheres, condition how perception is received and interpreted. Butler explores how linguistic and affective mediation can obscure or open pathways for certain forms of sense, insisting that the senses are not neutral avenues to a pre-given world but contested terrains of interpretation.

Political Stakes and Interventions
By tracing how sensing contributes to the making and unmaking of subjects, Butler provides a vocabulary for diagnosing political exclusions and imagining modes of radical recognition. The analysis links micro-processes of attention and perception to larger structures of power that determine whose lives are grievable, whose pain is visible, and whose presence is acknowledged. Interventions that reconfigure norms of intelligibility, through new practices of attention, solidarity, and responsiveness, become central to transforming social vulnerability into mutual accountability.

Method and Significance
Butler's approach combines close readings of philosophical texts with theoretical reflection on contemporary social phenomena, bringing together phenomenology, gender theory, and political thought. The result is a nuanced account of subjectivity that foregrounds the sensory conditions of social life and highlights the ethical and political work performed by perception. The study invites rethinking both how subjects are constituted and how communal life might be reimagined through altered practices of sensing and recognition.