What is postmodern music and how does it differ from earlier styles, including modernist music? What roles have electronic technologies and sound production played in defining postmodern music? Has postmodern music blurred the lines between high and popular music? Addressing these and other questions, this ground-breaking collection gathers together for the first time essays on postmodernism and music written primarily by musicologists, covering a wide range of musical styles including concert music, jazz, film music, and popular music. Topics include: the (...) importance of technology and marketing in postmodern music; the appropriation and reworking of Western music by non-Western bands; postmodern characteristics in the music of Górecki, Rochberg, Zorn, and Bolcom, as well as Björk and Wu Tang Clan; issues of music and race in such films as The Bridges of Madison County, Batman, Bullworth, and He Got Game; and comparisons of postmodern architecture to postmodern music. Also includes nine musical examples. (shrink)
In a time of globalization, Political Philosophy for the Global Age provides a theoretical basis for the convergence of human values in terms of legitimate conceptions of time, language, and notions of self. Sánchez Flores reviews what she considers to be the most important positions in the current debate on political theory (liberalism, communitarianism, feminism, and postcolonialism) and also proposes her own original contribution. Sánchez Flores’s unique approach is a critique of a type of morality formulated solely on the basis (...) of the Judeo-Christian view of reality. It is a theoretical construct that becomes an invitation to explore other notions of human morality and an inquiry into the need to produce a political philosophy that universalizes an ethics of caring and responsibility as well as provides a locus where diverse human cultures can meet. (shrink)
This article takes up the work of Judith Butler in order to present a vision of ethics that avoids two common yet problematic positions: on the one hand, the skeptical position that ethical norms are so constitutive of who we are that they are ultimately impossible to assess and, on the other hand, the notion that we are justified in our commitment to any ethical norm that appears foundational to our identity. With particular attention to the trajectory of Butler’s (...) project from The Psychic Life of Power to Giving an Account of Oneself, the article discusses the shortcomings of these two positions and the virtues of the alternative account that Butler develops during this period. (shrink)
No less an authority than John Rawls identified Judith Shklar as a ‘political’ liberal. However, though their respective conceptions of political liberalism are similar in a number of important respects, Shklar emphasizes that her vision differs notably from that of Rawls. In particular, she explicitly eschews Rawls’s focus on establishing and sustaining an overlapping consensus, arguing that his belief in the possibility of securing such a consensus is naïve and, indeed, dangerous insofar as it embodies an obvious disregard for (...) the painful lessons of history and thereby not only allows but invites the occurrence of new cruelties and horrors. Obviously, such an approach would seem to diverge dramatically from that promoted by Rawls and many other political liberals. The purpose of this essay is to analyze Shklar’s arguments and determine the validity of her claims regarding the differences between her conception and that of Rawls and, in so doing, assess the extent to which Shklar’s ‘liberalism of fear’ can be said to represent a meaningfully distinctive model of political liberalism. (shrink)
State Violence, Coalitions, Subjects After a consideration of the reception of her work in France , Judith Butler assesses the political contribution of queer movements and minority struggles. She addresses the need for the left to reappropriate the forthright critique of the State and its violence and to examine the way minorities are produced. To do so, her analysis starts from the question of immigrant persons. She highlights the issues and the difficulties which are involved, if there is to (...) be a productive critique of the State, the aim of which is to contest it. As part of a dynamic political perspective, she proposes the creation of coalitions. She outlines the main lines of such a coalition, its dynamics and singularities, its articulation with the subject, but also its limits. In conclusion, she examines the issue of revolution and her relation to Marxist thought, indicating the outlines of her current thinking. (shrink)
In light of recent interest among political theorists in the idea of political realism, Judith Shklar’s liberalism of fear has come to be associated with anti-Rawlsian thought. This paper seeks to show that, on the contrary, Shklar’s specific formulation of political realism, unlike more recent variations, was not motivated by a critique of Rawls. This paper will address three concerns: first, it will show what exactly Shklar’s initial realism was responding to; second, it will consider the implications of this (...) realism for thinking about liberal democracies; third, it will attempt, briefly, in light of this, to make sense of her relationship with Rawls and, in turn, through a comparison with Bernard Williams’s thought, her relationship to anti-Rawlsian political realism. (shrink)
Judith Butler's contribution to feminist political thought is usually approached in terms of her concept of performativity, according to which gender exists only insofar as it is ritualistically and repetitively performed, creating permanent possibilities for performing gender in new and transgressive ways. In this paper, I argue that Butler's politics of performativity is more fundamentally grounded in the concept of genealogy, which she adapts from Foucault and, ultimately, Nietzsche. Butler understands women to have a genealogy: to be located within (...) a history of overlapping practices and reinterpretations of femininity. This genealogical understanding of femininity allows Butler to propose a coalitional feminist politics, which requires no unity among women but only loosely overlapping connections. For Butler, feminist coalitions should aim to subvert, not consolidate, entrenched norms concerning femininity. Butler has been criticized, however, for failing to explain either how subversive agency is possible or why the subversion of gender norms is desirable. Reviewing these criticisms, I argue that Butler offers a convincing explanation of the possibility of subversive agency, but that the normative dimension of her political thought remains relatively underdeveloped. I explore how the normative aspect of Butler's thought could be strengthened by recasting her notion of genealogy along more thoroughly Nietzschean and materialist lines, in terms of an idea of active and multiple bodily forces. (shrink)
The first to use Judith Butlers work as a reading of how the legal subject is formed, this book traces how Butler comes to the themes of ethics, law and ...
A welcome addition to the Routledge Critical Thinkers series, Judith Butler is the first guidebook on this renowned feminist and queer theory scholar, which will help not only students of literary criticism but also students of law, sociology, philosophy, film and cultural studies. Examining Butler's work through a variety of contexts, including the formation of gender performativity, identity and subjecthood, Sarah Salih address Butler's crucial ideas on the gender agenda, the body, pornography, race, gay self-expression and power and psychoanalysis. (...) Concluding with an annotated bibliography, this book will be the ideal starting point for all new to Butler. (shrink)
In this paper I discuss some thoughts Judith Butler presents regarding corporeal vulnerability. This might help to elucidate the problem of whether critical education is still possible today. I first explain why precisely the possibility of critique within education is a problem for us today. This is because the traditional means of enhancing a critical attitude in pupils, stimulating their self-reflective capacities, contributes to the continued existence and strengthening of the current societal and political regime. A way out of (...) this deadlock is offered from within a Foucauldian perspective. Criticality here refers to an experience of exposure and expropriation of the self. This kind of limit-experience is also of a central importance in the most recent work of Judith Butler. She links this experience to the corporeal condition of susceptibility. Our bodies have a public dimension as we are inescapably exposed to one another. The main argument of my paper has to do with whether this appeal to corporeal vulnerability might offer a new way of thinking about the public realm and about the possibility of critique, especially within the field of education. I conclude the paper by showing the originality of Butler's thought in this respect and the possibilities it opens for thinking in a radically new way about critical pedagogy. (shrink)
Judith Butler's recent work expands the Foucaultian notion of subjection to encompass an analysis of the ways in which subordinated individuals becomes passionately attached to, and thus come to be psychically invested in, their own subordination. I argue that Butler's psychoanalytically grounded account of subjection offers a compelling diagnosis of how and why an attachment to oppressive norms – of femininity, for example – can persist in the face of rational critique of those norms. However, I also argue that (...) her account of individual and collective resistance to subjection is plagued by familiar problems concerning the normative criteria and motivation for resistance that emerge in her recent work in new and arguably more intractable forms, and by new concerns about her conceptions of dependency, subordination and recognition. (shrink)
In this interview, Judith Butler speaks about her most recent work, especially Excitable Speech , in terms of how it represents a continuation of certain themes and how it represents moves into new terrains of debate. In particular, she addresses both possible critiques of her work, expecially around the issue of the possibility of political visions and the attention to speech when theorizing subjectification, and responds to questions around certain related themes such as: just what is the possibility of (...) using the same analytical framework to talk both about racializing and gendering processes? How useful is the concept of melancholia? How are textuality and visuality interconnected? (shrink)
How do we theorize the experiences of caregivers abused by their children with autism without intensifying stigma toward disability? Eva Kittay emphasizes examples of extreme vulnerability to overturn myths of independence, but she ignores the possibility that dependents with disabilities may be vulnerable and aggressive. Instead, her work over-emphasizes caregivers' capabilities and the constancy of disabled dependents' vulnerability. I turn to Judith Butler's ethics and her conception of the self as opaque to rethink care amid conflict. Person-centered planning approaches, (...) pioneered by disability rights activists, merge Butler's analysis of opacity with Kittay's work on embodied care, while also inviting a broader network of people to both interpret needs and change communities. By expanding our conceptions of dependency, feminist disability studies can continue the aim of both Kittay and Butler: to humanize unintelligible lives. (shrink)
Although Judith Butler regards recognition as the theme unifying her work, one finds a striking absence of dialogue between her and the authors of the normative theories of recognition – Honneth, Habermas, Ricoeur, etc. In the present article I seek to call into question this sentiment, shared by the two sides, of a radical theoretical heterogeneity. First I seek to show that the theory of performativity which Butler developed initially, contrary to all expectations, sets her relatively apart from the (...) tradition to which she conforms (the French reading of Hegel), and brings her closer to the proposition represented by the normative theories of recognition in general, and that of Honneth in particular. Then I highlight how the recent modulations in her theory, through the appearance of the idea of a constitutive vulnerability, which enables her to found an ethics, undermine for once and for all the claim of irreducibility maintained by each of the two theories in relation to the other. (shrink)
Judith Butler's Kritik der ethischen Gewalt represents a significant refinement of her position on the relationship between the construction of the subject and her social subjection. While Butler's earlier texts reflect a somewhat restricted notion of agency, her Adorno Lectures formulate a notion of agency that extends beyond mere resistance. This essay traces the development of Butler's account of agency and evaluates it in light of feminist projects of social transformation.
This article utilizes the work of Judith Butler in order to chart a queer and feminist animal studies, an animal studies that celebrates our shared embodied finitude. Butler's commentary on other animals remains dispersed and fragmented throughout books, lectures, and interviews over the course of the last several years. This work is critically synthesized in conjunction with her work on mourning and precarious lives. By developing an anti-anthropocentric understanding of mourning and precarious lives, this article hopes to create ontological, (...) ethical, and political concepts that resist the violence of the present. In so doing, the article contrasts Butler's understanding of precarious life with Giorgio Agamben's understanding of bare life in order to conceive of precariousness as constitutive of social reality. This intellectual labor lays the groundwork for understanding mourning the lives of other animals as a political act that produces new communities, rather than as an individuating and isolating emotion. (shrink)
In her ground-breaking 1971 article, “A Defense of Abortion,” Judith Jarvis Thomson argues that even if one grants to the prolifer her most important premise—that the fetus is a person—the prolifer’s conclusion, the intrinsic wrongness of abortion, does not follow. However, in her 1995 article, “Abortion: Whose Right?,” Thomson employs Rawlsian liberalism to argue that even though the prolifer’s view of fetal personhood is not unreasonable, the prochoice advocate is not unreasonable in rejecting it. Thus, because we should err (...) on the side of liberty, the right to abortion is vindicated. In this article, I argue that Thomson’s latter reliance on Rawlsian thinking suggests a way of re-reading her earlier essay that casts doubt on whether she really grants the dominant prolife account of unborn human life. (shrink)
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. (shrink)
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: Butler and Philosophy: explores Butler’s unique relationship to the discipline of philosophy, considering her work in (...) light of its philosophical contributions Butler and Subjectivity: covers the vexed question of subjectivity with which Butler has engaged throughout her published history Butler and Gender: considers the most problematic area, gender, taken by many to be primary to Butler’s work Butler and Democracy: engages with Butler’s significant contribution to the literature of radical democracy and to thecentral political issues faced by our post-cold war Butler and Action: focuses directly on the question of political agency and political action in Butler’s work. Along with its companion volume, Political Theory of Judith Butler, 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. (shrink)
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. (shrink)
Many who write about the playwright Maria Irene Fornes’s work comment with reverence about the experience of watching those productions she herself directed.1 Managing somehow to combine frank depictions of cruelty and violence with an odd, otherworldly charm, Fornes’s direction conveyed a distinct sui generis quality that has deflected analytic scrutiny—the exterior operates in such an exquisite fashion one hesitates to lift the hood and look beneath. The set is a wooden room which sits on an earth promontory. The (...) promontory is five feet high and covers the same periphery as the room. The wood has the color and texture of bone that has dried in the sun. It is ashen and cold. In Mud’s opening notes.. (shrink)
By the time George Wilton Field concluded his work at the marine laboratory his initial scientific concerns had forced him directly into local politics. He pleaded with little success with the community of South Kingstown, and with no success with the town of Narragansett, to create and maintain a permanent breach:Is it not possible for the acute business sense and the broad philanthropy of the community to sweep aside petty, local, and personal jealousies which are now blocking practical progress for (...) the establishment of a permanent breach at Point Judith Pond? It is truly criminal neglect which permits fifteen hundred acres of valuable water-farming area to lie practically idle and rapidly deteriorate with each passing year.... In the opinion of the writer the Point Judith Pond and those of similar type could be made the seat of oyster, clam, crab, herring, white perch, and striped bass fisheries.30In the summer of 1899 Field was invited to teach a summer course on echinoderms at the MBL in Woods Hole, and to conduct summer research in a laboratory of the U.S. Fish Commission, also located at Woods Hole. When the summer was over, he remained there. Whether he had intentions of returning to resume his position in Rhode Island is unclear. At this point all correspondence with the Agricultural Experiment Station ceases, and Field's last report is a brief statement in the annual report of the experiment station for 1900 wherein he laments the variety of experiments he has not been able to carry to conclusion, such as a study of the artificial fertilization of water analogous to the method of chemically fertilizing the land for crops.The correspondence reveals that the enthusiasm Field brought to Point Judith Pond in 1896 was gradually sapped by his own fragile health, by three years' exposure to the local politics surrounding the southern Rhode Island fishing industry, and by a college administration determined to remove the stench of his invertebrates. He sought a refuge in the sheltered world of pure research at the U.S. Fish Commission Laboratory, where he set out to investigate the “Origin of Sex” using, as his animal models, squid and toadfish.On November 14, 1899, the Board of Managers of the college ordered the director of the experiment station to dispose of the marine laboratory at Point Judith Pond.31 How long the laboratory at Buttonwood Point survived in the institutional memory of the University of Rhode Island is open to question. The current Graduate School of Oceanography, in the event, traces its history back to 1937, not 1896.Nevertheless, Field and his one-room marine station established a precedent of land-grant marine research that other state colleges would follow, including Rhode Island itself, which reestablished its marine station, this time permanently, at South Ferry in 1937. In his brief research career in Rhode Island, George Wilton Field had discovered the same coastal attributes that would lead later to the creation of one of the world's major marine research centers at the University of Rhode Island's Graduate School of Oceanography.And, in a measure of triumph for his work, little more than a year after Field left for Woods Hole and his laboratory was dismantled, the town of South Kingstown voted the funds necessary to begin the construction of a permanent breachway.32 Whether Field's scientific reasoning and the conclusions of his marine research played any part in finally deciding the thirty-year-old debate in the affirmative will probably never be known. What is evident is that Field had no patience for those who could not see the results of his research as clearly as he could himself. (shrink)
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. (shrink)
This article considers `critique' as performative, being on the one hand a reiterative performance, that enacts the `critic' through the act of critique, and on the other hand reflecting the constitution of the subject. While this approach takes on the conceptual framework of Judith Butler's work, it differs by refusing critique — or its correlates; parody, subversion or similar — any special status. Like any other performance critique is taken here as a cultural practice, as a Foucauldian `technique of (...) self', though the complex genealogy of such a technique lies outside the scope of this article. In order to illustrate this argument I interpret a number of Butler's prefaces, interviews and digressions which diverge from her own theoretical framework, and argue that these `fictions' arise from critical `disavowals': that is, a `self-transformative' turn against power. The subjective `crisis' that prompts critique is then elaborated by comparison to Girard's work on imitation and sacrifice. (shrink)
The chapters of Judith Butler's Giving an Account of Oneself originally were given as the Spinoza Lectures for the Department of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam in the spring of 2002. In this work, Butler returns to the problem of subjectivity and subject formation, but this time in the context of ethics and ethical philosophy. Pulling together ethical considerations and theories of the self from authors including Nietzsche, Foucault, Adorno, and Levinas, Butler deftly and successfully decenters and refocuses (...) ethical analysis by claiming that the subject is not the ground for ethics but rather the problem for ethics. Central to this thesis is the claim that the self is inherently relational, and emerges .. (shrink)
When a slim, winsomely-written introductory volume manages accessibly to survey many of the most important signposts across Heidegger's path, does so in a way that both excavates new sources and puts them to constructive use, is historically-informed but futurally-minded and generous but critical -- that's an achievement. What's more, Judith Wolfe accomplishes these things while illuminating the rich but underemphasized hermeneutic significance for Heidegger's work of his lifelong struggle to reconcile himself to the Christian moorings of his life and (...) thought. (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)
This review of Irene Oh's The Rights of God focuses on women's rights in Islamic theory and practice. Oh suggests that religious establishments, and the texts they disseminate, often press believers to recognize and reject social problems, such as racial and gender discrimination. Islamic scholars and texts have played a more ambiguous role in efforts to recognize women's rights within Muslim states. Modernist intellectuals have used Islamic texts to support the advancement of women's rights, but members of the more (...) conservative religious establishment have typically curbed or rejected these efforts. Muslim women themselves have established various responses to the question of Islam's compatibility with women's rights. While some embrace the value and compatibility of both, others reject the propriety of either Western conceptions of rights, or the Islamic tradition, as harmful for women. Muslim reformers and feminists have much to learn from comparative studies with other faith communities that have undergone similar struggles and transformations. (shrink)
Judith Butler's theory of the constitution of subjectivity conceptualizes the subject as a performative materialization of its social environment. In her theory Butler utilizes Louis Althusser's notion of interpellation, and she critiques the constitutive paradoxes to which its tautological framing leads. Although there is no pre-existing subject, as it is constituted in the turn to the interpellative hail, Butler nonetheless theorizes a guilt and compulsion acting on an “individual” that compels his or her turn to answer the hail. There (...) is a price to pay for subjectivity in Butler's schema: the reprimand of the interpellative law that punishes at the same time as it constitutes. But a return to Althusser's text finds that he does not rely so much on coercion and guilt in his explanation of the subject's answer to the hail. Althusser can instead be read as suggesting that we are already an instantiation and enactment of power-ideology and, to paraphrase Michel Foucault, are already the principle of our own “subjection.” This contests the notion that we are in any way compelled to submit to an external, punitive force to become subjects. As subjects, we are always-already the embodiment of the field of society-power-ideology. (shrink)
: Judith Butler's Kritik der ethischen Gewalt represents a significant refinement of her position on the relationship between the construction of the subject and her social subjection. While Butler's earlier texts reflect a somewhat restricted notion of agency, her Adorno Lectures formulate a notion of agency that extends beyond mere resistance. This essay traces the development of Butler's account of agency and evaluates it in light of feminist projects of social transformation.
This article proposes to analyse the way in which the body is addressed in the philosophical works of Judith Butler. The constructionism that characterizes her initial articles has been widely spread in the contemporary debates about sex and gender diversity, since in those articles she links the body to a discursive ontology that denounces the contingent and unnecessary welding between body -which is considered as the substantial and natural basis of gender and sexuality- and subjective identities. Such an epistemological (...) turn, however, entails the problem of the dissolution of the material body as a strong foundation for various political claims. From this point on, some argumentative lines will be drawn parting from different segments of the authors thought. These lines tend to present a complex notion of the body, clung to the idea of vulnerability. El presente artículo se propone analizar el modo en que la obra filosófica de Judith Butler aborda el cuerpo. El construccionismo social que caracteriza sus textos iniciales ha cobrado gran difusión en los debates contemporáneos sobre la diversidad sexo-genérica, pues allí la autora vincula al cuerpo a una ontología discursiva que denuncia la soldadura contingente y no necesaria entre cuerpo -pretendida base sustancial y natural del género y la sexualidad- y las identidades subjetivas. Tal giro epistemológico, sin embargo, genera el problema de la disolución del cuerpo material como fundamento sólido para reclamos políticos diversos. A partir de aquí se extraen líneas argumentativas de diferentes segmentos del pensamiento de la autora tendientes a presentar una noción compleja de cuerpo anclada en la idea de vulnerabilidad. (shrink)
This article attempts to respond to the fractional presence of feminist discourse around René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire. I will first briefly examine the relevant critical stands on mimesis and then proceed to rehabilitate it for feminism via an analysis of Judith Butler’s theory of performative gender. By bringing together selected aspects of Girard and Butler’s work, it will be possible to build a constructive dialogue between the two thinkers. Due to the scope of the paper I will (...) not be able to give an exhaustive account of the respective theories, and hence I will discuss only the most relevant aspects. Girard is concerned with giving an account of conflictual mimetic desire in social and cultural.. (shrink)
In this essay I explore the role of dialectics for how social theory can take account of the problem of structure and agency, or, determination and freedom, in a critical and emancipatory way. I discuss the limits and possibilities of dialectical, and of anti-dialectical, criticisms of Hegelian dialectics. For this purpose, I look at Judith Butler’s discussion of dialectics and the concepts of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ in her writings between 1987 ( Subjects of Desire ; republished 1999) and 1990 (...) ( Gender Trouble , republished 2000). Butler’s book Gender Trouble remains a key text of contemporary feminist theory. Butler formulates in this book a critique of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex based on her claim that Beauvoir makes a distinction between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ that implies the notion of the sexed body as a pre-cultural entity. In her earlier writings, though, her evaluation of de Beauvoir had been much more positive. The change in Butler’s evaluation of de Beauvoir is part of her increasing rejection of dialectics: Butler rejected in Gender Trouble any form of Hegelian dialectics with reference to Luce Irigaray’s (1985) claim that it is ‘phallogocentric’. Although Butler subsequently returned to Hegelian themes, she seems never to have revoked this claim made in her most momentous work. I argue that this change in the theoretical structure of Butler’s argument weakens her critique of identity politics and I suggest reading Butler backwards, from Gender Trouble to the more open discussion of dialectics in her earlier texts. Drawing on Adorno’s Negative Dialectics and other formulations of critical theory, I argue that the valid aspects of the critique of Hegelian dialectics can better be formulated as a dialectical critique of dialectics (Adorno; Butler, 1987a) than as a rejection of dialectics (Derrida; Irigaray; Butler, 1990). Retracing the genealogy of Butler’s argument will be a necessary backdrop, too, for evaluating her more recent comments on the Hegelian and ‘Frankfurt School’ traditions such as her Adorno Lectures given in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, in November 2002. Key Words: Theodor W. Adorno • agency • Judith Butler • Simone de Beauvoir • dialectics • emancipation • G. W. F. Hegel • sex/gender distinction • structure • subjectivity. (shrink)
Eve Sedgwick critiques paranoid methodologies for denying a plurality of affective approaches. Instead, she emphasizes affects such as hope, but her description of hope's openness does not address how hope can avoid discourses that appear to offer amelioration while deceptively masking subjugation. In this context, I will argue that suspicion in feminist political philosophy, as shown in the earlier work of Carole Pateman and Judith Butler, provides a cautious approach toward hope's openness without precluding hope altogether. This analysis will (...) reconsider the domination and empowerment debates in relation to affect, pointing toward compatibilities between the two perspectives. First, I will expand Sedgwick's analysis of hope to explain its potential as a feminist political affect. Second, I will examine the techniques of suspicion employed by Pateman and Butler and how they risk denying possibilities for hope. This will lead to a discussion of how Amy Allen's theory of power indicates that suspicion is compatible with hope. Finally, I will explain how the suspicious approaches of Pateman and Butler illuminate hope as an inherently risky, fragile project. This will show that suspicion does not necessarily take up the totalizing position of paranoia, but rather can productively ensure that hope is not led astray. (shrink)
