Judith Butler
Judith Butler
Judith Butleris an American philosopher and gender theorist whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics and the fields of feminist, queer and literary theory. Since 1993, she has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is now Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory. She is also the Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth24 February 1956
CityCleveland, OH
CountryUnited States of America
Revenge tries to solve the problem of vulnerability. If I strike back, I transfer vulnerability from myself to the other. And yet by striking back I produce a world in which my vulnerability to injury is increased by the likelihood of another strike. So it seems as if I'm getting rid of my vulnerability and instead locating it with the other, but actually I'm heightening the vulnerability of everyone and I'm heightening the possibility of violence that happens between us.
War begets war. It produces outraged and humiliated and furious people. That is almost invariably the case.
Sexual harassment law is very important. But I think it would be a mistake if the sexual harassment law movement is the only way in which feminism is known in the media.
Peace is a resistance to the terrible satisfactions of war .
Indeed it may be only by risking the incoherence of identity that connection is possible.
There was a brief moment after 9/11 when Colin Powell said we should not rush to satisfy the desire for revenge. It was a great moment, an extraordinary moment, because what he was actually asking people to do was to stay with a sense of grief, mournfulness, and vulnerability.
I was off to Yale to be a lesbian
Bound to seek recognition of its own existence in categories, terms, and names that are not of its own making, the subject seeks the sign of its own existence outside itself, in a discourse that is at once dominant and indifferent. Social categories signify subordination and existence at once. In other words, within subjection the price of existence is subordination.
You only trust those who are absolutely like yourself, those who have signed a pledge of allegiance to this particular identity.
Masculine and feminine roles are not biologically fixed but socially constructed.
The life doesn't simply get erased. It gets imprinted and remembered.
There is no original or primary gender a drag imitates, but gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original.
Perhaps the promise of phallus is always dissatisfying in some way.
The critical image... must not only fail to capture its referent, but show its failure.