Judith Butler - Rethinking secularism

Butler, Judith and Cornel West. Rethinking secularism. Judith Butler and Cornel West in conversation. Cooper Union. October 2009.

 

Judith Butler - Rethinking secularism

In a recent symposium held by the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU, the Social Science Research Council and the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook University, Judith Butler, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Cornel West came together to discuss the project of “rethinking secularism.” Today we are posting audio and a transcript of the discussion that took place between Butler and West, moderated by Eduardo Mendieta, in which the political theorist and the prophetic pulpitarian exchange thoughts on the ethics and limitations of citizenship, as well as temporality, memory, and the problematics of progress. (Listen to the paper presentations that preceded this discussion here.)

MENDIETA: Judith, this situation, the exilic situation or condition—can we translate that into an ethics for a U.S. citizen? How would we translate that into an ethics of citizenship in our present context? Or is it only applicable to Jews?

BUTLER: Eduardo, I guess I want to say that I think we have to start with the distinction between the citizen and the non-citizen, because we also have a politics which involves refusing to grant citizenship to a vast domain of the population, who nevertheless work here, constitute who we are—we might even say have become indigenous or have acquired indigenous status, because they are not entitled and not enfranchised. I worry very much about using citizenship as the framework without actually thinking about how that distinction between citizen and non-citizen is also imposed here. I worry that a lot of our own notions of pluralism and even our ideas about communitarianism assume already enfranchised communities, or already visible communities. But how do those communities actually get constituted through the production and erasure of non-public and disenfranchised communities? So it’s that relationship that I would like to think about. What breaks through? What are the moments in which the population without working papers or the population without citizenship nevertheless appears? I think the singing of the national anthem in public in Los Angeles by a number of undocumented workers was a kind of astonishing moment, where the anthem was sung in Spanish and in English both. But I think there are other ways in which the amnesiac surface of our everyday politics has to be broken, so that we actually see who the workers are on whom we depend and to whom we extend no rights; who are the populations that are living here fearful of getting ill because there is no possibility of health insurance, there is no clear guarantee that they will even be accepted into hospitals. So perhaps we have our own dispossessed and we are haunted by the dispossessed, or we fail to be haunted by the dispossessed, and we need to think about what an ethics would be that would help us rethink the relationship between the citizen and the non-citizen now.

MENDIETA: One more question. In terms of this ethics of memory—won’t that make us, perhaps, overly nostalgic, always looking backwards? Then we might lose sight of how to gauge progress. How do we start thinking about progress if we are always thinking from the standpoint of an ethics of memory, of memorization?

BUTLER: I think it’s not so much an ethics of memory or memorization. Maybe “remembrance” in Benjamin’s terms is a little different. It’s not that we turn to the past and lose ourselves in the past. It’s rather that the past flashes up in what he calls “the time of the now,” the Jetztzeit. What actually happens is that something about our present experience is interrupted by what he calls an image of the past, but I think we could translate that in several different ways. Some undocumented or un-archived history of oppression emerges within our contemporary life and makes us rethink the histories we have told about how we got from one place in history to the present. It also, I think, has the effect of producing converging temporalities in the present, which allows us to reorient ourselves in non-identitarian ways so that we’re not just looking out for our own history or our own people, but our history turns out to be interrupted fundamentally by an effaced history. I think Cornel’s example of the effacement of the genocide against native peoples in this country is exactly such a moment. Do we allow that amnesia to continue? What are the public moments in which that amnesia is broken apart? I think it not only recalls us to a past—or, rather, let’s the past into the present—but it reorients us towards a broader, more capacious idea of social justice. So I’m not sure about progress. I guess I’m maybe too much with Benjamin and Kafka in this way.

WEST: And you juxtapose the last line of Adorno’s great essay on progress, where he defined it as resistance against the mainstream, where the alternative is capitulation—you juxtapose that line with the first line from Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization: “All Utopian thought is predicated on some memory of plenitude.” That’s Marcuse’s romantic tie to Schiller. Adorno—much more dialectically dark. Put it that way. But it’s a fascinating tension. Adorno, like Benjamin, is calling into question progress, because progress constitutes catastrophe, and the best we do—the dialectic is at a standstill—you put your foot on the brake to stop the elite from just looting everything. That’s what the Obama election was about. He was just putting the brakes on capitalist civilization gone mad—short-term thinking, ecological crisis, climate warming, and so forth. How long do you think you can go? Put the brakes on. Here comes Obama with charisma, wonderful rhetoric. He looks pleasant. We know if he looked like the late, great Isaac Hayes, he would not have won that election. But we love our brother, we love our brother. But you have to put the brake on. That was Benjamin-like, in a certain sense. That’s part of Utopian interruption. Stop the madness that is oftentimes at work when it comes to treatment of poor working people.

BUTLER: I think moving forward has to be distinguished from progress. One reason that progress is linked to catastrophe is that it produces debris that it cannot assimilate into its own narrative structure, so that debris keeps on piling up. What can not be brought forward? What is left behind? There’s always something left behind, especially in, in particular, aggressive notions of progress that hold out the promise of a kind of final redemption.

MENDIETA: We are linking progress to secularization, which is an instance of modernization. The question was also a way to ask you, how do we uncouple modernization progress from secularization? You have demonstrated how we have all of these incredible resources in very Jewish philosophers, and if we’re going to move forward, we would have to give up that.

BUTLER: I do worry that some of the conceptual frameworks we have for linking secularization with modernization actually assume certain kinds of religions as the relevant ones. Which religion got secularized? Which set of religions are left behind—which now, as Thomas Friedman would say about Islam, represent the pre-modern? So I’m not sure secularization has brought all religions with it. We might actually think a little bit about whether there is a kind of presumptive Christian presupposition there and whether it’s also a Christianity that is, in some sense, divided from Judaism—which is, of course, not what Cornel does—and whether all of the other religions that have remained unspeakable here today even count as part of that story. I guess I’m way back there. I haven’t arrived yet in this narrative.

WEST: I think there are two senses of secularization that are important. One, I think it’s very important to acknowledge the moral and political breakthrough of liberalism against the kings, because when you provide that space for rights and liberties across the board, especially if it’s broad in its empathy and imagination—all-inclusive in that sense—that is a breakthrough. At the same time, it’s clear that the Weberian thesis about the disenchantment of the world resulting in fewer cognitive commitments to God-talk—that’s not true. It was never true in the United States, but it’s certainly not true around the world now. So we’ve got to hold onto the liberal political-moral breakthrough and try to make the breakthrough on the economic level, in terms of democratizing, but also acknowledge that Durkheim was actually more right than Weber. Durkheim talked in The Elementary Forms—think about page 431—he says, there’s something eternal: individual worship and faith. And if you shift from God-talk, you end up worshipping the market or its accompaniments and accoutrements. You can end up worshipping a lot of things. It’s Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. You are going to treasure something. What is it? Is it Kurtz and the ivory? That’s Conrad, 1899, the critique of idolatry. Christians like myself say you must forever be vigilant in critiques of idolatry. Why? Because idolatry is shot through all of us. But you’re going to treasure something. If you treasure something that pulls you out of yourself and makes you love more and sacrifice for justice, that’s going to be better than the next Lexus that you get. There’s no escape from the fiduciary dimension of being human.

BUTLER: May I ask Cornel a question? Cornel, talk to us about treasuring something, valuing something, and worshipping something. Are they interchangeable in your vocabulary?

WEST: I would just say “treasure.” Let’s just say “treasure.”

BUTLER: Let’s just say “treasure”?

WEST: Yes.

BUTLER: You’re stepping back.

WEST: In your mind, what’s the difference?

BUTLER: I don’t know. It’s interesting, because on the one hand, you talk about worshipping and you talk about being vigilant against idolatry. For many people, worshipping is idolatry. You are actually offering us a distinction, so I was just making an opening for you.

WEST: I’ve got to decide whether to walk through that opening or not.


MENDIETA: Here’s another question, while you think on that one. This is a question inspired by Habermas’s work. Don’t you think that perhaps our state hasn’t been secularized enough? This is from the other side. You called us to accept and understand the plurality of religious beliefs. But there’s one thing that brings a knot to my throat, and that’s when the President always has to invoke, “God bless America,” as though we are ordering God. On the other side, you as a prophetic citizen, how do you feel about that, when the President invokes this God?

WEST: I don’t like it. I do not like it. It’s like Caesar saying, “Jesus, I really do like you, but you’ve got to go.” There is a line there, but it’s part of the rhetoric of the thing. But I don’t take it that seriously. It’s like, every January, the President says, “There is no problem we cannot solve because we are Americans.” That’s just the religion of possibility. It’s part of the American self-understanding. It’s a lie. There are problems Americans cannot solve. But it’s that sense of strenuous mood-generating energy and so forth. I would say this, though, in regard to the point you made to Professor Habermas: Secularization is one thing; for me, the priority is a democratization of the state, which has to do with the substantive accountability and answerability of corporate elites and financial oligarchs, who are running amok in terms of might, status, and reshaping the nation, and much of the world, in their image. That’s very dangerous. It is very dangerous. It is as dangerous as kings and queens running amok in the 17th and 18th centuries—unaccountable elites. And the histories of democracies are of the dēmos awakening and trying to impose some kinds of regulations, some kinds of controls on them for the public good. It’s clear that, for the most part, they have the public interest and the common good as tertiary in their calculations.

MENDIETA: When you talked about prophetic interruptions and of Utopian interruptions, I was thinking immediately of Ernst Bloch, and not just The Principle of Hope, but his book on atheism in Christianity. And there he begins by saying that the true Christian must be an atheist and the atheist is the Christian. This is a relationship to anti-fetishism, anti-idolatry; and, while remaining profoundly Christian, how do we live up to that challenge of Bloch?

WEST: I think we have to live that tension. We have to live that tension. What that means is that we are forever aspiring and then falling short, but calling into question the ways in which we become deferential to idols or the ways in which we become not empathetic enough, not imaginative enough, not courageous enough, and so on. But I think that that kind of creative tension is part and parcel of what it is, partly, just to be human, in terms of having ideals and reality. Like John Dewey—okay, you don’t want to engage in God-talk. There’s always the gap between your ideals and what is real. That gap is where you have to live. There’s going to be a tension. Of course, for religious persons, it’s tied to not just God, but all the various stories that try to keep us honest and keep us candid about how we’re falling short and when we’re making some breakthroughs. But that’s another reason why certain revolutionary moments—it could be Badiou’s 1968 in Paris and the event that means so much to him, it could be Martin King, it could be the Stoner rebellion, it could be the workers’ movement in 1892—these moments at which this unbelievable courage of fellow human beings emerged, and they were willing to put everything on the line. I would say, in relation to the struggle against fascism, I’m in solidarity with Churchill—that’s a rare thing. He’s fighting fascism. He believes that black people are sub-human, in colonialism in India and Africa, but he’s fighting Hitler. I’m in his army, because I’m fighting Hitler, too. I’ve just got some other white-supremacist matters to attend to once the war is over. Does that make sense?

MENDIETA: Absolutely, absolutely.

BUTLER: It’s interesting, because it’s the reverse of loving your own people first. You’ve got to love your own people first, but sometimes the political principle is, you have to put other people first and then you have to come back to your own. It’s interesting.

WEST: That’s true. That’s a wonderful way of putting it.

Judith Butler - Jewish Voice for Peace advisory board members respond

Butler, Judith, Ronnie Gilbert and Aurora Levins Morales. Jewish Voice for Peace advisory board members respond to efforts by the San Francisco Jewish Community Federation and others to police acceptable forms of Jewish identity and cultural expression. Jewish Voice for Peace. November 19, 2009.

 

Judith Butler, Ronnie Gilbert and Aurora Levins Morales - Jewish Voice for Peace advisory board members respond to efforts by the San Francisco Jewish Community Federation and others to police acceptable forms of Jewish identity and cultural expression.

The San Francisco Jewish Community Federation ran an ad entitled “Setting the Record Straight“ in the October 16 edition of j. the Jewish news weekly of Northern California. The next week, j. printed another op-ed entitled “To heal post-‘Rachel’ rift, Federation needs a new policy.” As members of the Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) Advisory Board, we must respond to both of these statements.

Like the Federation, we value the contributions of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival over the past 29 years. JVP has been proud to support the Festival by co-presenting several films in recent years. The Festival has been an important cultural force in the Bay Area Jewish community precisely because of its commitment to presenting a wide variety of ideas and perspectives and its willingness to explore controversial issues. As such, it is critical that the Festival’s programming choices not be subject to undue pressure from funders.

We are therefore dismayed that the Federation is attempting to put constraints on the Festival’s choice of speakers and co-presenters, in order to stop them from choosing Jewish Voice for Peace and the pacifist Quaker group, the American Friends Service Committee, as co-presenters in the future.
Furthermore, in the October 23 j. op-ed, three individuals set themselves up as a Jewish community version of the House Un-American Activities Committee, demanding a blacklist for alleged “anti-Israel” organizations.

Jewish Voice for Peace is an organization of Jews working for peace, security, justice, and human rights for both Israelis and Palestinians. We believe that ending the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is the only way to achieve a just peace and is in the best interests of Israelis and Jews everywhere. These beliefs are shared by thousands of Bay Area Jews, and hundreds of thousands of Jews across the U.S and around the globe. It is unacceptable for the Federation, an organization that claims to promote “mutual respect and accommodation of diversity within Jewish life,” to attempt to shut out our organization and the large and growing segment of the Bay Area Jewish community that JVP represents.

Netanyahu has thumbed his nose at Obama’s request for a settlement freeze, and his foreign minister, a West Bank settler, refuses to participate in the peace process. It is not realistic to expect this government to make any meaningful moves toward peace without outside pressure. The boycott/divestment/sanctions movement (BDS) encompasses a variety of tactics and targets, and people of good will do disagree about their use. We at JVP are not of one mind about this movement. But we all agree that boycott/divestment/sanctions is a non-violent approach to applying pressure on the Israeli government. And we believe that no one should be demonized for using nonviolent forms of protest in the effort to change policy, especially policy as deadly serious as this.

For too long, our community institutions such as the Federation have remained silent in the face of ever-growing Israeli settlement expansion, human rights abuses and other policies which have created major obstacles to peace. For too long, their “support for Israel” has in practice meant tacit support for policies that undermine the cause of peace and security, endangering both Israelis and Palestinians.

JVP’s 90,000 supporters include countless individuals of all ages who play vital roles in upholding and strengthening a diverse and dynamic Jewish community through their participation in religious life, culture, academia and politics. And our numbers are growing. We reject this attempt to isolate and silence the growing number of U.S. Jews who see our work as an important expression of Jewish values. We invite members of the Jewish community who believe in full equality for all people to join us. We urge all those who disagree with our beliefs or our tactics to recognize that ethical debate is part of our tradition, and to embrace the full breadth and diversity of Jewish identity, thinking and expression. Finally, we invite all Jews, whether or not you agree with us, to defend freedom of expression in our community as an essential part of any lasting solution.

Judith Butler is Professor of Comparative Literature and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley.

Ronnie Gilbert is an American folk singer and writer, and was a member of the singing group the Weavers with Pete Seeger. The Weavers were blacklisted in the 50s.

Aurora Levins Morales is a poet, essayist, community historian and activist.

Judith Butler - Wise Distinctions

I was glad to see in today’s press that it was decided to separate the question of what sex Caster Semenya really is from the questions of whether she could keep her medal or compete in women’s sports. It seemed to me that the drive to publish the results of the sex determination tests was always sensationalist and intrusive, and that it missed the important points at issue in this situation.

Yesterday’s decision by the IAAF goes part of the way to honour the complexity and vulnerability of the person here, but also to affirm the way her gender is bound up with cultural and familial modes of belonging and recognition. In fact, I wonder why we feel compelled to determine sex in a definite way, given that sex can be ambiguous (and is for at least 10 per cent of the population, and much more if you take ‘psychological factors’ into account), and the standards that we use to ‘determine’ it are clearly shifting and not always consistent with one another (chromosomal, hormonal, anatomical, to name a few). In fact, the negotiated agreement with Semenya is not based on the ‘facts’ of sex, but on a consensus achieved among the various parties to the case about how to proceed. Let’s applaud this distinction.

After all, the question of whether she should be allowed to keep her medal or to participate in women’s athletics is different from the question of what sex she really is – and should remain so.

Given that so many people do not conform to the standards that establish univocal sex, we have to find other ways to decide the question of who can compete under what category. That is not an easy decision, but it is important to keep in mind that we can invoke certain standards for admission to compete under a particular gender category without deciding whether or not the person unequivocally ‘is’ that category. If the standard turns out to be, for instance, hormone levels, and it is decided that one cannot exceed certain levels of testosterone to play in women’s sports, then a competitor could still be a ‘woman’ in a cultural and social sense and, indeed, in some biological senses as well, but she would not qualify to compete under those standards. Conversely a ‘man’ in a cultural sense may not qualify to compete in men’s sports according to the same standard, but does qualify for women’s sports – why should that be a problem? In both cases, we would not have to first decide the sex to establish qualifications for competition under a particular gender category. I’m not saying that this should be the standard, but am only using it as an example in order to show how standards for qualification do not have to be the same as final decisions about sex, and these can certainly be distinct from larger and overlapping questions of gender. Similarly, the decision that Semenya can retain the title is a separate issue from what the scientific findings are – this is the wise distinction encoded in the agreement between the sports ministry and those representing Semenya in this proceeding.

It is important to remember why in 1999 sex testing was ruled out for world sports competitions. I gather it kept making ‘errors’ and that there was no agreement on results. Let’s remember as well that results of such tests always have to be interpreted, and that is the place where gender norms frame and pervade scientific findings (see Helen Longino’s excellent work on this topic).

I confess to being amused and interested by two propositions put forward by this morning’s New York Times article. The first comes from the South African sports minister: ‘Caster Semenya can decide to run as a woman, which she is.’ It would seem that if she can decide, then her gender is, to some extent, a matter of decision. But if she ‘is’ a woman, then it would seem not to be a decision. The statement contains two different standards for what we think about sex-determination, and it also belies a certain confusion between sex-determination and gender identity. The second claim is: ‘it is unclear what the exact threshold is, in the eyes of the IAAF, for a female athlete’s being ineligible to compete as a woman.’ One would think that if she is a female athlete, she can compete as a woman, but obviously the NY Times is making a certain sex/gender distinction. In fact, the sports association works backwards, trying to decide whether or not the athlete is ‘female’ at all. And yet, if we consider that this act of ‘sex determination’ was supposed to be collaboratively arrived at by a panel that included ‘a gynecologist, an endocrinologist, a psychologist and an expert on gender’ (why wasn’t I called!?), then the assumption is that cultural and psychological factors are part of sex-determination, and that no one of these ‘experts’ could come up with a definitive finding on his or her own (presuming that binary gender holds). This co-operative venture suggests as well that sex-determination is decided by consensus and, conversely, where there is no consensus, there is no determination of sex. Is this not a presumption that sex is a social negotiation of some kind? And are we, in fact, witnessing in this case a massive effort to socially negotiate the sex of Semenya, with the media included as a party to the deliberations?

The whole debate also elides the condition of intersex. We might say as well that the institution of world sports rests upon a certain denial of intersex as a persistent dimension of human morphology, genetics and endocrinology. What would happen if the IAAF or any other world sports organisation decided that it needed to come up with a policy on how those with an intersex condition might participate in competitive sports? If they refuse to come up with such a policy, then we could say that they have preemptively excluded intersexed peoples from competition, making discrete sex determination into a prerequisite for entering competitions. This would not only be blatantly discriminatory, it would make the ideal of sexual dimorphism into a prerequisite for participation. So rather than try and find out what sex Semenya or anyone else really ‘is’, why don’t we think instead about standards for participation under gender categories that have the aim of being both egalitarian and inclusive? Only then might we finally cease the sensationalist witch hunt antics of finding anyone’s ‘true sex’ and open sports to the complexly constituted species of human animals to which we belong.

Butler, Judith. Wise Distinctions. London Review of Books. November 20, 2009.

Judith Butler - You Will Not Be Alone

Butler, Judith. "You Will Not Be Alone." The Nation. April 13, 2010.

 

Judith Butler - You Will Not Be Alone

Editor's Note: What follows is the text of a speech Professor Butler will give on Wednesday, April 14, to the students of the University of California, Berkeley. On March 18, Berkeley's Student Senate voted 16-to-4 to divest from General Electric and United Technologies because of their role in harming civilians as part of Israel's illegal occupation and the attack on Gaza. A week later, the Senate president vetoed the bill. The bill's opponents have been waging a fierce campaign of misinformation; student senators have been flooded with letters and Alan Dershowitz may visit the campus. More information about the bill can be found here.

Let us begin with the assumption that it is very hard to hear the debate under consideration here. One hears someone saying something, and one fears that they are saying another thing. It is hard to trust words, or indeed to know what words actually mean. So that is a sign that there is a certain fear in the room, and also, a certain suspicion about the intentions that speakers have and a fear about the implications of both words and deeds. Of course, tonight you do not need a lecture on rhetoric from me, but perhaps, if you have a moment, it might be possible to pause and to consider reflectively what is actually at stake in this vote, and what is not. Let me introduce myself first as a Jewish faculty member here at Berkeley, on the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace, on the US executive committee of Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, a global organization, a member of the Russell Tribunal on Human Rights in Palestine, and a board member of the Freedom Theatre in Jenin. I am at work on a book which considers Jewish criticisms of state violence, Jewish views of co-habitation, and the importance of 'remembrance' in both Jewish and Palestinian philosophic and poetic traditions.

The first thing I want to say is that there is hardly a Jewish dinner table left in this country--or indeed in Europe and much of Israel--in which there is not enormous disagreement about the status of the occupation, Israeli military aggression and the future of Zionism, binationalism and citizenship in the lands called Israel and Palestine. There is no one Jewish voice, and in recent years, there are increasing differences among us, as is evident by the multiplication of Jewish groups that oppose the occupation and which actively criticize and oppose Israeli military policy and aggression. In the US and Israel alone these groups include: Jewish Voice for Peace, American Jews for a Just Peace, Jews Against the Occupation, Boycott from Within, New Profile, Anarchists Against the Wall, Women in Black, Who Profits?, Btselem, Zochrot, Black Laundry, Jews for a Free Palestine (Bay Area), No Time to Celebrate and more. The emergence of J Street was an important effort to establish an alternative voice to AIPAC, and though J street has opposed the bill you have before you, the younger generation of that very organization has actively contested the politics of its leadership. So even there you have splits, division and disagreement.

So if someone says that it offends "the Jews" to oppose the occupation, then you have to consider how many Jews are already against the occupation, and whether you want to be with them or against them. If someone says that "Jews" have one voice on this matter, you might consider whether there is something wrong with imagining Jews as a single force, with one view, undivided. It is not true. The sponsors of Monday evening's round table at Hillel made sure not to include voices with which they disagree. And even now, as demonstrations in Israel increase in number and volume against the illegal seizure of Palestinian lands, we see a burgeoning coalition of those who seek to oppose unjust military rule, the illegal confiscation of lands, and who hold to the norms of international law even when nations refuse to honor those norms.

What I learned as a Jewish kid in my synagogue--which was no bastion of radicalism--was that it was imperative to speak out against social injustice. I was told to have the courage to speak out, and to speak strongly, even when people accuse you of breaking with the common understanding, even when they threaten to censor you or punish you. The worst injustice, I learned, was to remain silent in the face of criminal injustice. And this tradition of Jewish social ethics was crucial to the fights against Nazism, fascism and every form of discrimination, and it became especially important in the fight to establish the rights of refugees after the Second World War. Of course, there are no strict analogies between the Second World War and the contemporary situation, and there are no strict analogies between South Africa and Israel, but there are general frameworks for thinking about co-habitation, the right to live free of external military aggression, the rights of refugees, and these form the basis of many international laws that Jews and non-Jews have sought to embrace in order to live in a more just world, one that is more just not just for one nation or for another, but for all populations, regardless of nationality and citizenship. If some of us hope that Israel will comply with international law, it is precisely so that one people can live among other peoples in peace and in freedom. It does not de-legitimate Israel to ask for its compliance with international law. Indeed, compliance with international law is the best way to gain legitimacy, respect and an enduring place among the peoples of the world.

Of course, we could argue on what political forms Israel and Palestine must take in order for international law to be honored. But that is not the question that is before you this evening. We have lots of time to consider that question, and I invite you to join me to do that in a clear-minded way in the future. But consider this closely: the bill you have before you does not ask that you take a view on Israel. I know that it certainly seems like it does, since the discussion has been all about that. But it actually makes two points that are crucial to consider. The first is simply this: there are two companies that not only are invested in the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and peoples, but who profit from that occupation, and which are sustained in part by funds invested by the University of California. They are General Electric and United Technologies. They produce aircraft designed to bomb and kill, and they have bombed and killed civilians, as has been amply demonstrated by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. You are being asked to divest funds from these two companies. You are NOT being asked to divest funds from every company that does business with Israel. And you are not being asked to resolve to divest funds from Israeli business or citizens on the basis of their citizenship or national belonging. You are being asked only to call for a divestment from specific companies that make military weapons that kill civilians. That is the bottom line.

If the newspapers or others seek to make inflammatory remarks and to say that this is an attack on Israel, or an attack on Jews, or an upsurge of anti-Semitism, or an act that displays insensitivity toward the feelings of some of our students, then there is really only one answer that you can provide, as I see it. Do we let ourselves be intimidated into not standing up for what is right? It is simply unethical for UC to invest in such companies when they profit from the killing of civilians under conditions of a sustained military occupation that is manifestly illegal according to international law. The killing of civilians is a war crime. By voting yes, you say that you do not want the funds of this university to be invested in war crimes, and that you hold to this principle regardless of who commits the war crime or against whom it is committed.

Of course, you should clearly ask whether you would apply the same standards to any other occupation or destructive military situation where war crimes occur. And I note that the bill before you is committed to developing a policy that would divest from all companies engaged in war crimes.

In this way, it contains within it both a universal claim and a universalizing trajectory. It recommends explicitly "additional divestment policies to keep university investments out of companies aiding war crimes throughout the world, such as those taking place in Morocco, the Congo, and other places as determined by the resolutions of the United Nations and other leading human rights organizations." Israel is not singled out. It is, if anything, the occupation that is singled out, and there are many Israelis who would tell you that Israel must be separated from its illegal occupation. This is clearly why the divestment call is selective: it does not call for divestment from any and every Israeli company; on the contrary, it calls for divestment from two corporations where the links to war crimes are well-documented.

Let this then be a precedent for a more robust policy of ethical investment that would be applied to any company in which UC invests. This is the beginning of a sequence, one that both sides to this dispute clearly want. Israel is not to be singled out as a nation to be boycotted--and let us note that Israel itself is not boycotted by this resolution. But neither is Israel's occupation to be held exempt from international standards. If you want to say that the historical understanding of Israel's genesis gives it an exceptional standing in the world, then you disagree with those early Zionist thinkers, Martin Buber and Judah Magnes among them, who thought that Israel must not only live in equality with other nations, but must also exemplify principles of equality and social justice in its actions and policies. There is nothing about the history of Israel or of the Jewish people that sanctions war crimes or asks us to suspend our judgment about war crimes in this instance. We can argue about the occupation at length, but I am not sure we can ever find a justification on the basis of international law for the deprivation of millions of people of their right to self-determination and their lack of protection against police and military harassment and destructiveness. But again, we can have that discussion, and we do not have to conclude it here in order to understand the specific choice that we face. You don't have to give a final view on the occupation in order to agree that investing in companies that commit war crimes is absolutely wrong, and that in saying this, you join Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Christians and so many other peoples from diverse religious and secular traditions who believe that international governance, justice and peace demand compliance with international law and human rights and the opposition to war crimes. You say that you do not want our money going into bombs and helicopters and military materiel that destroys civilian life. You do not want it in this context, and you do not want it in any context.

Part of me wants to joke--where would international human rights be without the Jews! We helped to make those rights, at Nuremberg and again in Jerusalem, so what does it mean that there are those who tell you that it is insensitive to Jewishness to come out in favor of international law and human rights? It is a lie--and what a monstrous view of what it means to be Jewish. It disgraces the profound traditions of social justice that have emerged from the struggle against fascism and the struggles against racism; it effaces the tradition of ta-ayush, living together, the ethical relation to the non-Jew which is the substance of Jewish ethics, and it effaces the value that is given to life no matter the religion or race of those who live. You do not need to establish that the struggle against this occupation is the same as the historical struggle against apartheid to know that each struggle has its dignity and its absolute value, and that oppression in its myriad forms do not have to be absolutely identical to be equally wrong. For the record, the occupation and apartheid constitute two different versions of settler colonialism, but we do not need a full understanding of this convergence and divergence to settle the question before us today. Nothing in the bill before you depends on the seamless character of that analogy. In voting for this resolution, you stand with progressive Jews everywhere and with broad principles of social justice, which means, that you stand with those who wish to stand not just with their own kind but with all of humanity, and who do this, in part, both because of the religious and non-religious values they follow.

Lastly, let me say this. You may feel fear in voting for this resolution. I was frightened coming here this evening. You may fear that you will seem anti-Semitic, that you cannot handle the appearance of being insensitive to Israel's needs for self-defense, insensitive to the history of Jewish suffering.

Perhaps it is best to remember the words of Primo Levi who survived a brutal internment at Auschwitz when he had the courage to oppose the Israeli bombings of southern Lebanon in the early 1980s. He openly criticized Menachem Begin, who directed the bombing of civilian centers, and he received letters asking him whether he cared at all about the spilling of Jewish blood. He wrote:

I reply that the blood spilled pains me just as much as the blood spilled by all other human beings. But there are still harrowing letters. And I am tormented by them, because I know that Israel was founded by people like me, only less fortunate than me. Men with a number from Auschwitz tattooed on their arms, with no home nor homeland, escaping from the horrors of the Second World War who found in Israel a home and a homeland. I know all this. But I also know that this is Begin's favourite defence. And I deny any validity to this defence.

As the Israeli historian Idith Zertal makes clear, do not use this most atrocious historical suffering to legitimate military destructiveness--it is a cruel and twisted use of the history of suffering to defend the affliction of suffering on others.

To struggle against fear in the name of social justice is part of a long and venerable Jewish tradition; it is non-nationalist, that is true, and it is committed not just to my freedom, but to all of our freedoms. So let us remember that there is no one Jew, not even one Israel, and that those who say that there are seek to intimidate or contain your powers of criticism. By voting for this resolution, you are entering a debate that is already underway, that is crucial for the materialization of justice, one which involves having the courage to speak out against injustice, something I learned as a young person, but something we each have to learn time and again. I understand that it is not easy to speak out in this way. But if you struggle against voicelessness to speak out for what is right, then you are in the middle of that struggle against oppression and for freedom, a struggle that knows that there is no freedom for one until there is freedom for all. There are those who will surely accuse you of hatred, but perhaps those accusations are the enactment of hatred. The point is not to enter that cycle of threat and fear and hatred--that is the hellish cycle of war itself. The point is to leave the discourse of war and to affirm what is right. You will not be alone. You will be speaking in unison with others, and you will, actually, be making a step toward the realization of peace--the principles of non-violence and co-habitation that alone can serve as the foundation of peace. You will have the support of a growing and dynamic movement, inter-generational and global, by speaking against the military destruction of innocent lives and against the corporate profit that depends on that destruction. You will stand with us, and we will most surely stand with you.

Judith Butler - I must distance myself from this complicity with racism

Butler, Judith. "I must distance myself from this complicity with racism, including anti-Muslim racism." 'Civil Courage Prize' Refusal Speech. Christopher Street Day. June 19, 2010.

 

Judith Butler - I must distance myself from this complicity with racism

When I consider what it means today, to accept such an award, then I believe, that I would actually lose my courage, if i would simply accept the price under the present political conditions. ... For instance: Some of the organizers explicitly made racist statements or did not dissociate themselves from them. The host organizations refuse to understand antiracist politics as an essential part of their work. Having said this, I must distance myself from this complicity with racism, including anti-Muslim racism.

We all have noticed that gay, bisexual, lesbian, trans and queer people can be instrumentalized by those who want to wage wars, i.e. cultural wars against migrants by means of forced islamophobia and military wars against Iraq and Afghanistan. In these times and by these means, we are recruited for nationalism and militarism. Currently, many European governments claim that our gay, lesbian, queer rights must be protected and we are made to believe that the new hatred of immigrants is necessary to protect us. Therefore we must say no to such a deal. To be able to say no under these circumstances is what I call courage. But who says no? And who experiences this racism? Who are the queers who really fight against such politics?

If I were to accept an award for courage, I would have to pass this award on to those that really demonstrate courage. If I were able to, I would pass it on the following groups that are courageous, here and now:

1) GLADT: Gays and Lesbians from Turkey. This is a queer migrant self-organization. This group works very successfully within the fields of multiple discrimination, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, and racism.

2) LesMigraS: Lesbian Migrants and Black Lesbians, is an anti-violence and anti-discrimination division of Lesbenberatung Berlin. It has worked with success for ten years. They work in the fields of multiple discrimination, self-empowerment, and antiracist labor.

3) SUSPECT: A small group of queers that established an anti-violence movement. They assert that it is not possible to fight against homophobia without also fighting against racism.

4) ReachOut is a councelling center for victims of rightwing extremist, racist, anti-Semitic , homophobic, and transphobic violence in Berlin. It is critical of structural and governmental violence.

Yes, and these are all groups that work in the Transgeniale CSD, that shape it, that fight against homophobia, transphobia, sexism, racism, and militarism, and that - as opposed to the commercial CSD - did not change the date of their event because of the Soccer World Cup.

I would like to congratulate these groups for their courage, and I am sorry that, under these circumstances, I am unable to accept this award.

Judith Butler - Gender Trouble: Still Revolutionary or Obsolete

International Lesbian, Gay Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association and Judith Butler. "Gender Trouble: Still Revolutionary or Obsolete?" Bang Bang. Interview with Judith Butler. August 10, 2007.

 

Judith Butler - Gender Trouble: Still Revolutionary or Obsolete

Bang Bang is a Belgium weekly Queer radio magazine mixing genders and refusing separation among genders. Bang Bang focuses on lesbian, gay, and trans cultures and shows how gender has an influence on main stream culture.

In May 2007 Aurore interviewed Judith Butler during her visit to Brussels.

Bang Bang: A the time you published «Gender Trouble», the book had great success and was considered revolutionary. Years have passed, do you think the ideas of « Gender Trouble » are still revolutionary or slowly being accepted ?

Judith Butler: Well, it’s hard for me to say. I think I never expected “Gender trouble” to have any particularly revolutionary effect so whatever effects it has, I’m always surprised. I think we have to ask, not, what “Gender trouble” is today but where “Gender trouble” is today. So, for instance, when “Gender trouble “ is translated into Japanese, it produces a problem of vocabulary and a way of thinking about a quality for instance that is somewhat controversial in academic circles and also outside of the academy. In other places, “Gender trouble” is old. I mean, you know, in New York, it is old. I mean it’s sweet. I mean people are really kind about it but it’s like a former love affair you had and you’re done. You know ? But look, “Gender trouble” includes a critique of the idea that there are two ideal bodily forms, two ideal morphologies: the masculine and the feminine. I want to suggest that today the intersex movement is very engaged with criticizing that idea. Not all bodies are born in male or female. There is a continuum of bodies and it seems to me that trying to persuade medical and psychiatrist establishments to deal with the intersex involves critique of the binary gender system.

Similarly there continues to be extreme, sometimes very extreme violence against transgender people.

And it seems to me that “Gender trouble” will always be important to try and open up our ideas of what gender is. So, I don’t know if it’s revolutionary, but maybe it still has something to say to those issues.

Bang Bang: You just said: when «Gender Trouble» is translated, it produces a problem of vocabulary. Dealing with questions about gender with a different approach, can a new vocabulary be experimented and developed scientifically and currently?

Judith Butler: You know I do think it’s important that we experiment with new vocabularies. That new words help us conceptualize our social existence in a different way. But I think maybe it’s more important to know the traditional concepts we have for thinking about how bodies are feminine or masculine or how sexuality is, straight or gay. These categories very often fail to describe the complexity of who we are. So it’s not like it’s a brand new vocabulary that permits to have a new reality. It’s rather a new vocabulary that lets us see that our lives have always been more complex than traditional categories allow. So, I think, you know, maybe the introduction of new words permits us to rethink what we’ve taken for granted about what forms bodies take, what the name is for certain kinds of sexual, intimate relations, how we think of a life. You know when somebody says “I’m gay, I’m straight, I’m bisexual”. You know, are they saying I am these things for all time? It seems to me that the word “queer” allows you to have a life in which there are changes. In which, yes, you have this straight thing, and that gay thing, and you might be bi or you might not. But you’re an evolving and transforming person, right? And how do we capture that dynamics of sexuality in that complex sense? There may be times when someone feels oneself more overly masculine or maybe more feminine, or where the terms themselves become confused, where passivity and activity also don’t maintain their usual meaning. Right? But if we think about sexual life for a gender life, it seems to me that we have to allow for certain kinds of changes or certain kinds of ways of reconceptualizing ourselves. So, for instance, my hope was that the word “queer” would allow people to have a less fixed and normative idea of what their identity is and permit them a greater vocabulary for gender infrasexuality.

Bang Bang: Do you think the word « queer » is to easily and often used ? Any festivities can be gay and lesbian but they are suddenly « queer », etc...

Judith Butler: Well, in certain places, yes. And in other places, no. So, again, I want to say, it’s not a question of saying what is “queer” now but where is “queer” now, you know? ‘cause if we say “Oh, queer, it’s all become domesticated and very accepted etc…” , we can say yes it is true in Brussels, and maybe it’s true in Amsterdam and maybe it’s true in parts of Paris. But then, in which arrondissement? You know? I mean, we have to think of the world as larger than that. You know, I worry when “queer” becomes an identity. It was never an identity. It was always a critique of identity. I think if it ceases to be a critique of identity, it’s lost its critical edge.

Bang Bang: You are saying, we are constituted from anteriority and exteriority; There is no defined norm when we are born; one should take distance from the norm in order to begin building oneself and make a choice. For the listeners, can you give a path of progression? How to start thinking what type of man or woman one is? How much masculinity or feminity one has ? What can an individual do?

Judith Butler: Ok, let me say one thing to clarify my position. I think we can take distance from norm but I think we are also mired in norm, “empêtrés”, I think you say in French. And I think the choices we can make are only in a certain struggle with the norms out of which we’re constituted, right? So, when I was young there were lesbians who said “Oh, I will free myself of all norms of masculinity, all norms of heterosexuality “. And then, they ended up in very complex relationships that were maybe full of heterosexual power dynamics or full of lesbian forms of masculinity and they became very confused. It wasn’t possible just to rid oneself, simply, of the norms through which one is constituted.

One struggles always with these norms. So one doesn’t construct oneself freely without respect to norm but one works with one’s historical situation and sees where there might be some play. Where there might be some freedom to move.

Bang Bang: >ou are also saying, it is dangerous. One is intelligible, when living in the norms. And so, unintelligible, living outside the norms and taking risks. Then, how to begin with the least distress?

Judith Butler: I think it’s important to live with a certain danger and a certain risk. I think we need a politics that allows us to risk what is intelligible. To be maybe slightly unintelligible, too be slightly “illisible”. To take the risk of suggesting that the human form might take another form. That it doesn’t comply with genders that make us “visibles”. We have to ask how we can stretch and how sometimes we can break the norms that determine what’s intelligible and readable and what is not. The real question is how do you survive at the same time you pose those risks? Because you need to survive.

And it seems to me that you survive in community or in solidarity, with others who are taking the risk with you. So there might be a kind of collective effort that allows for those risks to be taken, pose a certain danger but not a suicidal one.

Bang Bang: Judith Butler, have you done this work? Is Judith Butler the same woman today as 20 years ago?

Judith Butler: Mais je suis une jeune femme, c’est un scandale ! Oui. On ne naît pas une femme, on devenir (devient, NdT) une femme. Et je ne suis pas sûre que je deviens une femme. Alors, quelle est votre autre question ?

(But I am a young woman. Its a scandal, yes. We are not born women, we become women. And I am not sure I am becoming a woman. Then, what is your next question?)

Bang Bang: What other risks did you take besides the writing and the reflective theory?

Judith Butler: Well, you know, I must say, I feel the reception of my work is none of my business. You know? It’s not my concern. It’s your concern. I just keep working. I keep posing certain questions and I think there are times when people think “What happened to the Judith Butler I used to know?” or “She’s not doing gender trouble. Does that mean she refuses it or she’s disavowed it?” And I would say no. I have not refused or disavowed anything. I have simply taken some of the same questions and reposed them in new ways. But, you see, I must live. Right? I mean I can’t stay the same for everyone to be consumed as the author of “Gender trouble”. I have to continue to live and that means I have to “reposer les questions”.
 
Bang Bang: Being a personality recognized by the academy, how do you think your gender questions can influence our society? Do you think that your ideas have finally influenced the society in an extensive way? Or have they simply influenced people thoughts about homosexuality and gender? Do you see the evolution of your ideas traveling through political and popular culture?

Judith Butler: Well, I think, what I want to say is that yes, my ideas have travelled into popular culture they also emerged from popular culture in a way, or from the general public as you put it. But not as a program. You know? I mean, as in “Here is a political program which I recommend we put into place”. Rather, as a theorist, I open up some questions of what is possible. Or I try to re-imagine what life and identity and questions of justice might be like. And then other take them up. And you know, one sees art, work with something else than what I have done. Or one sees some kind of work in law that takes up some of my ideas, but does something that I, myself, could not have anticipated, would not have known how to do. Right? So, yes, I mean, it travels. Sometimes, occasionally “Gender trouble” appears on a television show in the US as a kind of funny moment. But that’s ok with me, that’s good. Many people have said, you know, “it’s so difficult, writing is so difficult, complicated. It can’t possibly have any effect on the general public”. But what’s strange, is that so many people are willing to torture themselves and read the book anyway. And then, that is an interesting question.

Maybe we have an anti-intellectual idea of the “public général”. “Oh, that will never have an effect on “le public général””. But maybe, in fact, le “public général” is interested in certain ideas and would like to understand gender better. So yes, I have also been invited to talk to psychologists and psychoanalysts and I liked that very much. Because, they are the ones who are bringing a lot of very, you know, problematic ideas about sexuality and gender into psychiatric and psychological settings.

And I like having some influence there.

Bang Bang: How is it in the universities of United States ? Is there enough freedom to speak about gender or sexuality topics? Outside the academy, do you share the idea that united states is polarized between conventionals and radicals?

Judith Butler: Well, I think it’s complicated you know. The United States are such a large place. And there are some states and some cities where the questions of gender or sexuality would not be asked, or where scholars or academics are working in small little corners of the universities trying to raise these questions and being told that either that they’re strange or not appropriate or being actively opposed. There are other places where there is very active scholarship going on. Certainly on gender.

I think gender has become maybe more accepted as an academic topic than sexuality studies or queer studies. So I think there is no one answer. It is still a struggle, there are tensions and I’m sure there are many people who would like to see these questions laid to rest or cease to be posed altogether.

Bang Bang: And my last question is about the «hate speech»; there is in Europe a movement about penalizing the homophobic speech and in the same way it is against the freedom of expression ; this will stop me from criticizing the political proposals like, as an example, the Homosexual Union. What is your view?

Judith Butler: Alors, c’est une grande question. OK, comment commencer avec la question si grande ? I think one has to look in the particular context in which these questions emerge. So, for instance, it’s important that if one opposes discriminatory speech, one opposes all kinds. That is that one decides on a principle that it will include all minorities. But if the protection of one minority against another minority is what is happening, then I worry about that. Right? You could protect a religious minority against gays and lesbians. Or you could protect gays and lesbians against a religious minority.

And then, it seems to me something political is happening. Because we’re not really looking at the kind of speech that is injurious. We’re trying to divide groups or decide that some of them are truly victims and some of them are truly aggressors. So my sense is that one has to be careful with this. In the US the problem has been, for instance, that Nazis have rights of free expression, right? But other kinds of racist speech are not protected. And you have to link the speech to conduct or to a certain kind of threat against minority population. I know that in Europe, this kind of framework doesn’t exist in the same way so it’s very difficult to make the analogy. I do think we need to allow for there to be room for subversive and ironic speech. We need to be able to put out plays in which we make fun of ourselves or in which we interrogate the words that injure us. And maybe give them another meaning.

Maybe resignify them in some ways that robs them of their power to injure. So for instance in rap music, you very often hear words that would seem very racist, or very misogynous or very homophobic but in some of those instances, the words are being taken back or redefined so that they lose their injurious quality. So we need to be I think equally sensitive to the injurious power of certain kinds of speech acts but also to the subversive and possibly liberating effects of certain kinds of play.

Bang Bang: During the past 30 years, would you say that the gender has progressed or it is the understanding of the gender that has improved?

Judith Butler: I want to say that the way in which we understand gender actually changes the way we live gender. As we interpret ourselves differently, we also live ourselves differently. The important thing is to think about theory in life in that way. And I think we don’t have to be theorists, we don’t have to have gone to the academy, or to the university to learn theory and to be a theorist of gender. I mean, every taxi driver I have ever spoken to has a theory of gender. Ok, I mean, everyone has a set of presuppositions: what gender is, what it’s not. And they may not write them out or they may not be in theoretical books published by Routledge, but they have a theory, right? And if you have a conversation “Why is it you think masculinity is linked with heterosexuality? Or why is it you think masculinity is linked with sexual dominance or the sexually active position in the sex act?” If you start to ask people those questions, then they realize “Maybe gender is not one thing. Maybe I have collected a number of things under one category and I’ve made a mistake”. But once you see that, it could be that you, yourself, live differently. A certain kind of permission is given to live differently, to conceptualize and to act according to a new conceptualization.

Bang Bang: Thank you, thank you very much.

NdT: The phrases in italics were pronounced in French during the interview.

The English Transcription of the interview was made by Stéphanie Lange and Sandrine Debuyserie.

Judith Butler - Gender is Extramoral

Judith Butler and Fina Birulés (Interviewer). “Gender is Extramoral.” Interview with Judith Butler. Barcelona Metropolis. Summer, June – September 2008.

Essayist, thinker and professor in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, Butler is best known for her studies of gender and sexuality, in which she examines the question of what it means to remake, to resignify, the restrictive normative concepts of sexual life and gender.

Is it possible to establish any relation between the political transformations deriving from the events of 11 September 2001 - the decline in nation-state sovereignty and the centrality of security policies - and transformations in political subjectivity and gender? In her latest writings the philosopher Judith Butler has outlined an "ontology of vulnerability" that is moving in this direction.

Her work, Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), apart from being one of the most widely read texts in feminism, is also considered to be one of the founding texts of Queer Theory, a current within gay and lesbian studies that sets out to flee from theoretical impositions and from culturally and socially determined notions about the difference between the sexes.

Unwilling to speak in terms of 'post-feminism', Butler takes as her starting points the conceptual and political resources that form part of the feminist tradition so as to rethink the category of gender in terms that go beyond the difference between masculine and feminine, instead reformulating the question around the idea of "that which is human". The US philosopher emphasises the need to resist the temptation to resolve the discrepancies into a unity, since, in her opinion, it is precisely dissension that keeps thought and political struggle alive.

This interview took place in February 2008 on the occasion of a talk by Judith Butler at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB).

Fina Birulés: Could you explain your conception of critical thought and its relation with Foucault's famous words: "I do not know if today it is necessary to say that critical work still implies faith in the Enlightenment; I consider that it must always work on our limits, that is, a patient labour that forms the impatience for freedom"? In one of your latest texts you refer to this; perhaps you could relate the task of critical thought and its connection with feminism.

Judith Butler: The critical task demands a preoccupation with limits, and Foucault was particularly interested in the problem of how this delimited field shapes the subject. Thus, if we are formed as obedient subjects, if the state or some other regulated form of power imposes itself on us and we accept it, we become obedient subjects. But in the moment we begin to ask ourselves about the legitimacy of this power we become critical, we adopt a point of view that is not completely shaped by the state and we question ourselves about the limits of the demands that can be placed on us. Foucault is very clear in this respect: questioning the demand for obedience made of us by the state means questioning our ontology as subjects.

And if I am not wholly formed by this power of the state, in what way am I, or might I be, formed? Asking yourself this question means you are already beginning to form yourself in another way, outside this relation with the state, so critical thought distances you to some extent. When someone says "no" to power, they are saying "no" to a particular way of being formed by power. They are saying: I am not going to be subjected in this way or by these means through which the state establishes its legitimacy. The critical position implies a certain "no", a saying "no" as an "I", and this, then, is a step in the formation of this "I". Many people ask about the basis on which Foucault establishes this resistance to power. What he is saying to us is that in the practice of critical thought we are forming ourselves as subjects, through resistance and questioning. Foucault does not presuppose a pre-existing subject that can say "no" and criticise authority. Rather that the subject forms him or herself through the practice of criticism. And, in my view, some forms of criticism involve a questioning of the intelligibility of the norms that constitute us as people. If the powers that be address me as a citizen or as a non-citizen, in terms of a gender or a racial category, I must fight against this social determination. The norms establish my social intelligibility, the categories through which I understand myself and other people. If, from the very outset, a gender is attributed to me, if I am called a "girl", then I actively am a girl; the "I" that emerges through this gender is intelligible, in part, as a social being: the gender attribute to me guarantees my intelligibility and my legibility as a person, and if I question this gender, I risk a certain unintelligibility, risk losing my place and my social legibility as a particular person. However, the "I" could say "no" or could ask "why?" With what means, for what end have I been generated, with what right has this medical establishment attributed a particular gender to me, or with what right has the law attributed this gender to me? The "I" steps back from these gender norms, even if such norms are the conditions that have determined its formation; that is, it does not abandon or destroy them, but it does wrestle with them. Is it possible to reconstruct gender? And if so, can this be understood as a practice of freedom? Can it be understood as a way of becoming? And if so, what other formations are possible? In my opinion, feminism implies thinking about the practices of freedom: when we object to discriminatory practices at work, to forced reclusion within the private domain, when we protest about violence against women..., it is not only because we want women to achieve equality, to be treated justly. Equality and justice are very important norms, but there are more: we want certain freedoms for women so they are not totally limited to the established ideas of femininity or even of masculinity. We want them to be capable of innovating and creating new positions. Insofar as feminism has been, at least in part, a kind of philosophy, it is crucial that it develops new notions of gender. If feminism suggests that we cannot question our sexual positions or affirm that we have no need of the category of gender, then it would be saying, in some sense, that I should accept a particular positionality or a particular structure - restrictive for me and for others - and that I am not free to make and remake the form, or the terms in which I have been made. And it is true that I cannot change these terms radically, and even if I decide to resist the category of woman, I will have to battle with this category throughout my whole life. In this way, whenever we question our gender we run the risk of losing our intelligibility, of being labelled 'monsters'. My struggle with gender would be precisely that, a struggle, and that has something to do with the patient labour that forms the impatience for freedom. Thus, gender perfomativity can be understood: the slow and difficult practice of producing new possibilities of experiencing gender in the light of history, and in the context of very powerful norms that restrict our intelligibility as human beings. They are complex struggles, political in nature, since they insist on new forms of recognition. In fact, from my experience of feminism, these political struggles have been being waged for the last hundred years, at the very least. I only offer a radical language for these struggles.

Fina Birulés: Speaking about performativity and the possibility of new forms of being, the question arises of how to evaluate the diverse innovative forms of agency, because not everything that is novel is necessarily 'good'. In your Undoing Gender you speak a little about this, but is there any single criterion that will allow us to make this distinction? Is it pertinent here to speak of universality?

Judith Butler: If we are referring to the various ways in which gender is understood as a form or a cultural interpretation of the body, I believe it is not appropriate to speak of good or bad genders:

gender is extra-moral. Those who wish to establish the distinction between normal genders and pathological genders, or who set out to regulate gender are making a mistake. They are absolutely and universally wrong. There are illegitimate operations of power that attempt to restrict our idea of what gender might be, for example in the areas of medicine, law, psychiatry, social policy, immigration policy, or the policies against violence. My commitment involves opposition to all restrictive and violent measures that are used to regulate and restrict the life of gender. There are certain types of freedoms and practices that are very important for human flourishing. Any excessive restriction of gender limits, or undermines, the capacity of humans to flourish. And, what is more, I would add that this human flourishing is a good thing. I am aware that there I am taking a moral standpoint here; I know that I have a strong normative structure, but this has nothing to do with saying "this kind of gender is good and this one is bad". To do so would constitute a dangerous use of morality; rather, I am trying to shift the moral structure towards another framework in which we can ask ourselves: how does a body survive?, what is a flourishing body?, what does it need to flourish in the world? And it needs various things: it needs to be nourished, to be touched, to be in social settings of interdependence, to have certain expressive and creative capacities, to be protected from violence, and to have its life sustained in a material sense.

Today there are many people with modalities of gender that are considered unacceptable - the sexual or gender minorities - and who are discriminated against, considered abnormal, by the discourses of psychiatry or psychology, or who are the object of physical violence. These people are not being given the opportunity of having their lives recognised as worthy of being protected or helped, not even as lives that deserve to be mourned. I question the norms of gender that prevent us or make us incapable of recognising certain lives as being worth living, and which stop us providing the material conditions necessary for these lives to be lived, to flourish. For these lives to be publicly recognised also means their being understood as lives whose disappearance would be felt as a loss.

The same thing happens in war: certain lives are deemed worthy of being protected, while others are considered expendable, of negligible importance, radically dispensable. One could say that all my work revolves around this question: what is it that counts as a life? And in what way do certain restrictive norms of gender decide for us? What kind of life is worth protecting and what kind of life is not?

Fina Birulés: In recent years important changes have taken place in many aspects of the lives of gays, lesbians and even transsexuals. For example, in our country same-sex marriages have been made legal. In the light of your reflections about the way in which a broader context of intelligibility has ontological consequences, it might be useful to ask to what extent this recognition could end up leading to new forms of restriction, other forms of normality.

Judith Butler: Of course, if marriage exists, then homosexual marriage should also exist; marriage should be extended to all couples irrespective of their sexual orientation; if sexual orientation is an impediment, then marriage is discriminatory. For my part, I don't understand why it should be limited to two people, this appears arbitrary to me and might potentially be discriminatory; but I know this point of view is not very popular. However, there are forms of sexual organisation that do not imply monogamy, and types of relationship that do not imply marriage or the desire for legal recognition - even if they do seek cultural acceptance. There are also communities made up of lovers, ex-lovers and friends who look after the children, communities that constitute complex kinship networks that do not fit the conjugal pattern.

I agree that the right to homosexual marriage runs the risk of producing a conservative effect, of making marriage an act of normalisation, and thereby presenting other very important forms of intimacy and kinship as abnormal or even pathological. But the question is: politically, what do we do with this? I would say that every campaign in favour of homosexual marriage ought also to be in favour of alternative families, the alternative systems of kinship and personal association. We need a movement that does not win rights for some people at the expense of others. And imagining this movement is not easy.

The demand for recognition by the state should go hand in hand with a critical questioning: what do we need the state for? Although there are times that we need it for some kinds of protection (immigration, property, or children), should we allow it to define our relationships? There are forms of relation that we value and that cannot be recognised by the state, where the recognition of civil society or the community is enough. We need a movement that remains critical, that formulates these questions and keeps them open.

Fina Birulés: I would like to bring up a thinker I have been working on in the last few years, Hannah Arendt. I believe there are aspects of her thought that interest you. Where would you situate Arendt's distinction between liberation and liberty in your work? Similarly, how does the concept of responsibility fit into your reflections about the importance of performativity and resignification as political practices?

Judith Butler: It is true that, in general, I do not think of freedom in terms of liberation. I continue to be very strongly influenced by Foucault's History of Sexuality, in which he warns us against imagining a complete liberation from power. There can never be a total liberation from power, especially in relation to the politics of sexuality. Foucault says two things at the same time: we can never totally liberate ourselves from power (there is no space from which to say "no" to power) and, on the other hand, we are never completely determined by power. Thus, despite the impossibility of transcending power, a space of liberty opens up, and both determinism and radical voluntarism are refuted. What is this space of freedom that opens up once we have understood this? Here freedom is a kind of practice, a struggle, a continuous process with neither a beginning nor an end. When this practice is systematically attacked we cannot function as political subjects, our political capacities have been undermined.

When referring to freedom, I am not alluding to the idea of an individual subject, alone, since a subject is free to the extent that s/he is conditioned by conventions, norms and cultural possibilities that make freedom possible, though they do not determine it. They are the conditions of possibility of freedom. Who we are as subjects of freedom depends on non-voluntary forms of connection with others; I was not only born within a series of rules or conventions that form me, but also within a series of relationships on which I depend for my survival and which constitute me as an interdependent creature in this world. The questions of responsibility emerge in the context of this sociality, this interdependence.

On the matter of responsibility I am interested in the productive formulations made by Levinas. For Levinas, I am not responsible for my actions - though in fact I also am - but rather responsible for the Other, for the demands of the Other. And any demand made by the Other is prior to any possibility of social contract: whatever the demand the Other puts before me, it affects me, it involves me in a relation of responsibility.

Legal contracts cannot adequately describe this situation of primary responsibility. That means that I am responsible even for those who are not in any form of contractual relationship with me, or who do not form part of my community, or my nation, or who are not covered by the same legal framework as me. This helps to understand, for example, how I can be responsible for those who live at a distance from me, who are under a different form of political organisation, or those who are stateless. In Levinas' framework, even those we never meet, those whose names and faces we do not know, present us with a demand. It is, then, a question of accepting our global interdependence and even our obligation to protect the lives of those we do not know. For Levinas, this primary obligation is expressed through what we commonly call commandments, "Thou shall not kill": a requirement to preserve life. This does not mean that I can or should preserve the life of every individual (of course I cannot do so, and to imagine I could would be unhealthy, it would imply some sort of narcissism, a certain messianism), but rather that I should think about what kind of political structures we need to sustain life and minimise those forms of violence that extinguish it. This does not mean I am capable of making these structures come into existence - responsibility is not the same as efficacy - but rather that I can fight for a world that maximises the possibility of preserving and sustaining life and minimises the possibility of those forms of violence that, illegitimately, take life, or at least reduce the conditions that make it possible for this to happen. This is part of what I am thinking about at the moment. And I have to say that it is not easy to situate Arendt in this context.

Despite the fact that Levinas himself was not a pacifist, I believe that, taking his ideas as a starting point, it is possible to develop a philosophy of non-violence and even a conception of a trans-national political community that holds these values to be fundamental. We have to take Levinas' framework and develop a kind of trans-national ethics based on non-violence, and thus it is necessary to disagree with him with respect to the difference between ethics and politics, to his stand on pacifism, and on Israel.

Fina Birulés: Certainly, we are not only responsible for what we have done; responsibility points towards the interplay of autonomy and limit. To the extent that we always live and survive through some sort of consent that can hardly be considered voluntary, political responsibility also has to do with the idea that we are aware of, that we hope will continue, that we want to innovate or conserve. In this sense, unless our attitude towards the world is one of indifference, we can talk about a kind of political responsibility in the maintenance of structures and habits or values that, in many spheres, impede the possibility of feminine freedom.

Judith Butler: Let me start with a criticism Derrida made of Levinas: if it is necessary to respond to all demands, that means an infinite number of demands, and how should we decide which group of demands to respond to? Perhaps responsibility is only made possible by circumscribing a group of demands, that is, by becoming irresponsible in relation to all other demands. In a way that is characteristic of him, Derrida affirms that responsibility, in Levinas' sense, leads to a necessary irresponsibility. Yet this is to continue to misunderstand the singularity of the demands made on us. It's not enough to deal with them case by case. Let's think, for example, about violence against women: it is true that we can consider a rapist or an aggressor to be responsible before the law; in a legal framework, he will have to pay for his acts, will have to be punished, once evidence of his guilt has been provided. No doubt we need a punitive legal institution, but the question is whether, once legal responsibility has been assumed, this means that full responsibility has now been apportioned. Legal responsibility is not an adequate model for conceptualising the whole range of responsibilities we have, because there remains a fundamental question to resolve: rape and domestic violence continue. Why do these social practices reproduce themselves time and again in a culture? A broader kind of intervention seems to me to be necessary, a kind of outcry about violence against women, and against sexual minorities; I believe it is very important to relate them: violence against transsexuals, for example, against sex workers, against illegal immigrants who can have no recourse to law, and violence against many groups who have been dispossessed of all their rights. I consider that we need a strong policy that connects all these forms of violence, and also demands the production, through the mass media, of an education, an ethos, that would act as a counterweight to these forms of violence.
If you examining all this, case by case, you lose sight of the horizon: these forms of violence form part of a social practice - are even socially acceptable amongst certain types of men - of a social model.

But how can we intervene at the level of social practices? By using the law, certainly, but not only in this way, given that we have a responsibility to remake the world, and to institute certain standards of non-violence on a more general level. Political responsibility must go hand in hand with legal responsibility.

Fina Birulés: In your latest books you deal with the issue of the place occupied by passions and emotions, like pain and vulnerability in politics. Similarly, you point to the urgency of asking ourselves "what is means to be human?" Isn't it a little surprising that all this should be written by an author who appears to form part of the anti-humanist tradition, part of the tradition that is known in the USA as French Theory?

Judith Butler: It is necessary to be careful when we talk about 'humanism'. We only have to look at the various legacies of humanism to see that there is not just one kind of humanism: the forms that emerge in Italy are very distinct from those that emerge in France. There is also a humanism based in classical liberal political philosophy that can not be assimilated into literary humanism. In any case, if we agree that philosophical anthropology is a form of humanism that supposes that there is just one single idea of what it is to be human, and that it is possible to attribute defining traits to this human subject, then we are taking that which is human as something given, something that already exists.
What I want to suggest is the following: for humanness to become possible - in specific times and places - depends on certain types of social norms that are involved in the exercise of producing and 'de-producing' humanness. In other words, for that which is human to be human, it must be in relationship with that which is inhuman or non-human, and this is a differential operation of power. Humanness is produced and sustained in one form and is 'de-produced' and not sustained in other forms: the human being is a differentiating effect of power.

In the USA, for example, at present there is a very powerful discourse that sets out to define humanness as being a product of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Similarly, we have some morphological policies that define humanness in terms of certain ideas about what a human body should be like. And this produces a population with disabilities, or of disabled individuals whose bodies do not match the morphological idea. Remember that any regulatory ideal of humanness always produces exclusions, 'outsiders', and creates a problem: how should we refer to these beings that appear human but are not? We only have to think of the history of slavery, something which survives in the USA, where it remains unclear if all the black men who are imprisoned are human or not.

Humanness is not something given, it is a differentiating effect of power, but we need the term because without it we cannot understand what is happening. I am worried by those positions that say: "that which is human belongs to humanism, so we can never talk any more about humanness"; "choice belongs to voluntarism, we have to stop talking about choice"; "the Enlightenment belongs to that which we have dismantled, so we can no longer speak of Enlightenment". But they don't ask themselves what the Enlightenment was. Why go back to that which was? Why go back to humanness? Well, because these concepts, these really important ideals, have not left us, they continue to form us. And there is a new way of understanding them that starts with the idea that they do not have a single form and that, in fact, their regulation operates politically to produce exclusions that we must challenge. For someone to say that a person who is considered non-human is, in fact, human means a resignification of humanness and emphasises that humanness can work in another form. On occasions it is important to use the term precisely in the way that the Human Rights discourse sometimes does: taking someone to whom the defining characteristics of humanness are not attributed and affirming that person is human is a performative act that redefines humanness in terms of liberation, as emancipation. It is not a question of searching for what was already there, but of making it happen.

Fina Birulés: In your recent reflections, when you talk about 'that which is human' you connect it with the question of which lives deserve to be recognised as being worthy of being protected or helped. When you speak about 'life', are you taking as your starting point the distinction between bios and zoe?

Judith Butler: The question of life is difficult; I have my doubts about the way in which the distinction that Arendt establishes in the Human Condition has been popularised by Giorgio Agamben. Despite the fact that bios and zoe are analytically distinguishable, each is always implied in the other. I have problems when Arendt affirms that the point of life cannot be life itself. For her it is a terrible idea, since she only understands life as something that is bound up with very important principles and values. Arendt wanted to distinguish between life that was not worth living and life itself, and in this she was following Socrates: an unexamined life was not worth living. That is why, for her, thinking, judging and responsibility were so important, because she understood that these human activities make life worth living, and if these are not possible, then neither is life. But this does not help us to understand why it is necessary to preserve the life of sensate beings, including human beings.

Arendt distinguishes between the public and private spheres. The public domain is where we think, judge act; the private domain means that someone looks after the home, the food, the reproduction of the material conditions of life. It seems to me to be worth remembering that there is a politics of this sphere, a politics of the domestic, there is a politics of private life. Who does the work of cleaning the house, of keeping it all together? The questions about relationships, about the family, about work, are political questions.

I would like to go back and ask about the conditions of survival: what do we need to survive? We depend on our surroundings and on food; the food should be well distributed and eating habits healthy.

We depend on justice and the distribution of economic resources. I believe there could be a politics of this sphere that looked on life as simply that, life, bare life; a politics that allowed us to see that life is never just naked life, that it is always politically saturated. Hence my disagreement with Agamben's characterisation of 'naked life', for example when he refers to the Palestinians in Gaza, stripped of their rights, exposed to brutality without any defence, reduced to mere life; it is not a question of 'mere life', these lives are politically saturated: there is a battle taking place to cross the border, to find food, to rebuild the house destroyed by bombs, or to get medicine. All these actions are struggles, even, I would say, practices of freedom. The practices of survival are extremely important; if we say they are simple mere organic life, we cannot recognise them as political struggles.

Fina Birulés: In your latest books you deal with the idea of thinking the community in terms of relatability. This perspective seems to me very interesting, since it allows us to establish a nexus between the misnamed 'domestic' violence and the violence of war. Do you believe that this would allow us to rethink global international politics?

Judith Butler: When the USA was attacked in September 2001, the government set out to quickly construct an idea of the country as sovereign, impermeable, invulnerable, because it was unacceptable that its frontiers had been breached. The system involved creating very powerful images, normally of men: men of the government, men fighting to save people inside the World Trade Center. There was a kind of resurgence of the idea of a strong, efficacious, militarised man, a man whose body will never be destroyed nor affected by anyone, who will be pure action and pure aggression. A certain idea of the subject was produced: who is the American subject? Who is America? A very aggressive affirmation was made about masculine sovereignty, a certain idea of what the body is - of the masculine body, a certain idea of masculine subjectivity, which also amounts to a national self-comprehension - and then naturally they annihilated the sovereignty of Iraq, of Afghanistan, they resorted to Guantanamo because it is not under Cuban sovereignty and is also outside the borders of US sovereignty, in such a way that they could do what they wanted. They play with sovereignty; they take a certain kind of sovereignty as a prerogative, but do not respect sovereignty as a principle.

Another possibility would have been to say: we have been attacked, we accept the fact that we live in a global community, our frontiers are porous, people can cross them, we have to decide how we want to live this. Instead of defending ourselves, what we need are new international agreements and also to show the USA as being committed to international law, because we should remember that since 2001, and even before, Bush has refused to sign almost any international treaties: the anti-missile treaty, that establishing the International Court; anything to do with international cooperation, including the UN. He exercised his sovereignty over them and against them.

Perhaps because international cooperation is an ethos: we are dependent on a global world, we are all vulnerable, there can be accusations and agreements. How do we live together? What kind of agreements do we accept? But it is the nation-states that establish agreements between themselves and the real question is that of the stateless peoples: insurgent populations, people who live within political organisations that are not permitted to participate in international agreements. What kind of connection can be established here? This implies another kind of politics, a global politics, one that does not restrict itself to the nation-states. I am referring to other ways of thinking our vulnerability as nations, our limits as nations, and that include the conception of the subject as being fundamentally dependent or fundamentally social, as well as the forms of political organisation that seek to structure global politics in such a way as to gain recognition of our interdependence.

Fina Birulés: To round off our conversation, I would like to formulate some of the questions that ideas of sexual difference have raised: how do you explain, from your conception of gender, the historical asymmetry between the sexes? How do you explain that lack of recognition of our first origins, of having been given birth to by a woman?

Judith Butler: I am always surprised that, in Europe, these great divisions are made between Irigaray and the philosophers of sexual difference, on one side, and Butler, on the other, because in the USA we work in both lines. For me, this supposed contrast does not exist; in my classes I teach Irigaray. In my opinion, when we study the significances that have been conferred on sexual reproduction and how it has been organised, we find important convergences between Irigaray's work and mine, because the question is: how does the scene of reproduction come to be the defining moment of sexual difference? And what do we do with this? And, in this respect, we find various points of view: that of psychoanalysis, which underlines masculine dependence on the mother and at the same time its rejection; that which emphasises the importance of the maternal as a feminine value, as the basis for the feminist critique; and we can also find another perspective that raises questions like: why has sexuality been thought of in a restrictive form within the framework of sexual reproduction? What does it mean that sexual difference is determined around the idea of reproduction? What does it mean to think of non-reproductive sexuality in relation to this burdensome symbolic scene of reproduction? Every nation-state, every national religious unit, wants to control reproduction, everybody is very uneasy about reproduction: the Spanish conservatives want to control reproduction, they say "no" to abortion. Why? Because it is through the control of women's bodies that reproduction of the population is achieved and it becomes possible to reproduce the nation, the race, masculinity.

We are all trying to change these values and work on them, trying to find other spaces and possibilities for femininity, for masculinity, for that which is neither feminine nor masculine. We have distinct conceptions about how to think this difference, but, for sure, we are all interested in exploring this difference. Given that we cannot assume a hard and fast division between these positions, I think there could be a dialogue between them: none of us want to accept the conception of sexual reproduction that transforms woman into a non-being that makes possible the being of man. We all start here, though we all have different strategies about how to move on. Summer (June – September 2008)