Judith Butler - Dispossession: The Performative in the Political

Preface

The two of us met in Athens, Greece, in December 2009, when Judith gave the Nicos Poulantzas Memorial Lecture for the Poulantzas Institute, affiliated with SYRIZA (Coalition of the Radical Left), and spoke for the Department of Social Anthropology at the Panteion University, where Athena is a professor. We began a conversation on politics, theory, embodiment, and new formations of left politics, focused at first on the question of how older left politics might respond to newer feminist and queer concerns with resisting precarity. Our first conversation (which was published in Greek), Questioning the Normative, Reconfiguring the Possible: Feminism, Queer Politics and the Radical Left, appeared in the volume Performativity and Precarity: Judith Butler in Athens (Athens: nissos, 2011).

Athenas own work focuses on feminist theory and radical social thought, bringing perspectives on the work of Luce Irigaray and Michel Foucault to critically consider critically relations between masculinism, technology, and the human. Athenas volume, co-edited with Elena Tzelepis, Rewriting Difference: Luce Irigaray and the Greeks (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010), moves from tropes derived from classical Greek myth to contemporary transnational and postcolonial contexts of corporeal and critical practices. She has published a book in Greek called Life at the Limit: Essays on the Body, Gender, and Biopolitics (Athens: Ekkremes, 2007), on the bodily dimensions of the Greek debt crisis; in it she addresses the indefinite state of exception as an instance of neoliberal governmental rationality conducted in the name of the economic emergency and involving forces of racialization and feminization that fundamentally structure the condition of becoming precarious. Her overall work focuses on forms of queer deconstruction and feminist modes of performative politics, including non-violent public demonstrations of grieving and resistance to contemporary regimes of biopolitics, such as the work of the transnational, antimilitaristic, feminist movement Women in Black. In considering concrete manifestations of subversive gender performativity, Athena has been inspired by Judiths philosophical work on ethics and politics, gender and queer performativity, corporeality, language, normative violence and violence of derealization, the vulnerability of human life and the question of what makes for a livable life. And Judith has been challenged by Athenas anthropological and philosophical perspectives wrought from Irigaray and Heidegger as well as the geopolitical challenges of neoliberalism that have been so acutely registered in Greece. Like Judith, Athena has been engaging with a non-sovereign account of agency, the relationality of the self, freedom with others, questions of recognition and desire, as well as the gendered, sexual, and racial implications of ones bodily exposure to one another. So our conversation insistently explored these questions, as we sought to convey and map out the political and affective labor of critical agency.

Our conversation began with the consideration of a poststructuralist position we both share, namely that the idea of the unitary subject serves a form of power that must be challenged and undone, signifying a style of masculinism that effaces sexual difference and enacts mastery over the domain of life. We recognized that both of us thought that ethical and political responsibility emerges only when a sovereign and unitary subject can be effectively challenged, and that the fissuring of the subject, or its constituting difference, proves central for a politics that challenges both property and sovereignty in specific ways. Yet as much as we prize the forms of responsibility and resistance that emerge from a dispossessed subject one that avows the differentiated social bonds by which it is constituted and to which it is obligated we also were keenly aware that dispossession constitutes a form of suffering for those displaced and colonized and so could not remain an unambivalent political ideal. We started to think together about how to formulate a theory of political performativity that could take into account the version of dispossession that we valued as well as the version we oppose.

The following represents a wide-ranging dialogue that happened over several months in meetings, conversations, and writing, but mainly on email, though we met in London in February 2011 to plot the trajectory of this exchange. During that meeting in London, the Egyptian revolution was in full swing, and in the last weeks of writing this text together the Greek Left posed a serious challenge to the neoliberal politics of austerity, opening up the possibility of a new European Left opposed to the differential distribution of precarity and the technocratic suppression of democracy. Our reflections register these events obliquely, and in the course of this exchange we refer to several political movements, demonstrations, and acts that helped us to formulate what we mean by a politics of the performative. Our approaches converge and differ. Athenas geopolitical position informs her reflections on modes of resistance and public mourning, and she draws from the work of Irigaray, Heideggers critique of technology, Foucaults notion of biopolitics, and post-Lacanian psychoanalysis. Judiths work emerges from Foucault and speech act theory, gender theory, queer activism, and heterodox psychoanalysis. Both of us return to Greek myths to understand the present, which means that those myths are animated in new ways, as in an extraordinary film that we discuss, Strella (dir. Panos Koutras, 2009), in which a transgendered sex worker lives out a contemporary Oedipal myth in twenty-first-century Athens. Along the way, we seek in convergent ways to prepare Hannah Arendt for a Left she would not have joined, and we enter into questions of affect and ethics within the frame of politics by thinking through recent forms of political mobilization.

Both of us found ourselves returning to the question, What makes political responsiveness possible? The predicament of being moved by what one sees, feels, and comes to know is always one in which one finds oneself transported elsewhere, into another scene, or into a social world in which one is not the center. And this form of dispossession is constituted as a form of responsiveness that gives rise to action and resistance, to appearing together with others, in an effort to demand the end of injustice. One form that injustice takes is the systematic dispossession of peoples through, for example, forced migration, unemployment, homelessness, occupation, and conquest. And so we take up the question of how to become dispossessed of the sovereign self and enter into forms of collectivity that oppose forms of dispossession that systematically jettison populations from modes of collective belonging and justice.