Judith Butler and Politics

THINKING POLITICS
Series Editors: Geoff M. Boucher and Matthew Sharpe

Published titles
Agamben and Politics: A Critical Introduction
Sergei Prozorov
Foucault and Politics: A Critical Introduction
Mark G. E. Kelly
Taylor and Politics: A Critical Introduction
Craig Browne and Andrew P. Lynch
Habermas and Politics: A Critical Introduction
Matheson Russell
Irigaray and Politics: A Critical Introduction
Laura Roberts
Lyotard and Politics: A Critical Introduction
Stuart Sim
Hannah Arendt and Politics
Maria Robaszkiewicz and Michael Weinman
Martha Nussbaum and Politics
Brandon Robshaw
Judith Butler and Politics
Adriana Zaharijević

Forthcoming titles
Nancy Fraser and Politics
Marjan Ivković and Zona Zarić
JUDITH BUTLER AND POLITICS

Adriana Zaharijević
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 Contents

Acknowledgementsvi
Abbreviations of Butler’s Worksvii

Introduction1
1 Ontology and Politics 10

Part I Performativity
2 Bodies and Norms 45
3 Agency 86

Part II Liveable World

4 Liveable Life 137
5 Nonviolence 181
Conclusion: Our Place 221

Bibliography227
Index245
 Acknowledgements

This book has been written twice. It first appeared in Serbian as Život
tela. Politička filozofija Džudit Batler (Belgrade: Akademska knjiga,
2020) and was then translated into English and heavily rewritten. I
am most grateful to Bora Babić, my Serbian publisher, for allowing
me to use the book as a template for this one.
I wish to sincerely thank Geoff Boucher for his continuous support
during the entire process of (re)writing this book, as well as Ersev
Ersoy and Sarah Foyle from Edinburgh University Press for making
the publication process an enjoyable experience.
The manuscript benefited greatly from innumerable conversations
with valuable interlocutors I was privileged to have in the last four
years. I especially wish to thank those who helped me either advance
my thoughts or shift them in the direction of being presented in
English. Hana Ćopić, Mark Devenney, Éric Fassin, Clara Gallagher,
Ben Gook, Sabine Hark, Emma Ingala, Biljana Kašić, Predrag Krstić,
Hanna Meißner, Ana Miškovska Kajevska, Aleksandar Pavlović,
Elisabeth Plate, Eva von Redecker and Nuria Sánchez Madrid all
became, in different ways, fellow travellers, turning this into a truly
exceptional journey. The chance to present parts of the manuscript
in Belgrade, Brighton, Ljubljana, Madrid and Warsaw provided me
with fulfilling discussions which, in some cases, significantly altered
the text; nor would the text be what it is without Edward Djordjevic,
with his careful reading and subtle feeling for languages.
Being acquainted not only with the work of Judith Butler but with
her personally invited a sense of great humility, imposing an impera-
tive not to attempt the most accurate interpretation, but to offer
Butler’s expansive thoughts through a frame of political imagination
– a more than necessary requirement in the moment in which our
world finds itself.
Finally, this book would never be without the loving companion-
ship of Gert Röhrborn, his piercing mind and inexhaustible desire to
always complicate the discussion.

vi
 Abbreviations of Butler’s Works

AC – Antigone’s Claim
BTM – Bodies That Matter
CF – ‘Contingent Foundations’
CHU – Contingency, Hegemony, Universality
D – Dispossession
ES – Excitable Speech
FCR – ‘For a Careful Reading’
FN – The Force of Nonviolence
FoW – Frames of War
GAO – Giving an Account of Oneself
GT – Gender Trouble
MC – ‘Merely Cultural’
NT – Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly
PL – Precarious Life
PLP – The Psychic Life of Power
PW – Parting Ways
SD – Subjects of Desire
SS – Senses of the Subject
UG – Undoing Gender

vii
viii
 Introduction

It is not very often that reading a book leaves us with a feeling that
something in us has changed. Yet, there are many testimonies to this
experience when it comes to reading Judith Butler. Butler’s texts
seem to have the power to challenge us profoundly and coax us into
thinking differently. The seemingly simple question that hovers over
the pages of this book is: how is this possible? What do Butler’s texts
do to their readers? What do they perform on us? Moreover, what
is it about these texts that incites us into thinking that there is some-
thing about the world that needs to be remade, done differently?
Given that Butler’s thought is shaped by the registers, questions
and frames largely taken from philosophy, its inherent political
impetus is a continual source of puzzlement. All comprehensive
studies of her work show full awareness of its entanglement with the
political. Situating Butler’s thought at the crossroads of gender and
queer theory, Sara Salih (2002), Vicki Kirby (2006), Moya Lloyd
(2007) and Gill Jagger (2008) all put strong emphasis on the politi-
cal power of the performative. Elena Loizidou (2007) was the first to
discuss Butler’s work in the triad of ethics, politics and law, Samuel
Chambers and Terrell Carver (2008) present Butler as a significant
political thinker, while Birgit Schippers (2014) defines her work as
belonging to an emerging field of international political philosophy.
Butler, however, complicates straightforward definitions. She has
adamantly claimed that she has not produced a specific conception
of the political: ‘I am sure I do not have “a conception of the politi-
cal”. I am not sure one needs to have such a conception in order to
think about politics or even to engage politically’ (Ingala 2017: 26).
In addition, on many occasions she has insisted on important differ-
ences between theory and politics.
Taking these cues into account, this book aims to capture an
almost paradoxical dynamic of philosophy and politics that gives
shape to Butler’s thought. Urging us to question even the most basic
experiences, philosophy interrupts business as usual, arrests us mid-
stream, forces us to stop and question, and to sometimes remain in

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 judith butler and politics

question. Philosophy slows down. The political, on the other hand,

impels us forward, coerces into action, speeds life up, always launch-
ing us in the midst of the multitude and amongst others. This double
commitment in Butler’s thought – to urgency and to the scrupulous
labour of thinking – is a crucial part of its peculiar performativity.
‘Insurrection at the level of ontology’, possibly the leitmotif of this
book, attempts to take stock of this double commitment. The phrase
itself appears in one significant paragraph in Precarious Life, which
spurs us to open up critical questions about reality (Precarious Life,
2004a [hereafter PL]: 33). The phrase as such is curious, combining
hardly relatable nouns. Insurrections are paradigmatically political
acts of open resistance against the established order and authority.
One can rebel, of course, at various levels, but ontology is not usually
considered one of them. Reading Butler, however, compels us to rise
up at precisely that level, to rebel against what we thought was real.
The insurrection is performed as a demand on the reader, challenging
us, urging us to question what is given, and whether it can be thought
differently – indeed, whether something can be done for reality to be
remade. Thus, the political emerges out of the text itself; it appears
and challenges in medias res. The text as such does not offer an
account of an insurrection; it is neither description of it, nor does the
text ever explicitly prescribe it. Still, caught by this textual insurrec-
tion at the level of the real, we are seized by an act that opens us up,
initiates us into a change happening to us here and now.
Extricating politics from philosophy in Butler is not easy. Politics
is about action; it is performative in the truest sense of the word.
Philosophy does something as well, but these actions differ. Crucially,
philosophy is not there to supply the vision that will redeem life (‘For
a Careful Reading’, 1995b [hereafter FCR]: 131). Butler’s politics
of philosophy, to borrow a phrase from Tuija Pulkkinen, aims at
something entirely different. ‘The kind of politics of philosophy
which we encounter in Butler’s texts is doing rather than explaining
or arguing’ (Pulkkinen 2018: 142), let alone procuring axioms for
action. Whenever she engages with philosophical textual traditions,
and this book aims to shed light on some of those creative dialogues,
she disentangles them from their omnitemporal foundations, inter-
vening in the here and now, presenting those interventions as a direct
performative engagement with the social and political reality. If we
follow Mark Devenney, we could claim that Butler’s ‘insurrectionary
ontology’ entails an ‘improper politics’, which is in the end always
about ‘unpicking the violence intrinsic to proper ways of being’

2
 introduction

(Devenney 2020: 3). The notion of violence here is crucial, and it is

crucially political: ultimately, Butler’s entire opus can be understood
as a philosophical struggle to reduce violence.
This may seem too strong a statement. Certainly, there will be
those who will claim that it does apply to the more recent work,
but not to Butler’s entire oeuvre. Indeed, some caution is in order,
since from 2004 – which saw the publication of two significant
books, Undoing Gender and Precarious Life – a certain redirection
in her thought did take place. Undoing Gender brought the curtain
down, at least temporarily, on debates about gender performativity.
Precarious Life, on the other hand, was a response to US policy after
September 11th, introducing various problems that would shape
Butler’s texts from then on: war, antimilitarism, precarity, disposses-
sion, assembly and, finally, nonviolence. The new topics also carry
with them a seemingly entirely new terminological arsenal, and this
‘second phase’ was described variously as her ethical turn, human-
ist turn, a shift from performativity to precarity. Given its utility
for wading through Butler’s fractal and layered work, the distinc-
tion between phases can be deployed, and is deployed in this book.
However, I do not support the thesis of a clear and fundamental
break – in which violence appears as an entirely new subject, where
political gave way to the ethical, in which the human irrupted into a
previously antihumanist discourse, with performativity abandoned
for a different ontological axis.
Ordinarily, when there are perplexing distinctions between the
phases of someone’s oeuvre, interpreters tend to fall into one of two
types: those seeking to emphasise the differences, and those seeking
similarities and connections even when those are difficult to find. My
endeavour belongs to the second group, even at the risk of ignoring
Butler’s own advice for reading her work. She once claimed that, in
general, she does ‘not try to connect the earlier work with the more
recent work. . . it was never my intention to produce a systematic or
internally coherent system of thought’ (Zaharijević and Butler 2016:
106). At first glance, it is indeed difficult to construct intrinsic ties
between debates about gender and those regarding interdependence,
just as it is unusual to fit under one umbrella figures as diverse as
Walter Benjamin, Joan Scott and Melanie Klein. The social ontology
she professes to offer does not seem causally related to her theory of
performativity. Butler’s work does not have the features of a system,
while some of the paths through the thicket of her concepts can only
become visible by means of careful reconstruction. They reveal that

3
 judith butler and politics

some initially small byways later become main roads (such was the
case with the notions of grief and mourning, which alongside melan-
choly haphazardly appeared in early texts, only to flare up from the
margins of the debate on Antigone, becoming a mainstay of the texts
written after 2001); or else, that some notions that looked early on
to carry a lot of weight, have receded from view in later work (such
is the notion of subversion).
Despite there being no system, there is a fine thread in Butler’s
work connecting many diverse and non-overlapping problems. The
thread can be briefly described by way of a formula-question that
will be varied throughout this book: how is it possible that some lives
do not count as lives? From this question issue a series of others that
shape the political thought of Judith Butler: how is the differential
value of lives produced and maintained? How does the counting
itself effect violence? How can a (human) life be lived if not counted?
Finally, how can we think life – life of the body, social life – such
that all count? The main question, philosophical in kind, appears
– in Butler’s double commitment – also as a political demand. In
The Force of Nonviolence (2020), it is articulated as the demand for
radical equality.
In addition to the claim that Butler’s philosophical endeavours
revolve around the reduction of violence, this book proceeds from
two important assumptions. The first one is that, throughout her
work, Judith Butler tries to think bodies differently, such that all
bodies count. The second one is that by doing this, she provides a
peculiar social ontology guided by an ethico-political impulse.
Now, even those well acquainted with Butler’s work would surely
pause over the word ‘body’. Has not a significant portion of criti-
cism revolved around the charge that the body has not been given
sufficient attention in her writing? Is there not well-nigh consensus
that the theory of performativity and its specific shaping of gender
and sex cuts across the usual ways of speaking about bodily matters?
There will be indeed those who claim that, of late, Butler has begun
to include bodies in her thinking with greater persistence: ‘While
Butler started off with a merely linguistic theory of (gender) perform-
ativity, in her recent works she broadens her approach and explicitly
includes the bodily dimension’ (Wehrle 2020: 120–1). Certainly, the
books written after Precarious Life foregrounded the bodily dimen-
sion quite strongly. However, my assertion is that bodies were there
all along. Once asked why she decided to put an emphasis on corpo-
reality of public gatherings in her performative theory of assembly,

4
 introduction

Butler responded: ‘Well, I have always focused on corporeality, even

in Gender Trouble some 23 years ago, so it is probably no surprise
that this dimension of current demonstrations interests me’ (Kania
2013: 38). This book tries to confirm this thesis, which goes against
the grain of widely accepted interpretations. I argue, moreover,
that the body binds seemingly disparate phases or divergent themes
within her work. Social ontology – or the ontology of the body –
developed especially in Frames of War (2009) only makes this bond
tangible.
It seems fair to indicate what this book can and cannot do. First,
it cannot retain the peculiar manner of Butler’s writing. To write
about Butler is to accept that one is writing against the performativ-
ity of her writing. Gathering, cross-reading and synthesising is far
less performative, as it necessarily involves definitions or at least a
quest for them. Second, Butler often wrote ‘in concert’ with others
– sometimes quite literally.1 She has been part of many and, content-
wise, truly sundry joint writing projects, which Eirini Avramopolou
(2014: 201) describes, referring to Dispossession, as ‘a new strategy
of writing that foregrounds the significance of speaking-with, co-
thinking and creating alliances’. This book aims to look for and
preserve this thinking with others: her philosophy is not a product
of a heroic individual, but a truly joint enterprise. Third, a remark
on language: the author of this book is not native to the language
in which the book is written. In its current form, the book has been
partially translated from Serbian, partially written anew. This bears
mentioning not only because of the great importance of the notion of
cultural translation in Butler’s double commitment, but also because
this walk back and forth between languages is a common experi-
ence for many of Butler’s readers whose life has been changed by the
encounter with her texts. If cultural translation and building cross-
national alliances is essential to Butler’s political project, then it must
be that her philosophy only acquires its full shape in being trans-
ferred across various linguistic boundaries, as well as returning to
the language in which it was originally conceived. Fourth, this book
attempts to invoke a wide variety of women, many of whom spoke
and speak in mother tongues other than English. In a way, my task
was to heed Clare Hemmings’s advice on how to tell feminist tales:
that is, imagine ‘the feminist past somewhat differently – as a series of
ongoing contests and relationships rather than a process of imagined
linear displacement’ (Hemmings 2005: 131). Although one cannot
– and should not – underestimate the influence of Hegel, Foucault

5
 judith butler and politics

and Freud, three of Butler’s most consistent interlocutors, her story

of a famous gender and queer theorist begins with an engagement
with Simone de Beauvoir (Butler 1985, 1986). Through this engage-
ment, Butler’s double commitment also begins to gain shape. Butler
read The Second Sex not as feminist primer, but as a book whose
fundamental question – what is a woman? – is ontological, and can
be further operationalised for political reasons. Developing her own
framing of this ontological quandary, she indeed contested many
of Beauvoir’s ideas, but the question itself remained the true point
of departure for the theory of performativity. Thus, whenever such
acknowledgements were possible, this book tried to shed ample light
on them.
The book systematically reads through Butler’s texts written from
the mid-1980s to the most recent articles, lectures, interviews and
op-eds. Its aim is to supply readers with problems and frames pecu-
liar to different phases of Butler’s thinking, through various registers
in which they were voiced. The book is structured as a trajectory
of Butler’s thought, which assumes a certain chronological order.
The first part of the book, ‘Performativity’, focuses on texts written
mainly before 2001, while the second, ‘Liveable World’, presents the
ideas that followed thereupon. However, we need to tread lightly
here, since chronologies can be misleading. For example, if we rely
exclusively on text as a witness, we could say that ‘the early’ Butler
developed her thought in the theoretical circle of so-called French
feminists, perhaps crucially Beauvoir and Monique Wittig. Such
company provided space for new understandings of feminism and
first definitions of queer, and no one would reasonably expect to find
Hannah Arendt in it. Rightly so. Arendt only becomes more promi-
nent in Butler’s work from 2007, that is, from Who Sings the Nation-
State?, and further, Parting Ways (2011), in which she explores the
possibility of Jewish thought opposed to Israeli Zionism. One could
simply say, Arendt came later in Butler’s career, she is part of a new
set of problems. However, in ‘Ethical Ambivalence’, a text published
in 2000, at the beginning of which Butler biographises this ambiva-
lence, she mentions something that at that point in time must have
sounded like a practical joke: ‘I read since the age of fourteen a series
of Jewish thinkers and writers [referring to Maimonides, Spinoza,
Buber, Benjamin, Arendt and Scholem], and if I am to be honest,
I probably know more about them than I know about anything
written in queer theory today’ (Butler 2000: 16). Such a statement
complicates the seemingly neat division into ‘before’ and ‘after’.

6
 introduction

The book as a whole is organised ‘in doubles’ to reflect Butler’s

double commitment. The two parts, ‘Performativity’ and ‘Liveable
World’, are further divided into two chapters each, which comple-
ment one another. The two-step architectonic is particularly reflected
in the preceding first chapter, ‘Ontology and Politics’. Shifting
between philosophical and political stakes of Butler’s endeavours, it
plays out the paradox of slow thinking and acting in medias res. The
chapter provides a kind of glossary of terms that function as pillars,
or key motifs, giving shape to the mise en scène of the theory of
performativity. It outlines the idea of the insurrection at the level of
ontology, the purpose of which is to open up and produce possibili-
ties, allowing something new to appear. Uprisings against restricted
possibilities are enacted through collective struggles and the labori-
ous work of cultural translation, both of which are political tools for
producing a more liveable world.
Part I, ‘Performativity’, consists of two interrelated chapters,
which describe performativity’s double movement – the crucial idea
that we act and are acted upon. The chapters ‘Bodies and Norms’
and ‘Agency’ aim to capture this dynamic. There are many accounts
of Butler’s understanding of performativity, and the one I am offer-
ing relies primarily on its relation to becoming. To this end, the
second chapter reads early Butler, trying to reconstruct the influence
of Simone de Beauvoir, along with Gayle Rubin, Wittig, Hegel and
Foucault, on her conceptualisation of the relation between bodies
and norms. The theory of performativity is about the reality in which
we live, as embodied – and hence also always gendered – beings.
Thus, performativity tells us something about how the real has been
established for us, but also about our role in the constitution of such
reality. Norms shape our social reality that we at the same time
perform – under constraint. The second chapter presents Butler’s
understanding of sex, gender and performance, so to say, prior to the
introduction of the complex notion of performativity. It thus ends
with a host of unresolved questions, most important of which is why
we do our genders – or, why we craft our bodies – the way we do.
Chapter 3 focuses on what it means to act. In various places,
Butler claims that performativity is an account of agency. Agency, as
this chapter endeavours to explain, is a mode of remaking the social
reality in which we live as embodied beings. In that sense, it needs to
be understood as Butler’s political commitment to social transforma-
tion. However, agency is not only employed to transformative ends.
It belongs to acting itself; it is part of our performative becoming in

7
 judith butler and politics

the world, it constitutes us into subjects. The third chapter therefore

introduces a fully fledged understanding of performativity as cita-
tionality, and presents the notion of constrained and conditioned
agency, offering, in addition, Butler’s peculiar theory of the subject.
It unpacks the transformative aspects of agency, attempting to define
who is the agent of social transformation. The last part of this discus-
sion involves various subjects – from drag queens and Antigone to
the precarious assembled to performatively protest their disposabil-
ity. It also prefigures the notion of the social, which is important for
subsequent chapters.
In the years after 2001, Butler placed the issues of gender some-
what on hold, turning increasingly to equality and nonviolence.
Instead of the subject of agency, the focus was now more on the
conditions of life in which any agency becomes possible. Part II,
‘Liveable World’, consists of two, again interrelated, chapters,
‘Liveable Life’ and ‘Nonviolence’. The world in the title refers to our
world, the one in which we appear – or do not appear – as humans.
The world is thus another name for social reality, the reality of norms
that turn us into intelligible and, in a certain way, valuable beings,
creatures worthy of being taken into account, protected and, in the
final instance, grieved.
Chapter 4 focuses on liveable life, the curious concept engendered
by the theory of performativity. The main thesis of the whole section
is that not all lives are liveable. Some lives, varying historically and
topographically, are unliveable because they are not qualified or
counted as alive in the same way. The bodies in which such lives are
lodged do not permit of capaciousness. However, the emphasis here
shifts from the bodies to the world which fails to respond to the con-
ditions required for a liveable life. Although ultimately undefined, the
notion of life appears in Butler’s work with many attributes, and this
chapter functions as a comprehensive review of them. The section
ends with the considerations of war, understood not only as a legiti-
mised mode of manufacturing death, but also as a mode of enhancing
ungrievability of lives. Crucially as well, war is the most apparent
and the most destructive mode of violating the relation between the
bodies and the world.
The fifth chapter delves into Butler’s understanding of nonvio-
lence, defined as a way of acknowledging social relation (The Force
of Nonviolence, 2020 [hereafter FN]: 9). The first part of the chapter
offers a trajectory of the notion of violence, tracing its appearances in
Butler’s thought from the very beginning, where one would probably

8
 introduction

not expect to find it, to the present where it has become fully recog-
nised as the landmark theme of her work. The lives that do not count
in the present configuration of the world are exposed to violence
which both precedes and effectuates their not counting. Insurrection
at the level of ontology is, conclusively, motivated by the urge to
stop or at least reduce violence. In Butler, there are two main paths
towards this goal. One is the active repudiation of our own violent
and destructive impulses; the other refers to acknowledging interde-
pendence between all lives on Earth. Interdependence appears as the
pillar concept that describes our position in the world, by which we
are all given relations that help us thrive or otherwise preclude us
from possibility.
The conclusion, with the poetic title ‘Our Place’, is about our
reclaiming the world – the only one we have, the one in which we
craft ourselves in medias res. Our place is one in which we live as
bodies, plural, occupying space together with unchosen others, vul-
nerable to relation or the lack thereof, responsible for the relation we
build by our own acting, and interdependent by merely being there.
Nonviolence thus appears as a performative perseverance in cohabi-
tation, as ‘an experiment to living otherwise’ (Butler 2001b: 39) to
the current configuration of continuous violation of social bonds.
Far from being a mere absence of violence, a politics of nonviolence
impels us to do something with the world, the only place we have,
here and now.

Notes
1. In addition to Dispossession, Butler was in dialogue with Seyla
Benhabib, Nancy Fraser and Drucilla Cornell in Feminist Contentions;
she discussed radical democracy and philosophy with Slavoj Žižek and
Ernesto Laclau (Contingency, Hegemony, Universality); she had an
exchange regarding the necessity of opening feminism to plurality of
all women’s voices with Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim and Lídia Puigvert
(Beck-Gernsheim, Butler and Puigvert 2003); she commented on Axel
Honneth’s reading of the notion of reification together with Raymond
Geuss and Jonathan Lear (Honneth 2008); she discussed a presumed
secularism of critique with Wendy Brown, Talal Asad and Saba
Mahmood (Asad et al. 2009), and had debates with Jürgen Habermas,
Charles Taylor and Cornel West on the place of religion in the public
sphere (Butler et al. 2011).

9
 Chapter 1

Ontology and Politics

The Philosophy of Judith Butler

If there is any need to offer a more precise description of the philoso-
phy Judith Butler produces, we may provisionally call it ‘queer’. The
use of mischievous vocabulary, concepts such as ‘sex’, ‘jettisoned
life’ or ‘parody’, together with an emphatic, almost deliberate disre-
spect for strict boundaries between disciplines, their proper objects
and language, fits well with the idea of queering. Butler weaves the
ecstatic and improper movement of thought, to the point of some-
times questioning the standards of coherence, clarity and unity of
text. Her writing is a performance in language, frequently spilling
over into activist practices, which unintended ecstatic afterlife then
gets woven back into the fold of following texts.
To write about Butler – to impose a sense of unity or coherence
to her oeuvre – is to accept to write against the performativity of her
thought. One can attempt to do a kind of bio-bibliographical inquiry,
to collect data and trace textual trails that reveal the causal chains
and intellectual influences on certain ideas. Any endeavour seeking
to present large portions of an oeuvre must do precisely this kind of
mining work, an excavation that of necessity straightens many of its
curves. It seems that this straightening becomes particularly emphatic
when the task is to present two transversal, deeply entangled sides
of her thought: one belonging to philosophy, the other to politics.
This chapter begins with a bold statement – Butler is a philosopher
– and with an acknowledgement that some of the queerness in her
philosophy must be lost in this process of mining and honing. Despite
this, I hope to have preserved a double movement of philosophy and
politics, organised as a two-step and sustained throughout the book
– and specifically in this chapter, which is supposed to provide a kind
of glossary of terms to help us move through the continual shifting of
demands to think and act differently.
To insist on Butler’s doing philosophy is also to go against her
own somewhat ambivalent relationship towards it, which she has

10
 ontology and politics

voiced on numerous occasions, but perhaps most prominently in a

text with the suggestive title, ‘Can the “Other” of Philosophy Speak?’
(Undoing Gender, 2004b [hereafter UG]: 232–50) – where the
‘Other of philosophy’ seems to stand in for the subaltern. Or, con-
sider how Gender Trouble begins with an avowal of the philosophi-
cal register – ‘philosophy is the predominant disciplinary mechanism
that currently mobilizes this author-subject’ – only to be put into
question a moment later with the claim that this ‘inquiry seeks to
affirm [. . .] positions on the critical boundaries of disciplinary life’
(Gender Trouble, 1999 [hereafter GT]: xxxiv). This affirmation,
which continues to take place at the nexus of thought and life, goes
consistently against ‘boundarying’ (Sabsay 2016: 46). Resistance to
boundarying is itself a mode of queering of language and definitions.
Before she became famous as a gender theorist, Butler wrote a
book on Hegel, which was – judging from the topic, but also from
the journals in which the book was reviewed at the time – a properly
philosophical book. The properness of this endeavour needs to reflect
its aim, since – although the book was on Hegel and his reception
in twentieth-century France – the book in fact dealt with the life of
desire, something that, strictly speaking, escapes thinking. Butler is
careful to note that hers is not an attempt at an intellectual history
or a sociology of knowledge (Subjects of Desire, 1987 [hereafter
SD]: x–xi), but it might be added that her reading of Hegel was not
a contribution to the history of philosophy either, because, as will be
the case with numerous later encounters with philosophical texts, she
never took the trouble to produce comprehensive interpretations of
those she read. What Subjects of Desire grapples with is desire itself
and its philosophical life – the refusal, contestation and discomfort of
philosophy with life as a process, as change. Confronting the refusal
to release possibilities, foreclosed by certain habitual and often
violent presumptions, remains part of her work to this very day.
This too may help us understand Butler’s enduring defiance against
definitions of the many concepts she uses: the language of philosophy
often frames and forestalls the processuality and change so character-
istic for the unfathomable life outside of the concept, delimiting and
shoring it up, fixing and preventing it from spilling over.
Butler’s thinking is characterised by continual, even constitutive
open-endedness. In her first interview, she contends that ‘the whole
question of “What is a woman?” ought to be kept open as a question
[. . .] To the extent that gender is a kind of psychic norm and cultural
practice, it will always elude a fixed definition’ (Kotz 1992: 86). This

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 judith butler and politics

is a paradigmatic Butlerian claim, which has become a mainstay

of queer and performative theory of gender. I suggest, however,
that we also read it as an active engagement with the philosophical
means of capturing life and desire – desire to be, to be recognised –
­something Butler admitted to still writing about in the midst of queer
and gender troubles (‘What I wrote on in Hegel was desire, and the
relationship between desire and recognition [. . .] And I think I’m still
writing about that’ [ibid.: 89]). How, then, can language be deployed
for the purposes of uncovering that which eludes fixing? How can
philosophical means offer an entry into something that is fixed by
thinking itself?
Butler’s examination of The Phenomenology of Spirit begins with
looking at Hegel’s idiosyncratic and ‘sometimes tortuous’ language
that defies the rules of grammar and tests the limits of ontological
imagination (SD: 17). But there is something about this language
that goes far beyond mere testing of one’s intellectual endurance.
The reader is required to accompany the subject on a convoluted and
torturous journey, during which, moreover, the text does something
to the reader. ‘We do not merely witness the journey of some other
philosophical agent, but we ourselves are invited on stage to perform
the crucial scene changes’ (SD: 20). The setting transforms rapidly
and unexpectedly – the whole idea of phenomenology is, ultimately,
about a continuous becoming something other than what the appear-
ing subject thought it was at a previous point in the journey. The
changes are necessary, functioning as the condition of possibility for
the journey itself. It is they that propel the movement of the subject,
who in its quest for a circumscribed identity endures innumerable
tragic failures. The language untethers thought from unilinearity,
exposing it to processuality and change; the changes that the text
performs disclose – tragically or comically – that the apparent onto-
logical givenness is in fact deceptive. Crucially, The Phenomenology
of Spirit does not tell, but it enacts (SD: 18): it performs for and with
us, entangling us with the arduous life of thinking.
We recognise some of these motifs in Butler’s own texts written
well after Subjects of Desire. They do things as well, implicating us
in a performance, enacting something both transformative and not
easily accessible. We are invited to join, to become part of the scene,
to participate in the deception that we know ourselves and the world
around us. The texts are sometimes equally tortuous – unruly, serpen-
tine, dense, refusing to offer closures, evasive of definitions and clear
conclusions. And yet, something transpires through them, something

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that bends and flexes thought, something living and pressing, with
the power to carry us elsewhere. Thus, perhaps we may say that the
hunt for desire, begun with the reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology,
continued as a quest for something alive and pulsating, which must
be mediated, yet without being disjointed, by language.
Leszek Kołakowski (2010) offered a beautiful description of the
history of philosophy as an everlasting antagonism between a mul-
titude of priests and a handful of jesters. On the side of the jesters,
Butler’s philosophy sometimes goes against coherence and clarity,
absolutes and common sense, against that which alleges it must be
the way it is. Plunged into texts that have the capacity to turn lan-
guage upside down, we are made to think about what can appear in
language and what remains hidden by its use. Invited onto a stage
where a philosophical performance – of the real and the possible – is
taking place, we are sometimes literally inventing possibilities, and
maintaining them as possibly real. Queer performances are of neces-
sity improper, both in the sense of propriety and property.
Now, it may come as a surprise that Hegel, probably the greatest
priest in the history of philosophy, appears in the role of midwife
to a queer philosophy. No doubt, many of Butler’s interlocutors
who will appear in the pages of this book stand firmly on the side of
jesters. One, who also egregiously disobeyed boundarying practices,
Michel Foucault, can help us understand how Butler worked with the
thought of others, including Hegel. Foucault once suggested that all
his books are little toolboxes, welcoming those who decided ‘to open
them, use a particular sentence, idea, or analysis like a screwdriver or
wrench in order to short-circuit, disqualify or break up the systems of
power’ (Foucault 1996a: 149). On another occasion, when asked to
comment on the growing popularity of Nietzsche’s thought, Foucault
protested against the tide of the ‘most accurate interpretations’,
saying that, for him, it is important to utilise the writers one likes.
‘The only valid tribute to thought such as Nietzsche’s is precisely
to use it, to deform it, make it groan and protest’ (Foucault 1980a:
53–4). No one understood those precepts better than Butler, who
peruses texts meticulously for tools, sometimes used against their
original authors.
For this reason, Butler’s thought often weaves together those who
would otherwise rarely meet, such as Hegel and Foucault, among
many others. Strangely positioned next to one another, both are her
true and long-standing interlocutors – although she remains neither
entirely faithful nor interpretatively loyal to either. Take Hegel: the

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pilgrimage of the spirit, rising over high peaks and across deep valleys
in its quest for dialectical harmony with the world, ends in absolute
knowledge. In Butler’s philosophical journeys, there are no happy
dialectical endings that provide certainty; rather, she stays with the
negative. Or, take Foucault: Gender Trouble deployed genealogy as
a method; but not as we have come to know it in either Nietzsche
or Foucault. Although historicity, context, contingency and discur-
sivity all have a prominent place in her work, she does not follow
Nietzsche’s claim – which Foucault did – that for a genealogist, the
most vital is ‘what is documented, what can actually be confirmed
and has actually existed, in short the entire long hieroglyphic record,
so hard to decipher, of the moral past of mankind’ (Nietzsche 1989:
7). There is no archival work in Butler, who, even when she claims
to do genealogy, does genealogy at the crossroads of ontology and
politics – mapping ‘out the political parameters of [the “being” of
gender’s] construction in the mode of ontology’ (GT: 45). She makes
no inquiry into how, historically, ‘certain cultural configurations of
gender take the place of “the real”’ (ibid.), although the fact that
there is a history behind these configurations gives them changeable
status, precisely making a different real possible. Butler’s ‘genealogy
of gender ontology’ draws on other texts as its archive, ranging from
Plato to Mary Douglas, all treated as toolboxes and utilised in a sin-
gular way.
I dare claim that Butler’s method, which has remained character-
istic across her entire opus, was given in one unpresumptuous foot-
note, in which she defines her understanding of Foucault’s notion of
genealogy as a ‘specifically philosophical exercise in exposing and
tracing the installation and operation of false universals’ (Butler
1993b: 30). This particularly philosophical exercise has two main
motivations. The first belongs to ‘queered philosophy’, which aims to
create a counter-imaginary to the dominant ontological claims, or, in
Butler’s own words, ‘to produce ontology itself as a contested field’
(Meijer and Prins 1998: 279). The second is political and relates to
the opening up of possibilities.

Insurrection at the Level of Ontology

Among the various turns that characterise interpretations of Butler’s
philosophy, the ontological one has garnered only minor attention
(for exceptions cf. White 1999; Mills 2007; Chambers and Carver
2008; Schippers 2014; Vogelman 2017; Charpentier 2019; Richard

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2019). Continuing with bold statements, however, I wish to suggest

that Butler’s philosophy as such can be understood as an insurrection
at the level of ontology.
Lisa Disch (1999: 547) once claimed, with a certain foresight,
that politics of the performative is a politics of insurrection, while
Athena Athanasiou has suggested that the trope of insurrection at the
level of ontology should be read as a gesture of politicising ontology
(Dispossession, 2013 [hereafter D]: 120). To justify the importance
of this trope, I propose we take a careful look at a paragraph from
Precarious Life, which will resurface at a number of different places
in this book. Butler says:

I am referring not only to humans not regarded as humans, and thus to

a restrictive conception of the human that is based upon their exclusion.
It is not a matter of a simple entry of the excluded into an established
ontology, but an insurrection at the level of ontology, a critical opening
up of the questions, What is real? Whose lives are real? How might reality
be remade? Those who are unreal have, in a sense, already suffered the
violence of derealization. What, then, is the relation between violence
and those lives considered as ‘unreal’? Does violence effect that unreality?
Does violence take place on the condition of that unreality? (PL: 33)

What is real and how do we know it as such? These questions have

probably propelled philosophy from its Greek roots until today. The
question of the real – of what is – belongs to the realm of ontology.
The second question in the quote tells us what kind of real interests
Butler: one that has something to do with lives, and expressly human
lives. Finally, the third question – how might reality be remade? – is
crucial, as it suggests two important things: reality as it is could be
different, it could be transformed by certain acts or actions.
We might expect that such engaging words would be accom-
panied by directions or prescriptions about how to do this remak-
ing; but we would be mistaken. These are not to be found easily in
Butler’s texts: she offers no definite and precise formulas, she does
not strictly enumerate ‘good’ actions, separating them from the ‘bad’.
Butler does not focus on how to include the excluded or widen the
legally or culturally closed space to those not understood as properly
human. What she demands from us is to take several steps back,
return to the realm of ontology, and once again ask if what we think
is real – is the only possible real. Her motives are political – she obvi-
ously wants this remaking to happen – but the first step needs to take
place in thought. Such a demand is, of course, inexorably complex.

15
 judith butler and politics

Yet, violence being an integral part of our reality demands rethink-

ing that reality all the more. So long as there are some human lives
to whom reality is refused and who are violently removed from it,
such a demand must always be made. For that reason, Butler suggests
an insurrection at the level of the real with a clear political aim: to
demand equality in reality, such that certain lives are no longer more
or less real, that the ‘derealisation’ of lives, violent as it is, ceases to
be a viable option.
From Precarious Life onward, this demand has an increasing role
in shaping Butler’s work. But could we say that it was also present, at
least at the level of motivation, in the texts written before? Consider
this locus classicus in Gender Trouble:
Within feminist political practice, a radical rethinking of the ontological
constructions of identity appears to be necessary in order to formulate a
representational politics that might revive feminism on other grounds. On
the other hand, it may be time to entertain a radical critique that seeks to
free feminist theory from the necessity of having to construct a single or
abiding ground. (GT: 8)

We easily recognise this passage as typically Butlerian: identities

are constructed, feminism as a political practice needs grounds less
confining than those it operates with and feminist theory should stop
investing all its powers into fortifying these incapacious grounds.
What may be overlooked is that the ontological frames in which
identity (of woman, which then serves as ground for feminism)
appears in need of radical rethinking. Radical critique should unpack
what it is ‘to be’ a woman (a man, a gender, a subject, a human),
and what this ‘being’ reifies, turning something dynamic into a static,
thing-like entity, ontologically deprived of change.
One could wonder about the relation between the standard onto-
logical question of the real and its feminist articulation. As humans,
we are born into reality that has existed before us, and we live in it
as bodies, which very much contributes to the ontological imagina-
tion of reification. Bodies That Matter begins by signalling that, as a
rule and almost vocationally, philosophers had trouble with bodies:
‘they invariably miss the body or, worse, write against it. Sometimes
they forget that “the” body comes in genders’ (Bodies That Matter,
2011a [hereafter BTM]: viii). Such an omission seems strange, since
gender is one of the most prominent ways in which bodies live and
which makes the life of the body a social one. Declining to repeat the
vocational difficulty, Butler does write about bodies, emphatically

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 ontology and politics

wanting to think bodies – not as such, not in binarised way, but as

plural.
The body is always somehow gendered because it is entirely entan-
gled in social relations. This entanglement is not temporary or of a
kind that could be wished away: the reality in which lives of bodies
take place, in which bodies become, is a social reality that equips us
with intelligibility and situates us. The realities of concrete bodies
are, to a large extent, defined by their capacity to conform and reit-
erate the norms that define what is intelligibly real. In that sense,
bodies that are intelligible – which we can clearly define, categorise as
woman or man – are those that we can understand and assess as real.
Those, on the other hand, outside the sphere of intelligibility, remain
less real (even unreal) because they do not qualify or count in the
same way. It is bodies themselves that become differently and ‘exceed
the norm, rework the norm, and make us see how realities to which
we thought we were confined are not written in stone’ (UG: 29). Due
to their fleshy exposure, bodies are always potentially exposed to vio-
lence, almost invariably preceded by violence of derealisation itself.
For a body to be considered real – having a material, tangible
reality – it must matter, that is, it must have certain value and a
certain ascribed (and later also self-ascribed) meaning. The ques-
tion ‘what is real?’ could also be read as ‘what matters?’. Applied to
bodily lives, it can be further translated into ‘who counts as a life?’.
There are zones that remain in the suspended, shadowy regions of
ontology, inhabited by material, but only ambivalently living beings
– who do not matter and are therefore only ambivalently human. ‘To
be a body is to be exposed to social crafting and form’, to be exposed
to norms, ‘and that is what makes the ontology of the body a social
ontology’ (Frames of War, 2009a [hereafter FoW]: 3). In other
words, the reality that interests Butler is a reality of living and plural
bodies that are figured as more or less human: that is, a social reality.
In reality as it is, not all lives count the same, not all merit equal pro-
tection. This prompts us to think about how reality might be remade,
which is directly related to the issue of social transformation.
To take part in the insurrection at the level of ontology is to
ask what counts as real, in order to then possibly understand what
changes we need, under what conditions and on which terms. For
various minority realities to become included and acknowledged,
in order for them to gain equal status, which would then be legally
and institutionally acknowledged, it is necessary first to question
the established ontology. Although we certainly need to struggle for

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changes and radical expansion of laws, social transformation begins

with our struggle to think the real differently. For this reason, we
must expose ourselves to the risk of a ‘certain destabilization of [. . .]
familiar language, become exposed to something new, and begin to
imagine the world otherwise’ (Blumenfeld and Breen 2005: 25).

Possibilities
It seems that philosophy, almost vocationally, urges one to go against
urgency, to think first, to take time. Nietzsche used to caution against
thinking impatiently, especially ‘in the midst of an age of “work”,
that is to say, of hurry, of indecent and perspiring haste, which wants
to “get everything done” at once’ (Nietzsche 2006: 5). But when
philosophy becomes entangled with action, with a certain kind of
politics, especially with struggles for emancipation, then patience
becomes difficult to demand. To stop and think takes precious time,
which could, and should, be used for struggling against injustice. Yet,
perhaps paradoxically, this too appears in Butler’s texts. There is in
Butler, so to say, a contradictory movement of demands: one that
urges us to do slow philosophy – being ‘a chance to pause together
and reflect on the conditions and directions of acting, [which is] a
form of reflecting that has its own value, and not merely an instru-
mental one’ (Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly,
2015b [hereafter NT]: 123–4) – and the other, prompting us to act
now.
Let us consider this conundrum in the context of feminism.
Stopping to ask what is a body, what is natural, what is (my) expe-
rience, what it means to say that I am a woman, what it means to
consider myself human, slows down action in which I may wish to
simply struggle on the basis of my sense of a disenfranchised self
in this world. It prevents me from using language of universality
without interrogating it, or making strong normative claims about
what is good, desirable or right for all women out there. To stop
and think about, for example, what is a body, means to come face
to face with a knowledge we rarely if ever consider, which is some-
thing acquired, accumulated, belonging to historical time, contingent
and changeable. Yet, when we do stop to think about the body, one
that this feminist takes to the street to protest the precarious state of
abortion laws or the violent and disrespectful practices in maternity
wards, we are faced with a simple fact that all questions about that
body take place in language. Being shared and, properly speaking,

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 ontology and politics

belonging to everyone and no one in particular, language carries

many sediments of uses that are not my own, that is, are only ambiv-
alently mine. Thus, stopping to think about what at first seemed very
personal and most intimate now appears as a pattern with an imper-
sonal history. The simplest truths about ourselves, which we barely
ever question, seem to be part of norms that are there long before we
grew conscious of their existence. They help us orient ourselves in the
world by supplying definitions of what is a body, natural, woman,
human and so on. To question our fundamental knowledge about
the world, about what is real, to stop and consider the language used
to think the world and ourselves as subjects, to ask what is particu-
larly mine and what is shared, may, of course, cause different reac-
tions. It can make us dizzy, even paralysed; instead of propelling us
to action, it may produce certain discomfort and a sense that we do
not know what to do, a feeling that all that was firm and reliable has
now become destabilised.
Butler decisively states that theory is transformative. This does
not mean, however, that social and political transformation can
be reduced to theory. Something else surely needs to happen, ‘such
as interventions at social and political levels that involve actions,
sustained labor, and institutionalized practice, which are not quite
the same as the exercise of theory. I would add, however, that in
all of these practices, theory is presupposed’ (UG: 204–5). Slowing
down to think not only confronts us with the complexity of what
previously seemed simple, but it also makes us aware that any action
driven by certain principles or ideals is somehow philosophically
informed. Asked about the role of philosophy, which compared to
warmongering and the military-industrial complex looks powerless
indeed, and no more than a kind of solitary heroism, Butler warns
us not to forget that they too have a philosophy: ‘the contemporary
cowboy also has, or exemplifies, a certain philosophical vision of
power, masculinity, impermeability, and domination’ (Schneider
and Butler 2010). Whenever one strives for social transformation –
war being one of its possible faces, if a deplorably horrific one – or
becomes involved in the acts that should bring it about, however
expedient and swift, one is already involved in and informed by a
certain theory or philosophy, by a certain understanding of what is
possible and what is real. In the act of social transformation, we are
all ‘lay philosophers’ (UG: 205). Thus it becomes increasingly impor-
tant to think about some of the most elementary notions that seem to
be at the basis of our thinking and acting.

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 judith butler and politics

Very well – we may imagine someone saying – even if we concede

the notion that haste is not the best mode of doing either philosophy
or politics, it is still unclear why we should involve ourselves in an
insurrection at the level of ontology. What are the practical outcomes
of such involvement and how is it exactly related to social transfor-
mation? The answers to these questions belong to three different
orders: the first is related to the idea of possible life, the second to
the political materialisation of an insurrection, the third to a certain
discontinuity between philosophy and politics.
‘The thought of a possible life is only an indulgence for those
who already know themselves to be possible. For those who are still
looking to become possible, possibility is a necessity’ (UG: 219).
Looking to become possible may happen through local or global
struggles, through reforms or revolutionary acts, in organised or
anarchic ways, but it will always be preceded by an insurrection at
the level of ontology, at the level of critical opening up of questions:
does reality consist of only these possibilities, is the real necessar-
ily thus, must it be violent against lives that are less possible, and
is it violent precisely due to their lack of possibilities? Posing these
questions, motivated as they are by the sheer unviability or unlive-
ability of life, is a critical ‘no’ to reality as it is, and a critical ‘yes’ to
a political rearticulation of possibilities thus produced. Insurrection
produces possibilities: it engenders the possibility of possibilities,
the possibility for something new to appear. ‘The ontology of the
excluded’ (Butler and Connolly 2000), however, does not fit into
a merely somewhat extended old reality, which otherwise stays the
same. If new possibilities are to become viable, the boundaries of
established ontology cannot simply remain in place. The seams of the
established are un-seamed by the new.
The decision on how the new should be materialised may take
place only when possibilities appear as possible:
The idea of producing possibility is a precondition to deciding which pos-
sibility to realise; there must first be possibilities established, and this is a
crucial task, hardly simple. If theory does this, then it can be absolutely
exhilarating in so far as it opens up this world we thought was so closed
to us. (Reddy and Butler 2004: 122)

The production of possibilities takes place at the level of thinking

about what is real, what is (an intelligible) body, to whom the pre-
rogative of reality belongs, and what kinds of violence remain with
us if we take the established reality for granted. If there are minority

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 ontology and politics

realities whose lives are impossible – and what is a minority reality

has changed in time and is unequally distributed across space – then
their mere ‘becoming possible’ is a political achievement (Butler and
Connolly 2000). Becoming possible introduces disorder into possi-
bilities that have previously been enabled, sanctioned and maintained
as the only viable ones, and demands their reordering in which the
new will be a viable, liveable possibility. Thus, making room – in
thinking, in language, in the wording of policies and laws – for a pos-
sible life, or a life not steeped in violence, is a legitimate, if not vital
political aim that does not go against urgency. To the contrary, there
is even more importunity to making room, demanding that in haste
we do not lose sight of how established boundaries of the real them-
selves effect violence, and how this imperils the survival of various
real, pulsating and living bodies.

In Medias Res
Again, we can imagine someone protesting – alright, but are all pos-
sibilities advantageous? What if the production of possibilities causes
our reality to decompose, or become derealised, or unreal? Is the
new good and desirable, simply by virtue of being new? For Butler,
what waits ahead belongs to the sphere of the unknowable, and it
can never be derived from a plan established ahead of time. In order
to assume responsibility for the future, we do not have to know its
direction fully in advance, ‘since the future, especially the future with
and for others, requires a certain openness and unknowingness; it
implies becoming part of a process the outcome of which no one
subject can surely predict’ (UG: 39). Embracing unknowingness is an
integral part of radically democratic life. While we will have to act
and politically decide which possibilities are good and desirable once
they are realised, we also need to accept that ‘nothing good or desir-
able will arrive without a new’ (Butler and Connolly 2000).
The question of materialisation or institutionalisation of possi-
bilities belongs to the sphere of politics, which is for Butler always,
to a certain extent, discontinuous with philosophy. Despite being
an unambiguous call for change, for social transformation, Butler’s
philosophy seems never to have developed a politics proper – a kind
of hidden political agenda that should instruct us about the goals of
insurrection, how exactly to realise them and how to make them func-
tional once insurrection is over. We are indeed told that ‘no political
revolution is possible without a radical shift in one’s notion of the

21
 judith butler and politics

possible and the real’ (GT: xxiv), and we may infer that something
new is going to emerge with the destabilisation of the status quo. But,
what will the frame of the new be and what will be the political shape
of social transformation? We do not find this in Butler’s thought; it is
rather about the charting of possible worlds, schematising possibil-
ity, without precisely telling us which possibilities to realise or where
to go with them (Reddy and Butler 2004: 122).
For a long time, this was described as an issue of normativity,
most often placed in the context of Butler’s poststructuralism, post-
modernism, antifoundationalism or Foucauldianism. Early on, she
claimed that her work had a normative direction, but no normative
ground (Butler 1993a: 125). Even in the latest texts where the nor-
mative direction is much more overt, Butler does not abandon her
long-standing belief that philosophy is not supposed to provide a
political programme or ‘rush to decision-ism and to strong normativ-
ity’ (Olson and Worsham 2000: 763–4). This may surely justify some
in their opinion that one such position can never move too far from
subversion. Tied down to trouble-making, in a political sense it refers
only to something transient, frivolous, even trivial, in line with the
conclusion that trouble is inevitable and that the task is ‘how best to
make it, what best way to be in it’ (GT: xxix).
Although there is certainly something poignantly trouble-making
about Butler’s philosophy, there is nothing trivial about the claim
that to live politically is to live in medias res. Insurrection at the
level of the real is politically motivated and has a clear normative
direction: to rearticulate the terms in which inequality of possibil-
ity is real, to open up space for possibilities, to reduce violence that
upholds certain possibilities’ circumscription, to call for a more
liveable world. That is, however, not all that politics is about. To
act politically is to act within the given circumstances that demand
action now. Butler always philosophically contested the closure
of identity categories. However, she is also explicit that there are
moments when demonstrations, legislative efforts and radical move-
ments make claims and have to make claims, for example, in the
name of women (‘Contingent Foundations’, 1995a [hereafter CF]:
49). Or, that there were ‘political occasion[s]’ where she would
appear ‘under the sign of lesbian’, although theoretically ‘to write
or speak as a lesbian appears a paradoxical appearance of this “I”’
(Butler 1991: 13–14).
What exactly does it mean that politics is about the now
and the new? To answer this, we need to briefly revisit the

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 ontology and politics

Habermas–Foucault debate (see Ashenden and Owen 1999), part of

much broader disputes between radical theories and post-Enlighten-
ment normativism. The same breach can be detected in the volume
Feminist Contentions, which, significantly, was first published in
1993 in Frankfurt under the title Der Streit um Differenz. Although
I pay more attention to this important exchange in the chapter on
agency, for the time being some of its motifs can explain the idea of
politics in medias res.
The normativist-inspired understanding (represented by Seyla
Benhabib in the exchange in question) is that to have an inter-
est in emancipation, that is, a strong political direction, (feminist)
theory has to be founded on certain philosophical (or metaphysical)
premises. These foundations are necessary for the definition of the
emancipatory subject, but also to provide a critical basis or norma-
tive grounds for what is to be achieved through this emancipation.
It must be guided by certain ideals or utopian visions without which
‘not only morality but also radical transformation is unthinkable’
(Benhabib 1995a: 30). The premises supply the action with legitimat-
ing principles and narratives that are not value-neutral and strive to
be universally valid.
For Butler, on the other hand, we can assemble and protest, under
the sign of women or lesbians or under some other sign, in concrete
political efforts to effectuate certain changes, without assuming that
these efforts have, or must have, necessary foundations. Theory is
not there to furnish the struggle with either grounds for action or the
subject of agency. The political subject emerges in and through collec-
tive struggle, which is concrete, possibly paradoxical, always poten-
tially thwarted because its effects cannot be calculated in advance.
The struggle is not normatively shaped before it begins to take place,
and does not take place according to a philosophical rulebook that
guarantees full implementation of its regulative ideals. Theory has
no necessary political consequences, ‘only a possible political deploy-
ment’ (CF: 41). Thus, instead of positing premises, together with
the acting subject that precedes action itself, one needs to ask what
possibilities of mobilisation there are in the existing configurations of
power, ‘for what is at hand politically is a set of challenges that are
historically provisional, but are not for that reason any less neces-
sary to engage’ (FCR: 128). When, for example, protesters gather at
Wall Street to reclaim public space in a political struggle against late
capitalism, they stand in the midst of it, encircled by its architectural
signs, equipped with gadgets and engaged in social media actions

23
 judith butler and politics

that would hardly be imaginable without the existence of transna-

tional corporations, extractivism or neoliberal political rationality.
Then and there, they are physically and symbolically entangled
with what is historically provisional but must currently be engaged:
‘towers [are] mocking us, as we call for a more radical dismantling
of [capitalism’s] terms. There is no transcendental purity to be had.
Or if there is, it is reserved for those who refuse to act’ (Seeliger and
Villa Braslavsky 2022).
Against the normativists’ presumptions, Butler refuses that the
philosophical establishment of the normative foundations can pos-
sibly pull the political subject out of the unruliness, contingency and
contextuality of political life. Positing the necessary foundations of
politics in effect desires the ‘decontamination’ of politics, to provide
it with a clean slate, which is never to be had. The foundations, in the
words of Wendy Brown, act as refusals ‘to allow history and contin-
gency to contour the existing dimensions and possibilities of political
life. In this sense, they constitute repudiation of politics, even as they
masquerade as its source of redemption’ (2001: 94). The laying down
of normative premises in the form of necessary foundations of poli-
tics is used to authorise and define a priori what is politically good or
desirable. This, however, forecloses and excludes certain possibilities
from the outset, and stands in the way of some others that might
open up in the course of the struggle. Furthermore, the foundations
position ‘the idealist actor at a distance from politics, [who thus
becomes] inevitably disappointed by it and perhaps even prepared to
renounce politics because of its failures and compromises vis-à-vis his
or her ideals’ (ibid.). Doing politics in medias res means precisely that
we open ourselves to the de-idealisation, which can make us realise
‘that your own critical position may be an effect of the very power
regime that you seek to criticize, without being fully coopted by it’
(Kotz 1992: 89). This realisation may appear as ‘the very precondi-
tion of a politically engaged critique’ (CF: 39).
Understanding agency as being neither exempted from the field of
powers, nor one-directionally leading to the fulfilment of ideals set
beforehand, is to remain with the lived difficulty of political life. To
live politically in medias res means to ‘become available to a trans-
formation of who we are, a contestation which compels us to rethink
ourselves, a reconfiguration of our “place” and our “ground”’ (FCR:
131). It means to quit territorialism, to give up on the foreclosure
of the future through transhistorical, universally valid premises pre-
scribed in advance, to renounce grounds which will remain anchored

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 ontology and politics

and uneroded, regardless of potentially transformative contestations

posed to us by the democratic life itself (FCR: 131–2).

The New
This critical endeavour is not guided by the Habermasian ‘why strug-
gle?’, but by the Foucauldian ‘how to proceed?’ (Foucault 2000: xii;
see Allen and Goddard 2014). For Foucault, politics is to be used
for a ‘permanent opening of possibilities’, a means of unconstituting
what has been historically constituted (Foucault 2014: 267). In that
sense, politically engaged critique begins by asking what possibili-
ties are produced on the basis of existing configurations of power,
how this matrix can be reworked, how the legacy of its constitution
can be reconstituted and destabilised (CF: 47). Yet, to act politically
means to act now, with resources we have, and not those predefined
or left to be obtained at some future moment. The question how to
proceed implies that, for the most part, some kind of situational and
insurrectionary political analysis and strategies have to be invented
along the way, in and through the very struggles (Foucault 1996b:
211).
Now, normativist philosophy champions the production of pos-
sibilities as well. However, it begins by defining the possibilities that
ought to be realised. The new that is supposed to come is, in that
sense, not particularly new. That which will happen in the future is
already projected, philosophically strategised and thought through
before the action that should take us there takes place. There is, in
other words, a direct continuity between philosophy and politics.
For Butler, in contrast, politics is about the present. To be sure,
we act with normative direction. However, we are not endowed
with authoritative knowledge of where acting will take us. What
lies ahead belongs to the sphere of the unknown, regardless of
our projections of a desirable future. ‘We are all unknowing and
exposed to what may happen, and our not knowing is a sign that we
do not, cannot, control all the conditions that constitute our lives’
(NT: 21) – which is what ultimately makes us all precarious. Thus,
instead of reaching out for something that (still) does not belong to
the domain of the real, projecting in it some already defined ‘new’,
we should take part in a political performativity in the present,
because the re­ establishment of established reality ‘is fundamen-
tally dependent for its maintenance on that contemporary instance’
(Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 2000 [hereafter CHU]: 41).

25
 judith butler and politics

To act politically is to push the limits of the established, without the

illusion of the possibility of its total escape.
It is important to note that Butler’s insistence on unknowingness,
which stands in the way of a direct continuity between philosophy
and politics, comes to her though the peculiar reading of Hegel, and
not only, as the early debates on normativity seem to have empha-
sised, through her overreliance on Foucault. In point of fact, her
philo­sophical landscape is here much wider, comprising not only
Hegel’s journeying subject and Foucault’s political ontology of
the present, but also Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s under-
standing of radical democracy, as well as Hannah Arendt’s notion
of acting in concert that would become particularly prominent in
Butler’s later work.
Let us for a moment turn to Butler’s particular reading of Hegel’s
The Phenomenology of Spirit and its subject’s journey that presents
itself as a series of acts of cognition. Before becoming cognisant – a
long process with many dialectical stages – the subject is set for the
unknown. It surrenders to the world each time, giving itself over to
it, open to whatever it encounters on its path to absolute knowledge.
‘Hegel’s own persistent references to “losing oneself” and “giving
oneself over” only confirm the point that the knowing subject cannot
be understood as one who imposes ready-made categories on a
pregiven world’ (CHU: 19). The subject is fundamentally unknowing
because the world is not given to it in advance. The world becomes
known only through the categories shaped by the subject’s encoun-
ter with it. Desire, ‘this subject’s necessarily ambiguous movement
toward the world’, urges the subject to be consumed, externalised
and dispersed through the world, and ‘the “Life” of the subject is the
constant consolidation and dissolution of itself’ (SD: 42). Ecstatic
and relational, the subject remains open to the transformations that
encounters bring: ‘We do not remain the same, and neither do our cog-
nitive categories, as we enter into a knowing encounter with the world.
Both the knowing subject and the world are undone and redone’ by
these encounters (CHU: 20). Hegel was, further, vital for an under-
standing that the possibilities which need to be produced are not in
some temporal and spatial ‘elsewhere’, but already in the world, in
established reality. However, as we already know, Butler reads Hegel
without closure, without a dialectical happy ending, which brings her
close to a Foucauldian critical ‘no’ that always halts us in the now.
At almost the same time that Habermas proposed his theory of
communicative action in an attempt to ‘upgrade’ what little had been

26
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left of critical theory – which, in his view, had become totally nega-
tive, directed against reason as the foundation of its own analysis, and
no longer able to operate in the realms of truth and validity claims
(Habermas 1982) – Foucault also began to show strong interest in
the critical enterprise, with a startling admiration for Adorno and
Horkheimer’s project of unrelenting critical theory. Both Habermas
and Foucault wished to offer a positive notion of critique, but their
understanding of positivity differed fundamentally. For Foucault,
critique appears as a practice necessary for the philosophical ethos,
even philosophical life that consists of questioning things we say,
think and do. Departing from Kant’s reflections of limits, the critical
question today, claims Foucault, is positive and practical, and makes
us ponder what is given to us as universal, necessary and obligatory,
although it is actually singular, contingent, a product of arbitrary
constraints (Foucault 2007b: 113). This is necessary for our under-
standing of who we are, how we came to be what we are, and under
which constraints, or for what he calls a critical ontology of ourselves
in the present. However, critique is not only about knowing, but
is also ‘an experiment with the possibility of going beyond’ these
limits (ibid.: 118). It is an experiment based on separating out ‘from
the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no
longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think’ (ibid.:
114).
In 2001, possibly also as a retrospective account on Foucauldian
normativity ingrained in her work, Butler published a text on
Foucault’s notion of critique, which, she claimed, has strong nor-
mative commitments that appear in forms that would be difficult,
if not impossible, to read within grammars of normativity shaped
by the currently dominant version of critical theory. Critique is a
practice of questioning the limits of what we are most certain we
(think we) know. To question these limits is to push them because
‘one has already run up against a crisis within the epistemological
field in which one lives’ (Butler 2001a). The ‘one’ appearing in this
assertion is any one of us for whom the epistemological field, or the
world, is given. The ‘one’ is, in that sense, not a Hegelian subject
who only comes to grow cognisant of the world and, through acts
of cognition, creates categories shaped by its encounter with the
world. We appear in the world in which there are already catego-
ries that order our lives, which, being given, seem necessary and
unchangeable. Yet, some of these categories produce incoherences
that, pushed to their limit, open up entire realms that previously

27
 judith butler and politics

seemed unthinkable and unutterable, that is, impossible in the exist-

ing categorial apparatus.
To act uncritically or, in Foucault’s words, to let oneself be gov-
erned by the categorial apparatus that defines what is and what is
not possible, means to comply with the given conditions that delimit
possible existence, to remain within the established order of truth or
the real. By contrast, to open oneself up to a critical attitude, to an
‘art of not being governed like that and at that cost’ (Foucault 2007a:
45) – which assumes that one is still within this very order, because
another has not (yet) been found – means to potentially suspend the
ontological basis of the given order. Critique is a form of defiance
against what Foucault calls the politics of truth, which orders our
very basic ways of knowing and acting in the world, so basic that it
refers to questions like ‘what counts as a person? What counts as a
coherent gender? What qualifies as a citizen? Whose world is legiti-
mated as real?’ (Butler 2001a).1
These questions take us back to the realm of the knowable, think-
able and sayable. They urge us to consider ways in which these
realms have historically been circumscribed by the unthinkable and
the unspeakable. Such consideration, however, can only appear by
breaking through the prohibitions that enable and structure the
established truth and real. This breaking through is endowed with an
insurrectionary force (Excitable Speech, 1997a [hereafter ES]: 142)
and can produce something new. The ‘rogue viewpoint’ – that which
is unsayable and must be cast away for the domain of the speakable
to be established – ‘is not the one that can be spoken without doing
some damage to the idea of what is speakable’ (Butler 2009c: 777).
This ‘damage’ opens up a possibility for something new to arrive.

Collective Struggle
Foucault believed that to do critical ontology of ourselves we need to
abandon all projects that claim to be global or radical. His distrust
of projective and universally applicable ‘programs for a New Man’
was related to the notion that there is no escape from the present that
would allow us ‘to produce the overall programs of another society,
of another way of thinking, another culture, another vision of the
world’ (Foucault 2007b: 114). We have to act without an archi-
tectonic theory or a philosophical-political programme. This posi-
tion left many readers uneasy, believing that this would encourage
only small battles with ‘a single-issue orientation’ or ‘personalistic

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flavor’: ‘without a program, the left has had difficulty devising or

orchestrating strategies for change in general’ (Wapner 1989: 88).
The preference for partial and local transformations, organised
around the question ‘how to proceed’, seems perfectly fitting to this
view, advancing only fragmented, immediate, collective, moderately
militant and antiutopian actions (Allen and Goddard 2014: 43–43).
Now, even if Butler agreed with many of these points, she was at
the same time always explicit about her feminist, queer, antiracist,
leftist and radical democratic activism. Unlike Foucault, who was
amused by a long list of contradictory political ascriptions, from
crypto-Marxist to Gaullist technocrat, without ever avowing any,
Butler always insisted on the importance of collective struggle with
recognisable political affiliations.
As a matter of fact, collective struggle is one of the oldest notions
in her work. The term itself is hard to pin down as it refers to various
phenomena: assemblies, human rights activism and uprisings, coali-
tional actions that go against seamless identities or proper objects,
and projects of cultural translation. The idea of collective struggle is
embedded in the notion that to act politically is to act performatively,
in a plurality of voices, in coalition and immersed in the present
moment. Philosophy does not need to tell us why we have gathered
together to protest and under what banner – that belongs to the con-
textual and contingent sphere of political life – but it may inform us
of the importance of the plurality at the heart of a radically demo-
cratic life, and the performative aspect of acting in concert.
In that sense, collective struggle refers to joint action, which
is notably performative, radically democratic, rearticulatory and
resignificatory, plural and expressive of competing universalities.
Through them, ‘those who are deemed “unreal” nevertheless lay
hold of the real, a laying hold that happens in concert, and a vital
instability is produced by that performative surprise’ (GT: xxxviii).
Queer alliance, for instance, managed to grasp these dimensions.
Fundamentally non-identitarian and non-communitarian, it refers
to a gathering across gender, race, class, geopolitical situations,
and around a common issue, such as the AIDS crisis that affected
a variety of people. The crisis produced ‘the necessity of a really
broad range of coalitions and ideas of equality: equality to educa-
tion, equality to health care [. . .] equal grievability of lives’ (Danbolt
2015: 6). The idea of the queer served as a site, essentially incomplete
in its referentiality, and available for contested meanings and their
performatively surprising rearticulations. It was to an extent similar

29
 judith butler and politics

to Laclau and Mouffe’s (2001) understanding of radically democratic

practices: striving for pluralism, in contestation over legitimacy
claims, open for future revisions, and creating a chain of equiva-
lence among varying democratic struggles against different forms of
subordination.
Collective struggle gained an equally strong expression in Butler’s
performative theory of assembly (see NT). Performative politics of
the precarious built upon the idea of queer politics, and assembling
became a form of rising up in opposition to an unendurable condi-
tion, a form of making an embodied ‘bid for a livable life’ (Butler
2016b: 25). Those who assemble may ‘have been crossed, denied,
degraded, but now, in the moment of uprising, they gather a certain
strength or force from one another, from alliance itself, one formed
by a shared rejection of the unlivable’ (ibid.). Those who rise up
together do not have to read Marx or actively participate in leftist
disputes, nor to have a drafted programme that would, by its mere
existence, turn assembled bodies into a revolutionary force. They
could, however, like the proletariat, rise up to negate the very con-
ditions that negate their capacity to subsist, thereby re-embodying
and rearticulating the power of negation itself. This reincorporation
of negative power appears as a moment of uprising, as part of the
signifying chain of negation (Butler 2015a). It will involve a moment
of critique, as a sort of collective and embodied political judge-
ment, ‘a visceral judgement incarnated in stance and action’ (Butler
2016b: 28), and a moment of ecstatic desire, often resulting from
‘a long simmering process of dawning and expanding recognition’
(ibid.: 27). The political subject of an assembly may appear under
various synecdochal names – such as ‘Tahrir’, ‘Syntagma’, ‘Zuccotti
Park’. ‘Taksim’, for instance, gave its name to an uprising that began
when a group of people defending public water rights was joined by
anarchists, Marxists, feminists, drag queens, Kurdish mothers, envi-
ronmentalists, activists fighting for the preservation of the common
good, football fans, those fighting state authoritarianism and those
protesting the war in Syria (Butler 2015a). All of them became
çapulcu, looters, reappropriating a state-imputed derogatory name
and grounding themselves in the very movement they made together.
There is no ‘single collective subject. It is a judgement shared, passed
between people, heterogeneous yet concerted, embodied differently
and yet in common’ (Butler 2016b: 29).
Although uprisings refer to the collective struggles that are hap-
pening now, against a pressing, negating injustice, they also help us

30
 ontology and politics

understand that Butler is not arguing for permanent presentism. In

line with her understanding of performativity (discussed in detail in
subsequent chapters), each new form of collective struggle belongs to
a citational chain: they rearticulate previous uprisings, ‘as a memory
embodied anew, in events episodic, cumulative, and partially unfore-
seeable’ (ibid.: 36), and form a layer in an open chain of futural reit-
erations (Butler, Laclau and Laddaga 1997: 10). Collective struggles
are synchronic and diachronic forms of linking, of creating bonds
and binds, that call for setting aside
all recourse to primary and secondary oppressions and focus more on
translation as a political practice. The possibility of a transregional and
multilingual solidarity depends on having one’s settled epistemic frame
upended by another and then reformulated for the purposes of expanding
solidarity. (Seeliger and Villa Braslavsky 2022)

Performative Universality
The occupiers of Taksim or Wall Street, each momentarily becom-
ing the name of the universal, form a translatable concatenation of
demands. ‘Whenever universal becomes possible – and it may be
that universal only becomes possible for a time, “flashing up” in
Benjamin’s sense – will be the result of a difficult labour of transla-
tion’ (‘Merely Cultural’, 1998 [hereafter MC]: 38), in which a mul-
titude of insurgents or movements converge against the backdrop of
ongoing social contestation.
The notion of the universal appears in two forms in Butler’s work.
In Gender Trouble there are open hesitations about it: if something
is said to have universal validity, it is significant to know who says
it, what such totalising speech act aims at, where its limits are and
who is excluded from its scope. These early misgivings are grounded
in Butler’s refusal of a normativist type-universalism and totalising
gestures in feminism. Gender Trouble was, among other things, a
radical critique of the universal validity of categories of identity and
identity-based oppression, that is, of the dominant feminist under-
standing of patriarchy and neat distinctions between sex, gender and
desire (GT: 5, 18–19, 48; for a full complexity of ‘sexual identity’,
see Sedgwick 1994: 6–7). Casting domination as universal becomes
a colonising epistemological strategy that produces and performs
new modes of domination, reification and exclusion, with the help of
seemingly non-porous, circumscribed and universally valid catego-
ries. In its endeavour, Gender Trouble is not an isolated project, but

31
 judith butler and politics

rather a continuation of the critical work of women of colour, radical

thinkers of sex and postcolonial feminists (hooks 1981; Ferguson et
al. 1984; Mohanty 1988; Spivak 1988; Rubin 1992; Moraga and
Anzaldúa 2015). In this critical corpus, the universal functions as a
‘false universal’, integrative by force, erasing experiential differences,
imposing a fixed, only purportedly shared structure, stifling dishar-
monious voices. Butler’s early work was in that sense part of the
collective struggle against the cloaked violence of a singular common
essence that claims to have universal validity.
In the Preface to the second edition of Gender Trouble, written
ten years after the original, Butler confesses to having revised her
earlier positions on the meaning and usefulness of universality, under
the influence of her political engagements. It turns out that if taken
as non-substantial and open-ended, universality can have important
strategic and performative use, ‘conjuring a reality that does not yet
exist, and holding out the possibility for a convergence of cultural
horizons that have not yet met’ (GT: xviii). This ‘future-oriented’
universal does not come to be through the processes of abstraction
and decontextualisation, meaning that it is not known in advance. To
conjure a reality that is not yet, assumes the possibility of something
emphatically new and that ‘the universal is only partially articulated,
and that we do not yet know what forms it may take’ (Butler 1996:
46).
Consider a historical example. In nineteenth-century Britain the
demand for ‘universal suffrage’ referred exclusively to a demand for
the suffrage of men. The notion of ‘universal’ was meant to incor-
porate those not yet included, referring, before the Reform Acts of
1867 and 1884, to the vast majority of working-class men. When
the demand for women’s suffrage was articulated, in the second half
of the same century, from the start it was emphatically particular,
since the ‘universal’ was obviously not capacious enough to include
women. This, in turn, produced a rearticulation of the earlier demand,
turning it into ‘universal manhood suffrage’. Another question would
be why universal suffrage, when it was first articulated as universal,
did not involve everyone who was, by then, excluded from the (exclu-
sive and exclusionary) universal (see Zaharijević 2014). What this
example makes clear, however, is that the universal of universality,
either in the ontological or legal and political sense, assumes certain
historically articulated standards: they may appear as universal, nec-
essary and obligatory, but they are in fact singular, contingent and a
product of arbitrary constraints (Foucault 2007b: 113).

32
 ontology and politics

A critical relation to the parochial and exclusionary character of

a given historical articulation of the universal is part of its expand-
ing into the not-yet-reached universal. This ‘not yet’, or the temporal
zone of those still without a claim to universality, constitutes the
universal itself:
The universal begins to become articulated precisely through challenges
to its existing formulation, and this challenge emerges from those who
are not covered by it, who have no entitlement to occupy the place of the
‘who’, but who nevertheless demand that the universal as such ought to
be inclusive of them. (Butler 1996: 48)

Butler speaks of a performative and insurgent universality that

arises out of contention with what now assumes the position of the
universal, as something potentially new of which we are, as yet,
unknowing (Butler and Connolly 2000). The appearance of women’s
suffrage is one such insurgent universality (of a particularity, [all]
women). It helped redefine the boundaries of what was up to that
point conceived as universal, as universally human, unmasking it as
exclusionary universal and exclusively male. ‘Women’ appeared as
ontologically new in the midst of the notion of the human, tearing
apart both the seams of the human and of the universal, and expand-
ing both in directions theretofore unthinkable.
Whenever one lays claim to a position of universality, one does
so from a historically formed position in the social world, as there
is no ‘place’ that is socially shapeless, untouched by and exempt
from power relations. The performative speech act ‘I lay claim to
the position of universality’ is made only in the context of extant
norms writing such a claim off, making it unthinkable or unsayable.
The British women who demanded suffrage in the second half of the
nineteenth century had been written off as ‘unsexed’, as creatures
removed from their essence, women who were not women, some
kind of, literally, embodied contradiction, as if the mere demand for
suffrage had the power to transmute bodies and impair the ‘normal’
workings of sex (Zaharijević 2014). Butler provides us with another
example, which in today’s anti-gender furore gains entirely new cur-
rency (Butler 2019a; Graff and Korolczuk 2022). In the context of
the large international, UN-sponsored meetings of the 1990s (see
Oosterveld 2005; Rothschild 2005; Girard 2007; Antić and Radačić
2020), when LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) rights were
only beginning to enter the discursive code of universally recog-
nised human rights, there were political and religious groups that

33
 judith butler and politics

questioned the possibility of gay and lesbian rights being treated

as universal, as rights belonging to the human on the basis of their
humanness. For Butler, there was no space for surprise that the
Vatican referred to the possible inclusion of ‘lesbian rights as “anti-
human” [. . .] To admit the lesbian into the realm of the universal
might be to undo the human, at least in its present form, but it might
also be to imagine the human beyond its conventional limits’ (UG:
190).
Whenever a position excluded from the universal demands inclu-
sion, two parallel processes take place: first, the ‘universal’ becomes
uncovered as non-universal, because some or many groups linked
together announce themselves as excluded; second, the demand
for inclusion dismantles the existing ‘universal’ – unmasking it as
false, seeking a more encompassing and capacious one. Each form
of appropriation of the universal occurs in a context of that univer-
sal appearing unthinkable. In its appropriation, it resists the extant
norm, but also calls for it to be transformed in certain quite unex-
pected ways. Laying claim to a ‘non-place’ and a temporal modality
of a ‘not yet’ (CHU: 37) is fundamentally performative and opens the
possibility of convergence of cultural horizons.

Cultural Translation
Rather than imagining that women automatically have something identi-
fiable in common, why not say, humbly and practically, my first obliga-
tion in understanding solidarity is to learn her mother tongue [. . .] This
is preparation for the intimacy of cultural translation [. . .] if you are
interested in talking about the other, and/or in making a claim to be the
other, it is crucial to learn other languages. (Spivak 1993: 192)
To take one’s own linguistic horizon as the limit implies a conceited
self-sufficiency that can always turn into a colonising epistemological
strategy. Not only can there be no solidarity, a kind of political com-
monality that I seek from you in a joint struggle, but if you do not
understand the language I speak – even less, if I too cannot decipher
the words you utter and there is no third as intermediary – there is
no translation and ‘there is no ethical response to the claim that any
other has upon us [. . .] we are [then] ethically bound only to those
who already speak as we do, in the language we already know’
(Parting Ways, 2012 [hereafter PW]: 17). Without translation, my
words directed at you – ‘pomozi mi, немој да ме повредиш, ne čini
to!’ – a cry for help and a plea against violence in my language,

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 ontology and politics

remain unintelligible to you, without any ethical weight, faceless. No

transformative encounter happens without translation.
The idea of cultural translation is, in my understanding, one of the
most important practical-political tools of Butler’s thought, running
parallel to the political in medias res. Although without an explicit
definition, it appears as a thread through a large part of Butler’s
work, crossing philosophical and political registers. The crossing
is enabled by separable and, at first glance, quite discontinuous
sources of this idea. Butler certainly draws on Benjamin and post-
colonial theory for her understanding of (cultural) translation; but
another source is also her engaged activism. This includes practical
encounters in the domain of international law, the struggle against
contemporary forms of epistemological and political colonialism,
and a resolute break with any communitarian discourse. Over time,
Butler’s engagement expanded from the interrogation of a narrow
western universalist epistemology to go beyond ‘first world’ femi-
nism,2 and the left that dismisses non-class, ‘merely cultural’ strug-
gles as divisive and insignificant (see MC).
Claiming that cultural translation belongs to the key practical-
political tools of Butler’s thought is, however, not easy to justify. Not
only is the concept not defined, but it appears in myriad contexts,
including conflicts that require action that cannot be performed in
the present. At one level, it seems to refer to a real task of learning
another language, practically and humbly, to be able to translate
and thus preserve a relation between speakers and cultures, without
mastery. At another level, it refers to a tool that preserves the col-
lective nature of struggle, enabling an encounter between competing
horizons of those involved. At yet another level, cultural translation
seems to be embedded, as a normative demand, in the preservation of
cohabitation in plurality: there needs to be a translation ‘in the midst
of converging and competing ethical claims’ in order to remap and
preserve social bonds (PW: 8).
Unlike action in medias res, translation requires patience. The
slow-moving work of translating cultural horizons allows the possi-
bility of communal life, that is, cohabiting, slow-weaving of encoun-
ters that will not end in domination or annihilation. It potentially
opens a non-hegemonic view of existence and allows unspeakable
languages to become utterable. No sociality and no politics – other
than mute warfare – is possible without translation.
For her understanding of the power of translation, Butler is specif-
ically indebted to Walter Benjamin. For him, each translation is in a

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certain sense a new original: the original reappears in the other (lan-
guage) reiterated, derived, same but also new and different. Benjamin
refers to a profound ambivalence of the process of translation. As
there is always at least a trace of the untranslatable, the original
retains something that can never be transferred or exhausted in the
‘new original’; but the translated is also a crucial form of survival
(Überleben, Fortleben, of a life that goes on). As Benjamin claims
in ‘The Task of the Translator’, ‘languages are no strangers to one
another, but are, a priori and apart from all historical relationships,
interrelated in what they want to express’ (Benjamin 1977: 72). As
long as a language is spoken, written and translated, it survives.
Translation is, therefore, a survival, a re-living and re-turning of life,
which in a very fundamental sense depends on living language ‘deriv-
atives’. Linguistic survival also allows social bonds to survive, since
languages themselves offer a tool for continual exchange and nego-
tiation. Translation is a reaction against the impossibility of encoun-
ter, of contact: it enhances and augments communicability (FN:
126). In another text, Benjamin claims that there is a sphere wholly
inaccessible to violence, ‘the proper sphere of “understanding”, lan-
guage’ (Benjamin 2004: 245). It provides the mode of preservation
of agonism, even conflict, but in a non-violent, non-eradicating way
(FN: 128). To agree to enter into a situation of translation means to,
at least temporarily, give up on force, the right of the stronger, of the
first: translation creates a situation of commutation, transfer, active
and reciprocal interference. What is especially important for Butler:
it constitutes and maintains the social relation.
The idea of cultural translation seems to be borrowed from post-
colonial theory. For example, Homi Bhabha claims that translation
is the performative nature of cultural communication, language in
actu, which desacralises ‘the transparent assumptions of cultural
supremacy, and in that very act, demands a contextual specificity, a
historical differentiation within minority positions’ (Bhabha 1994:
228). For Bhabha, who draws on Benjamin, in the context of transla-
tion, the subject of cultural difference appears as irresolutely liminal,
untranslatable and forever culturally inassimilable (ibid.: 224). This
is, for Butler, the residue that can only violently fit itself into the
established category of the universal – through a colonial imposi-
tion of its own dominant version, through erasure of certain kinds
of demands and the refusal to engage in their rearticulation. Butler
here follows Bhabha, for whom this liminal, residual and inassimi-
lable element – which he calls cultural difference – is precisely that

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which urges us to submit to a translation, a slow and demanding – or

as Spivak says, a humble and practical – process. Quick and hasty
resolutions most often end in domestification or assimilation of dif-
ference. Only by consenting to the demand of translation does one
become resistant to them. Cultural translation assumes a willingness
to undergo an unanticipated transformation and yield to an amend-
ment of one’s terms.
Cultural translation thus maintains the idea of the untranslatable,
but it also insists on something specifically dynamic, even performa-
tive, in the very possibility of translation, which pushes the process of
the translation/communication forward. Cultural translation is what
conserves and renews the social bond, while at the same time having
the power to transform it. There seems to be a paradox here, because
transformation rarely coincides with preservation. However, if dif-
ference is not domesticated or assimilated, then ‘difference’ is given a
chance to transform what has until then been understood as ‘same’,
real or universal. When a certain particular demands to be included
in the universal (women of the late nineteenth century or lesbians of
the late twentieth), it is demanding to be translated, along with its
untranslatable residuum, along the way also altering the meaning of
the universal. This demand puts both the universal and the particular
to the test, together with the norms that enable and maintain the
exclusion of the given particular from universality.
In a radically democratic framework, everyone has a right to
translation and equal participation in a contestation of universality.
And only in the dynamic contestation of competing, overlapping uni-
versalities do new fields of possibilities possibly open. In a radically
democratic framework, the process of translation has no predict-
able end. Universality that is ‘not yet’, universality-to-come (Lloyd
2009), ‘would not be violent or totalizing; it would be an open-ended
process, and the task of politics would be to keep it open, to keep
it as a contested site of persistent crisis and not to let it be settled’
(Olson and Worsham 2000: 747). This is how translation appears as
a task of politics informed by ethics, and understood as a process of
pluralisation and institutionalisation. It is a process that follows, and
has to follow, the insurgent acts in which unthinkable and unsayable
claims enter language and reality, demanding to become thinkable
and sayable, indeed demanding a right to a translation.

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 judith butler and politics

Human, Never Too Human

This chapter functioned as a sort of glossary of the key ontological
and political linkages in Butler’s work. Among these, the notion of
the human has a special place. It can be said that the search for new
forms of thinking and uttering, what in established ontology and
grammar has no expression and appears unthinkable, is an attempt
to find forms in which the human would be thought beyond its
current boundaries. It can also be said that the production of pos-
sibilities refers to creating conditions for a broader, more capacious
and more encompassing understanding of humanness, and that the
insurrection at the level of the real is only possible because there
are various humans who are closed off from reality, despite the fact
that they are present and corporeal. In an important passage, Butler
claimed that
perhaps, then, it should come as no surprise that I propose to start, and
to end, with the question of the human (as if there were any other way for
us to start or end!). We start here not because there is a human condition
that is universally shared – this is surely not yet the case. The question
that preoccupies me in the light of recent global violence is, Who count as
human? Whose lives count as lives? (PL: 20, italics mine)

Those who firmly believe that Judith Butler is representative of some

version of postmodern feminism must find it quite odd that she
decides to begin and end anything with such a question. Is she not
here repaving the way to humanism (see Kramer 2015), the grand
narrative to which Foucault bid farewell when he declared ‘that man
would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’
(Foucault 2002a: 422; cf. Ingala 2018a)? Has not feminist theory
denounced humanism, showing that ‘man’ was male all along? Had
not Butler herself showed clear reservations about this concept which
simulates universality, at the same time excluding so many from
the scope of its validity? Perhaps we should take this focus on the
human as a sign that the previous premises have been abandoned?
Or, maybe, one could read this as a way to smuggle in (normative)
foundations, together with the doer behind the deed? It might be
that this ‘bootleg’ humanism comes at the cost of the ethical, which
presumably took over from Precarious Life onwards, accompanied
by vulnerability, dispossession and precarity, new notions by virtue
of which Butler finally parted with her contentious poststructuralist
past.

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 ontology and politics

It seems that we will have to settle the dispute with a split between
the human and humanism, which, I would argue, marks Butler’s
entire work. In an interview from 2016, Butler says:

I think we cannot give up on the idea of the human. At the same time,
we cannot become ‘humanists’ in any of the conventional senses attached
to that term [. . .] The human works not as foundation, but as a criterion
for recognition, precisely because there are those who have not yet been
recognised as human, or whose recognition would ‘break’ the category,
we have to keep it in place precisely to understand its historical changes,
and the vector of power that works through it. (Zaharijević and Butler
2016: 107)

The human simply appears every time when one asks ‘what is a
human?’, or ‘who counts as human?’, with an implication that there
are humans who are not quite that, who lack something vital to be
subsumed into the term. The very possibility of this implication urges
us to further consider what layers of meaning have been woven into
the norm that we take for granted as universal. These layers have their
own histories, some of which are surely humanist, based on the idea
of an autonomous, wilful subject, capable of acting independently
in and from the world. These meanings, as Joanna Bourke claims
in her history of the term, are built around a very particular type of
human. ‘Humanism installed only some humans at the centre of the
universe. It disparaged “the woman”, “the subaltern” and “the non-
European” even more than “the animal”’ (Bourke 2013: 3). These
histories constrain the human from within, and have been used to
justify the explanation of who counts as (fully) human. Yet, perhaps
even more importantly, such histories reveal the human as an unfin-
ished form, that is, having undergone various social transformations.
Unlike some other crucial notions in Butler, that of the human
functions only within social frames. For humans, reality is always
social reality, and the ontology of the human is always social ontol-
ogy. Moreover, the human appears as the social norm, possibly the
one that in social reality gives meaning to all other norms. Thus, the
answers to very basic questions – ‘what counts as a person? What
counts as a coherent gender? What qualifies as a citizen? Whose
world is legitimated as real?’ (Butler 2001a) – are defined, ontologi-
cally and legally, on the basis of the norm of the human.
The histories of law, gender and citizenship show that there is no
single, necessary, transhistorical and transcultural answer to these
questions. What appeared as the universal in the past has undergone

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 judith butler and politics

sundry transformations and has been redefined alongside social

norms that regulate the scope of the human. For that reason, the
question of the human is tightly bound to the articulation of the
universal. The human cannot act as a foundation, or as something
that is prior, outside or beyond volatile, contingent social conditions.
It rather emerges as a horizon of recognition of the reality of par-
ticular bodies that demand to coalesce under the sign of the human,
keeping universality in the form of ‘not yet’. Recall that insurrection
at the level of ontology takes place because the notion of the human
appears too restrictive (PL: 33). This insurrection is about unwa-
vering repetition of the questions: how is it possible that there are
humans for whom there is no space in the principally unrestricted
idea of the human? Where is the place of those living bodies not con-
sidered real? How does this alleged unreality justify violence?

Notes
1. We should note a certain affinity between Butler’s and Foucault’s use
of the notion of insurrection, and its relation to the notion of critique.
Insurrection first appears in Excitable Speech, referring to the force of
the unspeakable, censored speech surfacing in the conventional, offi-
cial discourse, which has the potential to open ‘the performative to an
unpredictable future’ (ES: 142). This idea of insurrection is associative of
Foucault’s use of the term at the beginning of Society Must Be Defended
(‘c’est ce qu’on pourrait appeler l’insurrection des “savoirs assujettis”’;
‘Il s’agit de l’insurrection des savoirs’ [Foucault 1997a: 10, 12; 2003:
6, 9]), where he discusses the local forms of critique, opposed to the
effects of all-encompassing, global theories. Butler and Foucault do not
speak about the same dimension of things. Foucault is primarily inter-
ested in a recent phenomenon which he calls the ‘return of knowledges’,
and the insurrection refers to subjugated (assujettis) knowledges, which
he defines in two ways: as ‘historical contents that have been buried or
masked in functional coherences or formal systematizations’ (Foucault
2003: 7), and as a whole series of knowledges from below, unqualified
or disqualified as non-conceptual (and thus unintelligible), naive and
hierarchically inferior, local, regional, differential, incapable of unanim-
ity (ibid.: 7–8). It is precisely the appearance of subjugated knowledges,
unburied by genealogy, that made critique possible. Several years later, in
lectures on critique, the idea assujettissement – subjectivation, becoming
a subject and becoming subjected – acquires a central role. ‘If govern-
mentalization is indeed this movement through which individuals are
subjugated [subjected, assujettis] in the reality of social practice through
mechanisms of power that adhere to a truth’, then critique appears as

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a counter-movement of voluntary insubordination, insuring ‘the des-

ubjugation [desubjectivation, deassujettissement] of the subject in the
context of what we could call, in a word, the politics of truth’ (Foucault
2007a: 47). Insurrection of the minority realities that were historically
buried and masked by a seemingly coherent and systematic order of the
real, unqualified or disqualified as unintelligible, is related to the ‘ontol-
ogy of the excluded’ which makes critique, or desubjectivation, possible.
Critique is an act, or a series of acts, that question what makes us into
subjects – intelligible, real, human – in the existing order of reality,
questioning thus not only the regimes of truth, but also the reality that
consolidates them.
2. I believe we should add to this the experience of encounters with activ-
ists and theorists from around the world. In an interview with Maja
Uzelac (2000) for the Croatian magazine Zarez, Butler links the idea
of cultural translation to her first experiences with ‘East-European’
feminisms (which can, no doubt, be expanded to include encounters
with South American, African and other non-north/western forms of
reading, writing and acting, which she touches upon in referencing
Chandra Mohanty’s ‘Under Western Eyes’ [PL: 47–8]). In the interview,
she explicitly mentions her early experiences of Prague and Budapest,
facing resistance to Americanisation of Eastern European theory, that
is, its refusal to simply appropriate the existing (western) models. Being
cautious not to impose such models as authoritative without knowing or
understanding local contexts is part of the idea of cultural translation.

41
 Part I

Performativity

43
 Chapter 2

Bodies and Norms

The Revolution of Simone de Beauvoir

Philosophy seldom revolved around the field today known under
the name of gender studies, but the concepts from which the idea
of gender is built are as old as thinking itself. The first musings
on the cosmos (Diels 1960: 105), an ordered whole characterised
by harmony and proportion, were based on the division of oppo-
sites. Pythagoreans were said to have determined the ten principles
(Aristotle 1991a, 11 [986a23–986b3]) classified into two columns of
cognates: limited/unlimited, odd/even, single/plural, right/left, male/
female, resting/moving, straight/curved, light/darkness, good/bad,
square/oblong. First principles are constitutive for the functioning of
the cosmos: nature is ordered (physei) and the social world of norms
is legislated (nomoi) in line with them.
Thus, from the very beginning of philosophical thinking, the male/
female couple was given a particular position in thought itself. In that
couple, the female was one half of the dyad which, although in abso-
lute terms necessary for order and harmony, represented the ‘dark
side’. For the Greeks, this was confirmed not only by the nexus of
badness and femaleness, but also by the link between the female and
disconcerting indeterminacy (plurality, the absence of limit, purpose-
less movement without rest). Aristotle developed this distribution
of being further, by allocating form and matter oppositionally: ‘The
body is from the female [. . .] the soul is from the male’ (Aristotle
1991b, 45 [738b]). The female provides the material, the male fash-
ions it; the male is characterised by activity, the female by passivity,
its ontological function being a mere reception of form; the male is
distinguished by the capacity to produce, to create something new
out of itself, the female by non-productivity, incapacity, sluggishness.
Both sides are necessary, for without them there would be no life,
but in the order of things their positions are unequal, reflecting the
asymmetry of form and matter, soul and body. On the basis of this, it

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 judith butler and politics

is also possible to think and justify the ‘natural’ configuration of the

political community, because it is supposed to reflect the harmonious
configuration of the cosmos: ‘for the soul rules the body with the rule
of a master, whereas understanding rules desire with the rule of the
statesman or with the rule of the king [. . .] Moreover, the relation of
male to female is that of natural superior to natural inferior, and that
of ruler to ruled’ (Aristotle 1991c, 8 [1254b5–15]).
When, many centuries later, Freud, paraphrasing ‘the great
Napoleon’ (Freud 1912: 189), declared that anatomy is destiny,
his ruminations were no less anchored in a metaphysics strongly
resembling the one devised by early cosmologists, despite his current
subject being not the cosmos, but the universal state of the civilised
man. The notion that anatomy is destiny came to be interpreted as
if the whole lifeworld of an individual is defined and conditioned by
an unchanging skeletal configuration of its body. The given arrange-
ment of bones and organs determines one’s position in the universe.
For a woman, it is her uterus; and her entire existence is inscribed in
the proportions of her pelvic structure. Although Freud himself never
made this particular claim, it was readily available among his con-
temporaries, such as, for example, Patrick Geddes. This today largely
forgotten Scottish polymath, biologist, geographer, sociologist and
urban planner relied on the discoveries of the young science of biology
to claim that the sexes were entirely different, but complementary
and mutually dependent, such an arrangement being necessary for
an evolutionary harmony of the human species. The physiology of
the cell provided him with an explanation of the ‘biological fact’ that
human females are more passive, conservative, sluggish and stable,
while males are more active, energetic, eager, passionate and variable
(Geddes and Thomson 1889: 270; see Laqueur 2003: 6). On second
look, new kinds of knowledges (biology) and their new discover-
ies (the cell) only confirmed old ‘facts’, produced long ago through
Aristotle’s combination of rudimentary forms of observation and
the first cosmological principles. Similarly, the value of these sup-
posed facts went beyond science: they were used to order the sphere
of social and political life. Thus, Geddes claimed that ‘what was
decided among the prehistoric Protozoa cannot be annulled by Act
of Parliament’ (Geddes and Thomson 1889: 267). The year of the
proclamation was 1889, and the insight was very timely. While the
suffragists were attempting to perform fundamental changes in the
sexual political sphere, they were confronted with their supposed
nature and essence that emanated from their plural, limitless, curved

46
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and dark body. The Victorians might have believed that they were
beyond metaphysics – they were in no need of external warranty, an
unmoved mover or God of Scripture, to confirm the structural differ-
ence: the physiological axiomatics of the cell did all the work.
The notion that anatomy or biology is destiny – that the givenness
of the cellular life is the basis of social and political acts – invalidates
the difference between nature and society, between what we are,
as complex sets of physical, chemical and biological processes, and
what we do (and what is done to us) within our communities into
which we were born with particular bodies. Although the language
of Victorian science sounds more contemporary to our ears, in its
essence it is not far removed from the mystical Pythagorean opposites
on which cosmic harmony rests. Men and women are different; the
difference is fundamental in kind; one side contains a surplus, the
other bears a lack; there is active form and passive matter. The gen-
dered order of the universe is a natural, not a social issue.
In this sense, gender – the specific positioning of male and
female in the functioning of the universe – was part of philosophi-
cal thought from the beginning. The gendered arrangement of the
natural and social cosmos was different, and the main difference lay
in the unyielding postulate pertaining to the side of the female: to
paraphrase Beauvoir’s famous line, a woman is simply born. Woman
is: her anatomy, her sex cells. The essence of a woman is given in
the destiny of her corporeity. From that point of view, the idea that
one is not born but rather becomes a woman represented a true
revolution in the way socio-sexual ontology is thought. Beauvoir
famously claimed that ‘no biological, psychological, or economic fate
determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is
civilization as a whole that produces this creature [. . .] described as
feminine’ (Beauvoir 1956: 273).
Simone de Beauvoir confronted the whole history of thinking of
embodied destinies by posing a question: what is a woman? (ibid.:
13). The question was not particularly new, but her answer to it was.
She is resolute that woman is not the female, a being imprisoned in
her sex (ibid.: 33), entirely wrapped by her organs, the grand female,
an imaginary creature that feeds on ‘shreds of the old philosophy of
the Middle Ages which taught that the cosmos is an exact reflection
of a microcosm – the egg imagined to be a little female, the woman
a giant egg. These musings, generally abandoned since the days of
alchemy’ remain persistent despite the scientific precision with which
they are demonstrated, so Simone de Beauvoir urges for a scrupulous

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 judith butler and politics

admittance that ‘it is a long way from the egg to woman’ (ibid.:
42–3).
Laws regarding woman rest on a paradox: ‘The married woman
has full legal powers. These powers are limited only by the mar-
riage contract and the law’ (ibid.: 143). (At the time of writing The
Second Sex, this logical incoherence cloaked in legal language was
still in force!) Society created the conditions in which it would be
very difficult for a woman to become human, that is, it created the
conditions in which one part of humanity can be imagined as reduc-
ible to the womb. The world given to each woman is a world in
which she is
treasure, prey, sport and danger, nurse, guide, judge, mediatrix, mirror
[. . .] the Other in whom the subject transcends himself without being
limited [. . .] she is the Other who lets herself be taken without ceasing to
be the Other, and therein she is so necessary to man’s happiness and to
his triumph that it can be said that if she did not exist, men would have
invented her. (Ibid.: 201)

This gallery of (imagined) female figures, from treasure to mirror, is

not a mere reflection of an enlarged uterus, but a product of social
forces, multiplied over centuries, renewed in each woman and each
man, in a social structure that left women living dispersed among
males (ibid.: 18). This could be defined as the space of gender, of
social reality that adheres to and subsists on the corporeal frame of
the woman, who is, among mammals, ‘the most individualized of
females [and] the most fragile [. . .] she who most dramatically fulfils
the call of destiny [of her extravagant fertility (ibid., 88)] and most
profoundly differs from her male’ (ibid.: 53).
Although Beauvoir is unambiguous in her refusal of the anatomi-
cal fatum, the female in Beauvoir (the body of the female sex) cannot
be renounced. In that sense, biology provides one – definitely insuf-
ficient – answer to her fundamental question: what is a woman?
However,
I deny that they [the data of biology] establish for her a fixed and inevi-
table destiny. They are insufficient for setting up a hierarchy of the sexes;
they fail to explain why a woman is the Other; they do not condemn her
to remain in this subordinate role for ever. (Ibid.: 60)

Categorically refusing to blend vague naturalisms with even vaguer

ethics, proclaiming such attempts to be pure nonsense, Beauvoir
not only refutes the likes of Geddes, but confronts the whole

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philosophical tradition occupied with the essences that remain inher-

ent in being, thinking and acting.
If a female is born, a woman becomes. Despite the fact that,
for Beauvoir, a woman has a certain biological beginning, it is the
process of becoming that provides the full answer to the ontological
question about what a woman is and what she is now. In order to
imagine a state in which subjection would cease to be the only availa-
ble option in the process of becoming a woman, Beauvoir underlines
the importance of possibilities. The possibilities refer to a potential
future, to what a woman may be. Existence – dispersed, contingent,
varied – exercised by actual women is opposed to the static imperish-
able, inevitable, changeless myth of the Eternal Feminine (ibid.: 260).
Finally, the drama of woman consists in the fact that, through her
projects, she seeks to expand her existence into an indefinitely open
future, since a woman is ‘a free and autonomous being like all human
creatures’ (ibid.: 27). However, in contrast to other human creatures,
woman does this while at the same time being defined as the Other,
as object or immanence.

The Project and the Body: Beauvoir via Hegel and Sartre
The notions of possibility, freedom and existence are fundamental
for the conception of being as becoming. Man does not inhabit the
kingdom of necessities – his is not the sphere of immanence; he is
free – nor does he live a reified life of an object, predetermined by
an inner essence. The man became what he is due to the possibility
of free choice of his own existence. Therein lies the key difference
between man and thing. A thing is such by way of necessity and
belongs to the order of necessity: it cannot be other than it is. Being
other than a thing, according to the philosophy of existence, a man is
destined to have an unreified existence. However, to speak of fate or
destiny here is to speak only metaphorically, because the fate of man
is freedom, unpredetermination, a being unconditioned by essences:
‘that I do not become an object, is for me a possibility of freedom’
(Jaspers 1956: 175). Autonomous freedom, which Beauvoir also
evokes, entails the absence of givenness of what one is, as one is only
what one becomes. The being that becomes ‘is not, but can be and
ought to be’ (ibid.: 1) – ‘indeed, our existence is nothing but a could
be’ (Abbagnano 2020: 267). That there is a field of autonomous
freedom, of possibilities, means that a man – or his destiny – cannot
be defined in advance: ‘He will not be anything until later, and then

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 judith butler and politics

he will be what he makes of himself’ (Sartre 2007: 22). Man is only

what he has become – existence precedes essence. The first principle
of existentialism is, according to Sartre, that man is nothing other
than what he makes of himself.
What does it mean to make something of oneself? What distin-
guishes man from moss, fungus or cauliflower, is that he consciously
projects into the future: each man is ‘nothing other than his own
project. He exists only to the extent that he realizes himself, there-
fore he is nothing more than the sum of his actions’ (ibid.: 37). The
man is not only architect, but also the main construction worker, the
maker and governor of his existence. His existence is becoming; his
reality is incessant action. The process of becoming consists of an
endless series of acts that are quintessentially chosen. Yet, although
man appears as autonomous architect of his own project, each man is
at the same time humanity itself: all of humanity reproduces itself in
each and every man. Thus, every man has total responsibility, since
every choice is an affirmation of the value of the chosen. To support
this, Sartre offers a typically Beauvoirian example:
If I decide to marry and have children – granted such a marriage proceeds
solely from my own circumstances, my passion, or my desire – I am none-
theless committing not only myself, but all of humanity, to the practice
of monogamy. I am therefore responsible for myself and for everyone
else, and I am fashioning a certain image of man as I choose him to be. In
choosing myself, I choose man. (Ibid.: 24–5)

Let us now return to The Second Sex. It seems that the figure of an
independent woman with which Beauvoir concludes her book goes
in the direction of Sartrean godlike freedom of action, at least in
the form of a project for the future. But the story of the second sex
is rather about something else. It tells us that not everyone is their
own project – not everyone, not yet. Not everyone is a sum of their
actions: a woman, who is a human, is at the same time defined as the
Other, the object and immanency, rather than as the Absolute, the
subject and transcendence. Simone de Beauvoir introduced gender in
the naive existentialist universalism, fully exposing the fact that the
human was interchangeable only with man/‘he’.
What follows from here are several equally important quanda-
ries. Either there is something wrong with the notion of humanity
and its universal reach, or humanity appears under different guises,
some of which are somewhat less human. Or, perhaps, since they are
not men, women are human only to a certain extent, only partially.

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The ontological question, what is a woman?, which The Second Sex

attempts to answer, demanded rethinking what existence, possibility
and freedom mean when applied to a certain portion of humanity. As
a true existentialist, Beauvoir claimed that one is not born a woman,
but becomes one. However, even if the female is not the essence of
woman’s existence, the process of becoming a woman – of existing
humanity in the form of womanhood – is a process of becoming the
Other, not a project in which she becomes solely what she makes of
herself.1
The question that The Second Sex opened up is surely: is there a
human freedom unconditioned by gender? In other words, to what
extent is freedom defined as the very possibility of transcendence
of the body, and how the embodiment of certain humans precludes
them from attaining one such bodiless freedom? This is, however,
not the only crucial question that The Second Sex made possible.
We also have to consider whether a woman can become otherwise?
Can she, in her process of becoming, become something other than a
woman, that is, the Other? Can this lead to certain outcomes that are
not given or known in advance? Can she – by way of non-becoming
woman – perchance become something other than man, the emblem-
atic autonomous freedom, not tied down by the body?
It seems that Judith Butler embarked upon her considerations of
gender precisely with these questions in mind. The question – can
one become differently? – is, I would argue, the cornerstone of what
will gradually become the theory of performativity. This, in turn,
is closely related to the question of the body. Contrary to a deep-
seated assumption that the theory of performativity neglects the body
(Duden 1993; Alamo and Hekman 2008), I argue that Butler sought
to return the body to thought. But to make this possible, the ‘body
as such’ – an abstraction, a genderless body or a body imprisoned
in sex – needs to be dislodged from thought and replaced by bodies
understood as lived and plural processes of becoming.
In order to grasp these processes to which Butler’s entire oeuvre
is devoted, the body is not to be equated with sex. The justification
for their untying also originates from The Second Sex. Detached
from sex understood as the immanence of life of the species, as well
as from the Sartrean bodiless sum of actions, the body is given a
chance to emancipate itself from its reified status in thought. In that
sense, the question of becoming otherwise goes beyond the liberation
of the female (body) from its path of otherness, from its imprison-
ment in sex. It equally demands emancipation of thought from the

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reduction of being to the duality of subject (as res cogitans) and the
Other (as res extensa), where res extensa is lived either as the body
or as the transcendence of the corporeal, that is, in which the body
is, ultimately, the destiny of woman, whereas bodilessness is merely
a possibility for man.
From here we should turn to one of the most epic episodes in the
history of philosophy, to further clarify the nexus between the body
and becoming. The episode concerns the struggle of two self-con-
sciousnesses that ends with their transformation into lord and bonds-
man. Beauvoir drew her own understanding of otherness from Hegel’s
The Phenomenology of Spirit (Lloyd 1983: 2; Butler 1986: 43–4;
Lundgren-Gothlin 1996; Purvis 2003), and The Second Sex could even
be read as an extended elaboration of an embodied, and of course gen-
der-marked, version of the lord and the bondsman. The same episode
greatly influenced Butler’s philosophical endeavours, as will be dis-
cussed at various places in this book. I will now focus on Butler’s first
reading of the struggle of self-consciousnesses in Subjects of Desire, in
a chapter entitled ‘Bodily Paradoxes: Lordship and Bondage’, which
strongly impacted the general direction of her thought.
At the moment of encounter, in Hegel’s The Phenomenology of
Spirit, neither of the two self-consciousnesses is primary: they meet
as equals. Their equality in sameness is reflected in the way they
approach one another – to both, the other consciousness appears
as an inessential object, a pure other. They are the same so long as
they need the other to affirm their respective independence from their
respective alienation in the other (SD: 50–1). In other words, they
both equally demand recognition of their substance. Their desire for
recognition creates an unwilled bond between them, which turns
into a ferocious struggle unto death where both self-consciousnesses
desire to prove themselves as independent beings for themselves.
However, the major consequence of this potentially absolute nega-
tion is in fact the creation of a sense of appreciation of life. The newly
discovered desire for life (SD: 54) is what in the next step produces
inequality, that is, domination of the lord over the bondsman, where
recognition becomes one-sided and unequal. In Hegel’s words, ‘one
is the independent consciousness whose essential nature is to be for
itself, the other is the dependent consciousness whose essential nature
is simply to live or to be for another. The former is lord, the other is
bondsman’ (Hegel 1977: 115).
Butler reads this episode in quite a peculiar way, introducing a
surprising corporeal dimension, absent in Hegel’s text. For Butler,

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at the very moment when the two self-consciousnesses appear to one

another, each becomes conscious of itself and of the body as a limit:
from now on, ‘corporeality everywhere signifies limitation, and the
body which once seemed to condition freedom’s concrete determi-
nation now requires annihilation in order for that freedom to be
retrieved’ (SD: 51). Becoming a self-consciousness assumes a desire to
transcend the immediacy of ‘pure life’, but the price of such a desire is
a very probable death. Thus, a radical life-and-death struggle culmi-
nates either in a fully autonomous death, which has to remain empty
and unrecognised because both self-consciousnesses perish, both
willing to lay down their lives in the struggle against the immediacy of
mere living; or, it leads to domination as a continuation of annihila-
tion within the context of life. In both cases, the body is annihilated.
In their struggle for recognition, whatever its ultimate result, ‘each
self-consciousness engages in an anti-corporeal erotic which endeav-
ors to prove in vain that the body is the ultimate limit to freedom,
rather than its necessary ground and mediation’ (SD: 52). Becoming
lord and bondsman introduces a dynamic in which the bondsman as
‘the Other must now live its own death’, appearing as an illusion of
‘an unfree body, a lifeless instrument’ (SD: 52), while the lord lives
an illusion of having managed to overcome the immediacy of life in
the form of a free disembodiment. ‘The lord’s identity is essentially
beyond the body; he gains illusory confirmation for this view by
requiring the Other to be the body that he endeavors not to be’ (SD:
53; cf. The Psychic Life of Power, 1997b [hereafter PLP]: 34–52).
Unlike Hegel, whose travelling subject continues its journey on
a thorny path to absolute knowledge, Butler stops at this episode
(both in Subjects of Desire and, generally, in later writing). The
episode, however, echoes in her first texts on gender, in which a
bondsman, a living and embodied Other, intersects with a woman, a
body imprisoned in its immanence, as read through Beauvoir. Their
intersection ushers in a view on the body, since in Butler lord and
bondsman appear, significantly, as figures of embodiment. The lord’s
mastery consists in defining the corporeal field – the lord is the one
who defines the Other as the body, the body as the feature of the
Other. Defined by another, the bondsman becomes the body in its
very essence, bonded because enslaved to its essence. Similarly, the
‘women become the Other; they come to embody corporeality itself.
This redundancy becomes their essence, and existence as a woman
becomes what Hegel termed “a motionless tautology”’ (Butler
1986: 44).

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However, the masculine detachment from the body – which seems

to be also the basis of the grand project of becoming a sum of one’s
own acts (the acts performed, so to say, without a body) – re-emerges
in the form of denial (‘the denial of the body, as in Hegel’s dialectic
of master and slave, reveals itself as nothing other than the embodi-
ment of denial’ [Butler 1986: 44]). On the other hand, feminine
essentialised embodiment, the complete imprisonment in and by the
body, may end either in a reverse and total denial of embodiment (in
striving to become a lord/a man), or in passive yielding to bondage
which will never be resolved by a specifically female form of ‘labour’
(since, according to Hegel, it is labour that in the end emancipates the
bondsman from subjection). Woman’s path to autonomy is onerous,
because she is required to relinquish the body in order to become a
set of bodiless acts, or to remain enslaved by her body as destiny,
which is her fate regardless of any possible acts. The answer to the
question ‘can one become otherwise?’ must then offer a way to over-
come the dualist division into unfree, non-acting bodies, and free,
acting disembodiments. In that sense, we can claim that the theory of
performativity sprang from Butler’s early commitment to the notion
that the body is the necessary ground for freedom and a point of its
mediation (SD: 52).

Could One Not Become Woman?

For Butler, the body is never bodiless. It is neither an abstractable
body as such, a generalisable entity outside living processes, nor a
destined given, reducible to a hidden essence emanating through its
changing appearances (this kind of ‘body’ is just another, so to say
‘female’ side of the abstraction). The rejection of a bodiless body
implies the need to grasp bodies differently – as lived, plural, chang-
ing, vulnerable, capable of pleasure, exposed to violence, and yet also
as the ground for freedom, not its limit. The body is material, but its
materiality is not a grave to possibilities, either in the old Platonic
sense, or in certain feminist sentencing of women to sex,2 and thus
also to otherness radiating from female bodies. The body is mine,
inextricably bound to this individual that I am, but its life is at the
same time mine and not mine. We become social beings precisely by
virtue of our bodies.
Thus, somewhat in contrast with the generally accepted view, I
argue that Judith Butler began to develop her theory of performativ-
ity out of the imperative to think bodies differently, in order to make

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the life of bodies more capacious. The idea of the body as the locus
of sociality would become central for Butler’s later work, but its
rhizomes can already be found in the early interpretations of gender,
drawn from her readings of Beauvoir, through Hegel, Wittig, Rubin
and Foucault. Here is a representative quote:

As a locus of cultural interpretations, the body is a material reality which

has already been located and defined within a social context. The body is
also the situation of having to take up and interpret that set of received
interpretations. No longer understood in its traditional philosophical
senses of ‘limit’ or ‘essence’, the body is a field of interpretive possibilities,
the locus of a dialectical process of interpreting anew a historical set of
interpretations which have become imprinted in the flesh. (Butler 1986:
46)

The body functions as the junction of cultural interpretations, as a

site of socially mediated interactions. My body – the configuration
of materiality in this very concrete form – is at the same time given
over to others, who see, understand and interpret it in this way or
that, according to available social tools of interpretation. This is,
however, not only done by others around me. I myself also acquire
and appropriate the interpretations that are at my disposal, which I
receive from the social and cultural context to which I belong. My
body is the field in which I become who I am by virtue of others and
together with them. But as bodies are always gendered in some way,
I do not become an I in some abstract sense; rather, the I is gendered,
and gendered according to the interpretative possibilities available to
it. As cultural and social, the interpretations can never be axiomatic;
they also always contain the possibility to be different. Which is why,
quite in line with Beauvoir, there is freedom and there are fundamen-
tal limitations at play, there are both possibilities and constraints.
Butler’s aim in her early texts is not to demonstrate which side
prevails in this either/or situation. She remains primarily interested
in what possibilities open for bodies in their processes of becoming.
It comes as no surprise that the most promising conclusion she drew
from Beauvoir is that ‘women have no essence at all, and hence, no
natural necessity, and that, indeed, what we call essence or a material
fact is simply an enforced cultural option which has disguised itself
as natural truth’ (Butler 1985: 516). Butler’s answer to the question –
how one lives this cultural option, that is, how one interprets bodily
available possibilities – takes us to the core of the theory of performa-
tivity. Let us, however, dwell for a moment on the ‘most promising

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 judith butler and politics

suggestion of Simone de Beauvoir, namely, that women have no

essence at all’ (ibid.). If one is not born a woman, perhaps one also
need not become one? If the essence is absent and there is, in fact, no
ultimate answer to the question what a woman is, would it then be
possible for a ‘cultural option’, regardless of the body it happens to
inhabit, to transform into something which is neither Other, nor the
Sartrean godlike subject making himself into what he is? Is becom-
ing otherwise possible and how? For that, we need to see how Rubin
liberated the body from gender, and then also how Wittig liberated
gender from nature.
Butler openly acknowledged the great significance of Gayle
Rubin’s ‘The Traffic in Women’ for her own approach to gender
(Rubin and Butler 1994: 68; GT: xi). Rubin began this enormously
important text with a question that paraphrases Marx and echoes
Beauvoir: what is a woman? Without much hesitation, she declares
that a woman is a woman, but she ‘only becomes a domestic, a wife,
a chattel, a playboy bunny, a prostitute, or a human dictaphone in
certain relations’ (Rubin 1997: 28). The implication is that outside
these relations, she might play some other role or become something
else. Rubin calls the shaping of the raw material of human sex and
procreation the ‘sex/gender system’. This arrangement is a product of
specific social relations, which are, moreover, also productive of soci-
ality itself. On Rubin’s expanded map of the social world, humans
are labourers, peasants and capitalists, but they are also wives,
domestics and prostitutes. Political economy, so rarely interested in
the sphere of gender identity, sexual desire and fantasy, or the con-
ceptions of childhood and family, needs to understand and formulate
a human productive activity in which we do not appear essentially
as labourers and capitalists, and only accidentally as women and
men. For this reason, Rubin adds Lévi-Strauss and Freud to Marx
and Engels, trying to show how the structures of kinship and incest
taboo enforce the specific production of relations through which we
become men and women.
Sex is, for Rubin, not a (biological) condition of possibility for
gender. Rather, gender, as the arrangement that makes sex socially
productive, limits the possibilities of the body (not only female, but
all bodies). ‘The social organization of sex rests upon gender, obliga-
tory heterosexuality, and the constraint of female sexuality’, where
gender functions as a ‘socially imposed division of the sexes’ (ibid.:
40). What becomes of great importance to Butler are Rubin’s insights
of this peculiar reversal of sex (‘body’) and gender (the socially

56
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productive uses of bodies), their unfixed nature, a certain system of

social meanings, and the cultural positioning of practices, desires and
anatomies. The cultural interpretations of our supposedly speechless
anatomies are not so much reflection of our primary sex characteris-
tics, as much as they are the reiterations of the elementary positions
in a system of exchange constitutive of social relations. A cultural
interpretation of bodies is enabled by replicating a system in which
women function as gifts and tokens of peace between military units,
change households, take other names as their own, act as someone
else’s property; while men, on the other hand, organise this exchange
to expand the circles of kinships, imposing ‘social ends upon a part
of natural world’ (ibid.: 38). What is socially sanctioned as natural is
the exchange of sexual access, genealogical status, lineage, property,
rights and the movement of people. Bodies become male and female
through these social relations, becoming legitimate (or illegitimate)
actors of social exchange.
The path from being born to becoming a woman is, in Rubin’s
rendering, a process of continual cultural inscription of gender iden-
tity onto the body, produced for the sake of the production of social-
ity itself. Thus, it seems that women are not at all oppressed by their
bodies. What is oppressive is the specific gender configuration of the
female body as something susceptible to oppression, a configuration
in which penis and vagina seem indissoluble from the symbolic posi-
tion of lord and bondsman. ‘Far from being an expression of natural
differences, exclusive gender identity [being either man or woman]
is the suppression of natural similarities’ (ibid.: 40). Through her
reversal of the positions of sex and gender, Rubin seems to have
opened up the possibility of liberating bodies from the binary divi-
sion imposed on them by gender.
The liberation, however, cannot happen on its own; a ‘cultural
evolution’ is as necessary as economic revolution, because it provides
us
with the opportunity to seize control of the means of sexuality, repro-
duction, and socialization, and to make conscious decisions to liberate
human sexual life from the archaic relationships which deform it [. . .]
[Feminist revolution] would liberate forms of sexual expression, and
it would liberate human personality from the straightjacket of gender.
(Ibid.: 52)

In the spirit of the revolutionary 1970s, Rubin believed that the

archaic sex/gender systems could be eliminated, because they are

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 judith butler and politics

not ‘an ahistorical emanation of the human mind; they are prod-
ucts of historical human activity’ (ibid.: 55). After their elimination,
there would be no obligatory sexualities and sex roles: ‘the dream
I find most compelling is one of [. . .] society in which one’s sexual
anatomy is irrelevant to who one is, what one does, and with whom
one makes love’ (ibid.: 54). The anatomy of sex becomes irrelevant,
since a female need not become a woman. Beyond the binary configu-
ration of gender, bodies can become differently.
The way Monique Wittig expanded the idea that one is not born
a woman can be marked as the point of departure for the theory of
performativity. Wittig’s text ‘One is Not Born a Woman’ represents a
fierce attack on those who believe that Simone de Beauvoir’s dictum
allows for a conclusion that the basis of women’s oppression is both
biological and historical. For Wittig, there is nothing ‘biological’ or
natural that would have any substantial role in constituting the cat-
egories of woman and man. Both categories are exclusively political
and economic (Wittig 2002: 15). Those who cling to the bond of
nature and history consent to a myth. They return to the same mythi-
cal female disclosed and denounced by Beauvoir: ‘“woman” does
not exist for us: it is only an imaginary formation, while “women”
is the product of a social relationship’ (ibid.). The mythical ‘Woman’
that remains forever rooted in her sex, socially natural and naturally
oppressed, helps naturalise the historical phenomena, which, in the
final instance, stands in the way of any possible change. Since this
oppression, although social in origin, cannot be dissociated from
nature, anatomy, one way or another, remains the destiny of women.
For Wittig, however, there is a ‘living proof’ that this is not so: ‘by
its very existence, lesbian society destroys the artificial (social) fact
constituting women as a “natural group”’ (ibid.: 9). The lesbian
is a woman that is not Woman; she is, however, not a man either.
Although born in the female body, she never becomes a woman, if
becoming a woman means to be in relation to a man, one that implies
the subjection of Other to the Absolute. The lesbian is the locus in
which sex and gender collapse. Regardless of her being born female,
she stands outside the relations that predispose those born female
to become ‘a domestic, a wife, a chattel, a playboy bunny, a pros-
titute, or a human dictaphone’ (Rubin 1997: 28). And while Rubin
dreamt of the feminist revolution that would forever disarrange the
links between gender, compulsory heterosexuality and limitations
to female sexuality, Wittig demanded a guerrilla ‘destruction of het-
erosexuality as a social system which is based on the oppression of

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women by men and which produces the doctrine of the difference

between the sexes to justify this oppression’ (Wittig 2002: 20).
Now, even if Butler may have had some sympathy for Rubin’s
dream of androgynous society, she turned away from both Wittig’s
and Rubin’s revolutionary conclusions. This shift is the nucleus of
her specific understanding of performativity and, a fortiori, agency.
Butler neither endorsed their ideas of destruction (of sex/gender
system, of heterosexuality), nor did she accept their utopias in
which the power relations are no more, that is, in which sex (Wittig)
or gender (Rubin) is transcended. It could be argued that the whole
project of Gender Trouble is one extended polemic against a desire
for transcendence and its attendant political meaning. Abandoning
the desire for transcendence helps her remain complicit with a body
lived now, rather than in some indeterminate (unlived) future, as
well as to accept whatever agency there is at the moment, before
utopia, in this body and in this life. However, while rejecting their
political projects, Butler uses Wittig and Rubin to read Beauvoir in
a performative way: the link between sex and gender is not fixed
and can be brought into question; one could become in various
ways, despite becoming being culturally delimited; the very pres-
ence of various ‘cultural options’ shows that becoming is not
grounded in anatomy, biology or nature, but that it follows some
other patterns that are part of the social/historical organisation of
reality; finally, binarity in the sphere of gender stands in the way
of the possibilities of liberation of the body. Since gender is not
fixed (in sex), Butler will conclude that the possibilities for unmak-
ing binary oppositions lie in gender itself. As performative, gender
appears more capacious and open for social lives of various bodies,
that may have the capacity to change the society and power rela-
tions it rests upon.

Bodies and Norms

To say that gender is performative is to say that it is a certain kind of
enactment; the ‘appearance’ of gender is often mistaken as a sign of its
internal or inherent truth; gender is prompted by obligatory norms that
demand that we become one gender or the other (usually within a strictly
binary frame); the reproduction of gender is thus always a negotiation
with power; and finally, there is no gender without this reproduction
of norms that in the course of its repeated enactments risks undoing or
redoing the norms in unexpected ways, opening up the possibility of

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remaking gendered reality along new lines. The political aspiration of this
analysis, perhaps its normative aim, is to let the lives of gender and sexual
minorities become more possible and more livable. (NT: 32)

This paragraph from Notes Toward a Performative Theory of

Assembly summarises the main points of Butler’s understanding of
performativity of gender, which will be examined at length in the
remainder of this and the next chapter. The passage signals that the
‘keywords’ around gender are performance, enactment and appear-
ance. The reality of performance, enactment and appearance is
not a given one, but depends on certain actions, which at the same
time function as the space of negotiation with the extant power
relations (and this is why reality can be remade). The passage also
states clearly the normative aspirations that spurred such analysis of
reality; however, the very central position in it belongs to the concept
of the norm.
This chapter is, however, called ‘Bodies and Norms’ for a
reason. Namely, my claim is that bodies and norms are the two
pillars of Butler’s theory of performativity. Bodies perform, and
the performance is guided by norms. Agency, which I discuss in the
next chapter, provides the link between bodies and norms, that is,
between the performance itself and the constraints that channel it.
Now, the concept of norm entered Butler’s philosophy via
Foucault. The obligatory relations through which we become recog-
nised as women and men, in which our bodies ‘speak’ (in our name,
and instead of us), delineating our life paths in socially acceptable
and intelligible ways, are most frequently referred to as norms. In
addition to norms, Butler also borrowed from Foucault the notion
that reality is saturated with power relations, that norms are con-
stantly reproduced in the most mundane circumstances, that it is
impossible to reach some stable ground of utopia where there would
be no power relations (or where ‘good power’ reigns), that agency is
tied to its exercise, here and now, within power relations.
What is the norm for Foucault, and why is it, as a rule, discursive?
As is well known, Foucault never dealt with sex/gender distinction.
His ‘political economy of a will to knowledge’ (Foucault 1978: 73)
revolves around sex, and sex for Foucault denotes far more than
anatomy fixed onto the body: it is about practices, sensations, pro-
hibitions, incitements, proper and improper appetites, desirable and
undesirable thoughts, about desire that is manageable and should
be managed politically. Sex is, above all, constituted as a problem

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of truth (ibid.: 56) – not something residing within us, not even
something we do or indulge in, but something discursive through
which we become aware of ourselves as sexual, through which we
come to learn the truth about sexuality (Mort and Peters 2005: 13).
This ‘problem’ does not manifest itself through risqué stories only. It
refracts through the enormous variety of the forms of speech: social,
political, economic, medical, moral hygienic and legislative. ‘Between
the state and the individual, sex became an issue, and a public issue
no less; a whole web of discourses, special knowledges, analyses,
and injunctions settled upon it’ (Foucault 1978: 26). It is a web of
discourses that has the power to govern bodies in myriad ways.
This discursive web – a dispositive of sexuality – accounts for
economic relations, systemic exchange and transfer of name and
property, work of drives, for having and being a sex, yet it is, on the
whole, irreducible to any of them. This historically newer forma-
tion began to emerge when it became socially expedient to develop
and multiply new techniques for maximising life, and politically
opportune to institute an order of life of a new class that affirmed
itself through care for the ‘body, vigor, longevity, progeniture, and
descent’ (ibid.: 123). The dispositive of sexuality was first estab-
lished for a purpose other than kinship arrangements as described
by Rubin. In order to show that sexuality is a new thing, Foucault
elaborated on the differences between the deployment of sex from the
seventeenth century onwards and what he calls the dispositive of alli-
ance (ibid.: 106). The latter refers to a complex system that defines
the rules of conjugality, legislates certain transfers, supports certain
statuses and specific forms of wealth circulation. Sexuality, on the
other hand, is tied to historically more recent devices of power, is not
primarily governed by reproduction, provides means of population
control, and is relayed through the body and its various intensifica-
tions. The history of the political dispositive of sexuality is a history
of bodies of sorts, focused on the direct connections between power
and the body – its functions, physiological processes, sensations and
pleasures (ibid.: 152). Only with the dispositive of sexuality does
power penetrate deep into the body, into the most material and vital.
This is how sex emerged – as something discrete and corporeal, sepa-
rate from other organs, bodily functions and sensations, enabling,
however, their specific groupings into an artificial, fictitious unity,
which from now on functions as a causal principle – becoming at the
same time the most material and the most speculative bodily element
(ibid.: 152–6).

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 judith butler and politics

The historically new formation of sex seems not to belong to the

body, but it also does not seem to function as a ‘gender supplement’:
something belonging to the social sphere simply grafted onto the
body. For Foucault, and later also Butler, sex lives through discourses,
through knowledges that produce and maintain its truth, asserting
that it is indeed something and what that something is (‘anatomy is
destiny’ is one such authoritative assertion), imprisoning the body
in the truth of sex, in a fictitious aggregation of axiomatic mean-
ings – that is, the norm. The norm is at the same time restrictive and
productive. Truths about the body inform it, put the body in motion,
produce, conduct and govern it. The body becomes, incomparably
more than in the dispositive of alliance, a locus through which power
prismatically refracts.
Foucault’s insistence on the engendered character and the his-
torical novelty of this formation is of the utmost importance, as it
invites us to imagine a possibility of an emergence of yet another,
hitherto unknown dispositive. Foucault is certainly interested in
such a possibility, as would Butler be later. They also share an inter-
est in breaking away from sex, foregrounding the ‘claims of bodies,
pleasures and knowledges in their multiplicity and their possibility
of resistance’ (ibid.: 157), crucially, through tactical reversals of the
mechanisms of power, through the invention of a different set of
norms. Butler remains Foucauldian whenever she insists that there is
no point outside, prior to or beyond power, no site free from power,
which is one of the main claims of Gender Trouble. Power can be
redirected, bent, transformed, multiplied, because the discourse
through which it works ‘transmits and produces power; it reinforces
it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it
possible to thwart it’ (ibid.: 101); but it can never be abolished once
and for all. Lastly, Butler’s first mentioning of subversion is related to
Foucault’s rejection of a possibility to transcend the binary opposites:
to subvert them is to have them proliferate to a point where binarity
itself becomes meaningless. ‘His tactic, if that is what it can be called,
is not to transcend power relations, but to multiply their various con-
figurations, so that the juridical model of power as oppression and
regulation is no longer hegemonic’ (Butler 1985: 514). Subversion, it
seems, may function as a passageway to a new dispositive not based
on binaries. Their relentless multiplication, brought to life by subver-
sive practices, may derange the hegemony of the current system of
norms.

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 bodies and norms

Bodies and Acts: Doing, Crafting

Thus far I have presented the frames Butler combines in forming
her early understanding of sex and gender, with the main emphasis
on the body.3 My claim – with which I am consciously departing
from common interpretations – is that gender is a posterior, subse-
quential concept, serving as an explanatory tool for a more primary
object of Butler’s consideration. Although she is a world-renowned
gender theorist, and her concept of performativity is as a rule tied
to gender, at the core of her earlier, and I would argue also later,
considerations on gender are, in fact, bodies and acts – that is, what
one does with one’s body. I emphasise this not only because of the
obstinate accusations of a certain somatophobia (Butler 1993a:
110; BTM: xix), but also because the body provides significant links
between the phases of Butler’s work which this book aims to sew
together.
Butler’s text that introduces the notion of the performa-
tive, ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in
Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’, also provides us with the defi-
nition of becoming as a stylised repetition of acts. It is the body that
is stylised, although what is constituted in the process is an illusion of
an abiding gendered self (Butler 1988: 519). Gender happens in time
– and its temporality is emphatically social. Here Butler defines her
task as an examination of the ‘ways gender is constructed through
specific corporeal acts, and what possibilities exist for the cultural
transformation of gender through such acts’ (ibid.: 521). The corpo-
reality that acts is not the carrier of culture, or a material facticity, or
a res extensa onto which cultural meanings are plastered. The body
is not a piece of matter, but ‘a continual and incessant materializing
of possibilities’: meanings are materialised with, through and in the
bodies, and so one is not a body, ‘but, in some very key sense, one
does one’s body’ (ibid.).
Our bodies are active loci of cultural interpretation; they do the
interpretations. Doing oneself is a certain dramatisation in the form
of reproduction of available conventions and through available
rituals that in the given circumstances have some socially relevant
meaning. But we do not do ourselves from time to time, occasion-
ally, when we are particularly inclined to interpret the social script.
One does one’s body daily, again and again, in an endless repetition
of acts. What we repeat or re-enact by our own corporeal stylisations
are certain possibilities that are at our disposal, certain norms that

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are there for us as historically conditioned beings. The body, there-

fore, materialises possibilities – those present, available, allowed,
socially given to us.
To explain this further, let us take an example from the history of
clothing. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, women in the
west wore long gowns that always covered their ankles in public. This
social rule, today seeming perfectly contingent and quite Victorian,
was observed indiscriminately, even in some very odd circumstances,
such as horse-riding. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, it
was unimaginable for a woman to ride dressed as a man, that is, in
breeches. Instead, women riders were supposed to sit side-saddle,
to accommodate their impracticable dresses and the strict dressing/
moral codes of the time. In the mid-nineteenth century, the first form
of trousers for women appeared in the United States. Bloomers, as
they were known, were gathered around the ankles and worn under
a slightly shorter skirt, heralding dress reform, if somewhat unsuc-
cessful at first (Tortora and Keiser 2013: 26). Their name came from
Amelia Bloomer, the first US woman to own, operate and edit a news-
paper for women, The Lily. She wore and unabashedly promoted the
garment in her journal as a form of women’s emancipation. Although
we are speaking about a mere hundred years, it would be a long path
from the crinoline, a whalebone-hooped petticoat that rapidly came
to replace the short-lived and ridiculed bloomers, to Mary Quant’s
miniskirt, with sleeveless dresses worn under the knee in the Roaring
Twenties and the factory overalls of Rosie the Riveter in between.
From today’s point of view, it feels incomprehensible that until very
recently women were forbidden from wearing trousers. Conversely,
Scottish kilts and priestly robes notwithstanding, men wearing skirts
still represents an almost improbable social transgression.
Of course, we should be always careful with examples. Doing or
crafting one’s gender is not about apparel or, to what the perplexing
word ‘stylisation’ might lead, about fashioning one’s appearance in
line with cultural commodities. Butler explicitly links it to the late
Foucault’s understanding of the stylistics of existence (Butler 1988:
521; GT: 190), which in this context can be misleading too (cf. Butler
2001a; Boucher 2006: 137; Käll 2015). However, the example of
trousers tells us something about the social world, or the world of
norms, within which we do our bodies. Our existence, embodied
and therefore gendered, is manifested – appears, has its phenomenal
form – in certain ways, or styles. The birth of a girl is the birth of a
body that will throughout its life be stylised as feminine in an attempt

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to affirm its femaleness: the existence of a woman is a continuous

process of becoming one. Stylised affirmation involves the active
crafting of certain models or ideals to embody certain social stand-
ards or patterns. This engagement is by no means deliberate; we do
not knowingly calculate what and when to perform, with intention
and specific results in mind. It is not a project in the existentialist
sense, nor a set of premeditated, intentional acts. The affirmation
refers to the adoption, appropriation and internalisation of models
that are already everywhere around us (but also inside us, which
Butler describes as the ‘psychic life of power’), such that they appear
as our own, an integral part of our will and self-understanding.
In that sense, when a Victorian woman wore a long, heavy and
utterly impractical riding habit, this she did not do for its conveni-
ence, nor indeed because she consciously refused to deviate from the
fashion of the day, but because the norms of the time prescribed only
this particular behavioural pattern. There was no alternative avail-
able to horse-riding women; trousers were not a ‘cultural option’
that could have been interpreted by female bodies. Around her were
other women who also wore comparable garments. The ‘morals’ that
spoke through petticoats and riding breeches reflected a gender dif-
ference, which then impacted the agility of a rider. From here, it is a
short step to Geddes’ ‘biological fact’ of passivity, sluggishness and
stability in the human female, and activity, spiritedness, eagerness
and passionateness in the males. The ‘biological fact’ was further
confirmed by the invisible physiological life of the sex cells. However,
on a more mundane level, one accessible to those not versed in the
mysteries of a new science, it spoke through gowns that made not
only horse-riding extremely inconvenient, but prevented any kind of
rapid movement, jumping, bending or running. This continual physi-
cal restraint, supposedly caused by cells, but safeguarded by garb,
was then translated into mannerliness, and from there into distinctive
traits of the entire gentler sex: meekness, timidity, decency and other
similar qualities that outline the field of Victorian femininity.
Femininity/masculinity is thus about the stylisation of the body,
but it also entails a certain stylisation of the will, of manners and
modes of comportment, ways of apprehending our place in the order
of social relations and adopting, not necessarily consciously, ideas of
what that particular place implies. We are born bodies that through-
out their lives ‘get crafted into genders’ (Butler 1988: 525) through
a bodily adoption of the normative standards. In that sense, Woman
does not refer to this or that woman, but to a set of norms to which

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every body born with recognisably female sex characteristics must

seek to conform. This is an active crafting, a series of innumerable
achievements, lasting continuously throughout one’s life.
Each and every one of us strives to embody the gender norm. The
norm is a rule, a standard of what is valued and valid; but it is also
that which is normal, according to the norm, normalised – d ­ esirable
through the workings of the norm, that from which one is not
supposed to refrain. The norm operates as an implicit standard of
normalisation (UG: 42). The norm imposes, organises and sustains
patterns of sociality, against which we orient ourselves when reading
others and assessing the extent and ways they too observe, or deviate
from, the norm. As a standard of normalisation, it allows certain
types of acts and practices to become acknowledged as valued and
valid, and accords them social recognition (as well as protection, for
example, through legislation and other forms of institutionalisation).
As both prohibitive and productive, the norm provides the para­
meters for something or someone to appear within the field of social
intelligibility. Thus, the norm works as a divider: it helps opera-
tionalise the (historically volatile) boundary between the knowable
and legible, and the rest, that which remains (and should remain)
non-appearing, unknown, unknowable and illegible. If one performs
their social existence, not to appear means to socially disappear:
their becoming is a becoming unreal. ‘Having or bearing “truth” and
“reality” is an enormously powerful prerogative within the social
world, one way in which power dissimulates as ontology’ (UG: 215).
What does ‘having truth, bearing reality’ mean? The world in
which our bodies become crafted into gender is a social world. If
bodies are thought as living and plural, then even those fundamental
physical features – extension, mass, matter – have a social reality.
They appear only in the space of the social world, not as static
physical entities or, in another register, a motionless mass of bones
swathed in tissue, but as dynamic modes of becoming, co-defined by
the world. Within a given social reality, bodies appear as the pro-
cesses of embodying. The truth of these processes can be confirmed
only within social reality, in which bodies ‘speak’ themselves and are
given meanings as they occupy space contiguous with other bodies,
having a certain shape of pelvis or bosom, being underfed or old,
having this or that skin colour. Materiality of the body materialises
too: the material is not simply there, but becomes through the mate-
rialisation of available meanings, becoming real through the materi-
alisation of possibilities, possible ‘cultural options’.

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Apart from spatiality, the embodying process is also characterised

by a certain duration. As Butler often underlined, the temporality of
our becoming embodied is markedly social and essentially repetitive.
The norm, or set of norms, that precede us in time, impress on us,
form and condition us, act on us from all sides, often in contradictory
ways. This continues ‘with a tenacity that is quite indifferent to our
finitude’ (Senses of the Subject, 2015c [hereafter SS]: 5). The acts of
embodying these norms provide us with reality and truth. There is,
however, no specific point in time when the acting stops, because the
norm is embodied in full and is from then on lived as the model itself.
Quite the contrary, the conformation to the norm and the confirma-
tion of its truth is a continual, repetitive process. One never becomes
one’s gender once and for all.
This is where the idea of performative begins to emerge, providing
the nexus between bodies and norms. The reality of gender as a norm
depends on its embodying, on performing gender. ‘Gender reality is
performative which means, quite simply, that it is real to the extent
that it is performed’ (Butler 1988: 527). There is no reality of gender
that would be outside of its performance; but also, bodies have no
reality apart from the one they perform.
The notion of performance, although obviously belonging to a
register of a certain social ontology, invites us to think in theatrical
metaphors. Reality could be figured as a grand stage on which the
life of bodies takes place. Somewhat like professional actors who
embody characters, supplying voice and gesture to a script, we too
embody our genders by reading the script of the norms that surround
and inhabit us. And, like professional actors who excel in portray-
ing Medeas, Cassandras or Lysistratas, or else remain pale copies
of more talented colleagues, we too perform the script to varying
degrees of success. As is the case with the performances repeated
many times, some will be better than others. Some may seem quite
bland and unpersuasive, sometimes to the point of being comic, even
farcical. And while we watch, we may start to feel deceived, irate,
develop an urge to yell or throw something at the actors. Likewise,
our own embodying of the gender ideal can border on parody, espe-
cially as the text we get to interpret is never unambiguous. Public
condemnation can and does ensue when we have ‘bad’ performances.
In the process of constant repetition, failures, misinterpretation of
the script, but also exaggerations and caricatures, are always pos-
sible. Of course, the theatrical metaphor has its limits. Once the
curtain drops, professional actors leave the stage, lauded or panned,

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and their performance stops (at least the professional performance

they freely and consciously chose). No such break appears in the
labour of embodying one’s gender: the stage lights never dim, as our
performance is not a matter of decision. We literally perform our
gender in order to live.
The assertion that the life of the body is a performance means
that the body does something, that it performs, in a continuous and
repetitive manner, countless series of actions that enable it to live,
on a ‘stage’ – which can be variously termed as (social) reality, the
(social) world (of norms), or sociality – where bodies are given mean-
ings, where they become intelligible, legible, recognisable. Gender is
one such intricate web of meanings or power relations. It is neither
the exclusive nor the most substantial one, but it has an enormous
influence on how the reality of the bodies is shaped. Appropriating
the norms through their repetitive performance, and thus continually
re-establishing them is a complex form of the life in the body, which,
failing to perform properly, puts to risk the life itself. Because, ‘if
existence is always gendered existence, then to stray outside of the
established gender is in some sense to put one’s very existence into
question’ (Butler 1986: 41–2).
Early on, Butler set herself the task of examining simultaneously
how gender is established through specific bodily acts and what
are the possibilities for the transformation of gender through those
very acts (Butler 1988: 521). Performativity is, in that sense, always
already an ‘account of agency’ (Butler 2009b: i). In other words, per-
formativity is about the question how bodies live in a social world
in which they perform the very norms that enable them to live: what
is it that they do; but also, what is it that they can do, in order to
perhaps live otherwise, in a world in which no body would be unreal
and untrue? By the end of this chapter, I will have further elaborated
the nexus between norms and bodies, focusing on why we craft our
bodies the way we do, and why – if we could become otherwise – we
become men and women.

Gender and Sex: De-essentialised Body

From what has been already said, we may claim that gender is the
norm enacted and materialised through our daily performances of our
bodily existence. Our performances take place in the world, which
recognises us as real or, in the absence of this recognition, makes us
unreal. However, what happens with sex, if bodily enactments take

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place in the sphere of gender? In other words, if in the social sphere

everything is reducible to our repetitive crafting, what happens with
the ‘non-social’ sphere, to the domain of nature in which we are born
before we begin to embody the norm? Is there, in fact, any reason to
keep these ‘spheres’ apart, if the life of the body never really ceases to
be performative, or, in a Beauvoirian register, a becoming?
The debates on sex and gender that began in the 1950s appeared
first in relation to sexology and those ‘otherly sexed’ (Germon
2009). The distinction was further taken up by second wave femi-
nism (Millet 1970), becoming a staple of feminist theory to this
day, surviving through numerous policy documents that attempted
to mainstream gender equality on national and international levels.
According to the standard definition, sex is a natural or a material or
a biological basis upon which gender is overlaid. That basis ‘belongs
to’ the body, and it is, so to speak, determined by the body – by its
anatomy, hormones, chromosomes, genes, depending on the level of
the refinement of the scientific knowledge that describes it at a given
moment in time. Being ‘in’ the body, sex is prediscursive, similar in
its somatic muteness to bones and blood. Gender, on the other hand,
is a social or cultural effect of sex: since I was born female, I acquire
feminine traits and become a woman. It is a discursive superstructure
built on a prediscursive base, or a cultural construction drawn from
the fixed natural substrate, becoming imbued with specific values
through the action of various social forces. Without a gender super-
structure, the uterus and testicles are just another natural form of
pistil and anthers. However, value categories, entirely absent from
the world of gladioli, redwoods and sunflowers, turn nature into
culture.
The feminist discovery of gender was emancipatory, as it was
largely assumed that what is constructed and learned could be decon-
structed and unlearned. The existing framework of values, nested in
the social and cultural sphere, could be dismantled, expanded and
prospectively equalised – almost despite the materially immutable
nature of sex (taken as a given at the time when the idea of gender
first appears), which still retained many aspects of destiny. The
dismantling was supposed to be done by women, who – being the
subject of change, of the political action – functioned as an identity
around which the feminist demands were grouped and in whose
name they were articulated.
Undoubtedly, Butler was impacted by Joan Scott’s definition of
gender as the ‘primary way of signifying relationships of power’

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(Scott 1986: 1067). As she claimed much later, Scott showed that
gender always needs to be contextualised and seen as ­producing
‘apparently unrelated domains, such as class, power, politics, and
history itself’ (Butler and Weed 2011: 3). It is not possible to know
what a category of gender ‘is’ apart from the way it is produced,
mobilised and deployed. When it comes to sex, Butler is very
close to an understanding that sex is a ‘somatic fact’ created by
a cultural effect (see Fausto-Sterling 2000: 21). However, what
seemed to have incited the particular gender trouble Butler became
renowned for was the emancipation in the sphere of gender that
was supposed to be brought about by women as subjects of
­feminist politics. Gender Trouble begins with a quandary: ‘Is the
construction of the category of women as a coherent and stable
subject an unwitting regulation and reification of gender relations?
And is not such a reification precisely contrary to feminist aims’
(GT: 7)?
The complex story of sex and gender, identities, subjects, coher-
ences and foundations – forged in the dense language of Gender
Trouble that veers between disciplines, but still heavily relies on
profoundly philosophical tools,4 and promises to think politics
but then thinks ontology – seems to be premised on the following
question: what is the life of the bodies for which sex, gender and
desire are not causally related (as would be in the case of one born
female, therefore become a woman, therefore desiring men) – and
do these bodies matter? As we already know, Butler’s motivation
to pose such a question is political, as she wanted to imagine the
lives of gender and sexual minorities as more possible and more
liveable (NT: 32). However, the question is also unrelentingly
philosophical, as it further complicates the idea of the body. With
it, the body forever ceases to be thinkable as a kind of derivative of
the ‘body as such’, as bodies always come in genders. But if gender
remains defined as the expression of sex, a social or cultural effect
of a natural cause, then this definition also goes against the lived
bodies that diverge from such causality. The lives of these bodies
seem not to fit their designations, even those – or precisely those
– that were supposed to work for their emancipation (and Butler
does think that gender can be such a designation5). For that reason,
the question ‘do all bodies matter?’ is equally relevant for feminism
as emancipatory politics. Feminism ought to take into account a
‘moral and empirical problem’, articulated by the end of Butler’s
first text on gender:

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What happens when individual women do not recognize themselves in

the theories which explain their insurpassable essences to them? When
the essential feminine is finally articulated, and what we have been calling
‘women’ cannot see themselves in its terms, what are we then to con-
clude? That these women were deluded, or that they are not women at
all? (Butler 1985: 516)
Lastly, this question has important ramifications related to the
understanding of the social reality of bodies. If within established
reality certain bodies have no available possibilities to embody, they
would remain not only unequal, but also, significantly, less human,
and so always exposed to some form of violence. The theoretical
struggle for the emancipation of the possibilities should thus also be
understood as a struggle against violence.
The emancipation of the body Butler was after, when putting
gender into trouble, rests upon the expansion of the sphere of gender
and on its permanent untying from sex. The latter is in fact the condi-
tion of the former. And although it may seem that Butler ventured to
undo the tie only in Bodies that Matter, which figures sex in its subti-
tle, this had already taken place in Gender Trouble: ‘If the immutable
character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called “sex” is
as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always
already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between
sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all’ (GT: 9–10; cf.
earlier in Butler 1986: 45).
How are we to understand such a claim? The conflation of sex
and gender does not only put in question the mainstay of feminist
theory, but it seems to fall back on theses one would ascribe to the
likes of Patrick Geddes. In fact, Butler does the former, without
doing the latter. The statement ‘anatomy is destiny’ (or the like) does
indeed reify destiny through anatomy. No distinction between sex
and gender is possible, because sex is gender: the essence conditions
existence. With their doubling, the domain of gender was seen, at
least potentially, as liberated; but sex remained a metaphysical given:
although the sphere of gender can be changed and is about becoming,
sex is. What Butler suggests – that sex is gender – de-essentialises the
body that was supposed to ‘carry’ sex. The assumption of the causal,
expressive or mimetic relation between a mute sex and a chattering
gender did not manage to emancipate the body from its fixed place in
the established ontology.
So far, the body has been referred to as the locus of materialisation
of norms, the point where power relations refract in each individual,

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a cultural situation. Does this mean then that the de-essentialisation

of the body assumes that nothing of its materiality or naturalness is
there to stay? What happens with the natural body, and its natural
accompaniment, sex, after its de-essentialisation? What happens
with the matter that the body is, so to say, regardless of its performa-
tive actions?
Butler was at various times accused of idealism, postmodernism,
discursive essentialism, linguistic monism, for the erasure of the reality
of bodies or of propagating the disembodiedness of women. These
notions were so powerful that in some places, such as Germany, they
provided the framework for feminist debates for years (Hark 2001).
It is, of course, hard to disentangle these accusations from various
related or unrelated phenomena: the so-called theory wars, revolving
around the professed detachment of the language of theory from real
life and material hardships, decried as the pretentious nonsense of the
‘Pomo Left’ (Duggan 1998: 13); the insistence on the ‘ludic postmod-
ern erasure of the political in the name of discursive difference’ (Ebert
1993: 10), in which the operations of socioeconomic arrangements
become obscured by the play of disembodied signifiers; reframing of
the polemical gap between gender and sexual difference, where the
latter supposedly more truly represents bodily existence and experi-
ence of women (Braidotti 1994); the appearance of queers and their
continual pressure on the coherence of categories of sexual identities,
in whose ‘fantasy world of ambiguity, indeterminacy and charade,
the material realities of oppression and the feminist politics of resist-
ance are forgotten’ (Kitzinger and Wilkinson 1994: 465); the insti-
tutionalisation of gender studies and their tentative removal from
politics or activism, etc., etc. All this notwithstanding, Butler is wary
of the naturalness of the body as the mute foundation of gender. She
does question the natural that should be beyond discursive reach,
that is, the material boundary and interior into which one supposedly
cannot penetrate.
Responding to Braidotti’s criticisms once, Butler ‘confessed’ that
she is not a very good materialist, because whenever she tries to
write about the body, she ends up writing about language (UG: 198).
This is, however, insufficient to separate good from bad material-
ists. Although the body is a physical object as described by physics,
a complex set of organs as described by anatomy, and a complex set
of tissue functions as analysed by physiology, each of these ‘appear-
ances’ of the body is always and primarily given in language, setting
apart certain corporeal aspects from others. Bodies are in language

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whenever we think or speak (about) them, regardless of jargon or

register, and notwithstanding the various scientific fields’ pretensions
to accurately reach a non-linguistic, material understanding of them.
Whatever this ‘natural’ body is, it comes to us through a linguistic
mould: language fabricates, produces and constructs the body. The
natural is always already said or thought as social.
We can imagine someone protesting: does this mean that this body
of mine is, in fact, not bodily, that it has no reality outside language,
no matter, no natural residuum that remains forever prediscursive,
unutterable? Is my volume, my mass, the texture and the firmness of
my tissue just a series of illusions? Is there nothing material in me
capable of resisting the invasive reduction of social construction?
Are there no bodily processes, such as fluid discharge or gravidity,
that are part of the corporeity beyond its sociality? A response to
such questions would be that the body depends on language to be
known, but also exceeds linguistic capture. For Butler, ‘the body is
not known or identifiable apart from the linguistic coordinates that
establish the boundaries of the body – without thereby claiming that
the body is nothing other than the language by which it is known’
(SS: 20). Yet, the search for the separate, pure, extralinguistic bodily
ontology does nothing but underscore the chasm between language
and body (SS: 21).
So, we may rest assured that the body is corporeal and material,
that it has surfaces that are firm and impermeable, and that it is char-
acterised by the processes that belong to corporeity itself. But, when
the bodily discharges turn into sweating, when bleeding is termed
to be menstruation, and gravidity translates into pregnancy, these
corporeal processes become socially encoded and saturated with
meanings that do not spring out of corporeity itself. Whatever the
matter of our interiors, we materialise the possibilities according to
what is available to us in the social world. Karen Barad is right when
she claims that the crucial limitation of Butler’s theory of materiality
– if it is indeed a limitation – is that it concerns the materialisation
of human bodies, or more precisely, only their surfaces, ‘through
the regulatory action of social forces (which are not the only forces
relevant to the production of bodies)’ (Barad 2007: 209), without
exactly explaining how the norms materialise the very substance of
the human body. Butler is not interested in the substance of the flesh
or matter or nature ‘as such’. She is after a lived body, a body that
lives in a social reality, a body that comes to us – appears as know-
able, intelligible and legible – only through language, or cultural

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articulations (Blumenfeld and Breen 2005: 14). This does not neces-
sarily mean that there is no ‘matter’ or ‘nature’ – that they do not
exist. It only means that what we seek to grasp as natural reaches us
as already naturalised, linguified, culturally articulated – social.
This takes us back to sex, the supposedly most material, natural
and corporeal foundation of gender. Each time when we attempt to
say something about sex, which supposedly resides in the sphere of
non-discursivity, it reaches us ‘as gender’. It comes to us in the form
of Geddes’ sluggish cells and Freud’s anatomy, both of which point
to something ‘in’ the body, ushering both the historical idiom and
its tacit ontological assumptions disguised as scientific truths. If we
wish to, for example, reject Geddes’ or Freud’s stylisation of sex, but
still persist in holding on to it as a natural prediscursive foundation,
then ‘“sex” becomes something like a fiction, perhaps a fantasy, ret-
roactively installed at a prelinguistic site to which there is no direct
access’ (BTM: xv). Sex thus comes to us either as already absorbed by
gender, or as a fictional entity, somewhat like the mythical wander-
ing womb.
Butler’s interest in sex is, however, not only epistemological,
restricted to the question ‘what can we know about the true nature
of our bodies?’. It is, from the start, also emphatically political.
The detachment of the body from sex as its natural anchor opens
up possibilities for bodies in the sphere in which transformation is
possible, the sphere of gender. Retaining the causal or mimetic rela-
tionship between sex and gender not only leaves us with biological
determinism, but it extends biology to the sphere which, presumably,
ought not to be determined by destiny. That is why Butler asks: ‘If
gender is constructed, could it be constructed differently, or does its
constructedness imply some form of social determinism, foreclosing
the possibility of agency and transformation?’ (GT: 10–11). If social
construction of gender is possible in one way only, if even in the
sphere of gender there are no other possibilities than those naturally
imposed by the sex-substrate, ‘then it seems that gender is as deter-
mined and fixed as it was under the biology-is-destiny formulation.
In such a case, not biology, but culture, becomes destiny’ (GT: 11).
Thus, if we are not born but become women, our becoming is
not determined by a facticity, an invariant, unchangeable pattern
from within. ‘Indeed, it becomes unclear when one takes Simone de
Beauvoir’s formulation to its unstated consequences, whether gender
need be in any way linked with sex, or whether this conventional
linkage is itself culturally bound’ (Butler 1986: 45; GT: 152). The

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unstated, implied radical consequences of this are that the bounda-

ries of gender are not prescribed by the assumed boundaries of sex,
that there is no single way of becoming a man or a woman, and that
bodies could materialise possibilities that may be unavailable to them
in the social reality shaped by determinism of biology or culture.

Repetition under Constraint

‘Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated
acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to
produce the appearance of the substance, of a natural sort of being’
(GT: 45), while sex is this ‘natural sort of being’. Like gender, sex
neither belongs to us, nor is it ‘a static description of what one is: it
will be one of the norms by which the “one” becomes viable at all,
that which qualifies a body for life within the domain of cultural
intelligibility’ (BTM: xii).
Gender is something that one becomes, stylising one’s body for
the sake of being viable. No essence directs this becoming, which
in Butler’s radical way of reading Beauvoir also never stops, never
fully comes to be. Instead, it is ‘an incessant and repeated action of
some sort’ (GT: 152), a repeated process of materialising the norm
that qualifies a body for life. The time of this action is not just the
present time of my acts. Its time encompasses the past and the possi-
ble futures of my own performances and the performances of others,
to whom I am directly or very indirectly exposed. The temporality of
gender is social, and it is mine only to the extent that I, in my own
time, reiterate and reproduce what is already there for me in the form
of possibilities. The space where gender is crafted is not interior,
but public: even when no one else is around, others are constitutive
for the enactment of my own bodily stylisations. Gender as a norm
requires my repetitions, which is ‘at once a re-enactment and re-
experiencing of a set of meanings already socially established; and it
is the mundane and ritualized form of their legitimation’ (GT: 191).
Endlessly repeated acts by an endless number of actors who do their
gender, appear as socially available possibilities for all subsequent
stylisations of bodies. Over time, they sediment: the acts begin to
appear as something one is or has.
Sex is thus not an essence, but an appearance of something essen-
tial, of a natural being, of substance. Gender as performance ‘pro-
duces the illusion of an inner sex or essence or psychic gender core;
it produces on the skin, through the gesture, the move, the gait (that

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array of corporeal theatrics understood as gender presentation), the

illusion of an inner depth’ (Butler 1991: 28). Incessantly repeated
acts through which social reality is constituted produce an effect that
there is something ‘behind’ the performance, something more real,
more permanent, more lasting, more substantial that conditions the
performance itself – as its internal schema, essence, cause, original.
But there is nothing in the background of the acts. My gender is my
imitation of the gender norm, which gets reproduced by my attempts
to approximate and embody the norm.
If there is no internal truth of gender, the question is then – and
this seems to be the central question of the theory of performativ-
ity – what makes us repeat, both in general and in specific ways?
If gender is only an incessant and repeated action, why does it not
take place in a variety of ways? Why is it that we (generally) act in a
binary way, becoming either women or men? We might conjecture
that it was precisely this question that motivated Butler’s radical
rereading of the notion of becoming, remodelled after Rubin, Wittig
and Foucault. The notion of the performative was necessary to help
further develop the unstated consequences of the idea that one is not
born, but becomes, a woman. One indeed becomes, performatively,
but not in an unconditioned way, choosing what, when and how to
become. In a way, Butler rearticulated Sartre’s idea that an existence
is a sum of the realisations of possibilities, a sum of one’s actions, but
with an important – Beauvoirian – caveat: the realisation of possibili-
ties takes place in a world that was there before any individual actor
began to make any conscious choices; the possibilities we realise take
place within an unchosen, rigid regulatory framework; we act within
a framework of norms that qualify the body for an intelligible life.
We become a sum of our actions under constraint, and act ourselves
into men or women by the force of compulsory heterosexuality.
The constraint is rearticulated and renewed with every repetition,
with every new approximation of the norm – either outwardly, or
on the inside, as ‘there are workings of gender that do not “show”
in what is performed as gender’ (PLP: 145). Psychoanalysis would
need to meet Foucault to explain the psychic life of power, to show
how what plays out or is exteriorised also stands in relation to what
is repudiated, disavowed or barred from performance. It also helps
Butler work through the double life of the norm, its attachment to
our stubborn attachments to it. Lastly, the constraint plays out not
only through the corporeal theatrics, the way we talk, the way we
walk, or our passionate psychic attachment to our subordination to

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the norm (PLP: 6); it is also very much part of the material organisa-
tion of life, which voices itself through a ‘specific mode of sexual pro-
duction and exchange that works to maintain the stability of gender,
the heterosexuality of desire, and the naturalization of family’
(MC: 42). Under constraint, we repeat our gender not only because
we desire recognition that qualifies a body for life within the domain
of cultural intelligibility, but also in order to be socially reproduced
as persons.
Bodies materialise possibilities, those that are available to them in
the established social reality. Their availability is organised accord-
ing to norms of intelligibility that are socially productive, and on the
basis of which we become acknowledged as true and real. Life in
which ‘one’ embodies the norm qualifies the body as human. Those
‘bodily figures who do not fit into either gender fall outside of the
human, indeed, constitute the domain of the dehumanized and the
abject against which the human itself is constituted’ (GT: 151). To
‘be’ human is to be socially intelligible as one.
It has already been argued that Butler’s main object of thought
was the lived body. There are bodies that are lived differently to
the prescribed norm, that have fewer (or even no) possibilities to
embody the norm(s) in a social reality that is nevertheless also theirs.
Knowing these bodies, making them appear in the register of knowa-
bility or intelligibility, particularly within feminist emancipatory
politics, was one part of Butler’s aim. Understanding the norms that
organise the field of intelligibility was, however, never solely a philo-
sophical enterprise. As Butler claims in an important interview with
Irene Meijer and Baukje Prins:

My work has always been undertaken with the aim to expand and
enhance a field of possibilities for bodily life. My earlier emphasis on
denaturalization was not so much an opposition to nature as it was an
opposition to the invocation of nature as a way of setting necessary limits
on gendered life. To conceive of bodies differently seems to me part of
the conceptual and philosophical struggle that feminism involves, and it
can relate to questions of survival as well. The abjection of certain kinds
of bodies, their inadmissibility to codes of intelligibility, does make itself
known in policy and politics, and to live as such a body in the world is
to live in the shadowy regions of ontology. (Meijer and Prins 1998: 277)

Being unintelligible means being deprived of the resources that can be

life sustaining. It means being exposed to violence (more) and barred
from equality in a more profound sense, as someone who lives, but

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not quite equally to others; as someone who is real, but not entirely
thinkable in reality mottled with shadowy regions. Embodying the
norm improperly leads to various kinds of derealisation and dehu-
manisation. Embodying the norm improperly amounts to becoming
(gendered as) monstrous, ‘unthinkable, abject, unlivable’, not mat-
tering in the same way (BTM: x). The critical question – might such a
reality be made differently (GT: xxiv), or might it be remade (PL: 33)
– is what invites an insurrection at the level on ontology. Instead
of bodies changing, making them conform to what they are not – a
strategy employed for centuries – in order not to be condemned to
death within life (GT: xxi; AC), it is established norms that need to
be transformed.
This chapter focused on the first part of Butler’s early stated task
(Butler 1988: 521). It sought to show the relation between bodies
and norms, or how gender is constituted through specific corporeal
acts. The following chapter concentrates on the second part of that
task: to examine what possibilities exist for the transformation of
gender through such acts. In Butler’s philosophical endeavour, the
ontological and political lines of inquiry are rarely separated, even
for heuristic purposes. This is why the theory of performativity needs
to be understood as a theory of agency.

Performance/Performativity
The books written immediately after Gender Trouble sought to
elucidate the theory of performativity and expand it in various
directions. The Preface to its second edition is categorical: ‘Much
of my work in recent years has been devoted to clarifying and revis-
ing the theory of performativity that is outlined in Gender Trouble’
(GT: xv). The term used here – ‘outline’ – is quite appropriate, since
Gender Trouble is not a book on performativity. To complicate
things further, this book (which also largely applies to Butler’s entire
opus, even to texts written as ‘compendiums’) does not seek to lay
the foundations, to offer a firm frame with precisely defined theoreti-
cal levers. Quite the contrary, performativity there only emerges as a
possible frame that would have to be filled in by way of other texts
elaborating points that Gender Trouble only touches upon. Crudely
speaking, Bodies That Matter elaborated on the workings of power
in the sphere of materiality, introducing the key notion of citational
politics; The Psychic Life of Power turned from matter to interiority,
delving into the psychic effects of social power; and Excitable Speech

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worked out the link between performativity and language, bodily

and speech acts, and offered an important account of vulnerability,
which would become paramount for her later work.
The theory of performativity outlined in Gender Trouble has
bodies and norms at its centre. It looks into those that perform, act
or do (‘their’ gender), and into how gender regulates bodily acts by
discursive means. Widening the sphere of discursivity, which remains
a deep Foucauldian trace in Butler’s work, to make room for the
psychic, and later institutional and infrastructural dimensions as
well, should be understood both as an attempt to expand the theory
of performativity, but also to go beyond it.
At this level, the meaning of performativity could be drawn
entirely from the famous Nietzschean postulate: there is no essence,
being, inner core, subject or self behind (or prior to) the act, ‘there
is no such substratum; there is no “being” behind doing, effecting,
becoming; “the doer” is merely a fiction added to the deed – the
deed is everything’ (Nietzsche 1989: 45). Although Butler reserved
the notion of fiction for sex as an inner core of the woman-subject,
and was less sceptical about the misleading influence of language and
less disparaging about the subject than Nietzsche (who called it ‘a
changeling’ [ibid.]), for her theory of performativity, the absence of
substratum is (anti)foundational. Performativity relies neither on the
determining essences nor on the intentional subject. Its foundation –
mere doing – is a contingent one. Performativity is about bodies that
are in incessant and manifold performing processes. These perfor-
mances are imitations or bodily approximations of the norms, which
also affirm and maintain the validity of the norm. Bodies perform
their gender, thus participating in the production of the social
reality that co-defines future acts of any other bodies. A Butlerian
translation of Nietzsche, for the purposes of her nascent theory of
performativity, would be: ‘That the gendered body is performative
suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts
which constitute its reality’ (GT: 185). To this we can add, as Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick does, that the performative always carries the
double meaning of the dramatic and non-referential, encompassing
the polarities of non-verbal and verbal bodily action. Furthermore,
the non-referentiality always includes aberrance, ‘the torsion, the
mutual perversion, as one might say, of reference and performativity’
(Sedgwick 2003: 7).
Although the Butler of Gender Trouble is (and would remain) crit-
ical of the ‘metaphysics of substance’, in quite a Nietzschean fashion,

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she by no means refrained from shaping her understanding of per-

formativity in terms of ontology. Bodily performances enact social
reality in which they take place. The performative enactment is, so
to say, bidirectional, it is simultaneously produced and productive.
This can be also seen as the lasting trace of Foucault’s understand-
ing of power. What appears to be our deepest, most fundamental
reality – our interiority, our being, regardless of our actions – is in
fact ‘an effect and function of a decidedly public and social discourse,
the public regulation of fantasy through the surface politics of the
body’ (GT: 185). Certainly, one might wonder why a fantasy would
be regulated and, even more so, why regulation would be linked to
something interior. To this, Butler responds: ‘If the “cause” of desire,
gesture, and act can be localized within the “self” of the actor, then
the political regulations and disciplinary practices which produce
that ostensibly coherent gender are effectively displaced from view’
(GT: 186). In that sense, what the theory of performativity seeks to
show is that fantasy is regulated and that politics is somehow impli-
cated in this regulation. Removing the self (in quotation marks) from
the position of the necessary foundation enables the ‘political and
discursive origin of gender identity’ (GT: 186) to come into full view.
Outlined thus, the theory of performativity offers a conceptual and
a political corrective to the emancipationist aims of feminist theory.
The theory of performativity aimed to emancipate lived bodies from
(unliveable) essences, to emancipate agency from its phantasmatic
foundations, to loosen the constraints of identities and open space
for more collective struggles, an aim that remains as important for
Butler to this day.
However, this ‘outline’ has instigated a host of complex questions
which have occupied various interpreters of performativity. For the
sake of clarity, they could be divided into three groups. The first
group of questions deals with the ‘performer’: who performs if there
is no doer behind the deed? What happens with the subject if the act
cannot be localised within the self? Does the doer have a body, is it
material, is it positioned within the material arrangements of reality,
or is it somehow free-floating and unanchored? Does the actor have a
soul – is there any room for psyche in the theory of performativity, or
do the performative enactments take place exclusively on the surface
of the body? The second set of questions is about the act itself and
its invoked politicality: is a (political) act possible without a compact
subject? What is the scope of an action and where does it take place?
Is an act reducible to a speech act and is there performativity outside

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language? Is an act anything but a performance, understood as a the-

atricalisation of an act? Lastly, the third group of questions revolves
around the dispute on voluntarism/determinism: can there be any
change within this rigid public regulation of our private practices and
fantasies, or does it merely replicate what was formerly understood
as biological determinism? Is there, quite the opposite, any restric-
tion to the unrestrained will of the actor who derails gender norms
seemingly on a whim? Is political agency reduced to a free play of
signifiers, or genderfuck, or masquerading, or random slippages in
the citational chain?
As already noted, possibly the key question that expanded the
original outline of performativity is: why are we doing gender the
way we are if there is nothing inside us that compels us to act thus?
Put another way, is going against the grain of gender norms some-
thing now easy and playful, when we know that no interiority is
there to bind us? This question, which was posed in Gender Trouble
and has been framing feminist and queer theories and practices ever
since, required that Judith Butler reflects further on the nature of the
doer, or the acting subject. In that sense, the theory of performativity
has evolved into a peculiar account of the performative constitution
of subjectivity. On a different, related level, it demanded considera-
tions of the nature of acts and action, with particular emphasis on
the relationship between a performance (a bounded act, or a set of
particular acts done by performing individuals) and performativity
(reiteration of norms that precede, constrain and exceed the per-
former [Butler 1993b: 24]). The fundamentally political question –
can possibilities be materialised differently? – belongs to yet a third
plane, although still related to the problem of social transformation.
A variant of this question, especially bearing in mind the somewhat
offhand use of certain terms in Gender Trouble, would be: is the indi-
vidual the one who breaks free from reiterative actions, or must the
existing ‘body politic’ necessarily be called into question by collective
struggle? ‘Body politic’ and politics of liveable life will later coincide
and intersect when ‘the performative emerges precisely as the specific
power of the precarious [. . .] to demand the end to their precarity’
(D: 121).
It was pointed out many times that Gender Trouble produced one
gross misunderstanding of the performative, enabling the interpreta-
tions of gender as a choice, a role, a construction we build, ‘as one
puts on clothes in the morning, that there is a “one” who is prior to
this gender, a one who goes to the wardrobe of gender and decides

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with deliberation which gender it will be today’ (Butler 1993b: 21).

This misreading proved particularly important for Butler’s later
articulation of performativity as an account of agency, and the politi-
cal articulation of the insurrection at the level of ontology. One of
the more significant aspects of this shift in meaning has been the
inclusion of Austin’s understanding of performativity (Butler 1993b;
BTM; ES), which had not been there from the start. It can be said
that Butler’s turn to language, through Derrida’s reading of Kafka
via Austin (Bell 1999), was supposed to complicate the initial idea of
the performative act as a performance, which can always slide in the
direction of the intentional subject. The turn to language, in which
the bodily act became essentially supplemented by the speech act,
could be understood as the key shift from individual acts towards the
social constitution of action. In its subsequent iterations, the theory
of performativity sought to explain how sociality both constitutes
and constrains us, sometimes to the point of suffocation; how it
generates inequality among lives at the fundamental level of our (gen-
dered) existence; how it makes us vulnerable, exposed, precarious;
how we live in a state of interdependence – so often socially, politi-
cally and psychically denied in favour of being considered discrete
existences.

Notes
1. In one of her first texts, ‘Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir’s Second
Sex’, Butler considered the question of the choice to become a woman.
She rejects the interpretations which lead to an understanding that
women choose their oppression, that is, being the second sex is their
freely chosen project. To the contrary: ‘the phenomenology of victimi-
zation that Simone de Beauvoir elaborates throughout The Second Sex
reveals that oppression, despite the appearance and weight of inevita-
bility, is essentially contingent. Moreover, it takes out of the sphere of
reification the discourse of oppressor and oppressed, reminding us that
oppressive gender norms persist only to the extent that human beings
take them up and give them life again and again’ (Butler 1986: 41). A
woman indeed becomes in the mode of the Other, but there is no neces-
sity to such becoming. Both becoming and women are imaginable as far
more contingent domains of existence.
2. Butler rarely thematises feminist sources with which she contends.
Gender Trouble is an exercise in ‘French feminism’ for which French
feminist theorists had little sympathy (cf. Delphi 1995; Moi 1999; Berger
2014), rejecting it as Americanisation or genderisation of feminist theory

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(Möser 2019). The related contention on gender and sexual difference

(Braidotti 1994; Braidotti and Butler 1994) appears marginal for the
development of Butler’s feminist position (UG: 174–203; Pheng and
Grosz 1998). Although she seldom named the feminists she opposed,
in the early 1990s there were strands of US feminism that collided with
Butler’s anti-identitarian thought, such as certain forms of maternalist
thinking (CT: 49), and Catherine MacKinnon’s style of radical femi-
nism. Her distancing from the current represented by MacKinnon was
profound and far-reaching, and Butler expressed it openly and very
early, declaring that it makes feminism ‘into a position which asserts
the systematic domination of women by men, distils both these catego-
ries into very fixed places of power, sees women as always in positions
of relative powerlessness, as victims who then only get to claim power
through recourse to the state – a very frightening prospect’ (Kotz 1992:
86). Rather, Butler’s affinity tended towards black and postcolonial
feminism (PL: 47), which in its own way calls into question the (white,
western) meaning of ‘Woman’. Furthermore, there was a certain humil-
ity in her own role and participation in feminist debates (FCR: 132). Just
as those she opposed, Butler was also cautious in naming her ‘allies’. She
expressed her debt to Denise Riley (GT: 4), and I believe that Butler’s
feminist positioning is very much in line with Riley’s words: ‘“Women”
is historically, discursively constructed, and always relatively to other
categories which themselves change; “women” is a volatile collectiv-
ity in which female persons can be very differently positioned, so that
the apparent continuity of the subject of “women” isn’t to be relied on;
“women” is both synchronically and diachronically erratic as a col-
lectivity, while for the individual, “being a woman” is also inconstant,
and can’t provide an ontological foundation. Yet it must be emphasised
that these instabilities of the category are the sine qua non of feminism,
which would otherwise be lost for an object, despoiled of a fight, and, in
short, without much life’ (Riley 1988: 1–2). Indeed, when asked explic-
itly, Butler refused to offer a definition of feminism: ‘I do not understand
myself in a position to define feminism. It could be that I do not want
feminism to have a fixed definition, but that is because I want it to remain
alive, becoming more expansive, inclusive, and powerful’ (Tohidi 2017:
462).
3. To this we should certainly also add Merleau-Ponty’s understanding
of the body as a historical idea rather than a natural species, and an
active process of embodying certain cultural and historical possibili-
ties (Merleau-Ponty 1962; Butler 1988: 520–1; Butler 1989). Although
cautious towards the key phenomenological notion of intentionality
(Phelps 2013), phenomenological thought is an important background
for Butler’s conception of the body (Stoller 2010; Foultier 2013; Käll
2015). Alongside the frames elaborated here, certain sociological and

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anthropological ideas also had an impact on Butler’s understanding

of gender. In her text on performative acts (Butler 1988: 528), she
explicitly references Kessler’s and McKenna’s (1978) thesis on gender
as an ‘accomplishment’, and underscores her distance from Goffman’s
(1956) understanding of performance of gender roles and gender display.
Kessler and McKenna are important for Butler because, drawing on
Garfinkel, they argue that ‘male’ and ‘female’ are cultural events and
the effects of gender attribution processes, rather than a collection of
traits, behaviours or physical attributes (Kessler and McKenna 1978:
154). The idea of gender as some kind of action or ‘deed’ appeared in the
sociological text ‘Doing Gender’, where gender is defined as ‘a routine,
methodical, and recurring accomplishment [. . .] Doing gender involves a
complex of socially guided perceptual, interactional, and micropolitical
activities that cast particular pursuits as expressions of masculine and
feminine “natures”’ (West and Zimmerman 1987: 126). The individuals
‘do’ gender, but that doing is socially situated, interactional and insti-
tutional, and always at the risk of gender assessment. To the question
‘can we ever not do gender?’, they answer in the negative: ‘Insofar as a
society is partitioned by “essential” differences between women and men
and placement in a sex category is both relevant and enforced, doing
gender is unavoidable’ (ibid.: 137). Finally, Esther Newton’s Mother
Camp (1979) had inestimable significance for Butler’s thesis that gender
is drag, an imitation of the normative ideal. I discuss Newton’s influence
in Chapter 3.
4. Gender Trouble is organised around distinctions that play a funda-
mental role in the history of philosophical thought. On a closer look,
it operates with quite a few of them, such as being/becoming; being/
acting; essence/existence; thing in itself/phenomenon; essence/appear-
ance; original/copy; inside/outside; contingent/necessary; natural/artifi-
cial; nature/construction; determinism/freedom.
5. In Gender Trouble, the notion of gender seems problematic; it makes
trouble and gets into it, because of its reduction to two genders that,
in fact, simply reinstates the binarity of sex (together with its fateful-
ness). Gender Trouble wishes to liberate gender from binarity, or from
counting (Butler never cared about the possible number of genders, or to
increase it), because identitarian formations of gender bring about new
exclusions and, with them, also newer forms of violence. In its later itera-
tions, especially in Undoing Gender, gender will function as a designa-
tion that is far more expansive and capacious, as it is by that time entirely
untied from sex. ‘To assume that gender always and exclusively means
the matrix of the “masculine” and “feminine” is precisely to miss the
critical point that the production of that coherent binary is contingent,
that it comes at a cost, and that those permutations of gender which do
not fit the binary are as much a part of gender as its most normative

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instance’ (UG: 42). Thus, gender functions as the mechanism by which

feminine and masculine are produced, naturalised and normalised in
their exclusionary binarity, but it can also serve for the denaturalisation
and de-normalisation of that same binarity.

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 Chapter 3

Agency

Performativity as an Account of Agency

The theory of performativity has always been almost automatically
linked to the performativity of gender. Gender is, as we have seen,
one – albeit extremely powerful – norm that in multiple ways condi-
tions the lives of the bodies in the world given to us long before we
are capable of being autonomous. However, the idea that we do or
craft our bodies into genders, that the reality of our bodies is the
reality of our acts, unmoored from any givens, has from the very
start demanded elaborate theorisation of what it means to act. On
several occasions, Judith Butler has claimed that performativity is an
account or a theory of agency (Butler 2009b: i; GT: xxv). Drawing
on the notion that Butler’s philosophy is an insurrection at the level
of ontology, we can say that the account of agency she has attempted
to offer refers to the crucial question of how reality might be remade
(PL: 33).
The theory of agency can also be read as Butler’s theory of the
subject. This is why we must begin with the vexed debate on volun-
tarism and determinism – the unsolicited legacy of Gender Trouble –
which further splintered into debates on subject constitution and the
character of the agent. The debate revolves around two questions:
does Butler’s notion of agency enforce a subject who freely decides
with which norm to comply with today and which to violate tomor-
row? Or, contrarily, to what extent is the social character of reality
permissive of a free action, if ‘the social conditions of my existence
are never fully willed by me, and there is no agency apart from such
conditions and their unwilled effects’ (FoW: 171)? The third issue, to
which we will return in the latter part of this chapter, is how indi-
vidualist this account of agency is, if it is bodies that act, but their
acting is in some crucial sense a ‘shared experience and “collective
action”’ (Butler 1988: 525)?
With her rejection of both biological and social determinism
(GT: 10), yet without an unambiguous answer to the question of

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what urges us to act the way we do, Butler encountered accusations

of radical voluntarism: if there are no internal restrictions preventing
us acting as we please, we may act in whatever way we like. This is,
for example, how Elspeth Probyn described the early celebration and
appropriation of Butler’s argument. We can have whatever type of
gender we want, we wear it as drag and there are as many genders as
there are people, ‘in short, the sort of feel-good gender discourse at
large’ (Probyn 1995: 79).
Although such a conclusion certainly produced many liberat-
ing effects, the theory of performativity is more than a superficial
reformulation of a Sartrean radically free actor. Doing is indeed
crucial for it, and the possibility to do differently is crucial for its
larger aims at social transformation. However, Butler was very cau-
tious with the first principle of existentialism according to which
‘man’ is nothing but the sum of his actions, who, when choosing
himself, consciously, intentionally and with total responsibility
chooses mankind (Sartre 2007: 37, 25). Beauvoirian remodelling
of the existentialist subject, who from then on became gendered,
stood in the way of an unmoored, unconditioned act. If we are the
sum of our actions, we are thus only in a conditioned way, where
what conditions us also provides us with the notion of ‘mankind’
that comes to us from elsewhere and with significant limitations. No
one is their own exclusive source: we only become in a social world
that was already there when we were born into it. With advanced
technologies, we begin to become even literally before we come
into the world. With ultrasound, for example, we are gendered –
socially defined – before we even have a body of our own (which
in some parts of the world, where a male child is favoured, might
even prevent someone coming into the world). Clearly, then, we are
the actors of our existence – this is the very essence of performativ-
ity – but we are at the same time conditioned and constituted by the
world in which we act. The notion of the social constitution of the
act stands in the way of both radical voluntarism (I wake up and
choose the body in which I will leave the bed), and radical determin-
ism (something in me, anatomy which is my destiny, or something
outside of me, an unbendable web of norms, precludes any kind of
agency I might have).
In order to counter the argument from radical voluntarism,
Butler develops a complex conception of performativity, expand-
ing the initial Foucauldian frame of discursive norms to integrate
Austin’s theory of speech acts, Derrida’s understanding of iterability,

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Althusser’s notion of interpellation and Lacan’s conception of the

symbolic. The performative subject of agency appears neither as
radically free nor determined, but as constituted. The constitution of
the subject is markedly social in kind. Thus, before we proceed to the
concept of performativity, let us first briefly consider the notion of
the social, especially since in Butler’s early work it appeared in differ-
ent guise (see Campbell 2002; Lloyd 2009).
Initially, Butler spoke of ‘the political and cultural intersections’
in which gender is ‘invariably produced and maintained’ (GT: 4–5).
Gender appeared as the cultural interpretation of sex, as the cultural
norm that provides cultural intelligibility and demands cultural
transformation. Appropriating the language of feminist theory, in
which nature was pitted against culture and which fitted well with
the general academic jargon of the time, the language of Gender
Trouble and, to lesser extent, Bodies that Matter, remained ‘cul-
tural’. ‘Culture’ encompasses various discourses though which norms
speak to us, make us understand ourselves and the world around
us, and reiterate what we understand. It encompasses daily rituals,
some of which have institutional form. It manifests itself in the law’s
binding and prohibitive force, in scientific truths, religious beliefs and
practices, and so forth. But, whatever form it takes, by being discur-
sive the norm is always in language.
A certain movement from ‘discourse’ to ‘language’ would gradu-
ally put the notion of the social in place of the cultural. The life of
bodies is marked by our linguistic existence: we require language in
order to be (ES: 1–2). Language functions as the relay of sociality, of
something markedly unchosen. Even before we begin to speak our
mother tongue, we are addressed and named, and as such we become
socially recognisable beings. To be addressed is a call to which we do
not always respond, nor always entirely intentionally. Further, there
is no intention in adopting a language, nor do we choose the names
we adopt with it. Language positions and subjectivises us. The subject
appears through language as a social being: I speak, but through me
it is language that speaks (Olson and Worsham 2000: 738). Once we
become self-conscious, as thinking and acting beings, our conscious-
ness and volitions remain equally constituted by a plethora of norma-
tive discourses, which impacts how our understanding is formatted,
how we think of and read reality. The social thus refers to that which
belongs to us, although we never chose it. An unchosen array of
apprehensions and affects is what constitutes us as social thinking
and acting beings, together with various other forms of dependencies

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(on other people, relations, institutional support, infrastructure),

which Butler later develops in her social ontology:

The language we have for what is most intimately our own is already
given to us from elsewhere. This means that in the most intimate encoun-
ters with ourselves, the most intimate moments of disclosure, we call
upon a language that we never made in order to say who we are. In this
sense, we are exposed to the social, impinged upon by the social, in ways
that precede my doing, but any doing that might come to be called my
own is dependent upon this very unchosen domain. (Reddy and Butler
2004: 116–17)

Our acts are bodily and linguistic. Moreover, they are linguistic as
bodily, because ‘speaking is itself a bodily act’ (ES: 10; UG: 172).
Whatever agency we have, we have it as embodied beings that are
socially constituted in and through language. It is in this vein that we
should understand Butler’s appropriation of Austin’s theory of the
speech act into linguistic agency, performativity as citationality, and
the double movement of performativity that takes place always and
only in the domain of the social.

Citationality: Agency under Constraint

The notion of performativity has a specific conceptual history, most
commonly referring to John Austin’s seminal work How to Do
Things with Words. Austin differentiated between the descriptive
statements and ones that do things. The first type of the statements
would be, ‘This is my wife’ or ‘I have put a bet that it will rain tomor-
row’. But statements such as ‘I take this woman to be my wife’ or ‘I
bet £5 it will rain tomorrow’ are not descriptive or constative, and
cannot be said to be true or false. These sentences offer no descrip-
tion of what one is doing – their utterance is in itself a sort of doing
(a wedding, or a bet). Since they perform an action and, through this
action, produce certain immediate effects in reality, Austin calls such
utterances performatives (Austin 1962: 5–7). Performatives can have
force and referent value – they can be felicitous – only in appropri-
ate circumstances that have a ceremonial or ritual character, as they
fall under the domain of conventions (ibid.: 18–19). Let us briefly
consider an utterance performative of a wedding. ‘I take this woman
to be my wife’ produces concrete effects when uttered under certain
conditions: during a wedding ceremony, in the presence of a priest or
a registrar, if uttered by a man (a condition at the time when Austin

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gave his lectures, a universally valid rule until recently), if the man
saying it is not already in a binding relation with another woman, if
the woman he ‘takes to be his wife’ is not his mother, sister, daugh-
ter. Lastly, such an utterance does something only in a world of con-
ventions in which it can actually bring about that some two persons,
previously random individuals, become one person before God and
in law, as had been the case for centuries. The utterance accumulates
its authority (Butler 1993b: 19), and each of its repetitions functions
as a layer which provides its newer iterations with performative
power (Derrida 1988: 15; FoW: 168).
Austin’s theory of the speech acts was, however, not among the
sources for Butler when she first formulated her understanding of
performative acts (Butler 1988), but rather came to her through
Derrida’s reading of Kafka’s ‘Vor dem Gesetz’ (GT: xv; FCR: 134;
Bell 1999). Taking a cue from Derrida, Butler shows no interest in
a ‘fantasy of sovereign power in speech’ (Bell 1999: 164; ES: 48), or
in the fact that I, the subject of the utterance, do something with the
words when I utter them: for example, that I, a man, say the words ‘I
take this woman to be my wife’, through which I become a husband.
The dimension of ‘my’ intention – I want to get married, therefore,
I have to say, and I do indeed say the proper words in appropriate
circumstances – is less significant than the citational character of the
speech act enacted by a supposedly free will. Discursive practices
that enact what they name outlive the ‘discursive event’ of an act and
surpass any intentions the speakers might have had. Although the
intention does not disappear completely, it ceases to be conceived as
capable of governing the entire scene or system of discursive practices
(Derrida 1988: 18).
The performative dimension of the acts, in the Nietzschean sense,
reveals not the doer but the doing. The instance of my speech act cites
all previous performative instances of that act, becoming intermixed
with its innumerable iterations. That iterability, the fact that what
is said/done has been said/done innumerable times, is what gives
authority to what I have said/done. In other words, the performa-
tive does something, enacts or produces what it names, because it is
uttered again and again, and not because there is a subject who utters
it. The theory of performativity, which thus foregrounds the doing,
also implies a certain critique of the subject (Butler 2010: 150).
Unlike constatives that can be true or false, performatives behave
like all conventional acts, which for Austin means that they can
be done properly, or they may have infelicitous effects, failing to

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create some intended state of affairs. The notion of failure is impor-

tant for Butler, but in a very Derridean sense, where it is not only
a possible possibility, but a necessary one. Failure is, in fact, what
enables felicitous or successful performatives (Derrida 1988: 15).
Now, if failures have such a constitutive role for the production of
the successful acts and thus for the upholding of the entire system
of conventional signification, it becomes clear why their unravelling
through parody of ‘felicitous’ performatives has had such allure
(and to which the whole debate on agency in Butler has very often
been reduced [Magnus 2006; Kim 2007: 97; Hood-Williams and
Harrison 1998]).
However, the idea of failure had far more encompassing conse-
quences for the theory of performativity – both in terms of subject
constitution and the significance of agency. Namely, citationality is
always an inherently incomplete process. ‘Performativity never fully
achieves its effect, and so in this sense “fails” all the time; its failure
is precisely what necessitates its reiterative temporality’ (Butler 2010:
153). As it takes place only in a mode of endless repetition, per-
formativity is never successful in any definitive way. Thus, although
repetitions produce sedimentation, congealment, ossification, from
which they draw their performative authority, this authority is not
incontestable. Its constitutive contestability is what requires ever
more repetition, through which authority of citation gets renewed as
recited. The ‘necessary possibility’ of failure within the performative
structure is crucial for Butler’s understanding of agency.
In addition, citationality expands the Nietzschean notion of doing
into a countless series of acts, through which the subject gets recon-
stituted time and again. If performance could be taken as a singular
act, performativity is never reducible to one act alone. Citationality
shifts the emphasis from the volitional subject who does the citing, to
the acts of citation. An act of uttering the sentence ‘I take this woman
to be my wife’, which in correct circumstances for centuries estab-
lished monogamous marriage between persons of opposite sexes,
assumes reiteration of the norm, a series of its repetitions – countless
utterances of the matching sentence through which countless mar-
riages began. Who was the initiator, the first mover or creator of that
history, when and why it began, is impossible to say with certainty
(UG: 52). Iterability or citationality can indeed be seen as the opera-
tion of ‘metalepsis by which the subject who “cites” the performa-
tive is temporarily produced as the belated and fictive origin of the
performative itself’ (ES: 49).

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The performative is then ‘not a singular act by an already estab-

lished subject, but one of the powerful and insidious ways in which
subjects are called into being from diffuse social quarters, inaugu-
rated into sociality by a variety of diffuse and powerful interpella-
tions’ (ES: 160). Applied to bodies becoming gendered, or to gender
performativity, this linguistic conception means that there are certain
bodily acts and norms that are cited by these very acts. What I take to
be my sex, the very interior of my body, is a series of reiterations of
hegemonic norm, ‘conventions’, into which I have been socially inter-
pellated. The norm reiterates itself each time, from the ultrasound
examination when the sex of the foetus is first determined, and in all
subsequent invocations of that same sex, for example, for adminis-
trative purposes. These regulatory moments are not just boxes to be
ticked. In addition to our name, date of birth and place of residence,
they in fact index that we are something or, rather, someone capable
of entering institutions, various kinds of relations or contracts. The
instances in which we appear as somehow ‘sexed’ re-establish us as
persons and provide us with a position in social reality. We may or
may not be able to confirm this ascribed status: sometimes because
we are incapable of doing so (as is the case with the newborn); some-
times because there is no good option to circle or tick; sometimes
because it is done without our consent by others through whom the
authority speaks.
The sexed I performs, but not intentionally. The one who per-
forms the sex is not a rational and self-actualising subject who is
the cause of its becoming, repeating sexedness knowingly and with
purpose. There is no subject behind the repetitive acts, orchestrat-
ing or, as Derrida would say, governing the scene of its becoming.
It is in fact the repetitions that enable the very constitution of the
subject. Even more importantly, the time of this constitution is not
external to the acts. The acts do not remain self-identical as they
are repeated in time (BTM: 244): the subject is always constituted
only temporarily – it gets constituted time and again through per-
formative repetition. (The possibility of an ‘infelicitous repetition’
is, in this process, a necessary possibility and, as we will see later
on, an occasion for subversion.) In that sense, the subject is neither
given in advance, in some solid and unchanging way, as the one
who first is and then does, nor is it constituted once and for all by
some, so to say, great performative act that would bring its perfor-
mance to an end. We repeat the norms of gender in order to live
until we die.

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The introduction of citationality provided an answer for some-

thing that seemed insufficiently clear in the early outline of the
theory of performativity. There were both hegemonic norms and
the possibility of resistance, but no explanation for what mediates
between them. As Amy Allen claims, ‘the upshot of this problem is
that readers of Gender Trouble are left with the paradoxical feeling
that resistance is either completely impossible or too easy’ (Allen
1998: 461). With citationality, doing one’s gender ceased to be think-
able as a singular willed act. The ‘doer’ of the norms is not a ‘great
performer’ who performs their gender on the stage of the world, self-
consciously choosing to liberate the world from the shackles of sex.
The doer is performed by their doing through a ritualised recital of
norms, which – to have any existence – require citation, reproduc-
tion, reiteration, that is, embodiment and incorporation. In Butler’s
version of performativity, it is not only that there is no doer behind
the deed: there are neither doers nor norms without the repetitive
doing under constraint.
Constraint is, as we have already seen, the crucial notion in which
bodily, psychic and wider social limits converge to curb the wild
freedom of action. Butler claims that constraint is what impels and
sustains performativity (BTM: 60), what enables the subject consti-
tution, but also keeps us opaque to ourselves (Giving an Account of
Oneself, 2005 [hereafter GAO]: 20), incapable of giving a full and
seamless account of how we began and continue to become. The
unconscious losses, produced by the early interpellations through
which we enter sociality, are an important site of storage of irrecov-
erable constraints. As Letitia Sabsay (2016: 54) claims, ‘we could
say that it is precisely the efficacy of the performativity of power in
the unconscious that reifies gender and sexuality as identities at the
imaginary level with such pertinence’.
Psychoanalysis thus seems to be a logical ally of any attempt to
show that the subject is not self-identical and self-transparent, and
does not act as a sovereign master of their intentions. It appeared in
this form in Bodies that Matter, where Lacan’s notion of the sym-
bolic was deployed to counter the idea of the ‘great performer’. Now,
although a book entirely devoted to Butler’s peculiar approach to
psychoanalysis has yet to be written, the notion of constraint would
certainly play a very prominent role in it. At present, I can only
touch upon one aspect of Butler’s use of Lacan’s understanding of
language, which has allowed her to expand the linguistic structure of
performativity, and is crucial for her understanding of agency.

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The symbolic in Lacan functions as the domain of the Law that

regulates desire and the linguistic structure that establishes univer-
sal conditions for communication. For Lacan, the unconscious is
structured like language, to which we all have access, but which
none created. Once one enters into language, accepting its rules
and, through them, the dictates of society, one is able to begin
to communicate with others. Entry into the ‘symbolic order’ is
made possible by the acceptance of the law, which for Lacan is the
Law of the father. ‘It is in the name of the father that we must rec-
ognize the support of the symbolic function which, from the dawn
of the history, has identified his person with the figure of the law’
(Lacan 1977: 67). Entry into the symbolic order is the moment of
normative constitution of the sexed subject within language, as
‘it consists in a series of demands, taboos, sanctions, injunctions,
prohibitions, impossible idealizations, and threats’ (BTM: 69–70).
All these appear in the form of constraining performative speech
acts (‘you must not’, ‘you ought to’, ‘you have to’, ‘if . . . then’)
endowed with the power to produce or materialise properly sexed
subjects. In this sense, ‘sex’ is not something one is or has, but
a symbolic position assumed under the threat of castration and
punishment – that is, under constraint operative within the very
structure of language.
The notion of constraint proved useful in explaining why agency
cannot be, to quote Allen, ‘too easy’, but Lacan’s binding under-
standing of the symbolic threatened to make it completely impos-
sible. Thus, as good as this link with Lacan was for a defence against
accusations of voluntarism, Butler had begun reading Lacan counter
Lacan himself already in Bodies That Matter. Under the influence of
Monique Wittig’s understanding of language (GT: 157), Butler rede-
fines the symbolic performatively in order to emancipate bodies from
their positions determined by the markedly heterosexist structure
of the symbolic. With this gesture, the Law of the Father becomes
deprived of its fixed position, conceived as prior to and independent
from any possible recitals of the Law. The assumption of a sex thus
ceases to be understood as a singular act, a one-time entry-card into
the social world. For Butler it is an interminable practice of citing
the norm of ‘sex’. What was supposedly there ‘from the dawn of
history’ is recited anew with each repetitive reestablishment of sexed
subjects, and is itself a product of citations that precede and outlive
time-limited attempts of mortal subjects to approximate and embody
the Law.

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In Lacan, the symbolic is the universal, timeless and irrevers-

ible structure that governs the social domain of the temporary,
ephemeral and volatile embodiments and incorporations. As such,
it is of ‘limited use for a theory that seeks to understand the condi-
tions under which the social transformation of gender is possible’
(UG: 44). In Butler, on the other hand, the symbolic too has a per-
formative history, and is performed in time. Instead of being fixed in
a timeless structure, the positions that produce the subject as sexed
function as the citational practices that take place within constitu-
tive constraints. Reinstating the subject-position reinstates both the
position itself and the Law that positions it. Thus, not only do both
sex and Law depend on their repetition and recital, but neither ‘can
be said to preexist their various embodyings and citings’ (BTM: 71).
Instead of being conceived as impervious to a reiterative replay and
displacement, the performatively elaborated symbolic appears as the
sedimentation of social practices (Antigone’s Claim, 2002a [hereafter
AC]: 19; UG: 44).
The theory of performativity dismisses the strict distinction
between the symbolic and social law, introducing contingency and
historicity in the Lacanian frame of structural necessity. If the sym-
bolic/linguistic structure is temporally renewable, then the logic of
performativity applies to it; and this produces the possibility of its
amendment (Olson and Worsham 2000: 739). This certainly does
not mean that the constraint disappears and limitations crumble.
Instead, it means that there is space for something new and incalcu-
lable, performable from the scene of constraint itself. Not only does
the possibility of agency appear within the less inflexible domain of
the norm, ‘which can never be fully extricated from its instantiation’
(UG: 52), but an independent ontological status of the norm itself is
negated, as the norm is only produced in its application. The norm
is dependent on its being acted out in social practice and through
the daily rituals of bodily life. It ‘is (re)produced through its embodi-
ment, through the acts that strive to approximate it, through the
idealizations reproduced in and by those acts’ (UG: 48).
The effective scope and importance of norms cannot be diminished
– they have the power to define what is real and what remains in the
shadowy regions of ontology. However, whenever a new citational
chain is set in motion, each new citation of the norm opens itself to a
necessary possibility of a failure, a slippage, a displacement, a wrong
citation. Each thus reveals the social life of the norm, a life that is
contingent, contextual, historically situated. It is precisely repetition

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that reveals the absence of destiny behind the norm, as either ‘natural
body’ or calcified structure of the symbolic.

Contingent Foundations: Is There a Subject behind Agency?

Gender performativity was from the very start interpreted in two
opposite ways: one interpretation allowed for the ‘great performer’,
the other warned against the total abolishment of agency. If the first
gave rise to a complex development of the theory of performativ-
ity, the latter idea, registered, for example, in Feminist Contentions,
stimulated further elaborations of Butler’s understanding of the
subject formation and agency – importantly underscoring their con-
tingent foundations.
The book Feminist Contentions presents an engaging form of role
play among friends who shared an interest in philosophy and femi-
nism, but seemed to differ on the question of postmodernism, one of
the burning issues of the early 1990s. The contentions were many,
but the central one, as Linda Nicholson noted introducing the debate,
revolved around issues of subjectivity and agency. Seyla Benhabib
took on the role of critic of postmodernism, understood as a quietist
stance that undermines the ‘theory which examines present condi-
tions from the perspective of utopian visions’ (Nicholson 1995: 4), a
theory that claims to lay the foundations of agency. Despite her con-
sistent dismissal of the caricatural moniker, Butler has observed that
she appears as the symptom of ‘postmodernism’ (FCR: 133), and is
therefore given the role of questioning the very possibility of agency.
Although closer to Benhabib, Nancy Fraser seems to be positioned
halfway, with a tentatively conciliatory role, while Drucilla Cornell,
who was a latecomer to the discussion, was supposed to provide a
certain balance to this ‘gang of four’ (Nicholson 1995: 1). The heart
of these contentions, however, seems to be in an exchange between
Benhabib and Butler. Benhabib begins the discussion with three
deaths – of man, history and metaphysics – cautioning that feminist
theory needs to be wary of their strong, postmodernist formula-
tions. In her rendering, Butler appears to be the paradigmatic backer
of the first death, that of man. What is the connection between the
‘postmodernist’ variant of Nietzschean–Foucauldian announcement
of this death and agency, and how might performativity become
emblematic of its abolishment?
A feminist, Benhabib is ineluctably critical of the western philo-
sophical subject, yet is nonetheless concerned to keep some of its

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traditional attributes, primarily self-reflexivity, the capacity to act

on principles, rational accountability of one’s actions and ability
to project into the future. The subject Benhabib wishes to preserve
for feminism needs to be endowed with autonomy, rationality and,
a fortiori, agency. The subject is, obviously, a (genderless) ‘man’,
a ‘better’, upgraded version of the old humanist subject which, if
extended enough, may also include women (and if need be, other
minority realities as well). Again, as a feminist, Benhabib assumes
that a subject is radically situated in ‘various social, linguistic, and
discursive practices’ (Benhabib 1995a: 20), but that going beyond
these conditions is precisely what attests to its possession of agency.
In her view, the postmodernist subject stands on the opposite side,
dissolved in yet ‘another position in language’. Along with this dis-
solution, ‘disappear of course concepts of intentionality, accountabil-
ity, self-reflexivity, and autonomy’ (ibid., italics mine). Having lost
all human qualities, this postmodernist ‘being’ is just a grammatical
construct entangled in the chains of significations and deprived of
its role of initiator and author. In addition, a feminist appropriation
of the trope ‘no doer behind the deed’ works against the fragile and
tenuous women’s sense of selfhood. It bids farewell to the self as the
subject of a life-narrative, which can have detrimental consequences
to female agency (ibid.: 21–2). The theory of performativity seems
especially worrisome to Benhabib:
If we are no more than the sum total of the gendered expressions we
perform, is there ever any chance to stop the performance for a while,
to pull the curtain down, and let it rise only if one can have a say in the
production of the play itself? (Ibid.: 21)

Women would not fare much better, fears Benhabib, even if this
(Goffmanesque, not Butler’s) model of performativity is replaced
by the speech act model, because the linguistic constitution of the
subject (woman, gender identity) abolishes the human side of the
subject:
What does it mean ‘to be constituted by language’? Are linguistic prac-
tices the primary site where we should be searching for an explication of
gender constitution? What about other practices like family structures,
child-rearing patterns, children’s games, children’s dress habits, school-
ing, cultural habitus etc.? Not to mention of course the significance of the
words, deeds, gestures, phantasies, and the bodily language of parents,
and particularly of the mother in the constitution of the gender identity of
the child. (Benhabib 1995b: 109)

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Furthermore, it is unclear what ‘normative vision of agency follows

from, or is implied by this theory of performativity’ (ibid.: 111): the
subject is entangled in power relations, as a subject-position in the
web of discourses, but it remains uncertain how and to what purpose
these power relations could or should be opposed.
The ontogenetic understanding of subject-constitution advanced
by Benhabib is, of course, not in opposition to the idea of the stylised
repetition of bodily acts, since the bodies repeat or cite the norms
that come from elsewhere – including unchosen family structures and
patterns, games, cultural habitus and cultural assumptions. The true
point of collision refers to the ‘place’ of the subject who, for Benhabib,
seems to be somehow able to step out of the conditions that constitute
it, even transcend them. When the curtain is pulled down, Benhabib’s
version of the subject will have some other place to ‘go’, to spare time
for reflection and decision-making, in order to potentially change
what is restrictive about the conditions that constitute it. The power
to leave them behind, if only for a moment, and to reappear when one
has a certain say in the production of this play of subject-constitution,
equals autonomy. There is, therefore, no possibility of emancipation
without the pre-Nietzschean figure of the doer behind the deed, as it
seems to be the necessary foundation of agency.
Contrary to this, the ‘place’ of the doer is, for Butler, in the doing
itself. The subject becomes. It neither has a stable existence prior to
or apart from the social field within which it operates (comprising
all the practices Benhabib mentions, which also appear in linguistic
form), nor is it endowed with agency by virtue of being the subject
first, or by being rational, autonomous, and so on. It is false to
presume that ‘a) agency can only be established through recourse
to a prediscursive “I”, even if that “I” is found in the midst of a
discursive convergence’ (GT: 195), or, in Benhabib’s register, an ‘I’
that precedes its ontogenesis, as some sort of irreducible remainder
immune to the effects of practices that shape it. Yet, it is equally
false to presume ‘b) that to be constituted by discourse is to be deter-
mined by discourse, where determination forecloses the possibility of
agency’ (GT: 195). The subject becomes in and through the act. This
places agency within concrete conditions, demanding no metaphysi-
cal foundations as its guarantee. Conditions – everything that enables
and constrains the subject in its constitution or becoming – are them-
selves the contingent foundations of its agency.
Claiming that the subject becomes says nothing about its qualities.
Who is the subject of agency? Is it a wo/man, flesh and blood, or a

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mere position in language? If the latter, as Benhabib seems to suggest,

the subject is irrevocably deprived of its humanness, which was
indeed recognised by some as Butler’s ‘antihumanism’ (Lovibond
1996; cf. Ingala 2018a). Perhaps it will suffice to say that the subject
is simply anyone who says ‘I’, when referring to themselves. The
I-sign belongs to no one: until I say, referring to myself, ‘I, Jane; I,
Julia; I, Adriana’, it remains anonymous, dissociable from anyone
who may invoke it to refer to oneself as the subject. But each time the
subject positions itself in the otherwise anonymous linguistic place of
the ‘I’, it is constituted – the speaking body becomes a subject. And
each time the ‘I’ is invoked, in using it, I cite all prior uses of this
alluring word which, although most intimate, most ‘mine’, belongs
to no one in particular. For Butler, this ‘is precisely the condition of
agency within discourse [. . .] That the subject is that which must be
constituted again and again implies that it is open to formations that
are not fully constrained in advance’ (FCR: 135).
With this in mind, we can say that the subject is indeed an embod-
ied someone whose body is a situation of possible interpretations of
cited meanings, and flesh and blood to which this I repeatedly refers,
each time reconstituting itself anew. The subject, the ‘I’, acts at times
with certain intentions, which sometimes even prove to be quite
autonomous; but these acts, of whatever kind, are never extricable
from the conditions that constitute that very acting – be they linguis-
tic or more broadly social. Acting is conditioned by powers that are
not external to agency. The actor cannot stop the performance and
demand the curtain be pulled down. There is no possibility of stand-
ing outside the discursive conventions or power relations by which
the ‘I’ is constituted, no possibility to will away, however strong our
will, all the norms that constitute embodiment. Our only possibility
is to work through the very conventions by which we are enabled
(FCR: 136), the ones that put us on the stage where family structures,
patterns of upbringing, children’s games, are played out, where we
are dressed in certain ways and where the ‘stage’ represents our cul-
tural habitus, with words, gestures and fantasies an integral part of
the script.
Clearly, Butler departs from the dominant conceptions of agency
relying on a self-referential, intentional subject, bearer of free
will whose agency belongs to it as an internal – and potentially
­emancipatory – feature, untouched by the powers that remain fun-
damentally external to it. Surely, such an emancipatory model of
agency served as an inspiration for many oppressed groups, women

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in particular. For Butler, however, this model fails to answer the

question: why should agency, as well as the subject itself, be pre-
supposed – secured in advance – rather than being accounted for
by a complex interrelation of powers, discourses and practices that
partake in its constitution? There is nothing in the subject that would
be emancipatory per se, as its internal feature, that is prior to or apart
from the fields of power in which any kind of emancipation may and
does take place. The issue important for Butler regards the

concrete conditions under which agency becomes possible, [which is] a

very different question than the metaphysical one, what is the self such
that its agency can be theoretically secured prior to any reference to
power [. . .] What this means politically is that there is no opposition to
power which is not itself part of the very workings of power, that agency
is implicated in what it opposes, that ‘emancipation’ will never be the
transcendence of power as such. (FCR: 137)

What is required for agency to have emancipatory or transformative

dimensions is ‘the difficult labor of deriving agency from the very
power regimes which constitute us, and which we oppose’ (FCR:
172) – to the extent that we oppose them. Whether we oppose them
depends on the circumstances: the specific conflicts, institutional
arrangements and historical conditions – the contingent foundations
which galvanise transformative agency.

How Does the Subject Become?

The move from performance to performativity – with the introduc-
tion of citationality and constraint – complicated the initial relation-
ship between bodies and norms. The question of acts, or agency, of
repetition under constraint and the possibilities of social transforma-
tion, engendered a very specific understanding of the subject as well.
Thus, before we go on to elaborate the transformative agency in
Butler, we need to say more about the subject that emerges together
with its contingent foundations.
The preoccupation with the subject precedes Butler’s involve-
ments with gender. The performative theory of the subject – which
of necessity also appears as the critique of subject (Butler 1993a,
2010) – is a complex and composite theoretical enterprise. The
notion of becoming is central to it, fusing Hegel’s journeying subject
with a circumscribed process of becoming a woman (or the Other
of the subject), developed by Beauvoir. Phenomenology provided

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the notion of unbroken continuity of subject constitution, in which

the subject does not appear as an actor who willingly decides on the
process of its constitution, but is the activity of constitution itself
(Käll 2015: 29). Acts of the constitution never happen in a vacuum,
but only within the field of power relations: the subject becomes
through the process of subjectivation (assujettissement). The limita-
tions of Foucault’s understanding of the subject’s discursive consti-
tution are mediated by Althusser’s understanding of interpellation
(Bell 1999: 164). The specific elaboration of Freud’s understanding
of melancholy provides Butler with a notion of subject constitution
through pre-emptive losses (PLP: 132–3). From Subjects of Desire to
The Psychic Life of Power, Butler’s theory of the subject rests on an
account of a desiring subject and presumes that the logic of identity
is inherently exclusionary, which produces, as Jana Sawicki (2005:
392) notes, a ‘queer subject of history, a permanent principle of
destabilization at the heart of the subject’.
In Butler’s first text on performative acts, she claims:

As a public action and performative act, gender is not a radical choice or

project that reflects a merely individual choice, but neither is it imposed
or inscribed upon the individual, as some post-structuralist displacements
of the subject would contend. The body is not passively scripted with
cultural codes, as if it were a lifeless recipient of wholly pre-given cultural
relations. But neither do embodied selves pre-exist the cultural conven-
tions which essentially signify bodies. Actors are always already on the
stage, within the terms of the performance. (Butler 1998: 526)

The subject of this passage is, obviously, the body, an embodied ‘I’
that acts, and gender is what this acting body performs. The body/
the subject does not pre-exist its acts, nor is it passively receiving the
norms that have an existence of their own, separate from acts. The
subject constitution takes place in social reality, which is the only
reality in which subjects, embodied and situated in the social world
and in relation to others, come into being (Käll 2015: 28). The
subject may indeed sometimes choose to act in this or that way,
stylising its embodiment within the limits of the possible or, at times,
even breaking with them. No one, however, chooses the reality that
enables its constitution. Whenever we act, we are already on stage,
that is, in an unchosen social world. The performance is not the
subject’s ‘project’, in the existentialist sense of total self-constitution
as a choice. Referring, quite interestingly, to the unnamed poststruc-
turalist position, this early exposition of the double movement tells

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us that performance is also not entirely imposed either, such that it

determines the subject. Acting takes place within the terms of the
performance – the field of constitutive possibilities that depend on
repetition, reappropriation and renewal for their existence. Norms
too depend for their reproduction on bodies that act.
The mainstay of Butler’s theory of the subject is, therefore, that
there is no subject prior to or apart from acting. The subject is an
effect of its bodily and linguistic acts, as much as it may be the cause
of some new string of actions. Performativity goes against one-
directionality of the subject, as it always involves a certain double
movement: I acts and is acted upon by the norms that enable its very
acting.
The subject-constitution is not limited to a certain portion of time.
For example, gender constitution does not happen only under the
influence of practices to which we are exposed in early childhood.
The subject gets reconstituted in time, at no point taking a ‘final’
form, conclusively crafted once and for all (Butler 2007a: 182). This
crucially temporal dimension – of becoming, rather than being –
maintains an inherent instability at the heart of the subject.
That I act, that ‘my’ repetitions constitute me as a subject, through
endless acts performed by ‘my’ body, also says something about
the authorship and ownership over these acts that are ‘mine’. I get
constituted as a subject by turning the norm into that which belongs
to who I am, and I am compelled to continue doing so in order to
remain ‘myself’. Materialising those possibilities that are there for
me, I become those possibilities, and I realise myself through what is
not exactly ‘mine’. This can be also described as a form of i­nstability
– or dependency – at the heart of the subject, which never really
comes to an end either.
Let us apply this to the constitution of the woman-subject. To
begin with, one is not born a woman. In a social world in which
gender binarity functions as the norm, what actually is born is a
miniscule human who will, over the course of their becoming, affirm
its humanness by becoming a woman. The physical act of emergence
into the world has a social form: the umbilical cord is cut, and the so-
called primary sexual characteristics of a newly born become observ-
able. A person announces the first social fact about the newborn
– ‘It’s a girl!’ – calling a woman into being. Before the birth of this
particular human, the ‘primary sexual characteristics’ have already
existed in the social register as a discursive form of naming and
norming. (The utterance ‘It’s a girl’ automatically also means ‘It’s not

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a boy’. The trouble is, of course, when it is neither, when the primary
sex characteristics are undefined or imprecise – when, in fact, there
is no differentia specifica at all.) The announcement has performa-
tive and interpellative force, if by interpellation we mean a discursive
production of the social subject (PLP: 5) through a discursive prac-
tice that produces what it names (BTM: xxi). In other words, long
before this concrete human becomes able to refer to herself as a girl
(to define herself as the subject of her gender, gender that ‘belongs’ to
her), it will be subjected to the norm that provides social intelligibil-
ity, enabling others – parents, custodians, carers, relatives, childmin-
ders, doctors – to situate it within the frame of social reality.
Becoming a girl-subject is also a taxing and uncertain early
achievement in the domain of the psyche effectuated by prohibi-
tions of certain kinds of attachment that produce the incorporation
of disavowed and unmourned losses. Through stylised repetition
– imitation and appropriation – of possibilities, she finds it possible
to respond to her social name, and the subject that addresses itself
as ‘I, the girl’ becomes constituted as the girl-subject. Becoming this
subject takes place within constraints: ‘not to be a boy’, not to be
‘ambivalent’, but to approximate an assumed status of the woman-
subject. However, although the constraints are rigid, and although
for a significant period of time they do not fall under the domain of
the girl-subject’s volition – a formative period of learning and adopt-
ing the codes of sociality and locating oneself within these frames
– they are, for that reason, not the structurally static features of the
self. Their dynamic nature is evident in the very necessity of their
constant renewal. ‘I perform (mainly unconsciously and implicitly)
that renewal in the repeated acts of my person [which later provides
and sustains the status of the girl-subject or woman-subject]. Even
though my agency is conditioned by those limitations, my agency
can also thematize and alter those limitations to some degree’ (Olson
and Worsham 2000: 739), but it can never abolish them entirely. The
process of becoming the woman-subject does not end with the end
of girlhood, or any other point in the life of a woman. She remains
attached to the norms that constitute her into a ‘she’, continuously
citing the norms of womanhood in order to live a legible, intelligible,
liveable life, until she dies.

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Agency, Power and Resistance

What are the implications for agency in this theory of the subject,
if agency is only possible ‘within the terms of performance’ (Butler
1998: 526)? As has been shown, the subject gets constituted
without a ‘place’ of shelter or freedom from power. This is indeed
a Foucauldian framework, to which Nancy Fraser (1995: 68) also
points during the philosophical exchange on the benefits of post-
modernism for feminism. If we follow Foucault, the story of power
is about the ‘different modes by which, in our culture, human beings
are made subjects’ (Foucault 2002b: 326). Butler agrees: ‘No indi-
vidual becomes a subject without first becoming subjected or under-
going “subjectivation”’ (PLP: 11). Subjectivation (assujettissement)
assumes that one becomes a subject only by subjection to power.
Power says no: it halts, prohibits, constrains us; and precisely in this
way also forms, delimits and animates within limits of the allowed.
The human addressed as a girl is limited (‘you are not a boy’, ‘don’t
act like a boy’, ‘girls don’t do that’), and simultaneously produced
into a girl-subject. Subjection to norms is the condition of possibility
for becoming subject/ed. It is a regulatory principle of the production
of the subject (PLP: 84; GAO: 17).
Agency is thus constituted by the very powers that enable the
becoming of a subject. However, the powers that condition the
subject do not deliver it ‘ready-made’, ‘finished’, in one go. The body
is not a lifeless recipient of power, but a site of its continuous trans-
fer – it acts and is acted upon. ‘Power happens to the body, but this
body is also the occasion where something unpredictable can happen
to power itself’ (Butler 2002b: 15), since the subject is always only
‘partially constituted, or sometimes constituted in ways that can’t
quite be anticipated’ (Bell 1999: 164). If power relations hold only
to the extent that they are performed, renewed by the daily rituals of
our bodily lives, it means that they are also open to the productive
and non-mechanical aspect of performance itself. Ultimately, a radi-
cally conditioned form of agency is possible due to this constitutive
incompleteness of the subject (PLP: 14–15).
Anxious to show that agency is counter to any notion of a vol-
untarist subject that exists apart from the regulatory norms it pro-
claims to oppose, Butler introduced the paradox of subjectivation,
claiming that the resisting subject is enabled by the norms it resists.
This constitutive constraint does not preclude agency, but it does
‘locate agency as a reiterative or rearticulatory practice, immanent

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to power, and not a relation of external opposition to power’

(BTM: xxiii).
What is agency, then? If the subject becomes by and through
acting, is it not, so to say, continuously agentic? Or, is agency some
specific quality of a resisting actor, which would be, for example,
Benhabib’s understanding? Is agency, for Butler, always already
there as a quality of iterable action, or is it reducible to resistance
only? She claims that it is precisely the ‘iterability of the subject that
shows how agency may well consist in opposing and transforming
the social terms by which it is spawned’ (PLP: 29). Saba Mahmood
once rightly noted that there are two simultaneous moves that Butler
seems to be making: agency is indeed located within the structure of
power itself, rather than in the rational, autonomous and therefore
agentic subject, but it still seems that resistance is its paradigmatic
instance. Thus, although the transcendental-humanist-liberal idea of
the subject is disputed by Butler’s understanding of subjection, ‘what
remains intact is the natural status accorded to the desire for resist-
ance to social norms, and the incarceration of the notion of agency
to the space of emancipatory politics’ (Mahmood 2001: 211).
Mahmood wonders what remains of agency if it is not equated
with a desire for resistance. This is an important question to which I
will return later in this chapter. For the time being, let us remain with
the designations Mahmood uses to describe Butler’s understanding
of agency. Can agency be identified with resistance, if not with the
social transformation itself? Does agency equal freedom? What kind
of politics is envisioned when we think of agency as political, and on
what normative grounds can such a politics be said to be transforma-
tive or emancipatory?
In laying down the contingent foundations of her theory of the
subject, through its various rearticulations and modifications, Butler
never entirely abandoned its Foucauldian set-up. She did not heed
Nancy Fraser’s early warning that such an adherence necessarily
stands in the way of normative thinking, that is, ‘her poststructuralist
Foucauldian framework [. . .] [is] structurally incapable of providing
satisfactory answers to the normative questions it unfailingly solicits’
(Fraser 1995: 68; similarly, Benhabib 1995b: 110; cf. Fraser 1996).
Butler disagreed: her essay on Foucault’s notion of critique (Butler
2001a), could be read as a longer affirmation of the importance of
‘Foucault’s contribution to normative theory, almost against the
normativists themselves’ (Zaharijević and Krstić 2018: 29–30). The
Foucauldian coupling of power and resistance – together with its

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specific normativity – remained ingrained in how Butler understood

agency.
In Foucault, power is irreducible to the figure of a mortal God,
sovereign or any general system of domination – these are ‘only
the terminal forms power takes’ (Foucault 1978: 92). ‘Society is
an archipelago of different powers’ (Foucault 2012), prohibitive
and enabling, productive and confrontational, intentional and non-
subjective (Foucault 1978: 94). Resolved to de-economise power, to
approach it not as a commodity that can be possessed, transferred
or alienated, Foucault defines it ‘as something that is exercised and
that exists only in action’ (Foucault 2003: 14). Power is everywhere:
diffused, proliferating, cutting through social relations. It is exercised
through and in relations; a search for the foundations of power –
‘power as such’, perfidiously concealed behind its own relations and
manipulating them according to some plan – is futile. Power has no
single source such as the state, the ruling class or patriarchy.
Yet, as much as it is an archipelago of powers, society is also an
archipelago of resistances. As they are myriad and interrelated in
myriad ways, there is no single locus of Power, there is no single
‘locus of great Refusal, the soul of revolt [. . .] source of all rebellions,
or pure law of the revolutionary’ (Foucault 1978: 96). For Foucault,
no one thing is solely of the order of oppression or solely of the order
of liberation (Foucault 1996b: 339). Equally, there is no pre-given,
privileged or single subject of resistance (Foucault 1980b: 208).
Resistances happen within concrete, given, limiting and en­ abling
conditions. If successful, resistances can cause the operation of
existing power relations to change, on a small or a large level. They
might lead to their redirection, restructuring or reversal. Still, they
never lead to an ultimate overthrow of power. No resistance has the
capacity to engender total freedom from power as such. Even when
particularly forceful and with far-ranging effects, resistances do not
do away with power, but create new power relations.
Resistances do not make us ultimately free or autonomous, but
do – to a point – desubjectivise. Resisting or opposing makes us,
in other words, critical towards being governed (Foucault 2007a).
Certainly, desubjectivisation is in itself neither ‘good’ nor ‘bad’: what
is transformative about it is that it opens up possibilities not previ-
ously disclosed, accessible or available to us.
Desubjectivisation is an ambivalent concept. It entails the possibil-
ity to become freer, but not free in any absolute sense. In Foucault,
freedom never arrives as a permanent and incontrovertible state

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upon the resolution of some ‘ultimate resistance’. No liberation

project can have entirely transparent, one-directional and calculable
effects, and no liberating process produces freedom as a final conse-
quence. Discussing gay communities and what would later emerge as
identity politics, Foucault once insisted that the victories won in the
1970s, however important, do not amount to freedom as such: what
was needed next was the creation of new forms of life, relationships,
through ethical, sexual and political choices (Foucault 1996b: 383).
Freedom is not vouched for by any liberationist project, nor is it
guaranteed by laws and institutions, because ‘“liberty” is what must
be exercised’ (Foucault 1996b: 339; cf. Birulés 2009; McWhorter
2013). Only such exercises can control the new power relations
introduced by liberations themselves (Foucault 1997b: 283–4).
Butler’s understanding of power and power relations is largely
compatible with Foucault’s, as she has insisted on various occasions.
Agency is, however, not a Foucauldian term, and its equation with
resistance complicates matters. In addition, freedom – a concept far
from univocal in Foucault himself – remains undefined in Butler.
She once referred to what freedom is not. Her refusal of ‘the classi-
cal liberal and existentialist model of freedom’ (GT: 169) was in a
sense Foucauldian, as it entailed the rejection of an assumed barrier
between the volitional subject untouched by power, and its ‘outside’,
infested with power. However, rejecting these models did not lead
her to embrace and further develop some other recognisable model
of freedom. Moya Lloyd noted that although politically commit-
ted to freedom, Butler remained silent on what it means to be free,
‘viewing judgements of this kind as the (provisional) outcome of
democratic contestation rather than the purpose of political theory.
Instead her aim, indeed the aim throughout her work is to uncover
how restrictive norms might be challenged’ (Lloyd 2007: 133). The
act of challenge, or the act of resistance, seems to be freeing, but it
does not amount to freedom as such. Freedom needs to be exercised
as a continual resistance to the restrictive norms.
Subversion has been frequently framed as the specifically Butlerian
form of challenge to norms. There were some who understood ‘more
subversive’ models of gender performance as prominent instances
of resistance, while others saw them as Butler’s recommendations
of patterns for simulation (Hennessy 2000). Butler certainly con-
tributed to shaping such views: several sentences after the stated
rejection of the models of freedom that are based on an impossible
fantasy of full-scale transcendence of power, she goes on to say: ‘In

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my view, the normative focus for gay and lesbian practice ought to
be on the subversive and parodic redeployment of power’ (GT: 169).
‘Normative focus’ and ‘ought to’ are strong formulations, and the
exactness with which she defines the subject of the said practices
leaves little room for ambivalence. However, even if we accept that
the queer subject – which did not yet ‘exist’ at the time of Gender
Trouble’s writing (partly because it would only be invented by this
book) – had a privileged position at the time of emergence of queer
theory, I wish to offer a somewhat different reading, one to which
Butler’s more recent work gives support.
Resistance is not a possibility restricted to any chosen subject.
It is, in contrast, available to all, opening up through the repetitive
stylisation of the body. Challenging the norms through which this
stylisation takes place, resisting our very becoming in a certain way,
means to question the terms by which one is constituted. If one is
constituted as abject, unreal, one certainly may have the urge to resist
such a constitutive social reality more than those who get a social
confirmation of their reality. This, ultimately, is what the insurrec-
tion at the level of the real is about, to which Butler is, to paraphrase
Lloyd, politically committed.
To redeploy and displace – Foucault’s spatial and strategic formu-
las which Butler often used to describe agency – is to work within
the very terms of performance (Butler 1998: 526). Redeploying and
displacing power relations means that resistance is exercised from
within the power relations themselves. Thus, to redeploy and dis-
place is what one can do in medias res. After all, Gender Trouble
urges us to focus on what can be done or enacted now, rejecting both
narratives proposing emancipation from within the past or a utopian
future out of reach. The search for an imagined past in which there
was no power, or a future where there will be only good power,
hinders us, albeit in different ways, from focusing on what is at hand:
to act politically and exercise political agency.

Repeating Differently: Rearticulation, Resignification

Philosophy should help us engage in ‘the displacement and trans-
formation of frameworks of thinking, the changing of received
values and all the work that has been done to think otherwise, to do
something else, to become other than what one is’ (Foucault 1997c:
327). Butler is agreeing strongly with Foucault that the purpose of
philosophy is not to supply us with the vision ‘that will redeem life,

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that will make life worth living’, seducing us away from the lived
difficulty of the political. Holding on to this ‘urge is the very sign
that the sphere of the political has already been abandoned’ (FCR:
131). Such ‘normative commitments’ entail certain similarities of
critical reading of Butler’s and Foucault’s respective conceptions of
why resistance, freedom or agency is exercised, and who conducts it.
Namely, if power is ubiquitous, and if there is no clear criterion for
separating ‘good’ from ‘bad’ powers (or resistances, which, even if
initially emancipatory, can and have taken various unemancipatory
turns, the Iranian revolution being one prominent example [Foucault
2018], or the current classificatory and identitarian normalisation of
queer positions [Sabsay 2016]), on what grounds are we to formulate
our political aspirations and normative visions? Second, can agency
in Butler ever liberate itself from Foucault’s individualist exercise of
freedom? Or, in other words, is there any space in this conception for
a ‘we’, that is, a collective struggle?
We have touched upon the first dilemma in the debate with
Benhabib. To philosophically assume a subject with agency – prior
to its formation within the political field – means that ‘the terms of
a significant social and political task of transformation, resistance,
radical democratization’ (CF: 46) have not been taken into account.
Political agency is contingent and contextual, not bound to the
prescriptions of a politico-theoretical programme.1 The absence of
prescriptions on what is to be done, does not, however, mean that
political agency is uncritical. As interrogation of the established
domain of ontology, critique is crucial for Butler’s notion of politi-
cal agency. Asking ‘What, given the contemporary order of being,
can I be?’ (Butler 2001a), is where both the practice of critique and
exercise of freedom begin. In the register of performativity, the ques-
tion of transformative agency is how, from within the field of power
relations and repetition itself, to produce a transformation beyond
the limits of our endless iterative practices?
Early on, Butler claims that considering the possibility of social
transformation is one of her central tasks. However, the way she
termed the processes leading to transformation is, admittedly, quite
peculiar: displacement, redefinition, resignification, redeployment,
rearticulation do not belong to terms with obvious revolutionary
potential. In the most provocative part of Gender Trouble, ‘From
Parody to Politics’, Butler defined agency in the frame of resignifi-
cation: agency is to be located in the possibility of a variation of a
regulated process of repetition (GT: 198). Such a definition leaves

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one with an uncertain feeling that all politics is exhausted in varia-

tion. In addition, she also defines a ‘critical task for feminism’, which
becomes to locate strategies of subversive repetition and affirm the
resignifications of the regulated processes that provide the immanent
possibility of their contestation (GT: 201). Since it is not a question
whether to repeat or not – we cannot decide to pull the curtain down
for a time to reflect on further production of the performance – the
task of feminism becomes how to repeat and, through a radical pro-
liferation of gender, ‘to displace the very gender norms that enable
repetition itself’ (GT: 203). Even if citationality enters the picture,
mollifying, to paraphrase Amy Allen (1998: 461), the paradoxical
feeling that agency is either completely impossible or too easy, two
significant questions remain. First, how does one repeat with displac-
ing effects (and how is one to know that these effects are displacing)?
Or, framed in the jargon of critical normativists, even if we accept
that agency is articulable as resignification, we remain in the dark
regarding the kinds of resignification that lead to advantageous,
acceptable or desirable changes. Claiming that we need to repeat
differently says nothing specific about how this ‘difference’ ought to
look. The second question seems even more troublesome: is subver-
sion the only aim of this (political) action, or would it be more accu-
rate to say that its aim is ‘parody’, even parody of the political itself?
Responses to Butler’s understanding of agency varied. Martha
Nussbaum (1999), for example, reads Butler’s theory as no more
than the parody of the political itself. However, Nussbaum’s vitu-
perative piece can serve as a true model of dismissive, outright
hostile, vitriolic writing. Different in tone and aim, other feminist
critiques have pointed to certain problems with Butler’s notion
of agency, which seems to take place outside social and historical
circumstances, and ‘remains abstract and lacking in social specific-
ity’ (McNay 1999: 176; cf. Nelson 1999). Butler’s insistence on
the significance of context and historicity, which was exceptionally
rarely followed by examples from either history or present contexts,
justified such claims. Cincia Arruzza speaks of ‘historicity without
history’, stating that Butler ‘neither historicises her own categories
nor addresses the historical conditions that make her own descrip-
tion of gender possible in the first instance’ (Arruzza 2015: 36, 42).
Similarly, Lloyd contends that Butler deploys the term ‘social’ pro-
fusely, without examining ‘the historical practices that themselves
generate the social’ (Lloyd 2008: 104). Butler is indeed quite cautious
with examples, because her famous example of performativity, the

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drag queen, turned into a paradigm, which led her ‘to be wary of
one’s [own] examples’ (Butler 1993a: 111). This is, of course, only
part of the explanation. The absence of historicisations where they
were expected as ‘promised’ generally fits well with Butler’s under-
standing of the type of genealogy she proposes to offer – a ‘specifi-
cally philosophical exercise in exposing and tracing the installation
and operation of false universals’ (Butler 1993b: 30) – which is, so
to say, an odd, ungenealogical genealogy. Butler’s exposition of false
universals is also open to objections of neglecting various ‘ontoge-
netic’ explanations, as Benhabib would have it, and to speaking in an
antihumanist tongue (Fraser 1995: 67). From here, it is only a small
step to the charge for obliteration of the corporeal dimensions of per-
formativity and agency (Clare 2009). Some critics wonder about the
normative orientation of Butler’s ‘specifically philosophical exercise’,
because it does not pretend to be emptied of value statements, some
of which, moreover, aim at political application. Is this a ‘ludic’ form
of politics that promises to transform patriarchy ‘through an indefi-
nite series of individual acts (“performance”) of parodic repetition’
(Ebert 1993: 39), or a postmodernist politics fetishising sexual iden-
tity and promoting ‘bourgeois humanist individuality as a more fluid
and indeterminate series of subversive bodily acts’ (Hennessy 2000:
120–1; cf. Glick 2000)?
Figured as repetition variation, agency seems too diffuse, too
disorienting, politically unfathomable. Quandaries remain: to repeat
differently, but to what purpose? What parameters do we use to
measure difference? How do we know that different is different
enough? How do we know that we have achieved our politically rel-
evant goal, if this is what political agency is about? Ultimately, even
if it is not summarily dismissed as ludic or postmodernist, a different
repetition might have trouble escaping the individualist trap of the
‘great performer’, leading some to claim that Butler’s ‘theory remains
confined to the perspective of the isolated individual either resisting
their subjectification or confronting their oppressor’ (Boucher 2006:
114), and that ‘it fails to explore fully how the active appropria-
tion and reshaping of values and resources by actors may result in
changes at a collective level’ (McNay 1999: 190).

The Individual, the Collective, the Social

In the text on the politics of performativity, Geoff Boucher argues
(2006: 129) that Butler, like Foucault, dethroned the omnipotent

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subject in order to save the political individual. For Boucher, a

subjectless conception of agency provides Butler with the oppor-
tunity to develop her understanding of an individual resisting their
subjection through oppositional cultural practices. Among the
many issues regarding agency, the question of the character of the
performative subject – is it exclusively individual, or can it have a
collective expression? – seems to have true pertinence. The question
itself received greater attention from Butler in more recent years,
especially in Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly
(2015b). My claim is, however, that she engages with this topic
throughout her work: from early endeavours to link subversion
with the queer, through dispersed, but insistent, critiques of the
autonomous subject, to her commitment to radical democracy and
equality of precarious lives. In this matter, Butler’s social o
­ ntology
of the body is equally important as the performative theory of
assembly. Now, although these directions may seem scattered, what
links them is Butler’s multivalent notion of the political. Comprising
many layers, without neat coherence between them, her notion of
the political includes the feminist credo that the personal is politi-
cal; ‘queer structure’, to which she holds steadfastly in her texts,
even when the term ‘queer’ itself became less frequent; persistent
commitment to collective struggle;2 advocacy for a politics that goes
beyond mere inclusion, extension of rights and reform of laws; faith
in action not mediated by state mechanisms, and equivalent distrust
of the state;3 Gramscian trust in the power of civil society, in ‘our’
power to change things, through the laborious, unending task of
cultural translation, through exercising non-violent expansion of the
universal and joint defence against it shrinking (Butler and Connolly
2000; Olson and Worsham 2000; Heckert 2011; McCann 2011;
Willig 2012).
Butler never offers a synthetic overview of these issues, which is
why the notion of the political, central to all her endeavours, remains
relatively elusive. Yet, we can claim that two impulses – anti-identi-
tarianism and politics in medias res, which function as the political
engine in Gender Trouble – remain implicated in all later develop-
ments of her understanding of the political. These two impulses do
not follow causally from her critical approach to established ontol-
ogy or the metaphysical foundations of the normativist theories
of the subject, which functioned as an implicit (insidious, installed
[GT: 203]) assumption of feminist theory. If we understand Gender
Trouble as a philosophical toolbox for unravelling gender (and sex),

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then its possible political application needs to include engagement

against identity’s necessary exclusions, which are at work if the
subject of feminism remains an unproblematised notion of ‘woman’.
Second, the political implication of contingent foundations of agency
assumes that we need to be able to act politically in medias res, acting
from a plurality and in coalitions which would not be based on iden-
tities – an idea at the very heart of the early notion of queer.
The claim that politics based on identity is of necessity exclusion-
ary, and that it inevitably only reproduces inequality, remains a per-
manent feature of Butler’s political thought. For example, in Frames
of War, arguing for urgency and a radical democratic response to
matters at hand, she underlines that the focus of left politics should
not be on identities, but on precarity and its differential distribution.
Precarity cuts across identity categories, ‘thus forming the basis for
an alliance focused on opposition to state violence and its capacity to
produce, exploit, and distribute precarity for the purposes of profit
and territorial defence’ (FoW: 32). The second idea that politically
animates Gender Trouble refers to the demand to act here and now,
using the resources presently at one’s disposal, in an unauthorised,
even insurrectionary way. Thus, in Dispossession we read that ‘per-
formativity names that unauthorized exercise of a right to existence
that propels the precarious into political life’ (D: 101; cf. ES: 147).
Such an entry takes place when the uncounted start to count them-
selves, to appear and, thus, to matter.
The appearance of the precarious produced a radical shift in
Butler’s thought. This shift, however, did not mean a radical break
with the theory of performativity. Rather, it built on it, productively
engaging its inconsistencies and tensions. I would claim that, in the
sphere of the political, the crucial tension regards the question of
individual and collective agency, that is, the question of ‘we’. This
‘we’ needs to be based neither in identity, nor collective conscious-
ness (or experience), nor function as an aggregate of discrete indi-
viduals. The question – whether political agency is about ‘a way
of politicising personal life’ (Butler 1986: 45) or about liveable life
– seems to be the crux of this tension. The exercise of freedom is,
for Butler, not reducible to the Foucauldian care of the self and the
aesthetics of existence, but requires the production, multiplication
and diversification of possibilities for a liveable life. ‘Freedom is more
often than not exercised with others’, and presumes ‘a set of enabling
and dynamic relations that include support, dispute, breakage, joy,
and solidarity’ (NT: 27). The following sections of this chapter delve

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into the political forms of this exercise, beginning with subversion

and ending with assembly.

The Individual: Subversion, Parody, Drag

In one of her first texts, ‘Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir’s
Second Sex’, at the moment when Butler defines body as situation
and a field of interpretative possibilities, she goes on to say that ‘the
body becomes a peculiar nexus of culture and choice, and “existing”
one’s body becomes a personal way of taking up and reinterpreting
received gender norms’ (Butler 1986: 45). Although she immediately
follows up this claim by saying that there are limitations to how
we personally choose to do ourselves, and although the existential-
ist ‘project’ gives way to the Foucauldian proliferation of corpo-
real styles, the individualist dimension of this very early claim still
remains: ‘To the extent that gender norms function under the aegis
of social constraints, the reinterpretation of those norms through
the proliferation and variation of corporeal styles becomes a very
concrete and accessible way of politicizing personal life’ (ibid.). Even
though it does not appear as bluntly in Gender Trouble, this ‘con-
crete and accessible politicisation’ reverberates through the notion
of subversion, which was, for some, Butler’s central contribution to
political theory (Chambers and Carver 2008: 137) or political phi-
losophy (Solana 2017: 16).
The prominence of the notion of subversion cannot be overes-
timated – after all, it is in the subtitle of Gender Trouble. But this
is also where the trouble with subversion begins. First, the notion
itself is almost entirely undefined. Second, through it, politics often
becomes one with parody. And, as it was strongly identified with the
practices of drag, political agency seems to be something theatrical,
belonging to the genre of comedy. Bearing in mind Moya Lloyd’s
important suggestion (2007: 51) that subversion is a third type of
politics, in addition to reform and revolution (which can be exempli-
fied by Rubin’s and Wittig’s ideas of destruction of the sex/gender
system or heterosexuality), the question that presents itself is: what
exactly characterises this political column? Is it, perhaps, its playful-
ness? Further trouble with Butler’s supposedly central contribution
to the political is that it simply disappears from later texts, without a
clear explanation why.
When it comes to its definition, the most one can hope for is the
statement from an early interview: ‘subversiveness is not something

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that can be gauged or calculated. In fact, what I mean by subver-

sion are those effects that are incalculable’ (Kotz 1992: 84). Surely,
subversion in Gender Trouble is presented as a desirable and politi-
cal practice. We are led to this conclusion indirectly, from Butler’s
criticisms of strategies that can never become sustained political
practices and are based on an unacknowledged emancipatory ideal,
or remain grounded in a subject with godlike dimensions (GT: 110,
127, 158). Thus, if something is to produce certain political effects, it
cannot come from a point external to the practices themselves, that
is, it cannot be guided by ideals impossible to maintain, nor done
by subjects who presumably have access to a ‘truer reality’ than the
one they inhabit. If subversion is possible, it will happen ‘within the
terms of the performance’ (Butler 1998: 526), with our bodies here
and now, on the horizon of ‘an open future of cultural possibilities’
(GT: 127).
Subversion is, therefore, a possible action against the norm or a
system of norms. What makes it possible is not the heroic will of an
actor who has the power to refuse and destroy them, but the instabil-
ity of the norms themselves (Deutscher 1997: 26). The actions take
place within a normative matrix with an immanent potential for
self-subversion, as it is neither founded on structural necessity of the
symbolic law, nor dictated by the laws of anatomy. The performative
double movement assumes both inherent erosiveness and instabil-
ity of the enacted norms, and the possibility to further erode them
through subversive bodily enactments, in which they may become a
site of parodic contest.
But why would this contest be parodic, and not, as we have
become accustomed with the teleologies of emancipation – as Saba
Mahmood called them (Mahmood 2001: 210) – hard fought in
blood, sweat and tears? Why are these practices fundamentally disor-
dering and why does the subversive actor appear in drag? We should
recall that in the subtitle of Gender Trouble, subversion subverts
identities. Subversion redirects or rearticulates repetition of acts that
take place within a highly rigid regulatory frame. This frame con-
geals over time to produce the appearance of the substance of identi-
ties of man and woman, that is, as an external expression of a hidden
inside, mediated through the heterosexualisation of desire. In such a
normative frame, only men and women exist as intelligible, legible,
recognisable, while all other embodied variations of sex, gender and
desire occupy positions of ‘developmental failures or logical impos-
sibilities from within that domain’:

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Their persistence and proliferation, however, provide critical oppor-

tunities to expose the limits and regulatory aims of that domain of
intelligibility and, hence, to open up within the very terms of that
­
matrix of intelligibility rival and subversive matrices of gender disorder.
(GT: 24)

The way the term ‘critical’ is used in this quote could be understood
as both referring to critique, a process of desubjectivisation of those
deemed to be ‘logical impossibilities’ within the matrix of intelligibil-
ity, and as a kind of critical strike against the domain that produces
ostensible coherence of gender through political regulations and
disciplinary practices. Subversion would, in that sense, be a certain
‘strike back’ at power, positioned beyond the master/bondsman
logic, perhaps in the sense borrowed from Butler’s own reading of
Foucault’s ‘tactic of nondialetical subversion’, in which the ‘constant
inversion of opposites leads not to a reconciliation in unity, but to a
proliferation of oppositions which come to undermine the hegemony
of binary opposition itself’ (SD: 222, 225).
Subversion introduces a disorder into the syllogistic coherence of
the norm – I was born female, therefore I become a woman, there-
fore I desire persons of the opposite sex – exposing this coherence as
possible only in a ‘hetero-reality’ (Lloyd 1999: 197), a heterosexist
matrix that regulates bodily acts. ‘The target of Butler’s politics of
subversion must be that assemblage, the matrix itself, heteronor-
mativity’ (Chambers and Carver 2008: 148). What is subverted is
the ostensible naturalness of heterosexuality (Lloyd 2007: 50), and
the cultural logic of straightness based on binary disjunction (Disch
1999: 548). Subversion does not assume that one ‘leaves’ the matrix
in order to strike back at it. It is only from within the repetition of
regulatory practices that maintain the matrix that subversion, in
repeating differently, possibly alters those terms. What is subversive
about subversion is that it reveals the norm as contingent, cultural,
historical sedimentation that designates us as either real or suspended
as unreal, untrue, abject creatures.
Almost in passing, Butler ascribed this revelatory role to a specific
stage actor: drag. This actor then turned, as Jay Prosser commented
(1998: 24), not only into a queer icon, but something of an icon
for the new queer theory itself. ‘In imitating gender, drag implicitly
reveals the imitative structure of gender itself – as well as its contin-
gency’ (GT: 187). Drag appeared in Mother Camp, an anthropo-
logical study published in 1979, which examined the phenomenon of

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professional impersonators, ‘persons who most visibly and flagrantly

embody the stigma’ (Newton 1979: 3). Their ‘work is defined as
“queer” in itself’, since ‘no one but a “queer” would want to perform
as a woman. It is the nature of the performances rather than homo-
sexuality per se that accounts for the extreme stigmatization of drag
queens’ (ibid.: 7). In their performance, the impersonators play with
two powerful oppositions: masculine/feminine and outside/inside.
Feminine belongs to ‘woman’, which Esther Newton anthropo-
logically locates to be a social category peculiar to American culture,
which otherwise has relatively few ascribed roles (ibid.: 102). This
category is based on strong bonds between biology, nature and
sex-role symbols. The performance of drag queens ‘wrenches the
sex roles loose from that which supposedly determines them, that
is, genital sex’, demonstrating by their very acting that ‘if sex-role
behavior can be achieved by the “wrong” sex, it logically follows
that it is in reality also achieved, not inherited, by the “right” sex’,
which is why it can be classified as ‘an appearance’, an ‘outside’
(ibid.: 103). The passing of persons in drag reveals the imitative
structure of the real itself: ‘it seems self-evident that persons classified
as “men” would have to create artificially the image of a “woman”,
but of course “women” create the image “artificially” too’ (ibid.: 5).
Thus, the queer transgender has a double function in the unveil-
ing of the norm: they parallel the process by which heterosexuality
reproduces binarised gender identities and therefore itself, and, at
the same time, they contrast with heterosexuality’s naturalisation
of this process. ‘For whereas the constructedness of straight gender
is obscured by the veil of naturalization, queer transgender reveals,
indeed, explicitly performs its own constructedness’ (Prosser 1998:
31). These acts of revelations have a parodic quality, because they
expose gender norms as altogether mimetic, unoriginal and untrue in
any metaphysical sense. The parody mocks not women themselves,
the ‘original’, so to speak – Butler explicitly states that the parodic
performance is a part of ‘hegemonic, misogynist culture’ (GT: 187)
– but the notion of originality, the notion that there is an internal
schema, essence, cause, original to be copied (Butler 1991). Drag
reveals all gender as parody.
However, drag was too powerful an example: it rapidly turned
into a paradigmatic ‘gender troubler’ whose acting became entirely
equated with the desirable subversive politics. This ushered in a host
of misconceptions of agency in Butler as a voluntarist, unbound,
theatrical collection of parodying acts done by a special kind of

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performer. It also gave rise, as Eva von Redecker (2017: 89) beauti-
fully points out in her examination of parody in Butler, three axes of
critique in terms of laughter – the first worrying that Butler makes
parodic laughter hollow, the second that it cannot be more than a
helpless giggle, the third insisting on defining the difference between
mean laughter and clever parodies.
Butler would return to her example again and again (BTM: 85ff.,
175ff.; PLP: 144ff.; UG: 213ff.), claiming that ‘there is no neces-
sary relation between drag and subversion’ (BTM: 85), shifting the
emphasis from specific actors who undo gender to the norms that
both constitute and undo gender:

When one performance of gender is considered real and another false,

or when one presentation of gender is considered authentic, and another
fake, then we can conclude that a certain ontology of gender is condi-
tioning these judgments, an ontology (an account of what gender is) that
is also put into crisis by the performance of gender in such a way that
these judgments are undermined or become impossible to make. The
point to emphasize here is not that drag is subversive of gender norms,
but that we live, more or less implicitly, with received notions of reality,
implicit accounts of ontology, which determine what kinds of bodies
and sexualities will be considered real and true, and which kind will not.
(UG: 214)

If the early account of subversion offered an opportunity to focus

on individual actors who, on or off stage, reinterpret and resignify
norms through the proliferation and variation of corporeal styles,
the rejection of ‘the great performer’ entailed a shift in focus to the
reality of norms. Even though the notion of subversion would be
lost in that move,4 I wish to claim that it added a crucial dimension
to further forms of politicisation of performativity. Namely, subver-
sion is not only a revelatory but also an insurrectionary action. To
repeat differently is a form of unauthorised exercise of a desire to be,
to persist within a reality of social fantasies that organise material
lives of embodied individuals. Drag showed that certain ontological
presuppositions are at work, and that they may be open to rearticula-
tion. Since rearticulation depends on the logic of iterability, subver-
sive acts also function without prior legitimacy, challenging ‘existing
forms of legitimacy, breaking open the possibility of future forms’
(ES: 147).
This ‘breakthrough’ of the ‘constitutive outside’ – necessary to
provide naturalness, originality and unity to the ‘coherent inside’

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– can undo, and in the last thirty years has undone, the sedimented
coherences in laws, public policy, culturally accepted behaviour and
private lives of innumerable individuals. Although this breaking open
takes place in and through various individual bodily acts, these acts
are still not modelled on sovereign agency (Chambers and Carver
2008: 147). They are local, contextually enabled performances,
whose effects could not have been gauged or calculated in advance,
because they were unauthorised.
Alison Stone claimed (2005: 15), almost prefiguring performative
theory of assembly, that Butler’s understanding of coalition estab-
lishes a possibility of a collectively subversive action. In my under-
standing, although it never appears as a collective act, subversion is
also not narrowly individualistic either. Still, a certain hesitation is in
order here, because the alternative social ontology Butler later pro-
poses, in which clearly no one remakes reality alone, was still in the
making.

The Social: Agency and Dependence

The rejection of the ‘classical liberal and existentialist model of
freedom’ (GT: 169) did not, as previously mentioned, provide an
alternative working definition of freedom. Although Butler did
develop a particular understanding of agency, it was clearly not
modelled on autonomy, while her emerging performative theory of
subject constitution stood in the way of the liberal-humanist under-
standing of sovereign mastery. On the other hand, a widespread
tendency to interpret her notion of agency as reducible either to
subversive (drag) performances, or to linguistic formation given in a
distinctly antihumanist language, led her to a more intense focus on
the reality in which agency takes place. This turn will have important
consequences for subsequent elaborations of the ideas of interde-
pendence, dispossession and vulnerability, that is, the major building
blocks of the social ontology of the body.
The reality in which we craft ourselves into genders is a reality
of norms. Our acting, or whatever agency we may have, takes place
in the social world. Taking place is, however, too vague an expres-
sion for what happens to us while we act in a world that enables
and constrains our acting. The social world is what we depend on.
This dependence is precisely what orchestrates the materialisation
of our possibilities, and also our consent and reproduction of power
relations.

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In the books written after Bodies That Matter, especially in

Undoing Gender, the social world and our dependence on it have
a prominent place. Certain reworkings of discursive constitu-
tion of the subject also shifted in that direction. Butler adopted
Althusser’s understanding of interpellation to show that a ‘certain
social existence of the body’ is only enabled through appearing in
and by virtue of language, through interpellation and naming. Our
very existence is fundamentally dependent on the address of the
Other. We are crafted into addressable, recognisable beings by a
world that provides us with social definitions (ES: 5). Reworking
Foucault’s theory of subjectivation within a psychoanalytic frame
enabled Butler to further develop the notion of dependency on
the powers that subject us. Now, a child’s primary dependency,
before it can make decisions on who cares, does not amount to
political subordination in the usual sense, but it does indicate that
our formation is impossible without dependency. Primary depend-
ences, recalled and exploited through our longing for recognisable
and enduring social existence, and guaranteed by social categories,
work in the service of subjection – ‘which is often preferred to
no social existence at all’ (PLP: 20). With the concept of subver-
sion fading into the background of the theory of performativity,
Gramsci’s understanding of hegemony proved useful to allow for
the possibility of social transformation of everyday relations. Thus,
Butler claims that her understanding of performativity is ‘not far
from’ the theory of hegemony, as they both emphasise ‘the way
in which the social world is made – and new social possibilities
emerge – at various levels of social action through collaborative
relation with power’ (CHU: 14).
In order to be who we become, we are dependent on the social
world into which we arrive. The act of arrival, of course, says some-
thing about the one who has arrived. However, it also says some-
thing about arrival ‘in the world, in discourse’ (BTM: 173), in the
sphere of social names, and the relations of power one finds to be
limiting only much later, if ever. Even when one chooses to oppose
these ‘resources’, one neither becomes independent of them, nor can
this opposition provide a position of sovereign mastery over them.
To constitute oneself as a subject, to be able to say ‘I’ in the first
place, one depends on language, which is never quite one’s own and
is indeed complicit with power. But, in order to have agency, one
need not restore the (fantasy of) sovereign autonomy in speech or
lift oneself up beyond language. Thus, instead of demanding more

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control, more mastery, we may concede the idea that ‘speech is

always in some ways out of our control’:

Untethering the speech act from the sovereign subject founds an alterna-
tive notion of agency [. . .] Whereas some critics mistake the critique of
sovereignty for the demolition of agency, I propose that agency begins
where sovereignty wanes. The one who acts (who is not the same as the
sovereign subject) acts precisely to the extent that he or she is constituted
as an actor and, hence, operating within a linguistic field of enabling con-
straints from the outset. (ES: 15–16)

It is, however, not only speech that remains beyond our control. All
the resources that prompt us into our social being are only somewhat
controlled by us; we hold them only to an extent in our possession. If
we cannot be without doing, then what conditions our doing is what
conditions our very existence. If we are so conditioned, we cannot
decide at some point to remake the world in a way to become its
masters, makers of the world itself. If we do have any agency, it is
not to be found in the denial of the conditions of our constitution. ‘If
I have any agency, it is opened up by the fact that I am constituted by
a social world I never chose’ (UG: 3).
However, our mastery proves most elusive in what seems to be
our most obvious, most immediate possession – our bodies. It is as
embodied subjects of agency that we can neither abstract nor tran-
scend sociality. Our bodies bind us to the here and now, tether us to
the place they occupy. Even if our mind is elsewhere, the body places
us in medias res, at the heart of social reality. It seeks support, leans
on, has various undesired and unchosen groundings – it invariably
needs infrastructure. This physical need demonstrates that the reality
of the body is not identical with social reality. In its physicality, the
body is indeed material and extended, heavy and massive, but the
reality which recognises its mass, which defines the space it occupies,
in which the basic processes of feeding and sleeping transpire and
have a name (also requiring a roof, a bed, a spoon), is a social reality.
Bodies live in discursive reality, which constitutes them in time that
is not a present simple of the body itself. Norms ‘continue to act
according to an iterative logic that ends for any of us only when life
ends, though the life of norms, of discourse more generally, continues
on with a tenacity that is quite indifferent to our own finitude’ (SS: 5).
But if discourse is understood to be ‘also social action, even violent
social action’ (GT: 225), where violence turns into a ‘discourse in
action’, violence itself happens to the body. The body is our outside,

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it is in the public sphere, exposed to different forms of touch. ‘In its

surface and its depth, the body is a social phenomenon’ (FoW: 33),
which is why ‘my body is and is not mine’:

Given over from the start to the world of others, it bears their imprint,
is formed within the crucible of social life; only later, and with some
uncertainty, do I lay claim to my body as my own, if, in fact, I ever do.
Indeed, if I deny that prior to the formation of my ‘will’, my body related
me to others whom I did not choose to have in proximity to myself, if I
build a notion of ‘autonomy’ on the basis of the denial of this sphere of a
primary and unwilled physical proximity with others, then am I denying
the social conditions of my embodiment in the name of autonomy?
(PL: 26)

If my agency is, by my very embodiment, only somewhat mine,

then I am the locus of my own acts and intentions and I am, at the
same time, a locus over which I can never have sovereign mastery.
The body is in the world and it is always, regardless of our will,
open and exposed to its relations. This openness is not reducible to
primary bodily dependency in the earliest forms of support and care
– throughout its becoming, the body depends on the materials that
the world makes available for it. ‘The ideal of radical self-sufficiency
is jeopardized by the body’s permeability and dependency [. . .] the
body constitutes a site of contested ownership, one which through
domination or the threat of death can always be owned by another’
(PLP: 54).
The last quote looks as though it could have been taken out
of some of Butler’s latest texts. In fact, it appears in ‘Stubborn
Attachment, Bodily Subjection’, a rereading of Butler’s first exposi-
tion of the master/bondsman scene. In Subjects of Desire, bodies
were smuggled in ‘where they are almost never to be found as object
of philosophical reflection, much less as sites of experience’ (PLP:
34). Smuggled in, the bondsman now appears as the body, and
the condition for the master not to be the body (SD: 53). An act of
emancipation on the part of the bondsman would seem to require
a full split from the body he essentially was while he was in a state
of bondage. In other words, a full-scale autonomy would not only
assume emancipation from the master but also an emancipation
from the body, which remains constitutively open to becoming the
possession of another. Freedom, in Butler’s reading of Hegel, entails
an escape from bodily permeability to a sphere in which no bodies
exist at all. ‘There’, where there are no more bondsmen and where,

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by implication, all should be sovereign masters, there must also be no

bodies.
Subjects of Desire implies that the body is a necessary ground for
freedom and the point of its mediation. This has implications for
our understanding of autonomy. Namely, the body that performs
its becoming fits neither into the figure of a bondsman nor of that
of a master – it is neither entirely subjected, nor is it somehow won-
drously free of all subjection. Performative embodied agency never
overlaps with autonomy as radical self-sufficiency, sovereign mastery
or independence from what makes us social beings.

The Social: Repetition and Risk

If, therefore, there are bodies and there are norms, if they are in an
almost closed circuit of repetition, and if autonomy is inherently con-
stricted by its social conditioning, what remains of political agency?
Benhabib’s curtain never falls. The body as the site of agency dispos-
sesses rather than making us into possessors of ourselves. Our embod-
iment forever forecloses the possibility to push ourselves into a sphere
where there are only fully volitional, bodiless masters, or to settle
ourselves somewhere apart or beyond the social reality which turns
our becoming into endless repetitions. Indeed, this is the ambivalent
scene of agency in Butler. The power that the subject of agency has is
not the power to triumphantly deny or transcend its social conditions
or its own embodiment. Yet, agency is nonetheless a power derivable
from the conditions that enacted the subject into being, and wielded
by the same subject throughout its compelled and incomplete process
of becoming. ‘The subject is itself a site of this ambivalence in which
the subject emerges both as the effect of a prior power and as the
condition of possibility for a radically conditioned form of agency’
(PLP: 14–15). Although radically conditioned by it, agency is not
completely constrained by the prior workings of power. In that sense,
it may exceed the power by which it is enabled (PLP: 15). In addi-
tion, the subject wielding agency, already sullied by the ‘taint’ of the
powers that have subjected it, is not primarily self-reflexive, capable
of acting on principles, rationally accountable for their actions and
able to project into the future. The subject wields this power that
is agency, not on account of its rationality and autonomy, but by
virtue of its acting. Agency is a possibility intrinsic to the acting of the
subject constituted by that very acting. There is no ‘special subject’ of
agency, just as there are no ‘special conditions’ for agency.

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Recall that the theory of performativity is in itself an account of

agency. The incessant and continuous acting, not predetermined
by any essence, is the condition of possibility of agency. But, as
we are clearly aware, not all acting produces social transforma-
tion. Examined in the light of citationality, acting – citing of norms
through bodily acts – is part of an unstable and incomplete process
of repetition that fundamentally depends on new reiterations. Norms
are sustained through their continuous reproduction, which depends
on our acting under the constraint of a rigid, regulatory frame.
However, the fact that norms require reiteration in order to be, opens
up a space for ‘anomalous or subversive practices’ (CHU: 14), that is,
for repetitions that have made it possible to subvert the norms they
are supposed to reinforce. It is crucial to note that reiteration is an
occasion – a possibility – for a norm to be subverted: ‘resignification
isn’t necessarily subversive; the fact that norms must be cited in order
for them to remain in force does not mean that citationality is a suf-
ficient condition for subversion, only that it is a necessary one’ (Allen
1998: 462; CHU: 41). With Saba Mahmood, we could claim that
agency is the ‘capacity for action that historically specific relations
of subordination enable and create’ (Mahmood 2001: 210). Thus,
action itself may provide just another layer in an already sedimented
norm. On the other hand, it could also go in a different direction,
either unintentionally, anomalously, in a form of a slippage – expos-
ing the norm for what it is – or else it may have subversive, insurrec-
tionary potential to induce transformative effects.
The theory of performativity is an account of agency because it
rests on the assumption that to act is to potentially produce new
possibilities. Defining action as the most important human activity,
Hannah Arendt related it to the possible production of something
new, to the ‘fact that man is capable of action, that the unexpected
can be expected from him, that he is able to perform what is infi-
nitely improbable’ (Arendt 1998: 178). Leaving aside, for now, how
Arendt understood the relation between action and the political, as
well as the Arendtian ‘man’ – a peculiar political figure to whom the
body belongs only ambivalently – we can say that the power of acting
is interchangeable with the power to create beginnings. Before it
becomes realised in this or that way, the ‘beginning’ can be seen as a
possibility, as potential for something new. If such potential is inher-
ent to every action, then agency appears not only when one expects
the unexpected, but equally in entirely expected outcomes of actions,
that is, in the domain of the most probable.

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Given that we act in order to be, that our actions transpire in the
domain of everyday social relations, the political impetus of these
actions needs to be understood within the domain of the probable
– although from a horizon of an improbable, incalculable future.
‘Social transformation occurs not merely by rallying mass numbers
in favour of a cause, but precisely through the ways in which daily
social relations are rearticulated’ (CHU: 14) – by anyone. There is
neither a special subject of agency, nor does agency entail special
circumstances that must include rallies or partisanship. Quite ‘unpo-
litical’ actions have a profound political potential. If our actions are
shaped by and, at the same time, shape social reality, acting differ-
ently has the potential to question established reality.
If the political takes place in medias res, within acting itself, in
this body and in this social world, then political agency is acting that
reveals established reality precisely as established. It opens up pos-
sibilities within the real itself and seeks to preserve them as viable
options. Since it takes place within the terms of performance, here
and now, political agency is a moment in the process of desubjectivi-
sation and does not assume a set of rules to be followed to reach a
prefigured aim. Besides, political agency that the theory of performa-
tivity delineates is truly egalitarian: anyone can perform differently.
There are no actors privileged based on a particular feature – just as
‘there is no necessary relation between drag and subversion’ (BTM:
85). Political agency is not consigned to a specific group or heroic
individuals of the teleologies of emancipation or, for that matter, to
Arendt’s ‘men’ who act together, gathered in the agora.
Significantly, it now seems that the transformative potential
that agency has does not realise itself only in a parodic play (see
Zaharijević 2021a). Since different repetitions may question our
reality, repeating differently necessarily assumes a risk of an unintel-
ligible, unliveable, impossible life, especially for isolated individuals:

The subject is compelled to repeat the norms by which it is produced, but

that repetition establishes a domain of risk, for if one fails to reinstate
the norm ‘in the right way’, one becomes subject to further sanction, one
feels the prevailing conditions of existence threatened. And yet, without
a repetition that risks life – in its current organization – how might we
begin to imagine the contingency of that organization, and performatively
reconfigure the contours of the conditions of life? (PLP: 28–9)

Put this way, performance ceases to be easy-going or mirthful. It

also seems that there is nothing really theatrical about it, even in

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the Brechtian, serious sense. Risk – putting one’s life at risk in order
to risk the very reality in which some lives are socially dead or
expandable – is an integral part of political agency. As it happens
in and through the body acting, political agency inevitably entails
risks. ‘The body imposes a principle of humility and a sense of the
necessary limit of all human action’ (NT: 47). The body’s mortal-
ity, vulnerability, permeability and dependency on various types
of support always turns the stage on which the body performs its
agency into a potential scene of violence. For this reason, political
agency may indeed expand the space of what matters, but the body
always remains at its centre. Agency can produce an organisational
reconfiguration of life, but the price may be violent death.

The Collective: How Not to End up Like Antigone

Let us return to individual and collective agency. Early on, Butler
claims that the ‘act that gender is [. . .] is clearly not one’s act alone’,
but a ‘shared experience and “collective action”’ (Butler 1988:
525). At first glance, it may seem that the notion of a shared expe-
rience could have been derived from feminist standpoint theory.
Developing the idea that women have access to particular knowl-
edge based on their universally shared experience, standpoint theory
drew on the Marxist argument that the oppressed class has special
access to knowledge not at the ruling class’s disposal. Shaping this
knowledge would culminate in the articulation of class conscious-
ness and, in the Marxist version, the realisation of the historical
mission of the proletariat. ‘Like the lives of proletarians in Marxist
theory, women’s lives in Western capitalist societies also contained
possibilities for developing a critique of domination’ (Hartsock
1997: 368). However, Butler’s antiessentialist and antifoundational
theoretical assumptions make this link untenable. The presumed
unity of women’s experience can be established only at the expense
of varieties of experiences of different women, often accommodat-
ing and hierarchising interlocking systems of oppressions. (This
is, significantly, something that Hartsock acknowledges, claiming
that Marx made no theoretical space for any oppression other than
class, which she then repeated with women.) Further, it is fair to
assume that Butler agrees with Joan Scott that experience is neither
the origin of explanation, nor authoritative evidence that grounds
what is known. Rather, experience itself seeks historicisation for
which one needs to ‘attend to the historical processes that, through

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discourse, position subjects and produce their experiences’ (Scott

1992: 25).
The shared character of experience needs to be located in the way
we participate, through our individual acts, in a shared, almost col-
lective action of sustaining the social reality of norms. Marx claimed
that men make their own history, but not as they please. ‘They do
not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under
circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the
past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a night-
mare on the brain of the living’ (Marx 1972: 10). In Butler’s register,
this nightmarish unchosenness is part of the social conditioning that
both enables and constrains any ‘making of history’. Our individual
acts of embodying our assumed genders are conditioned by ‘the
tradition of all dead generations’ that still live, and are reproduced,
recited, renewed through the acts of those living (also making us into
ancestors who will weigh on future generations). Perhaps this is also
how we should understand the phrase in quotation marks: ‘shared
experience and “collective action”’. Because one’s act is never one’s
act alone, the action is always already ‘collective’. The act is also
collective because, in making one’s history, one does not do it as one
pleases. This applies both to the stylisations of the body and to the
stylisations of the will, which Butler discusses in her ‘ethical’ texts:
‘There is no “I” that can fully stand apart from the social conditions
of its emergence, no “I” that is not implicated in a set of condition-
ing moral norms, which being norms, have a social character that
exceeds a purely personal or idiosyncratic meaning’ (GAO: 7).
Let me end this chapter with a short reading of Antigone, a
defiant maker of her own history and a very special character in
the history of dramatic expositions of womanhood. Butler reads
Antigone searching for a different symbolic framework of kinship,
and Antigone’s improper appropriation of mourning shows that
‘there is no commandment that can outlaw grief, even as it seeks to
outlaw its public form’ (Stauffer 2003), what proved exceptionally
important only a year after the publication of Antigone’s Claim in
2000. However, I will focus on Butler’s reading of Antigone from the
perspective of agency. I would like to show why, although the titular
character appears a heroic subject whose actions perform a series of
transgressions, she cannot truly function as the paradigmatic figure
of political agency.
The plot of Sophocles’ play is well known. Against the will of the
new king, Antigone wants to bury her brother and wants to do so

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publicly. She knows that Creon’s law condemns Polynices as a traitor

to lie unburied outside the walls of Thebes. She nevertheless claims
her right to mourn – and mourn properly, observing the proper ritual
– invoking the pre-eminence of divine over human laws. Creon per-
sonifies the state and wants to confirm his sovereignty which Antigone
knowingly challenges and, when questioned over her actions, repeat-
edly denounces. The king, enraged by her defiance, condemns her to
be immured in a cave, which she bewails without truly regretting her
actions. These actions are in opposition to the royal edict, but they
also go against the admonitions of her sister Ismene, and lead her to
reject the love of the crown prince, Hemon, through which Antigone
rejects a future as queen and mother. Antigone hangs herself, in
response to which her betrothed and his mother, the king’s wife, also
commit suicide. Ignoring the warnings of the blind prophet Tiresias,
Creon allows for this tragic chain of events to take place in order to
protect order and the rule of law.
What can we learn about political agency from this heroic figure?
Antigone is a complex figure who, as Oedipus’ daughter, does
not choose her complexity – she is thrown, fatefully, into a very
tangled kinship skein: her father is her brother, her mother is her
grandmother, her brothers are her nephews, her maternal uncle
was about to become her father-in-law, her cousin was intended
to be her husband. For this reason, Butler insists she cannot signify
kinship, but kinship’s fatal aberration (AC: 15). She is a woman only
ambivalently, too. Being a woman – at a time when women, even
when daughters of kings, were not recognised as citizens – Antigone
acts ‘against’ her womanhood. Instead of enacting ‘her feminine role
as guardian of the realm of the home [. . .] she displaces the politi-
cal boundaries and the proper limits of the polis’ (Athanasiou and
Tzelepis 2010: 108). She is punished, perhaps additionally, for dis-
rupting the gender order: not only does she defy sovereignty, she also
calls into question the masculinity of the sovereign (who cries: ‘I must
be no man at all, in fact, and she must be the man, if power like this
can rest in her and go unpunished’ [Sophocles 2003: 74]). By flouting
the law, Antigone thus renounces her femaleness, rejecting an exist-
ence of ‘only and exclusively [. . .] the fleshy prerequisite of biological
life’ (Athanasiou and Tzelepis 2010: 108). ‘Through a powerful set
of physical and linguistic acts’ (AC: 2), Antigone defies the state, and
by refusing to stay alive and become a wife and a mother (her name
means ‘one who will have no progeny’), ‘deinstitutes heterosexuality’
(AC: 76). ‘O tomb! O bridal bedchamber! O deep cave of a dwelling

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place [. . .] now by force he’s leading me away, without a nuptial bed,

without a wedding ceremony, and receiving no share of marriage nor
of rearing children’ (Sophocles 2003: 94–5). At a time when women
were considered to be essentially unpolitical, she demands to be at
the centre of the polis, to be political ‘like a man’. But for her to be
political is, of course, impossible: the chorus both reprimands her
(‘your self-willed temper has destroyed you’ [ibid.: 93]) and praises
her, calling her glorious and αὐτόνομος, ‘answering only to the laws
of yourself’ (ibid.: 90). Her autonomy is reflected in her being the
only mortal who, guided only by her own laws, will go into Hades
alive. Her words very much resemble those of the sovereign:

She is exploiting the language of sovereignty in order to produce a new

public sphere for a woman’s voice – a sphere that doesn’t actually exist at
the time. The citation of power that she performs is a citation that, yes,
is mired in established power [. . .] but it also uses the citation in order to
produce the possibility of a political speech act for a woman in the name
of her desire that is radically delegitimated by the State itself. (Olson and
Worsham 2000: 741)

By her doing and undoing – rites, speech, sex, laws – Antigone pro-
duces a radical crisis in established power, without being an outsider
to it. She is herself engendered by those social (and kinship) relations
that enabled sovereign power to be established. The tragic moment
of her impossible autonomy is not only that death must be the chosen
outcome, but also in the exposure of bareness of sovereign norm,
which leaves the king without kin or heir.
It may seem that Antigone presents us with a perfect example
of agency in the political individual who resists subjection through
oppositional practices. She is the paradigmatically autonomous
figure (and the first to be labelled as such, since Antigone is ‘the
oldest extant Greek text in which the word αὐτόνομος appears’
[Safatle 2016: 257]), determined to remain her own legislator, even if
this means legislating death to herself. Because she is denied her right
to mourn, although it is an inherent part of femininity, Antigone’s
insistence on grieving for her brother paradoxically ends up undoing
her femininity: by mourning, she forecloses the possibility of fulfill-
ing her role as mother and queen. She speaks ‘like’ a king and her
speech is in opposition to his; but in speaking ‘like’ the king, she
calls the sovereign speech act into question. Antigone appears almost
as the Arendtian ‘man’ in the agora who speaks and acts, perform-
ing the most political of all human activities. But Antigone is not a

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man; and for continuing to speak and act ‘as if’ a man, she is to be
entombed, while the site of the political, the Theban polis, crumbles
upon her physical and linguistic acts. Being neither proper woman
nor man, Antigone confuses the space of the human. ‘If she is human,
then the human has entered into catachresis: we no longer know its
proper usage’ (AC: 82).
Despite all this, Antigone cannot serve as a model of political
agency for us to emulate. Antigone dies. She pays for her defiance
with her life. The risk she was prepared to take led to her bodily
disintegration. Thus, the main question for political agency is: what
would it mean for Antigone to have stood up to Creon and lived?
Butler’s answer to this question turns from the heroic individual to
the social world in which political agency can only take place:
We should be able to live in a world in which our demands for justice do
not cost us our lives. We want to survive; we want to make such claims
and survive. So the question that Antigone raises for me is, what kind of
world would it have been or could it be in which Antigone could survive?
(Reddy and Butler 2004: 122)

In an interview given at the time of Occupy Wall Street, Butler

reshapes her answer in a more collective direction: ‘The only way
she could have lived is if she had had a serious social movement with
her [. . .] It’s really important to be able to re-situate one’s rage and
destitution in the context of a social movement’ (Bella 2011).
Political agency, then, revolves around two interrelated issues:
how to preserve the undetermined character of subversion, ‘a politics
of the incalculable, a non-programmatic and ungrounded politics
of possibility’ (Chambers and Carver 2008: 142), and not have
Antigone die? The political moral of her story is that the individual,
however autonomous – which in Antigone’s case goes along with
deep entanglements of many unchosen layers that fatefully condition
her autonomy – cannot stand up to social reality alone. We want a
politics that challenges social intelligibility and political represent-
ability, but without tragedy, without staking life. The question of
survival is, in a sense, a prerequisite for a successful or, rather, live-
able political agency. ‘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’ (Butler 2007c).
What does it mean that there are others who are taking the risk
‘with me’? One way of approaching this would entail assemblies or

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social movements: Antigone leads or participates in an insurrection

against the tyrant, or in a massive public mourning, a kind of col-
lective act of defiance of a sovereign edict. Not only does she then
perhaps not die, but her body is shielded and sheltered by other
bodies, gathered together and acting in concert. But there is also
another approach to this question, which combines our bodily sin-
gularities, the social world in which these bodily existences walk and
talk, and a (perhaps unseen, unheard) collectivity of others who take
the risk together with me. Even individual actions thus have a certain
collective quality, since ‘the “I” is invariably implicated in the “we”’,
as the ‘I’ is always already social (D: 107). And since ‘my’ actions
bear a constitutive social imprint, reproducing this imprint anew,
my actions are performative of some we. This is not necessarily a we
of a social movement or a rally. This we may as well belong to the
most quotidian practices, those we ordinarily do alone; on occasion,
however, in some places on Earth and in some historical circum-
stances – perhaps even now – they cannot be done without putting
our lives at risk.
One such action is walking. Today, a woman cannot walk in
Maidan Shahr without a niqab, while in Toulouse a woman cannot
walk in a niqab. Refugees from the Middle East cannot walk in
Podlaskie Voivodship, held as they are at the Polish border, even as
they are also egged on by Belarusian security officials. Transgender
women cannot walk in broad daylight in Belgrade, in Ankara, in
Springfield, in Ceará:
If and when it does become possible to walk unprotected and still be safe,
for daily life itself to become possible without fear of violence, then it
is surely because there are many who support that right even when it is
exercised by one person alone. If the right is exercised and honored, it is
because there are many there, exercising it as well, whether or not anyone
else is on the scene. Each ‘I’ brings the ‘we’ along. (NT: 51)

The social stakes of my agency are never individual, but are always a
matter of shared, collective performance. Thus, even if it is a singular
body that does the walking, and experiences it without the threat of
violence, ‘to walk’ means that there is a public, a common and shared
space in which walking is possible, because there is ‘group, if not an
alliance, walking there’ (NT: 51).
Lastly, something needs to be said about those others, with whom
we take the risk in solidarity. Early queer anarchism rebelled against
identity politics, gathering together those who were ready to join a

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collective struggle: ‘It didn’t matter what you did, or how you did
it, or how you felt about what you did; if you were willing to affili-
ate, that was politically viable’ (Kotz 1992: 83). Queer politics was
understood as politics of democratisation (Butler 1993b: 19), both
with regard to its undetermined subject and to its demands. It should
come as no surprise that Butler advocated for radical democracy,
which appears as the double task of cultural translation and sustain-
ing competing universalities. There is a trace of the old parodic cri-
tique in the newer form of contentious politics, striving as it does to
proliferate antagonisms, rather than institute a new order or hegem-
ony (Redecker 2017: 288). In the second phase of her work, centred
around precarious life, ‘the others’ would finally appear as unified,
but the category of their unification is carefully chosen never to allow
its transmutation into identity. It is important for the differences
within these ‘others’ and their competing demands for universality to
never be irreducibly blended together, while allowing everyone in the
collective struggle to still demand the end of precarity. Precarity is a
‘rubric that brings together women, queers, transgender people, the
poor, the differently abled, and the stateless, but also religious and
racial minorities: it is a social and economic condition, but not an
identity’ (NT: 58).
The manner of the political articulation of demands is also per-
formative. If we seek what we do not have and are barred from
having, then we can, like Antigone, reach out for power that does not
belong to us, acting as if we were entitled to it: ‘sometimes it is not a
question of first having power and then being able to act; sometimes
it is a question of acting, and in the acting, laying claim to the power
one requires’ (NT: 58). However, if such politics in medias res initi-
ates the struggle against social death, seeking to support life – then
this politics cannot be strictly individual (making it always poten-
tially suicidal, like Antigone’s). At this point, it becomes clear why a
theory of assembly finally manages to offer a frame for a collective
struggle: at its core it holds the collective power of the assembled
bodies who perform plural forms of agency in concert (NT: 9).

Notes
1. In a 1999 interview with Vikki Bell, Butler gives a telling answer about
her understanding of the relation between theory and politics. ‘I think
what’s really funny – and this probably seems really odd considering
the level of abstraction at which I work – is that I actually believe that

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politics has a character of contingency and context to it that cannot be

predicted at the level of theory. And that when theory starts becoming
programmatic, such as ‘here are my five prescriptions’, and I set up my
typology, and my final chapter is called ‘What is to be Done?, it pre-
empts the whole problem of context and contingency, and I do think
that political decisions are made in that lived moment and they can’t be
predicted from the level of theory [. . .] I suppose I’m with Foucault on
this. I’m willing to withstand the same criticisms he withstood. It seems
like a noble tradition’ (Bell 1999: 166–7). Without fail, Butler returns
to this in 2015: ‘Of course, the theory of gender performativity that I
formulated never prescribed which gender performances were right, or
more subversive, and which were wrong, and reactionary, even when
it was clear that I valued the breakthrough of certain kinds of gender
performances into public space, free of police brutality, harassment,
criminalization, and pathologization. The point was precisely to relax
the coercive hold of norms on gendered life – which is not the same as
transcending or abolishing all norms – for the purposes of living a more
livable life. This last is a normative view not in the sense that it is a form
of normality, but only in the sense that it represents a view of the world
as it should be. Indeed, the world as it should be would have to safeguard
breaks with normality, and offer support and affirmation for those who
make those breaks’ (NT: 33).
2. This commitment can be observed in various places and guises. For
example, we find it in ‘Against Proper Objects’, where she discusses the,
in her opinion, wrongheaded tendency of disciplinary factionalisations
between queer and feminist (women’s or gender) studies in the interest
of provisional institutional legitimation: ‘methodological distinctions
perform the academic version of breaking coalition’ (Butler 1994: 21; cf.
UG: 181–5). Further, in addition to her opposition to institutional sepa-
ratism that works to keep thought narrow, sectarian and self-serving,
in ‘Merely Cultural’ she responds to the charge that newer forms of left
politics reduce activism to mere assertion and affirmation of cultural
identity, by demanding a rethinking of the splintering of material and
cultural. Instead, Butler contends that political formations overlap, that
they are mutually determining and take place in convergent fields of
politicisation. ‘In fact, most promising are those moments in which one
social movement comes to find its condition of possibility in another’
(MC: 37). Finally, the same motif of collective struggle can be observed
in the more recent context of anti-gender mobilisation. Butler ends her
2021 Guardian article with a call to ‘gender critical’ feminists to turn
away from reactionary powers that target trans, non-binary and gender-
queer people. ‘Let’s all get truly critical now, for this is no time for any of
the targets of [anti-gender] movement to be turning against one another.
The time for anti-fascist solidarity is now’ (Butler 2021).

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3. Butler has shown some sympathy towards anarchism, echoing the posi-
tions of, for example, Gustav Landauer or Howard Zinn (cf. Zinn 2009:
653; Lynteris 2013; Redecker 2016). She links critique to deliberative
democracy, an open and uncensored consideration of political values and
actions, ‘and to anarchism – an operation of thought and action that is
not regulated in advance by state or corporate power’. Critique cannot be
reduced to either, but both are historically and philosophically tied to it
(Willig 2012: 142). Certainly, this is part of the Foucauldian critical tra-
dition, which never opts for radical anarchy, for radical ungovernability,
but still includes significant resistance to governability (Butler 2001a).
This is why Butler always remained sceptical about full institutionalisa-
tion of critical and political agency. In Butler’s performative theory of
assembly there are also ‘anarchist moments or anarchist passages’, that
mark the new time and space for popular will, in which the assembled
bodies exercise the ‘performative power to lay claim to the public in a
way that is not yet codified into law and that can never be fully codified
into law’ (NT: 75).
4. The absence of subversion is quite conspicuous in texts after Bodies
That Matter. Indeed, even there, faced with the criticism of privileging
not only certain actors, but also certain spheres of reality (centred exclu-
sively around gender and sexuality), Butler goes on to say that the goal
of a more complex mapping of power ‘cannot be pure subversion, as if
an undermining were enough to establish and direct political struggle.
Rather than denaturalization or proliferation, it seems that the question
for thinking discourse and power in terms of the future has several paths
to follow: how to think power as resignification together with power as
the convergence or interarticulation of relations of regulation, domina-
tion, constitution’ (BTM: 184). In her introduction to the second edition
of Gender Trouble, subversion fared quite badly, as a notion brimming
with normative expectations, which ends up being undefendable: ‘The
effort to name the criterion for subversiveness will always fail, and ought
to. So what is at stake in using the term at all?’ (GT: xxiii). The question
really at stake is what will qualify as ‘human’ and ‘liveable’.

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 Part II

Liveable World

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 Chapter 4

Liveable Life

What Counts as a Life?

In a conversation with Fina Birulés (2009) published under the title
‘Gender Is Extramoral’, Judith Butler asserts: ‘one could say that
all my work revolves around this question: what is it that counts
as a life?’. Such a statement must be startling. The notion of life
did not appear so often in the preceding elaboration of the theory
of performativity. Yet, the statement clearly refers to the whole of
Butler’s work. In addition, given that she refuses to define life, as it
‘tends to exceed the definitions we may offer [. . .] so the approach
to life cannot be altogether successful if we start with definitions’
(Schneider and Butler 2010), it seems that we are here faced with a
certain conundrum. What is this ‘life’ that all of her work revolves
around, and has it been with us all along?
Importantly, Butler’s question is not about what a life is, but
what counts as a life. The inconspicuous term ‘counting’, possibly
one of the most Butlerian terms, should thus serve as a link. Not
only does it connect the phases of Butler’s work, but it also points
in the direction we should think about life. What counts as a life;
who counts as living; what living counts as possible; and who
counts as a life for which living is in some sense foreclosed? Can
we, in fact, ever really say that such life is counted? ‘To live in the
shadowy regions of ontology’ is to live a life that does not count
(Meijer and Prins 1998: 277). Talking with Birulés, Butler argues
that gender is extramoral. Genders are, in themselves, neither good
nor bad and, therefore, there are no genders that are ‘better’ than
others. If there are, however, restrictions regulating what counts as
the body supported in its desire to persist, we find ourselves in the
midst of a different discussion, which is primarily political in kind.
This discussion revolves around the life of the body, as well as con-
ditions for life’s flourishing, and, ultimately, around inequality. In
other words, the main question of the discussion is: what makes for
a liveable life?

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Life has had a long trajectory in the history of philosophy, but ‘live-
able life’ emerged out of the theory of performativity. The phrase has
become a cornerstone of Butler’s philosophy written after Precarious
Life, galvanised by the questions ‘what counts as a livable life and a
grievable death?’ (PL: xvi), and what counts as normatively human?
At first, it might appear that these questions are entirely beyond the
scope of the theory of performativity. Precarious Life responded to
circumstances produced by the monstrosities of war that made Butler
turn to ‘philosophy and peace’ rather than continue working on
gender (see Stauffer 2003). However, the tools used to address these
novel issues were engendered by the theory of performativity, even
if they were now less applied to questions posed previously. This is
important not only because it helps connect various directions of a
work organised around ‘registering events and movements in the
world and transposing them into theoretical idioms’ (O’Hana 2017),
but also because it provides links between variously precarious lives
and contingent foundation of equality among them. ‘Livable life’
made its appearance later, but it was there in nuce all along (cf. Lloyd
2007: 134; Loizidou 2008: 145; McNeilly 2015: 149–50).
In 1999, when revisiting the ideas and aspirations behind Gender
Trouble, Butler wrote:
I also came to understand something of the violence of the foreclosed life,
the one that does not get named as ‘living’, the one whose incarceration
implies a suspension of life, or a sustained death sentence. The dogged
effort to ‘denaturalize’ gender in this text, emerges, I think, from a strong
desire [. . .] to live, to make life possible, and to rethink the possible as
such. (GT: xxi)

If we take this claim seriously, there is every reason to say that live-
able life has been both central and present all along. Yet, the term
‘liveable’ remained undefined in her texts, even when it began to
appear with a certain regularity, accompanying an equally undefined
notion of ‘life’.
To what does ‘liveable’ in liveable life refer? If we consult diction-
aries (noting, of course, differences across languages), this attribute
can be understood as referring to something ‘cosy’, ‘homey’, ‘com-
fortable’, ‘habitable’, but also something akin to ‘bearable’, ‘endur-
able’, ‘sufferable’. A liveable life would then, by inference, be some
kind of life in which we have enough space, where this capacious-
ness feels warm and familiar and where we can count on permanent
shelter and support of some kind. A liveable life is a life that one

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 liveable life

can inhabit, living with innumerable inconveniences that inevitably

arise. The English dictionaries suggest yet another meaning: a life
worth living. However, I would propose we read liveable life as one
that can be lived, that we are able to live. In that case, two questions
present themselves. Is ‘liveable life’ a pleonastic expression, where
liveability is not more than an inner capacity of the body to keep on
living, some simple feature of life that does not stop on its own? Or,
conversely, if we are the inhabitants of our own lives, would that
mean that it is upon us to make them more capacious and homelike,
indulging in some sort of DIY or life-related feng shui? The answer
to both questions is negative. Although life is centrally related to the
desire to persist (even in unliveable conditions, even under threat to
survival), and although we certainly can and should do things to have
a more meaningful existence on Earth, liveable life in fact refers to
the conditions provided to us by the world we inhabit, through the
bodies we inhabit.
Although it made its grand appearance in the title of Precarious
Life, life had to wait for Frames of War for a more careful elabora-
tion (Power 2009). Rejecting thinking of life as such, like she rejected
thinking of the body as such, Butler rather urges us to consider what
qualifies as a life: how is it that we apprehend this qualification and
through which frames? The frames are epistemological, related to
the question ‘how do we know?’, but they are not to be dissociated
from the operations of power that shape how we see, apprehend and
acknowledge that some lives indeed qualify as having a full life, while
others seem expendable. For that reason, the question of life is not
only epistemological, but also ontological: we cannot say what life is
without accounting for the operations of power through which a life
is produced (FoW: 1). This production involves bodies and norms,
because ‘to live is always to live a life that is at risk from the outset
and can be put at risk or expunged quite suddenly from the outside
and for reasons that are not always under one’s control’ (FoW: 30).
Being lodged in the body, which is invariably ‘exposed to socially
and politically articulated forces as well as to claims of sociality –
including language, work, and desire’ (FoW: 3), life cannot be extri-
cated also from ethical and political dimensions of the fundamentally
unequal production of lives and their unequal exposure to violence.
So, responding to the question from the beginning of this chapter
– what is ‘life’ and was it with us all along? – we can say that, despite
its centrality, life in Butler remains undetermined, but the condi-
tions that each life requires in order to be liveable have to be both

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thinkable and politically fought for. This struggle is for a plurality

based in equality and against violence.

Survival, Life and the Good Life

If we seek to understand what liveable life is – and not what it is not
– we encounter a problem. Only once does Butler provide a positive
reference to it, hinting that liveable life can be seen as the good life.
The reference to ‘a good life, a livable life’ (NT: 208) requires certain
caution, not only because it reiterates and reclaims Adorno’s suspi-
cions that one could live a good life in a bad one, but also because
it appears in the form of repetition. However, since we know that
reiterations do things, let us try to use it to consider what it means
to say that a liveable life is a good life. Let us, for the sake of argu-
ment, pit it against mere survival. This opposition does not belong to
Adorno’s register, but it is operative in theorists with whom Butler is
often in discussion: Arendt, Foucault and Benjamin. It is also impor-
tant to remember that we perform norms not only to be intelligible,
but literally to survive.
Adorno claimed that there can be no right life in the wrong (‘Es
gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen’, a sentence that apodictically
concludes his ruminations on ‘asylum for the homeless’ [Adorno
1951: 55–9, 59ff.]). The possibility of leading a good life while the
world is falling apart is an old one, known at least since the Stoics.
How can one will to do good and live as good, when the world is
replete with corruption, inequality, exploitation and various forms of
alienation? The social conditions that inform our individual under-
standing of what is or should be good themselves create obstacles
to a moral life. Adorno believed that the existing norms and moral
principles only amplify social domination, and that in the false total-
ity of advanced capitalist society, the good life becomes impossible
(Schweppenhäuser 2004: 328). This, of course, does not mean that
we should lead a ‘bad life’. Adorno, in fact, insists on the necessary
task of appropriating morality, at the same time opposing forms of
ethical violence, a recourse to ethics in an attempt to suppress the
difficulties of the contemporary ethos of life. Adorno’s lesson, impor-
tant also in Butler’s ethical considerations expounded in Giving an
Account of Oneself, is that no individual, no ‘I’, can be understood
outside the sociality it belongs to; it cannot be ‘espoused as a pure
immediacy, arbitrary, or accidental, detached from its social and his-
torical conditions’ (GAO: 7).

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In contrast to the single positive reference of ‘a good life, a livable

life’, there are many terms in Butler’s work associated with unlive-
ability (see Zaharijević and Bojanić 2017). Unintelligible and abject,
ungrievable and precarious, jettisoned and dispossessed: these seem to
be the many names of lives that are real and lived, but somehow lived
as unreal, almost spectrally, in a certain suspension. These lives are
illegible, expungable, eradicable. We can say that, as such, these are
bad lives, lives lived badly. This statement is emphatically not ethical,
but political, because deprivation – unreality, spectrality, suspension
– is not a consequence of someone’s choice, of someone’s wanting to
do bad. Such lives are marked by a constitutive lack of reality; they
can be said to be produced as spectral, suspended, deprived of reality.
The badness of these lives is produced as bad by the norms through
which the world confers value and meaning. Let us thus reverse the
basic ethical question and ask, ‘how can I live a life that is not bad?’
The presupposition of this question is obviously another, a political
one, ‘how can I live?’, in which life almost appears in survival mode.
The emphasis moves from the ‘I’ to the conditions of a life which is
mine. In order not to allow for ontologically deprived lives, we need
to first ask, ‘what makes for a livable world’ (UG: 17)?
The question of the ‘world’ refers to the arrangement of the social
and historical conditions of life. These will surely include items under
the rubric of infrastructure and institutions, necessary for any body
to survive and flourish, to be sustained in a material and symbolic
sense. But the question of the world also refers to what has thus far
been termed ‘social reality’, the reality of norms, of discourses that
turn us into intelligible and, in a certain way, valuable beings, crea-
tures worthy of being taken into account, protected and, in the final
instance, grieved. For something to be apprehended as a life, it first
must have a ‘right to ontology’, to a rightful place in the social reality
that enables others to perceive and count it as real, to apprehend it as
qualified for life. The right to an ontological status cannot be taken
as self-evident, so long as there are gradations of humanness that
allow for some lives to be less real than others. ‘The domain of ontol-
ogy is a regulated domain: what gets produced inside of it, what gets
excluded from it in order for the domain to be constituted is itself an
effect of power’ (Meijer and Prins 1998: 280). This is why the ques-
tion of power and norms precedes the question of what a life is, or
what will be recognised as life.
Perhaps the distinction between lives that matter and those that do
not can be seen as fertile ground for biopolitical operationalisation

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of a distinction between qualified and bare life, that is, a life worth
living and a life reducible to mere survival? The circumstances of war
in which some lives are deemed worthy of all kinds of protection,
while others appear radically dispensable, seem only to augment
such an operationalisation. Thus, it may seem that the venerable
distinction between bios and zoe, restored of late in biopolitical
discussions, is also at work here. Indeed, Butler herself referred once
to Agamben’s Homo Sacer, arguing that there are certain normative
conditions that must be fulfilled for life to become life. Once again,
life appears in two senses, as the ‘minimum biological form of living’
and the one which ‘establishes minimum conditions for a livable life
with regard to human life’ (UG: 39, 226).
Defining the pair vita nuda/political existence as the fundamental
categorical pair of western politics, Agamben strongly emphasised the
difference between two essentially distinct forms of life, conserved in
Greek: zoe is an expression of a mere fact of living; bios, on the other
hand, refers to a ‘qualified life’ (Agamben 1998: 12, 11). The first is
excluded from the polis, the latter is impossible without it, since bios
is essentially bios politicos. The polis itself ‘comes into existence,
originating in the bare needs of life, and continuing in existence for
the sake of a good life’ (Aristotle 1991c, 4 [1252b29–30]). Thus, a
qualified life is a good life is a political life.
It is, however, not only on Greeks that Agamben relies in ampli-
fying this dyad. In a different formulation, bare life and good life
also appear in Walter Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’. Benjamin
emphasises the falseness, even ignominy of the proposition that exist-
ence (Dasein) stands higher than mere existence (gerechtes Dasein),
‘if existence is to mean nothing other than mere life’. If life is, in con-
trast, the irreducible total condition that is ‘man’, then this can never
coincide with the ‘mere life in him’ (Benjamin 2004: 251). Countering
the stance of Kurt Hiller, a radical pacifist and a prominent gay rights
activist, for whom the simple sanctity of life entails a prohibition on
violence (Bojanić 2019), Benjamin insists that ‘however sacred man
is [. . .] there is no sacredness in his condition, in his bodily life vul-
nerable to injury by his fellow men’ (Benjamin 2004: 251). ‘Man’ is
neither exhausted in the mere life (bloßes Leben), nor is ‘he’ reducible
to the uniqueness of his bodily person (leibliche Person [ibid.]).
This distinction has found yet another afterlife: in Arendt’s The
Human Condition, the living body, zoe, finds itself outside the
public zone, where specifically ‘human life’ takes place. For Arendt,
there are two dimensions of life, one cyclical, repetitive and bodily,

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pertaining to all living creatures, the other linear and narrative, per-
taining to humans. A life with a story, able to constitute a biography,
is a life whose beginning and end are, so to say, partially removed
from the cyclical, endlessly repetitive movement of nature. The ‘bio-
logical process in man’ is surely the motor of our stories, but unlike
the ‘story-telling’, it forever retains the character of unceasing natural
movement. Bios, a life that constitutes bio-graphy, belongs to unique,
irreplaceable, unrepeatable beings who live in the world ‘which
existed before any one individual appeared into it and will survive
his eventual departure’ (Arendt 1998: 97). To be in the world with
a story requires, for Arendt, speech and action, two central features
of the political. Arendt also draws on Aristotle and his definition of
life being ‘action and not production’, praxis, not poiesis (Aristotle
1991c, 6 [1254a7]). It is interesting to note that at this point in the
Politics, where property and slavery are defined, we are still outside
the proper sphere of the polis; rather, we are in the household, the
domain where zoe reigns. In the very section where life is defined as
action, we learn that action is administered not by the owner of the
property, but by the owner’s human possession, the slave, defined as
the instrument or tool for action (Phillips Simpson 1998: 30).
Mere, natural, naked, bodily life and good, human, qualified,
political life are merged in Foucault’s exposition of modern biopoli-
tics (or what is perhaps more adequately termed ‘zoe-politics’). ‘For
millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal
with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man
is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in
question’ (Foucault 1978: 143). For modern man, the ‘biological life’
becomes an object of political struggle. With power transforming
into biopower, power over life, the political has become organised
around arrangements and distributions of physiological features of
life according to their value and social utility. Such power ‘effects
distributions around the norm’ (ibid.: 144) – the very same that gives
rise to the questions of ‘man’ and ‘sex’.
Now, Butler is hardly a typical biopolitical thinker (cf. Deutscher
2017: 144–51). However, in her reading of Adorno’s understand-
ing of the impossibility of a good life in a bad life, she suggests that
a very old question, ‘how am I to lead a good life?’, is bound up
with biopolitics. By this she means those ‘powers that organize life,
even powers that differentially dispose lives to precarity as part of
a broader management of populations through governmental and
nongovernmental means, and that establish a set of measures for the

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differential valuation of life itself’ (NT: 196). The question of my

life is inextricable from the response of the world that values my life
more or less than other lives. My life unfolds in a world in which the
right to ontological status and an undamaged future is differentially
distributed.
Bearing all this in mind, it seems that the question ‘whose lives
matter’ is a paradigmatically biopolitical question. However, despite
a singular, unhappy reference to Agamben, Butler does not employ
the zoe/bios distinction. She is indeed interested in a human life, a life
that can (potentially) constitute a biography. At the same time, she
refuses the distinction between the political and non- or pre-political
life, as well as the parallel distinction of private and public, which
keeps certain lives forever in the shadowy domains of reality. The
lives that are ‘bad’ or ‘damaged’, deprived of a right to ontology or a
sense of a tenable future and remaining on the side of mere survival,
are very much politicised and political, as they too are distributed
around the norm defining the human. Human life is, ultimately,
impossible to separate from the body, always potentially exposed as
it is to harm and vulnerable to injury by fellow men. It is therefore
neither reducible to a biological minimum, nor a passive piece of
flesh. The body is rather ‘a living set of relations’ (NT: 65) that fur-
nishes the demands for a liveable life with meaning.
The point where the liveable and good life coincide reads thus:

We cannot struggle for a good life, a livable life, without meeting the
requirements that allow a body to persist. It is necessary to demand that
bodies have what they need to survive, for survival is surely a precondi-
tion for all other claims we make. And yet, that demand proves insuf-
ficient since we survive precisely in order to live, and life, as much as
it requires survival, must be more than survival in order to be livable.
(NT: 208)

Obviously, Butler does not elaborate on the symbolic homelessness

of modern man. However, she takes from Adorno the idea of an
unchosen badness which not only configures our personal responses
to it, but also situates ethics at the heart of politics – a politics that
emphatically takes bodies into account. My life is reflected back to
me from a world in which I try to constitute a certain biography and
become in certain ways, and in which my becoming is recognised as
valuable, as mattering. My life depends on norms, infrastructure,
institutions, other lives and discourses provided by the world which,
as Arendt said, existed before any one individual appeared in it and

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will survive their eventual departure. In that world, I may be pro-

duced in an invisible or valueless biography, even barred entirely
from biography, a being whose speech about their life is unfathom-
able and untranslatable into any idiom. My humanness can be appre-
hended only doubtfully or ambivalently. ‘Whether or not I can live
a life that has value is not something that I can decide on my own,
since it turns out that this life is and is not my own, and that this is
what makes me a social creature, and a living one’ (NT: 200). So
long as the norm of the human allows for some humans to live bad
or shadowy lives, the differential distribution of survival and (the
good) life will keep certain portions of humanity barred from ‘more
than a survival’.
Butler refrains from saying how good a liveable life should be. She
refrains from offering prescriptive models of liveability, which would
inform us how to lead a good or at least a better life. The only thing
we learn is that there is something ‘more’ to liveability than survival
– and this ‘more’ shifts us from ethics to politics. Liveability reveals
a fundamental inequality in the midst of life, an inequality that
demands insurrection at the level of ontology. The aim of this insur-
rection is to abolish the shadowy regions of the real that produce
lives that always potentially fall back on survival.1

The Desire to Persist

There is, however, more to survival than ‘mere survival’. For Butler,
survival does not fit into a dyad comprising bare life/political exist-
ence, the most fundamental categorical pair of western politics, as
Agamben would have it. Survival is important – and it is important
to socially and politically safeguard it – because the desire to live well
presupposes the desire to live (SS: 65).
‘Can the “Other” of Philosophy Speak?’, the final chapter of
Undoing Gender, itself a peculiar trajectory of reading practices,
gives Spinoza a seemingly strangely prominent position in Butler’s
personal history of philosophy. She describes the Ethics as her first,
autodidactic and ‘premature’ encounter with philosophical thought,
and the idea that a primary human passion is to persist (UG: 235). In
Spinoza, everything endeavours to persist in its own being, and this
endeavour (conatus) or power is the actual essence of the thing in
question, infinite in time. In the human, conatus appears in the form
of will, appetite or desire (Spinoza 1901: 136–7). Desire is the actual
essence of man, insofar as it is ‘determined to act in a way tending

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to promote its own persistence’ (ibid.: 173), thus prefiguring Hegel’s

notion of desire as desire for recognition (SD: 7). For Spinoza, bodily
existence is what constitutes the essence of the mind, so the mind will
endeavour to affirm the existence of the body (Spinoza 1901: 138).
This self-preservation principle is further confirmed by the claim
that no virtue can be conceived as prior to the endeavour to preserve
one’s own being: we cannot desire to act and live right, ‘without at
the same time wishing to be, to act, and to live – in other words, to
actually exist’ (ibid.: 203).
Yet, instead of an egoistic individual at the base of Spinoza’s
thought, Butler extends the desire to persist to involve a desire to
live in a world that reflects the possibility of that persistence, which
also reflects and furthers the value of others’ lives (UG: 235; SS: 65).
We will return to the second part of this claim in the next chapter.
For now, let us remain for a moment on the first part. Being funda-
mentally ecstatic, desire depends on its externalisation. The desire to
persist, to not encounter our own destruction, depends on something
which is external to us, on a world which is outside but is constitutive
of what we are. Up to this point, the question of survival has appeared
several times in relation to embodiment of norms. Materialising the
norm means embodying available possibilities, which are to an
extent unchosen by us. In our long processes of becoming, we can
persist on condition that possibilities remain available, that is, that
they not become negated. For bodies that struggle to comply with
norms, norms appear as both what guarantees life, and what, if lived,
threaten with effacing this very life (UG: 217). ‘If there are no norms
of recognition by which we are recognizable, then it is not possible to
persist in one’s own being, and we are not possible beings: we have
been foreclosed from possibility’ (UG: 31).
The Psychic Life of Power offered a theory of subjection that tried
to show why we remain stubbornly attached to what subjects us, and
how our original dependency coupled with a desire to persist renders
us vulnerable to subordination. Becoming a subject is becoming
subjected to norms that provide us with recognition, protecting us
from becoming (socially) dead or perishable. If becoming within the
available set of norms for some of us includes wretchedness and pain,
then ‘a subject will attach to pain rather than not attach at all’ (PLP:
61). In other words, when norms are in opposition to our desire to
persist, we reach for options that are available, regardless of the fact
that they produce a contradictory and ‘bad’ life. A desire to persist is
a desire for possibility – a possibility to be and remain real.

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‘How is survival to be maintained if the terms by which existence

is guaranteed are precisely those that demand and institute subordi-
nation’ (PLP: 27), asks Butler? Is subjection to norms, produced by a
desire to persist, equal to ‘love of the shackles’ (PLP: 27), and auton-
omy is nothing but illusion? As discussed in the previous chapter, our
fundamental dependence on the world in which we come to be turns
autonomy into something ‘always conditioned and, to that extent,
subverted by the conditions of its own possibility’ (PLP: 204). What
Butler reads from Spinoza is that we persist in our own being only
within ‘the risky terms of social life’:
To persist in one’s being means to be given over from the start to social
terms that are never fully one’s own [. . .] Only by persisting in alterity
does one persist in one’s ‘own’ being. Vulnerable to terms that one never
made, one persists always, to some degree, through categories, names,
terms, and classifications that mark a primary and inaugurative alienation
in sociality. (PLP: 28)
Instead of ‘love of shackles’, subjection to norms functions almost as
a struggle for life, a striving to affirm ourselves as real and persist as
possible beings. An endeavour to persist in one’s own being implies
that we will submit to a world that enables us to persist. And if pos-
sibilities the world makes available also come to threaten us, then our
life is no more than mere survival.
Yet, the desire to persist is not exclusively related to our psychic
life. Taken by itself, the life drive is not sufficient; it needs to be sup-
ported by something outside itself (FoW: 21). ‘Life is sustained not
by a self-preserving drive, conceived as an internal impulse of the
organism, but by a condition of dependency without which survival
proves impossible’, which is of the kind that ‘can also imperil sur-
vival depending on the form that dependency takes’ (FoW: 46). Thus,
survival, that is, the perseverance in one’s own being, is possible
only on condition of dependency – on norms, infrastructure, institu-
tions, other social beings – and on condition of interdependence, in
which the unchosen structures of the world become implicated in my
own survival. Survival is ‘dependent on what we might call a social
network of hands’ (FoW: 14), which seeks to minimise the unlive-
ability of lives (NT: 67).

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The Possible Life

A life that cannot be lived is an impossible life. The absence of pos-
sibilities restricts the sphere of life sometimes quite literally, through
restricted movement, breathing, speech, assembly, expression of inti-
macy, dignified death. We have become accustomed to understanding
these possibilities as rights that are politically there for us, regulated
either on account of our humanity or citizenship. Moving, breathing,
speaking, loving and dying, however, are ‘activities’ that also exist in
a pre- or non-legal sense, which take place regardless of their being
legally sanctioned. Thus, the fact that they are instituted as certain
prerogatives (I move in part because the right to free movement
belongs to me, both in accordance with Article 13 of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights and with Article 39 of the Constitution
of the Republic of Serbia) does not mean that their regulation is the
precondition of their possibility. That they are regulated shows that,
as activities, they can be allowed or prevented, sometimes forcibly
and arbitrarily, despite their very basic character. In certain cir-
cumstances, such as a pandemic, they can be limited or denied: in a
state of emergency certain rights are suspended, allowing the state
to restrict the most elementary activities such as walking, gathering
and speaking. Further, in a world of countries and c­ itizenship – that
is, nationally restricted possibilities – what is possible on a given
territory will not necessarily be possible on another (for example,
the basic right to work stops being a right if we find ourselves on a
territory that is not ‘ours’). In war, many rights become suspended,
perhaps even indefinitely.
Rights can be conceived as regulated possibilities integral to
our humanness. They, however, possess rich histories. With this in
mind, it can be said that our basic activities have been recognised as
human in phases, and that these phases were quite uneven. Indeed,
the very regulation of possibilities needs to be seen as an outcome
of many and various attempts and struggles to push through the
limits of the human. Transforming basic possibilities into rights and
acknowledging that they may and should belong to everyone has
required a multitude of historical rearticulations of the norm of the
human. Each of these rearticulations we now read in terms of rights
– among many others, the right to strike, the right to be included in
the universal claim of suffrage, the right to child custody, the right
to social property, the right to gender definition, the right to reli-
gious freedom – demanded an insurrection at the level of ontology,

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which preceded or went along with politically organised forms of

rebellion.
If the possibilities – to move, speak, express my intimacy and
grieve over the loss of a relation, to work, to die in a dignified way –
are there, but are still not possible for me, then I live a life that cannot
be lived. The demand for access to possibilities is the demand for
one’s reality to be recognised. I demand that in the extant registers of
what is real, my existence stops being unreal and impossible. If I am
not the only one to demand this, if we are rising up together, it may
lead to the expansion of the space of the real. Importantly, any such
expansion testifies to the mutability of the limits of the real, to their
expandability, transforming also the zone of possibility. We can say
that all existing rights are recognised possibilities that, once recog-
nised, transform the register through which the real gets established
as the only possible one.
The three subsections that follow, on recognition, appearance and
the jettisoned life, will examine the (im)possibility of life from dif-
ferent angles, relying on Butler’s reading of Hegel, as well as on her
overt disagreements with Arendt and those less overt with Agamben.
The question of the impossible life assumes a world in which formal
equality is taken to be achieved in the greatest part of the globe.
Despite formal equality, however, there are lives that remain unequal
or less equal. The reason for this is that the possibilities, even when
they are regulated as rights and thus formally granted, still depend on
social norms.

To Recognise
To ask for recognition, or to offer it, is precisely not to ask for recognition
for what one already is. It is to solicit a becoming, to instigate a transfor-
mation, to petition the future always in relation to the Other. It is also to
stake one’s own being, and one’s own persistence in one’s own being, in
the struggle for recognition. This is perhaps a version of Hegel that I am
offering. (PL: 44)
Recognition is the central motive of the encounter of the two self-
consciousnesses in Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit. Some ‘you’
has to appear on the scene in order for an ‘I’ to become conscious of
itself. But this ‘you’ is a challenger: invoking and validating the self
in the self-consciousness is at the same time a possible revocation and
invalidation of it, which in its fierceness resembles the Hobbesian war
to death. The struggle between the two ‘I’s in Hegel, however, is not

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motivated as in Hobbes by distrust of others or self-subsistence, but

by their equal desire for recognition: ‘Self-consciousness exists in and
for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is,
it exists only in being acknowledged’ (Hegel 1977: 111). The strug-
gle of the two ‘I’s is necessary and radical. Since the only way for
a self-consciousness to reach its own certainty is through the exist-
ence of another self-consciousness in which it loses itself, and from
which it wants to return to itself, and since this action is doubled, it
can resolve only in struggle, in the death of the other, that is, in the
staking of life. The encounter that transforms a consuming desire
into a desire for recognition takes place when the Phenomenology’s
solitary traveller ‘leaves’ the world of sense-certainty and ‘enters’ the
world of those desiring the same thing. The first ‘social’ situation
in Hegel, that of domination, ultimately arises out of the conflict
between two ‘I’s that equally desire recognition of the other, but
where one submits because its mere life, survival, is dearer to it. In
effect, it becomes a bondsman.
Crucially, what makes Hegel’s scene of recognition so different to
the Hobbesian vision of the state of nature is the emphasis on rela-
tionality. Self-oriented individuals in Hobbes are also situated within
the frame of encounters, albeit exorbitantly unwanted and com-
pletely irresolvable without the establishment of a mortal God, the
sovereign instituted through the compact on peace and protection.
Such is the nature of their encounters that they forever remain atom-
ised loners, whose (subsequent) sociality is equally artificial as the
‘artificial eternity’ of the ‘artificial man’ (Hobbes 1965: 149). In con-
trast, the demand for recognition, constitutive for the Hegelian self-
consciousness, is an expression of a desire for recognition of the other
and by the other. This desire is at the same time self-determining and
ecstatic (SD: 50): estranging – as it finds its expression in another;
and assertive – as it affirms the desiring one. Recognition makes us
ecstatic, out-of-ourselves, as we need to be among others in order
to be something at all. The self-consciousness is never self-­sufficient
and in itself. ‘One could say that Hegelian self-­consciousness is the
locus for a fundamental experience of non-identity that is manifested
through the material relations between the subject and the other,
such relations being understood through the figures of labor, desire
and language’ (Safatle 2016: 29).
Hegelian staging of recognition leads to destruction or subjection,
and many important readers of Hegel have put particular stress on
the struggle and emancipation that follows. For Butler, however, it

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seems that it is the relational character of the subject, constituted

prior to struggle proper, that matters most. In her latest readings of
Hegel (Butler 2019b; but cf. SD: 50), this paradigmatically combative
scene enables non-combative conclusions: the self-­consciousnesses
are mutually related, and would be deprived of knowledge of them-
selves without being recognised by another, which implies their
interdependence (Hegel teaches us that knowing ourselves does not
imply an inward turn, for we gain knowledge of the self only in the
social world). However much we have striven towards a monologi-
cal ideal of self-sufficiency, the demand for recognition makes us into
creatures that exist exclusively in the mode of dialogue (Taylor 1992:
33–4).
Therefore, to seek recognition assumes the existence of others
who will acknowledge and accept the legitimacy of our demand.
The subject’s becoming is possible only by virtue of others. A self-
consciousness is a self-consciousness only in demanding recognition
for itself in an encounter with another self-consciousness. However,
Hegel is insufficient to explain how it is possible to seek recognition
and still be unrecognisable. The story of the two self-consciousnesses
has nothing to say on the unequal distribution of recognition
(Zimmer, Heidingsfelder and Adler 2010). Although one becomes
a socially viable being through the experience of recognition – and
this experience is constitutive for any social being – Hegel is of
no use in explaining the conditions under which recognition itself
becomes possible. For that we need to introduce sociality or norms,
in a Foucauldian register, through which recognition becomes a site
of differential production of the human. ‘To the extent that desire is
implicated in social norms, it is bound up with the question of power
and with the problem of who qualifies as the recognizably human
and who does not’ (UG: 2).
The journeying experience of the Hegelian subject is in many
respects unique. The world opens – starts to appear – to the subject
through its various trials and tribulations of becoming intelligible to
itself. The subject appears, so to speak, together with the world; they
are co-constitutive. In our becoming subjects, we are not so demiur-
gic. On the contrary, one is ‘fundamentally dependent upon terms
that one never chose in order to emerge as intelligible being’ (D: 79).
The terms which ought to determine and affirm who we claim we
are, are already out there in the social field, ready-made for us before
we begin to articulate any demands of our own. Now, if we assume,
following Spinoza and Hegel, that everyone desires to persist in their

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own being, then the striving for recognition appears as an extended

form of the desire to persist in the world, among others.
Birgit Schippers (2014: 26) rightly insists on the importance of
the difference between recognition and recognisability in Butler’s
thought. The first, in Hegelian fashion, refers to reciprocal acts
where two ‘I’s demand recognition from one another. ‘One comes to
“exist” by virtue of this fundamental dependency on the address of
the Other’ (ES: 5). The ‘Other’, of course, appears in many guises: as
the self-consciousness seeking reciprocal recognition from me, as the
Althusserian figure of the one who interpellates me, as the Levinasian
Other who obligates me. But, Butler is critical of the demiurgic and
essentially dyadic structure of these encounters. Each of these ‘Others’
is not just some ‘you’ and recognition is not an autochthonous act. It
might be such in Hegel, where it appears as the ‘first encounter’, con-
stituting the very idea of encountering, of relationality, and thus soci-
ality. However, the context in which ‘you’ and ‘I’, as actual persons
in the quotidian meaning of the referent (that is, not as Hegelian
self-consciousness), encounter one another complicates the dyadic
relation between us: there is always a boundless field of ‘others’ who
shape ‘our’ encounter. ‘The participation of all or of many within
a society is necessary; it is what guarantees that the performance is
continually repeated’ (Ferrarese 2011: 763) and recognised as suc-
cessful according to social norms. Thus, recognisability refers to the
conditions under which any acknowledgement of the demand for
recognition is made possible. Others appear as other ‘you’s, but also
as norms sedimented into terms we use to demand recognition: they
are ‘themselves conventional, the effects and instruments of a social
ritual that decide, often through exclusion and violence, the linguistic
conditions of survivable subjects’ (ES: 5; cf. GAO: 29). And if there
is a ‘you’ who confers recognition on me, I will probably be able to
survive. But the ‘two of us’ are also in various ways part of relations
that are not dyadic in kind, and ‘always refer to a historical legacy
and futural horizon’ (UG: 151). Thus, to be survivable, the norms
that decide upon the possibilities of survival need to enable me to
demand recognition from anyone, without risk from exclusion and
violence.
In that sense, recognisability refers to the normative or regulatory
schemes of recognition that define who will be at all able to appear as
a recognisable being. Let us perform a small thought experiment and
try to put Antigone and Creon in place of two Hegelian genderless,
even human-less ‘I’s who appear to one another as self-consciousness

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seeking recognition. The suggestion is unusual, especially given that

Antigone does later appear in The Phenomenology of Spirit. She is
figured as the pre-political opposition to politics, in contrast to Creon
who is representative of the ethical order and the state. Representing
kinship and femininity, in Hegel’s rendering Antigone turns into
‘womankind in general’, and into an internal enemy of the commu-
nity which ‘only gets an existence through its interference with the
happiness of the Family’ (Hegel 1977: 288). However, since we are
engaging in the thought experiment, let us ask a perhaps paradoxical
question. Can we somehow imagine that Antigone is not a defender
of the hearth and spirit of family piety (ibid.: 447), but a self-­
consciousness striving for recognition? Could we, against the grain
of authoritative interpretations, claim that Antigone is in fact the
very embodiment of the desire for recognition, although hers is the
body of a woman? If such a claim does not seem to work, perhaps
the reason is that Antigone is a woman. She can hardly be figured
as a self-consciousness striving for recognition – despite her willing-
ness to put her life at stake, despite the fact that her acts call kinship
into question, leading not only to the fulfilment of the promise of
her name, but also causing deaths that preclude her various forms
of subjection. In the schemes of recognisability available both in
Theban tyranny and in Prussian enlightened monarchy, Antigone is
not recognisable in the frame of struggle for recognition. This turns
her into an impossible insurgent who dethrones the tyrant, and into
an impossible journeying subject in the most famous story on the
subject’s appearance in the history of philosophy. If she can be rec-
ognised at all, it is only as womankind in general, as ‘the irony of
community’ (ibid.: 288).
The invocation of Antigone with emphasis on the troubling fact
of her gender could misleadingly suggest that Butler considers rec-
ognition in the context of identities. Recognition is, however, never
reducible to an acknowledgement of identities (FoW: 163), not only
due to their inherently exclusionary logic.2 For Butler, recognition
should reach beyond what possibilities are already available. It is
fundamentally about opening up possibilities for something new to
appear.
In 2008, Butler was featured in Astra Taylor’s eight-part film,
Examined Life: Philosophy Is in the Streets. Appearing alongside
Sunny Taylor, a painter, writer and disability activist who is in a
wheelchair, they are shown walking down a San Francisco street.
Butler is the first to speak: ‘I thought we should take this walk together

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and one of the things I wanted to talk about is what it means for us to
take a walk together.’ They agree that nobody goes walking – or can
go walking – without there being something that supports that walk.
Recognising differently-abled people obviously requires more than
acknowledging that certain difference is there. It considers our built
environment as an unequally distributed resource. Furthermore, the
demand for recognition requires from all of us to understand both
movement and space differently, to understand what possibilities
there are for movement in space that make some of us less present,
and thus less real. Our desire to be depends very much on the condi-
tions that make the realisation of that desire possible. In that sense,
meeting such a demand for recognition involves a social and politi-
cal readiness to recreate the space that allows for different forms of
movement. This means the redistribution of funds from, for example,
the production of arms to an ambitious reconstruction of the general
infrastructure of cities and towns. But it also, importantly, involves
our becoming aware of what bodies can do, what they are permitted
to do, how that is not ours to choose, and how dependent we are as
social beings on one another, but also on norms that decide on our
liveability (Butler and Taylor 2008; Abrams 2011). If this is taken
into account, social reality cannot simply remain as it was prior to
the ‘transformation’ effected by such a recognition: something in the
order of intelligibility, and in this case, something in our understand-
ing and practice of moving, also has to profoundly change.

To Appear
The demand for recognition is made by those not yet recognised. The
place that ‘belongs’ to them in the existing distribution of the real is
too narrow and incapacious, exposing them to a lack of relation or
to a dangerous relation. One seeks recognition because in the existing
categorial apparatus, normative discourses, infrastructural arrange-
ments, their place is a non-place. Within the existing possibilities
in the order of the real, this subject remains less possible, without
a foothold. How can we exist without a place that in some ways
enables us, allowing us to move at all or to move without a threat
to life? This question introduces another aspect of possibility, which
primarily refers to the spatial character of embodied life.
In an interview with George Yancy (2015), Butler discusses the
chant ‘Black Lives Matter’ against the rejoinder that all lives matter.
No doubt, Butler’s idea of liveable life is equalising, meaning that all

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lives do matter. But, so long as there is only one kind of life – white
life – that is given recognition, emphasis on the obvious, that black
life is a life too, claims something that has historically not been
realised. If whiteness is understood as a background to (universal,
human) experience, as an ongoing history which ‘orientates bodies
in specific directions, affecting how they “take up” space’ (Ahmed
2007: 150), then non-white bodies appear as insufficiently universal,
insufficiently human, as ‘spaced-out’. If (universal, human) experi-
ence is epidermalised as implicitly white, then non-white bodies
appear in it with a difference that denies them universality. Insisting
on that difference is the demand for recognition that all lives never
really included all lives. It is a demand that now, in this moment, lives
that have historically not mattered, have been unworthy, were con-
sidered ‘only a fraction of life’ (Yancy and Butler 2015), emancipate
from their historical abjectness, reconfiguring in the process the very
notions of the human and universal.
Writing recently on the sudden and senseless murder of black
people, Kimberlé Crenshaw succinctly states that their deaths were a
direct consequence of their being Black. For them ‘the violence of the
past is the violence of the present’ (Crenshaw 2020). The offence of
Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man, was ‘jogging while Black’
(ibid.). In our social organisation of the visible, his mere skin colour
signalled depravity and danger, his embodied presence justifying the
violence mobilised to subdue the implicit threat he posed (see Butler
1993c). Arbery, it has been suggested, would have avoided getting
killed had he not gone jogging in broad daylight. Had Arbery not
appeared, had he not gone jogging in public, he might be alive.
What does it mean ‘to appear’? Can we appear at all if we make
only spectral, damaged or attenuated claims to the human (Feola
2014: 135)? What if we try to pose as human, but ‘no recognition is
forthcoming, because the norms by which recognition takes place are
not in your favor’ (UG: 30)? If we are abject, do we ever appear?
The figure of the ‘abject’ holds a prominent place in Bodies That
Matter, referring to those beings who live in unliveable and unin-
habitable (yet densely populated) zones of the social (BTM: xiii).
Julia Kristeva gave this strange notion conceptual life. According to
her, in its opposition to the subject, the abject is more and less than
an object: it is ‘the jettisoned object’, radically excluded, radically
separate, loathsome, ‘not me. Not that. But not nothing either. A
“something” that I do not recognize as a thing [. . .] On the edge of
non-existence and hallucination, of reality that, if I acknowledge it,

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annihilates me’ (Kristeva 1982: 2). The proximity and indistinctness

of the abject is disturbing, as it rips an ostensibly seamless texture of
social life. The abject is there, but illegible, ambiguous (ibid.: 9). This
ambiguous zone – neither this nor that – is an abjected outside, unin-
habitable but inhabited, invisible or framed to be unseen, yet densely
populated. Jettisoned from the ‘symbolic system’, ‘it is what escapes
that social rationality, that logical order on which a social aggregate
is based’ (ibid.: 65).
Butler uses the idea of abject to explain how the domain of
‘unthinkable, abject, unlivable bodies’ (BTM: x) is produced as the
constitutive outside to intelligible bodies. The zone of uninhabitabil-
ity is the limit to the subject’s domain, its autonomy and life, and also
a limit to what qualifies as ‘human’ (BTM: xiii, xvii). The production
of the ‘unsymbolizable, the unspeakable, the illegible is also always a
strategy of social abjection’ (BTM: 142), which depends on the space
in which the symbolisable, sayable, legible appears. The space of
appearance is where we are made to be seen, heard, ‘read’ by others,
symbolising something unambiguous, included, within. In that sense,
for Butler, ‘appearing turns into an issue of social and political rec-
ognition’ (Pulkkinen 2018: 136).
The intrinsic relation between appearance and reality found one
of its most powerful articulations in the work of Hannah Arendt.
Action, the central notion of her political thought, is tied to the idea
of appearance. The political emerges from acting together, that is,
‘the sharing of words and deeds’ (Arendt 1998: 198). Contrary to
labour and work, action and speech do not leave material, tangible
traces, and they do not outlive the moment of their actualisation.
However, what they produce in a fleeting moment of their actualisa-
tion has no correlate in poietic human activities. The ‘product’ of
speaking and acting together is the polis itself. Far more than a physi-
cal city-state, the polis is what holds people together and provides
them with ‘the space of appearance in the widest sense of the word,
namely, the space where I appear to others as others appear to me,
where men exist not merely like other living or inanimate things but
make their appearance explicitly’ (ibid.: 198–9).
The space constituted in common, through action and speech, is
public space. (The word ‘public’ is itself full of cues. The Greek κοινή
refers to what is common and shared. Populus [people] and pubes
[grown-up, person of age] merge in the Latin publicum. German
Öffentlichkeit points to the openness, where the public – those who
listen to the one speaking – is in the open [das Offene], and not in the

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invisible, inaccessible spaces normally considered to be walled in, that

is, private. Russian общественность and гласност combine ‘society’
with ‘voice’, that which can be and – in public – will be heard. The
curious Slavic word javnost combines an uttered response/report
[javiti] with the state of being awake [java]. Etymologically, it relates
to a specific form of sociality, when shepherds returned their herds
from pasture and gathered together after a while – when one finally,
after a long time, hears the voice of another. This, the word seems to
suggest, is something that cannot take place in dreams; it demands
acting together at one place common to all.)
The public is the space where human beings appear explic-
itly through speech and action. ‘To be deprived of it means to be
deprived of reality, which humanly and politically speaking, is the
same as appearance. To men the reality of the world is guaranteed
by the presence of others, by its appearing to all; “for what appears
to all, this we call Being”’, as Aristotle says in Nicomachean Ethics,
‘and whatever lacks this appearance comes and passes like a dream,
intimately and exclusively our own but without reality’ (Arendt
1998: 199). Humanly and politically speaking, what does not appear
remains unreal and in a certain sense un-human, since it is only
human beings who ‘have the privilege of appearing to one another,
distinguishing themselves in their in-born uniqueness, such that, in
this reciprocal exhibition, a who is shown to appear, entirely as it is’
(Cavarero 2000: 20). The ‘who’ that appears is a life that constitutes
a biography.
Posited as such, the public realm – the space in which the political
takes place – seems egalitarian: the presence of others to and with
whom one appears safeguards the reality of the world. The trouble is,
however, that, for Arendt, the space of appearance strictly depends
on the existence of the opposite, non-appearing realm that ought
to be out of reach. The private is the limited reality of family life,
warmth of the hearth (Arendt 1998: 59), natural in its cyclicality,
coming and passing like a dream. Now, if all humans moved unhin-
dered through these spheres according to their possibilities and needs,
alternately appearing and disappearing, perhaps this co-dependence
of the private and the public would not be a problem. One appears,
so to say, for a time, and then disappears to nourish themselves under
the cover of the dreamlike private. Configured thus, the private and
the public are complementary spaces, in which the one who moves
through and between them is the one who sometimes speaks and
acts, and sometimes sleeps and loves.

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This is, however, not how Arendt imagined this distinction.

Figuring it upon the image of Athenian democracy, she accepted
that there must be those who are never part of the public, although
they will be found in the nooks of the private. The private – the
household interior – is shadowy (ibid.: 38), related to an uncertain
kind of existence, an existence unseen and unheard (ibid.: 50). The
private, for Arendt, is always in the dark, referring to the darkness
of physis, of bodily functions, toil, love, something deprivative, inti-
mate, protected, concealed, invisible (see Loidolt 2018: 135–8). But,
if this is so, the reality of the world does not open to everyone. Those
who remain in the shadow, who do not speak or act in public, are
not entirely endowed with reality. They lead what Arendt defines as
‘an entirely private life’, deprived of the essentially human. They are
deprived of a reality that comes from being seen and heard, as well as
the possibility to achieve something more permanent than life itself
(Arendt 1998: 58):

The political realm [. . .] is the public sphere in which everybody can

appear and show who he himself is. To assert one’s own opinion belonged
to being able to show oneself, to be seen and heard by others. To the
Greeks this was the one great privilege attached to public life and lacking
in the privacy of the household, where one is neither seen nor heard by
others. (The family, wife and children, and slaves and servants, were of
course not recognized as fully human.) In private life one is hidden and
can neither appear nor shine. (Arendt 2005: 14, italics mine)

Arendt offers a social ontology in which appearance is intrinsically

related to being, where to be is to be in public. To be (a human) is to
act, that is, to create and perform the reality in which one appears.
However, this powerful conception directly depends on the dark side
of the same social ontology, assuming the existence of spaces that
not only temporarily hide from appearance (as shelters, fortresses),
but are entirely deprived of appearance (within ontological walls).
The unyielding ‘of course’ from the passage quoted above, affirms
not only the division between public and private, but also the given-
ness of the differential distribution of humanness across this divide.
Certain spaces are spaces of appearance, such that anyone can
appear in them, as long as they are fully human, that is. Those fully
human can show themselves, be visible and audible, since these are
spaces that affirm their humanness. But this historically obdurate ‘of
course’ belongs to a social reality in which some are constituted as
politically meaningless beings (indistinct, illegible, unintelligible – as

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Barbarians speaking in a bar-bar tongue never to become κοινή, the

language of the ‘politēs’). As such, they are constituted precisely as
invisibly human, as unreal humans, sometimes monstrous and limi-
nally dreamlike (Zaharijević 2020a: 152).
Butler’s understanding of the political can hardly be understood
without Arendt, from whom Butler draws, among other things,
acting in concert, performative aspects of the political, plurality,
and the unchosenness of cohabitation (D: 122). As shown by Emma
Ingala (2018b: 35–40), what strongly binds these two thinkers is
the relational nature of the political subjects, the emphatically com-
promised sovereignty of political actors and their agency, and the
common space of appearance always created performatively with
others. Nor can the significance of appearance in Butler’s under-
standing of the real be overestimated: our bodies are indeed in the
world, with an invariably public dimension, making us into social
beings.
However, the aspect of non-appearance – a conspicuous admis-
sion of a limit to reality (and humanness) in Arendt’s ‘of course’ – is
the basis of Butler’s continuous contestation of Arendt. The fact
that for Arendt there is ‘only one basic world-opening activity that
indeed is in need of visibility: acting/speaking, which amounts to the
actualization of plurality’ (Loidolt 2018: 140) is especially problem-
atic for Butler. As early as Antigone’s Claim, she criticises Arendt’s
lack of acknowledgement that the internal boundaries of the public
were secured through the perpetual production of its constitutive
outside. Women and children, slaves and servants, all non-property-
holding males, but rather themselves property, ‘were not permitted
into the public sphere in which the human was constituted through
its linguistic deeds. Kinship and slavery thus condition the public
sphere of the human and remain outside its terms’ (AC: 82). The
‘fully human’ was applicable to certain human beings, consigning
others not only to the outside of the public, but also to the outside
of ‘full humanity’.
What forms the ‘constitutive outside’ changed over time. The
norms defining the boundaries of private and public, non-appearance
and appearance, less-than-human and human have histories of their
own. And although these histories can be told as social histories,
pertaining to something on the other side of the political, cut off
from the space where the true political takes place, the political itself
would remain untransformable if its constitutive exclusions remained
unrecognised. Women as paradigmatic bodies, slaves as tools for

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action, metics as the first named form of immigrants were variously

excluded from access to the space where humans show themselves
and shine. The fact that these were ‘entirely private lives’, deprived of
the possibility to achieve something more permanent than life itself,
cannot be considered the choice made by women, slaves or metics. As
Athena Athanasiou and Elena Tzelepis powerfully state,

the Athenian polis is the biopolitical site in which women, along with
slaves and foreigners, constitute the irreducible limit of humanity: the
marked and dreaded Other who is banished from the political domain
as mere body, and, at the same time, represents the abjected ground on
which the body politics claims to be constituted [. . .] In the discursive
regime of the ancient polis, where the political is emphatically defined as
the sexually neutral domain of disembodied reason and essential logos,
the female body – or, perhaps more accurately, the female as mere body
– is considered to be essentially unpolitical. (Athanasiou and Tzelepis
2010: 110)

The fact that these lives, neither seen nor heard by others, existed as
unpolitical – and not of their own will – points to what a political
life, a good life, was and ought to be, as well as what it ought no
longer be.
In this neat division of spheres, mere survival belongs to bodily
life. At first glance obscured, the distinction between body and mind
resurfaces as the difference between zoe and bios. The bodies that
appear in public seem somehow to be ‘bodiless’, as their bodily needs
are catered for elsewhere, in the darkness of the private. (In a dif-
ferent place, Arendt also considered what the non-bodiless bodies
looked like in public. Referring to ‘rebellions of the belly’, meaning
in particular the women who marched on Versailles while their chil-
dren were starving in squalor, Arendt claims that their force appears
irresistible as it ‘lives from and is nourished by the necessity of bio-
logical life itself’ [Arendt 1990: 112]. It seems that biological lives in
political, public space never appear as plural, but only as ‘a multitude
united in one body’ [Cavarero 2021: 146].)
On the other hand, bodies that are ‘fully embodied’, and therefore
precluded from the space of the political, remain behind the ontologi-
cal walls of the private. The private is private (deprived) because it
is short of the political. Those who never cross its threshold remain
consigned to zoe. For centuries, the self-evidence of this precept pro-
duced ontological deprivations in the organisation of the space of the
political.

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Butler makes a distinctly feminist argument when she claims

that
the foreign, unskilled, feminized body that belongs to the private sphere is
the condition of possibility for the speaking male citizen (who is presum-
ably fed by someone and sheltered somewhere, and whose nourishment
and shelter are tended to in some regular ways by some disenfranchised
population or another). (NT: 45–6)3

But Butler also goes beyond this essentially feminist formulation,

demanding a different social ontology, one in which there are no dif-
ferential conditions that determine what is worthy of appearance and
what remains excluded, jettisoned and abject.
Appearance is generally inseparable from the corporeality that is
seen, felt and understood in certain ways. The presumably bodiless
beings that speak and act cannot be separated from bodies, even for
a moment. A speech act is a bodily act: an audible utterance neces-
sitating a larynx and lungs (among other things). If, on the other
hand, we do not appear, it is because we are not assigned a place of
appearance in the world. That is to say, there is either a lack of norms
that situate one’s body in the space of productive meaning, or the
presence of norms that exclude and render abject. The universal is
either simply foreclosed to some bodies, or they turn into particulari-
ties, given a side-place to the universal. Thus, we have the political
in which there are humans and, on the side, there are women, slaves
and foreigners.
A social ontology that insists on bodies would have to demand
the destabilisation of the distinction between zoe and bios. There is
no sphere in which we are not embodied. It is bodies that have an
unalterably public dimension; they appear, becoming visible and
audible to others. The meaning of the public/private distinction is
not derived from the capacity of bodies to appear, but from a dif-
ferential historical framing of various appearances and the unequal
valuing of different bodies. Appearance is always bodily and always
imbued with norms that order the social positioning of the bodies
(whether they appear, becoming either a ‘political existence’ or mere
life). The destabilisation of these age-old distinctions has been in play
whenever the demands for recognition were made by those ‘of course
not fully human’. Feminists have fought for the politicisation of the
private under the banner ‘the personal is political’ long before this
slogan was even invented. But Butler goes one step further by claim-
ing, in contradistinction to Arendt, that the private is always already

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political, indeed that it is the constitutive outside to the political itself

and its condition of possibility.

To Be Jettisoned
The private, however, need not be considered only in terms of
privacy. It seems that the argument about the outside that shapes
the ‘inside’ has held up over time, even when the private sphere was
considered much more porous and less fixed. The private can be
understood as the space produced by closing off – or walling in – the
open, where humans shine. Not shining are all those who, leaving
the obscurity of the private, do not appear, although as bodies they
have to appear: be they Athenian women, the emerging labouring
classes in the industrial revolution, slaves on cotton plantations, Jews
in ghettos, gay men cruising during the AIDS epidemic, documented
and undocumented immigrants who, driven by war or destitution
seek shelter in wealthier countries – in a word, people who were or
could be ‘stripped of genealogy, cultural memory, social distinction,
name, and native language, that is, of all the elements of Aristotle’s
bios’ (Ziarek 2008: 95). The ‘private’ is thus rather a broad and
indistinct domain in which inequality is allowed – even desirable –
despite the fact that not only the aim of the political, but also the
mode of its constitution, on which point Butler agrees with Arendt,
should be equality.
Butler’s first comprehensive critique of Arendt is to be found in
a little book, Who Sings the Nation-State?, whose ultimate goal is
the rejection of the deep divide between zoe and bios. The book
title refers to a group of undocumented residents, who in the spring
of 2006, at the time of intense debates in Congress on changes to
US immigration policy, demonstrated in several cities in California.
These protests, which surely influenced Butler’s later elaboration
of the performative theory of assembly, had a singular trait: the
undocumented Mexican residents who gathered in the streets of Los
Angeles sang the Star-Spangled Banner in Spanish. The US President
specifically condemned the act of singing in a language other than
English: ‘I think people who want to be a citizen of this country
ought to learn English. And they ought to learn to sing the anthem
in English’ (qtd in Holusha 2006) – the only language that is ‘ours’,
defining our national identity and the boundaries of the polis. Had
the protesters sung the anthem in the official language of the polis,
their gesture could have been understood as a peculiarly formulated

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plea for integration (‘we sing your anthem, we are learning your lan-
guage, please recognise our request to legally reside in your country’).
But a rendition in Spanish (by a plurality) makes the singing itself
into an articulation of plurality (Butler and Spivak 2007: 59). It dis-
places the anthem from its monolingualism, turning it into an object
of a translation and a demand for the redefinition of the language
through which the polis speaks. (The demanded redefinition is, in
a sense, only catching up with reality, as the polis already speaks in
various languages, Spanish being the second most represented.) The
Spanish rendition of the anthem becomes a speech act of sorts, and
the established space of the public gets unsettled when the street – the
space of appearance par excellence – becomes a place from where
bodies and voices announce their desire to end disenfranchisement.
In ‘normal’ circumstances, the undocumented immigrants, singing
the American anthem in Spanish, are there, but are consigned to the
dark space of non-appearance. In ‘normal’ circumstances, they are
inaudible, since the ‘politēs’ do not speak this (barbaric) language.
When the invisible and the inaudible take to the streets and speak by
singing the very symbol of the polis – to which they do not belong
and which relegates them to a non-place – they performatively enact
their right to assembly, to plurality, to a place (ibid.: 63), although
no such right exists for them as of that moment.
The figure of the stateless reveals starkly the paradox of human
rights. Insofar as they are human the stateless possess inalienable
rights; yet, being ‘without a state’, they lack the frame in which
any rights can be recognised. The poetic French term ‘apatride’,
referring to one without a fatherland, a patria and patrimony, has a
rather bureaucratic echo in another French term, ‘sans-papiers’. We
see in this pair a profound tension between rights that belong to us
on account of our humanity, and rights that we have on account of
citizenship, but can also lose or not have. In a world organised into
discrete nation-states, one can lose a state. The nation, however,
remains inscribed in one’s first paper, the first administrative recog-
nition of someone’s existence, alongside one’s name, sex and place
of birth. This paper often also includes information on the ‘blood’ of
the newborn, which, together with place, defines the boundaries of
citizenship on the basis of ius soli and ius sanguinis. Who we are
remains cached in our birth certificate, the paper confirming that
we were born somewhere, engendered at a given moment, in some
nation(-state). The paper is a state acknowledgement of the status
of being born, of coming to be. That paper – as well as our mother

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tongue, the language of ‘our’ anthem – ceases to have power and

ability to guarantee rights when we find ourselves on foreign ground
which defines itself by its own monolingualism, if not ‘monosan-
guinism’. For this reason, persons ‘without papers’ (or those whose
papers are void) are those who, moving across borders, become
undocumented, and thus ‘illegal’ humans. They are ‘living proof’ that
the world recognises only humans with papers. Herself ‘stateless’,
Hannah Arendt’s consideration of this issue led her to introduce the
famous concept of the right to have rights. ‘The same essential rights
were at once claimed as the inalienable heritage of all human beings
and as the specific heritage of specific nations [. . .] the practical
outcome of this contradiction was that from now on human rights
were protected and enforced only as national rights’ (Arendt 1962:
230).
Could we then say that in the world of nation-states, ‘humans’
whose inalienable rights become meaningless by their status of illegal
aliens, are in a sense banished from humanity? Perhaps we could
claim that they are stripped of all qualities and relations, reduced to
a bare life (zoe)? Without papers, without language and legally pro-
vided possibilities to act, these humans ‘appear’ – to invert Arendt
– not as ‘men’, but precisely as ‘physical objects’ (Arendt 1998: 176).
Perhaps they are then nothing more than bloßes Leben (Benjamin
2004: 251)?
Giorgio Agamben reintroduced bare life to contemporary philo-
sophical discussions, referring to a conception in which the bio-
logical fact of life is given political priority over the way it is lived.
Unlike the Greeks, for whom the simple, natural life (a merely
reproductive life) remained confined to the sphere of oikos, and was
strictly excluded from the polis, for modern man the realm of bare
life, originally situated at the margins of political order, gradually
begins to coincide with the political realm (Agamben 1998: 12).
The ‘biopolitical body of the West (the last incarnation of homo
sacer)’ (ibid.: 105) appears as a threshold of absolute indistinction
between the outside and the inside, the included and the excluded,
zoe and bios. ‘When life and politics – originally divided, and linked
together by means of the no-man’s-land of the state of exception
that is inhabited by bare life – begin to become one, all life becomes
sacred and all politics becomes the exception’ (ibid.: 86). With
power becoming biopower, the distinctions between the excluded
bare life, formerly consigned to a particular place or category, and
the included rights-bearers, begins to collapse. Instead of being

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somewhere outside of the city, bare life ‘now dwells in the biological
body of every human being’ (ibid.: 81). In today’s biopolitics, we
all become a homo sacer, potentially reducible to living but without
rights. Biological life is in this case the object of management tech-
niques in various spaces where law can easily be set aside, which
becomes painfully obvious in cases of ‘deprivation of citizenship, the
interning of refugees, border detentions, those interned without due
process, those interned as lesser forms of life, or those possessing
lesser (or no) rights’ (Deutscher 2017: 132).
Claiming that Arendt and Agamben share an understanding of
zoe and bios, Butler says that the two can be distinguished, although
exclusively for analytical purposes: the Socratic good life, so dear to
Arendt (Arendt 2005; Canovan 1990), must be at least implied in life
itself, in our sheer capacity to live (Birulés 2009). More life is already
assumed in mere life, as Bonnie Honig suggests. ‘If democratic
politics is about risk and heroism’, orienting us towards the gifts of
life and making us strive to produce a biography, ‘it is also just as
surely about generating, fairly distributing, demanding, or taking the
sources of life – food, medicine, shelter, community, intimacy, and
so on’ (Honig 2009: 10–11). The Arendtian premise that the sphere
of a merely reproductive life – the dark nooks in which bodies are
fed, nourished, kept clean and healthy – is unpolitical needs to be
rejected. In the same vein, practices that enable the survival of bios
are not reducible to the physiological fact of living. We might say
that hunger, the need for sleep, illnesses, gravidity, exposure of the
body in its materiality (to a potential violence which is always more
likely to happen if hunger, illness and gravidity are at an advanced
stage) belong to a merely physiological arrangement of our bodily
life. But even so, what enables the body to assuage hunger, to obtain
care and attendance, to maintain a healthy pregnancy and give birth,
to remain protected from arbitrary violence – in other words, to
remain alive – belongs to the sphere of the political for which speech
and action will be employed.
Life does not have a basis and superstructure: each sphere in which
life takes place is saturated with power. Thus, the notion of bare life
feeds on an exclusionary logic whose ultimate aim is to depoliticise
life (Butler and Spivak 2007: 38). Indeed, it relies on a tacit assump-
tion that there were times when certain lives were understood as
exclusively zoe and ‘non-political’, and that this must have been good
for the political, for the polis, because the ‘political lives’ (bios) were
such precisely because the two were separable and separated.

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Lives that (have to appear but) do not appear in a humanly

­ ualified way – in the Athenian polis or in contemporary nation-
q
states – inhabit excluded zones that are also politically produced.
Due to their exclusion, those ‘non-appearing’ are indeed barred from
recognition as qualified lives, but they are as such neither mere physi-
cal objects (even if they often ‘appear’ as abject), nor bare physiologi-
cal (biological or ‘natural’) processes simply declining to terminate.
The naturalness of human life, as well as its reified and abject status,
is always an effect of various political processes of naturalisation,
objectification and abjectification – all diverse forms of derealisation.
One of the oldest forms of allocation of recognition is the predeter-
mination for a pre- or non-political life on the one hand, and for the
qualified political life, on the other. This ‘predetermination’, which
has for centuries been understood as something entirely natural – in
the case of women, in the most direct, ‘anatomical’ way – is itself
politically produced. To claim that we are now living at a time when
the distinction between bare life and political existence is becoming
blurred is to accept that for women, slaves and metics, politics has
always been a form of biopolitics.
Agamben ominously claimed that ‘if there is no longer any one
clear figure of the sacred man, it is perhaps because we are all virtu-
ally homines sacri’ (Agamben 1998: 68). However, the functioning
of all previous political communities that had a clear understanding
of their insides and outsides was made possible by multitudes of
those politically preordained to live a merely reproductive, politically
unrecognised life. Their reducibility to a mere biological reproduc-
tion codetermined and co-defined political from within. In that sense,
politically qualified life, itself a result of concerted action, has always
been regulated by norms of recognisability that distributed appear-
ances, denying or granting the right to appear, distributing positions
of mere life and bearing rights differently. In Butler’s understanding,
all lives are steeped in power, and none is ever outside of the work-
ings of the political. It is the way in which lives are politically con-
ditioned that reflects on their possibility to be something more than
mere life.
Agamben’s understanding of qualified and unpolitical lives,
however, also has an important aspect regarding agency. If we are
all becoming sacrificeable at the altar of our biopolitical communi-
ties, political agency is taking place in an indistinctly shrunken space,
that is, slowly evaporating. In Agamben’s view, no one is exempt
from this thinning of political agency, but those possessing lesser

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or no rights seem to appear as the very embodiment of bare life, as

harbingers of our bleak collective future. Now, there is a wide array
of candidates who fit the elastic criteria of such partially (or entirely)
unrecognised lives, excluded from the position of rights-bearers. If
we follow Butler, it is of great importance what language we use to
describe those unrecognised lives. If we understand them as bare life,
as the ‘deanimated givens’ of political life (NT: 79), we implicitly
ratify a perspective that consents to the existence of the politically
living dead beings – even though our nominal aim is to call this
into question. This perspective disregards and devalues forms of
political agency emerging ‘in those domains deemed prepolitical or
extrapolitical and that break into the sphere of appearance as from
the outside, as its outside, confounding the distinction between inside
and outside’ (NT: 78). If we wish to take into account exclusion itself
– enabled by and maintained through the distinctions of zoe/bios,
private/public – not only as a political problem, but as part of the
workings of the political, we need to reject the notion of bare life.
This is precisely what Butler does when, discussing statelessness,
she claims that no life stands outside the political. When a state
unbinds, releases, expels, banishes, dispossesses us, ‘we are not
outside of politics [. . .] This is not bare life, but a particular forma-
tion of power and coercion that is designed to produce and maintain
the condition, the state of the dispossessed’ (Butler and Spivak 2007:
5). Deprived of legal protection from a state they have lost, these
paradigmatically expendable lives do not reside in zones outside of
the political. Their life is steeped in power (ibid.: 9), defined through
manifold modes of deprivation, destitution and dispossession. It is
politically produced as the very state of the stateless:
The stateless are not just stripped of status but accorded a status and
prepared for their dispossession and displacement; they become stateless
precisely through complying with certain normative categories. As such,
they are produced as the stateless at the same time that they are jettisoned
from juridical modes of belonging [. . .] they are, significantly, contained
within the polis as its interiorized outside. (Ibid.: 15–16)

Lives that are lived from the interiorised outside, that inhabit the
uninhabitable zone of unrecognition, are, Butler maintains in Who
Sings the Nation-State?, jettisoned lives. Their exclusion, unrecogni-
tion and non-appearance is operated from within the political that
assigns them their particular, legally unrecognised place. Jettisoned
life does not return to a state outside the polity (ibid.: 36). It is not

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cast out from the polis in a state of radical exposure, as Agamben

would have it, where it could be sacrificed, but is ‘bound and con-
strained by power relations in a situation of forcible exposure’ (FoW:
29). Radically disenfranchised, these lives are situated at the nexus of
the political, saturated with the very power relations that determine
which life is qualified and which is jettisoned. Although they live as
‘spectral humans, deprived of ontological weight and failing the tests
of social intelligibility required for minimal recognition’ (Butler and
Spivak 2007: 16), never qualifying for a life that shines, they are not,
for that reason, on the outside of the political. The state of being
jettisoned, cast away from the space in which rights are fulfilled, is
indeed a situation of extreme precarity. However, a jettisoned life is
never bare, barren, naked and stripped of agency. It can transform
its destitution into a politically performative tool; it can rebel from
within its precarious state (cf. Ziarek 2008: 103; Cabrera 2018: 9).
Revisiting Arendt in a more conciliatory tone than in Who Sings
the Nation-State?, as if wrenching her from Agamben’s reading and
onto her own side, Butler writes:

Those who have been dispossessed of rights are actively dispossessed:

they are not jettisoned from the polis into an apolitical realm [. . .] The
rightless and stateless are maintained in conditions of political destitution
[. . .] Indeed, Arendt writes quite clearly in The Origins of Totalitarianism
that the ostensible ‘state of nature’ to which displaced and stateless people
are reduced is not natural or metaphysical at all, but the name for a spe-
cifically political form of destitution. (PW: 150)

Let us, once again, return to the undocumented workers who sing
the US national anthem in Spanish. They may, for our present pur-
poses, represent today’s rightless and stateless, framed by a norma-
tive regime that classifies some ‘bodies as “genuine” and others (be it
emaciated bodies of refugees squashed in lorries in which they have
been smuggled to the “West”, or confined to the leaky Tampa ship
hopelessly hovering off the shores of Australia) as “bogus”’ (Zylinska
2004: 526). As bogus, they can be deported, or jettisoned to an ‘inde-
terminate place’. The place is, nonetheless, entirely determinable,
appearing on the maps of immigration routes, regardless of the fact
that it often remains out of sight, unseen and unheard of by those
who are, as yet, not homines sacri. Mexican immigrants are surely
not entitled to the same prerogatives as US citizens. Their ­spectrality
– an effect of displacement and dispossession – in the space of
appearance speaks of their profound political destitution. But a life

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steeped in political deprivations is not ipso facto deprived of agency.

When they gather to sing together, they obviously do not sing ‘from a
state of Nature. They’re singing from the streets in San Francisco and
Los Angeles’ (Butler and Spivak 2007: 67). By singing the national
anthem in Spanish on the streets, they are altering the space of the
political from the very heart of public space. Their bodies appearing
in public becomes ‘a turbulent performative occasion’ (D: 178). On
the street ‘we act, and act politically in order to secure the conditions
of existence’ (NT: 58), the basic possibilities without which lives –
both in the sense of mere and more life – remain impossible.
While Agamben dejectedly predicts that we are all becoming
homines sacri – including those of us who have thus far been privi-
leged members of the polis – and that little can be done about it,
Butler responds that ‘the performative emerges precisely as the spe-
cific power of the precarious’ (D: 121). Precisely because there is no
space beyond or outside the political, agency is always possible, and
the conditions of precarity make it urgent – sometimes literally a
question of life and death.

Precarious and Dispossessed Life

Now, it can be said that the immigrants are not ‘private’ persons in
the same way that women, slaves and metics of the Athenian polis
were. A similar argument can be made for various (alien) others, like
‘racialized strangers’, precarious workers, or trans and queer people
(although the latter are in many parts of the world seen as the very
paradigm of private lives, as those who must remain in ‘their four
walls’). What these different groups of people share is their unequal
access to the space of appearance and fragile or non-existing recogni-
tion, due to which they live jettisoned lives, being assigned to a non-
place. In that sense, they are exposed to greater precarity and various
forms of dispossession.
Precarious life is one of the central notions of Butler’s entire work,
so much so that from Precarious Life onwards, precarity gradually
became a concept on par with performativity. Although at the begin-
ning of this chapter it appeared conjoined to other names for ‘unlive-
able’ life, precarious life differs from the concepts we have examined
thus far. I suggest we read precarity together with dispossession
because both terms crucially relate to the bivalent traits of our being/
becoming in the world as humans, and both involve a certain criti-
cism of ownership. Both are bivalent, and in Butler’s philosophy this

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important bivalence has to do with equality (see Zaharijević 2022).

Namely, precariousness and dispossessability are what makes all
humans equal, while precarity and dispossession are modes of social
and political production and institutionalisation of our inequality.
The term ‘precarious’ refers to something uncertain, dependent
on the will of another or circumstances beyond one’s control, being
exposed to or involving danger and insecurity. In Roman law, where
the ancient institute of precarium first appears, that ‘something’
always related to possession, to something we can claim as our own.
In this tradition, then, precarium stands at the opposite end of the
scale from dominium. ‘Ownership is the largest interest that one can
have in things; precarium, or tenancy-at-will, is the smallest. Yet,
a person holding precario had the benefit of possessory interdicts,
and was called a possessor’ (Hunter 1803: 379), despite the fact
that they were deprived of animo domini. They are thus an owner
even in the absence of animo domini, or the ‘intention of the sover-
eign’, that is, without the power to assert sovereignty or ownership
over a thing. According to the Victorian jurist, in terms of law and
reason, precarium is a ‘startling inconsistency’ and an ‘extraordinary
anomaly’ (ibid.: 380). The inconsistency is that the tenancy-at-will
could be converted into a tenure in perpetuity, on the basis of which
a tenant could hold the tenancy in defiance of his patron (ibid.: 381),
to whom the ‘intention of the sovereign’ (animo domini) belongs.
Insubordinate tenancy was later regulated by turning precarium into
a convention according to which one is allowed to use or exercise a
right freely until revocation, which, however, can take place at any
time and at the whim of the holder of animo domini.
In Butler’s use of ‘precarious life’ we can recognise certain echoes
of the original usage of the term. There is the possessor without
sovereignty, and a ‘tenant’ with defiant possessory interdicts, whose
tenancy-in-life nevertheless does not depend exclusively on the sov-
ereign. Thus, a precarious life could be translated into a life owned,
but only tenuously; acquired by supplication, but always open to
arbitrary denial or seizure. A precarious life is a life of a ‘tenant’
who, from the very outset, acquires their tenancy with a great level
of uncertainty, in the knowledge that, although obtained for now,
the ‘rights to tenancy’ can be withdrawn at any time. In such a life,
one ‘begs’, even while at the same time expressing defiance against
the concatenation of powers on which one depends and over which
one cannot be sovereign. In a world characterised by precarisation,
the implacable production of adjustments to insecurity (D: 43),

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precarious life can extend to include insignificance, disposability, a

sense of damaged present and an unliveable future.
Put another way, a precarious life is simply the life of the body in
the world. Our being in and of the world is what at the same time
constitutes and dispossesses us as embodied lives (PL: 24). If dispos-
session is the removal of that which makes something possible to
remain in place (Devenney 2020: 74), we are simultaneously put and
removed from our place, which makes both the idea of place and its
being ours quite ambivalent.
As the long exchange between Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou
clearly shows, there are two valences to dispossession. One directly
refers to loss, denial, deprivation: that is, taking something away,
whether land, property, citizenship, basic means of livelihood. In this
sense, it is an intended production of loss and deprivation. However,
for one to become dispossessed of what belongs to them, one first
must be ‘dispossessible’, that is, not in control of the world on which
one still depends with one’s belongings. The second valence of dis-
possession seems to be no less negative, as it points to the limits of
one’s self-sufficiency and reveals that one is always only partially
and incompletely in possession of oneself. Dispossession indicates
that dependency and independence are not entirely detached from
one another, that relationality is implicated in autonomy, that the
world does indeed penetrate through what was thought to be the
impenetrable boundary of the skin. In the liberal political imaginary,
the second valence has to be understood as deprivative, because ‘the
“I” is always to some extent dispossessed by the social conditions
of its emergence’ (GAO: 8), and it is only in and from dispossession
that the I can give any account of itself. For Butler and Athanasiou,
however, this is what positions the self as a fundamentally social,
ecstatic being, moved by forces that precede and exceed it, ‘driven by
passions it cannot fully consciously ground or know [. . .] depend-
ent on environments and others who sustain and even motivate the
life of the self itself’ (D: 4). Our being ‘out there’ contests the idea
of an individual as an absolute owner over their primary possession,
defined from Locke onwards as life and limb, our living body. Since,
as an embodied life, I am inherently dispossessible, I am only ever an
incomplete, partial owner of whatever is ‘mine’.
When we say that lives are dispossessed, we are in fact under-
scoring that lives ‘take place’: we are born into an unchosen world
– somewhere, at some moment – in which we continue to lead
a complex process of living, an action only partially undertaken

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autonomously. We are not in control of the various factors on which

we depend for our persistence and thriving. Sometimes these factors
are epidermalised, as Fanon (1986) described the fundamental other-
ing of people of colour; sometimes one is unlucky to be born or live
in a war zone; or else one comes from an indebted country, the debt
having been taken on against the people’s will. We are then not only
deprived of a viable status or position, but also assigned a status of
deprivation, lack, of a spectral existence, without place, power or
possessions.
Butler claims that ‘one’s life is always in some sense in the hands
of the other’ (FoW: 14). The ‘other’ is at times someone we know:
perhaps we were the ones to entrust them with our life. At other
times, however, the ‘other’ merely belongs to the world we inhabit,
someone I do not know and might never even meet. Lives are thus
by definition precarious – because they do not persist in and of them-
selves, but are always and from the start given over to the world.
Each and every one of us is dependent on a relation between the
world and the body that makes our life precarious. No one is in total
possession or in complete mastery of an entire social field – of (all)
others, of norms, of language, discourses, institutions, infrastruc-
tures. In that sense, all life is heavily dependent on sociality. One can,
of course, debate its degree, but the fact of dependency is beyond
dispute. Precariousness is not the internal feature of a monadic indi-
vidual, of this or that life, but a state integral to life itself as a condi-
tioned process (FoW: 23).
Since no life has been, as yet, capable of transcending injurability
and mortality, precariousness and precarity appear synchronously.
Precariousness can be understood as an existential category applica-
ble to all lives equally: each life ‘begs’ for norms that allow for more
possibilities, for relations and an infrastructure that enable its thriv-
ing. Precarity, on the other hand, is not a generalisable condition of
the human, but a politically and socially produced state in which
some lives have to ‘beg’ more not to be exposed to violence and dis-
possession. While precariousness refers to the primary vulnerability
to injury and loss, precarity is ‘a condition of induced inequality
and destitution’ (D: 20; FoW: 25; NT: 33). The synchronicity of
precariousness and precarity is important, because the first does not
refer to some pre-political state of the body, to a purely existential
condition (Ingala 2018b: 44). Bodies live through materialising
possibilities that are available to them, and precariousness is thus
always materialised as a particular degree of precarity, which makes

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it ‘indissociable from that dimension of politics that addresses the

organization and protection of bodily needs. Precarity exposes our
sociality, the fragile and necessary dimension of our interdepend-
ency’ (NT: 119).
Precariousness of bodily life is a ground for equality among lives
(FoW: 22), but it is, at the same time, also the ground for their
inequality. Precariousness and dispossessability could be understood
as ineradicable human openness to destitution. We all depend on
sociality, which is politically organised and managed: the first is
what makes us equal, the latter introduces differences in how we are
positioned, seen and heard, in the world. This is, upon the whole,
why Butler declines to define life. Life is a given, and it is given as
precarious, bound to the world, in need of a relation, and in need of
a relation that is not violent.

Life That Matters, Grievable Life

At the beginning of this chapter I suggested that liveable life should
be understood as a life that can be lived. ‘Life worth living’ in Judith
Butler’s philosophy has a different name: grievable life. The notion
of grievability appeared in Butler’s thought together with precari-
ous life. However, while the latter describes the existential state of
human bodies living in the world, grievable life has a regulative
function: it says something about the worth ascribed to lives in and
by the world. While all lives are precarious, not all are grievable.
‘Grievability is a presupposition for the life that matters’ (FoW:
14). Such a life is a life that mattered while it was lived, which
appeared as worthy of value, and not already lost before it departed
(Schneider and Butler 2010).
Recall that ‘mattering’ is a significant word that previously used
to accompany bodies. Bodies That Matter showed that not all bodies
materialise in a ‘proper’ way, as they do not all have a stable position
in the hegemonic system of signification; in short, not all qualify as
fully human. Minority realities that Butler describes as the ‘domain
of abjected bodies’ are deprived of an appropriate place in the
established ontology of the human. However, what seems to have
interested her most at the time, in 1993, is the potential challenge
bodies ‘produce to a symbolic hegemony that might force a radical
rearticulation of what qualifies as bodies that matter, ways of living
that count as “life”, lives worth protecting, lives worth saving, lives
worth grieving’ (BTM: xxiv). Obviously, grieving is already there in

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1993, attached to the worth of a fully human life; but its understand-
ing would be greatly expanded after the war-related events of the first
decade of the twenty-first century.
The question of grieving – why we feel stricken by grief, why
we fail to grieve, and how this failure is socially shaped – has a
long trajectory. In an interview with Udi Aloni, Butler gives a short
reconstruction of her interest in the conditions under which we fail
to grieve for others. From the experience of mourning in the Jewish
community in which she was raised, to the postwar generation of
German culprits’ inability to mourn (as proposed in Mitscherlich
and Mitscherlich’s widely read study from 1975) to which Butler
was drawn as a student, to the unacknowledged emotional loss and
stigmatisation of dying and grief for the gay and lesbian communi-
ties decimated by AIDS – it is the question of grievability that links
early queer politics with war and violence, including her approach
to Israel–Palestine (Aloni 2010). In addition, the concept of griev-
ability allowed her to theoretically move away from the inherent
singularity of bodies, to lives that can be figured in terms of groups
or even populations. Take an example from the era of the AIDS epi-
demic. Random individuals infected with HIV turned into a strangely
coherent population marked as a contagious embodiment of evil, a
vampiric sexuality collapsing into something ‘sexually exotic, alien,
unnatural, oral, anal, compulsive, violent, protean, polymorphic,
polyvocal, polysemous, invisible, soulless, transient, superhumanly
mobile, infectious, murderous, suicidal, and a threat to wife, chil-
dren, home, and phallus’ (Hanson 1991: 325; on another level of
reality, these same people appeared, as Hanson strongly put it, in
a ‘portrait of a lover as pallbearer’ [ibid.: 334]). The AIDS crisis
revealed that some lives are worth sustaining, while others are utterly
worthless. Similarly, in an armed conflict, there are many lives that
do not get to even be pallbearers, or indeed corpses that deserve
burial. The logic of distinction between abundant and destructible or
superfluous life (Cooper 2008) is embedded in different class, racial
and gendered histories of devalued and unrecognised labour all over
the world. Soaring inequalities establish lives as valuing, and thus
mattering, differently.
Butler has begun to address these issues as directly biopolitical
in her latest works, because they are similarly organised around
the norm dividing lives into those that need to be protected and
mourned, and those effectively dispensable and thus ungrievable. Her
work on these issues was prompted, however, by the violent attack

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on the United States in 2001 and the subsequent ‘war on terror’,

which raised the questions of violence, vulnerability and loss – to
some extent already operative in Butler’s vocabulary – to a different
level. The term ‘9/11’, a shorthand for a string of events that shaped
international politics of the early twenty-first century, presented
grief, loss and mourning in an entirely new light, giving them entirely
new political meaning.
Faced with vulnerability, with injurability, with being wounded or
losing our loved ones, how do we respond? Do we retaliate? Should
we be ready to – in the name of loss and wound – quickly create new,
insignificant losses, propping up ungrievability as a value? Should
we have the (almost national) duty to recuperate harm done to us,
stoking fantasies of invulnerability and impermeability? Or else, do
we try to work against such ‘horrid masculinism’ (Stauffer 2003),
attempting instead to become responsive to the shared conditions
of life, and politically reimagine the possibility of community on the
basis of vulnerability and loss (PL: 20)?
The question that preoccupies me in the light of recent global violence is,
Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? And, finally, What
makes for a grievable life? Despite our differences in location and history,
my guess is that it is possible to appeal to a ‘we’, for all of us have some
notion of what is to have lost somebody. Loss has made a tenuous ‘we’
of us all. (PL: 20)

Because we are socially constituted, loss and vulnerability appear as

resources for building a political community. We are ‘attached to
others, at risk of losing those attachments, exposed to others, at risk
of violence by virtue of that exposure’ (PL: 20). The primary ‘aliena-
tion in sociality’ (PLP: 28) diagnosed in The Psychic Life of Power,
from Precarious Life onward starts to function as an equalising
feature of lives. The capacity to grieve – or, rather, readiness to give
ourselves over to grief – to acknowledge the losses of the other, any
other, assumes that we apprehend our belonging to the basic com-
munity of beings whose only reality is a social one.
It seems that in the works written after 2001, sociality started
to have a different valence for Butler, and the notion of grievability
contributed immensely to this change. If up to that point Butler was
mainly concerned with how certain bodies never really measure up
to the social norm, the social now began to appear as a resource
rather than an obstacle. The fact that sociality is constitutive for the
bonds we share, regardless of our will and predisposition, appears

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as the contingent foundation for a peculiar social ontology Butler is

offering. This move helped her to further hone a position of radical
egalitarianism. The profound inequality diagnosed by the theory
of performativity transformed into a call for radical equality. Not
all lives are grievable, although all are precarious, always and from
the start given over to the world. To politically reimagine the social
world has to entail the possibility of equal grievability, of lives mat-
tering equally.

Mourning Otherwise
An encounter with grief, which is in a sense an encounter with the
loss of relation, shows, above all, that in relations we are always
‘beyond ourselves’. This is much more than to say that we are rela-
tional beings. It is about an ecstatic quality of humans – of not being
our own, being given over to the other without at the same time
being owned by them (UG: 149). The other, the relation, is constitu-
tive of who we are. Thus, being beyond ourselves means becoming
other than what we are by way of the other, forever incapable of
returning to a previous state when the other was not there (GAO:
27). But we are not constitutively beyond ourselves only due to the
encounters with the particular ‘you’s to whom the ‘I’ is given over.
We are thus because we are continuously given over to the world, to
sociality. It is the body that makes us the centre of relations due to
its ‘socially ecstatic structure’ (FoW: 33), that is, to being exposed to
the willed and unwilled proximity of others, and the circumstances
that go beyond our intentions and the power to control them. (This
is a recurring thought in Butler. We find it as early as 1986: ‘This
ek-static reality of human beings is, however, a corporeal experience;
the body is not a lifeless fact of existence, but a mode of becoming’
[Butler 1986: 38].)
Butler believes that grief, a response to loss and vulnerability, can
urge us to politically reimagine the possibility of a different commu-
nity. Our being ‘for’ and ‘by virtue’ of another (PL: 24) is particularly
acute when we are beyond or beside ourselves with desire or grief.
Both are forms of dispossession; they also open us to the apprehen-
sion that, being conditioned by relations, we are in fact continuously
dispossessed. In grieving, as much as in desiring, it becomes appar-
ent how partial our autonomy is and how our control over life is of
necessity compromised by possible losses that are an integral part of
life, of an ‘I’ conditioned and sustained by others, in relations and

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reciprocity. Loss has the power to deconstitute, but perhaps also

reconstitute us, to recompose us anew.
Many have read this attempt at political reimagination of commu-
nity as problematic, either because it relies too much on melancholic
subjectivity derived from a rereading of Freud’s account of mourn-
ing and melancholia (Freud 1917; McIvor 2012), or because it does
not move farther than the ‘sofa’, where we go to be recomposed in
our private losses (Ruti 2017), or else because ethical sensitivity,
procured by the ideas of vulnerability, exposure and grief, gets pur-
chased at the cost of the denial of politics (Dean 2008: 109; cf. Honig
2010). What Butler calls a ‘you’, a someone who matters very much
to me, whose loss may completely defragment me and without whom
my life would make much less sense, is my very private, ungeneralis-
able ‘you’. If a politics does emerge out of the loss of someone dear,
it most often assumes retaliation, creating new losses and more grief.
Butler, however, points us in a completely different direction. The
many, innumerable ‘you’s expand into the structure of sociality itself.
Opposing the idea that grief is privatising and thus depoliticising,
Butler claims that it ‘furnishes a sense of political community of a
complex order, and it does this first of all by bringing to the fore the
relational ties’ (PL: 22). It furnishes us at the same time with a sense
of fundamental dependency on others, but also on a liveable world.
Relationality is thus not conceived ‘only as a descriptive or historical
fact of our formation, but also as an ongoing normative dimension of
our social and political lives, one in which we are compelled to take
stock of our interdependence’ (PL: 47).
This is where the complex idea of interdependence makes its first
appearance. We will return to it at the very end of the next chapter,
when other concepts around which it has been built are also intro-
duced. In the Preface to Precarious Life, interdependence appears
‘inevitable’ and as the very ‘basis for global political community’;
but at the time, Butler confesses to still not knowing how to theo-
rise it (PL: xii–xiii). Interdependence will have immense significance
in shaping her understanding of social ontology, organised around
the opposition to ‘liberal versions of human ontology’ (PL: 25).
Significantly, however, it was first conceptualised through an encoun-
ter with the monstrosities of war. As we shall see, this is also the
reason why nonviolence goes hand in hand with interdependence.
Wars are not only legitimised modes of manufacturing death, but
also modes of violating relations. The presupposition of any war is
the existence of destructible lives, whose loss need not and cannot

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be grieved. They therefore rest upon a differentiation of lives, on the

production of a restricted notion of the human. All wars function as
the operationalisation of the unjustifiable right to restrict relations,
whereby ‘our’ relations have value and significance, while others are
declared expendable or insignificant, inexistent although they exist.
In a vicious cycle of violent retaliation, wars have the force to ulti-
mately annul relations altogether.
Facing the nation at war after 9/11 urged Butler to think of the
possibilities of a creation of some ‘we’ different from and larger than
‘us’ who share national intimacy. Interdependence and vulnerability
would be imagined as the basis for global political community, in
contrast to sovereign independence and desired invulnerability of a
nation in war. Independence and invulnerability seem to rest upon
an enormously exaggerated fantasy of invincibility and inviolability,
and the production of grievable and ungrievable losses, based on a
unilateral proclamation of what is rational and affective, sensible and
memorable. The severe censorship of any kind of critical approach
to the power relations that created this political subjectivity sustains
the disavowal of responsibility and justifies retaliatory violence. In
an atmosphere in which any critique becomes identified with high
treason, the erasure of loss is encouraged by the rapidly foreclosed
mourning and ensured by the production of new losses through
vengeful wounding of others.
This description certainly does not apply only to the ‘war on
terror’. The so-called Yugoslav wars are but one example, already
past recollection in the long line of armed conflicts. In her brilliant
study of the political dissidence of the Women in Black, the Belgrade-
based group that became the symbol of ‘agonistic mourning’, Athena
Athanasiou shows how war works within a differential distribution
of grief. To be a ‘we’, a kind of aggrandised political individual
through whom the nation speaks, we are allowed to mourn only
‘our own’, only the relations that are lost to us and only those
through whom we became exposed to loss. Any form of dissent from
national intimacy turns into a transgression, a betrayal. Essentially,
however, this betrayal works against the produced restriction of
humanness – against ‘us’ being the exemplary humans, and ‘them’
less-than-human. The ‘betrayal’ of Women in Black was a form of
collective resistance that arose from loss. It was an attempt to endure
and account for loss by creating alternative ties of belonging and
maintaining its structural possibility as ‘affirmation of the political,
from which to resist sovereignty’ (Athanasiou 2017: 39, 67). The

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group’s gathering in Belgrade’s central square, clad in black and in

performative silence, from the autumn of 1991 until today, is an
assembly of plural bodies that perform agency in concert (NT: 9). It
is also, importantly, a living archive, an embodied counter-memory,
an uncanny afterlife of wars that stands bodily in the way of norma-
tive forgetfulness and of continual recreation of violence that became
institutionalised, both in war and in its aftermath. This ‘spatial
poetics of self-estrangement’ (Athanasiou 2017: 173), of improper
mourning in the heart of the city, politicises affectivity, reclaiming
both the polis and the courage belonging not to a heroic warrior, but
to a ‘situated performative ethos of collective endurance, resistance,
and political engagement’ (ibid.: 242).
Returning to the events inaugurated by 9/11, Bąsak Ertür recon-
structs what happens when the idea of a political community based on
loss and vulnerability fails to take root. Violence acquires performa-
tive and symbolic autonomy, becoming something of a culture and
institution unto itself. The limits to dissenting public discourses were
used to legitimise violence. Later, they will not only become institu-
tionalised through law, but also governmentalised through radicali-
sation discourses that create varieties of ‘terrorists’ all over the world
– among them, groups like ‘Academics for Peace’ who support a
peaceful solution to the Kurdish-Turkish conflict. Vulnerability was
not understood as an ineliminable part of sociality that invites us to
accommodate it in our critical imaginaries of our unchosen cohabita-
tion. Instead, it began to have an increasingly institutionalised politi-
cal life of its own. Such is the case, for example, with ‘vulnerability
to radicalisation’, which becomes a problem addressed through risk
management and resilience-building, shoring up a paternalist, secu-
ritarian and ever more interventionist state (Ertür 2017: 69–72; cf.
Butler, Gambetti and Sabsay 2016). In retrospect, the hegemonic dis-
course produced by the long-lasting ‘war on terror’ started to shape
the spaces and conditions of thought ‘partially because it thrives on
war: the more prolonged the military war, the more its autonomously
generative formations play havoc with the viability and audibility of
critical registers in which historicities and temporalities of violence
may be understood’ (Ertür 2017:73).

Notes
1. In an applied politics sense, this can be, of course, a very disorienting
direction, if a direction at all. This brings us back to the question of

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political agency. However, in the spirit of the performative theory of

agency, we can say that the performative insurrection has its own direct
political forms. ‘If resistance is to enact the very principles of democracy
for which it struggles, then resistance has to be plural and it has to be
embodied. It will also entail the gathering of the ungrievable in public
space, marking their existence and their demand for livable lives, the
demand to live a life prior to death, simply put’ (NT: 216).
2. Let us stay with women for a moment longer, and consider the con-
founding phrase ‘women’s human rights’. What this doubling of women
and humans – at first glance paradoxical – seems to convey is that
‘human’ was somehow too narrow to encompass women as well. As if
glued on, ‘women’ here appear as a necessary correction of the human.
A demand for women’s human rights transforms the idea of what the
human is and what human rights may be, highlighting that the value of
‘human’ is not equally distributed among humans. However, if ‘women’
then starts to work as an identity, based on the internal boundaries of
the idea of ‘woman’, it may become yet another site of differentiation
among humans. When it too starts to produce exclusions, its role ceases
to be socially transformative. On the contrary, it becomes conservative,
remaining steadfast only in the demand for expansion of space within
the existing order, standing in the way of possibilities it initially opened
up in the limited and limiting notion of the human.
3. Butler is here clearly referring to The Human Condition, and we can
suppose that she had the ancient polis in mind. However, this claim
largely applies to the contemporary neoliberal homo economicus as well.
In Undoing the Demos, published in the same year as Notes Toward a
Performative Theory of Assembly, Wendy Brown develops this point
in detail, arguing that women, being the main provisioners of care in
households, schools and workplaces, remain ‘the invisible structure for
all developing, mature, and worn-out human capital – children, adults,
disabled, elderly’ (2015: 105). This responsibility is still formulated as
an effect of nature, not of power. In truth, unlike in the times of the
Athenian polis, those positioned as women in the sexual division of
labour which neoliberal order continues to reproduce, today have a
choice: either they themselves also become homo economicus, ‘in which
case the world becomes uninhabitable, or women’s activities and bearing
as femina domestica remain the unavowed glue for a world whose gov-
erning principle cannot hold it together, in which case women occupy
their old place as unacknowledged props and supplements to masculinist
liberal subjects’ (ibid.: 104–5).

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 Chapter 5

Nonviolence

Politics and Ethics of Nonviolence

A long paragraph towards the end of the first chapter of Undoing
Gender gathers together several important political conclusions of
the first phase of Butler’s work:
We must ask [. . .] what humans require in order to maintain and repro-
duce the conditions of their own livability? And what are our politics
such that we are, in whatever way is possible, both conceptualizing the
possibility of the livable life, and arranging for its institutional support?
There will always be disagreement about what this means, and those
who claim that a single political direction is necessitated by virtue of this
commitment will be mistaken. But this is only because to live is to live
a life politically, in relation to power, in relation to others, in the act of
assuming responsibility for a collective future. To assume responsibility
for a future, however, is not to know its direction fully in advance, since
the future, especially the future with and for others, requires a certain
openness and unknowingness; it implies becoming part of a process the
outcome of which no one subject can surely predict. It also implies that
a certain agonism and contestation over the course of direction will and
must be in play [. . .] It may also be that life itself becomes foreclosed
when the right way is decided in advance, when we impose what is right
for everyone and without finding a way to enter into community, and to
discover there the ‘right’ in the midst of cultural translation. (UG: 39)

Nearly all key notions are here: life in relation to power, in relation
to others, liveable life as human life, conditions of liveability (live-
able world), unknowingness, the political in medias res, futurity,
radical democracy and cultural translation. To be sure, some hesita-
tion is also discernible, chiefly in regard to the nature of the ‘new’
that opens when we act in concert and in plurality, but these seem to
belong to all collective struggles starting with equality. Missing from
this note on political performativity is an answer to the question: on
what ground is equality maintained within the agonistic, plural and
embodied voices that demand translation and, through translation,

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access to the universal and its limitless extension? The answer

requires the introduction of the notion that all lives are precarious
and need to be grievable: the existential, structural trait common to
all socially conditioned beings, and the normative, political ideal of
equality.
As the quote underscores, one political direction – what road do
we take towards the liveable life? – is neither sufficient, nor possible
in a radically democratic contestation. There is no single norma-
tive sketch of the good life, a single methodology that could abolish
all bad forms of life. In line with this, there is no single politically
pertinent way to reach and maintain the radical aim of equality.
Collective struggles which continue their life translated into certain
global obligations belong to one plane of the political. The other
plane refers to a decisive repudiation of violence, something that has
the potential to transform the political here and now. The Force of
Nonviolence: Ethico-Political Bind can be understood as the most
direct exposition of this idea. As suggested by its subtitle, the book
has a strong ethical aspect, missing in overt form from the paragraph
quoted above.
Needless to say, the debate on Butler’s ‘ethical turn’ produced a
wide array of reactions, but two main lines are easy to detect: one
locates her interest in ethics as a newer development, the other sees
it as a continuation of her thought (Loizidou 2007; Mills 2007;
Chambers and Carver 2008; Thiem 2008; Honig 2010; Rushing
2010; Murphy 2011; Stark 2014; Lloyd 2015; Karhu 2016). The
debate centres around the issue of what happens to the political
with the sudden onrush of ‘ethical’ categories, such as grievability,
vulnerability, responsibility, grief and precariousness. For many, the
‘ethical turn’ meant the abandonment of action in favour of the vul-
nerable body and a strong departure from subversive politics.
At first, Butler demonstrated a certain hesitancy towards ethics,
discernible in her texts and interviews published at the turn of the
century. For example, the edited volume The Turn to Ethics fea-
tures Butler’s contribution entitled ‘Ethical Ambivalence’ (2000).
Roughly at the same time, in a conversation with William Connolly,
she ‘confesses to worrying about the turn to ethics’, as she tends to
think ‘that ethics displaces from politics, and I suppose for me the
use of power as a point of departure for a critical analysis is sub-
stantially different from an ethical framework’ (Butler and Connolly
2000). Reading Antigone through Hegel’s rendering of the figure in
the Phenomenology of Spirit section on ‘The Ethical Life’ (where

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Antigone ends up being defined as the ‘irony of community’), Butler

sees her as an impossibly ethical character who is, precisely for this
reason, political, laying ‘claim to a rageful agency within the public
sphere’ (AC: 31, 35). Two relevant texts also appeared in 2001:
a reading of Foucault’s understanding of critique as virtue, and a
prelude to her ‘first extended study of moral philosophy’. In the
latter, she attempts a grounding of personal or social responsibility,
despite working with a theory of a subject that is not self-grounding
(Butler 2001b: 22). Both the text on Foucault and her early version
of ‘Giving an Account of Oneself’ investigate the possibility of ethics
within the horizon of norms (GAO: 25). We may claim, however,
that all these texts retain a level of ambivalence.
It seems that Butler was ready to explore some kind of vague
ethical position, the need for which appeared from the moment per-
sistence in alterity – in sociality – came to be understood as the pre-
condition of persistence in one’s own being (PLP: 28; Barbec 2017).
The ethical was never meant to replace the political, or to take its
privileged place. It has been part and parcel of Butler’s understanding
of the social which both constitutes and dispossesses us, making us
continuously vulnerable to terms we did not make, but for which, in
a very performative way, we may well be responsible. Although we
can claim that this is what Butler’s philosophy has been about from
the very start, it becomes explicit from the moment when she begins
to underscore sociality as constitutive for the bonds we share. The
experience of war and the call for a global political community also
engendered another very important question: what does it mean to
share a violent bond, one that does violence, a bond through which
we act and are acted upon violently? However, it needs to be men-
tioned that from the very introduction of ethical issues, ‘an ethics of
non-violence’ (Butler 2000) appeared as a crucial.
I propose we take up nonviolence as the point where performa-
tivity and precarity meet. I take my cue here from The Force of
Nonviolence, which I will be following in this chapter, claiming that
nonviolence is a way of acknowledging social relation (FN: 9). This
critical extension might seem peculiar, but in fact follows from the
elaboration of social reality or the social world detailed in the previ-
ous chapters. If performativity is about the relation between bodies
and norms, if transformative agency is about possibilities to remake
this relation, and if liveable life requires a liveable world, then non-
violence also appears in the midst of this relation, albeit with an
ethico-political twist. Nonviolence translates into doing something

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with the fact that persistence in sociality is a condition of persistence

in one’s own being.
There is a relation between the body and the world that needs to
be acknowledged in order for anyone to persist in the world. The
meaning of the word ‘acknowledgement’ is not univocal here. It
assumes action; it assumes working through ethical obligations that
appear together with others being thrown into the world, with us and
just like us; it also assumes a critique of what counts as reality, and
acceptance of a certain unknowingness as the point of departure of
agency. ‘When the world presents as a force field of violence, the task
of nonviolence is to find ways of living and acting in that world’ (FN:
10, italics mine). Living is, thus, already acting when presented with
a task ‘such that violence is checked or ameliorated, or its direction
turned, precisely at moments when it seems to saturate the world and
offer no way out’ (FN: 15).
Nonviolence does not rest on sympathy, love or identification
with some or even all people, but on an assumption of a common
world, built by those like us who we do not and cannot know. At this
juncture, ‘moral and political philosophy meet, with consequences
for both how we end up doing politics, and what world we seek to
help bring into being’ (FN: 7). A specific ‘bringing world into being’,
nonviolent performativity is thus based on ethical and political obli-
gations we have simply by virtue of being part of the world.

Trajectory of Violence
To say that violence is a newer theme in Butler’s work would require
yet more ‘careful reading’. As I claimed at the very beginning, we
would not be wrong in saying that her entire oeuvre can be read
as a philosophical struggle for the reduction of violence. That said,
as Emma Ingala insightfully shows (2019: 192), violence appears
under many names: as material, categorical, normative, textual,
social, epistemic, ethical, legal and state violence, and is understood
as a physical, linguistic, emotional, institutional and economic
­phenomenon – but is rarely defined (cf. Ingala 2021). In this section,
which seeks to provide the trajectory of the performative movement
of the notion of violence, I rely on Ingala’s division into two phases
of Butler’s work. In the first, the notion of violence appears mostly
under the name of normative violence, ‘inherent to the normalization
involved in the process of subjectivation and, in particular, of gender
norms’ (ibid.). From Precarious Life onwards, violence is much

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more related to vulnerability and the fundamental precariousness

of bodily life. What, according to Ingala, connects the two phases is
the understanding of violence as ‘the stabilisation or petrification of
a particular worldview that is thereafter represented as natural and
definitive. Non-violence, on the contrary, is conceived as the inter-
ruption or suspension of this stabilization, as an opening to other
possible worlds’ (ibid.).
When related to how gender norms work, violence is termed
normative (GT: xix–xx). We become our gender through perform-
ing the possibilities available to us. If those are circumscribed, our
performances will be too. But the constraint to perform in line with
what possibilities there are, to become a man or woman (although
one is not born one), goes together with certain violence. Recall that
performances are never self-referential and unconditioned, but take
place within rigid, regulatory frames. The girl-subject becomes a girl
because she grows into a maze of symbolic demands, taboos, sanc-
tions, injunctions, prohibitions, idealisations and threats: as a girl,
you ought not behave in this way; girls are such and such; this is how
you too must be; in order to be a real girl, you have to do such and
such; if you behave like this, you are not a real girl, and so on. Because
embedded in structures that shape our body and psyche long before
we are capable of judgement or decision, normative violence does not
appear as violence at all. It is not something we (consciously) give
consent to; it is, rather, something that builds on the sphere of the un-
consenting. Denaturalisation of norms – probably the main task of
both Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter – shows that what we
experience and understand as real, as given and beyond our action,
is in fact very much enacted and established as real. The process of
establishment involves the constraint to enact precisely those pos-
sibilities as real. Denaturalisation of norms, the removal of the veil
of naturalness from something so fundamentally social, disrupts ‘the
ideal morphological constraints upon the human’, lifting the sentence
of death within life from ‘those who fail to approximate the norm’
(GT: xx). Such a fate – known well to Antigone, unwilling to submit
to the norms of the polis and gender order on which the polis is
dependent – is essentially violent.
But the physical side of violence of the norm can never be under-
estimated. Under Wittig’s influence, Butler insisted long ago that
violence enacted against people turned into ‘sexed’ objects can be
understood as a violent enforcement of a category. Enforcement –
the crimes against people reduced to their ‘sex’ – can be seen as the

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violent social action of the category/norm itself (GT: 225; cf. Karhu
2016). Normative violence ‘enables the typical physical violence
that we routinely recognise and simultaneously erases such violence
from our ordinary view’ (Chambers and Carver 2008: 76). A physi-
cal blow or strike is neither the only nor even a privileged form of
violence; it belongs to broader structures of normative violence.
Importantly, however, the threat, the harm and injury are embodied
(FN: 137). Lest we forget, Antigone dies rather than succumb to the
norm.
Bodies become gendered through their involvement in every-
day performances of gender ideals. These ideals are real – but their
reality resides neither in the Platonic world of ideas nor in the natural
configuration of the body. They are real on condition of their social
performativity. The norm does not exist in itself: it is continually
embodied and acted out under constraint (itself an effect of sedi-
mentation of acts) and through social practices that re-idealise and
re-institute it ‘in and through the daily social rituals of bodily life’
(UG: 48). Re-idealisation and re-institution of the norm confirm
certain possibilities as real and suspend others as unreal. This sus-
pension is violent because it rests upon exclusions we all perform
daily, thus contributing to the ossification of certain possibilities. In a
binary-configured reality (rather than a plural one), there are bodies
that remain unaccounted and uncounted.
What is the exact nature of normative violence? If it is central
to the petrification of the real, can it be said to have an ontological
status? Catherine Mills and Ann Murphy offered such an argu-
ment, in an attempt to account for what they see as the rift between
the articulations of normative and ethical violence. I agree with
Mills that Butler was from the beginning ‘dedicated to develop-
ing a critical ontology of embodied subjectivity and an account of
the possibilities of political transformation’ (Mills 2007: 135). But
her ontology entails that the subject who wishes to be ethical and
advocate for a nonviolent ethics is constrained by the norms and
dependent on their constitutive violence (ibid.: 148). Similarly, for
Murphy, the very possibility of non-violent ethics is compromised
by the profound difference between ontological, transcendental
violence and ethical violence that properly belongs to the domain
of moral philosophy (Murphy 2011: 199). Is normative violence
ontological? Is bodily reality violent, and is it necessarily thus?
Butler dismisses this argument (Butler 2007a): ontologisation of
norms not only ontologises violence, but also bodily performances

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that govern themselves according to supposedly transcendental

norms. The ontological status of violence reintroduces determin-
ism, leaving even less room for agency, and thus for reality to be
re-enacted differently and – what is particularly important to Butler
– less violently (GT: xxiii).
The hypothesis of the ontological status of normative violence
overlooks the importance of the double movement of performativ-
ity: the interrelatedness of norms and bodies, and the processual
character of reality. The double movement – acting and being acted
upon – is captured well by the notions of materialisation/embodi-
ment (of the norm and the body itself). Norms become material, real
in and through bodies that materialise them; bodies become material
and mattering by materialising the norm. Reality does not consist of
transcendental norms and static bits of matter, but of reiterative pro-
cesses of embodiment. Materialisation is a ‘kind of citationality, the
acquisition of being through the citing of power, a citing that estab-
lishes an originary complicity with power in the formation of the
“I”’ (BTM: xxiii). The process of becoming something, materialising
into an embodied self, becoming an ‘I’, assumes a compliance with
that which procures being. With each repetition, the ‘I’ affirms that
the acquisition of being has taken place in precisely that way. And
if what procures being is restrictive, constraining and violent, then
materialisation will also contain an element of violence. Nonetheless,
as shown in the chapter on agency, citationality contains within itself
the possibility of its own deconstitution. There is no necessity in the
way processes of materialisation are structured: even if violence is
constitutive in established reality – as it is, by becoming differently,
we open up possibilities of nonviolence. Constraint is not the same as
necessity – ‘even if norms originated in violence, it would not follow
that the fate of norms is only and always to reiterate the violence at
their origin. And it would also still be possible that if norms contin-
ued to exercise violence, they do not always exercise it in the same
way’ (Butler 2007a: 183).
Contrary to Mills and Murphy, I suggest we understand norma-
tive violence in terms of effects the constraint has on bodies. Violence
of norms appears as a restricted set of possibilities within the real
established by repetition. Those bodies that do not materialise the
norm (due to a lack of appropriate possibilities in the given real)
appear as impossible, and are thus harmed by the norm or are more
open to harm and injury. If what is established through repetition
is a relation between the body and the world, then some bodies

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are violently foreclosed from a relation, while others are part of a

harmful and violent relation.
The possibility of social transformation – but also, significantly, of
nonviolence – appears only within the real and in the midst of repeti-
tion, but through displacement or the rerouting of violent effects of
the norms. This is at the heart of agency: although our actions might
be conditioned towards enacting or producing violence, there is
nothing that completely predetermines us to act in a given way. The
possibility of doing otherwise is contained in the acting itself, allow-
ing us also to reject the restrictive norms and their violent effects,
as well as appeal to ‘a norm of nonviolence’ (UG: 220). From the
perspective of established reality, such an appeal may seem insur-
rectionary, or indeed subversive. But it is certainly possible (as a
possibility in the relation between the body and the world), and even
necessary if we wish to advocate for equality: because norms do not
only refer to ‘the regulatory or normalizing function of power, but
from another perspective, norms are precisely what binds individu-
als together, forming the basis of their ethical and political claims’
(UG: 219).
With life and liveability, normative violence moves into the back-
ground. Of course, this shift in focus needs to be taken with caution,
because, for example, normative violence appears in Frames of War
as ‘the norms of gender through which I come to understand myself
or my survivability’ (FoW: 53), while in The Force of Nonviolence
we find it again under the name of racial, gender and sexual violence.
With liveable life and the concomitant issues, new types of questions
emerge. The ethical query is how to allow the human to be some-
thing that does not already exist in the sphere of the accepted and
established. How is it possible to allow its rearticulation ‘in the name
of a more capacious and, finally, less violent world, not knowing
in advance what precise form our humanness does and will take’
(UG: 35)?
The generalisation of this issue – how to think of a world where all
lives are liveable? – began to strongly foreground another perspective
on norms. In it, norms are binding and the basis of ethical and politi-
cal claims. An appeal to a norm of nonviolence is, as is self-evident,
an appeal to a norm, one which is, so to say, already present, pro-
vided by the relation between the body and the world. The question
then is, how to think of a world in which violence is not what socially
configures us to fit into an established social reality. A possible sug-
gestion, if we follow Butler, is to generalise the idea of vulnerability.

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Therefore, violence of (gender) norms foregrounds humans

who are particularly exposed to the violence of exclusion, (non-)
appearance, lack of recognition. Normative violence limits plurality,
producing and maintaining narrowed possibilities, which renders
certain bodies particularly vulnerable. Many of these people are
today lumped together under an administrative label of ‘vulnerable
groups’. However, in the second phase of Butler’s work, the implied
dyad – the vulnerables and the invulnerables – is problematised dif-
ferently. ‘When vulnerability is owned as an exclusive predicate of
one subject and invulnerability attributed to another, a different kind
of disavowal takes place’ (Butler, Gambetti and Sabsay 2016: 4).
Vulnerability belongs to the configuration of the body, but the body
is always living only in the (social) world; it is given over to sociality.
Although inextricable from our embodiedness and, in that sense, an
existential condition, vulnerability is, at the same time, materialised
differently by different bodies. Seen as living sets of relations, bodies
are also socially and politically conditioned into being, which makes
them more or less exposed to precarity and dispossession.
If an appeal to the norm of nonviolence emerges in Undoing
Gender, Precarious Life announces the necessity of a non-violent
ethics based on the understanding of the ease with which human
life is annulled (PL: xxvii). Normative violence already assumes that
the human functions as a differential norm. Lives that are less real
or unreal, condemned to unliveability, are seen, felt and thought of
as lacking a human face. They can therefore be erased, expunged,
deleted, obliterated or destroyed – effaced. Violence dehumanises
and thus derealises. It turns one into something unreal, it negates
one’s reality, it suspends it in a point where one is neither dead nor
alive (UG: 25; PL: 33). In that sense, Butler’s critique of normative
violence already contained the seed of a critique that would develop
into an explicit anti-war and antimilitarist stance. Butler has spoken
of peace only on rare occasions, describing it once as ‘active and dif-
ficult resistance to the temptation of war [. . .] something that has to
be vigilantly maintained [. . .] a commitment to living with certain
kind of vulnerability to others and susceptibility to being wounded
that actually gives our individual lives meaning’ (Stauffer 2003). This
understanding of peace is, I believe, what has engendered the notion
of nonviolence as an active struggle against violence.
An insurrection at the level of ontology leads us to question what
is real, whose lives are real and whose derealised, and whether vio-
lence takes place due to that unreality. But, importantly, it also urges

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us to think how reality might be remade (PL: 33). This remaking

has as its goal a reality that will accommodate more real lives, and
less violence that circumscribes the real. This goal is, however, not
remote, located in a far-away future when we will have become better
humans. If our reality becomes established through our own acting,
and if one is consistent in rejecting the fantasy of full sovereignty
and transcendence of power, then within the given circumstances,
in medias res, we can open up to a transformation of what we are
and become different(ly). Nonviolence – or, rather, consequent,
vigilant and active rejection of violence – becomes a political form of
rearticulation and displacement of violent norms: acting that opens
up to that which is new, yet is already present, ‘within the terms of
performance’.
Again, two extreme poles of interpretation emerge from a discus-
sion of (non)violence. On the one hand, violence in Butler is read as
ontological, fundamental to reality itself. For this reason, it cannot
be eliminated or diminished, making the call to nonviolence mean-
ingless because impossible. The other direction remains dissatisfied
with the ostensibly low transformative stake of the ethical demands
of nonviolence. Since the theory of performativity is stubbornly silent
on the reality that emerges ‘after’ normative violence, and since it
does not insist on this or that (type of gendered) world as best, nor
rest on a prescription to ‘subvert gender in the way I say, and life will
be good’ (GT: xxi) – it appears too indeterminate, politically translat-
ing into a seeming lack of combativeness, even passivity.
It appears that both interpretative poles remain entrenched in the
already existing alternatives: there is either no possibility of change
and all struggle is a priori meaningless, or a struggle is indeed pos-
sible, but requires normative foundations, a predetermined subject
of struggle, a plan of action and elaborate description of what is to
be achieved by this action and, possibly, yes, a certain ‘ultimate vio-
lence’. What Butler proposes is forging another path, which would
itself be non-violent: reject the violent unchangeability and search for
modes of action in the present, without recourse to ultimate violence
that promises to abolish violence altogether. I propose we heed these
profoundly feminist words:
Women know this question well [. . .] There is the possibility of appear-
ing impermeable, of repudiating vulnerability itself. Nothing about being
socially constituted as women restrains us from simply becoming violent
ourselves. And then there is the other age-old option, the possibility of
wishing for death or becoming dead, as a vain effort to preempt or deflect

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the next blow. But perhaps there is some other way to live such that one
becomes neither affectively dead nor mimetically violent, a way out of the
circle of violence altogether. This possibility has to do with demanding a
world in which bodily vulnerability is protected without therefore being
eradicated. (PL: 42, italics mine)
It is precisely from a certain kind of feminist perspective that Butler
draws a demand for a liveable world, for a non-violent relation
between the body and the world. This perspective shapes a critique
of a presumptively masculine idea of a self-sufficient and a-social
subject, embedded in liberal versions of ontology. ‘Surely the critique
of the idea that any of us can exist outside a condition of depend-
ency is an important, enduring contribution of feminist theory and
politics’ (Antonello and Farneti 2009). From such critique springs the
need, itself ethical and political, for a world in which vulnerability
would not figure as weakness that needs hiding or protection, but a
demand for conditions that make the liveable life more plausible for
more living beings (Butler 2018: 249). A demand for such conditions
can be decidedly normative, such as in the form of global obligations,
whereby we gather to formulate and demand whatever needs to be
taken into account for a liveable life to be possible. But it can also
be performative, whereby we seek in our ‘action to sustain a world
without which life itself is imperilled [. . .] which allows us to under-
stand performativity as part of an ethical philosophy, if not a form
of social praxis’ (ibid.).

A Relation between the Body and the World

At the beginning of this chapter, nonviolence was described as a way
of acknowledging a social relation. Although social relation could be
considered the main subject of this book, the last pages will be specif-
ically devoted to the closer elaboration of four key concepts directly
related to it: vulnerability, interdependence, plurality and cohabita-
tion. These concepts cover different, but overlapping, dimensions of
life in and of the body. These dimensions are emphatically unchosen,
but are in play by the mere fact that we are embodied in the world.
Recall that Butler was engaged in a ‘specifically philosophical
exercise in exposing and tracing the installation and operation of
false universals’ (Butler 1993b: 30), that may as well be understood
as the metaphysical foundations of thinking and acting. This exercise
appeared in Gender Trouble under the name of ‘genealogy of gender
ontology’ (GT: 45). As I have hinted throughout the book, in the

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texts written after 2001, something that could be called alternative

ontology began to be articulated, in many ways surpassing the frame-
work of gender ontology. However, shifting the focus from gender as
such was by no means the removal of focus from that which is gen-
dered. At the heart of this alternative ontology – different to meta­
physical, humanist, liberal versions of ontology – are bodies. If ‘we
are to make broader social and political claims about rights to pro-
tection and entitlements to persistence and flourishing, we will first
have to be supported by a new bodily ontology’ (FoW: 2). Given that
bodily reality is social, a reference to ontology would not presume a
description of structures that are distinct from how these structures
are organised and maintained socially and politically: their enact-
ment is part of their ontology (NT: 61). Bodies are in their very being
‘given over to others, to norms, to social and political organisations
that have developed historically in order to maximize precarious-
ness for some and minimize precariousness for others’ (FoW: 2–3).
Thus, the ontology of the body is a social ontology, which turns its
subject ‘less [into] a discrete substance than an active and transitive
set of interrelations’ (FoW: 147). In effect, this means that we cannot
extract bodies from their constituting relations. Our constitutive vul-
nerability should not be considered as a subjective state, pertaining
to the vulnerability of the body alone, but as a feature of our interde-
pendent lives (FN: 45). Bodies are vulnerable to history, to culture,
to economic arrangements in which they desire to persist (NT: 148).
This exposure that is vulnerability can be understood either as
exposure to lack and loss, or as an opening to possibility of relation
(Devenney 2020: 75). Either way, it signals a certain form of rela-
tionality, a dependence on relation. Bodies are undeniably spatial
and this spatiality is precisely part of their exposure. As bodies, we
take up place. And regardless of our being singular, we do not take
up place alone. We are thus exposed and vulnerable to an unchosen
plurality of others, on whom we depend in various ways. As bodies
in the world we are dependent on a relation. Neither body nor world
are pure existentials, however. The world into which we are born
and in which we live is a social one. Yet it is the same world in which
plurality can be articulated or restricted (binarised) – in it, the rela-
tion on which one depends can be given or foreclosed – indeed, in
which our exposure makes us differently vulnerable to relations or
their lack.
The corporeal facts of vulnerability, interdependence, plurality
and cohabitation are fundamentally unchosen. They are constitutive

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for our existence, but we can make no decisions about them as such.
We can try to make certain decisions in order to lessen vulnerability
or even out its distribution, but no one can ever decide to be invul-
nerable. Or, consider our dependency on infrastructure. If there is no
road, we could decide to make one (no easy task, since no one builds
a road on their own). But in order to move, in the most basic sense,
freely and safely, we depend on the existence of roads. There is no
prior decision for this dependency. It, rather, motivates decisions, it
urges to work and organise with others, for a road we will all use and
make part of our common good. Interdependence – my dependence
on infrastructure, on other people, on political decisions, on social
norms (for example, that I, as a woman, will be free and safe to move
on that road alone) – is a heteronomous condition of autonomy.
Our existence on Earth is largely a matter of coincidence: no one
chooses to be born, nor indeed where, in what body, nor the way one
is raised – the content of the first administrative paper that stamps
our existence lies beyond our will. We are thrown into the world
and become part of it, along with all others who are here equally
coincidentally. The ‘we’ is plural and cohabiting, space-sharing. I can
survive – but also the notion of plurality can survive – on condition
that the basic postulate of our common thrownness in the world is
acknowledged: whoever is here already, has a right to be here.
This alternative, social, bodily ontology is premised on the follow-
ing: there is an undeniable plurality of bodies that seek protection
and sustenance; bodies are dependent on the world that sustains
their survival or threatens it, and they occupy space together in an
unchosen cohabitation. The body and the world are indeed neither
separated nor separable, as the bond between them comes about
through our acting, as much as the acting is itself conditioned by it.
The ethical and political question is how to demand radical equality
based on these premises, and how to struggle against violence that in
such circumstances always presents itself as a viable, even desirable
option.

Does an Individual Have a Body?

The alternative ontology Butler claims to offer is developed in oppo-
sition to its ‘liberal versions’ (PL: 25), or against ‘ontology of indi-
vidualism’ (FoW: 19). The emphasis on the social status may lead
us to conclude that socius is missing from the liberal version of the
story about the real, the story that begins and often ends with the

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individual. The emphatic stress on the body may as well lead us to

presume that in the dominant versions of the story on reality, body
has a peripheral, less significant position. Finally, some of the basic
categories of this alternative ontology invite an understanding which
in a certain way recomposes the entities it operates with, consider-
ing them not just as traits or episodic dispositions of a discrete unit,
but rather as ‘a mode of relationality that time and again calls some
aspect of that discreteness into question’ (NT: 130). What remains of
an individual when put through this sieve?
First and foremost, the individual is not an expected concept in
Butler’s opus. The characters of her stories are ‘I’, the self, ‘you’,1
‘we’. Before The Force of Nonviolence, the individual is not given
any substantial attention, and appears only in passing (e.g., PLP:
10–11). In Precarious Life it surfaces together with sovereign auton-
omy and grief, when Butler suggests that grief displays relationality
in ways that challenge the very notion of ourselves as autonomous
and in control. It is precisely in this context that the liberal versions
of human ontology appear as insufficient to elucidate the disposition
of ourselves outside ourselves, something that follows from our being
for and by virtue of the other. Autonomy is scrutinised in Giving an
Account of Oneself, a long response to the critics of poststructural-
ism, which tries to consider the responsibility of an ecstatic subject
(who is again, stricto sensu, not an individual). In Frames of War and
Parting Ways, an alternative social ontology is fully developed: its
point of departure is a shared reality that differs profoundly from the
one inhabited by discrete individuals in liberal ontologies. The sub-
jects of alternative ontology are distinct, but not discrete; in common,
but unchosen; in bodies that are at once never fully their own; laying
claims of autonomy over one’s self, yet never entirely independent of
relations and infrastructures, and constitutively exposed to their loss.
However, Butler is careful not to name these subjects in any specific
way.
There is one significant place in Frames of War that invites us to
challenge the premise of the dual ontologies, separating the indi-
vidual, the singular ‘one’, from the group, in order not to lose the
social aspect of their ontology (FoW: 166). The ‘group’ would later
indeed be theorised as the performative assembly, a ‘we’ that is
embodied, plural and acting politically in concert. We are told that
concerted action is not a sum of discrete individual acts, in the same
way that the ‘alliance is not reducible to a collection of individu-
als, and it is, strictly speaking, not individuals who act’ (NT: 84).

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Butler takes from Arendt the idea of a self conceived as plurality, as

a kind of a ‘federated self’, a subject inherently relational (D: 122).
However, she resists Arendt’s elaboration of the basic human con-
dition, in which humans act as singular in a space created between
people acting in concert. Instead, Butler will move ‘plurality’ out
of the Arendtian philosophically timeless realm of ‘human beings’,
and into the changing social and political realm (Pulkkinen 2018:
138–9). Nevertheless, the ‘we’ of alliances and assemblies, borrowed
from Arendt but remodelled, still does not seem to tell us more
about the individual. What happens to those who act once alliance
is disbanded, once the self becomes un-federated? We do not know,
because an individual remains in the background, behind Butler’s
other conceptual tools.
We should recall, however, that the politically performative ‘we’
is not the only ‘we’ Butler theorised. There is still a generalisable ‘we’
that emerges in the context of vulnerability and loss. At the time,
this other ‘we’ appeared too tenuous to Butler to serve as ground
for a critique of the individual (PL: 20). But, reading Butler, Adriana
Cavarero shows no doubt about the name of the autonomous and
sovereign subject that thinks of itself as closed and self-sufficient: ‘this
is the well-known subject, also called “the individual”, that “shores
itself up, seeks to reconstitute its imagined wholeness, but only at the
price of denying its own vulnerability, its dependency, its exposure”’
(Cavarero 2011: 21). For Cavarero, Butler gives sufficient reason
for the claim that the well-known figure of the individual cannot be
generalised into the ‘we’ that Butler wished to politically establish.
Such a ‘we’ would take into account our partial discreteness, the fact
that we are sustained by our many relations with the world, which
are part of the ecstatic nature of the embodied self. Thus, whatever
‘we’ gets created by the subjects of such an ontology, it seems right
to ask whether an individual, the cornerstone of the ‘liberal version
of ontology’, can even remain its integral part.
A ‘critique of individualism’ finally appears in The Force of
Nonviolence, as part of the debate on what is real and therefore
politically realisable. Butler writes that quite a few of her interlocu-
tors proclaim the advancement of nonviolence as entirely unrealistic;
as a provocation, but possibly also to make us think how we con-
ceive of the real, believing that realism is devoid of fictitiousness, she
returns to another potent political fiction, that of the state of nature.
By doing so, Butler is only joining the long line of those who scruti-
nised the fictiveness of this (allegedly) paradigmatically pre-political

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framework. Nevertheless, I suggest we read this differently. Without

referencing any specific story from the state of nature, she says that,
in the state of nature, we are already, for some reason, individuals, and
we are in conflict with one another. We are not given to understand how
we became individuated, nor are we told precisely why conflict is the
first of our passionate relations, rather than dependency or attachment.
(FN: 30)

The fact that originary people are depicted as warring is what con-
cerns her primarily, but it turns out that the fabric from which they
are produced is also significant.
This frieze sequence outside space and time offers a story of the
‘beginning’, in which it is precisely the beginning that is problem-
atic: the warring individuals are not entirely formless and faceless,
although they lack proper social names and recognisable forms of
communication that would later temper their thuggish character. In
the state of nature – which is the state of our nature – actors, who
are individuals, have the following features: they are men, adults,
self-sufficient and left to their own resources. When a natural indi-
vidual encounters another natural individual, they use all available
pre-social means of self-defence, which results in a spiral of recipro-
cal violence, stoppable only by an improbable contractual agreement
of truce. This is an ‘ontology of unbinding’ (Cavarero 2011: 23), of
atomised self-preserving ‘wolves’, bound only later and through con-
tract, the liberal subject’s most cherished form of ‘relationality’.
Upon reflection, it is highly unusual that one such fiction became
something so unobjectionable, to be used as grounds for defence of
political realism. The individual is, of course, the most appropriate
subject for liberal versions of ontology, the reality of which (after
the ‘first’ contract) consists of self-sufficient monads detached from
the world, independent from its relations and one from another.
They first live in the world alone, and only subsequently and almost
accidentally in relations they choose, shaping them according to their
will and best judgement. The individual – the one, the undivided – is
not only independent, but owes its self-actualisation solely to itself,
and is in complete possession of itself (Zaharijević 2021b). ‘Not only
has the individual a property in his own person and capacities [. . .]
it is this property, this exclusion of others [from them], that makes a
man human’ (Macpherson 1993: 142). The individual is in control
over their place in the world – a rather hazier, changing mise en scène
than something constitutively related to the individual. As a matter

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of fact, the sovereignty of the individual lies precisely in a certain

invulnerability to the world, which however needs to be further
secured by binding contracts.
The reality of the liberal version of ontology, extending the fic-
tionalisation of its remarkable beginnings ad infinitum, after the
state of natural war has been placed under unnatural control, differs
fundamentally from what Butler suggests. Paraphrasing Simone de
Beauvoir, Butler says the story
begins this way: every individual emerges in the course of the process of
individuation. No one is born an individual; if someone becomes an indi-
vidual over time, he or she does not escape the fundamental conditions of
dependency in the course of that process. (FN: 40–1)

Fundamental conditions of dependency are not some subsequent

features transferred from the social world into a state of nature. If
we care to actually imagine the state of our ‘nature’, the conditions
would include our embodiedness. However one imagines the situa-
tion that comes after the ‘social transformation of nature’, the body
continues to exist in its dependent, vulnerable and precarious way.
Erasing – or rather denying – those features, one erases and denies
that we come as bodies.
To be sure, embodiedness and other non-virile dimensions of
existence are not erased in toto. One could assume that even in
the story of the state of nature there were children, infirm or ailing
adults, perchance even some women. These characters, however,
have no significance for the warfare plot. The figure of the human
emerging onto the world is gendered, ‘but not by a social assign-
ment; rather, it is because he is an individual’ that ‘the primary
and founding figure of the human is masculine. That comes as no
surprise; masculinity is defined by its lack of dependency (and that
is not exactly news, but it continues somehow to be quite startling)’
(FN: 37). The masculine figure is also, emphatically, not a child, as
children are creatures totally consigned to relationship, in a condi-
tion of total defencelessness, as Cavarero says (2011: 30–1). This
invisibility – or, at best, selective visibility – is integral to the regula-
tive ideal of the liberal version of ontology populated by ‘bodiless’
beings, where everyone is an individual. The moment one steps onto
the scene equipped ‘with a body’, the ‘natural’ a priori equality of
individuals disappears. Therein lies the paradoxical duality of such a
reality, with enormous social and political consequences: the fiction
of equality of self-sufficient monads is hard to disentangle from the

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fantasy of mastery. Not having a body, that is, being invulnerable,

sovereign and independent, is conventionally shaped around depri-
vations that place ‘bodies’ among those who are weaker, defenceless
and dependent, open to harm and injury, women being the tradi-
tional ‘vulnerable group’.2
For Butler, ‘the body is not, and never was, a self-subsisting kind
of being [. . .] the body is given over to others in order to persist’
(FN: 49). The fictitiousness of an individual as a self-sufficient
and invulnerable being is based on the abstraction of embodied-
ness. ‘Vulnerability is something that is a trait belonging to others
– various beings dependent on, and thus subordinated to, the
invulnerable individual, invulnerable because he is supposedly not
defined by any relations towards others’ (Zaharijević 2020b: 9).
This fundamental unrelationality is at the core of invulnerability. It
is almost Robinsonian in kind, because the individual seems to have
an undisputed capacity to survive in any circumstances, without
others, beyond society. Such a capacity does not depend only on a
firm will, enormous amounts of self-control and skill to adjust to a
life on a virgin island, but rather on a fictitious absence of the body.
‘Bodilessness’ is the essential precondition for invulnerability.

Vulnerability
In recent times we have witnessed a prodigious increase in transdis-
ciplinary research focused on vulnerability. Defining it as sticky and
a true boundary concept, Marja-Liisa Honkasalo (2018: 3) points
out that it refers to a universal condition, but also to a phenomenon,
policy imperative, psychoemotional trait, individual or intersubjec-
tive experience, or a political ontology. Vulnerability is most often
related to the concepts of relationality, dependency, care, porous
boundaries, and recognition. Despite the revival, the concept, as
Estelle Ferrarese poignantly shows (2016: 150), continues to come
up against considerable reluctance. It is seen as notoriously lacking
in virility, being too Christian and conservative in substance, as it
insists on conservation of nature, species and life, reducing politics to
care and putting too strong a stress on the inescapable mortality of
the body that stands in the way of all (emancipatory) politics. This
seems to be the point on which thinkers as different as Arendt and
Badiou agree.
The undeniable fact is that, with vulnerability, the ‘ignoble’ body
has reappeared (or rather appeared in a new light) in considerations

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about the world. It can no longer be dispatched (even if only tem-

porarily) to a walled-in ‘somewhere’, where it will be cared for in
its cyclical needs, and from where it later emerges into the public as
originator of actions. Our embodied humanity, as Martha Fineman
defines it, calls for understanding vulnerability as arising from
embodiment. The body ‘carries with it the ever-present possibility of
harm, injury, and misfortune from mildly adverse to catastrophically
devastating events, whether accidental, intentional or otherwise’
(2008: 9). Instead of creating an ever-wider array of the vulnerable,
we should understand vulnerability as ‘a universal, inevitable, endur-
ing aspect of the human condition that must be at the heart of our
concept of social and state responsibility’ (ibid.: 8). With the body,
care also made its breakthrough into politics. Ethics of care, some
suggest, needs to become a resource for politics, building on ‘values
of caring – attentiveness, responsibility, nurturance, compassion,
meeting others’ needs – traditionally associated with women and tra-
ditionally excluded from public consideration’ (Tronto 1994: 2–3).
In addition, action and morality are intimately related to our ways of
thinking and seeing vulnerability (or, rather, ways of not seeing it).
Disavowed as belonging to others with whom one needs to disiden-
tify, vulnerability is produced into a highly negative state, and unseen
as a shared condition by means of a cultivated ignorance. Erinn
Gilson relates this produced ignorance with a pursuit of invulner-
ability as a desirable form of subjectivity (Gilson 2011: 312). Having
penetrated into all pores of our understanding of life, vulnerability
ultimately questions the philosophical ‘anthropology of the social
contract’ (Ferrarese 2016: 153), in which the individual appears
as the sole owner of oneself, and the sole originator of social rela-
tions that come into being through (it seems, of necessity) his will.
Apparently, the introduction of this notion into thinking transforms
many of the fundamental premises about us in the world, working ‘to
undo the world such as it is’ (ibid.: 158).
If hegemonic anthropology of the social contract begins (and
ends) with male adults, the story of vulnerability begins with our
birth. Instead of arising from our inescapable mortality, vulnerability
is in fact an inextricable characteristic of natality, of our original
needy appearance in the world. This appearance, birth, rarely prob-
lematised in the long history of philosophy, is the alternative, but
rather more realistic, story of our beginning, taking place before we
turn into wolves or contracting parties. In a psychoanalytic register,
the vulnerable states of a grown-up need to be connected to the

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primary vulnerability of a child, related to the care and support – or

lack thereof – of (unchosen, but most intimate) others. ‘Babies’ and
infants’ correspondingly near-total dependence on adult care renders
them vulnerable to failures, mistakes, indifference, inattention and
malice on the part of their care-givers’, which is carried into adult
life (Stone 2019: 73). In a different register proposed by Cavarero,
the infant is a creature fundamentally and structurally consigned to
relations, and thus the primary paradigm of vulnerability. This also
introduces a major difference between child and adult, as vulner-
ability and helplessness are not so complete in the latter (Cavarero
2011: 30–1). For Butler too, the subject is not thinkable without this
legacy. In order to think and manage violence, one needs to ‘return to
the “primary helplessness” and think of that in relation to what we
might call unmanageable (or unbearable) dependency’ of the adult
(Martínez Ruiz 2016: 63).
As we have seen in the previous chapter, vulnerability became
a very prominent concept with Precarious Life. In Butler’s fully
developed ontology of the body, vulnerability appears as some-
thing entirely basic, because the body is ‘a social phenomenon [. . .]
exposed to others, vulnerable by definition’ (FoW: 33). This existen-
tial, constitutive vulnerability is, however, inextricable from the one
unequally shared, as we embody our humanity in the world differ-
ently to one another:
In a way, we all live with this particular vulnerability, a vulnerability to
the other that is part of bodily life, a vulnerability to a sudden address
from elsewhere that we cannot preempt. This vulnerability, however,
becomes highly exacerbated under certain social and political conditions,
especially those in which violence is a way of life and the means to secure
self-defence are limited. (PL: 29)

In itself, vulnerability is neither good nor bad: it is ‘a basic kind of

openness to being affected and affecting in both positive and negative
ways’ (Gilson 2011: 310). Abstracted from its social life, vulnerabil-
ity as a category encompasses the states of passivity (something is or
can be done to us), affectivity (we are susceptible to affects, impres-
sions, responsiveness), dispossession (being given over to others turns
us into dispossessible beings), and exposure (we are always some-
where in the world). Our vulnerability is simply given – so much so
that it cannot be annulled without complete annulment of ourselves.
However, vulnerability can be abstracted from sociality only for
heuristic reasons. Since it always appears only socially shaped and is

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related to all domains in which power relations operate (subsistence

of the body, language, desire, labour, the need for belonging, to name
a few), it can become bad. When it does, one can certainly desire to
become less vulnerable, less injurable in one’s inescapable exposure.
When we are stricken by our vulnerability, we may wish to be less
or not exposed, dispossessible, affected. We may wish to play dead
or strike back.
But let us here recall how Butler sought a third path regarding
violence, because the same line of reasoning can be applied here.
As Gilson rightly underlines, vulnerability is a condition of open-
ness and potentiality (ibid.): opening us to love, learning, taking
pleasure in relations, as well as to suffering and harm, to loss of the
very constitutive relations. Vulnerability and agency are not mutu-
ally exclusive terms. On the contrary, Butler invites us to reimagine
a community (and act on this reimagination) based on generalis-
able vulnerability and loss: vulnerability, together with dependency,
is part of the performative account of agency (Butler 2016a: 19).
Vulnerability presents itself as a limit, but it also enables, it is that
which prompts us into being and into being agentic.

Enabling Vulnerability
At the end of the previous chapter I claimed that a major shift took
place in Butler’s writings after 2001, when sociality turned into
a resource, rather than an obstacle. We can trace this shift pre-
cisely through the notion of vulnerability, which had made its first
appearance in the two books published in 1997. Excitable Speech
elaborates on our linguistic injurability, which signals not only that
we are exposed to harm of the name, but that in our coming to be,
we depend on the address of the Other. ‘It is by being interpellated
within the terms of language that a certain social existence of the
body first becomes possible’ (ES: 5). As soon as one is born, one is
given a name. The name inaugurates one into existence. Language
already has names in store, they are already socially sedimented in
the language. Since the attributed name is unchosen – the birth name,
prosoponym, as well as the pronoun that follows it – one may be
injured by it at a certain point in life, when one can claim for oneself
to be an ‘I’. But before one can even say ‘I, Adriana’, ‘I, Julia’, ‘I,
Jane’, Adriana, Julia and Jane have all already been addressed by the
other, interpellated into existence, constituted into what will be the
posterior position of a subject:

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This ‘I’ that I am is already social, already bound to a social world that
exceeds the domain of familiarity, both urgent and largely impersonal. I
first become thinkable in the mind of the other, as ‘you’ or as gendered
pronoun, and that phantasmatic ideation gives birth to me as a social
creature. (FN: 101)
Linguistic norms can injure. If the body is not congruent with its
socially ascribed name or has trouble dealing with the social demands
that accompany that name, the norms can produce violent effects on
the body. Yet, if there is no other proper name for us, if we are not
recognisable, we do not exist in the proper way. For that reason,
although the name may be harmful to us, we often conform to it in
order to survive: it enables us to live in established social reality.
The Psychic Life of Power, on the other hand, could be under-
stood as a long answer to the question why we respond to the names
that misdescribe us, why we abide by norms that have the power to
injure us and, ultimately, possibly make our lives unliveable. The
longing for a social existence is here defined as longing for subjection
(PLP: 20), for remaining constituted or fending off de-constitution.
If the subject depends on norms that fall outside the domain of voli-
tion, then the ‘vulnerability of the subject to a power not of its own
making is unavoidable. The vulnerability qualifies the subject as an
exploitable kind of being’ (PLP: 20). Power relations imprinted on
us very early on tend to be those to which we are most stubbornly,
most passionately attached. Thus, our primary vulnerability does
not disappear once we leave the crib. In order to survive, we remain
attached to those possibilities that guarantee our social existence.
We attach to the norm that gives us back the sense of who we are,
keeping us forever socially mediated, and in a relation to ourselves
which is never entirely transparent (Butler 2002b: 17).
We are thus vulnerable to norms and to others, but this vulner-
ability is enabling – it does not preclude our agency or, as it turns out,
our capacity for responsibility (Butler 2001b). However, one needs to
admit that the ‘enabling’ aspects of vulnerability, as it is expounded
in Excitable Speech and The Psychic Life of Power, somehow
still seem primarily restrictive. They appear more as obstacle than
resource. The strange, almost counter-intuitive formulation ‘aliena-
tion in sociality’ (PLP: 28) testifies to this. We are, it seems, enabled
to persist due to being alienated in sociality. But if we are alienated, it
remains unclear whether we are then truly enabled – whether our life
can ever go beyond largely incapacious survival. Still missing from
Butler’s account on enabling vulnerability was a certain affirmation

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of this unwanted, unchosen relationality, through which ‘alienation’

also acquired a new name. After 2001, when she shifts to using given
over to the social (rather than alienated in it), enabling vulnerability
turns into a pillar of her ethico-political stance. From then on, the
desire to persist will of necessity encompass the desire to live in a
world that reflects the possibility of that persistence, also reflecting
the value of others’ lives as much as my own (UG: 235; SS: 65). The
notion of interdependency, which assumes that we inhabit the world
together and that ‘our fates are, as it were, given over to one another’
(FN: 51), was yet to be conceived.
Kelly Oliver noticed this paradox early in the sections of Witnessing
dealing with Butler. If we see ourselves through the lens of alienation
in a world not of our own making, if our becoming in the world is
marked by a certain loss inflicted upon us by the world, then the only
path for us has to be to liberate ourselves from our vulnerability to
the world. Agency would then be reduced to a desired de-alienation
from sociality, in order to recover from the primary loss. Oliver sug-
gests that we are here faced with an advancement of an idea Butler
fiercely argued against, because the desired de-alienation can easily
be interpreted as a longing for a self-possessed, independent sover-
eign subject. Only if one starts from an ideal of the self-possessed
autonomous subject can dependence on the other, on relation,
appear as alienating, subjugating and violent. What The Psychic Life
of Power defined as an enabling aspect of vulnerability seems only to
secure a life at the expense of violence and death. If dependence on
the Other is, as Oliver suggests, taken to be the source of life, as the
very possibility of transformation and the point of acknowledgement
of transferential relations with others, then we can ‘begin to “work
through” rather than repeat violence. “Working through” is a pro-
foundly ethical operation insofar as it forces us not only to acknowl-
edge our relations and obligations to others [. . .] but also thereby to
transform those relations into more ethical relations’ (Oliver 2001:
67–9).
We can say that this is precisely what took place with the intro-
duction of the notion of precarious life, and even more so with
the strong emphasis on interdependence. There can be no original
dispossession of the subject, if to become a subject is to become in
relation (Devenney 2020: 76). Dependence and vulnerability needed
to cease to be alienating, becoming truly enabling instead. For that,
the self had to be defined through relations, as being bound up with
others, being undone by others (PW: 98; PL: 23; FoW: 54). We can

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be undone by others only because we were first done by and ‘com-

posed’ of others (Drichel 2013: 15–16). Introducing ethical consid-
erations – a ‘you’ whom I recognise and respect rather than wish to
kill or injure, thereby working through violence without repeating
it – does not dilute the importance of the norms through which both
‘you’ and ‘I’ appear as recognisable. Vulnerability that enables pas-
sionate attachment to one’s own existence is given a new valence:
‘I’ am subordinated to the world that makes me relatable and offers
me relations, and although ‘I’ come to exist in and through ‘your’
address and ‘our’ relation, it is the world, that is, social reality that
mediates my addressability – my very possibility.

The Other/You/Face: Responsibility

Subjects of Desire begins with a discussion of a unified subject who
leads a unified philosophical life, itself discrete, unambiguous, easy
to locate and name properly, with internally consistent desires. Such
a subject serves as a necessary psychological premise and norma-
tive ideal in moral philosophies of all philosophers who ‘time and
again wanted to have a love affair with the good, maintaining that
the true philosopher is one who spontaneously and easily desires the
good, and just as easily translates those desires into good deeds’ (SD:
5). Surely this is not the subject Butler’s philosophy of complicated
desires provides us with. Let us not, however, be too quick to claim
that because it is ungrounded, non-unified, has fuzzy borders, is hard
to locate and even harder to name, no moral philosophy follows
from a performatively ungrounded subject. Perhaps we should here
take note of Elena Loizidou (2007: 46) who, at the beginning of her
analysis of Butler’s ethics, suggests that a subject can no longer be
seen as the ground for ethics, but as its problem. We should certainly
draw on Butler herself, who bidding farewell to the subject as the
metaphysical ground for morality, did not disavow the claim that a
‘moral psychology’ assumes a ‘moral ontology, a theory about what
a being must be like in order to be capable of moral deliberation and
action’ (SD: 6).
Butler’s ethical considerations are particularly concerned with
the question of responsibility. In the conversation with Antonello
and Farneti (2009), she mentions she wanted to think about
responsibility not as a purely individual matter. It always includes a
‘you’ (even if I call myself to accountability), someone who asks me
to take responsibility for my actions. This responsiveness happens

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in language – which sometimes also necessitates ­translation – and

is therefore always already socially mediated. At first glance, there
seems to be nothing complicated about such a claim. However, if
a subject is not entirely responsible for its coming to being, if its
agency is conditioned and emerges under constraint, if it is dispos-
sessed by relations, incoherent and opaque to itself, how can it
be said to be responsible for the other? On another, but related
plane, if what motivates the subject (constitutively) is to persist,
how will responsibility for the other avoid clashing with the
Spinozian desire to be? The question becomes even more acute if
we consider that Butler shapes her own ethical position drawing on
Levinasian ethics, for which vulnerability of the other is of primary
importance.
For Levinas, being exposed to the vulnerability of the other
questions my own conatus essendi, even suspends my right to self-­
persistence. My own desire to be is inevitably at variance with the
ethical demand of another (Levinas 1999: 69). In an encounter with
a ‘you’ – who to me always appears as a face and carries a single
unbearably commanding message, ‘Thou shalt not kill’ – something
has to happen to my constitutive vulnerability. In this situation,
my own vulnerability either remains primary, permitting elision of
another’s vulnerability from my point of view, or else it will recede
before the vulnerability of the other. ‘An appeal of the face of my fel-
lowman’, says Levinas, reminds me of its abandonment, defenceless-
ness and mortality. ‘In its ethical urgency, [it] postpones or cancels
the obligations the “summoned I” has towards itself and in which
the concern for the death of the other can be more important to the I
than its concern as an I for itself’ (Levinas 1998: 227). In a relation-
ship with the other, the subject loses its initial place. For Levinas,
this is a point of awakening to humanity: and the humanity of the
subject is emphatically in responsibility – ‘in passivity, in reception,
in obligation with regard to the other’ (ibid.: 112). According to
Levinas, the ethical is possible precisely because we take vulnerability
– precariousness and helplessness of the other – as our own primary
obligation. So, when Butler claims that responsibility is not about
cultivating a will but about making use of an unwilled susceptibility
as a resource for becoming responsive to the other, she seems to be
following in Levinas’ wake. The face of the other obligates me, puts
an ethical demand on me, ‘meaning that I am, as it were, precluded
from revenge’, whatever the other has done or intends to do, ‘by
virtue of a relation I never chose’ (GAO: 91).

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The importance of relations, of many ‘you’s who present them-

selves with uncompromising facial demands and ‘whose language
is spoken by the shared narrative scene’ (Cavarero 2000: 92), seems
unrelatable to the (Spinozan) subject who is always in the field of
passionate attachments. However, following in Levinas’ wake seems
to be in contradiction with Spinoza’s desire for persistence, crucial
for Butler’s understanding of the enabling vulnerability. Worse still,
it is also at variance with a certain Foucauldian legacy in Butler’s
understanding of subject constitution. Critique or desubjectivisa-
tion in Foucault is not motivated by a desire for recognition, and
the ‘you’ is not necessarily implicated in the normative scene one
strives to desubjectivate oneself from. Foucault’s ‘question effectively
remains “Who can I be, given the regime of truth that determines
ontology for me?”’ (GAO: 25), and is important for Butler, in that
it foregrounds the normative frame in which the desire to persist
takes place. However, Foucault ‘does not ask the question “Who are
you?”’ (GAO: 25), the question that initiates an encounter with the
other, and implicates me in a relation of responsibility (GAO: 88).
Butler spun a moral philosophy from sources not easily inter-
woven. Therefore, the ‘moral ontology’ that she offers is a peculiar
blend of the ‘I’, ‘you’ and the world. All of those are implicated in any
action of the ‘I’: ecstatic, opaque, stubbornly attached, only later and
on occasion critical of regimes of truth that determine its ­ontology,
regardless of its will. My constitutive vulnerability (to norms or
regimes of truth; to language; to care when helpless; to various kinds
of dispossession; to the other in the guise of institutions or infrastruc-
ture that prop me up; to a ‘you’ without whom my life would cease
to be what it is, without whom I would be but a cracked, splintered
‘i’, deprived of relation that gave my life content and meaning) is
vulnerability to a relation, or to its possible absence, withdrawal or
disappearance. It is the same vulnerability – to our being alienated in
sociality, given over to the world – as the one that in Precarious Life
appears under the name of ‘common human vulnerability’ (PL: 30).
For an ‘I’ to be, and to be recognised by a ‘you’, there needs to be a
world that provides a relation, that mediates relationality. What is
‘mine’ is hardly ever disentangled from what appears as a bond, a
tension, a knot with the world, from which one cannot free oneself
(SS: 67).
This is the basis of Giving an Account of Oneself, the paradig-
matically ‘ethics’ book of Butler’s opus. Each of our attempts to be
accountable and provide an account of oneself, to tell one’s story,

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perhaps an autobiography, to commence with the ‘I’, assumes

three crucial points. First, my story is always told to someone else,
someone who addressed me, who approaches me with a question –
such as ‘who are you?’ – to which I respond by saying, ‘I am. . . this is
my account of myself’. In a world inhabited by one human only, one
would not have a name, a pronoun, a history to tell. Such a world
would not be a stage, because no others would be there to sustain a
scene of address. There would be no occasion to respond to someone
and claim an ‘I’ for myself. In effect, the relation to the other is ‘a more
primary ethical relation than a reflexive effort to give an account of
oneself’ (GAO: 21). Second, the terms we give when accounting for
ourselves, ‘by which we make ourselves intelligible to ourselves and
to others, are not of our making. They are social in character, and
they establish social norms, a domain of unfreedom and substitut-
ability within which our “singular” stories are told’ (GAO: 21).
Telling one’s story, even when one reveals dizzily intimate, untold
thoughts and feelings, that up to that point maybe never appeared
in one’s own words, is an act of language. This linguistic shoring up
gives us something and at the same time takes it away from us: I can
hand over something that is ‘mine’, but the mode of transfer is never
mine alone, and this residuum is felt in situations when language
fails us, when we are left speechless. Third, however exhaustive and
painstakingly attentive to detail I might be in trying to respond to the
query ‘who are you?’, my account is destined to remain flawed and
incomplete. There is a chasm in the relation between language and
the body that remains inscribed in my speech. My singular body is
mine, but it is also ineffable, escaping me at some point. The story
of my body is a story of a body also not mine: it is immersed in my
formative histories that are unavailable until retrieved from someone
else’s memories, recited as someone else’s recollections (of someone
who possibly remembers the day I first answered a call, turned my
head to the name given to me, or when I reacted to a social address
that constituted me, for the first time, as a girl-subject). As the subject
of my own account, ‘I’ am always, at least to some extent, opaque to
myself. ‘My narrative begins in medias res, when many things have
already taken place to make me and my story possible in language’
(GAO: 39).
Such an ‘I’ has nothing to do with philosophies that want to have
easy love affairs with the good, utterly failing to provide an ethical
subject defined by self-reflexivity, the capacity for acting on prin-
ciples, rational accountability for one’s actions and the ability to

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project into the future – of the kind Seyla Benhabib wanted to protect
from postmodernist incursion. Not given in advance, not constituted
once and for all, fundamentally not discrete and self-transparent,
not capable of taking itself as its own source of normativity, con-
tinuously faltering in biographising itself, this subject appears ethical
only on condition of a certain unknowingness and an implication of
the other in its formation – making it foreign to itself (GAO: 84).
An ethics Butler proposes begins with heterogeneous forms of
vulnerability that strongly encourage one’s desire to persist. But in
this ethics, the other is also present from the start, and precisely
this binding relationality (towards the ‘you’, towards the norm)
becomes a resource for ethics. Importantly, the ethical appears also
within the region of unwilled and from the limits of self-knowledge.
Butler’s subject does not first know and then act ethically towards
the other. To the contrary: the subject is opaque to itself by virtue
of its relations to others. Similarly, the exposure to the other is not
only a result of an autonomous decision of the subject. In Butler,
the unwilled susceptibility is what is at once exposing to violence
and demanding a certain practice of nonviolence (GAO: 64; Drichel
2013: 18).
The dilemma about what is more primary – vulnerability of the
other or my own vulnerability – ultimately appears not to be a real
dilemma, because there is no I without you/s. That continuous state
of being mired, given over (‘even the word “dependency” cannot do
the job here’ [Butler 2001b: 37]) and acted upon is what gives place,
provides a position in language and enables or restricts my own
acting. The unwilled, unchosen passivity – impressionability and
susceptibility – appears as a condition of possibility of any respon-
siveness; it gives a possibility to respond and re-act, thus constituting
the I who speaks and acts. Depending on the address and shared
narrative scene, the subject is susceptible to unreciprocated action.
Susceptibility fundamentally involves the other in the constitution of
the ‘I’. This relation is beyond my will. Yet, the unwilled – that the
other is already implicated in the ‘I’ (for whom I am always a ‘you’
or a ‘she’) – is an ethical resource too (GAO: 100). An acknowledge-
ment of this primary relation to otherness – in effect, more primary
than the relation to the self – is what keeps narcissistic desire at bay.
‘This primary susceptibility to the action and the face of the other,
the full ambivalence of an unwanted address, is what constitutes our
exposure to injury and our responsibility for the Other’ (GAO: 91).
Responsibility is drawn from an ability to respond, in the now, and

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not from a posterior, self-reflective position when one decides whose

vulnerability is primary and whose secondary. We cannot examine
the question of responsibility in isolation from the other, because this
would mean taking ourselves out of the mode of address that frames
the very question of responsibility (Butler 2001b: 38). Responding to
a face, a vulnerable ‘you’, who may in return wound (the vulnerable)
me, is what opens me to responsibility and a practice of nonviolence
in an emphatically non-reciprocal way, ‘as an experiment to living
otherwise’ (Butler 2001b: 39; GAO: 100).
Therefore, to respond to the face commanding us not to kill means
‘to be awake to what is precarious in another life or, rather, the pre-
cariousness of life itself’ (PL: 134). Responding to a face certainly
requires us to bid farewell to an egoistic individual, without relin-
quishing our desire to persist. In Butler’s interpretation of Spinoza’s
‘ethics under pressure’ (SS: 85), this desire always assumes a world
that allows for the possibility of persistence, possible only if it reflects
the value of our common human vulnerability, a common physical-
ity, a common risk. Ethics, so to say, requires politics, and they
merge in the notion of interdependence.
But, before we finally turn to interdependence, there is one more
important question to be answered. Is ethics of nonviolence a passive,
non-agentic stance, or does it, conversely, imply any form of action –
or any form of autonomy? Recall that no one is born an individual,
but only becomes one, and in this becoming, one is never entirely
removed from the conditions of its dependency, never attaining the
level of invulnerability. To reach for violence can be seen as seeking
to reassert mastery, independence and unity (GAO: 64). To refrain
from violence seems to mean to do otherwise, to reject mastery, inde-
pendence and unity, or, in other words, to remain passive in one’s
dependency, disunity and subjection. This is, however, not what
Butler proposes. To refrain from violence is a form of doing, a kind
of action against such a reassertion, which consents to one’s depend-
ency, disunity and subjection. They become enabling aspects of our
critical agency and responsibility towards the other(s). Also, a certain
autonomy is required for such an action: there is some kind of deci-
sion involved in our active refraining from violence. Whatever we
choose to name it, it is not ‘sovereign autonomy’, ‘a state of individu-
ation, taken as self-persisting prior to and apart from any relations of
dependency on the world of others’ (UG: 32).
There is no sovereign autonomy, so long as we are dispossessed
and undone by the social conditions that constitute us. The social

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world functions as ‘a sign of our constitutive heteronomy’ (UG:

100). The alterations of the world come from an ‘increment of acts,
collective and diffuse, belonging to no single subject, and yet one
effect of these alterations is to make acting like a subject possible’
(UG: 100–1). Thus, as Amber Knight reminds us (contrary to Ruti
[2017] and Cyfer [2019]), ‘while being entirely self-knowing and
self-determining is not possible, it is within our reach to have some
limited ability to form and act on our choices’ (Knight 2021: 184).
This limited ability appears within the field not of our own making,
which is, at the same time, also performatively of our own making,
through our own agentic acts, through repeating, or acting other-
wise. This agentic heteronomous autonomy appears in the form of
critique of the social reality that determines ontology for us, possibly
even depriving us of a right to ontology, stripping us of the name
of the human. It also manifests as ethical action, in which we risk
ourselves, at the moment of our unknowingness, ‘when what condi-
tions us and what lies before us diverge from one another, when our
willingness to become undone constitutes our chance of becoming
human’ (GAO: 80).

Interdependence and Obligations

Although a ‘you’ has a central role in the constitution of an ‘I’,
Butler is not solely devoted to a dyadic relation of the face and the
one who, through that face, gets constituted as an ethical subject.
Common human vulnerability emerges as common and human only
in the social world in which we all live, in a world that makes us
bound to one another and conditions our coming out as human.
Responsibility, in that sense, involves more than a relation of a vul-
nerable I to a vulnerable you. It involves more than a dyadic encoun-
ter. Responsibility is also about our common accountability for a
social relation, through which any of our encounters may happen.
This is where the ethico-political notion of interdependence comes in.
The key point of interdependence is that ‘the subject that I am
is bound to the subject that I am not’ (FoW: 43). Significantly, this
subject that I am not but to whom I am still bound, this ‘you’ without
whom ‘I’ stops making sense, is not only chosen. It is also uncho-
sen, an unknown subject with whom I nevertheless share a bond.
Sometimes, a position which is particularly poignant in situations
of war, I am also bound to the subject I find threatening, abject,
unintelligible, a face without a proper face, thus not defenceless, but

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dangerous to all that I am. In Frames of War Butler puts this plainly:
‘we each have the power to destroy and to be destroyed, and [. . .]
we are bound to one another in this power and this precariousness’
(FoW: 43). In the same place, she insists that interdependency has to
be avowed, and that it has to be instituted though binding multilat-
eral and global agreements. Wars in fact only feed on the disavowal
of our shared precariousness and the refusal to institute it, denying
‘the ongoing and irrefutable ways in which we are all subject to one
another, vulnerable to destruction by the other’ (FoW: 43).
What does it mean to avow interdependency? For Butler, this
entails a recognition of a generalised condition of precariousness
(FoW: 48):
Precariousness has to be grasped not simply as a feature of this or that
life, but as a generalized condition whose very generality can be denied
only by denying precariousness itself. And the injunction to think pre-
cariousness in terms of equality emerges precisely from the irrefutable
generalizability of this condition. (FoW: 22)

Since we are social beings, we neither survive nor live as isolated,

bounded beings, but our boundaries expose us to others. To avow
interdependency assumes that we are able and willing to apprehend
that ‘the life of the other, the life that is not our own, is also our
life, since what ever sense “our” life has is derived precisely from
this sociality, this being already, and from the start, dependent on a
world of others, constituted in and by a social world’ (NT: 108). The
avowal of interdependency rests upon a demand for social relation
that is not based on destruction and eradication. It is, in other words,
a demand for a liveable world.
In various places, Butler insists that the demand for a liveable
world can be drawn from the lessons on fundamental equality and
potential eradication of two self-consciousnesses. Let us, there-
fore, one last time, bring Hegel into the discussion. The creation
of the master and the bondsman ends equality between these enti-
ties (bodies, as Butler insists early on), also putting an end to the
radical violence that might have otherwise led to their total annihi-
lation. Domination, ‘the relation that replaces the urge to kill [. . .]
[becomes] the effort to annihilate within the context of life’ (SD:
52). At first glance, it seems that there is no way out of this violent
situation in which one is either eradicated or dominated. ‘According
to Hegel, there is no subject without violence. Being a subject [. . .]
means dealing with violence as something that determines our way

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of being’ (Illetterati 2022: 36). Butler, however, reads Hegel differ-

ently. The desire for recognition makes this an encounter of equals,
creating a bond between them, establishing them as constitutively
relational (UG: 149–50) and conscious of their fundamental vul-
nerability to the other. So, ‘prior to any calculation [to subdue and
dominate], we are already constituted through ties that bind and
unbind in specific and consequential ways’ (FoW: 182). ‘The mere
possibility of our connection to others (which does not presume an
actual encounter) is central to our sense of self and our existence as
a subject [and] this relational structure is beyond individual choice’
(Stark 2014: 92). For Butler, this has major consequences for how
we deal with (this unchosen) relationality. Domination, solely a
continuation of annihilation in the context of life, is not a counter-
point to annihilation. The only true counterpoint to annihilation is
the transformation of the social relation that rests upon this false
dichotomy. Transformation relies on the avowal of two very basic
assumptions: that we acknowledge our reciprocal destructiveness;
and that we acknowledge that an endless, indeterminable eradication
(until death or in life) annihilates not only particular lives, but also
the relation between them. If eradication and domination are not the
only possibilities the constitutive relationality offers – as they both,
in the final instance, annihilate it – what remains is the acknowledge-
ment of the relation existing between my life and the life of another.
Recognition of the interdependent bond is not a philosophical or a
poetic embellishment of an ugly world, but a formidable and binding
ethico-political demand that obligates us to safeguard the relation on
which our lives depend (Butler 2019b).
Butler’s understanding of the social bond derives not only from a
peculiar reformulation of Hegel, but also from certain inversions of
Kleinian psychoanalytic positions (FN: 96), particularly important
for the articulation of nonviolence as a way of acknowledging a rela-
tion. Interfering with the psychic life of the social bond is necessary
in order to show that social bond does not arise out of expediency,
interest, sympathy or calculation. For Melanie Klein, the ego attempts
to preserve objects that threaten and provoke aggression in it (Klein
1935: 148). Aggression and destructiveness are integral parts of one’s
psychic life, but must be transformed in order for the ego to survive
(ibid.: 154). It is at the basis of this elementary vulnerability, out of
a need to forestall the possibility to become (psychically) destroyed,
that morality develops, implying that desire to preserve the other is
entangled with a desire for self-preservation. This double movement

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of aggression and preservation is important for Butler, although she

readily confesses to have used Klein in un-Kleinian ways (FoW: 44–5).
Butler seeks to show that, if my being is never entirely ‘mine’, if my
dependence on the world can be annihilated only by self-annihilation,
the endeavour to preserve the life of the other is something broader
than the striving to survive and persist in my own self-subsistence. The
endeavour to survive becomes equal to the endeavour to preserve a
relation that constitutes me, ‘because who “I” am is nothing without
your life, and life itself has to be rethought as this complex, passion-
ate, antagonistic, and necessary set of relations to others’ (FoW: 44).
To give consent to the world in which annihilation of lives is a norm
means that we consent to an unliveable world. Responsibility for the
other, any other, means support of the liveable world, one in which
annihilation stops being an option.
As necessary as it is, avowal of interdependency is not sufficient.
Across various places, Butler insists that interdependency also needs
to be instituted though binding, multilateral and global agreements,
which presuppose a persistent work through institutions. In that
sense, the notion of interdependency is very often accompanied by
the idea of obligatoriness. Prior to 2001, when Butler began to think
of violence in terms of total destruction, her work was not marked
by obligation. I would claim that the introduction of Levinas into her
thought inaugurated particularly strong obligations, so characteris-
tic of his ethical positions. Although Butler did not follow Levinas
blindly in terms of the content of ethical obligations, what remains
permanently Levinasian in her thought is the search for an obligative
form of interdependence. In a more recent interview, she says:

The ethical and the political converge at the problem of violence and
non-violence, since at such junctures, we have to ask what kind of obliga-
tions we owe to one another. If we seek to derive such obligations from
the social bonds that we have, then we are elaborating ethical principles
from, and about, a socio-political situation. What we call a ‘bond’ is
not ethical at the exclusion of the social or political. I know that some
Levinasians would have it that way, but I am more interested in the nexus
of interdependency and potential violence that characterizes social bonds
[. . .] It is only because we are already implicated in the lives of others, and
so part of an ongoing political existence, that we develop obligations that
we can call ‘ethical’. (Ingala 2017: 27–8)

Obligations rest upon recognition that lives – all lives – are

precarious. Precariousness arises from our interdependence, from
­

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the entanglement of my life with other lives. We can abhor this fact,
reject it with indignation or stubbornly argue against it, but this will
not stop the social bond from being shaped as nurturing or threaten-
ing to our fundamentally social being.
The obligation towards other lives is ethical, but it voices itself
also as a political demand for the creation of conditions for lives
to be liveable. The stakes of one such demand are very high. First,
the obligation towards other lives must become the basis for global
solutions (FN: 44; cf. Barbec 2017). Then, ‘the fact that our lives are
dependent on others can become the basis of claims for nonmilitaris-
tic political solutions, one which we cannot will away, one which we
must attend to, even abide by’ (UG: 22–3; cf. Stauffer 2003). Wars,
however, only make transparent how fragile and destructible our
existences are. In reality as we know it, there are differential modes
of protection of humans from destruction and harm. Some bodies are
perceived as virtually uninjurable, others as injurable, and yet others
as almost continually injured. This perception has everything to do
with the fantasy of mastery and the unequal distribution of vulner-
ability. The fantasy of mastery implies the existence of invulnerables
(and their duty to protect – their own – vulnerables), as well as the
existence of disposable populations whose lives do not count as lives.
Such stratification enormously affects how we make our way through
the world, whether the body we inhabit is understood, seen and felt
as threatening or socially dead. It is also worth considering to what
extent the boundaries of the self are entangled in the relation between
the world and the body. To be born a black person in a country with
a legacy of slavery, segregation and deeply unequal institutional
structures means that however strong one’s will to survive, it is
entirely possible to die pinned down under the knee of a white police
officer, managing only to utter ‘I can’t breathe’.
For this reason, the politics of interdependence assumes a rejec-
tion not only of militarism, but also of nationalism and racism, as
they depend on a ‘racial schema’, a frame or norm that produces
some lives as already ungrievable, ‘snuffed out, because, from the
start, such a life did not register as a life, a life worth safeguarding’
(FN: 121). Ethical obligations are not enough. ‘The moral precept
that prohibits killing has to be expanded to a political principle that
seeks to safeguard lives through institutional and economic means’
without distinguishing between grievable and ungrievable popula-
tions (FN: 100). Politics of interdependency stands against politi-
cal formations that justify and promote the unequal distribution

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of vulnerability (Butler, Gambetti and Sabsay 2016: 5; cf. Salmon

2016), sometimes also presenting it as a natural state of things
(return to the ‘natural roles’ between sexes in the worldwide strug-
gles against ‘gender ideology’ is indeed a return to the fiction of the
state of nature in which all dependent forms of life remain in the
invisible background, foregrounding only male, adult, white, inde-
pendent sovereign warriors). Finally, the politics of interdependency
takes stock of the damaged life, a life without a sense of futurity. In
this era of accelerating inequality, there is an obligation to struggle
against precarity, against acclimatising whole populations to insecu-
rity, which is today the commonest form of abuse of our precarious-
ness (D: 43; Butler in Lorey 2015: viii; Pagès and Trachman 2012: 2;
Kania 2013).

Cohabitation
What does it mean then to live with one another? It can be unhappy, it
can be wretched, it can be ambivalent, it can even be full of antagonism,
but all of that can play out in the political sphere without recourse to
expulsion or genocide. And that is our obligation, to stay in the sphere
with whatever murderous rage we have, without acting on it. (Filar 2014)
If performativity is about acting, and acting takes place as a rela-
tion of the body and the world, then our acting does something to
this relation, we act on it as much as we are acted upon by it. This
is the double movement of performativity. In that sense, we can
understand politics of interdependency as a call for a different per-
formativity, for acting differently in order to enact a different relation
between bodies and the world. In the world in which there are so
many destructive forms of relations – not only allowed, but pursued
with vigour – the annihilation of the social relation gets reproduced
and is, time and again, performatively affirmed, recited, reiterated.
An act of violence is, in that sense, a paradigmatic performative act.
In terms of social ontology, it is the act that violates the bond of our
basic interdependence.
However, it is not only that our particular persistances are bound
up with one another, but we are bound up because we are proxi-
mate, adjacent, up against one another, because we – an undeter-
mined plurality of bodies – take space at the same time. Therefore,
to accept our common condition of interdependence implies a prior
acceptance of our convergent condition of cohabitation (PW: 130).
No body exists without existing somewhere, without being in some

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‘there’ (FoW: 53), materialising those possibilities present. And as

no body lives alone in the world, bodies inhabit and co-inhabit this
‘thereness’. To acknowledge the world in which bodies live as plural,
where they are together because bound by proximity and sharing
the world, precisely due to which no one is deprived of relations one
fundamentally depends on – forms the basis of a strong ethico-polit-
ical stance. However, this position is also shaped by a fundamental
quandary regarding violence: we either have the right to choose with
whom we cohabit on the Earth, or such a right does not belong to us,
at any time, in any circumstances.
This dramatic dilemma becomes particularly prominent in Parting
Ways, a critical endeavour to recreate a pre-Zionist and non-Zionist
political Jewish subject who rejects violence against Palestinians,
which is itself performative of ‘a possibility to be part of the Jewish
people while criticizing Zionism as their only political realization’
(Rozmarin 2021: 36, 29). Here, as elsewhere, the dilemma is articu-
lated primarily through Arendtian conceptual tools. This can hardly
come as a surprise: Arendt tried to imagine a polity different than the
nation-state, statelessness being its recurrent predicament. This imag-
ination was followed by a ‘political obligation to analyse and oppose
deportations, population transfers and statelessness in ways that
refused a nationalist ethos’ (Butler 2007b). However, it was Arendt’s
idea that the conditio humana is predicated on plurality that had the
most important role in Butler’s formulations on cohabitation. The
Human Condition opens with the claim ‘that men, not Man, live
on the earth and inhabit the world’ (Arendt 1998: 7), plurality thus
appearing as an ontological precondition not only of all political life,
but also of the political itself.
Humans occupy space. They are contiguous, bordering and touch-
ing one another in their precarious tenancy of a single space and time.
Such a state can clearly be quite undesirable, antagonistic, wretched,
especially if one adjacent to me, whose bodily boundaries rub against
mine, is not to my liking or jeopardises me, or when this very close-
ness acts as a potential threat. And although we can surely do some-
thing to shape this given plurality and manage cohabitation – political
life serves precisely this purpose – the very givenness of plurality pre-
cedes our will and is outside the sphere of the chosen. The ontological
dimension of unchosenness is also part of our vulnerability and inter-
dependence: we do not simply choose to be vulnerable or depend on a
relation. But the unchosen dimension of plurality and cohabitation is
what gives meaning to vulnerability and dependence: in an imaginary

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world inhabited by one person, the fact of one’s vulnerability (to rela-
tion) ceases to be meaningful. That we are ‘here’, thrown in the world
with others, is our being here together. The fundamental impossi-
bility to decide upon this convergence of ‘me’ and ‘we’ being here,
reflects our primary belonging to the world. If cohabitation – a shared
thrownness into the world – can be at all considered in causal terms, it
is a consequence of the mere fact of birth. We are born into the world
that contains and contained others. (Primary plurality could be taken
to be a contingent foundation of the theory of performativity: the fact
of one’s birth is the only thing that is outside the sphere of acting and
is, at the same time, a condition of possibility of any acting. Natality –
the fact that all of us appear in the world by virtue of birth – assumes
that our unprecedented appearance takes place in a world with others
already present. On this point, through contingent but factual births,
Simone de Beauvoir and Hannah Arendt meet in a peculiar way in
Butler’s theory.)
Both that others are already there, and that belonging to this
‘there’ is less than mastery and ownership, can be ‘a source of a great
range of emotional consequences from desire to hostility or, indeed,
some combination of the two’ (PW: 176). But, although ‘we might
sometimes choose where to live, and who to live by or with [. . .]
we cannot choose with whom to cohabit the earth’ (PW: 125). This
fundamental lack of choice can produce antagonism and wretched-
ness, but it nonetheless demands an active preservation and affirma-
tion ‘of the unchosen character of inclusive and plural cohabitation’
(PW: 25). This demand may seem counter-intuitive, especially within
the liberal version of human ontology and its attendant anthropology
of the social contract. Reality inhabited by self-sufficient individu-
als for whom all relationality arises from various kinds of contracts
entered into with full knowledge of one’s intentions, makes no room
for relations that precede volitional acts, deliberation and choice
(PW: 23, 129–30). A ‘world’ that functions only as an agglomerate of
individuals, whose ties are artificial, chosen and posterior, who form
a ‘together’ merely as an arithmetic sum composed of independent
units, is paradoxically both the world of laissez-faire individuals who
buzz around the world, living and letting others live, on condition
that the basic prohibition of encroachment of one’s self-sufficiency is
respected; and a world in which the right to mastery can be invoked
at any time when the real or perceived trespasses take place.
When primary relationality provided to us by the world is not
taken into account, the right to mastery translates into a decision

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on who has the right to be thrown into the world. In her report
on the banality of evil, Hannah Arendt wrote about the exemplary
enactment of the right to annul plurality (Arendt 2006). The report,
composed during Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem, famously exposed
her to public opprobrium and produced a number of controversies,
many of which were related to Arendt’s observations on Eichmann
himself. Instead of the embodiment of radical evil, Arendt describes
Eichmann as a not particularly intelligent man, lacking the strong
emotions required to become a fanatic supporter of an ideology.
Nor were there any traces of a mental disorder; he did not display
any particular sense of responsibility; he demonstrated no capac-
ity to expose his motives for participation in atrocities; the word
‘duty’, to which he so often referred, remained mired in clichés and
stock phrases. No diabolical or demonic profundity could have been
extracted from Eichmann. Upon reflection, Arendt tells us that she
was struck ‘by a manifest shallowness in the doer that made it impos-
sible to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of
roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer [. . .] was
quite ordinary, commonplace [. . .] [characterised not by] stupidity
but thoughtlessness’ (Arendt 1981: 4). This emphasised thoughtless-
ness led Arendt to ultimately characterise the unthinkable evil pro-
duced by this terrifying machinery as ‘banal’. Nevertheless, Arendt
did consider him guilty of a crime that requires no demonic layer.
As Eichmann supported and carried out a ‘policy of not wanting to
share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of
other nations’, acting ‘as though’ he and his superiors had a right to
decide who should and who should not inhabit the world, ‘we find
that no one [. . .] can be expected to share the earth with you’ (Arendt
2006: 279). The decision that Eichmann and his superiors made
goes directly against the unchosen character of earthly cohabitation.
The ‘we’, the conjectured plurality through which Arendt expressed
herself – not from the position of judge, but in an operation of judge-
ment nonetheless, directly opposite to thoughtlessness – practically
and performatively enacts the ‘recognition of equality that follows
from her conception of human plurality’ (Butler 2011b: 294–5).
Anyone born has the right to be here.
Although we can and often do choose with whom we share a bed,
a flat or a neighbourhood, ‘we cannot choose with whom to share
the earth without engaging in genocide’ (D: 122). It is the unchosen
character of cohabitation that produces a normative demand to
refuse genocide. This refusal cannot be partial: we either concede

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to the invocation of a ‘genocidal prerogative’ (Butler 2011b: 292;

PW: 166) or we do whatever must be done to accept and preserve an
unchosen condition of lives on earth. ‘We cannot understand cohabi-
tation without understanding that a generalized precarity obliges
us to oppose genocide and to sustain life on egalitarian terms’ (NT:
119). Tacit acceptance of lives that do not count as life, that are not
worth preserving or grieving because they are already lost or losable,
belongs to the ‘very definition of genocidal epistemology’ (FN: 112).
If we do not choose with whom we inhabit the earth, we need
to actively keep – sustain and preserve – the unchosen character
of our plurality. The modes of support will differ but will have to
take into account the performative power of our acting. Antiracist
struggle teaches how to build on a dream: from the moment Martin
Luther King Jr first put into words the hopes of many previous gen-
erations for sons of former slaves and sons of former slave owners
to sit together at the table of brotherhood, to today’s enactment of
racial justice in the form of the Black Lives Matter movement. In this
dream, we appear in an already given world, one with an already
given history of actions, which prevent us from disregarding what
came before our appearance. These actions, however, do not deter-
mine our present, nor the performative possibilities of sustaining
plurality. There is thus an ‘obligation not to destroy any part of the
human population or to make lives unlivable’ (PW: 24). This obliga-
tion urges us to ‘devise institutions and policies that actively preserve
and affirm the unchosen character of open-ended and plural cohabi-
tation’ (NT: 112–13; Birulés 2009; Sarra 2012), because it is an obli-
gation no one can have alone, an obligation that can never belong
to any one in particular. It can always and only be realised on a
wider plane, through different forms of collective action (NT: 171–2;
D: 67; FN: 46–7).

Notes
1. The question of ‘you’ in Butler is most often related to her encounter
with Levinas. Although that is certainly not incorrect, I wish to draw
attention to Adriana Cavarero’s mediation of that encounter, which then
also of necessity involves Arendt and, on another register, Fanon. The
rehabilitation of the ‘you’ as the core of politics (Cavarero 2000), which
Butler never fails to attribute directly to Cavarero (UG: 35; GAO: 30–5;
SS: 197; Antonello and Farneti 2009), was extremely important in the
articulation of both Butler’s idea of the relation (PL), and the idea of
the narrative, the biography, the account we give of ourselves (GAO), in

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which the other, the ‘you’ is always already implied. Here is Butler very
early on: ‘For her, the question most central to recognition is a direct one;
and it is addressed to the Other: “who are you?” This question assumes
that there is an Other before us, one we do not know, whom we cannot
fully apprehend, one whose uniqueness and nonsubstitutability sets a
limit to the model of reciprocal recognition offered within the Hegelian
scheme [. . .] Cavarero argues that we are beings who are, of necessity,
exposed to one another, and that our political situation consists in part
in learning how best to handle this constant and necessary exposure.
In a sense, this theory of the “outside” to the subject radicalizes the
ecstatic trend in the Hegelian position [. . .] In her view, one can only tell
an autobiography, one can only reference an “I” in relation to a “you”:
without the “you”, my own story becomes impossible’ (Butler 2001b:
24). The exchange between Butler and Cavarero is profound and in many
ways exemplary of feminist acknowledgement and solidarity in struggle
(cf. Cavarero 2011, 2016; Pulkkinen 2020).
2. On the one hand, selective dependency, fragility and imperilment serve
as justification for domination, and on the other, make the protection
of what is ‘our own’ – possessions, women, family, children, nation,
culture, and so on – particularly urgent. The fantasy of mastery, which
rests upon total impermeability, total invulnerability, is a guiding fantasy
for many forms of nationalism and militarism (Zimmer, Heidingsfelder
and Adler 2010). After 2001, the US government set out to create the
representation of the country as sovereign, impermeable, invulnerable,
because it was unacceptable that its frontiers had been breached. This
representation depended on an image of efficacious, militarised man,
whose body and will are indestructible – the image of ‘pure action and
pure aggression’ (Birulés 2009; cf. Stauffer 2003). This fantasy had been
created in the United States, but also elsewhere and on many occasions,
through political, military and media strategical alliances. This explains
Butler’s interest in the power of media, frames and images, most discern-
ible in Frames of War.

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 Conclusion

Our Place

‘My’ place is that which I occupy as an embodied being. Yet, by my

very embodied nature, I am an ecstatic being, outside of myself, given
over to others. ‘My’ place is thus not entirely mine, because we, as
bodies, cohabitate, we are and we have together. In a world in which
to have means to be the sole possessor, having something together
often means not having it; we are taught that we must do all in our
power to reclaim what belongs to us and reject the state of disposses-
sion into which our bodies put us:
To say that ‘my’ place is already the place of another is to say that place
is never singularly possessed and that this question of cohabitation in the
same place is unavoidable. It is in light of this question of cohabitation
that the question of violence emerges. (PW: 62)

Violence appears as a reclamation of my own being and a rejection

of the shared world that dispossesses me.
Reclamation and rejection shape the relation between the body
and the world, which in its radical form can turn into an annihi-
lation of others constitutive of the relation, and thus an annihila-
tion of the relation itself. The ‘quandary’ – whether someone (an
individual, a group or a nation) has the right to reclaim their own
place for oneself, which in the final instance may lead to purging
the place of others – requires an unambiguous affirmation or rejec-
tion of violence. From 2001, when she suggested that responsibility
involves ‘an experiment to living otherwise’ (Butler 2001b: 39),
opening us towards a practice of nonviolence in an emphatically
non-reciprocal way, Judith Butler’s answer to this question is an
unambiguous no.
Nonviolence thus appears as an active form of perseverance in
cohabitation. To persevere in cohabitation – a having that is not
having, a having that is sharing – is to claim responsibility for the
liveable world and commitment to the equality of lives. To persevere
is to sustain an affirmation of the social relation in the force field of
violence, because nonviolence only becomes possible at the moment

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when to strike or strike back appears an obvious or desirable reac-

tion. We act non-violently not only when we refrain from violence,
but when this refraining is an active struggle against violence, ‘a way
of rerouting aggression’ (FN: 27). Rerouting is an important word,
reminiscent of rearticulation and resignification, referring to repeat-
ing otherwise. We struggle with(in) ourselves against our own anger
or rage, and we do it in order not to annihilate the other, preventing
the eradication of the relation that constitutes us both. Rerouting
– taking responsibility for the social relation – happens only in the
fray, only ‘within the terms of the performance’ (Butler 1998: 526).
Cohabitation does not provide the opportunity to pause being vul-
nerable and exposed ‘for a while, to pull the curtain down, and let
it rise only if one can have a say in the production of the play itself’
(Benhabib 1995a: 21). To take responsibility for the world that gives
us social relation is possible only from within the world itself, and in
medias res of violence.
The practice of nonviolence is a critical and ethical no to doing
violence, a decisive rejection of acting violently, of repeating vio-
lently. Nonviolence is resistance to the activation of the sedimented
layers of the past uses of violence, because ‘when any of us commit
acts of violence, we are, in and through those acts, building a more
violent world’ (FN: 19). There is, however, also a political obligation
to jointly think of ways to conserve cohabitation without violence,
securing conditions under which this remains a viable possibility.
For that we urgently need ‘institutions and policies that actively pre-
serve and affirm the unchosen character of open-ended and plural
cohabitation’ (NT: 112–13). Bearing in mind the double movement
of performativity, this dimension is crucial: in our acting, we ‘do’ the
world, but we are at the same time thrown into the world which is
not of our making alone. The practice of nonviolence includes both
our own acts, rerouted from doing violence, and norms and institu-
tions that allow for a world in which violence is not the first – or
second – option. If there are no institutional obligations and no
institutions that seek to preserve our interdependency, individual
non-violent acts – necessary as they are – will remain isolated heroic
deeds. To practise nonviolence in an unheroic way, nonviolence has
to be an instituted and enabled social norm.
To be sure, from a viewpoint of our ‘reality’, nonviolence as a
social norm looks simply unreal. Nevertheless, if we follow Judith
Butler, there is a philosophical obligation to resolutely espouse the
unrealistic, that which under existing conditions has the status of

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the impossible. Due to its contingent and contextual character that

can never be predicted at the level of theory, ‘in politics, sometimes
the thing that “will never happen” actually starts to happen’ (Bell
1999: 166). ‘And maybe one of the jobs of theory or philosophy is
to elevate principles that seem impossible [. . .] to stand by them and
will them’ in the name of possible life (Filar 2014). Surely, pondering
reality is one of the oldest jobs of philosophy, and perhaps a ‘critique
of what counts as reality’ (FN: 10) does not go too far from the
description of what an idealist political philosophy does. ‘Perhaps
nonviolence requires a certain leave-taking from reality as it is cur-
rently constituted, laying open the possibilities that belong to a newer
political imaginary’ (FN: 10–11).
Now, perhaps it is surprising to hear Judith Butler espousing
what seems like idealism. Was Butler not both celebrated and vili-
fied for her all too subversive approach to all that seemed solid? At
the very end of this book, after many attempts throughout to show
that Butler sought the possibilities of change, with cohabitation
we arrived at the opposite of social transformation: conservation.
Similarly, how can the task now, at the last, seem to be to stand by
and will the impossible? There are, further, two important questions
arising from such leave-taking of reality. First, if we need to imagine
and will a world in which peaceful cohabitation functions as the
basis of ethics and politics, are we speaking of some other, newer
and better world – perhaps utopian? Second, if nonviolence is our
pathway there, does this mean that such a world would be popu-
lated with beautiful souls, beings entirely lacking violent impulses
who acquiesce to ceding their place?; that is to say, are we speaking
of an utterly different people?
To answer these questions, we need to revisit, once again, what
has, throughout this book, been understood as reality or the world.
To that end, I propose we look back at the lines that give shape to
this book: the paragraph on the insurrection at the level of ontology
(PL: 33). The insurrection takes place when we pose critical ques-
tions about the world, such as ‘whose life is real?’ and ‘how can
reality be remade?’. These questions were, significantly, accompanied
by those on violence: what was the relation between violence and
lives considered ‘unreal’? How does violence effect (un)reality? What
is the perspective of the human if violence of derealisation always
remains possible?
Insurrection at the level of ontology does not entail stepping
outside the real; rather, it means saying no to such reality, taking

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leave of it, yet without searching for some new, non-place reality,
for some utopos. Quite the contrary, insurrection requires us to stay
in what is our only real place, into which we have been thrown in
a plural, unchosen way. Since ‘our’ place makes many of us unreal,
the insurrection says ‘no’ to derealisation and ascription of layers
of reality that allows expendable and ungrievable lives to exist. To
rebel means to desire and will a place in ‘our real’ where no lives are
unreal; it means to demand that here, in the midst of the relation
between the body and the world, there can be no lives whose reality
is violently abolished. The insurrection at the level of ontology is a
demand for our place without the violence that renders some lives
unreal. In the last instance, the insurrection at the level of ontology
is an insurrection against violence committed against anyone who is
part of this, our ‘ownly’ world.
True, Judith Butler speaks of an alternative ontology, and it stands
to reason that an alternative reality begins when the insurrection
comes to an end. Some other, new world appears in the midst of
reality as it is. If the various denials and selective formations that
produce inequality among lives were indeed to be abolished, another,
new world would appear in the midst of reality. With unconditional
consent to cohabitation, something new is on the horizon, which at
the present moment belongs to the domain of the unknown. This
‘new’ will be an effect of social transformation: a world that con-
serves and enhances social relations, in which norms do not develop
differential recognisability, vulnerability, dependency, precarity,
grievability; a world where the question ‘who counts as human?’
stops making sense.
In persevering in putting forth seemingly impossible principles –
one of which is that bodies are formative of social relations and that
they need protection from harm! – we encourage this ‘new’ to appear
and keep it in circulation. Presenting ‘impossibility’ as possible
begets possibility. Thus, we are not talking about some other place
and world, but about possibilities that have to be opened and kept
open here, in our shared place, which can only then be truly ours.
The insurrection at the level of ontology can happen only within
reality itself and against existing formations of the social relation that
produce and perpetuate inequality in the midst of equality.
In this equation, nonviolence functions as an insurrection against
violence integral to the established social relations. Nonviolence is a
practice that – right now – stopping a violent act or process, enables
us to remain in our only place. It is what can be done in medias res,

224
 conclusion: our place

in a world that has not banished aggression from life and politics.
Nonviolence does not come about in a fairy-tale world populated by
beautiful souls (or if it did, given such a world, it would not be impor-
tant). As a practice, nonviolence is crucial precisely in conditions that
produce us through violence. Agency appears when our acting turns
away from what keeps us bound (and subjected) to these norms. To
rebel against the reality that constitutes us (a critical gesture) assumes
neither its destruction nor transcendence, but a performative turn or
rerouting of violent norms. Its purpose is to acknowledge social rela-
tion (an ethical gesture), beyond which there is no other reality. The
turn that demands the transformation of our own production must
take place in the midst of violence, rerouting it, contesting ‘the deter-
mining power of that production; in other words, [making] good use
of the iterability of those norms and, hence, their fragility and trans-
formability’ (Butler 2007a: 185).
How would reality look if it were remade on the basis of radical
egalitarianism? What would our reality be if our ontology, based on
precariousness, plurality and interdependence, were also politically
sustained and protected? We do not know yet. It is a matter for the
future. Although not part of the world in which we presently live,
equality is to be politically advanced. This presupposes that we think
and act in the now, as if able to acknowledge our ontological equal-
ity. What kind of reality would emerge from those political struggles
is still as unpredictable and contingent as the imaginary of those who
might inhabit it. We remain unknowing of a world without the pos-
sibility of annihilation of the social bond. What would reality look
like if all lives were possible? How would the human look if its pos-
sibilities were not violently established?
To safeguard the future of life is not to impose the form that such a life
will take, the path that such a life will follow: it is a way of holding open
the contingent and unpredictable forms that lives may take. (FN: 146)

To tend politically to the future cannot happen from a programmatic

point already situated in an alleged future.
We tend to the future by doing in the now. This can also be taken
to be an answer to the question about the beautiful souls, people
who would presumably live in a good or at least better world. A
world in which annihilation is not an allowed form of a social rela-
tion, in which no one can invoke the genocidal prerogative, in which
no human is expendable, would indeed be a world inhabited by
beautiful souls. We do not know such a world yet. But a fairy-tale

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 judith butler and politics

description of the world is not what Judith Butler supplies. Rather,

however foreclosed such a possibility may appear in our given
frames, her political philosophy is an injunction to think radical
equality here and now.

226
 Bibliography

Texts by Judith Butler

Asad, T., W. Brown, J. Butler and S. Mahmood. 2009. Is Critique Secular?
Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Beck-Gernsheim, E., J. Butler and L. Puigvert. 2003. Women and Social
Transformation. New York: Peter Lang.
Benhabib, S., J. Butler, D. Cornell and N. Fraser. 1995. Feminist Contentions:
A Philosophical Exchange. New York: Routledge.
Butler, J. 1985. ‘Variations on Sex and Gender: Beauvoir, Wittig, and
Foucault’. Praxis International 4: 505–16.
Butler, J. 1986. ‘Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex’. Yale
French Studies 72: 35–49.
Butler, J. 1987. Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-
Century France. New York: Columbia University Press.
Butler, J. 1988. ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in
Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’. Theatre Journal 40 (4): 519–31.
Butler, J. 1989. ‘Sexual Ideology and Phenomenological Description: A
Feminist Critique of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception’.
In The Thinking Muse, edited by J. Allen and I. M. Young, 85–100.
Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Butler, J. 1991. ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’. In Inside/Out.
Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, edited by D. Fuss, 13–31. New York
and London: Routledge.
Butler, J. 1993a. ‘Gender as Performance’. In A Critical Sense: Interviews
with Intellectuals, edited by P. Osborne, 109–25. London and New York:
Routledge.
Butler, J. 1993b. ‘Critically Queer’. GLQ 1: 17–32.
Butler, J. 1993c. ‘Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White
Paranoia’. In Reading Rodney King: Reading Urban Uprising, edited by
R. Gooding-Williams, 15–22. New York: Routledge.
Butler, J. 1994. ‘Against Proper Objects: Introduction’. differences 6 (2&3):
1–26.
Butler, J. 1995a. ‘Contingent Foundations’. In Feminist Contentions, edited
by S. Benhabib et al., 35–58. New York: Routledge.

227
 bibliography

Butler, J. 1995b. ‘For a Careful Reading’. In Feminist Contentions, edited

by S. Benhabib et al., 127–44. New York: Routledge.
Butler, J. 1996. ‘Universality in Culture’. In For the Love of the Country,
edited by M. Nussbaum, 45–52. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Butler, J. 1997a. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New
York and London: Routledge.
Butler, J. 1997b. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Butler, J. 1997c. ‘Further Reflections on Conversations of Our Times’.
Diacritics 27 (1): 13–15.
Butler, J. 1998. ‘Merely Cultural’. New Left Review 1 (227): 33–44.
Butler, J. 1999 [1990]. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of
Identity. New York and London: Routledge.
Butler, J. 2000. ‘Ethical Ambivalence’. In The Turn to Ethics, edited by
M. Garber, B. Hanssen and R. L. Walkowitz, 15–28. New York and
London: Routledge. [Link]
-2222
Butler, J. 2001a. ‘What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue’.
Available at [Link] (accessed 8
December 2022).
Butler, J. 2001b. ‘Giving an Account of Oneself’. Diacritics 31 (4): 22–40.
Butler, J. 2002a. Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death. New
York: Columbia University Press.
Butler, J. 2002b. ‘Bodies and Power, Revisited’. Radical Philosophy 114:
13–19.
Butler, J. 2004a. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence.
London and New York: Verso.
Butler, J. 2004b. Undoing Gender. New York and London: Routledge.
Butler, J. 2005. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham
University Press.
Butler, J. 2007a. ‘Reply from Judith Butler to Mills and Jenkins’. differences
18 (2): 180–95.
Butler, J. 2007b. ‘I Merely Belong to Them’. London Review of Books
29 (9). Available at [Link]
butler​/i-merely-belong-to-them.
Butler, J. 2009a. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London and New
York: Verso.
Butler, J. 2009b. ‘Performativity, Precarity and Sexual Politics’. AIBR.
Revista de Antropologia Iberoamericana 4 (3): i–xiii.
Butler, J. 2009c. ‘Critique, Dissent, Disciplinarity’. Critical Inquiry 35:
773–95.
Butler, J. 2010. ‘Performative Agency’. Journal of Cultural Economy 3 (2):
147–61.

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 bibliography

Butler, J. 2011a [1993]. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of

‘Sex’. New York and London: Routledge.
Butler, J. 2011b. ‘Hannah Arendt’s Death Sentences’. Comparative
Literature Studies 48 (3): 280–95.
Butler, J. 2012. Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Violence.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Butler, J. 2015a. ‘Laclau, Marx, and the Performative Power of Negation’.
Verso blog. Available at [Link]
-butler-laclau-marx-and-the-performative-power-of-negation?utm_sour​
ce=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=verso_blog&fbcli​
d=IwAR26_HK9DKrQoaL8uCrBtk_Z7oj5S-N_n0kPMaMg4DhI1oOt​
1cuSqw-jGo8 (accessed 8 December 2022).
Butler, J. 2015b. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly.
Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press.
Butler, J. 2015c. Senses of the Subject. New York: Fordham University
Press.
Butler, J. 2016a. ‘Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance’. In Vulnerability
in Resistance, edited by J. Butler, Z. Gambetti and L. Sabsay, 12–27.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Butler, J. 2016b. ‘Uprising’. In Uprisings, edited by G. Didi-Huberman,
23–36. Paris: Gallimard, Jeu de Paume.
Butler, J. 2018. ‘Reply from Judith Butler’. Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research XCVI (1): 243–9.
Butler, J. 2019a. ‘Gender in Translation: Beyond Monolingualism’. philo­
SOPHIA 9 (1): 1–25.
Butler, J. 2019b. ‘Hegel for Our Times’. The Institute of Art and Ideas.
Available at [Link]
-1273 (accessed 8 December 2022).
Butler, J. 2020. The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind.
London and New York: Verso.
Butler, J. 2021. ‘Why is the Idea of “Gender” Provoking Backlash the World
Over?’ The Guardian, 23 October. Available at [Link]
[Link]/us-news/commentisfree/2021/oct/23/judith-butler-gender-ideolo​
gy-backlash (accessed 8 December 2022).
Butler, J. and A. Athanasiou. 2013. Dispossession: The Performative in the
Political. Cambridge: Polity.
Butler, J., Z. Gambetti and L. Sabsay. 2016. ‘Introduction’. In Vulnerability
in Resistance, edited by J. Butler, Z. Gambetti and L. Sabsay, 1–11.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Butler, J., J. Habermas, C. Taylor and C. West. 2011. The Power of Religion
in the Public Sphere. New York: Columbia University Press.
Butler, J., E. Laclau and R. Laddaga. 1997. ‘The Uses of Equality’. Diacritics
27 (1): 2–12.

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Butler J., E. Laclau and S. Žižek. 2000. Contingency, Hegemony,

Universality. London and New York: Verso.
Butler, J. and G. C. Spivak. 2007. Who Sings the Nation-State? Language,
Politics, Belonging. London, New York, Calcutta: Seagull.
Butler, J. and S. Taylor. 2008. Examined Life. Available at [Link]
[Link]/watch?v=k0HZaPkF6qE&ab_channel=%E9%BB%83%E5​
%B0%8F%E7%AB%B9 (accessed 8 December 2022).
Butler, J. and E. Weed. 2011. ‘Introduction’. In The Question of Gender:
Joan W. Scott’s Critical Feminism, edited by J. Butler and E. Weed, 1–10.
Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Interviews with Judith Butler

Aloni, U. 2010. ‘Judith Butler: As a Jew, I Was Taught It Was Ethically
Imperative to Speak Up’. Haaretz, 24 February. Available at [Link]
.[Link]/1.5052023 (accessed 8 December 2022).
Antonello, P. and R. Farneti. 2009. ‘Antigone’s Claim: A Conversation with
Judith Butler’. Theory & Event 12 (1). DOI: 10.1353/tae.0.0048.
Avramopolou, E. 2014. ‘Crisis, Critique and the Possibilities of the Political’.
The Cyprus Review 26 (1): 195–203.
Barbec, S. 2017. ‘An Interview with Judith Butler’. Verso blog. Available at
[Link]
ler (accessed 8 December 2022).
Bell, V. 1999. ‘On Speech, Race and Melancholia: An Interview with Judith
Butler’. Theory, Culture & Society 16 (2): 163–75.
Bella, K. 2011. ‘Bodies in Alliance: Gender Theorist Judith Butler on the
Occupy and SlutWalk Movements’. Truthout, 15 December. Available
at [Link]
-butler-on-the-occupy-and-slutwalk-movements/ (accessed 8 December
2022).
Birulés, F. 2009. ‘Interview with Judith Butler: Gender is Extramoral’.
Mronline. Available at [Link]
-judith-butler-gender-is-extramoral/ (accessed 8 December 2022).
Blumenfeld, W. J. and M. S, Breen. 2005. ‘“There is a person here”: An
Interview with Judith Butler’. In Butler Matters: Judith Butler’s Impact on
Feminist and Queer Studies, edited by M. S. Breen and W. J. Blumenfeld,
7–24. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Butler, J. and W. E. Connolly. 2000. ‘Politics, Power and Ethics’. Theory &
Event 4 (2). [Link]/article/32589.
Butler, J. 2007c. ‘Gender Trouble: Still Revolutionary of Obsolete?’ Interview
for Bang Bang, Belgium weekly Queer radio magazine. Available at [Link]
[Link]/mbbc/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/BangBang2007In​
[Link] (accessed 8 December 2022).
Danbolt, M. 2015. ‘In the Hands of the Social: An Interview with Judith

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Butler’. [Link]
NK_conversations_Butler.pdf.
Filar, R. 2014. ‘Willing the Impossible: An Interview with Judith Butler’.
Open Democracy. Available at [Link]
formation/willing-impossible-interview-with-judith-butler/ (accessed 8
December 2022).
Heckert, J. 2011. ‘On Anarchism: An Interview with Judith Butler’. In
Anarchism and Sexuality: Ethics, Relationships and Power, edited by J.
Heckert and R. Cleminson, 93–100. New York: Routledge.
Ingala, E. 2017. ‘Judith Butler: A Living Engagement with Politics’. Isegoria
56: 21–37.
Kania, E. 2013. ‘Exercising Politics. Interview with Judith Butler’.
[Link] 1(1): 32–41.
Kotz, L. 1992. ‘The Body You Want’. Artforum, 82–9.
Martínez Ruiz, R. 2016. ‘A Conversation with Judith Butler’. The
Undecidable Unconsciousness 3: 51–65.
McCann, M. 2011. ‘Whose Lives Matter? An Interview with Judith Butler’.
Available at [Link]
ew-with-judith-butler-34248 (accessed 9 January 2023).
Meijer, I. C. and B. Prins. 1998. ‘How Bodies Come to Matter: An Interview
with Judith Butler’. Signs 23 (2): 275–86.
O’Hana, S. 2017. ‘Judith Butler on the Poetry of Guantanamo: “In some
ways, literature and the arts help to make the world bearable”’. Literary
Hub, 7 July. Available at [Link]
-of-guantanamo/ (accessed 8 December 2022).
Olson, G. A. and L. Worsham. 2000. ‘Changing the Subject: Judith Butler’s
Politics of Radical Resignification’. JAC 20 (4): 727–65.
Pagès, C. and M. Trachman. 2012. ‘Analytics of Power. An Interview with
Judith Butler’. Books and Ideas. Available at [Link]
/IMG/pdf/20121129_an_analytics_of_power.pdf (accessed 8 December
2022).
Phelps, J. 2013. ‘Judith Butler on Performativity and Performance’.
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Pheng C. and E. Grosz. 1998. ‘The Future of Sexual Difference: An
Interview with Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell’. Diacritics 28 (1):
19–42.
Power, N. 2009. ‘The Books interview: Judith Butler’. The New Statesman.
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Reddy, V. and J. Butler. 2004. ‘Troubling Genders, Subverting Identities:
Interview with Judith Butler’. Agenda: Empowering Women for Gender
Equity, African Feminisms 62 (2,1): 115–23.
Salmon, C. 2016. ‘Trump, Fascism and the Construction of “the People”’.

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Verso blog, 29 December. Available at [Link]

ogs/3025-trump-fascism-and-the-construction-of-the-people-an-intervi​
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Sarra, S. 2012. ‘Solidarity in the Streets. An Interview with Judith Butler’.
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Schneider, N. and J. Butler. 2010. ‘A Carefully Crafted F**k You’. Guernica
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Stauffer, J. 2003. ‘Peace is a Resistance to the Terrible Satisfactions of War’.
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Zaharijević, A. and J. Butler. 2016. ‘In Conversation with Judith Butler:
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 Index

abject, 77–8, 108, 116, 141, 155–6, Beauvoir, S., de, 6, 7, 45, 47–52, 55–6,
161, 166, 173, 210 58, 74, 82n, 100, 197, 217
acting in concert, 26, 29, 131, 159, Beck-Gernsheim, E., 9n
179, 181, 195 becoming, 7, 49–51, 54–6, 58–9, 63,
Adorno, T., 27, 140, 143–4 98, 100–3, 144, 149, 186–7, 200,
Agamben, G., 142–5, 149, 164–9 209
agency, 7–8, 60, 86–9, 104–5, 123, Bell, V., 132n
183, 187, 201–4, 225 Benhabib, S., 9n, 23, 96–100, 105, 109,
and resistance, 93, 105–8 111, 123, 208
and subject constitution, 96–100, Benjamin, W., 3, 6, 31, 35–6, 140,
102–4, 119, 120–1 142
collective, 112, 113, 119, 126–32 Bhabha, H., 36
political, 109, 123–32, 166–9, 180n Birulés, F., 137
under constraint, 76–7, 93–6, 104, body, 4–5, 16–17, 51–63, 71–4, 101,
186–8, 205 121–3, 126, 139, 144, 160–1, 176,
Allen, A., 93, 94, 110 192–3, 197–9
Aloni, U., 174 Boucher, G., 111–12
Althusser, L., 88, 101, 120, 152 Bourke, J., 39
Antigone, 4, 8, 126, 127–32, 152–3, Braidotti, R., 72
182–3, 185, 186 Brown, W., 9n, 24, 180n
Antonello, P., 204 Buber, M., 6
appear (to), 8, 66, 113, 154–62, 219
Arbery, A., 155 Carver, T., 1
Arendt, H., 6, 26, 124, 125, 129, 140, Cavarero, A., 195, 197, 200, 219–20n
142–3, 144, 149, 156–62, 164, Chambers, S., 1
165, 168, 195, 198, 216–18, cohabitation, 9, 35, 159, 179, 191–3,
219n 215–19, 221–4
Aristotle, 45–6, 143, 157 collective struggle, 7, 23, 28–31, 32,
Arruzza, C., 110 80, 81, 109, 112, 132, 133n,
Asad, T., 9n 181–2
Athanasiou, A., 15, 160, 171, 178 contingent foundation, 79–80, 96–100,
Austin, J. L., 82, 87, 89–91 105, 113, 138, 176, 217
autonomy, 97, 98, 119, 122–3, 129, Cornell, D., 9n, 96
147, 171–2, 176, 193, 194, counting, 4, 8–9, 17, 28, 38–9, 113,
208–10 137–8, 141, 173, 175, 184, 186,
Avramopolou, E., 5 214, 219, 223, 224
Crenshaw, K., 155
Badiou, A., 198 critique, 27–8, 30, 40–1n, 109, 116,
Barad, K., 73 134n, 184, 206

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Derrida, J., 82, 87, 90–2 49, 52–4, 55, 100, 122–3, 146,
desire, 11–13, 26, 56–7, 70, 77, 80, 149–53, 182–3, 211–12, 220n
94, 101, 115, 139, 176, 204, Hemmings, C., 5
217 Hiller, K., 142
for life, 52–3, 138, 150 Hobbes, T., 149–50
for recognition, 30, 52, 77, 146, Honig, B., 165
150, 153, 206, 212 Honkasalo, M-L., 198
for transcendence, 59, 108 Honneth, A., 9n
to be/persist, 118, 137, 139, 145–7, Horkheimer, M., 27
192, 203, 205–6, 208–9 human, 15–17, 38–40, 50, 77, 98–9,
Devenney, M., 2 130, 134n, 138, 144–5, 148, 151,
Disch, L., 15 157–60, 163–4, 173–4, 178, 180n,
dispossession, 3, 38, 119, 123, 166–9, 188, 210
171–2, 176, 200, 203, 209
Douglas, M., 14 Ingala, E., 159, 184–5
drag, 8, 30, 84n, 87, 111, 114, 115, in medias res, 2, 7, 9, 21, 35, 108, 121,
116–19 125, 190, 207, 208–9, 222, 224
politics, 22–6, 112–13, 132, 181
ecstatic, 10, 26, 30, 146, 150, 171, insurrection, 2, 40n
176, 194, 195, 206, 220n, 221 at the level of ontology, 2, 7, 9,
Eichmann, A., 218 14–22, 38, 40, 78, 82, 86, 108,
Engels, F., 56 118, 145, 148, 189, 223–5
Ertür, B., 179 interdependence/interdependency, 3,
9, 82, 119, 147, 151, 173, 177–8,
Fanon, F., 172, 219n 191–3, 203, 209, 210–16
Farneti, R., 204
Ferrarese, E., 198 Jagger, G., 1
Fineman, M., 199
Foucault, M., 5, 7, 13–14, 25–8, 38, Kafka, F., 82, 90
40–1n, 55, 60–2, 76, 101, 104–9, Kant, I., 27
111–12, 116, 120, 133n, 140, Kessler, S., 84n
143, 183, 206 Kirby, V., 1
Fraser, N., 9n, 96, 104, 105 Klein, M., 3, 212–13
Freud, S., 6, 46, 56, 74, 101, 177 Knight, A., 210
Kołakowski, L., 13
Geddes, P., 46, 48, 65, 71, 74 Kosofsky Sedgwick, E., 79
gender, 3, 7, 11, 16, 47–8, 51, 56–9, Kristeva, J., 155–6
68–76, 83–4n, 101, 117, 119,
126, 133n, 137, 184–9, 191–2 Lacan, J., 88, 93–6
Geuss, R., 9n Laclau, E., 9n, 26, 30
Gilson, E., 199, 201 Landauer, G., 134n
Goffman, I., 84n, 97 Lear, J., 9n
Gramsci, A., 112, 120 Levinas, E., 152, 205–6, 213, 219n
Lévi-Strauss, C., 56
Habermas, J., 9n, 23, 25, 26–7 life, 137–40, 173, 213
Hanson, E., 174 and survival, 130, 140–7, 160, 202
Hartsock, N., 126 grievable, 173–6, 182, 214
Hegel, G. W. F., 5, 7, 11–14, 26, jettisoned, 141, 155–6, 161, 167–9

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liveable, 8, 81, 103, 113, 133n, shadowy regions of, 17, 77–8, 95,
137–9, 140–7, 181, 183, 188, 137, 144–5
191 social, 3, 4, 5, 17, 39, 67, 89, 112,
possible, 20, 145–6, 148–9, 223 119, 158, 160–1, 176, 177, 192–3,
precarious, 132, 141, 169–73, 176, 194, 215
182, 203, 213
qualified, 141–3, 166 performance, 67–8, 79–82, 91, 125,
unliveable, 125, 141, 147, 202 185–6
Lloyd, M., 1, 107–8, 110, 114 performativity, 68, 81, 183, 191, 215
Locke, J., 171 as citationality, 8, 89–93, 100, 110,
Loizidou, E., 1, 204 124, 187
Luther King, M., Jr, 219 double movement of, 7, 89, 101–2,
104, 115, 187, 215, 222
McKenna, W., 84n Plato, 14, 56, 186
MacKinnon, C., 83n plurality, 29, 35, 45, 113, 140, 159,
Mahmood, S., 9n, 105, 115, 124 163, 181, 189, 191–3, 195,
Maimonides, 6 215–19
Marx, K., 30, 56, 126–7 possibilities, 14, 20–1, 25, 49, 63, 71,
Merleau-Ponty, M., 83n 76, 106, 124, 146–9, 154, 169,
Mills, C., 186–7 185, 202, 224
Mohanty, C. T., 41n materialisation of, 66, 73, 75, 77, 102,
Mouffe, C., 26, 30 119, 146, 172, 187, 216
mourning, 4, 126–7, 129, 131, 174–5, precarity, 3, 38, 81, 113, 132, 168,
176–9 169, 172–3, 183, 215
Murphy, A., 186–7 Probyn, E., 87
project, 48–54, 65, 101, 114
new, 21–2, 25–8, 32–3, 153–4, 181, Prosser, J., 116
190, 224 Puigvert, L., 9n
Newton, E., 84n, 116–17 Pulkkinen, T., 2
Nicholson, L., 96
Nietzsche, F., 13, 14, 18, 79, 90–1, 98 queer, 6, 12, 29–30, 101, 108, 112,
nonviolence, 3, 8–9, 177, 181, 183–4, 113, 116–17, 131–2, 174
188, 190–1, 208–9, 221–2, 224–5 philosophy, 10–14
norm, 17, 34, 39, 59–68, 88, 92–6,
102, 116, 124, 141, 146, 186–8, radical democracy, 9n, 26, 29, 109,
201–2, 222 112, 132, 181
Nussbaum, M., 110 radical equality, 4, 176, 193, 225–6
recognition, 12, 30, 39, 40, 52–3, 66,
obligation, 182, 184, 191, 205, 68, 146, 149–55, 156, 161, 163,
213–15, 219, 222 166–9, 189, 198, 213, 218, 220n
Oliver, K., 203 Redecker, E., von, 118
ontology, 15, 118, 186 responsibility, 183, 194, 202, 204–10,
established, 15, 17, 20–1, 38, 112, 213
149, 173 Riley, D., 83n
liberal versions of, 177, 191, 192, Rubin, G., 7, 55, 56–9, 61, 76, 114
193–7, 217
of the body, 5, 17, 112, 119, 192–3, Sabsay, L., 93
200 Salih, S., 1

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Sartre, J-P., 49, 50–1, 76, 87 translation, 35–6, 205

Sawicki, J., 101 as a political practice, 31, 37, 163
Schippers, B., 1, 152 cultural, 5, 7, 29, 34–7, 41n, 112,
Scholem, G., 6 132, 181
Scott, J., 3, 69–70, 126 Tzelepis, E., 160
sex, 46–7, 51, 56, 61–2, 68–76, 92,
94–5 unchosen/unchosenness, 9, 76, 88–9,
sociality, 35, 55, 56, 66, 68, 73, 82, 98, 101, 121, 127, 130, 144,
88, 92–3, 139, 151, 172–3, 176–7, 146–7, 159, 171, 179, 191–4,
183, 200, 201–3 200, 201, 203, 208, 210–19, 222,
social reality, 7, 8, 17, 39, 66, 68, 71, 224
77, 79–80, 101–3, 121, 127, 141, universal/universality, 31–4, 37, 39–40,
175, 204 112, 132, 161, 182
social relation/ bond, 8, 17, 36–7, 183, unknowing/unknowingness, 21, 25–6,
191–3, 206–8, 210–14, 222–3, 225 33, 181–2, 184, 208, 210, 224–5
social transformation, 7, 17, 19, 39,
87, 95, 105, 109, 120, 124–5, 188, violence, 15–16, 71, 121, 126, 139–40,
223 155, 175, 179, 183, 184–91,
speech act, 89–92, 97, 163 211–12, 215, 221
and bodily act, 79, 82, 88–9, 102, vulnerability, 38, 79, 119, 146–7, 175,
161 177–9, 188–91, 197–204, 205–9,
Spinoza, B., 6, 145–7, 151, 206, 209 214, 216–17
Spivak, G. C., 37
Stone, A., 119 war, 8, 142, 174–5, 177–9, 183,
subjectivation, 40–1n, 101, 104, 120, 210–11, 214
184 West, C., 9n
subversion, 4, 22, 62, 92, 107, 110, Wittig, M., 6, 7, 55, 56, 58–9, 76, 94,
112, 114–19, 124, 130, 134n, 184 114, 185
world
Taylor, A., 153 dependence on, 120–3, 147, 151,
Taylor, C., 9n 154, 172, 192–3, 203, 213
Taylor, S., 153–4 liveable, 7, 22, 141, 177, 181, 183,
theory 191, 211, 213, 221
of agency, 78, 86, 104, 112, 123–5, social, 33, 64, 66, 68, 73, 87,
180n 101–2, 119–121, 130, 183, 210,
of assembly, 4, 30, 112, 119, 132, 211
134n, 162–3, 169, 179, 194–5
of performativity, 6, 51, 54–5, 59, Yancy, G., 154
76, 78–82, 86, 90, 113, 124, 138
of the subject, 80–1, 86, 90–6, 99, Zinn, H., 134n
100–4 Žižek, S., 9n

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