Abstract
Judith Butler and Politics is a comprehensive study on the intersection of ontology and politics in Judith Butler’s thought. The book unfolds Butler’s theoretical trajectory through a chronological review structured around four lines of inquiry that inform Butler’s political theory: performativity, agency, liveability, and nonviolence. Keeping at its core the paradoxical interplay between the political and philosophical stakes of Butler’s endeavours, Adriana Zaharijević’s analysis offers an insightful exploration of how the concepts of subjective agency and interdependence evolve hand in hand in Butler’s work.
The book is a valuable addition to the literature analysing the relationship between politics and ethics in Butler’s work. Zaharijević’s original contribution is centring her analysis around the concept of ‘insurrection at the level of ontology’ to frame the philosophical and political linkages in Butler’s thought. Zaharijević’s analysis suggests this linkage is evidence to a double commitment to thinking and taking action that covers the trajectory of Butler’s thought from discussions of gender performativity to considerations of ethical relationality. This reading takes us through an interpretation of Butler’s work as ‘a philosophical struggle to reduce violence’ (p. 3), where ontology and insurrection come together to forge a performative notion of the labour of thinking. The chronological approach of the book creates a readable analysis of Butler’s theoretical trajectory from the politics of the performative to an ethics of alterity, with vulnerability and precarity at its core. This approach succeeds in logically tying Butler’s work on performativity and politics together with her social ontological focus on subjective interdependence post 9/11. In the wake of 9/11 and the subsequent War on Terror, Butler supplemented her writing around performative subjectivity with an ethical dimension that brought relationality, and interdependence, into conversation with her politics. As such, Butler’s ontological thought is located within the political sphere and remains consistent with her earlier conceptions of performativity (see Shams, 2020: 33–44).
Judith Butler and Politics explores Butler’s philosophy in terms of its affinity with politics. To this end, Zaharijević examines Butler’s double commitment to philosophical and political thinking under two major lines of inquiry that divide the book into two parts. The first part is dedicated to the performative relation between the body and norms. It further delineates how agency in Butler’s thought emerges out of a paradoxical relation between norms and acts, where the same normative structures that constitute a subject enable it to act, and hence, enact agency. The second part of the book shifts the focus away from performativity and politics towards an ontological line of inquiry that explores Butler’s account of liveable life and nonviolence. Throughout the book, Zaharijević constantly keeps the readers informed of the political and ontological alignments in Butler’s thought while acknowledging the difficulty of reading Butler’s oeuvre in a unified and coherent way.
The second and third chapters delve into the concept of performativity, starting with an account of how bodies are constituted within norms and moving towards a discussion of how we can enact agency in relation to the same norms that constitute our being. Zaharijević’s informative and well-researched narrative in the second chapter situates the concepts of being and the body within a historical account of philosophical thought from Aristotle to Sartre, Hegel, and Beauvoir. From there, we come to see how Butler’s theory of performativity originated from her early commitment to an understanding of the body not as a limit but as the necessary ground for freedom. Zaharijević aptly demonstrates that for Butler, the body functions as a locus of sociality and cultural interpretations. The subject – by virtue of being constituted – cannot exist prior to the culture and discourse through which it comes to being. However, being constituted does not negate the possibility to be different. This explains the paradoxical interplay of constraint and agency in the process of becoming a subject. This understanding of the body helps to articulate the concept of gender performativity in terms of a capacity to re-enact the entrenching norms that shape our gender identity. Zaharijević clarifies for the reader that the performativity of gender must not be misinterpreted as a choice. It is, rather, an account of agency which is about the role that we perform – under constraint – in reinscribing social reality.
Butler’s account of performativity must therefore be understood in the context of a paradoxical interplay between constraint and agency. While the subject is constituted by norms (i.e. formed under constraint), it exercises agency through a performative process of reiteration which enables the subject to contest the same norms that constitute its being. The third chapter of the book expands this concept of performativity as an account of agency under constraint. Butler revisited gender performativity in her writings after Gender Trouble to address criticisms of voluntarism and determinism. To this end, as Zaharijević notes, Butler drew on Austin’s speech acts, Derrida’s iterability, Althusser’s interpellation, and Lacan’s the symbolic to elaborate on her conception of agency and the relation between norms and acts. A good deal of the third chapter is appropriately dedicated to how Butler’s account of agency – in the context of an understanding of norms as both restrictive and enabling – rejects voluntarism and determinism. The analysis provides an insightful account of subject formation within the constitutive terms of power that the subject reiterates, remakes, and subverts. While the chapter ends with an enlightening note on the social stakes of agency, there is a missed opportunity to inquire into how the concepts of liveable life and nonviolence were born out of the theory of performativity and subjective agency.
What does it mean for the subject to be dependent on the social world? The subject is formed in an ethical relation to the other who calls it into being. Subjectivity is grounded in interdependency and sociality as a fundamental vulnerability in the condition of being a subject. An analysis of the subject as bound to the other and implicated in the life of the other would enrich and contextualise the discussions of liveable life in the second part of the book. An important question to pose when we speak of liveability is what makes a life recognisable. For Butler, the terms of recognisability are conditioned by a social context of norms that make up the scene of recognition. As Butler puts it, ‘to be a subject at all requires first complying with certain norms that govern recognition – that make a person recognizable. And so, non-compliance calls into question the viability of one’s life, the ontological conditions of one’s persistence’ (Butler, 2009: iv). Recognition is therefore understood in terms of constitutive relationality and takes place in the context of an encounter with the other. For Butler, the liveable life, or life that matters, is connected to the notion of grievability, which is what makes a life recognisable or intelligible as a life. The fourth chapter offers a comprehensive review of the notion of life in Butler’s work, investigating the concepts closely tied to liveability including recognition, precarity, dispossession, grief, loss, and vulnerability. The chapter ends with a notable consideration of war as a mode of manufacturing death and violating relations with the presupposition that the loss of destructible lives cannot be grieved (p. 177). The discussion of nonviolence in the fifth chapter weaves the first stage of Butler’s intellectual itinerary – gender performativity – with her later formulations of the body in the public sphere. As Butler (2017) notes in an interview with Stephanie Berbec, individual enactments of gender and concerted action of assembling bodies are two forms of embodied performativity with a notion of political expression (p. 66). This concept of embodiment points us towards an understanding of subjective interdependency as a fundamental vulnerability in the condition of being human. In other words, our embodiment forecloses the possibility of transcending social conditions of our being.
Judith Butler and Politics locates Butler’s ontological conception of the subject in a broader context of political philosophy. The trajectory of Butler’s work is characterised by a theory of subjectivity that unfolds from performativity and evolves into ethical relationality as the sociality of the subject comes to the fore. In concluding the book, Zaharijević makes note of how a politics of nonviolence gives us a way of understanding our place in a world we share with a plurality of people whose lives are already implicated in the ‘I’ by which we recognise ourselves. As such, we are embodied beings, situated in a social world we never chose and involuntarily exposed to others who call us into being. Ethical responsibility, then, follows from the recognition of our vulnerability to the other, which becomes a locus of political resistance and a ground for an ethics of nonviolence.
