Who is judith butler

People in the world have every reason to be in a state of total rage. What we do with that rage together is important.

The significance of nonviolence is not to be found in our most pacific moments but precisely when revenge makes perfect sense. In the midst of feeling that rage, one can also work with others to find that other way, and I see that happening in nonviolent movements. I see it happening in Black Lives Matter. I think the feminist movement is very strongly nonviolent—it very rarely gets put in that category, but most of its activities are nonviolent, especially the struggle against sexual violence.

Antiwar protests are almost by definition nonviolent. What did you have in mind when you wrote those phrases? A leader can defy the laws of his own country and test to see how much power he can take.

He can imprison dissenters and inflict violence on neighboring regions. He can block migrants from certain countries or religions. Many people are excited by this kind of exercise of power, its unchecked quality, and they want in their own lives to free up their aggressive speech and action without any checks: no shame, no legal repercussions.

They have this leader who models that freedom. The sadism intensifies and accelerates. I think, as many people do, that Trump has licensed the overt violence of white supremacy and also unleashed police violence by suspending any sense of constraint.

Many people thrill to see embodied in their government leader a will to destruction that is uninhibited, invoking a kind of moral sadism as its perverse justification. That goes back to my question about where the boundary of violence lies. Executive speech acts have the power to stop people, so his speech acts do stop people at the border.

The executive order is a weird speech act, but he does position himself as a quasi king or sovereign who can make policy through simply uttering certain words. The tweet acts as an incitation but also as a virtual attack with consequences; it gives public license to violence. He models a kind of entitlement that positions him above the law. Those who support him, even love him, want to live in that zone with him.

He is a sovereign unchecked by the rule of law he represents, and many think that is the most free and courageous kind of liberation. But it is liberation from all social obligation, a self-aggrandizing sovereignty of the individual.

If we think about the cases of police violence against black women, men, and children who are unarmed, or are actually running away, or sleeping on the couch, or completely constrained and saying that they cannot breathe, we would reasonably suppose that the manifest violence and injustice of these killings is evident. Yet there are ways of seeing those very videos that document police violence where the black person is identified as the one who is about to commit some terribly violent act.

How could anyone be persuaded of that? What are the conditions of persuasion such that a lawyer could make that argument, on the basis of video documentation, and have a jury or judge accept that view? The only way we can imagine that is if we understand potential violence to be something that black people carry in them as part of their blackness. It has been shocking to see juries and judges and police investigators exonerate police time and again, when it would seem—to many of us, at least—that these were cases of unprovoked, deadly violence.

So I understand it as a kind of racial phantasmagoria. I have been working on this topic for a while. But, also, some of my allies on the left were pretty sure that, when Trump was elected, we were living in a time of fascism that required a violent overthrow or a violent set of resistance tactics, citing the resistance to Nazism in Europe and Fascism in Italy and Spain.

Some groups were affirming destruction rather than trying to build new alliances based on a new analysis of our times, one that would eventually be strong enough to oppose this dangerous current trend of authoritarian, neo-Fascist rule. Can you give some examples of what you see as affirming destruction?

At a very simple level: getting into physical fights with fascists who come to provoke you. Or destruction of storefronts because capitalism has to be brought to its knees, as has happened during Occupy and anti-fascist protests in the Bay Area, even if those storefronts belong to black people who struggled to establish those businesses.

When I was in Chile last April, I was struck by the fact that the feminist movement was at the forefront of the left, and it made a huge difference in thinking about tactics, strategies, and aims. In the U. Of course, it does not have to go that way, but I worry about a return to the framework of primary and secondary impressions. Many social movements fought against that for decades. You have faced violence, and I know there are some countries you no longer feel safe travelling to.

What has happened? There are usually two issues, Palestine or gender. I have come to understand in what places which issue is controversial. But the idea was that the bra would be incongruent with who I am, so they were assuming a more masculine core, and the pink bra would have been a way to portray me in drag. That was kind of interesting. It was kind of horrible, too. I was protected inside a cultural center, and there were crowds outside.

I am glad to say that the crowd opposing the right-wing Christians was much larger. I was scared. I had a really good bodyguard, who remains my friend. They see it as an attack on both the God-given character of male and female and the ostensibly natural social form in which they join each other—heterosexual marriage.

It is all very frightening, and it has been successful in threatening scholars and, in some cases, shutting down programs. There is also an active resistance against them, and I am now part of that. How long has this been going on, this particular stage of your existence in the world? I wrote briefly about that but could not imagine then that it would become a well-financed campaign throughout the world.

Theorists such as Asad Haider have adopted your theory to address racial divides in the United States. Haider emphasises your view of identity formation as restless and always uprooted. The right is seeking desperately to reclaim forms of identity that have been rightly challenged. In fact, these movements are primarily concerned with redefining what justice, equality and freedom can and should mean. In this way, they are essential to any radical democratic movement, so we should reject those caricatures.

So what does that mean for the left? If we base our viewpoints only on particular identities, I am not sure we can grasp the complexity of our social and economic worlds or build the kind of analysis or alliance needed to realise ideals of radical justice, equality and freedom. At the same time, marking identity is a way of making clear how coalitions must change to be more responsive to interlinked oppressions. Yes, it is important to acknowledge that, while a white person cannot claim to represent Black experience, that is no reason for white people to be paralyzed on matters on race, refusing to intervene at all.

No one needs to represent all Black experience in order to track, expose and oppose systemic racism — and to call upon others to do the same. If white people become exclusively preoccupied with our own privilege, we risk becoming self-absorbed.

How has your own gender identity informed your political theory? It was with some difficulty that I found a way of occupying the language used to define and defeat me. I still rather think that pronouns come to me from others, which I find interesting, since I receive an array of them — so I am always somewhat surprised and impressed when people decide their own pronouns or even when they ask me what pronouns I prefer.

You have often been the target of protesters across the world. What do you make of that? Anti-gender politics have been bolstered by the Vatican and the more conservative evangelical and apostolic churches on several continents, but also by neoliberals in France and elsewhere who need the normative family to absorb the decimation of social welfare.

This movement is at once anti-feminist, homophobic and transphobic, opposing both reproductive freedom and trans rights. It seeks to censor gender studies programs, to take gender out of public education — a topic so important for young people to discuss. And to reverse major legal and legislative successes for sexual freedom, gender equality and laws against gender discrimination and sexual violence. How much has changed since you came out? Oh, I never came out.

I was outed by my parents at the age of I was certainly affected by the gay and lesbian bars I frequented too often in the late s and early s, and I was concerned then as well with the challenges faced by bisexuals to gain acceptance. I met with intersex groups to understand their struggle with the medical establishment and eventually came to think more carefully about the difference between drag, transgender and gender in general. The demonstrations in my youth were certainly about the right to come out, the struggle against discrimination and pathologization and violence, both domestic and public.

We fought against psychiatric pathologization and its carceral consequences. 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. University of California Press, Die Macht der Geschlechternormen und die Grenzen des Menschlichen. Kritik der ethischen Gewalt: Adorno-Vorlesungen Suhrkamp, Seagull Books, Giving an Account of Oneself , Butler, Judith.

Giving an Account of Oneself. Dar cuenta de si mismo. Presses Universitaires de France, The Judith Butler Reader. Edited by Sara Salih. Wiley-Blackwell, Verso, Translated by Sarah Clyne Sundberg.

Tankekraft, Undoing Gender , Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. Routledge, Translated by Guo Jie. Shanghai san lian shu dian, Translated by Maxime Cervulle. Editions Amsterdam, Translated by Karin Lindeqvist. Translated by Jasmina Husanovic. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages.