www.egs.edu Judith Butler, Hannah Arendt Chair and Professor of Philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS.
Distinctions on violence and nonviolence. Public open lecture for the students of the Division of Philosophy, Art & Critical Thought at the European Graduate School EGS, Saas-Fee/Switzerland, August 12 2016.
Judith Butler holds the Hannah Arendt Chair at The European Graduate School / EGS and is the Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a philosopher and one of the most challenging thinkers of our time. She rose to prominence in 1990 with Gender Trouble, which caused an unexpected stir as it unearthed foundational assumptions both in philosophy and in feminist theory, namely the facticity of sex. Controversial debate on the subject(s) extended far beyond academia to which Butler responded, in part, in Bodies that Matter (1993). Butler’s academic rigor is pursued through innovative and critical readings of a wide range of texts in philosophy, psychoanalysis and literature, challenging the confines of disciplinary thinking. Within, and beyond that, Judith Butler is also known for her critical voice in socio-political discourse and debate. Her qualities as a thinker are reflected in her openness to what is at stake in the present and in her passionate engagement in conversations with contemporaries in and outside academia.
Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Butler was raised in a Jewish family and according to her own words, was initiated into philosophical thinking at the age of fourteen by a rabbi from her local synagogue. She attended Bennington College and then Yale University, which included a Fulbright Scholarship to Heidelberg University in 1979. In 1984, she received her PhD in philosophy from Yale University. Her philosophical training was primarily in German Idealism, phenomenology, and the work of the Frankfurt School. The turn towards post-structuralism, to which her work is considered to make a significant contribution, followed her PhD.
Judith Butler taught at Wesleyan University, George Washington University, Johns Hopkins University, and Columbia University and was appointed the Maxine Elliot Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley in 1998. An incomplete listing of her works includes: Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (1987), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (1997), Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997), Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (2000), Undoing Gender (2004), Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (2004), Giving an Account of Oneself (2005), Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009), Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2012), Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (co-authored with Athena Athanasiou, 2013), Senses of the Subject (2015), Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015).
Judith Butler's most influential book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity can be read as an intervention into feminism. Unmooring feminism at its basis, the book questions the assumption that there is such a thing as the unity of the experience of women. Women of color, who could not accept the category of women as their privileged one, articulated a critique of a unified subject of feminism and the reductive scheme operating within white feminism. Attuned to that polyphonic discourse, Butler maintained that the construction of the category of women involves a regulation of gender relations, which reverses feminist aims. She demonstrated that a feminism premised on the category of women is complicit with compulsory heterosexuality, as heterosexuality is the unreflected condition of a binary coded system of gender and desire.
In recent lectures and writings, Judith Butler embarks on new terrain. Focusing on political collectives, the coming together of people in public assembly-- the people, citizenship, and public space--Butler revives her sentiment for the performative. Expanding beyond the speech act, she offers a new perspective to her concept of the performative as it is the appearance of corporeal life that establishes performatively a field of the political and supports concerted action. It is the appearance of bodies not only being precarious, but also resistant and persistent. A first systematic approach to these lines of thought can be found in Judith Butler's recent publication, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015).