But the larger task is to affirm social and ecological interdependence, which is regularly misrecognized as well. You have written before about the concept of grievability, and it is an important idea in this book.
Can you talk about it? You know when I think it started for me? Here in the United States, during the AIDS crisis, when it became clear that many people were losing their lovers and not receiving adequate recognition for that loss.
In many cases, people would go home to their families and try to explain their loss, or be unable to go home to their families or workplaces and try to explain their loss. The loss was not recognized, and it was not marked, which means that it was treated as if it were no loss. Of course, that follows from the fact that the love they lived was also treated as if it were no love.
That puts you into what Freud called melancholia. In contemporary terms, it is a version of depression, even as it admits of manic forms—but not just individual depression but shared melancholia.
It enraged me then, as it does now, that some lives were considered to be more worthy of grieving publicly than others, depending on the status and recognizability of those persons and their relations. Those who were openly mourned tended to lead lives whose value was measured by whether they had property, education, whether they were married and had a dog and some children.
The traditional heterosexual frame became the condition of possibility for public mourning. You are referring to the twenty-five hundred mini-obituaries in the Times , right? It was rather amazing the way that the undocumented were not really openly and publicly mourned through those obituaries, and a lot of gay and lesbian people were mourned in a shadowy way or not at all. They fell into the dustbin of the unmournable or the ungrievable.
We can also see this in broader public policies. There are those for whom health insurance is so precious that it is publicly assumed that it can never be taken away, and others who remain without coverage, who cannot afford the premiums that would increase their chances of living—their lives are of no consequence to those who oppose health care for all. Certain lives are considered more grievable. We have to get beyond the idea of calculating the value of lives, in order to arrive at a different, more radical idea of social equality.
Black Lives Matter emerged from mourning. Douglas Crimp, the great art historian and theorist, reflected on mourning and militancy in an important essay by that name. Can you explain that? Take the example of electability. If one takes the view that it is simply not realistic that a woman can be elected President, one speaks in a way that seems both practical and knowing. As a prediction, it may be true, or it may be shifting as we speak. But the claim that it is not realistic confirms that very idea of reality and gives it further power over our beliefs and expectations.
We said it years ago about a black President. Sometimes you have to imagine in a radical way that makes you seem a little crazy, that puts you in an embarrassing light, in order to open up a possibility that others have already closed down with their knowing realism. It might be understood as one of the most profoundly unrealistic positions you could hold in this life.
But when I ask people whether they would want to live in a world in which no one takes that position, they say that that would be terrible. I want to challenge your examples a little bit.
I find that the dismissive form of realism is guarding those borders and shutting down those horizons of possibility. If the terms of their struggle and their suffering are the ones that they bring to you from their experience, then, yes, of course. That way of thinking rests on the notion that individual deliberation is at the core of moral action.
Of course, to some degree it is, but we do not think critically about the individual. I am seeking to shift the question of nonviolence into a question of social obligations but also to suggest that probing social relationality will give us some clues about what a different ethical framework would be. What do we owe those with whom we inhabit the earth? And why do we owe people or other living creatures that concern? Why do we owe them regard for life or a commitment to a nonviolent relationship?
Our interdependency serves as the basis of our ethical obligations to one another. When we strike at one another, we strike at that very bond. Many social psychologists will tell us that certain social bonds are consolidated through violence, and those tend to be group bonds, including nationalism and racism.
But what would it mean to live in a world of radical equality? Many people have pointed out that only certain people, in courts of law, are permitted to argue self-defense, and others very rarely are. We know that white men can protect themselves and their property and wield force in self-defense much more easily than black and brown people can. Who has the kind of self that is recognized by the law and the public as worthy of self-defense? If I think of myself not just as this bounded individual but as fundamentally related to others, then I locate this self in those relations.
In that case, the self I am trying to defend is not just me but all those relations that define and sustain me, and those relations can, and should be, extended indefinitely beyond local units like family and community. The problem of nonviolence looks different if you see it that way. I found myself a little disappointed every time you make that caveat. If I were giving a rational justification for nonviolence as a position, which would make me into a much more proper philosopher than I am—or wish to be—then it would make sense to rule out all exceptions.
We might then approach the world in a way that would make violence less likely, that would allow us to think about how to live together given our anger and our aggression, our murderous wishes—how to live together and to make a commitment to that, outside of the boundaries of community or the boundaries of the nation. And would it be correct to say that you are also asking us not to adopt this new framework individually but actually to rethink together with others—that adopting this frame requires doing it in an interdependent way?
I think so. We would need to develop political practices to make decisions about how to live together less violently.
We have to be able to identify institutional modes of violence, including prisons and the carceral state, that are too often taken for granted and not recognized as violent. Within, and beyond that, Judith Butler is also known for her critical voice in socio-political discourse and debate. Her qualities as a thinker are reflected in her openness to what is at stake in the present and in her passionate engagement in conversations with contemporaries in and outside academia.
Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Butler was raised in a Jewish family and according to her own words, was initiated into philosophical thinking at the age of fourteen by a rabbi from her local synagogue. In , she received her PhD in philosophy from Yale University. Her philosophical training was primarily in German Idealism, phenomenology, and the work of the Frankfurt School. The turn towards post-structuralism, to which her work is considered to make a significant contribution, followed her PhD.
Unmooring feminism at its basis, the book questions the assumption that there is such a thing as the unity of the experience of women. Women of color, who could not accept the category of women as their privileged one, articulated a critique of a unified subject of feminism and the reductive scheme operating within white feminism. Attuned to that polyphonic discourse, Butler maintained that the construction of the category of women involves a regulation of gender relations, which reverses feminist aims.
She demonstrated that a feminism premised on the category of women is complicit with compulsory heterosexuality, as heterosexuality is the unreflected condition of a binary coded system of gender and desire. Gender Trouble tackles the problem of exclusion yet in another way. Clearly, the achievement of Gender Trouble was that it launched a more nuanced understanding of identity and its mechanisms of exclusion.
However, the radical critique of categories of identity can also be couched in positive terms, as in opening up new political possibilities. In this sense, Gender Trouble also marks the advent of a new feminism.
However, Gender Trouble can still be looked at as an overture to her later thinking. It can be traced back to her very first publication, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflection in Twentieth-Century France , where she locates the ek-static character of being in the Hegelian life and death struggle that transforms into a relationship between Lord and Bondsman.
In Undoing Gender , Judith Butler revives this early motive, yet she aspires to displace the dyadic structure of the Hegelian recognition. What surfaces in her later writings is a renewed attention to desire, calling forth a politics prominently featuring corporeality, antagonism and passion. In introducing the concept of bodily vulnerability, Judith Butler brings her ontological aspirations linked to the ek-static structure of being on normative grounds.
In Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence , she makes the central assertion that life is essentially precarious and vulnerable. This grounds life negatively in its exposure to violence and death, but equally endows life, as a positive feature, with its capacity to be responsive and open towards the world.
Whereas precariousness captures the shared condition of all existence, precarity , its complementary figure, is the conceptual lens under which the unequal distribution of vulnerability can be comprehended, namely the unequally assigned disposability and the differential access to material resources resulting from neoliberal governmentality and war.
By the same token, Judith Butler affirms the idea of global bonds, that is to say a fundamental dependency that is neither restricted to those we know, nor to the imposition of national or cultural boundaries. From there, Butler concludes, arises the ethical obligation to create political institutions and forms of life that guarantee the persistence of distant others. What takes center stage is the epistemological question of how vulnerability can be apprehended given the existence of media frames that preconfigures affective responses and ways of seeing.
In recent lectures and writings, Judith Butler embarks on new terrain. Focusing on political collectives, the coming together of people in public assembly—— the people, citizenship, and public space——Butler revives her sentiment for the performative. Expanding beyond the speech act, she offers a new perspective to her concept of the performative as it is the appearance of corporeal life that establishes performatively a field of the political and supports concerted action.
It is the appearance of bodies not only being precarious, but also resistant and persistent. Harvard University Press, ISBN: Dispossession: The Performative in the Political. Polity, Senses of the Subject , Butler, Judith. Senses of the Subject. Fordham University Press, ISBN: X. Kindle Edition. Translated by Martin Rueff. Editions Payot, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism.
Columbia University Press, Translated by Gildas Le Dem. Fayard, Am Scheideweg: Judentum und die Kritik am Zionismus. Campus Verlag, Edited by Tatiana Eggeling. Maennershwarm, The Question of Gender: Joan W.
Indiana University Press, The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere. Columbia University Press. Ce qui fait une vie : Essai sur la violence, la guerre et le deuil , Butler, Judith. Ce qui fait une vie : Essai sur la violence, la guerre et le deuil. Zones, Raster des Krieges: Warum wir nicht jedes Leid beklagen. She shoulders a standard teaching load. Butler used to have an office alongside the rest of her colleagues in the comp-lit department, but the traffic she attracted eventually became oppressive.
Now she works amid the art-history department: The Van Gogh postcard outside her office door is camouflage. Still, I pass a pair of students craning their necks.
Butler came to Berkeley not long after Gender Trouble made her reputation. The hard part is having two academics. She had a conversation with a group of them not long ago about navigating campus sex in an ethical way. What kind of community do we want to build? Isaac belongs to a generation for whom Butler is part of the canon. Butler is thrilled to see the work that has gone beyond hers.
David Halperin was another early queer theorist and is the author, most recently, of How to Be Gay. He teaches at the University of Michigan. The shift from marginal to mainstream can be startling for academics who made their names as radicals.
Butler has begun to anticipate the freedom of her eventual retirement from Berkeley. In recent years, Butler has been considering how we define the human. Whose lives do we see as valuable; whose deaths are therefore grievable? Difficulty, for Butler, often remains the point. But the possibility of things getting a little easier is one of the charms of this new world. A new generation of female artists is making VR the most diverse corner of the male-dominated tech space.
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