Book•
Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence
01 Jan 2004-
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that it is acceptable, even necessary, to grieve some lives, while others are not valued or are even incomprehensible as lives at all, and argue against the rhetorical use of the charge of anti-semitism to quell public debate.
Abstract: Written after September 11, 2001, in response to the conditions of heightened vulnerability and aggression that have prevailed since then, Judith Butler critiques the use of violence and argues for a response in which violence might be minimized, and interdependency becomes acknowledged as the basis for global political community. Following the expressions of public mourning post-September 11, Butler asks why it's acceptable, even necessary to grieve some lives, while others are not valued or are even incomprehensible as lives at all. Questions of sovereignty, patriotism and censorship are all examined, especially in light of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Finally she investigates the way in which any criticism of the Israeli state is automatically labelled anti-semitic, thus rendering all criticism of Israel a political taboo in the US and the UK. She counters that we have a responsibility to speak out against both Israeli injustices and anti-semitism, and argues against the rhetorical use of the charge of anti-semitism to quell public debate.
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01 Jan 2005
TL;DR: The Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence and Undoing Gender by Judith Butler as mentioned in this paper is an extended study of moral philosophy that is grounded in a new sense of the human subject.
Abstract: What does it mean to lead a moral life?In her first extended study of moral philosophy, Judith Butler offers a provocative outline for a new ethical practice-one responsive to the need for critical autonomy and grounded in a new sense of the human subject.Butler takes as her starting point one's ability to answer the questions What have I done?and What ought I to do?She shows that these question can be answered only by asking a prior question, Who is this 'I' who is under an obligation to give an account of itself and to act in certain ways?Because I find that I cannot give an account of myself without accounting for the social conditions under which I emerge, ethical reflection requires a turn to social theory.In three powerfully crafted and lucidly written chapters, Butler demonstrates how difficult it is to give an account of oneself, and how this lack of self-transparency and narratibility is crucial to an ethical understanding of the human. In brilliant dialogue with Adorno, Levinas, Foucault, and other thinkers, she eloquently argues the limits, possibilities, and dangers of contemporary ethical thought.Butler offers a critique of the moral self, arguing that the transparent, rational, and continuous ethical subject is an impossible construct that seeks to deny the specificity of what it is to be human. We can know ourselves only incompletely, and only in relation to a broader social world that has always preceded us and already shaped us in ways we cannot grasp. If inevitably we are partially opaque to ourselves, how can giving an account of ourselves define the ethical act? And doesn't an ethical system that holds us impossibly accountable for full self-knowledge and self-consistency inflict a kind of psychic violence, leading to a culture of self-beratement and cruelty? How does the turn to social theory offer us a chance to understand the specifically social character of our own unknowingness about ourselves?In this invaluable book, by recasting ethics as a project in which being ethical means becoming critical of norms under which we are asked to act, but which we can never fully choose, Butler illuminates what it means for us as fallible creaturesto create and share an ethics of vulnerability, humility, and ethical responsiveness. Judtith Butler is the Maxine Elliot Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. The most recent of her books are Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence and Undoing Gender.
2,547 citations
Book•
05 Nov 2011
TL;DR: Carbon Democracy as discussed by the authors argues that no nation escapes the political consequences of our collective dependence on oil, and argues that the oil-based forms of modern democratic politics have become unsustainable, while governments everywhere appear incapable of addressing the crises that threaten to end the age of carbon democracy.
Abstract: Oil is a curse, it is often said, that condemns the countries producing it to an existence defined by war, corruption and enormous inequality. Carbon Democracy tells a more complex story, arguing that no nation escapes the political consequences of our collective dependence on oil. It shapes the body politic both in regions such as the Middle East, which rely upon revenues from oil production, and in the places that have the greatest demand for energy. Timothy Mitchell begins with the history of coal power to tell a radical new story about the rise of democracy. Coal was a source of energy so open to disruption that oligarchies in the West became vulnerable for the first time to mass demands for democracy. In the mid-twentieth century, however, the development of cheap and abundant energy from oil, most notably from the Middle East, offered a means to reduce this vulnerability to democratic pressures. The abundance of oil made it possible for the first time in history to reorganize political life around the management of something now called "the economy" and the promise of its infinite growth. The politics of the West became dependent on an undemocratic Middle East.In the twenty-first century, the oil-based forms of modern democratic politics have become unsustainable. Foreign intervention and military rule are faltering in the Middle East, while governments everywhere appear incapable of addressing the crises that threaten to end the age of carbon democracy - the disappearance of cheap energy and the carbon-fuelled collapse of the ecological order. In making the production of energy the central force shaping the democratic age, Carbon Democracy rethinks the history of energy, the politics of nature, the theory of democracy, and the place of the Middle East in our common world.
1,028 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors introduce a special section concerned with precariousness and cultural work, bringing into dialogue three bodies of ideas: the work of the autonomous Marxist laboratory, activist writings about precariousness, and the emerging empirical scholarship concerned with the distinctive features of cultural work.
Abstract: This article introduces a special section concerned with precariousness and cultural work. Its aim is to bring into dialogue three bodies of ideas — the work of the autonomous Marxist `Italian laboratory'; activist writings about precariousness and precarity; and the emerging empirical scholarship concerned with the distinctive features of cultural work, at a moment when artists, designers and (new) media workers have taken centre stage as a supposed `creative class' of model entrepreneurs. The article is divided into three sections. It starts by introducing the ideas of the autonomous Marxist tradition, highlighting arguments about the autonomy of labour, informational capitalism and the `factory without walls', as well as key concepts such as multitude and immaterial labour. The impact of these ideas and of Operaismo politics more generally on the precarity movement is then considered in the second section, discussing some of the issues that have animated debate both within and outside this movement, wh...
1,001 citations
TL;DR: The article is concerned with a formation of ideas - "subaltern urbanism" - which undertakes the theorization of the megacity and its subaltern spaces and subaltern classes, and highlights emergent analytical strategies that transcend the familiar metonyms of underdevelopment.
Abstract: ijur_1051 223..238 This article is an intervention in the epistemologies and methodologies of urban studies. It seeks to understand and transform the ways in which the cities of the global South are studied and represented in urban research, and to some extent in popular discourse. As such, the article is primarily concerned with a formation of ideas — ‘subaltern urbanism’ — which undertakes the theorization of the megacity and its subaltern spaces and subaltern classes. Of these, the ubiquitous ‘slum’ is the most prominent. Writing against apocalyptic and dystopian narratives of the slum, subaltern urbanism provides accounts of the slum as a terrain of habitation, livelihood, self-organization and politics. This is a vital and even radical challenge to dominant narratives of the megacity. However, this article is concerned with the limits of and alternatives to subaltern urbanism. It thus highlights emergent analytical strategies, utilizing theoretical categories that transcend the familiar metonyms of underdevelopment such as the megacity, the slum, mass politics and the habitus of the dispossessed. Instead, four categories are discussed — peripheries, urban informality, zones of exception and gray spaces. Informed by the urbanism of the global South, these categories break with ontological and topological understandings of subaltern subjects and subaltern spaces.
807 citations
TL;DR: The concept of the biometric border was proposed in this paper to signal a dual-faced phenomenon in the contemporary war on terror: the turn to scientific technologies and managerial expertise in the politics of border management; and the exercise of biopower such that the bodies of migrants and travellers themselves become sites of multiple encoded boundaries.
786 citations
Cites background from "Precarious Life: The Powers of Mour..."
...Rather, the authority of the state is enhanced and revitalized, the apparent loss of sovereignty being ‘compensated through the resurgence of sovereignty within the field of governmentality’ (Butler, 2004, p. 56)....
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...Understood as examples of Butler’s resurgent ‘petty sovereigns’, the US VISIT disperses power throughout a network of authorities whose actions are sanctioned by a state that declares ‘exceptions’ to or ‘suspensions’ of the rule of law (Agamben, 2005; Butler, 2004)....
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...…who have pointed to the capacity of the satirical and playful practices of the arts to disrupt our sense of the ‘normal run of things’ (Bleiker, 2000; Butler, 2004; De Goede, 2005), I am going to suggest here that artistic interventions in the governing of mobility point to important, and often…...
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