Abstract
The question of Judith Butler's ‘politics’ and their normative justification has been raised by critics and supporters alike for some time. The number of recent texts dedicated to this topic suggests that it remains an unresolved and still pressing question. I argue that in order to identify and evaluate the political implications of Butler's work, we must first recognize the relationship and distinction between four vectors of her thinking: her diagnosis of the human condition, her expression of specific normative aspirations, her defense of a distinct ethical comportment and finally her theory of political engagement. I conclude that Butler implicitly counsels the cultivation of certain ethical dispositions, including generosity, humility, patience and restraint, as part of a practice of preparing to engage in a kind of politics that breaks radically with the mastery- and sovereignty-seeking variety all too familiar to us in contemporary times.
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Notes
In a 2008 interview with Thomas Dumm, Butler responds to his suggestion that she has shifted from gender to ‘the human’ by reminding Dumm that she published Undoing Gender in 2004, and thus has not left that thread of her work behind. Butler does not precisely address the issue of whether her concern for the human is a distinct thread, though she does say that she is not theorizing gender anew anymore but rather returning to some of her earliest concerns about the production of what she is now calling ‘the human’. In response to those who worry that Butler has moved beyond queer politics in favor of a new focus on ‘the human’ in international politics, I would draw on Brookey and Miller (2005) and suggest that perhaps Butler's embrace of ‘the human’ represents a deepening of her queer theoretical approach, in so far as it further ‘abandons the sign of sexual identity’ as the ‘most effective strategy for attaining sexual rights’ (p. 201). In this sense, we can see Butler as performing what Brookey and Miller call a pragmatic symbolic inversion, by taking the queer experience of corporeal vulnerability as paradigmatically human, and thus, perhaps ironically, not something that queer politics retains a political monopoly on. Nonetheless, the question I raise here about who, exactly, Butler's counsel of an ethics of generosity, humility and patience is directed at remains: is she talking to those in positions of dominance, or to anyone regardless of their social position? And if to anyone, how might such counsel function to offer relief to socially ostracized sexual minorities?
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Acknowledgements
The author thanks David Gutterman, Moya Lloyd, the editorial board of Contemporary Political Theory and the two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and constructive feedback on this paper.