doiSerbia

Social ontology: Butler via Arendt via Loidolt

Zaharijević Adriana (Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia)

This short contribution is written on the occasion of the book discussion of Sophie Loidolt’s Phenomenology of Plurality: Hannah Arendt on Political Intersubjectivity (2018) at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory. It presents an attempt to read the two key notions Loidolt elaborates in her book - spaces of meaning and spaces of the public and private - from a critical perspective offered by Judith Butler’s taking up of Arendt’s work. Offering Butler’s conception of social ontology through several major points of contestation with Arendt, I argue against an all too simple reduction of her understanding of the political and normativity to poststructuralist ones.

Keywords: Judith Butler, social ontology, spaces of meaning, private, public