Judith Butler's Precarious Politics

Critical Encounters

Terrell Carver, Samuel A. Chambers, Terrell Carver, Samuel A. Chambers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134222773
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Judith Butler has been arguably the most important gender theorist of the past twenty years. This edited volume draws leading international political theorists into dialogue with her political theory.

Each chapter is written by an acclaimed political theorist and concentrates on a particular aspect of Butler's work. The book is divided into five sections which reflect the interdisciplinary nature of Butler's work and activism:

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• Butler and Philosophy: explores Butler's unique relationship to the discipline of philosophy, considering her work in light of its philosophical contributions

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• Butler and Subjectivity: covers the vexed question of subjectivity with which Butler has engaged throughout her published history

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• Butler and Gender: considers the most problematic area, gender, taken by many to be primary to Butler's work

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• Butler and Democracy: engages with Butler's significant contribution to the literature of radical democracy and to the central political issues faced by our post-cold war

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• Butler and Action: focuses directly on the question of political agency and political action in Butler's work.

Along with its companion volume, Judith Butler and Political Theory, it marks an intellectual event for political theory, with major implications for feminism, women's studies, gender studies, cultural studies, lesbian and gay studies, queer theory and anyone with a critical interest in contemporary American 'great power' politics.

1 Introduction

Terrell Carver and Samuel A. Chambers

This volume represents the first collective critical encounter between scholars of political theory and the works of Judith Butler. The terrain on which this encounter takes place is in part traditional to political theory (e.g. sovereignty, rights, capitalism, culture), and in part germane to the philosophical enquiries with which political theory necessarily engages (e.g. epistemology, feminism, ethics, phenomenology). The work of Butler herself also sets the terms for this encounter and includes concepts such as vulnerability, grieving, performativity, ‘trouble’, and the liveable life. The terms of political theory have thus been markedly supplemented by Butler’s writings over the past twenty years—testimony not only to the power of Butler’s intellect but also to the intensity with which her works engaged with the realm of the political.

Butler’s most notable impact in the intellectual world continues to be her now famous reversal of the sex-gender conceptual relationship, and the implications of this deconstructive but decisive analysis for the theory and politics of feminism. However, in constructing this volume we refused to restrict its focus to that aspect alone of Butler’s thought; we resisted the tendency in political theory to fix on a small selection of her early texts. Instead we take a much broader and more inclusive view: this volume draws on a wide range of Butler’s work, tracking her thought from her pre-Gender Trouble writings in the 1980s to as close to our date of publication as possible. Above all, we have encouraged the contributors to use Butler’s thought in a very broad array of contexts, thereby mirroring Butler’s own eclectic engagements. While not underrating Butler’s achievements in reorienting the philosophical, sociological, and political study of sex, gender, and sexuality, this volume situates that work, as Butler does, in relation to further topics, further issues, further controversies, further interventions in ‘precarious politics’.

In this spirit, the contributors to this volume have been given extensive freedom with respect to choosing the issues and questions to which they find Butler’s works variously relevant, and absolute freedom in their critical assessments. This volume is not a guide to Butler’s work; it offers no chronological or thematic overviews of Butler’s oeuvre. Nor is it, in any sense, a Festschrift. Rather, we based the selection of contributors on enquiries across the field of political theory in an effort to elicit engagements with Butler’s writings across an extremely broad spectrum of issues and approaches—in order to explore the full range of critical views. We find the centrality of such critical engagements to be a defining strength of political theory as a discipline, and in assembling the volume we were guided by this ideal of staging and enacting a set of critical encounters with Butler’s work.

The further benefit of this approach reveals itself in the variety of materials through which these scholarly encounters are pursued. The contributors put Butler’s thought to work so as to explore philosophical issues of great weight and abstraction. Collectively, they contribute to the burgeoning project of working out Butler’s political theory. And they consistently work on cross-cultural and interdisciplinary issues in comparative social thought: this includes the exploration of macro-issues in public policy and international politics and the elucidation of contemporary politics as reflected and pursued in TV and cinematic drama.

From the start, Butler’s work has been profoundly philosophical, and therefore in principle multi-disciplinary; Butler herself emphasises this point. This volume therefore does not presume to claim her as in some proprietary sense exclusively a political theorist. For us, such categorical contentions are not helpful moves to make. Rather this collection exhibits the diversity of responses that political theorists have had to Butler, the array of issues and ideas to which her works have been made relevant, and most of all, the impact that her more recent books and articles have had over and above the famous inaugurating controversies about ‘performativity’, ‘the body’, and ‘agency’.

This collection is thus not about Butler but rather about how political theorists use her work to do things with her concepts, her claims, her theories. Both in their writing and in their interpretation, the major texts of political theory can all be helpfully described as ‘interventions’ — interventions into both politics and broader fields of knowledge as they are constituted at a particular spatio-temporal nexus. Rather than merely describing Butler’s interventions, these chapters make their own by calling on the diverse resources of Butler’s work.

Given Butler’s own grounding in philosophy, and her repeated returns to it, we open the volume on this native philosophical terrain. In ‘Butler’s Phenomenological Existentialism’ Diana Coole situates Butler’s work in relation to an ostensible break between the phenomenological/existentialist and post-structuralist/constructivist schools of thought. Coole suggests that Butler herself wrongly situates her own thought, particularly in Gender Trouble (1990, 2nd edn 1999), in an uncompromisingly anti-humanist setting. Further, Coole seeks to demonstrate that much of Butler’s more recent work is self-evidently indebted to these disavowed approaches. This matters, Coole argues, because Butler’s later thought, and indeed her political interventions, thus risk eclecticism and incoherence in relation to the experiential issues of corporeality, materiality, agency, intersubjectivity, politics, and society. Coole’s critical tour de force resituates Butler’s Gender Trouble by linking her earliest philosophical works with her much more recent, and more overtly political ones.

In ‘Feminists Know Not What They Do’, Linda M. G. Zerilli distances Butler (along with Foucault and Derrida) from the epistemological tradition in Western philosophy. Zerilli describes this tradition as having a ‘craving for generality’; it presumes that knowledge must be universal if it is to survive an encounter with philosophical scepticism. Zerilli relates this to the ‘trouble’ that Butler caused within feminism, when Butler appeared either to invoke supposedly sceptical challenges to the category of ‘woman’ or to concede to them. Relating Butler’s account of ‘gender’ as a practice to Wittgenstein’s notion of following a rule—and his concomitant attack on the doubt that drives philosophical scepticism—Zerilli calls for a profound rethinking of feminist critique and hence of feminist politics. Drawing on Castoriadis’s account of radical imagination, Zerilli advocates a freedom-centred feminism that challenges feminists to leave behind the false security of epistemology, and venture out into the world of action—where the very insecurities of contingency can be much more productively confronted.

Butler’s impact on feminist philosophy and philosophising has of course been profound and dramatic, and above all, controversial. Lisa Jane Disch explores one relatively neglected aspect of this controversy in ‘“French Theory” goes to France’. Disch shows that ‘French Theory’ proves to be a rather bizarre construction, within an even stranger history: first it was a term applied by the North American academy to a select-yet-disparate group of French feminists, and now, with the recent translation of Gender Trouble into French, it becomes a term that French thinkers themselves use (in English) to designate what they deem a peculiarly American phenomenon. Disch offers a helpful and productive genealogy of French ‘materialist’ feminism, showing that French materialists were making a powerful set of critiques of standpoint feminism long before Butler and the influx of post-structuralist thinking came to the fore in the US and the UK. Disch opens with the question whether Butler’s work really adds anything significant to that of the French materialist Wittig and concludes with an affirmative answer, delineating precisely how Butler produces a thorough-going critique of the naturalised conceptions of agency—the very conceptions through which democratic politics currently takes place.

John Seery takes issue with Butler’s reading of Hegel in her published Wellek Library Lectures Antigone’s Claim (2000). In ‘Acclaim for Antigone’s Claim Reclaimed’ Seery recounts his initial advocacy of Butler’s reading of Sophocles’ play, in which she links incest with heteronormativity and thus adumbrates a manifesto for queer politics. Using Steiner’s work Antigones (1984), Seery argues that Butler misreads Hegel and others on the question and import of incest both in the play and in past and present politics. In particular Butler links the character Antigone—an incest-born person with possible incestuous desires—with the issue of liveable and grieveable lives as they arise within current structures of intelligibility, in particular that of kinship. For Seery, Butler’s queer politics is founded on a binary that recalls structuralist philosophy and analysis rather than the post-structuralism with which she is usually identified, and with which she herself has been in dialogue. Seery doubts whether ‘statically oppositional’ and ‘schematic’ language can offer a promising vehicle for the progressive politics that Butler advocates. And he questions the salience of a politics that derives from the ‘exclusion and horror’ of tragedy.

The nature of this progressive politics in its relation to the putative culture-economy dichotomy occupies the attention of two contributors who draw together Butler’s early work with her more recent ‘post-9/11’ interventions in contemporary political controversy. In ‘Missing Poststructuralism, Missing Foucault’ Anna Marie Smith takes Butler’s exchange with Nancy Fraser as indicative of current struggles over the central concepts of political theory. Agreeing with Butler’s challenge to a logic that draws a strict boundary between the economic and the ‘merely’ cultural, Smith traces out the weaknesses of Fraser’s position on the politics of sexuality. She notes, however, that Butler’s reading sometimes proves totalistic in character and thus vulnerable to the critiques levelled at structuralist thought. Smith finds Butler’s presumption that ‘the cultural’ is the condition of existence for ‘the economic’ suspect in empirical terms as well, especially in relation to institutional analysis. For Smith, Butler’s social theory, perhaps surprisingly, turns out to be insufficiently post-structuralist, and thus not as well suited to contemporary queer politics as it might be. The claim resonates in particular given the possibilities—i.e. potential for close historical analysis of the ways that bio-power emerges through the regulation of sexualities—inherent in her theory of subjectivation.

In her chapter ‘Towards a Cultural Politics of Vulnerability’ Moya Lloyd explores Butler’s recent writings and traces her continuing interest in grief and mourning vis-à-vis the development of a global political ethics. Lloyd finds Butler’s account of the human subject deeply rooted in the puzzle of the subject’s subjection, but Lloyd shows that Butler herself seeks to make sense of this dilemma in a rather puzzling way. That is, Butler resolves the problem of a subject that seeks its own subjection by resorting to an unexamined ontological claim about desire. Thus, Butler makes an implicit appeal to a pre-discursive, a move for which she has consistently criticised others. Is her ethics then pre-political at the outset, even though it becomes political within contexts of power? To answer this question Butler would need to work with a more historicised conception of the social, such that the emergence of discourses of desire can be understood politically, rather than merely posited philosophically. Like Smith, Lloyd finds that Butler’s work needs more Foucauldian flesh on Derridean bones.

The next pair of contributions sharpens the focus on Butler’s ‘ethical turn’ in the post-‘9/11’ works that themselves look back to Excitable Speech (1997). In ‘Change of Address’ Jodi Dean argues that Butler’s ethics presents openness and critique as preferable to condemnation and conviction, but does so at the expense of politics. According to Dean, Butler’s argument that current practices of governmentality are founded on the fantasy of a sovereign speaker is simply misplaced; Butler misses the extent to which American law is itself a contested site, with multiple, de-centred points of access and judgement. Dean also resists Butler’s argument that current American policies towards potential terrorists rest upon a prior exclusion of those individuals from the realm of the human. Condemnation, Dean advises, is not necessarily a statement of closure from a sovereign speaker, as Butler seems to suggest; rather it involves citationality and may help connect those who are focusing on political action. Butler’s ethics demands a politics that is not itself haunted by fantasies of sovereignty.

David. S. Gutterman and Sara L. Rushing continue this exploration of Butler’s current work in ‘Sovereignty and Suffering’, but from a very different perspective. Taking as their context the cycle of violence in American domestic as well as foreign policies in recent history, Gutterman and Rushing align Butler with Socrates. That is, they paint a picture of Butler as a moral philosopher who shares his concerns and engagements. Both suggest that our ethical grounds for judgement and action in politics should come from an acknowledgement of shared human fragility. The two diverge on the issue of self-knowledge: Socrates proposes a quest for self-knowledge and self-mastery, while Butler grounds her ethics in the unknowability of the self. Similarly, rather than appealing to a presumed commonality of rationality, discipline, and self-restraint, Butler’s account of ethical obligations takes failures of recognition and limits to knowability as its conditions of possibility. A responsible politics thus cannot presume an ethics that requires a full account of oneself—a self transparent to the other. Butler appeals to humility, generosity, and restraint, arising out of grief, figured as an ethical and political resource.

Grieving, of course, is mourning for a life. In ‘Butler and Life’ Elena Loizidou addresses Butler’s concern with creating better conditions for ‘livable lives’. This entails an agonistic relationship between the various spheres of life, and therefore it also centrally concerns the law. In the current political situation Butler argues that the law becomes an instrument of power to be deployed by the state. Law is no longer that which creates the state, nor that which constrains it; rather, it is one more tool for the state to use. Nonetheless, the law could have a meaningful and important role in negotiating what it is to be human, and therefore to have a liveable and grieveable life. Disciplinary power, exercised through the development of norms, can be resisted and re-interpreted; when norms and the law are collapsed together, as the current George W. Bush administration in the US attempts to do, then trials and legal interventions are an important site for securing precarious lives. Butler’s politics is thus rooted in agonism, rather than in any position or predilection that is ‘for or against’ the law.

In ‘Rights and the Politics of Performativity’ Karen Zivi continues the theme of explicating and analysing Butler’s philosophically reasoned interventions into current political controversies. The theory of performativity earned Butler very heavy public criticism; this arose from charges that her thinking undermined political action, in particular action aimed at liberatory political change. Arguing to the contrary, Zivi explains how Butler’s work on rights constitutes a progressive intervention in democratic politics. Moreover, Zivi shows that the practice of rights-claiming, far from proving impossible under Butler’s conceptualisation, actually illustrates Butler’s theory of performativity in an empowering way. While Butler argues that rights-claiming (specifically with regard to hate-speech) is problematic in licensing government regulation, and while her ‘politics of the performative’ has come to be associated with drag, parody, and similarly non-standard political tactics, Zivi argues that Butler’s politics presupposes a performative subject that has real agency—just what Butler’s critics have denied. The performative subject uses the ‘excess’ inherent in language to remake subjectivity and displace or denaturalise current configurations of power. Understood in this way, rights-claiming is a remaking of reality and expansion of the liveable, albeit without guarantees.

The final three chapters return to the fundamental terms that have always animated Butler’s work and continue to do so: humanity and vulnerability. Using Butler’s concepts of citationality and performativity, the contributors to this section look to photographs, movies, and television as artefacts through which meaning is instantiated and communicated. The contributors in this section offer readings of these artefacts designed to develop our understanding of ‘the political’ — to think politics as a way of dealing with human vulnerability. In ‘This Species Which Is Not One’, Kathy E. Ferguson presents Butler’s enquiry into the relation between the presumptions of normative gender and sexuality and the delimitation of lives into those that qualify as ‘human’ and ‘liveable’ and those that do not. Ferguson explores these crucial issues through the text of the television series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Science fiction proves particularly appropriate to such a project because it presents imagined perspectives on ‘the possible’ that challenge the familiar and the supposedly unquestionable. Ferguson guides us through the heterotopic world in the drama, where an array of metaphors and analogies reconfigure the supposed securities of human psychic and physical identity as part of a reproductive cycle involving symbiosis and ‘joining’. Normative sexuality is relocated from heterosexuality to timeline barriers involving separating past from present and future partners. These imaginative reconfigurations encourage contemporary readers to think more carefully, as Butler advises, about the normative violence and exclusion through which concepts of the ‘human’ and the ‘livable life’ are both constructed and enforced.

Butler has framed her responses to the events of 9/11 in terms of the precariousness of life. In this context she argues that violent vengeance both denies our vulnerability and further threatens our security. In ‘Vulnerability, Vengeance, and Community’ Robert E. Watkins explores Butler’s arguments through a reading of Mystic River (dir. Eastwood, 2000). Butler’s own arguments are augmented through Watkins’s projection of them into a cinematic dramatisation of vulnerability and vengeance. Watkins tracks the turn towards vulnerability and community in Butler’s recent work, showing how it preserves her interest in power, on the one hand, and the authoring of subjects by what precedes and exceeds them, on the other. Butler’s work remains committed to the idea of bodily interdependence within society and the vulnerability of the individual as an embodied being. Mystic River dramatises the two main responses Butler identifies when loss or injury impinges upon us: revenge as denial, and grief as recognition. As with Butler’s philosophy, Eastwood’s movie is a critique of vengeance. The timeliness of Butler’s message is unmistakable.

The final contributor to the volume is Timothy Kaufman-Osborn, whose ‘Gender Trouble at Abu Ghraib?’ returns us to Butler’s originary concerns with sex, gender, and sexuality. It does so, moreover, within the very dramatic context provided by the circulation of the famous photographs taken at Abu Ghraib which emerged in 2003. These photographs—taken by US military personnel at a prison complex in Baghdad—show the abuse and torture of Iraqi prisoners in overtly sexualised ‘stagings’. Kaufman-Osborn takes up the controversy among feminists over the activities of Lynndie England as depicted in the photographs, and the ensuing discussions about women, femininity, and feminism. Aligning himself with Butler, KaufmanOsborn advises that gender should be taken seriously as a signifier, unmoored from biological sex. He argues that feminist nostalgia for rooting femininity in bodily sex generates retrograde expectations about women. In his argument persons become en-gendered through complex performative practices, just as Butler suggests. Viewing Lynndie England and the Abu Ghraib photographs in this way avoids unproductive questions about what ‘men’ and ‘women’ are like; instead, it promotes clear-minded political engagement on the terrain of political power. In particular KaufmanOsborn reads the images and the episode as indicative of a militarised and militarising masculinism, rooted in misogyny and homophobia. He concludes that gendered practices are deployed in multiple ways, to produce discipline and subjection through sexualised violence—whether in hazing rituals, interrogation or incarceration.

Although one can locate much wider, and perhaps much more excited audiences for her writings than the field of political theory, and despite the fact that Butler does not speak exclusively or even directly to political theorists, nonetheless—wittingly or not—Butler’s work certainly qualifies as political theory. And we argue that her writings demand to be read as texts of political theory, to be debated by political theorists, to be interpreted as political interventions. As can be seen clearly from the chapters summarised above, Butler’s themes and enquiries bear on many of the major issues that political theorists routinely engage with in their work. These range from serious philosophical discussions—drawing on a spectrum of authorities from the classics to the postmoderns—to the most engagé interventions into current affairs that put her into conversation with other public intellectuals and politicians. The contributors to this volume have invested significant time and energy in their encounters with Butler, and they evince considerable enthusiasm for this agonistic engagement. As political theory itself is a broad field of study, drawing eclectically on numerous disciplines and subdisciplines in the social sciences and humanities, we hope that the critical appreciation of Butler’s work registered in this volume will have a similarly broad appeal to readers, and that her work itself will continue to engage a worldwide audience.

Part I
Phenomenology and epistemology

2 Butler’s phenomenological existentialism

Diana Coole

A simple narrative is often rehearsed regarding developments in radical political philosophy; one that seems especially apposite in relation to French thought and to the debates that have enlivened post-war feminism. Its main plot involves a displacement of the existentialist and phenomenological perspectives that had dominated Continental thinking from the 1940s to the 1960s, by anti-humanist approaches that began with structuralism before proliferating in various forms of poststructuralism (notably genealogy, radical constructivism and deconstruction). The freedom and experience emphasised by the forme...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on contributors
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Phenomenology and epistemology
• Part II Feminism and philosophy
• Part III Capitalism and culture
• Part IV Ethics and sovereignty
• Part V Law and rights
• Part VI Humanity and vulnerability
• Bibliography