Roland Faber (Editor) - Butler on Whitehead: On the Occasion

Proceedings of a conference held in Dec. 2009 at Claremont Graduate University.

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

ISBN 978-0-7391-7276-6 (cloth : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-7391-7277-3 (electronic)

192--dc23

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

It was our good fortune that Butler herself was included in the discussion, as her presence beckoned an audience unfamiliar with process thought, yet eager to understand its relevance for her. Undoubtedly the same can also be said of process thinkers who were interested in understanding Butlers work and its correlation with their own thinking. Butler pursues texts to both engage with and demarcate their essentialist tendencies. Drawing on Derrida, she seeks to disturb these texts from within, displacing them so as to construct a critique that speaks for a hidden other held within them. Her work began by providing a famous genealogy of gender, and this has birthed a further critical assessment of bodily subjectivity, subversive speech acts, and most recently, she has provided an analysis of social relations to further an antiwar politics based on an ontology of precarity. Today, Butler is involved with examining the imperialist tendencies of nations such as the United States, France, and Israel, in order to expose its constructed frame of power that leaves vulnerable lives unexposed, and unaccounted for, in its gaze of significance. This new mode of concentration in her work has renewed and reinforced the activism of her academic thought and work, and further exemplifies that her theory is prescient for our time.