The Political Philosophy of Judith Butler PDF Download

Author: Birgit Schippers
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113591320X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
Judith Butler can justifiably be described as one of the major critical thinkers of our time. While she is best-known for her interventions into feminist debates on gender, sexuality and feminist politics, her focus in recent years has broadened to encompass some of the most pertinent topics of interest to contemporary political philosophy. Drawing on Butler’s deconstructive reading of the key categories and concepts of political thought, Birgit Schippers expounds and advocates her challenge to the conceptual binaries that pervade modern political discourse. Using examples and case studies like the West’s intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in relation to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Schippers demonstrates how Butler’s philosophically informed engagement with pressing political issues of our time elucidates our understanding of topics such as immigration and multiculturalism, sovereignty, or the prospect for new forms of cohabitation and citizenship beyond and across national boundaries. A detailed exposition and analysis of Butler’s recent ideas, championing her efforts at articulating the possibilities for radical politics and ethical life in an era of global interdependence, this book makes an makes an important contribution to the emerging field of international political philosophy.

Author: Samuel A Chambers
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135989613
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
Political Theory of Judith Butler proceeds thematically to introduce Butler's basic terms and conceptions before leading the reader through her substantive contributions.

Author: Birgit Schippers
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780203551530
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
Judith Butler can justifiably be described as one of the major critical thinkers of our time. While she is best-known for her interventions into feminist debates on gender, sexuality and feminist politics, her focus in recent years has broadened to encompass some of the most pertinent topics of interest to contemporary political philosophy. Drawing on Butler s deconstructive reading of the key categories and concepts of political thought, Birgit Schippers expounds and advocates her challenge to the conceptual binaries that pervade modern political discourse. Using examples and case studies like the West s intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in relation to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Schippers demonstrates how Butler s philosophically informed engagement with pressing political issues of our time elucidates our understanding of topics such as immigration and multiculturalism, sovereignty, or the prospect for new forms of cohabitation and citizenship beyond and across national boundaries. A detailed exposition and analysis of Butler s recent ideas, championing her efforts at articulating the possibilities for radical politics and ethical life in an era of global interdependence, this book makes an makes an important contribution to the emerging field of international political philosophy."

Author: Judith Butler
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1788732774
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
“The most creative and courageous social theorist working today” examines the ethical binds that emerge within the force field of violence (Cornel West). “ . . . nonviolence is often seen as passive and resolutely individual. Butler’s philosophical inquiry argues that it is in fact a shrewd and even aggressive collective political tactic.” —New York Times Judith Butler shows how an ethic of nonviolence must be connected to a broader political struggle for social equality. While many think of nonviolence as passive or individualist, Butler argues nonviolence is an ethical position found in the midst of the political field. She champions an ‘aggressive’ nonviolence, which accepts hostility as part of our psychic constitution—but values ambivalence as a way of checking the conversion of aggression into violence. Some challengers say a politics of nonviolence is subjective: What qualifies as violence versus nonviolence? This distinction is often mobilized in the service of ratifying the state’s monopoly on violence. Considering nonviolence as an ethical problem within a political philosophy requires two things: a critique of individualism and an understanding of the psychosocial dimensions of violence. Butler draws upon Foucault, Fanon, Freud, and Benjamin to consider how the interdiction against violence fails to include lives regarded as ‘ungrievable’. By considering how “racial phantasms” inform justifications of state and administrative violence, Butler tracks how violence is often attributed to those who are most severely exposed to its lethal effects. Ultimately, the struggle for nonviolence is found in modes of resistance and social movements that separate aggression from its destructive aims to affirm the living potentials of radical egalitarian politics.

Author: Judith Butler
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 067449556X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Judith Butler elucidates the dynamics of public assembly under prevailing economic and political conditions. Understanding assemblies as plural forms of performative action, she extends her theory of performativity to show why precarity—destruction of the conditions of livability—is a galvanizing force and theme in today’s highly visible protests.

Author: Judith Butler
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000366421
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
‘When we claim to have been injured by language, what kind of claim do we make?’ - Judith Butler, Excitable Speech Excitable Speech is widely hailed as a tour de force and one of Judith Butler’s most important books. Examining in turn debates about hate speech, pornography and gayness within the US military, Butler argues that words can wound and linguistic violence is its own kind of violence. Yet she also argues that speech is ‘excitable’ and fluid, because its effects often are beyond the control of the speaker, shaped by fantasy, context and power structures. In a novel and courageous move, she urges caution concerning the use of legislation to restrict and censor speech, especially in cases where injurious language is taken up by aesthetic practices to diminish and oppose the injury, such as in rap and popular music. Although speech can insult and demean, it is also a form of recognition and may be used to talk back; injurious speech can reinforce power structures, but it can also repeat power in ways that separate language from its injurious power. Skillfully showing how language’s oppositional power resides in its insubordinate and dynamic nature and its capacity to appropriate and defuse words that usually wound, Butler also seeks to account for why some clearly hateful speech is taken to be iconic of free speech, while other forms are more easily submitted to censorship. In light of current debates between advocates of freedom of speech and ‘no platform’ and cancel culture, the message of Excitable Speech remains more relevant now than ever. This Routledge Classics edition includes a new Preface by the author, where she considers speech and language in the context contemporary forms of political polarization.

Author: Judith Butler
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1788732790
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
“Judith Butler is the most creative and courageous social theorist writing today." – Cornel West “Judith Butler is quite simply one of the most probing, challenging, and influential thinkers of our time.” – J. M. Bernstein Judith Butler’s new book shows how an ethic of nonviolence must be connected to a broader political struggle for social equality. Further, it argues that nonviolence is often misunderstood as a passive practice that emanates from a calm region of the soul, or as an individualist ethical relation to existing forms of power. But, in fact, nonviolence is an ethical position found in the midst of the political field. An aggressive form of nonviolence accepts that hostility is part of our psychic constitution, but values ambivalence as a way of checking the conversion of aggression into violence. One contemporary challenge to a politics of nonviolence points out that there is a difference of opinion on what counts as violence and nonviolence. The distinction between them can be mobilized in the service of ratifying the state’s monopoly on violence. Considering nonviolence as an ethical problem within a political philosophy requires a critique of individualism as well as an understanding of the psychosocial dimensions of violence. Butler draws upon Foucault, Fanon, Freud, and Benjamin to consider how the interdiction against violence fails to include lives regarded as ungrievable. By considering how “racial phantasms” inform justifications of state and administrative violence, Butler tracks how violence is often attributed to those who are most severely exposed to its lethal effects. The struggle for nonviolence is found in movements for social transformation that reframe the grievability of lives in light of social equality and whose ethical claims follow from an insight into the interdependency of life as the basis of social and political equality.

Author: Terrell Carver
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134222777
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
Judith Butler has been arguably the most important gender theorist of the past twenty years. This edited volume draws leading international political theorists into dialogue with her political theory. Each chapter is written by an acclaimed political theorist and concentrates on a particular aspect of Butler's work. The book is divided into five sections which reflect the interdisciplinary nature of Butler's work and activism: Butler and Philosophy: explores Butler’s unique relationship to the discipline of philosophy, considering her work in light of its philosophical contributions Butler and Subjectivity: covers the vexed question of subjectivity with which Butler has engaged throughout her published history Butler and Gender: considers the most problematic area, gender, taken by many to be primary to Butler’s work Butler and Democracy: engages with Butler’s significant contribution to the literature of radical democracy and to the central political issues faced by our post-cold war Butler and Action: focuses directly on the question of political agency and political action in Butler’s work. Along with its companion volume, Judith Butler and Political Theory, it marks an intellectual event for political theory, with major implications for feminism, women’s studies, gender studies, cultural studies, lesbian and gay studies, queer theory and anyone with a critical interest in contemporary American ‘great power’ politics.

Author: Elena Loizidou
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781845680633
Category : Feminist theory
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
It is undisputed that Judith Butler is the philosopher who invited us to think and imagine the subject as the effect of gender processes and practices. Over the last twenty years critical legal scholarship engaged either overtly or covertly with the question of the legal subject. And in this book, Elena Loizidou takes up Judith Butler's work as a reading of how the legal subject is formed. The most dominant notion of the legal subject within critical legal studies is one that is primarily pre-political, a-historical and spirit. As Loizidou argues, however, Butler returns this notion of the legal subject to its materiality and its embodiment; challenging legal scholarship to re-think its understanding of the subject and of its effects.

Author: Judith Butler
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113576963X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 542

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Book Description
A collection of work by leading feminist scholars, engaging with the question of the political status of poststructuralism within feminism, and affirming the contemporary debate over theory as politically rich and consequential.