Butler (Judith) Archives - Public Seminar

Race

Paul Gilroy: Race and ‘Useful Violence’

December 3, 2019 • by McKenzie Wark

Aimé Césaire called it: the so-called west is a decaying civilization. In both the United States and Europe, where institutions are receding, a base level of race-talk and racial solidarity is revealed as metastasizing beneath them. In such dim times, I turn to the writings of Paul Gilroy as offering ...

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Africa contra Hegel

September 24, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

There was once a fantasy, shared by left and right alike, that the states of the under-developed world could come, whether by leaps or by steps, to approximate those of the so-called developed world, as if they represented some kind of historical destiny. This idea belongs to what one might ...

Science & Technology

Virno on Human Nature

July 22, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

One of the central arguments of Paolo Virno’s book When Word Becomes Flesh (Semiotext(e), 2015) is that the conditions of possibility of experience can themselves be experienced. There are no transcendental conditions that are ‘out of the frame’ as it were. The transcendental or ontological “are humbly placed within the world ...

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Make Kith Not Kin!

On Donna Haraway

June 24, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

When my daughter was little, we played a game on the way to her preschool called Count the Dog Poo. It was a game about counting, as you would play with any child, but also a game for a little New Yorker, to teach her to watch where she steps. ...

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Chantal Mouffe on the crisis within liberal democracy

June 17, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

Watching the American Presidential Primaries and now the 'Brexit' vote in the UK on leaving the European Union, I am struck by how apt the political theory of Chantal Mouffe is to both situations. Both in the US and the UK, there was a contest as to whether liberal democracy ...

Chantal Mouffe on the crisis within liberal democracy

Theory & Practice

What the Performative Can’t Perform

On Judith Butler

June 8, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

Judith Butler's Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly (Harvard, 2015) is a series of occasional pieces which, taken together, show both the extraordinary range of her thought, and perhaps also some of its limitations. Here her thinking extends from questions of gender performativity, seen as an instance of precarity ...

Education

Judith Butler and The Many Subjects of Feminist Theory

June 6, 2016 • by Tiago Lima

This post is part of the Gender and Domination Course in OOPS. Despite their differences, various authors of feminist theory have been mobilized by a similar question regarding the subject of feminism -- more precisely, what kind of theory of the subject is most productive for the feminist debate? Ever since ...

Judith Butler and The Many Subjects of Feminist Theory

Education

On Unity and Feminist Struggle: A Response to Judith Butler

May 18, 2016 • by Dora Suarez

This post is part of the Gender and Domination Course in OOPS. It has now been more than twenty years since Judith Butler wrote the first edition of Gender Trouble, and the observations that she highlighted in its first chapter still resonate with us today, even as we ponder their significance ...

On Unity and Feminist Struggle: A Response to Judith Butler

Feature

Social Constructs: Can’t Live With Them, Can’t Live Without Them

May 9, 2016 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

There was a time, not so long ago, when men were men and women were women, when hetero-normativity prevailed, with the alternatives relegated to the margins, in closets, and in the shadows of lesbian and homosexual hidden locales, which were constantly under attack. Under such conditions, two sociologists explored the ...

Social Constructs: Can’t Live With Them, Can’t Live Without Them

Education

What Is It to Live with Contingent Foundations? A reply to Michael Weinman

January 8, 2016 • by David Kretz

Bard College Berlin, where I am currently a student in my senior year, has recently seen a debate, both informally and on an institutional level, about the diversity of its curriculum. The challenge brought forth by some of its students is that the curriculum fails to be as diverse as ...

What Is It to Live with Contingent Foundations? A reply to Michael Weinman

Education

When Is Someone “Like Us”?

December 7, 2015 • by Michael Weinman

When the victims of the Paris attacks received massive public sympathy on a global scale, many people pointed out that such an outpouring was disproportionate, and even stunk of Eurocentrism. After all, other attacks had occurred in recent months, other lives were lost, and far less attention was paid. There ...

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Germany’s Awkward Farewell to Günter Grass

May 6, 2015 • by Jaroslava Gajdosova

Can good poetry also be a good politics? I am paraphrasing a question that I have heard Jeff Goldfarb asking on several occasions. Günter Grass, German novelist, poet, sculptor, and a Nobel Prize laureate, delivered both -- the finest literature and daring political insights. With his departure, Germany and the ...