The article seeks to explain why spontaneity, a concept that political theorists have given scant attention to, matters. It argues that it matters because it delivers a capacity for producing democratic change that is urgent to reflect on amidst a prevailing mood of grief over a democracy lost. To stimulate this reflection, the article engages with Rosa Luxemburg’s work, showing how her understanding of spontaneity as an initiative that delivers something for democracy lays the groundwork for a theoretical orientation that (...) allows us to notice the effects of spontaneity on democracy without overplaying its short-lived nature. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Judith Butler’s work has tended to be read through two axes: an early gender theory/later ethical theory division, and/or an ethical/political divide. In contrast, I aim to undercut both hermeneutical strategies by turning to her epistemology, as manifested through her analyses of normativity and “frames,” to argue that the latter acts as the hinge uniting her so-called early and later works and the ethical and political dimensions of her thinking. From this premise, I maintain that Butler affirms that these (...) frames are conditioned by power relations and contingency, points to the existence of multiple frameworks that simultaneously compete against one another, and insists that frames are culturally specific and determining of the categories that identify what counts as a legitimate life for a particular community and the ways in which each life is to be treated. By highlighting the social, performative, and normative dimensions of epistemic practices, Butler offers an epistemology based in the construction of contingent and contestable frameworks and shows how the contestation between distinct frameworks conditions the ethical-political life of each community. (shrink)

Political theorists have increasingly adopted the psychoanalytic language of ‘mourning’ to characterize experiences of loss and injury, and to legitimate these as claims about a past political or cultural order. Mourning would seek to work through these experiences while opening persons to their shared vulnerabilities. With this article, I return to Freud’s original distinction between mourning and melancholia, along with its development through the work of Donald Winnicott and the relational school of psychoanalysis. Although psychoanalytic mourning balances a coming-to-terms with (...) loss against investment in new social relations, when it is extrapolated to a broader community it risks over-determining the social field. The cost is a foreclosure of other modalities for articulating claims about injury and political order, and in particular those that might draw on anger as a resource for political action and solidarity. (shrink)

Judith Butler’s meditations on precarity have received considerable attention in recent years. This article proposes that an undertheorized strain of her argument offers productive resources for theorizing violence. The question extends beyond material acts, to ask how certain groups are rendered eligible for heightened, regularized violence – and, by extension, how liberal subjects are rendered complicit with policies at odds with their universalist commitments. At stake is a politics of sensibility that complicates and enriches juridico-institutionalist models. That said, when Butler’s (...) account is brought to bear on a wider range of cases, it encounters a set of questions it is not prepared to answer on its own terms. Accordingly, I propose some directions the argument would need to be expanded to do justice to its own normative intuitions. (shrink)