This week, we're moving even closer to
the present with two contemporary
thinkers, Judith Butler and Slavoj Zizek,
who are both very active and and in some
respects, I suppose, in the prime of
their careers and it is a, a time for
thinking about the status of a critique
today as Judith Butler has sometimes put
it.
as Zizek has talked about it, it's really
the, the status of philosophy.
And in his case, also of, of
psychoanalysis.
We're going to focus on their texts, as
we do every week.
and, see how they relate to these
questions of anti-foundationalism and
the, status, of, the subject and of
thinking, in, the contemporary world.
With Butler, we begin with a
consideration of her work, on gender.
She's a prolific author.
Both of these authors are prolific and,
and we really, as I've said I guess,
throughout this semester, since we've
started way back with Kant, we're just
scratching the surface of their
productivity of their intellectual
contributions.
and, and Judith Butler started her career
as I did really, with the work on French
Hegelianism and her her, her, her first,
her dissertation and her first had to do
with the the status of Hegel in modern
France.
and I actually met her because of our
common research interest way back when
and and have followed her work, I've
followed her work with great interest
ever since.
>> I received a Fulbright to study in
Heidelberg.
And I studied with Gadamer and I took a
series of courses on Hegel there.
And the concept of desire was extremely
important to me.
The interplay between desire and
recognition, which is so central to
Hegel's phenomenology.
it seemed to be a point of departure both
for my philosophical interests and for my
interests in feminism and gender.
>> Yeah.
Right.
>> maybe, maybe that's all I really do,
is think about desire and recognition.
[LAUGH] I think, probably.
>> Yes,.
>> she moved on to work on gender and
sexuality in, in a book called Gender
Trouble which really was a game changer
in the field of women's studies gay and
lesbian studies and queer studies as it
came to be called later.
Gender Trouble was so surprising and so
provocative because it brought together
gender theory and performativity, or, or
theories of performance.
arguing that not only was gender not an
essential category, so she was
anti-essentialist and
anti-foundationalist.
But that gender had everything to do with
performance and with improvisation, as
she'll come to call it later on.
and, in a series of books since then,
Judith Butler has been working out the
ramifications of taking performance
seriously, while at the same time paying
attention to the ways in which identity
sexuality and politics intersect in the
contemporary world.
>> I think for me gender trouble was
well, it emerged from my activism.
Some people said, you're such a feminist,
why don't you do feminist scholarship?
I thought, oh, no, I don't want to do
feminist scholarship.
I just want to read my continental
philosophy over here.
>> Yes.
>> And then have my feminist activism
over there.
But then I was invited to work on
Beauvoir and Wittig and, and that
involved me in a kind of critique of
dominant forms of feminism at the time
that seemed to assume that women to be
recognized as a woman you had to be you
had to be within a certain kind of
heterosexual frame or you had have a
particular relationship to the maternal.
And I fought against that.
>> Yeah.
>> And I, I wanted to open up the
category, and I wanted to say that the
category mis-recognizes certain people.
>> Right.
>> Or fails to recognize them
altogether.
>> Right.
>> So, maybe opening up the terms of
recognition.
>> Yeah.
>> Was was, was one aim of Gender
Trouble.
>> the text we, we are focused on this,
this week is Undoing Gender, which is a
text from the, from the last decade,
where she has been reconsidering the that
constellation of issues gender,
sexuality, performance politics and eh,
ethics.
and in this more recent work with the
real focus on what, the difference that
vulnerability makes as we think about
identity responsibility, and performance.
The quotation that I start with is from
pages nine and ten.
To understand gender as a historical
category, she writes, is to accept that
gender understood as one way of cultural
configuring, culturally configuring a
body is open to continual remaking, and
that anatomy and sex are not without
cultural framing.
So, even anatomy, she puts it in quotes,
and sex, are culturally framed.
That's really important for Judith
Butler.
That they're not natural.
They're not essential, they're not
precultural.
and here's so important, open to
continual remaking.
And the, the freedom and pleasure is
found in this continual remaking.
She is very sensitive to the charge that
she, she writes as if people can just
reinvent themselves willy-nilly, or
ad-hoc.
she's not arguing that at all.
She's very much aware of how cultural
re-framing is also an inhibition on
remaking.
But, she's interested in how inhibition
and remaking work together or intersect
and that is certainly in the Foucauldian
tradition.
That is how prohibitions, how
prohibitions actually lead to new forms
of identity and remaking.
So she says that performance, this is
very early on, on the very first page of
the text we've assigned performance is a
kind of doing.
Here's what she writes.
If gender is a kind of doing, an
incessant activity performed, in part,
without one's knowing and without one's
willing it, it is not for that reason
automatic or mechanical.
Gender is not automatic or mechanical,
even though it is an, an activity that
happens, if we can say this,
unconsciously.
Gender is a practice of improvisation.
This is a very interesting word,
improvisation, because when you're
improvising on an instrument, you're,
you're often, you're not conscious of
what you are about to play.
That's one of the keys about
improvisation.
So we can put in some a clip here about
well, you know, playing the piano or
something where we're just making up
something.
You're making up something.
You can't say exactly what it's going to
be before you do it, but it's certainly
not automatic.
It's certainly not something that is just
mechanical.
It's that combination of, of
unpredictability and possibility that
Butler is emphasizing here.
She says there's no easy way to separate
the life of gender from the life of
desire.
So that our identity is very much
affected by our passions or, our desires.
This leads her, in the text we've
assigned, to a consideration of agency.
Agency is a vexed subject for, Judith
Butler because she does not want to rely
on a concept of the self that sees the
self as an author of everything that
happens in the world, that sees the self
as controlling, as dominating.
Because that would put her in the in the
liberal individualist paradigm that has
been criticized by a range of thinkers
we've seen and from Horkheimer and Adorno
through Foucault that is that the
criticizing of this notion of the
imperial or dominating self.
She's interested in agency as a mode of
being that is riven with paradoxes, she
says on page 3.
that is, it is the self is never outside
of cultural influences, but it is not
simply determined by those influences.
So, as she says, as a result, the I finds
itself at once constituted by norms, but
endeavors to live in ways that maintain a
critical and transformative relation to
those norms.
So she's, she wants a self or an agent
that is not just a victim, or an effect
of norms but is also not just able to
reinvent itself willy-nilly.
So gender is important for Butler because
of her own political and ethical stances
which involve her, have involved her in
in feminism and gay and lesbian,
transgender politics.
and she wants to have a philosophical
context for that politics that emphasizes
a possibility, that emphasizes freedom
but also acknowledges the realities of
social norms and of cultural constraints.
she wants what she calls an activism
without categorization.
Activisim without categorization, this is
from page 7 of her text.
After all, she says, queer theory and
activism acquired political salience by
insisting that antihomophobic activism
can be engaged in by anyone, regardless
of their sexual orientation, and that
identity markers are not prerequisites
for participation.
So she wants to make sure that everyone
understands that you don't have to be gay
to be in favor of gay liberation.
You don't have to be an, an Arab to be in
favor of Arab liberation.
You don't have to be a Jew to be in favor
of Jewish liberation etc.
etc.
that there is a kind of activism that
comes through identity, but it is not
limited to essential identity markers.
She wants an activism, in other words,
that is not categorized, through,
essential identity markers.
but then, if anyone can participate in
these different modes of activism, what
brings these political movements
together?
She writes that, on page eight, the task
of all of these movements seems to me to
be about distinguishing among the norms
and conventions that permit people to
breathe, to desire, to love and to live.
And those norms and conventions that
restrict or eviscerate the conditions of
life itself.
In other words, she thinks what brings
these movements together is a politics of
possibility that allows people to desire
and to live more freely.
