Week Eleven
Judith Butler, The Force of Nonviolence
The only living author in our lineup, Butler is one of the founders of queer theory, which applies critical theory to “queer,” or deconstruct, all notions of normativity/deviance when it comes to sexuality and gender. So her thought is at the center of the transgenderism roiling society right now. She had once helpfully noted the difference between sex and gender, distinguishing “between sex, as biological facticity, and gender, as the cultural interpretation or signification of that facticity,” while arguing that gender is a performative reality. But in her 1990 book Gender Trouble, she problematizes even “sex,” threatening to lose bodily difference in textual idealism. Refusing any essence at all to womanhood jeopardizes the feminist project, and indeed renders precarious other social justice claims based on the intersection of categories of vulnerability. Can one queer all categories and yet acknowledge justice claims based on categories? Or is commitment to progressive politics an unthinkable given?
“When the critique of continuing colonial violence is deemed violent (Palestine), when a petition for peace is recast as an act of war (Turkey), when struggles for equality and freedom are construed as violent threats to state security (Black Lives Matter), or when “gender” is portrayed as a nuclear arsenal directed against the family (anti-gender ideology), then we are operating in the midst of politically consequential forms of phantasmagoria.”
Judith Butler was born in 1956 in Cleveland to parents who were observant Reform Jews. Most of her maternal grandmother’s family were killed in the Holocaust. When asked what questions she wanted to pursue in an ethics tutorial at Hebrew School, she answered, “Why was Spinoza excommunicated from the synagogue? Could German Idealism be held accountable for Nazism? And how was one to understand existential theology, including the work of Martin Buber?” She obtained her philosophy degrees from Yale, writing her doctoral dissertation on the reception by twentieth-century French philosophers of desire and recognition as conceptualized in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. As a Fulbright Scholar, she studied Hegel and German Idealism under Dieter Henrich and Gadamer at Heidelberg. She teaches at UC Berkeley, and also holds the Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School. She came to French theory somewhat later, including Foucault, so important for her analyses. Butler’s career as a professor shows her an insider within the modern research university, that philosophe bubble which had been created to serve the ambitions of the new German nation-state.
The Davenant Institute on the key to Martin Luther’s theology, and view of eternal life.
Butler’s left-Hegelian orientation is clear, subserving her deconstructive commitment: “The emergent subject of Hegel’s Phenomenology is an ek-static one, a subject who constantly finds itself outside itself, and whose periodic expropriations do not lead to a return to a former self. Indeed, the self who comes outside of itself, for whom ek-stasis is a condition of existence, is one for whom no return to self is possible, for whom there is no final recovery from self-loss.” This is postmodern subjectivity. Butler frames her work in a way that indicates the importance of identity politics for emancipation: “What is the relation between desire and recognition, and how is it that the constitution of the subject entails a radical and constitutive relation to alterity?”