Sometimes Butler’s texts are difficult and protracted. Her work, which is never loud, bombastic or self-aggrandising, has for over quarter of a century played a major role in the re-imagining or re-inventing of a leftist politics of non-violence.Įmerging out of feminism and queer theory, this form of politics has the human body at its core, and therefore our common state of dependency on each other as human beings, our vulnerability to injury, and our need for protection and care even when there are such cruel disparities between those who can afford to inure themselves against the prevailing forces of insecurity and precarity on the one hand, and those men, women and children at the other end of the spectrum who find themselves pitching in the inflateable dinghies in the desperate hope of making it to the shore. It is impossible to under-estimate the exceptional contribution to political understanding provided in the writing of Judith Butler. Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly, Photograph by University of California Berkeley. But I had spent a few days inside Butler’s head, and I couldn’t pull away from our glaring vulnerability.Judith Butler in 2013. I should have been emotionally distraught over the bombing’s victims. I was reading Judith Butler’s Precarious Life when I heard the news. It had been an especially good day: I had even won myself a coveted window seat on the third floor at Snell Library.
I wrote the outline for this essay on Monday, April 15th. While the official response to the attack on the World Trade Center was vehement censorship, militarization, and breaching of citizens’ rights in the name of security, Butler suggests something of an alternate world: “What would it mean, in the face of violence, to refuse to return it?”… Prompted by the attacks of 9/11, Butler’s critique of the US response to fear and mourning is indeed contrary to the average American sentiment. Instead, we ought to give the criminal a trial, and not launch an attack that could result in the deaths of innocents…Ĭlick here for Brendan Hill’s perspective Butler does not suggest that we ignore the perpetrator, or let him or her walk free. When your city is terrorized, how do you react? Judith Butler says that we ought not to react to violence with violence. Click here for Katie Dillon’s perspective Click on each of the following images to read each student’s application of Judith Butler’s books to the events that took place on April 15th and the days following. To be mindful of one’s vulnerability, she proposes, can become the basis of claims for non-military political solutions. Butler proposes to make grief into a resource for politics she critiques that without the capacity to mourn the loss of life – our lives and that of the Other – we lose a keener sense of life and suffering we need in order to oppose violence. This book puts human vulnerability and loss (the precariousness of life) at its center and Butler asks us, against the backdrop of 9/11, what – politically – might be made of our grief besides a cry for war. Bormann’s Contemporary Political Thought POLS 2332 class this past semester.
Judith Butler’s book Precarious Life was a subject of discussion in Prof.
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