If the designation of seemingly fixed gender categories renders those who fail to inhabit these new spaces somehow unintelligible, then they become socially disenfranchised. How are these three tasks related to one another? Butler makes the link explicit between the performativity of gender and the increasing precarity of many people’s lives. The second task Butler sets herself in this set of essays is to offer a series of reflections on what she calls “spaces of appearance,” and on what it means to gather and assemble in the ways we have seen from the Occupy movement to the uprisings of the Arab spring to the often silent gatherings that have occurred in places such as Gezi Park in Turkey.įinally she asks us to consider the possibilities that new publics can come into being by means of concerted actions such as these and others including, for example, the spontaneous vigils which took place in London last week following the Orlando shooting and the murder of the Labour MP Jo Cox. That is to say, at the heart of her inquiry is a consideration of contemporary ‘ biopolitics’ and the management of populations, including the awarding or withholding of various forms of statehood and their attendant protections. She also explores how our rituals of mourning and grieving that manifest most in times of war and conflict tell us as much about those whose lost lives remain un-grieved or un-grievable. In this book we find Butler undertaking three inter-related tasks.įirst, as though in response to an often answered question, she wants to explain to her readers how she can connect her earlier writing on gender’s performativity-the way it comes into being during the processes of being enacted as a matter of enforced repetition-with her last decade of writing on precarious lives. ![]() They require a lot from the reader who accompanies the author in her dense arguments with figures including, in her most recent volume entitled “ Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly,” the social and political philosophers Emmanuel Levinas and Hanna Arendt. 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.
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