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Judith Butler

Judith Butler Books

Philosopher

Undoing Gender

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“D'altra parte, sbaglieremmo a credere che il primo mondo sia qui e il terzo mondo là, che ci sia un secondo mondo altrove e che la subalternità sia sottesa a questa suddivisione. Queste topografie sono ormai saltate, e quello che veniva percepito come un confine, qualcosa che delimita e contiene, ora è un luogo densamente popolato, se non addirittura la definizione stessa di nazione, nella quale le identità si confondono in una direzione che pare del tutto auspicabile. Perché se io sono confusa da te, tu sei già parte di me, e io non sono in nessun luogo senza di te.”

Humanism
Book:Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence
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“What is formed and framed through the technological grasp and circulation of the visual and discursive dimensions of war? This grasping and circulation is already an interpretive manoeuvre, a way of giving an account of whose life is a life, and whose life is effectively transformed into an instrument, a target, or a number, or is affected with only a trace remaining or none at all.”

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Book:Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?
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“The graphics of Israeli life, death, and detention are more vibrant; it conforms to the norm of human life already established, is then more of a life, is life, whereas Palestinian life is either no life, a shadow-life, or a threat to life as we know it. In this last form, it has undergone a full transformation into arsenal or spectral threat, figuring an infinite threat against which a limitless “defense” formulates itself. That defense without limit then embodies the principles of attack without limit (without shame, and without regard for established international protocols regarding war crimes).”

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Book:Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?
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“I don't think, for instance, that you can invoke a Protestant ethic when it comes to loss. You can't say, "Oh, I'll go through loss this way, and that will be the result, and I'll apply myself to the aks, and I'll endeavor to achieve the resolution of grief that is before me." I think that one is hit by waves, and that one starts out the day with an aim, a project, a plan, and one finds oneself foiled.”

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Book:Undoing Gender
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“It is not as if an 'I' exists independently over here and then simply loses a 'you' over there, especially if the attachment to 'you' is part of what composes who 'I' am. If I lose you, under these conditions, then I not only mourn the loss, but I become inscrutable to myself. Who 'am' I, without you? When we lose some of these ties by which we are constituted, we do not know who we are or what to do. On one level, I think I have lost 'you' only to discover that 'I' have gone missing as well. At another level, perhaps what I have lost 'in' you, that for which I have no vocabulary, is a relationality that is composed neither exclusively of myself nor you, but is to be conceived as *the tie* by which those terms are differentiated and related.”

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Book:Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence
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“For power to be withdrawn, power itself would have to be understood as the retractable operation of volition; indeed, the heterosexual contract would be understood to be sustained through a series of choices, just as the social contract in Locke or Rousseau is understood to presuppose the rational choice or deliberate will of those it is said to govern. If power is not reduced to volition, however, and the classical liberal and existential model of freedom is refused, then power relations can be understood, as I think they ought to be, as constraining and constituting the very possibilities of volition. Hence, power can neither be withdrawn nor refused, but only redeployed.”

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Book:Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
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“As feminism has sought to become integrally related to struggles against racial and colonialist oppression, it has become increasingly important to resist the colonizing epistemological strategy that would subordinate different configurations of domination under the rubric of a transcultural notion of patriarchy.”

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Book:Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
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“Sometimes ‘reality’ is used to debunk as childish or unknowledgeable points of view that actually are holding out a more radical possibility of equality or freedom or democracy or justice.… It reminds me of parents who say, ‘Oh, you’re gay…’ or ‘Oh, you’re trans—well, of course I accept you, but it’s going to be a very hard life.’ Instead of saying, ‘This is a new world, and we are going to build it together…”

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Author:Judith Butler
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“According to Melanie Klein, we develop moral responses in reaction to questions of survivability. My wager is that Klein is right about that, even as she thwarts her own insight by insisting that it is the ego's survivability that is finally at issue. Why the ego? After all, if my survivability depends on a relation to others, to a "you" or a set of "yous" without whom I cannot exist, then my existence is not mine alone, but is to be found outside myself, in this set of relations that precede and exceed the boundaries of who I am. If I have a boundary at all, or if a boundary can be said to belong to me, it is only because I have become separated from others, and it is only on condition of this separation that I can relate to them at all. So the boundary is a function of the relation, a brokering of difference, a negotiation in which I am bound to you in my separateness. If I seek to preserve your life, it is not only because I seek to preserve my own, but because who "I" am is nothing without your life, and life itself has to be rethought as this complex, passionate, antagonistic, and necessary set of relations to others. I may lose this "you" and any number of particular others, and I may well survive those losses. But that can happen only if I do not lose the possibility of any "you" at all. If I survive, it is only because my life is nothing without the life that exceeds me, that refers to some indexical you, without whom I cannot be.”

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Book:Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?
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“There is no life without the conditions of life that variably sustain life, and those conditions are pervasively social, establishing not the discrete ontology of the person, but rather the interdependency of persons, involving reproducible and sustaining social relations, and relations to the environment and to non-human forms of life, broadly considered. This mode of social ontology (for which no absolute distinction between social and ecological exists) has concrete implications for how we re-approach the issues of reproductive freedom and anti-war politics. The question is not whether a given being is living or not, nor whether the being in question has the status of a “person”; it is, rather, whether the social conditions of persistence and flourishing are or are not possible. Only with this latter question can we avoid the anthropocentric and liberal individualist presumptions that have derailed such discussions.”

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Book:Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?
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“O que significa exatamente inverter a narrativa causal de Freud e pensar as disposições primárias como efeitos da lei? No primeiro volume de A História da Sexualidade, Foucault critica a hipótese repressiva por ela pressupor um desejo original (não "desejo" nos termos de Lacan, mas gozo) que conserva integridade ontológica e prioridade temporal em relação à lei repressiva. Essa lei, segundo Foucault, silencia ou transmuda subsequentemente esse desejo em uma forma ou expressão secundária e inevitavelmente insatisfatória (deslocamento). Foucault argumenta que o desejo, que tanto é concebido como original quanto como recalcado, é efeito da própria lei coercitiva. Consequentemente, a lei produz a suposição do desejo recalcado para racionalizar suas próprias estratégias auto-ampliadoras; e ao invés de exercer uma função repressiva, a lei jurídica deve ser reconcebida, aqui como em toda parte, como uma prática discursiva produtora ou regenerativa- discursiva porque produz a ficção linguistica do desejo recalcado para manter a sua própria posição como instrumento teleológico. O desejo em questão assume o significado de recalcado na medida em que a lei constitui sua estrutura de contextualização: na verdade, a lei identifica e faz vigorar o desejo recalcado como tal, dissemina o termo e, com efeito, cava o espaço discursivo para a experiência constrangida e linguisticamente elaborada chamada "desejo recalcado".”

Psicologia
Author:Judith Butler
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“The misapprehension about gender performativity is this: that gender is a choice, or that gender is a role, or that gender is a construction that one puts on, as one puts on clothes in the morning, that there is a 'one' who is prior to this gender, a one who goes to the wardrobe of gender and decides with deliberation which gender it will be today.”

GenderPerformativity
Book:Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex"
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“In other words, they appeal to the state for protection, but the state is precisely that from which they require protection. To be protected from violence by the nation-state is to be exposed to the violence wielded by the nation-state, so to rely on the nation-state for protection from violence is precisely to exchange one potential violence for another. There may, indeed, be few other choices.”

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Book:Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?
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“The effect of gender is produced through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and styles of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self. This formulation moves the conception of gender off the ground of a substantial model of identity to one that requires a conception of gender as a constituted social temporality.”

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Book:Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
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“Without grievability, there is no life, or, rather, there is something living that is other than life. Instead, "there is a life that will never have been lived," sustained by no regard, no testimony, and ungrieved when lost. The apprehension of grievability precedes and makes possible the apprehension of precarious life. Grievability precedes and makes possible the apprehension of the living being as living, exposed to non-life from the start.”

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Book:Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?
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“No desafio de repensar as categorias do gênero fora da metafísica da substância, é mister considerar a relevância da afirmação de Nietzsche, em Genealogia da Moral, de que “não há ‘ser’ por trás do fazer, do realizar e do tornar-se; o ‘fazedor’ é uma mera ficção acrescentada à obra — a obra é tudo”. Numa aplicação que o próprio Nietzsche não teria antecipado ou aprovado, nós afirmaríamos como corolário: não há identidade de gênero por trás das expressões do gênero; essa identidade é performativamente constituída, pelas próprias “expressões” tidas como seus resultados.”

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Author:Judith Butler
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“Gender is not something that one is, it is something one does, an act... a "doing" rather than a "being". There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very "expressions" that are said to be its results. If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called 'sex' is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.”

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Author:Judith Butler
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“When some people rejoin with “All Lives Matter” they misunderstand the problem, but not because their message is untrue. It is true that all lives matter, but it is equally true that not all lives are understood to matter which is precisely why it is most important to name the lives that have not mattered, and are struggling to matter in the way they deserve.”

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Author:Judith Butler
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“I think we won't be able to understand the operations of trans-phobia, homophobia, if we don't understand how certain kinds of links are forged between gender and sexuality in the minds of those who want masculinity to be absolutely separate from femininity and heterosexuality to be absolutely separate from homosexuality.”

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Author:Judith Butler
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“Revenge tries to solve the problem of vulnerability. If I strike back, I transfer vulnerability from myself to the other. And yet by striking back I produce a world in which my vulnerability to injury is increased by the likelihood of another strike. So it seems as if I'm getting rid of my vulnerability and instead locating it with the other, but actually I'm heightening the vulnerability of everyone and I'm heightening the possibility of violence that happens between us.”

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Author:Judith Butler
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“I don't think there's any way that war can have a place in peace. I think that peace is the active and difficult resistance to the temptation of war; it is the prerogative and the obligation of the injured. Peace is something that has to be vigilantly maintained; it is a vigilance, and it involves temptation, and it does not mean we as human beings are not aggressive. This is a mistaken way of understanding non-violence.”

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Author:Judith Butler
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