Bodies That Still Matter: Resonances of the Work of Judith Butler 9789048552504

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Bodies That Still Matter

Bodies That Still Matter Resonances of the Work of Judith Butler

Edited by Annemie Halsema, Katja Kwastek, and Roel van den Oever

Amsterdam University Press

+ RESEARCH INSTITUTE FOR CULTURE, COGNITION, HISTORY AND HERITAGE

The publication of this book is made possible by a grant from CLUE+, the Interfaculty Research Institute for Culture, Cognition, History and Heritage at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

Cover illustration: ARCHIVE, a performance by Arkadi Zaides, photographed by Ligia Jardim at the MITsp festival, Sao Paulo, Brazil, March 2015 Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Typesetting: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 294 0 e-isbn 978 90 4855 250 4 (pdf) doi 10.5117/9789463722940 nur 740 © The authors / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2021 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.



Table of Contents

Introduction

Annemie Halsema, Katja Kwastek, and Roel van den Oever

9

Performativity On Butler’s Theory of Agency

21

The Psychic Life of Horror

31

Beyond Gender(s)

42

Adriana Zaharijević

Abjection and Racialization in Butler’s Thought Eyo Ewara

Jean-Luc Nancy

Speech The Performative Edge of Non-Politicians

53

Talking Back as an Accented Speaker?

65

What’s in a Name?

77

Populism and Shifting Legitimacy in US Presidential Politics Julia Peetz

Reframing Butler’s Idea of Subversive Resignification Tingting Hui

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and Private Romeo Roel van den Oever

Precarity Rethinking Counseling from a Relational Perspective From Alleviating Suffering to “Becoming Human” Carmen Schuhmann

91

Bridging Conversations

103

Dancing the Image

113

Santiago Sierra’s Workers Who Cannot Be Paid

127

“Paradigm Cases” of Dependency in Eva Kittay and Judith Butler Simon van der Weele

Complicity, Responsibility and Spectatorship Noa Roei

Precarious Labor in Contemporary Art Friederike Sigler

Assembly Rethinking Radical Democracy with Butler

141

Strategies of (Self-)Empowerment

155

Bodies That Still Matter

177

About the Contributors

195

Index

199

The Voice of Plurality Adriana Cavarero

On the Performativity of Assemblies in and as Theatre Erika Fischer-Lichte

Judith Butler

List of Figures Figure 1 Judith Butler lecture at conference ‘Critical Theory in the Humanities’, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, April 2017 10 Photo: Steven Lighthert; courtesy Steven Lighthert Figure 2 Private Romeo (2011), film still: Cadet Josh (on the right) speaks as Capulet, addressing cadet Carlos as Tybalt 79 Courtesy of the copyright holder, Agathe David-Weill

Bridging Conversations

103

Dancing the Image

113

Santiago Sierra’s Workers Who Cannot Be Paid

127

“Paradigm Cases” of Dependency in Eva Kittay and Judith Butler Simon van der Weele

Complicity, Responsibility and Spectatorship Noa Roei

Precarious Labor in Contemporary Art Friederike Sigler

Assembly Rethinking Radical Democracy with Butler

141

Strategies of (Self-)Empowerment

155

Bodies That Still Matter

177

About the Contributors

195

Index

199

The Voice of Plurality Adriana Cavarero

On the Performativity of Assemblies in and as Theatre Erika Fischer-Lichte

Judith Butler

List of Figures Figure 1 Judith Butler lecture at conference ‘Critical Theory in the Humanities’, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, April 2017 10 Photo: Steven Lighthert; courtesy Steven Lighthert Figure 2 Private Romeo (2011), film still: Cadet Josh (on the right) speaks as Capulet, addressing cadet Carlos as Tybalt 79 Courtesy of the copyright holder, Agathe David-Weill

Figure 3 Figure 4 Figure 5 Figure 6 Figure 7 Figure 8

Private Romeo (2011), film still: Private Romeo as a conventional retelling of Romeo and Juliet, with male 85 bodies speaking a heterosexual romance Courtesy of the copyright holder, Agathe David-Weill Arkadi Zaides, Archive (2015)115 Photo: Ronen Guter; courtesy of Arkadi Zaides and Ronen Guter Arkadi Zaides, Archive (2014)116 Photo: Ligia Jardim; courtesy of Arkadi Zaides and Ligia Jardim Arkadi Zaides, Archive (2014)116 Photo: Ligia Jardim; courtesy of Arkadi Zaides and Ligia Jardim Santiago Sierra, Workers who cannot be paid, remunerated to remain inside cardboard boxes, KW Institute for 128 Contemporary Art (2000) Courtesy Estudio Santiago Sierra Santiago Sierra, Workers who cannot be paid, remunerated to remain inside cardboard boxes, KW Institute for 131 Contemporary Art (2000) Courtesy Estudio Santiago Sierra

Introduction Annemie Halsema, Katja Kwastek, and Roel van den Oever Since the publication of her bestseller Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity in 1990, the American philosopher Judith Butler (born 1956) is one of the most influential thinkers in academia. After studying philosophy at Yale University, she broadened her academic scope to include gender and sexuality studies, and social and political thought, currently serving as Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. In over thirty years of scholarship, she has authored more than twenty books and numerous articles that address socially relevant and politically pertinent topics such as gender normativity, political speech, media representations of war, and the democratic power of assembling bodies and of nonviolence. In addition, she has operated as a public figure and political activist, speaking out on an array of issues including lesbian and gay rights, the Israeli/Palestinian-conflict, America’s involvement in several wars, and the Occupy movement. The arresting academic and public impact of Butler’s thought serves as an illustration of critical theory’s potential to effect social change. It was this notion that led us to organize a conference on how various scholars have engaged with her work. This three-day conference, titled Critical Theory in the Humanities: Resonances of the Work of Judith Butler, was held in April 2017 at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.1 We subsequently invited selected conference speakers, plus two additional authors for the sake of comprehensiveness, to submit papers for this peer-reviewed volume.2 The papers were selected based on three criteria. First, the volume showcases the range of academic disciplines in which Butler’s ideas have been taken 1 The conference was financed by CLUE+ (Vrije Universiteit’s Interfaculty Research Institute for Culture, Cognition, History, and Heritage) and KNAW (the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences), and organized by Marieke Berkers, Wouter Goris, and the editors of this volume. 2 We wish to express our gratitude to the authors, the peer-reviewers of both the individual contributions and the volume as a whole, Christine Irizarry for the translation of Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay “Beyond Gender(s),” and Anne Verhoef for her overall editorial assistance.

Halsema, Annemie, Katja Kwastek, and Roel van den Oever (eds), Bodies That Still Matter: Resonances of the Work of Judith Butler. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789463722940_intro

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Annemie Halsema, K atja K wastek, and Roel van den Oever

Figure 1 Judith Butler lecture at conference ‘Critical Theory in the Humanities’, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, April 2017

Photo: Steven Lighthert; courtesy Steven Lighthert

up, including the arts (dance, film, literature, performance art, theater), ethics and philosophy, the study of identity (class, gender, race, sexuality), and the social sciences (linguistics, political theory, psychology). Second, the volume collects the work of early-career scholars as well as established names. Third, the contributions resonate with Butler’s thinking in different ways: while some focus on one particular concept in her oeuvre and explain and critique it, others use her ideas as a springboard to move in new directions. The resulting collection is multidisciplinary, intergenerational, and methodologically diverse, a testament to Butler’s broad and continuing appeal. The volume Bodies That Still Matter: Resonances of the Work of Judith Butler brings together essays from scholars across academic disciplines who apply, reflect on, and further Butler’s ideas to their own research. Alternatively, the collection can be taken as a methodological survey. What does it mean to say that an author’s concepts resonate in the work of others? What are the different ways in which scholars engage with existing thought? How does the absorption of critical theory vary across the academic disciplines? Consequently, Bodies That Still Matter: Resonances of the Work of Judith Butler stands apart from a number of other publications on Butler’s thinking

Introduc tion

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that either function as a primer to her thought (e.g., Salih 2002; Brady and Schirato 2011) or discuss her ideas in relation to one particular academic field (e.g., Loizidou 2007; Chadderton 2018; Tyler 2020), expressly choosing a multidisciplinary approach instead. The volume’s variety belies a clear core to Butler’s thinking, namely an interest in bodies, be it the exclusion of homosexual bodies from the heterosexual matrix, bodies under attack from hate speech, bodies of war prisoners that cannot be mourned, or the power of assembling bodies. Likewise, we have grouped the essays in this collection into four body-related themes. They are performativity (bodies that are performatively gendered), speech (bodies addressed and sometimes injured by language), precarity (bodies that are vulnerable to different degrees), and assembly (bodies that assemble and demonstrate). The concept of gender performativity was Butler’s first major contribution to critical theory. She initially outlined her ideas on this topic in “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory” (1988), to then flesh them out in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity ([1990] 1999) and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” ([1993] 2011). Butler understands performativity as “the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names” (2011, xii). She applies this notion to the process of assuming a gender identity within a social order in which gender and sexuality are intimately connected in a heterosexual matrix. What these regulatory norms constitute is not only a gendered identity, but also the materialization of “sex” on the body. In other words, sexed identities and the sexed matter of bodies are produced in the process of citing and repeating gender norms. Bodies that do not materialize in accordance to the heterosexual matrix (think, for instance, of bodies that do not adhere to the binary division of masculinity and femininity) are denied intelligible social existence. Together with the “properly” sexed subject, then, zones that are unlivable spring up, inhabited by those who are abject. As Butler writes: This exclusionary matrix by which subjects are formed thus requires the simultaneous production of a domain of abject beings who are not yet ‘subjects,’ but who form the constitutive outside of the domain of the subject. (Butler 2011, xiii).3 3 Butler derives the theme of abjection from Lacanian psychoanalysis. From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity ([1990] 1999) onwards, she not only draws on psychoanalysis, for instance on Freud’s notions of mourning and melancholia, but reformulates

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Butler’s propositions on gender performativity have evoked countless responses and critiques, three of which are taken up in this volume. To begin, performativity does explicitly not pertain to the acts of a willing subject that freely chooses its gender identity and can change it at will. Or in Butler’s famous application of Nietzsche, “there is [no] ‘doer’ behind the deed” (1999, 33). This has compelled Butler to rethink the traditional notion of agency, a project that Adriana Zaharijević retraces and advances in “On Butler’s Theory of Agency.” Next, Butler’s descriptive distinction between subjects and abject beings has raised the question how we can theorize the form of subjectivity that precisely the abjected nonetheless experience. This issue is addressed by Eyo Ewara in relation to race in “The Psychic Life of Horror: Abjection and Racialization in Butler’s Thought.” Finally, Butler’s theory of gender performativity has been met with queries of genesis: Where does gender come from? What is the impetus for gender performativity? A novel approach to sex and gender is presented by Jean-Luc Nancy in “Beyond Gender(s),” an essay that we here publish in both its original French and an English translation. Nancy posits “sex” as a prima materia, that engenders gender among other things. One of the main sources for Butler’s understanding of gender performativity is J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words (1962). She would address the topic of the performative effects of speech more directly in Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997a), which opens with the central question: “When we claim to have been injured by language, what kind of claim do we make?” (1). Butler considers the wounding power of words in the context of a number of heated public debates in which speech is equated with harmful bodily conduct, including hate speech regulations, feminist anti-pornography arguments, and the former American military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell-policy. Drawing on the Althusserian doctrine of interpellation, she develops a theory of speech acts that considers being addressed by an injurious name as a discursive occasion for social existence, however painful. Moreover, the addressee can repurpose the injurious address through a subversive repetition of the name, in this way redefining its meaning. Butler’s interest in the performative effects of speech resonates in three contributions to this collection. In “The Performative Edge of Non-Politicians: psychoanalytical insights as well. Examples are her exploration of the lesbian phallus in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” ([1993] 2011, 28-57), her dialogue between Foucault’s understanding of power and a psychoanalytical account of how power and love become interrelated in the psyche in The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (1997b), and her critique of the Lacanian law of the father in Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (2000).

Introduc tion

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Populism and Shifting Legitimacy in US Presidential Politics,” Julia Peetz posits that populist speech acts pose a challenge to the theory of performativity, for their success is based not in an affirmation of the authority that makes a performative speech act felicitous, but precisely in a disavowal of this authority. Tingting Hui enters into a dialogue with Butler’s take on hate speech in “Talking Back as an Accented Speaker? Reframing Butler’s Idea of Subversive Resignif ication.” Where Butler emphasizes that the addressee of hate speech can subvert the harmful address, Hui shifts the focus to accented speech that betrays the speaker as an Other and makes her vulnerable to bodily harm. In “What’s in a Name? Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and Private Romeo,” Roel van den Oever, too, discusses how speech can turn against the speaker’s intentions and body. In a reading of the film Private Romeo he shows how the recitation of Shakespeare’s heterosexual play-text Romeo and Juliet overturns the visual representation of gay interaction between male bodies. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Butler’s central concern was precarity, a concept that can best be explained in relation to precariousness. The latter term describes the claim that all human life is interdependent, given over to others, and therefore never autonomous. For instance, in Giving an Account of Oneself (2005), Butler posits an ethics in which the self is considered as always already interrupted by the other and as embedded within prior social structures. In the opening essay of Undoing Gender (2004b), she calls this the human predicament of being “beside oneself” (17). Precarity, in contrast, signifies that this vulnerability is not equally distributed, but instead is impacted by social inequality. As Butler writes in Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009): “Precarity designates that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death” (25). As a result, some bodies and lives are discursively constructed as worthwhile, while others are not. For Butler, this distinction is for example operative in America’s violent response to the experience of loss after 9/11, which she describes in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004a). In “Rethinking Counseling from a Relational Perspective: From Alleviating Suffering to ‘Becoming Human,’” Carmen Schuhmann proposes to reconsider the aim of counseling practices to minimize vulnerability in light of Butler’s take on precariousness as a human condition. Simon van der Weele shifts the discussion from precariousness to precarity in “Bridging Conversations: ‘Paradigm Cases’ of Dependency in Eva Kittay and Judith Butler.” Both Butler and the philosopher Eva Kittay have formulated an ethics based in vulnerability,

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yet their respective proposed normative systems are markedly different, because where Butler has the refugee in mind, Kittay works within the context of disability studies. In “Dancing the Image: Complicity, Responsibility and Spectatorship,” Noa Roei applies the concept of precarity to the performance Archive (2014), in which the choreographer and dancer Arkadi Zaides engages onstage with footage of human rights violations in the occupied Palestinian territories. Another intersection between precarity and art is discussed by Friederike Sigler in “Santiago Sierra’s Workers Who Cannot Be Paid: Precarious Labor in Contemporary Art.” She discusses how the artist Santiago Sierra performatively highlights the precarity of the immigrants whom he, by necessity illegally, pays for their participation in his performance art. The volume’s f inal section revolves around Butler’s Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015), in which she takes up the topics of performativity, speech, and precarity again, and develops a political theory of assembled bodies protesting, such as Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring. For Butler, an assembly is a public manifestation of precarious bodies, demonstrating (meaning both dissenting and showcasing) rather than verbalizing a demand for a more equal distribution of livability. An assembly can thus be read as performative persistence, “asserting that a group of people is still existing, taking up space and obdurately living” (Butler 2015, 18). Subsequently, Butler suggests that Hannah Arendt’s theory of the political as expounded in The Human Condition (1958) needs revision, for it distinguishes the material conditions of living from the political realm. As such, Butler argues, Arendt conceptualizes political speech as separate from the acts of bodies, thereby failing to acknowledge the importance of the latter. In contrast, for Butler, the public realm is one of bodily appearance as much as of expression in speech. In “Rethinking Radical Democracy with Butler: The Voice of Plurality,” Adriana Cavarero draws on both Arendt and Butler, and touches on the ideas of Roland Barthes and the German-language author Elias Canetti, in order to hypothesize that the germinal moment of democracy lies in a plurality (instead of a mass) of voices speaking. Erika Fischer-Lichte connects Butler’s ideas on political assembly to the aesthetic assembly that occurs in theater. In “Strategies of (Self-)Empowerment: On the Performativity of Assemblies in and as Theatre,” she discusses three key periods in German theater history that gave rise to a sense of collective agency to both spectators and actors. The volume closes with a new essay by Butler titled “Bodies That Still Matter,” in which she asks how an assembly of precarious bodies that are silenced can nonetheless performatively demonstrate (against) the structural violence that comes with certain instances of biopolitics, such

Introduc tion

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as the structural femicide in Latin America and the precarious lives of war refugees at the borders of Europe. At the time of writing this introduction, early June 2020, we seem to be only in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, a crisis that eerily resonates with one of the central questions in Butler’s work: Which bodies and lives matter?4 At intensive care units in hospitals across the globe, for instance, physicians face the question which patients to admit and whom to refuse (with or without health insurance, the young or the aging). A large part of the world’s population does not even have access to proper health care facilities, which once more demonstrates that we have translated our shared precariousness into a deeply unequal distribution of precarity. And what remains of the performative persistence of the precarious when assemblies are (temporarily) outlawed as health hazards?5 Likewise, the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of the killing of George Floyd on 25 May 2020 infuses the title of this volume, “Bodies That Still Matter,” with a current urgency.6 These uncanny echoes highlight both the continuing timeliness of Butler’s work as well as its potential for generating yet more academic, artistic, and social resonances.

Works Cited Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Austin, J. L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Brady, Anita, and Tony Schirato. 2011. Understanding Judith Butler. Los Angeles: SAGE. Butler, Judith. 1988. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4: 519-531. —. 1997a. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York and London: Routledge. —. 1997b. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford: Stanford University Press. —. 1999. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and London: Routledge. First published 1990. 4 Due to the Corona pandemic, the publication of this volume was postponed by six months. 5 For Butler’s first take on the COVID-19 crisis, see her blog post “Capitalism Has Its Limits” (2020a). 6 For a short discussion of Black Lives Matter in relation to speech act theory, see Butler’s “Performativity and Black Lives Matter” (2020b).

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—. 2000. Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death. New York: Columbia University Press. —. 2004a. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London and New York: Verso Books. —. 2004b. Undoing Gender. New York and London: Routledge. —. 2005. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press. —. 2009. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London and New York: Verso Books. —. 2011. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” London and New York: Routledge. First published 1993. —. 2015. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. —. 2020a. “Capitalism Has Its Limits.” Verso, March 30, 2020. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4603-capitalism-has-its-limits. Accessed: April 6, 2020. —. 2020b. “Performativity and Black Lives Matter.” IAI News, July 3, 2020. https:// iai.tv/articles/speaking-the-change-we-seek-judith-butler-performative-selfauid-1580. Accessed: October 2, 2020. Chadderton, Charlotte. 2018. Judith Butler, Race and Education. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Loizidou, Elena. 2007. Judith Butler: Ethics, Law, Politics. London and New York: Routledge. Salih, Sara. 2002. Judith Butler. London and New York: Routledge. Tyler, Melissa. 2020. Judith Butler and Organization Theory. New York and London: Routledge.

About the Authors Annemie Halsema is associate professor of philosophy at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her research focuses on personal identity and embodiment in French phenomenology, hermeneutics and in feminist philosophy. She wrote two books on Luce Irigaray (in Dutch 1998, and Luce Irigaray and Horizontal Transcendence 2000), edited several volumes, among which a Dutch translation of Judith Butler’s essays (Genderturbulentie, 2000) and Feminist Explorations of Paul Ricoeur’s Philosophy (with Henriques, 2016). Katja Kwastek is professor of modern and contemporary art history at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her research focuses on processual, digital and post-digital art, in the broader contexts of art history, media aesthetics, and the environmental humanities. She has published and edited many books and essays, including Ohne Schnur. Art and Wireless Communication

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(Revolver, 2004), Aesthetics of Interaction in Digital Art (MIT Press, 2013), and a special issue of the Journal of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present on ‘Slowness’ (2019). She is one of the co-founders of the Environmental Humanities Center at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and associate editor of the journal Environmental Humanities (Duke UP). Roel van den Oever is assistant professor of English literature at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is the author of Mama’s Boy: Momism and Homophobia in Postwar American Culture (Palgrave Macmillan 2012).



On Butler’s Theory of Agency Adriana Zaharijević Abstract This essay addresses the notion of agency in Judith Butler’s work. Its central claim is that her political philosophy revolves around a specific understanding of agency, even a theory of agency, which has not as yet received due attention. The first part of the essay examines two main thought traditions in which agency became an operational notion, through the lenses of intentionality and constraints, voluntarism and determinism. The second part elaborates on the centrality of the body, the social, and the power in Butler’s understanding of agency, conjoining agency with performativity. The essay argues that agency in Butler exceeds freedom, autonomy, and liberation, and has a potent political meaning of its own. Keywords: agency, body, the social, the political

Jerome Schneewind ascribes the first philosophical use of the term “agency” to Samuel Clarke’s theorization of the “Power of Agency,” that the latter used identically to the meaning of “free choice.” In 1731, he described the word as “generally including the power of beginning Thought as well as Motion” (Schneewind 1998, 313). From its philosophical debut, agency bore a certain ambiguity. Is it a power and if so, of what kind? Is it the property of the action or of the actor? Is there mastery involved in possessing such a power, or are we to speak of a power relation which is more intricate and less masterful? In this essay, I will address the notion of agency in Judith Butler’s work, which is, I argue, one of the key notions in her overall philosophical architectonics. What exactly does agency refer to and what does it mean to offer a “theory of agency,” as she professes to have done? The concept of agency in itself def ies its being f ixed. As a notion, it leans on and intersects with action/doing, act/deed, and actor/doer. It is difficult to say whether it refers to a who or a what; to something static and

Halsema, Annemie, Katja Kwastek, and Roel van den Oever (eds), Bodies That Still Matter: Resonances of the Work of Judith Butler. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789463722940_zaharijević

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Adriana Zaharijević

circumscribed, or to a dynamic process, always in potentia. It is equally hard to determine its conceptual autonomy from action, or draw clear boundaries between agency and the (free-willing) agent or the (intentional) subject. It is, by the same token, unclear whether agency must be individual, since the originator of an action is always someone, or whether it may be collective, and whether there is a possibility for these two to overlap. Finally, the power that agency is – or has – brings it close not only to an act, but also to whatever free choice is included in its making, which makes it potentially political. The reference to Clarke demonstrates that the term is relatively old, while its frequent philosophical uses are of a somewhat more recent date (which is further corroborated by the notorious lack of a proper translation in many languages, see Balibar 2014; Zaharijević 2018). It can be claimed that agency “reflects the conditions of freedom, autonomy, and liberation that are shaped by and in late modernity and postmodernity” (Kim 2007, 83). In what follows, I will briefly explore the continental and analytic traditions that place agency at the forefront, to then assess its use in Butler’s understanding of the political – contested from an early stage as being politically insufficient or insufficiently political (see Benhabib et al. 1995). I contend that Butler’s take on agency is not only crucial for her own theoretical endeavors – a fact that is rarely appreciated (for an exception to this, see McNay 1999; Magnus 2006; Clare 2009) – but that it also functions as a term on its own, thoroughly different from freedom, autonomy, and liberation.

The Subjects of Agency In the analytic philosophical tradition, agency is understood as the capacity to perform intentional actions. It assumes that there is an agent who is in possession of capacities and intentions, who is able to self-identify, that is, to validate intentions both as one’s own and as the intentions to which one is willing to commit. The holder of this capacity is a self-conscious subject, in possession of the designs of one’s will and able to act upon them. The definition of agency in the analytic tradition revolves around distinctions between a mere occurrence and an action proper, between something that happens and that which is caused to happen (Davidson 1980), since the status of the performer of intentional actions remains unambiguous. Although this subject is basically “you” and “me,” that is, anyone endowed with a capacity and intentions, at its core, it is not only human, but also

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“humanist”: a sovereign agent who is the source of the intentional action and the locus of its truth (Dissanayake 1996). Thus “the capacity to perform” seems to be ahistorical, non-discursive, transparent and self-identical – and it applies equally to primitive bodily actions, such as tying one’s shoelaces, as it does to igniting revolutions. We encounter a similar figure in a completely different setting, but in this case distinctly political. In the radical feminist and anti-racist discourses of the 1960s and the 1970s (e.g. The New Left), that draw their assumptions from the continental philosophies of emancipatory subjectivity, there is faith in a powerful agent, an engaged individual or a collective that is the harbinger of change. In sharp contrast to the analytic lack of interest for the structures that possibly shape intentionality, in the teleologies of emancipation, to borrow Saba Mahmood’s term (2001, 210), such structures have a prominent place. On the one hand, there are the multi-layered orders of domination and, on the other, there is a peculiar form of “subjectivity in opposition” (Smith 1988, xxxv), vested with a certain revolutionary agency. In this rendering, the hegemonic structures of domination are always already there, not only conditioning but effectively impeding action. The “subjectivity in opposition,” however, releases itself from their grip, and by some agentic property (depending on the type of possible emancipation) it effectuates change, becoming a proxy for others to be liberated by its actions as well. A particular utopian quality of agency is related to the unyielding rigidity of the hegemonic structures within which it takes place.

The Conundrum of the Social To understand Butler’s take on agency, we need to move away both from analytic philosophy’s solitary subject of intentions and continental philosophy’s subject vested with the power to transcend structural restrictions. Those bearers of agency are in certain ways imagined as being able to transcend their bodies and to step out of the enabling and confining boundaries of the social. But if the body refuses to be surpassed, and if it defies being defined as a mere res extensa, then the subjects of agency come in bodies, as a condition of their access to the world. Albeit solitary, the subject of agency – simply by being embodied – is also always social. Even though powerful, the subject of agency remains firmly within, or in the midst of those relations that produce it as social. There is no agency that is shaped outside the material and symbolic crucible of social life. For this reason, Simone de Beauvoir claimed that

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the body of a woman is one of the essential elements in her situation in the world. But that body is not enough to define her as woman; there is no true living reality except as manifested by the conscious individual through activities and in the bosom of society. (Beauvoir 1973, 41)

I am the locus of my own actions, but the locus that I am is not under my own mastery. A structural position within the matrix of social power-relations impacts the allocation and the distribution of sovereignty of the will: will what I may, it is always already social, it is part of my “situation.” What is mine – my intentions, my capacities, my performances – is always also not mine: it comes from elsewhere, and is integrated into what I am as an agent and what I intend. My agency is chained to the various relations that locate me somewhere, depleting or solidifying my capacity to enact what I think is in my possession as a set of intentions. In that sense, it is deeply historical, often eludes transparency and is never entirely above or beyond the relations into which it is immersed. My agency is a power, but not, in Foucault’s terms, the power, something which could be acquired, accumulated or relinquished (Foucault 1978, 94). The subjects are produced – subjectivated – by power that is performed, exercised and enacted, in innumerable relations, not necessarily binary, and so is their agency. Might not this distinctly social character of agency preclude its potential for change – regardless of De Beauvoir’s existentialist framing of a “situation” into a “project,” and Foucault’s proclamation that where there is power there is also resistance? Would agency have any meaning if its potential for change becomes exhausted? Related to what may be, to what is yet to become actualized, any action of necessity involves a probable change. It can be infinitesimally small or inconsequential, but the change is part of this peculiar motion which initiates, inaugurates something new in the world. Recall Hannah Arendt when she noted: “The fact that man is capable of action means that the unexpected can be expected from him, that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable” (1998, 178).

Agency, Intrinsically Embodied and Social I argue that Butler’s conception of agency, emphatically political and tightly related to the notion of performativity, in itself implies a capacity for change, while at the same time remaining firmly in medias res of the social. According to Butler, agency is a power, a contingent, and a historical one. The matrices through which all willing first becomes possible are its enabling condition:

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there is no agency outside the “compulsory appropriation and identification with … normative demands” (Butler 2011, xxi). Being a power, it partakes in the petrification or in the dissolving of the power relations constitutive of the will: its location is not “beyond the play of power” (Butler 1992, 6), in a delusive point which would precede or be immune to that play in some utopian fashion. Agency is never metapolitical, but political in the most concrete ways – the political arises from its performative character. This is a Nietzschean trace in Butler: “there is no ‘being’ behind the deed, its effect and what becomes of it; ‘the doer’ is invented as an afterthought – the doing is everything” (Nietzsche 2007, 26). The “no doer behind the deed” trope is an expression of distrust of a foundational emancipatory subjectivity which could be thought before, beyond, or outside the string of performative acts themselves. In the Introduction to Gender Trouble Butler clearly states that in this text and elsewhere, she tried to understand what political agency might be, given that it cannot be isolated from the dynamics of power from which it is wrought. The iterability of performativity is a theory of agency, one that cannot disavow power as the condition of its own possibility. (Butler [1990] 1999, xxiv)

Indeed, she has written on this theme in her earliest works, predating Gender Trouble, in which she examines the idea of personal agency, an act (later to become a performative act) and public action, which has been thought through again in her latest works. Yet even early on, the constitutive dilemma appears: how to conceive of agency if we reject both free choice voluntarism and structural determinism? How to retain the potential for change, which is almost coterminous with action, without abstracting it from its constitutive conditions? Taking her cue from De Beauvoir’s famous observation that one is not born a woman, Butler ponders the nature of becoming a gender, a continuous process composed of uncountable numbers of acts which are at the same time personal (enacted through and with the body) and collective (normatively enforced and socially distributed). “That act that gender is … is clearly not one’s act alone,” it is also not one act alone, but a matter of a “shared experience and ‘collective action’” (Butler 1988, 525). While rejecting the political framework of the existentialist “project” which assumed a particular decision “to become in a certain way” and thus transcend existing norms, Butler will not abandon the idea of “politicizing personal life” (Butler 1986, 45). The “turning” of the personal into political agency is possible not because an individual has some peculiar power to remove itself from

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the relations that produce their way of becoming, heroically opposing the hegemonic structures that choke those less decisive, less pugnacious, or simply less fortunate. Personal agency is always, regardless of one’s awareness of it, enmeshed in and informed by the circumstances that exceed what an individual can, wants, or is able to do. Personal life, as an embodied space of agency, is radically conditioned, without being radically determined by the structures that make agency possible, giving rise to continuous, repetitive acts through which we perform what we are becoming. Relations as we encounter them are contingent historical conditions of possibility for agency itself, constituted within the normative registers and protocols of their own time, but also subject to change, in the Arendtian sense, constitutively open for the improbable, inscribed in the action itself. The contingency of norms that one performs in an act, which is never one’s act alone, makes the very performance contingent, even if it seems quite natural, fixed, and un-performative. To rephrase Arendt once again, we may say that performativity presupposes that we can expect not only the unexpected, but also the expected, the acquired, the learned, the most probable. In performing, we may well will the most probable, but may fail in the most improbable ways, demonstrating the unfixedness of those very constraints that both enable and delimitate our actions. It is only through agency that the normative structures reveal themselves as susceptible to reiterative and transformative articulation, and open to a future that cannot be fully anticipated in advance. As rigid and regulatory as they are, normative structures cannot preclude something new from taking place, but the new can only take place within an act which is here and now, enacted by the body permeated by these very norms. Rather than being related to a radical choice or an engaged decision, agency is part of performativity itself. It takes place (and must do so) within the concrete terms of innumerable processes of becoming what one not yet is, within terms that are never entirely one’s own. There is no prior to, beyond, or outside for agency: agency is immanent to power. But, equally important, agency is the assumption of a purpose unintended by power, one that could not have been derived logically or historically, that operates in a relation of contingency and reversal to the power that makes it possible, to which it nevertheless belongs. (Butler 1997, 15)

This is the ambivalent scene of agency, as Butler terms it (1997, 15). Agency may exceed that which has enabled it, it may become discontinuous with

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what has initiated it, it may condition rather than only be conditioned, and it may, of course, continue to perform the further congealment of the normative structures. There is nothing fundamental or fundamentally oppositional about it: it is not, to paraphrase Foucault, a single locus of great Refusal, a soul of revolt, a source of all rebellions, a pure law of the revolutionary (Foucault 1978, 95-96). Someone might be tempted to say that this is merely yet another play of power, and a playful one at that, framed by subversion and parody. To be sure, agency, as a power, cannot lead us out of the field of power: its potential lies in reproducing or transforming the relations constitutive of our volition. What we will now, what sustains our capacity to perform intentional actions generated by the social conditions of our existence never fully willed by us, may be open to a different set of contingent conditions that will differently constitute our volition in the future. But there is nothing light-hearted or gamesome in this play: agency calls for a certain responsibility that lies at the juncture between our acts and the conditions that generate them. Displacing unwilled effects of the norms (revealing them as unwilled, and trying to find or invent, and then enact, the willed ones), resignifying non-chosen signs that make our existences legible and representable (thence possibly opening new registers of legibility and representation), performing differently our becoming of what we not yet are (enacting what we are in ways that differ from forms that already exist for us) – none of these are matters of carefree play. Politically transformative agency in Butler is not a theatrical performance, not even some serious Brechtian one: transforming power means going against what has produced us thus far, facing sanctions and threats for not acting “the right way.” 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?” (Butler 1997, 29). Only by considering the body as the locus of the process of becoming do we understand the perils of the fundamentally shared experience and collective action that is performativity. That the body is the point of social intersection of norms is something that cannot be willed away. The fact that no body can transcend the terms of its own embodied existence radically contests the imagined sovereignty and self-sufficiency of the imagined body-less possessor of agency. Being permeable and dependent, vulnerable and precarious, the body is what potentially turns the theatre of agency into a theatre of violence. Therein lies the risk of any performative reconfiguration, which is always enacted in a bodily way: “the body implies mortality,

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vulnerability, agency” (Butler 2004, 26). But for Butler, it is precisely the body that joins the personal and the political, turning the where of the political into everywhere, thus transforming the acting and speaking Arendtian men into anyone at any time. In contrast to Arendt or, for that matter, teleologies of emancipation, agency in Butler is truly egalitarian. Thus, any personal agency is political in the sense that it may call into question the stakes of what a we (not only I) is and what we may become, willingly or unwillingly. Those stakes are nonetheless never individual, but always a matter of a shared, collective (re)enactment, which is an integral part of what constitutes the notion of performativity. By being bodily, agency is inevitably open to risks: it may expand the space of mattering only by exposing bodily vulnerability; it may lead to the reconfiguration of a current organization of life, but at the expense of (potential) banishment, suffering, and death. In the final instance, the question of agency is always paired with the fundamental political question about how we ought to live together.

Agency That Matters In terms of its quotidian character and distribution, agency for Butler is not easy and it has little to do with careless play of parodic effects. It is only through agency – never quite determined, never fully voluntary – that we can enact new constitutive terms that would allow us more possibilities and more livability. Only through the performance of agency can we become aware of the unwilled dependency and precarity of our bodily lives. Only through its performance can we begin thinking of a radically democratic world where all bodies matter and all lives are livable. Bearing this in mind, agency appears as one of the key notions in Butler’s overall architectonics, even if it rarely received the attention it deserves. David Kyuman Kim, one of the rare authors who defies the above description, argues that Butler’s theory is a postmodern project of regenerating agency, which is an effect of the depleted “enthusiasm for emancipatory practices in an age in which the urgency and concern for freedom has become banal” (Kim 2007, 85). I disagree. For Butler, agency becomes a term which ceases to be replaceable with autonomy/freedom/emancipation/ liberation, a term which productively challenges both the substantivity of the subject and of power in continental philosophy, and the empty formalism of intentionality in analytic philosophy, as well as the pan-political resistance in the teleologies of emancipation.

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Works Cited Arendt, Hannah. 1998. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Balibar, Étienne. 2014. “Agency.” In Dictionary of Untranslatables. A Philosophical Lexicon, edited by Barbara Cassin, 17-24. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Beauvoir, Simone de. 1973. The Second Sex. New York: Vintage Press. Benhabib, Seyla, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser. 1995. Feminist Contentions. A Philosophical Exchange. New York and London: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1986. “Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex.” Yale French Studies, no. 72: 35-49. —. 1988. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4: 519-531. —. 1992. “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism.’” In Feminists Theorize the Political, edited by Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott, 3-21. New York and London: Routledge. —. 1997. The Psychic Life of Power. Theories in Subjection. Stanford: Stanford University Press. —. 1999. Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and London: Routledge. First published 1990. —. 2004. Precarious Life. The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London and New York: Verso. —. 2011. Bodies That Matter. On the Discursive Limits of Sex. London and New York: Routledge. Clare, Stephanie. 2009. “Agency, Signification, and Temporality.” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 24, no. 2: 50-62. Davidson, Donald. 1980. Essays on Actions and Events. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Dissanayake, Wimal. 1996. “Agency and Cultural Understanding: Some Preliminary Remarks.” In Narratives of Agency. Self-Making in China, India and Japan, edited by Wimal Dissanayake, ix-xxi. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality. Volume I: An Introduction. New York: Pantheon Books. Kim, David Kyuman. 2007. Melancholic Freedom. Agency and the Spirit of Politics. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Magnus, Kathy Dow. 2006. “The Unaccountable Subject: Judith Butler and the Social Conditions of Intersubjective Agency.” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 21, no. 2: 81-103. Mahmood, Saba. 2001. “Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival.” Cultural Anthropology 16, no. 2: 202-236.

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McNay, Lois. 1999. “Subject, Psyche and Agency. The Work of Judith Butler.” Theory, Culture & Society 16, no. 2: 175-193. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2007. On the Genealogy of Morality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schneewind, Jerome. 1998. The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, Paul. 1988. Discerning the Subject. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Zaharijević, Adriana. 2018. “La Traduzione Politicamente Impegnata della Filosofia: Il Caso del Termine Agency.” In Cultures in Translation: A Paradigm for Europe, edited by Irena Fiket, Saša Hrnjez and Davide Scalmani, 113-127. Milano-Udine: Mimesis International.

About the Author Adriana Zaharijević is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade. Her work revolves around issues in political philosophy, feminist theory and social history. She is the author of Who is an Individual? Genealogical Inquiry into the Idea of Citizen (2014) and Becoming a Woman (2010) (in Serbian). Her most recent book project is The Life of Bodies. Political Philosophy of Judith Butler (in Serbian).



The Psychic Life of Horror Abjection and Racialization in Butler’s Thought Eyo Ewara Abstract This essay explores how Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection influences Judith Butler’s thinking about race and racism. I articulate how Butler presents racialized people as abjected in the formation of white subjectivity, but does not consider how abjection shapes the subjectivity of people of color subject to it. I argue that using abjection as a model for thinking about racialization in her work reifies the negative portrayal of people of color as abject and presents racism as a problem of white anxieties to be overcome instead of a problem of people of color’s harm that needs to be addressed. Keywords: Judith Butler, race, abjection, subjection, Julia Kristeva

This essay explores the relationships between subjection, abjection, and race in Judith Butler’s work. That the practices and processes of subjection are central in Butler’s thinking is hardly in question. From her early work on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in Subjects of Desire (1987) through her thinking in Gender Trouble ([1990] 1999), Bodies That Matter ([1993] 2011), The Psychic Life of Power (1997), and Undoing Gender (2004d), Butler has explored the performative and psychic production of gendered subjects. In her work on precarity and precariousness in texts like Precarious Life (2004c), Giving an Account of Oneself (2005), Frames of War (2009), and Dispossession (2013), she theorized how the subject is inextricably caught up in, and becomes a subject through, the very relations with others that can – at times – undo it. Indeed, the title of the collection of her essays published in 2015b, Senses of the Subject, points to how Butler’s thinking has returned again and again to the question of how subjects are formed and in what senses. One of

Halsema, Annemie, Katja Kwastek, and Roel van den Oever (eds), Bodies That Still Matter: Resonances of the Work of Judith Butler. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789463722940_ewara

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those senses of subjection that appears regularly in Butler’s thought is one wherein subjects are constituted by, and work to maintain their coherence through, practices of abjection. Abjection is the splitting off and repelling of some part of the self that cannot then be acknowledged, accepted, or touched without bringing that self’s constitution as subject into question. Subjection here relies on the production of an always threatening realm of a potentially destabilizing abject. Butler’s work takes up this concept from Julia Kristeva’s formulations of bodily and psychic forms of abjection in Powers of Horror (1982) and extends it into accounts of the abjection of whole groups of people or types of life whose proximity threatens the identity of subjects that have been made, and are recognized, on the condition that they distance themselves from others whose lives have been cast as unintelligible, unlivable, unlovable, or horrific. In this essay, I use abjection to characterize parts of Butler’s work that sometimes do not go under that name. In particular, I tie together some of her thinking on abjection and the constitution of differentially precarious or unlivable lives. While I recognize that Butler’s move away from the specifically psychoanalytic language of abjection is a serious theoretical departure, my goal is to show the continuities in her arguments despite this shift, emphasizing how Butler carries the same basic structure of abjection across that rift. She remains concerned about the production of unlivable lives as necessary for the production and maintenance of livable ones. Likewise, she remains concerned about how questions of the proximity of the unlivable to the livable threaten the coherence of the latter. Still further, as I hope to show here, she remains reticent of speaking about the psychic life of those cast in the place of the unlivable or the abject in her focus on the constitution and coherence of proper subjects. In her recent Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015a), Butler has articulated a democratic and ethical imperative to trouble and trouble again the boundaries of intelligible and livable life, calling into question the naturalization of particular kinds of subjects and of subjection by upsetting – though not simply expanding – the criteria that establish which practices constitute forms of recognizable subjecthood and which populations will then be cast as abject in response. There, though she does not use the language of abjection, Butler’s work aims to trouble the privileging of particular subjects and forms of subjection and to open up the possibility of recognizable subjecthood to populations that have been cast as abject. That said, Butler rarely asks how the abjection of certain peoples and populations for the sake of a realm of intelligible subjects – the exclusion of some individuals and groups from spaces of social and political appearance and the practices and psychic

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effects developed to naturalize and maintain that exclusion – shapes and forms the experiences of the people thus abjected. Butler works to show how subjection is a condition of inclusion and one that always presupposes and creates forms of exclusion. Significantly, Butler’s emphasis on the conditions of subjection and inclusion means that exclusion is presented as just that; as rejection, privation, non-life. Here the excluded is marked by privation in a way that makes it hard to see that there might be something more that is being produced through abjection than just an anti-subject. In short, Butler’s thinking does not engage the question of how abjection can be a kind of oblique subjection for people who are abjected. In what follows, I explore how this focus on the production of intelligible subjects and not on the subjecting effects of abjection becomes especially pertinent in Butler’s thinking on race. I show how, when offering accounts of race, Butler has presented racialization as a process whereby white subjects are constituted as white and as subjects through the abjection of others whose racial identity is then defined by its being “non-white,” whiteness’ fraught and threatening, though constitutive, outside.

Butler, Abjection, Race Butler’s explicit thinking on subjection, abjection, and race occurs in three places in her oeuvre, namely in Gender Trouble ([1990] 1999), Bodies That Matter ([1993] 2011), and “Endangered/Endangering” (2004a). The tie between Butler’s thinking on abjection and on the processes through which social – including racial – categories and identities are formed and reinforced appears in one of its clearest formulations in the account of abjection that she offers in her famous Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990). I quote this passage at length below as it lays out both Butler’s clearest account of abjection as it pertains specifically to social identity and points to some of the concerns raised therein. As Deborah Caslav Covino (2004) points out, there is already a degree of this wider social sense involved in Kristeva’s account of abjection. Abjection initially pertains to the relationship between the body of the child and the body of the mother from which it distances itself in becoming an individual but, even beyond this interpersonal sense of abjection, there is a wider, group-based, social sense of abjection. As Covino writes: One of Kristeva’s interests is the way in which the necessary abjection of the mother – our separation from her in order to become individualized,

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to take objects, to enter language, to become good citizens of the family and the social world – is mistranslated into the abjection of women in general, who are reduced to the maternal function. (Covino 2004, 21)

Here abjection is not simply about how individuals establish themselves as such through abjection of the maternal body. Abjection also involves the ways that women as a group are subject to a kind of abjection that mirrors the individual abjection of the maternal. In Gender Trouble, Butler takes up, elaborates, and extends that social sense as it pertains not just to gender, but to other forms of othering as well through her reading of Iris Marion Young’s appropriation of Kristeva (1990). She writes: The boundary of the body as well as the distinction between internal and external is established through the ejection and transvaluation of something originally part of identity into a def iling otherness. As Iris Young has suggested in her use of Kristeva to understand sexism, homophobia, and racism, the repudiation of bodies for their sex, sexuality, and/or color is an “expulsion” followed by a “repulsion” that founds and consolidates culturally hegemonic identities along sex/race/sexuality axes of differentiation. Young’s appropriation of Kristeva shows how the operation of repulsion can consolidate “identities” founded on the instituting of the “Other” or a set of Others through exclusion and domination. … The boundary between the inner and outer is confounded by those excremental passages in which the inner effectively becomes outer, and this excreting function becomes, as it were, the model by which other forms of identity-differentiation are accomplished. In effect, this is the mode by which Others become shit. (Butler [1990] 1999, 170)

Here Butler lays out Young’s model of a specifically social abjection wherein subjects’ identities are constituted through an “expulsion” of others who were or who might have been proximate to, or a part of, the self whose identity is being formed. The identity constituted by abjection then maintains itself through an ongoing “repulsion” of what – or who – it has expelled. This repulsion is what Young reads as at work in the social exclusion and domination of sexed, sexual, and racialized others whose identities are differentiated through this expulsion or “excretion” that presents them as the refuse or defiling excrement of the subjects that abjection worked to create. In Gender Trouble, Butler follows her reading of Young and Kristeva by calling into question the strategic effects of a thinking based on a division

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between the inner and the outer in accounts of abjection, writing that “regardless of the compelling metaphors of the spatial distinctions of inner and outer, they remain linguistic terms that facilitate and articulate a set of fantasies, feared and desired” (Butler [1990] 1999, 170). Here she questions the language of interior and exterior involved in theories of abjection by moving from a discussion of interiority to one of gender performatives. The theorizing that Gender Trouble works to call into question might focus on the development of a felt sense of self that strongly distinguishes an interior from an exterior, a self distinct from and prior to its engagements in and with a world. In contrast, Butler considers how a felt sense of interiority – including a sense of an interior gendered self – is produced through performative iterations of actions and practices that constitute and reinforce this sense. Despite this early hesitancy around the conception of abjection, only a few years later, in Bodies That Matter ([1993] 2011), Butler takes up abjection in conversation with Lacanian thinking on foreclosure, claiming abjection as a part of her own arguments in stating that what is foreclosed or repudiated within psychoanalytic terms is precisely what may not reenter the field of the social without threatening psychosis, that is, the dissolution of the subject itself. I want to propose that certain abject zones within sociality also deliver this threat, constituting zones of uninhabitability which a subject fantasizes as threatening its own integrity with the prospect of a psychotic dissolution … (Butler [1993] 2011, 186n2, emphasis on “abject” added).

In this text, Butler presents a model of abjection as constituting both white subjects and a realm of racialized abject peoples in her reading of Nella Larsen’s novel Passing (1929). In chapter 6 of Bodies That Matter, Butler analyzes the relationship between Larsen’s white racist character Bellew and his black wife who passes as white. She argues: If he associates with her, she cannot be black. But if she associates with blacks, she becomes black, where the sign of blackness is contracted, as it were, through proximity, where “race” itself is figured as a contagion transmissible through proximity. The added presumption is that if he were to associate with blacks, the boundaries of his own whiteness, and surely that of his children, would no longer be easily fixed. Paradoxically, his own racist passion requires that association; he cannot be white without blacks and without the constant disavowal of his relation to them. It

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is only through that disavowal that his whiteness is constituted, and through the institutionalization of that disavowal that his whiteness is perpetually – but anxiously – reconstituted. (Butler [1993] 2011, 126)

Though in this passage she uses the language of disavowal and not of abjection, Butler repeats the model that appeared in her readings of Kristeva and Young in Gender Trouble. Whiteness is constituted by distinguishing itself from a blackness that it then works to avoid a boundary-dissolving proximity with. At the same time, blackness itself – or here, “‘race’ itself” – is given a particular character by the process of abjection that constitutes it as a byproduct of white subjectivity, presenting it once again as a source of defilement, “a contagion,” that acts as a condition of white subjectivity by becoming the other from which it distances itself. Processes of white racial subjection here require an abjection that presents whiteness as endangered by a black contagion, and also presents blackness as contagion, as threat, as an excremental other. In her 1993 essay “Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia,” Butler again offers an account of racialization that mirrors the account of abjection she had read in Young. In this essay, Butler analyzes the trial surrounding the beating of Rodney King, and asks how it is that – though he was beaten – King was presented in court as a threat to the police officers who beat him. Reading the case through an interpretation of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1967), Butler writes: In Fanon’s recitation of the racist interpellation, the black body is circumscribed as dangerous, prior to any gesture, any raising of the hand, and the infantilized white reader is positioned in the scene as one who is helpless in relation to that black body, as one definitionally in need of protection by his/her mother or, perhaps, the police. The fear is that some physical distance will be crossed, and the virgin sanctity of whiteness will be endangered by that proximity. (Butler [1993] 2004a, 208)

Butler’s account of the racialization of black and white figures here repeats the dynamic at work in her earlier reading of Young and of Larsen on abjection and social identity. Whiteness establishes itself as both pure and vulnerable by expelling black people and then projecting the violence it had used to distance itself from black people onto and into the resultant sense of blackness, constituting blackness as an endangering threat to the whiteness premised on separation from it. Indeed, as Butler writes, to understand how King’s prone black body could be read as a threat to his

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assaulters, “it is necessary to read not only for the ‘event’ of violence, but for the racist schema that orchestrates and interprets the event, which splits the violent intention off from the body who wields it and attributes it to the body who receives it” (Butler [1993] 2004a, 210). Here, the way that violence is split off from the – white – body who wields it and is attributed to the – black – body that receives it mirrors the processes of exclusion and repulsion that Butler read in Young as a process of subjection dependent on the production of abjected groups or persons as defiling, threatening, and thus deserving of acts of distancing violence.

Speaking from the Place of the Abject Butler’s account of the formation of white subjects through processes of abjection directs her readers’ attention in a number of ways. First, this account is interested exclusively in approaching racism through a binary lens of white versus non-white and centers the formation of proper or intelligible white subjects with an exclusive focus on their experience of racialization. Second, and consequently, this account presents people of color as whiteness’ excremental other but does not address how people of color come to see and relate to themselves through white abjection. The model of racialization that understands it as working through abjection articulates only how white subjects come to understand themselves against abjected others without approaching how those others respond to, take up, or resist how they are framed as abject. Butler is clear, in her comments on the relationship between schemas of intelligibility and the human, that her project does not quite broach the question of what it means to be cast as the abject, to live under conditions of abjection, or to have one’s sense of self shaped by this expulsion and repulsion from a given order of being or a given realm of recognizable subjects. In what could be read as a kind of humility, in Undoing Gender (2004d) Butler writes: Another way of putting this [the question of the relationship between intelligibility and the human] is the following: “what, given the contemporary order of being, can I be?” This question does not quite broach the question of what it is not to be, or what it is to occupy the place of not-being within the field of being. What it is to live, breathe, attempt to love neither as fully negated nor as fully acknowledged as being. (Butler 2004d, 58, emphasis added)

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This question, which she acknowledges that she does not broach, is precisely the question of what it would mean to be abject, to be the necessary and yet disavowed condition of intelligible subjectivity and, given her association of abjection and racialization, the question of what it would mean to be a person of color and to relate to yourself or to others from the position of the non-white abject. A focus on this position would entail an account not only of how people of color are constituted as abject for the sake of white subjectivity, but also how that process of abjection works to shape people of color’s senses of themselves. Here abjection would not only be a process by which people of color take on a phobic sense for whites, but also how people of color’s own psyches are shaped by experiences of expulsion, repulsion, and continued white phobic oppression. In other aspects of her work Butler at times gestures towards an account of how processes of abjection or exclusion might themselves form senses of self or subjecthood for people thus abjected or excluded. In her dialogue with Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (2013), Butler points to how the production of excessive precarity in certain populations not only determines the sense of stability and coherence of the subjects for whom these especially precarious populations are produced as such, but also shapes the senses those precarious populations have of themselves. As she puts it: One reason I am interested in precarity, which would include a consideration of “precaritization,” is that it describes that process of acclimatizing a population to insecurity. It operates to expose a targeted demographic to unemployment or to radically unpredictable swings between employment and unemployment, producing poverty and insecurity about an economic future, but also interpellating that population as expendable, if not fully abandoned. These affective registers of precaritization include the lived feeling of precariousness, which can be articulated with a damaged sense of future and a heightened sense of anxiety about issues like illness and mortality. (Butler 2013, 43)

Here Butler talks about processes of precaritization whereby populations are not simply made precarious, put in positions of marginality or liminality so as to establish other positions as – at least seemingly – secure, but also as processes that shape the affective and lived experiences of those populations. Precaritization, though it might differ from abjection, could serve as an example of a possible route for beginning to think not only about subjection as it produces normal or normalized subjects, but also about the subjecting effects of abjection on people positioned as abject.

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There are reasons why Butler might be hesitant to further develop descriptions of precaritized, abjected, or racialized senses of self. Insofar as her project has often been to ask about how forms of rigid or imposed identity might be called into question or subverted, her work might purposively avoid attempting to give a potentially regulatory account of the psychic life of abjected peoples as abjected peoples. Indeed, analogously, in her essay “Imitation and Gender Insubordination” (1990) Butler turns away from an attempt to give an account of the “being” of being homosexual and instead writes: I am not at ease with “lesbian theories, gay theories,” for as I’ve argued elsewhere, identity categories tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes, whether as the normalizing categories of oppressive structures or as the rallying points for a liberatory contestation of that very oppression. This is not to say that I will not appear at political occasions under the sign of lesbian, but that I would like to have it permanently unclear what precisely that sign signifies. (Butler [1990] 2004b, 120)

Instead of offering an account of what it would mean to live as an improper subject or to be shaped by being ascribed a marginal or abject identity marker like “lesbian,” Butler leaves open the possibilities for what it might mean to respond to the ascription of forms of social identity. Something similar might be at work in her emphasis on how white subjects form through abjection and not how abjection forms subjects of color. As is the case elsewhere, her focus could be on how “proper” subjects are formed and maintained, elucidating the structures of normalization so as to be able to show where there is or could be space for subversions of normalizing processes. In doing so, her work might hope that undoing white subjection might reciprocally affect the people of color subject to, and through, abjection without having to reify racialized or oppressed forms of identity. Though Butler’s reticence to speak on or from the place of abjection is readable on these terms, offering an account of the psychic effects of abjection on the people made to stand in for the abject might allow Butler’s thinking to nuance and expand its account of racialization and of how technologies of subjection maintain and reproduce themselves. A focus on white subjection emphasizes only how abjected populations are expelled and repulsed by and for whites who might then be undone by proximity with people of color. Yet, bringing into play Butler’s claims about precaritization can also work to show how the dynamic of white repulsion and expulsion maintains white dominance by simultaneously producing

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abjected populations as subjects with damaged senses of future or increased senses of anxiety. These forms of racialized subjection through abjection might limit the likelihood that abjected peoples of color might enter the spaces and places of power that are controlled by whites whose sense of self requires their distance. It might also help elucidate how people of color are encouraged to focus their anxieties on that expulsion and repulsion, and not look to possible futures that might decenter whites or look to forms of anti-racism that might not be premised on attempts to become proximate to them physically, socially, or psychically. While there are reasons Butler might be suspect of attempts to elucidate abject or racialized forms of subjection, doing so might also point to how those forms of oblique subjection are not simply side effects of racializing and normalizing regimes, but key parts of the strategies through which they operate. Further still, if theories of racialization as abjection like Butler’s do not engage questions about how that racialization acts as a kind of subjection then she and they in effect reify the very account of people of color as abject, the account of the other as “shit” that, presumably, this deployment of social abjection was meant to call into question, continuing to imagine the experiences of people of color as important simply as the byproducts of white anxieties. To engage with the ways that abjection forms the people subject to it, would point not just to the white psychic lives based on a racializing abject horror, but to the psychic lives of those who live as that abject horror.

Works Cited Butler, Judith. 1987. Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France. New York: Columbia University Press. —. 1997. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Redwood City: Stanford University Press. —. 1999. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London and New York: Routledge. First published 1990. —. 2004a. “Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia.” In The Judith Butler Reader, edited by Sara Salih and Judith Butler, 204-211. Malden: Blackwell. First published 1993. —. 2004b. “Imitation and Gender Subordination.” In The Judith Butler Reader, edited by Sara Salih and Judith Butler, 119-137. Malden: Blackwell. First published 1990. —. 2004c. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London and New York: Verso Books. —. 2004d. Undoing Gender. New York and London: Routledge.

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—. 2005. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press. —. 2009. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London and New York: Verso Books. —. 2011. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York and London: Routledge. First published 1993. —. 2013. Dispossession: The Performative in the Political: Conversations with Athena Athanasiou. Malden: Polity Press. —. 2015a. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —. 2015b. Senses of the Subject. New York: Fordham University Press. Covino, Deborah Caslav. 2004. Amending the Abject Body: Aesthetic Makeovers in Medicine and Culture. Albany: SUNY Press. Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Objection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Larsen, Nella. 1929. Passing. In An Intimation of Things Distant: The Collected Fiction of Nella Larsen, edited by Charles Larson, 163-276. New York: Anchor Books. Young, Iris Marion. 1990. “Abjection and Oppression: Dynamics of Unconscious Racism, Sexism, and Homophobia.” In Crises in Continental Philosophy, edited by Arleen B. Dallery, Charles E. Scott and Holly Roberts, 201-214. Albany: SUNY Press.

About the Author Eyo Ewara is assistant professor in the department of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. His research explores the intersections between twentieth-century continental philosophy, critical philosophies of race, and LGBTQ thought and queer theory. His work has appeared in Critical Philosophy of Race, philoSOPHIA, and Black Women’s Liberatory Pedagogies.

A Few Words about Jean-Luc Nancy’s “Beyond Gender(s)” Annemie Halsema Jean-Luc Nancy has written a short text for this volume, that we publish in an English translation and the French original. “Beyond Gender(s)” resonates with Judith Butler’s work in a philosophical sense, by arguing that gender takes place, i.e., “genders,” each time anew in the act of sex. Thanks to Judith Butler we have moved beyond a too simple divide between sex as nature and gender as culture. Gender in Gender Trouble (1990) refers to the apparatus producing sex, gender, and heterosexual desire. Nancy interprets gender in an even broader sense: it engages every possible kind or genre of disposition to masculine/feminine, homo/hetero, cis/trans, active/passive, dominating/dominated, arousing/aroused, erectile/malleable, dry/wet, soft/hard, genital/anal, feverish/indolent, mute/chattering, brief/ stretched out, gentle/rough. Next to gender, Nancy also redefines sex in this text. According to him it is sex – as the incarnated act of our existence – that allows for the play of all these differences. It is productive and never ending. Sex as an act of Being is an expression of our being-in-the-world with others. Sex as an act of Being, or meontology, rejects Being as a metaphysical ground. It aims at the relation between beings, that is nothing but the exposure of beings to one another as existing with each other. Nancy calls it sexistence. Sex is the incarnated act of this exposure. It engenders the plurality of genders that make up an identity, one to an-other. Nancy develops this theme to a fuller extent in Corpus II. Writings on Sexuality (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013) and in Sexistence (Paris: Galilée, 2017).



Beyond Gender(s) Jean-Luc Nancy Translated by Christine Irizarry Abstract The study of gender invites one to consider its prima materia, that is to say sex. Sex is the play of genders. They gender it – which is to say they proceed from it not as productions but as the expansion itself that it “is,” if this can be called “being,” grasped in its nonexistence or rather meontology. Sex brings forth emotions, motions, forms, figures, textures and flavors, wounds and pains – the effervescent expression of its nonidentity or pluriidentity. This difference to oneself and the dissemination and multiplying effect of sex constitutes the deepest and most difficult lesson in the study of genders, which is far from being finished, though this has less to do with study, perhaps, than with an experience both meditative and amazed of what has always already pushed and driven us through all possible genders outside any kind of gender, assignation, and identification. Keywords: sex, gender, language, multiplicity

The study of genders allows all sorts of social, economic, psychological, and psychoanalytic analyses, as well as cultural and ethical ones. This study has yet another utility or another fertility which seems to have been less noticed so far. It invites one to better consider what constitutes its own materia prima or, if one prefers, the primum movens of the multiverse that it explores under the name of “genders.ˮ This first datum is nothing other than sex. Genders are gendering, if I may put it this way, only inasmuch as they distribute, spread, or simply allow the existence of that which they gender. They neither engender sex nor are generated by it. They are not the genders – or any gender or genre – of the “sex” order or family, for there is no “sex”

Halsema, Annemie, Katja Kwastek, and Roel van den Oever (eds), Bodies That Still Matter: Resonances of the Work of Judith Butler. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789463722940_nancy01

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order or family. Sex is a property of the majority of the living, but is not itself an entity prone to have specifications: species are differentiated from one another biologically due to the fact that they set limits to the possibility of interspecies sexual reproduction (except for a few cases of interspecies reproduction, whose offspring in turn are sterile), though “sex” itself, if we may say so, does not exist outside of its genders. There is more to say about it: “sex” remains or does not exist outside of the difference from its genders. A sexual gender is a way of incarnating and implementing what is called the sexual relation. By definition the relation is only possible provided there is a difference between two poles, or, if you want, subjects of the relation. In certain respects sex resembles electricity – it only works with a difference in polarity. However, it is not limited to two preset poles, and this is where genders come into play. One should consider the play of genders in the most serious sense of the word, a sense that unfolds in two steps: First, an articulation and mobility, due to an interval. Second, an activity containing its own finality. Indeed, genders assert themselves foremost because of intervals, which are not only played out within psychosocial types or configurations but throughout all possible types and bearings. They engage every kind – or genre – of disposition, tendency, leaning, and taste: masculine/feminine, homo/hetero, mono/ trans, active/passive, dominating/dominated, arousing/aroused, erectile/ malleable, dry/wet, soft/hard, genital/anal (oral, and so forth), feverish/ indolent, mute/chattering, brief/stretched out, gentle/rough… This enumeration is endless because each term that it involves soon proves to be in great danger of freezing into a scheme or even into a norm, whereas each one (like each word of each language, like language in itself) only gains its worth in a quivering suspense between indefinite multiplicities of sense. Such is sex – the common reason of this dissemination (a nod here to Jacques Derrida), and it is this reason only insofar as it involves no law or principle, no stable reference, except precisely the play itself that is sex. Sex is the play of genders. They gender it – which is to say they proceed from it not as productions but as the expansion itself that it “is,” if this can be called “being.” Sex has a similar working as Being for Heidegger in that he recognizes its nonexistence or rather meontology. Being is not, because it is nothing that is a being, but any being, by being, gives place – and play – to the act of Being. Sex is not a quality (whether essential or secondary) of something that would for example be “life.” Not all living beings are sexed, in fact, and if life consists in its own reproduction, then cell division, propagation from cuttings (both natural and artificial), transplantation, budding, and

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cloning are fitting ways as well of reproducing a living lineage. Sexual life introduces an exponential increase of these ways. But with it too comes the pressure particular to the relation that becomes the necessary vector for the vital impulse. This relation is not a thing. Rather it is what its name implies, namely a transport, a passage, and thus an action. Such a relation is always a transport; it traverses a distance, a gap. It does not fill out the distance or cancel out the gap: it animates and mobilizes them. In effect it forms the identity of difference as such. This identity of difference, within difference and on the whole as difference – this differing of differentiae – forms what is called “sex,” whose genders are reality. For “sex” itself has no other identity than that of its division. In other words, for the human animal, sex – like language – occupies the place or the role of an essential being-in-relation, which is constitutive of this animal. Other animals relate to one another but they do not turn their relation into a special order of reality, or hardly so – an order that can be presented and examined as such, and which can be targeted, appreciated, and felt as such. Thus language constitutes at the same time the transportation of meaning among speakers (though “transportation of meaning” is redundant: meaning is transport, or relation) and a specific order of reality that one can behold for itself – the difference between languages, significance, truth and lies, sense-making and the meaning of sense, poetry or the passage of meaning at the limit, and so on. Sex appears to be a kind of other face of language: it is complete in its difference from itself or within itself. As a sexed animal I am first of all of a certain gender (let’s say European male of the twentieth century) and gender further divides itself into several genders or generic possibilities (man/woman, childlike/adult, sensitive/blunt, and so forth). My identity as a European male of the twentieth century can again be divided into other genders, looks, cultures, and drives. What movingly rouses sex in me may be neither feminine nor European nor contemporary… I don’t even know where my sexual emotion begins and ends: it is not always absent from intellectual work or manual exertion, or from my solitude, or from any social relation whatsoever (be it administrative, medical, or technical), neither… nor… What would be left untinged by sex? What would be removed, through abstinence or strict chastity, from what I have felt fitting to call sexistence? The same goes for my identity as a reproducing male, which in no way excludes nonreproductive sex, sex producing nothing except its own pleasure or suffering. On the one hand, the products of reproduction, children, are

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themselves singular units, singularly gendered, and do not depend on a repetition of what has produced them. On the other hand, what sex without offspring issues in some fashion, are immeasurable seeds of emotions, motions, thrusts and retreats, forms, figures, textures and flavors, wounds and pains, which, not unlike children, are the effervescent expression of its nonidentity or pluri-identity. This difference to oneself and the dissemination and multiplying effect of sex constitute the deepest and most difficult lesson in the study of genders. This lesson is far from being finished. This has less to do with study, perhaps, than with an experience both meditative and amazed of what has always already pushed and driven us through all possible genders outside any kind of gender, assignation, and identification. One might put it this way: sex generates genders – it is not gendered in itself. But what sex sets up for generations is not only of the order of something engendered – whether it is offspring or any other kind of assigned identities, properties or characters, genders, or even combinations, transpositions, or indeterminations of such identities. Rather, sex engenders its own reproduction in a way… as if it were a non-sexed living being or organism itself. Indeed sex is not sexed since it “is” (which is to say sets up, acts, animates) sexuation. It is not so much a given structure as that which operates as the empty space in any structure, making possible the layout and combination of elements. Sex is not any of the sexes and/or sexualities and/or eroticisms that can come into play. It is neither one nor the other, nor any alteration of each, but rather it is the blank box of sexuation, that is, of the fact that there are differences of attraction or drives. These differences are not themselves given without being at the same time involved in the play of composition, bonding and unbonding, attraction and rejection, which is sexual play. A chromosomal organization is not implemented without all sorts of transformations of the sequences that generate it, and it does not enter the organization of a living being endowed with speech without deep modulations whose rhythms and ways make up what we call “someone:” the existence of an empty space (termed “subject”) whose singular mobility and plasticity are indefinitely generated as a multiplicity of figures and movements and never fixed throughout a life.



Hors genre Jean-Luc Nancy

L’étude des genres permet toutes sortes d’analyses sociales, économiques, psychologiques ou psychanalytiques, culturelles aussi ou éthiques. Cette étude a encore une autre utilité ou une autre fécondité qui semble avoir été jusqu’ici moins remarquée. Elle invite à mieux considérer ce qui constitue sa propre materia prima ou, si on préfère, le primum movens des multivers qu’elle explore sous le nom de “genresˮ. Cette donnée première n’est autre que le sexe. Les genres ne font genre que pour autant qu’ils distribuent, dispersent ou simplement font exister cela qu’ils genrent – s’il est permis de forger ce verbe. Ils n’engendrent pas le sexe ni ne sont générés par lui. Ils ne sont pas les genres – ni des genres – de l’ordre ou de la famille “sexe”. Car il n’y a pas d’ordre ni de famille “sexe”. Le sexe est une propriété du plus grand nombre de vivants mais il n’est pas lui-même une entité susceptible de spécifications : l’espèce se différencie bien, pour les biologistes, par le fait qu’elle délimite une possibilité de reproduction sexuelle (mis à part quelques cas de reproduction entre espèces, dont les rejetons sont pour leur part stériles) mais “le sexe” lui-même (si on peut dire) ne subsiste nulle part en dehors de ses genres. Il faut dire plus: “le” sexe ne subsiste ou n’existe nulle part ailleurs que dans la différence de ses genres. Un genre sexuel est une façon d’incarner et de mettre en œuvre ce qu’on appelle le rapport sexuel. Le rapport n’est par définition possible qu’à la condition d’une différence entre deux pôles ou si on veut deux sujets du rapport. A quelques égards le sexe ressemble à l’électricité: il ne fonctionne que dans une différence de pôles. En revanche, il ne se limite pas à deux pôles déterminés, et c’est ici que les genres entrent en jeu. Leur jeu est à considérer au sens le plus sérieux du mot, sens qui se déplie deux temps : 1) articulation, mobilité due à un intervall – 2) activité qui détient en soi sa f inalité. En effet, les genres valent avant tout par leurs intervalles. Ceux-ci ne jouent pas seulement entre des types ou des

Halsema, Annemie, Katja Kwastek, and Roel van den Oever (eds), Bodies That Still Matter: Resonances of the Work of Judith Butler. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789463722940_nancy02

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configurations psycho-sociales mais à travers tous les types ou allures possibles ils mettent en œuvre toutes sortes – tous genres – de dispositions, tendances, penchants et goûts : masculin/féminin, homo/hétéro, mono/ trans, actif/passif, dominant/dominé, excitant/excité, érectile/malléable, sec/humide, tendre/dur, génital/anal (buccal, et cetera), fiévreux/indolent, muet/prolixe, bref/prolongé, courtois/rustique…. Cette énumération n’a pas de fin, car chacun des termes qu’elle sollicite s’avère aussitôt en grand danger de fixer un schème, sinon une norme, alors que chacun – comme chaque mot de chaque langue, comme la langue en elle-même – ne vaut que dans un suspens tremblant entre des multiplicités indéfinies de sens. Tel est le sexe – raison commune de cette dissémination (salut à Derrida !) dont il n’est la raison que pour autant qu’il n’en donne aucune loi ni principe, aucune référence stable, sinon précisément le jeu qu’il est lui-même. Le sexe est le jeu des genres. Ceux-ci le genrent – c’est-à-dire procèdent de lui non pas comme des productions mais comme l’expansion même q’il “est” si cela peut se nommer “être”. Il en va du sexe comme de l’être tel que Heidegger en a saisi l’inexistence ou plutôt la méontologie. L’être n’est pas car il n’est rien d’étant mais tout étant, en étant, donne lieu et jeu à l‘acte d’être. Le sexe n’est pas une qualité – ni essentielle, ni secondaire – de quelque chose qui serait, par exemple, “la vie”. En effet tous les vivants ne sont pas sexués et si la vie consiste dans sa propre reproduction, alors la division cellulaire, le bouturage (naturel ou artificiel), la greffe, le bourgeonnement, le clonage sont autant de façons propres à reproduire une lignée vivante. Avec la vie sexuée s’introduit un accroissement exponentiel de ces façons. Mais avec lui s’introduit aussi la poussée propre au rapport qui devient le vecteur nécessaire de l’élan vital. Le rapport n’est pas une chose mais comme son nom l’indique c’est un transport, un passage donc une action : un rapport est toujours un trans-port, il traverse une distance, un écart. Il ne comble pas la distance, il n’annule pas l‘écart: il les anime, les mobilise, il forme en fait l’identité de la différence comme telle. Cette identité de la différence, dans la différence et somme toute en tant que différence, ce différer des différents forme ce qu’on nomme “le sexe” – dont les genres sont la réalité. Car “le sexe” lui-même n’a pas d’autre identité que celle de sa division. Autrement dit, chez l’animal humain le sexe occupe comme le langage la place ou le rôle d’un être-en-rapport essentiel, constitutif de cet animal. Les autres animaux sont en rapport mais ils ne  font pas – ou peu – de leur rapport un ordre spécial de réalité, qui peut être présenté et examiné comme

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tel – qui peut être visé, apprécié, éprouvé comme tel. Le langage constitue ainsi à la fois le transport du sens entre les locuteurs (dire “transport du sens” est même un pléonasme : le sens est le transport, ou le rapport) et un ordre propre de réalité qui peut être envisagé pour lui-même – la différence des langues, la signification, la vérité et le mensonge, le sens et le sens du sens, la poésie ou le passage du sens à la limite, et cetera. Le sexe se propose comme une sorte d’autre face du langage: il est tout entier dans sa différence d’avec lui-même ou en lui-même. En tant qu’animal sexué je suis d’abord d’un certain genre (disons: mâle européen du XXe siècle) qui lui-même se divise en plusieurs genres ou possibilités génériques (homme/femme, enfantin/adulte, tendre/brutal, et cetera). Mon identité de mâle européen du XXe siècle se redivise elle-même en d’autres genres, d’autres allures, cultures et pulsions. Ce qui émeut le sexe en moi peut n’être ni féminin, ni européen, ni contemporain… Je ne sais même pas où commence et où finit mon émotion sexuelle : elle n’est pas toujours absente du travail intellectuel, ni de l’effort manuel, ni de ma solitude ni du rapport social quel qu’il soit (administratif, médical, technique), ni…ni… Qu’est-ce qui ne serait pas coloré par le sexe? Qu’est-ce qui serait soustrait – fût-ce dans l’abstinence et la stricte chasteté – à ce qu’il m’a semblé opportun de nommer sexistence? Il en va de même de mon identité de mâle reproducteur qui n’exclut en rien le sexe non reproducteur – le sexe producteur de rien que de sa propre jouissance ou de sa propre souffrance. D’un côté les enfants, produits de la reproduction, sont eux-mêmes des unités singulières, singulièrement genrées et qui ne dépendent pas d’une répétition de ce qui les a produits; de l’autre le sexe sans enfant forme en quelque façon une incalculable semence d’émotions, de motions, de poussées et de reculs, de formes, figures, textures et saveurs, blessures et douleurs qui sont autant que des enfants l’expression effervescente de son inidentité ou de sa pluridentité. Cette différence à soi, cette dissémination et démultiplication du sexe constitue la leçon la plus profonde et la plus difficile de l’étude des genres. Elle est loin d’être terminée. Elle relève peut-être moins de l’étude que d’une expérience à la fois méditative et sidérée de ce qui nous a toujours-déjà poussés, propulsés par tous les genres possibles hors de toute espèce de genre, d’assignation et d’identification. On pourrait dire: le sexe est générateur, il n’est pas lui-même genré. Mais ce dont le sexe ouvre la génération n’est pas seulement de l’ordre de l’engendré – qu’il s’agisse d’enfants ou de toute autre sorte d’identités assignables, de propriétés ou de caractères, de genres ou même de combinaisons, de transpositions ou d’indéterminations de telles identités. Le sexe engendre

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plutôt en quelque façon sa propre reproduction… comme s’il était lui-même un vivant ou un organisme non sexué. Et de fait le sexe n’est pas sexué puisqu’il “est” – c’est-à-dire qu’il ouvre, qu’il agit, qu’il anime – la sexuation. Celle-ci est moins une structure donnée que ce qui opère dans toute structure comme la case vide qui rend possible les agencements et les combinaisons des éléments. Le sexe n’est aucun des sexes et/ou des sexualités et/ou des érotismes qui peuvent entrer en jeu. Il n’est ni l’un, ni l’autre, ni aucune altération de chacun mais il est plutôt l’unité vide de la sexuation, c’est-à-dire du fait qu’il y ait des différences attractives ou pulsives. Ces différences ne sont elles-mêmes pas données sans être en même temps engagées dans le jeu de composition, liaison et déliaison, attraction et répulsion qui est le jeu sexuel. Une organisation chromosomique ne se fait pas sans toutes sortes de transformations des séquences qui la génèrent et elle n’entre pas dans l’organisation d’un vivant doué de parole sans de profondes modulations dont les rythmes et les allures composent ce qu’on nomme “quelqu’un”: l’existence d’une case vide (nommée “sujet”) dont la mobilité et la plasticité singulière s’engendrent indéfiniment en figures et mouvements multiples et jamais fixés tout le long d’une vie.

About the Author Jean-Luc Nancy is Professor emeritus of philosophy at the Institut de Philosophie in Strasbourg. He has held visiting positions at the Freie Universität in Berlin and at UC Irvine, and is also a member of the faculty at the European Graduate School. Nancy’s most influential works, aside from his book on community (The Inoperative Community, 1991), are The Experience of Freedom (1993), The Sense of the World (1998), Being Singular Plural (2000), and the two volumes of Deconstruction of Christianity (2008 and 2013). Two collections of essays have also been published in English: Birth to Presence (1993) and A Finite Thinking (2003). Other important texts include Corpus (on the body, 2008), The Muses and The Ground of the Image (on art, 1996) and The Truth of Democracy (on politics, 2010). Among his most recent publications are Sexistence (2017), Exclu le Juif en nous (2018) and La Peau fragile du monde (2020).



The Performative Edge of Non-Politicians Populism and Shifting Legitimacy in US Presidential Politics Julia Peetz

Abstract Building on Butler’s theorization of legitimacy as performative and dynamic rather than institutionally enshrined, this essay explores the paradoxical performativity of contemporary populism. It asks how populists should be understood to operate performatively in ways that make them particularly successful in attracting followers. Populist speech acts pose a challenge to traditional theorizations of performativity: they seem to be successful in spite of the fact that they work through the disavowal, not the affirmation, of the authority that would normally be assumed necessary to make a performative speech act felicitous. Drawing on examples of persistent US presidential populism since Watergate, this essay posits that contemporary populism demands an expanded and revised understanding of the conditions necessary to achieve performative felicity. Keywords: anti-establishment, legitimacy, political speech, populism, representation, US presidency

For more than a decade, scholars have been exploring the performative dimensions of populism. According to Ernesto Laclau’s well-known theory, for instance, populism functions as a performative phenomenon brought about when there is widespread dissatisfaction with the political establishment, such that this dissatisfaction itself becomes the marker of identity for the emerging populist movement (2005). More recent work, such as that of Benjamin Moffitt (2016), looks at populism from the other side; here, it is the populist politician’s performative evocation of a state of crisis that

Halsema, Annemie, Katja Kwastek, and Roel van den Oever (eds), Bodies That Still Matter: Resonances of the Work of Judith Butler. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789463722940_peetz

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is in focus, rather than the process of populist identity formation among the electorate. Neither Laclau nor Moff itt, however, devotes sustained attention to theorizing the connection between a populist politician and their supporters, to the strange attraction or the quality of the representative relationship that exists between them. One of the most compelling questions about contemporary populism, concerning how populists operate performatively in ways that make them particularly successful in attracting followers, is thus left open. This essay will build on Butler’s theory of shifting legitimacy, as articulated in Excitable Speech (1997), to investigate how populist speech acts might be seen as working performatively to shift legitimacy in ways that controvert the rules of how performative speech acts are commonly assumed to function. For present purposes, populist speech acts are defined as those that follow the populist style, in that they set up a binary division between “the people” and “the establishment,” evoke a sense of crisis, and are performed in a strikingly media-savvy and personalized style (see Moffitt 2016, 43-45).1 I want to suggest that the successful anti-establishment speech acts of populist politicians are noteworthy for the performative operation, that of lifting a self-styled outsider to (or a maverick within) a political system into a position of significant power. In other words, the performativity of populist speech acts is of interest, because anti-establishment performatives seem to be successful in spite of the fact that they work through the disavowal, rather than the affirmation, of the kind of authority that would normally be assumed necessary to make a performative speech act felicitous. Populist speech acts thus enact a kind of paradoxical performativity that requires us to expand and revise our understanding of the conditions necessary to achieve performative felicity. Following the rise of right-wing populists like Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen, and Thierry Baudet in Europe and worldwide, anti-establishment and populist rhetoric have become extremely common in contemporary politics, such that newspapers and scholarship are at this moment awash with accounts of the 1 While populism is notoriously difficult to define, the consideration of populist-style performances (rather than “populism” as a more diffuse phenomenon) captures a number of significant characteristics of contemporary populism, as identified in leading scholarship. Populism has increasingly become a mainstream feature of democratic politics in the West (Mudde 2004; Arditi 2007; Moffitt 2016) and exists on a continuum (Rooduijn, de Lange, and van der Brug, 2014; Gidron and Bonikowski, 2013), such that populists can express only some elements of populism and can do so more or less forcefully. This also justifies the joint discussion of outsider appeals made by Obama, Trump, and Sanders, politicians who otherwise differ markedly in their performance styles.

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global ascendancy of populism (Moffitt 2016; Cox 2018; Rachman 2019). Still, this style of political performance is perhaps nowhere more visible than in performances of the US presidency since Watergate, where it coincides with a sharp decline in political trust (Pew Research Center 2019). Nor is it limited to the period since Watergate: already in 1964, the notable Americanist Richard Hofstadter identified what he called “the paranoid style” as a phenomenon of international politics that had “more scope and force among us [Americans] than it has had in many other countries of the Western world” (2008, 7). However, while Hofstadter argued that the fully-fledged paranoid style with its anti-establishment conspiracy thinking and disregard for facts was performed exclusively by minority movements in the US, my recent research suggests otherwise. The former Democratic and Republican White House speechwriters I interviewed for my research took it as a given that anti-establishmentarianism and the assertion of outsider status have become dominant elements in US national, and especially presidential, politics (Peetz 2019). Speechwriters noted that it has become “fun and successful to run against Washington in national [politics]” and described Washington as obviously “toxic.”2 Moreover, the last two presidential elections that did not feature an incumbent candidate have been all about change: 2008 saw Barack Obama running as someone who, as a first-term senator, could still count as somewhat of a Washington outsider, whilst John McCain presented himself as a long-time maverick in the US Senate.3 In 2016, Hillary Clinton struggled against the public perception of herself as a figure of the establishment, a perception that was pushed further by her opponent, Donald Trump.4 Clinton also faced a significant anti-establishment primary challenge from maverick independent senator Bernie Sanders. In light of the ubiquity of contemporary populism and, in particular, its strong persistence in US presidential politics for the last four decades, this essay aims to show that its successful performers achieve a complex and noteworthy performative gesture. This gesture further brings into 2 For ethical reasons, the data are anonymized. For a detailed account of my interviewing method, see Peetz 2019. 3 An outsider is someone who stands outside of and professes to lack links to the institutional system. A maverick, by contrast, is someone who is aff iliated with a political party and/or occupies political office, but frequently votes against the party line, works to reshape the party, or becomes an independent (Barr 2009, 34). Before running for president, Obama was advised by senior Democrats, including Harry Reid, then Senate Majority Leader, and former Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, on the political potential of the outsiderness he could still claim for himself (Heilemann and Halperin 2010, 33-34, 70). 4 Trump stressed or alluded to Clinton’s “bad experience” in all three presidential debates (Politico Staff 2016a; 2016b; 2016c).

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focus how populism functions within a system of institutional politics. Although Butler’s work does not usually feature in populism scholarship, I argue that her ideas around performativity and legitimacy can illuminate the paradoxical performativity of populism. While other scholars working on performativity, such as J. L. Austin and Pierre Bourdieu, highlight the importance of a speaker’s pre-existing authority to the felicitousness of his/her utterance, Butler is keen to introduce an element of dynamism into the thinking around performativity and legitimacy. As I aim to show here, the decoupling of legitimacy from institutional authority is fundamental to populism. For this reason, Butler’s ideas about shifting legitimacy are helpful in thinking through the otherwise confounding split between the performative edge of the anti-institutional outsider and what appears to be the growing performative ineffectiveness of political institutions.

The Paradoxical Performativity of Populism To understand the paradoxical performativity of populism, it first needs to be clarified how political representation works as a performative practice. According to the influential theory of the “representative claim” (Saward 2006; 2010; 2014), politicians’ public performances are constitutive of the representative relationship between them and their constituents. Politicians making claims to represent must perform their ability to tap into the prevailing political concerns and aspirations of the intended audience in a way that appears credible to that audience. Through their performances, they will then propose solutions to the audience’s concerns and ways of working towards the realization of their aspirations. If a representative claim is successful, then the politician becomes the representative of a particular constituency, for instance through electoral success. If we follow the thinking of J.L. Austin and Pierre Bourdieu, we would need to posit that a politician’s ability to make credible representative claims is closely tied to their pre-existing authority or at least their ability to perform their connection to and eligibility to hold institutional authority. For Austin, the felicitousness of performative utterances is typically determined by preestablished conventions and the acceptance of the authority of the speaker by all parties. Thus, a performative utterance depends on “some previous procedure, tacit or verbal” that must “have first constituted the person who is to do the ordering an authority” (Austin 1962, 29). In this view, those who operate outside of the boundaries of ritual, convention, and pre-established authority are not able to make the kinds of felicitous utterances that may be

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performed by authorities. Bourdieu’s Language and Symbolic Power (1991), which Butler critiques in Excitable Speech (1997), separates the felicitousness of performative utterances even more definitively from the speech act itself and instead ties felicitousness specifically to institutional authority. For Bourdieu, language cannot precede authority; it merely expresses it, and thus it is “the participation in the authority of the institution, which makes all the difference” (1991, 109, emphasis in original). “Language at most represents this authority, manifests and symbolizes it” (ibid.), he argues, stressing that an authorized spokesperson depends on his “accumulated symbolic capital,” here taken to mean his prior legitimacy, rather than anything inherent in the speech act itself (1991, 111, emphasis in original). Following Austin’s and especially Bourdieu’s logic, politicians seeking election (i.e., entry into a system that confers institutional authority) would naturally attempt to court institutional affiliation and authority, for instance by emphasizing how well connected they are. Indeed, at least in the United States, figures of incumbent re-elections have historically been notably high,5 as one would expect if pre-established authority implied performative advantage. In short, we would have to assume that political audiences find incumbents and well-connected candidates with strong institutional ties to be more credible as possible future representatives than outsiders who lack the social power conferred by “an authority whose limits are identical with the extent of delegation by the institution” (Bourdieu 1991, 109). But if we consider the fact that, in 2016, Hillary Clinton’s claim to a high degree of prior institutional authority fell largely flat, then this configuration becomes rather more complex. Being a presidential candidate who had previously been a first lady, a senator, and a secretary of state did not strengthen Clinton’s representative claim. A former Democratic White House speechwriter I interviewed admitted that “people are not very open to the Hillary Clinton argument [which is]: ‘I understand, I’ve been around a long time, I understand how it works, and so you need me to help sort it out.’” In addition to this, some of the (illegally leaked) emails of Hillary Clinton campaign staff members reveal the campaign struggling with Clinton’s status as part of the political establishment, which, far from being a major asset, was apparently considered to be somewhat of a liability.6 In 5 Increased incumbency advantage in congressional elections since the 1970s is a widely studied phenomenon (see Mayhew 1974; Abramowitz, Alexander, and Gunning 2006). 6 The leaked emails of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager in 2016, show Clinton-Kaine campaign staff members struggling with Clinton’s status as “part of the system,” stressing the need to show that Clinton knows “how much has to change” (Greenberg 2016) as well as the need to criticize the incumbent Obama administration (Schwerin 2015).

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contrast to this, Donald Trump’s performances of outsiderness, manifested in promises to “drain the swamp” (see Donald J. Trump for President 2016), resonated much more strongly. Trump’s campaign launch announcement on June 16, 2015, for instance, was based on nationalistic, anti-immigrant appeals to the white working classes about beating Japan at manufacturing cars, and beating Mexico “at the border,” because Mexico, just like China, was portrayed in the speech as “killing us economically.” This simplistic and openly racist nationalism was complemented by Trump’s repeated claim that “all of these politicians that I’m running against now” were stupid, dissociating, and “don’t have a clue” about leadership, whereas Trump presented himself as a business leader who had done “an amazing job” amassing his own “net worth” while watching the politicians from afar and coming to the conclusion that “[t]hey will never make America great again” (Time Staff 2015). The performativity of this sort of presidential anti-establishment rhetoric might then be seen to operate in the opposite direction from Austin’s standard model of performative felicity: not through the enforcement, but through the disavowal of the kind of authoritative backing with which one might assume such speakers would be seen, and would wish to be seen, to be invested. In other words, anti-establishment rhetoric by political outsiders or mavericks turns out to be performatively effective precisely because it enables and perpetuates a performative shift that moves legitimacy away from incumbent and previous officeholders as well as from established institutions. Instead, it bestows legitimacy on outsider or maverick politicians. It is thus precisely these politicians’ perceived lack of previous affiliation with the maligned institutional establishment and not their pre-existing institutional authority that makes the performative operation felicitous. It may be tempting to suggest that performative success in the case of Trump simply becomes tied to another kind of authority (economic, financial, et cetera), as in his performances of his economic successes, but the case is not so clear-cut. While Trump might indeed have appealed to a specific kind of American anti-political entrepreneurialism (see Brown 1997),7 Sanders’ appeal during the 2016 campaign was not tied to any kind of business acumen and was instead largely due to his maverick position within the US Senate, which made him a (relative) outsider to the party system. Social power in this case therefore does not stem from “an authority whose limits are 7 The relative success of the businessman and independent candidate Ross Perot in the 1992 presidential election, for instance, points to the persistence of this kind of business-driven anti-politics in US political life.

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identical with the extent of delegation by the institution” (Bourdieu 1991, 109), but on a speaker’s (credible performance of her/his) lack of delegated institutional authority. This is where Butler’s thinking around legitimacy becomes pertinent.

Anti-Establishment Rhetoric and Dynamic Legitimacy In contradistinction to Austin and Bourdieu, Excitable Speech (1997) envisions performative utterances as dynamic vis-à-vis established power structures. Drawing on Derrida’s reading of Austin (1988), Butler seeks to overturn Bourdieu’s emphasis on the primacy of social power, which reduces the power ascribed to the performative utterance itself, making it appear epiphenomenal at best. She charges Bourdieu with failing to “theorize the particular force produced by the utterance as it breaks with prior context” and failing “to take account of the way in which a performative can break with existing context and assume new contexts, refiguring the terms of legitimate utterance themselves” (Butler 1997, 148, 150). In Butler’s view, performative utterances themselves can, by rehearsing “the conventional formulae in non-conventional ways,” provoke a shift in the terms of legitimacy so that “an invocation that has no prior legitimacy can have the effect of challenging existing forms of legitimacy, breaking open the possibility of future [social institutional] forms” (147). This way of theorizing performativity, I posit, is particularly pertinent when thinking through the seemingly paradoxical performative edge of the non-politician or political outsider and the systemic effects of populist rhetoric. If politicians employ anti-establishment rhetoric and present themselves as outsiders in making a representative claim, we can assume that they are doing so in an attempt to mobilize anti-establishment aspirations and political distrust that they suppose are prevalent political concerns among their audiences. What the populist speech act is doing, then, is making use of existing dissatisfaction with the political establishment to boost the social power of the outsider or maverick politician. Here, the populist movement, defined by its dissatisfaction with the political establishment (as in Laclau’s theory of performative populism), and the populist politician, defined by its anti-establishment stance and its performative evocation of a sense of political crisis (as in Moffitt’s theory of the populist style), connect. As I noted at the beginning of this essay, it is this connection between populist politicians and their supporters that is thus far significantly undertheorized in scholarship of performativity and populism.

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Butler’s ideas about shifting legitimacy allow us to think through the remarkable performative operation at work in populist speech acts: by deploying anti-establishment rhetoric, populists access and mobilize existing anti-establishment sentiment, thus building on and further stoking the suspiciousness with which the audience already regard institutional structures and the political system.8 The populist binary division of society, with the dissatisfied people on one side and the unsatisfactory establishment on the other, is thus both tapped into and co-authored by these politicians – and then used for their own political benefit. In doing so, populists must performatively constitute themselves as individuals who can credibly represent “the people,” since the electorate must come to view them as outsiders who intend to penetrate into the contaminated system with the goal of eliminating corruption. “The people” are then defined by their distrust of and disillusionment with the political establishment while the politician’s pledge to act in their direct interest as a decontaminator of the system becomes the source of populist authority. In other words, in this paradoxical performativity, the very lack of previous authority and institutional affiliation is elevated into the source of the speaker’s perceived legitimacy as a political representative. If populist representative claims are felicitous – that is, if the politician succeeds in being perceived as a genuine outsider or maverick who will act on behalf of the people – that individual becomes the anti-establishment representative of the people and, hence, the leader of the populist movement. The development of this movement has to prefigure the politician’s performative intervention, but, although it does not entirely depend on the politician’s speech act, it is further strengthened and consolidated by it.

The Populist Slope in Political Discourse The populist courting and shifting of legitimacy away from established institutions and towards self-styled outsiders is not without risk. The most significant risk is the possibility of portraying the political system as so corrupt that it is beyond redemption. Continued exposure to populist anti-establishmentarianism might lead to something of a “populist slope” 8 In the contemporary United States, there are a number of reasons for widespread political dissatisfaction, such as the increasing de-democratization of US politics under neoconservative neoliberalism, which has arguably toxified political life even while moving towards an increasingly consensual and managerial politics (Brown 2015), and the increasing securitization of US politics since September 11, 2001 (see Wolin 2008).

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in political discourse. That is, audiences who are continually exposed to representative claims that speak to their dissatisfaction with the political establishment come to expect the disavowal of institutional authority as a necessary element of any potentially credible representative claim. Forcefully articulated opposition to the political establishment then becomes the norm. In other words, performing opposition to “Washington,” “the government,” or “the system” might become not just paradoxically effective as a performative act, but a prerequisite for performative success. One of the former Democratic White House speechwriters I interviewed sketched this possibility in a way that highlights the complexity of the reception work political audiences have to do when presented with populist speech acts. The speechwriter stressed, first, that Republicans and Democrats made different kinds of anti-establishment arguments, such that, while Republicans had for a long time portrayed government “as being inherently inimicable to liberty, to freedom, to individual rights,” Democrats tended to emphasize the need to “bring a new perspective into Washington and make government work because government has to work.” However, when pressed to clarify whether the differences between these arguments came across in a political environment where everyone runs against Washington, the speechwriter conceded that Obama’s argument about Washington being dominated by special interests and Trump’s argument about the system being rigged were “the same argument used to different ends.” Especially when Bernie Sanders’ forcefully articulated anti-establishmentarianism came into play on the Democratic side, the speechwriter suggested that political discourse might end up in “a dangerous place,” one where the government was seen as fundamentally corrupt and irredeemable by default. In short, the performative edge of the self-styled “non-politician” can have profound effects on a system of institutional politics. Through their paradoxical performativity, populist anti-establishment performances restructure the terms of legitimacy in a way that not only separates institutional authority from legitimacy, but that, in time, can call the system’s very existence into question.

Works Cited Abramowitz, Alan I., Brad Alexander, and Matthew Gunning. 2006. “Incumbency, Redistricting, and the Decline of Competition in U.S. House Elections.” The Journal of Politics 68, no. 1: 75-88. Arditi, Benjamin. 2007. Politics on the Edges of Liberalism: Difference, Populism, Revolution, Agitation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Austin, J. L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barr, Robert. 2009. “Populists, Outsiders and Anti-Establishment Politics.” Party Politics 15, no. 1: 29-48. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power, edited by John B. Thompson, translated by Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson. Cambridge: Polity Press. Brown, Gwen. 1997. “Deliberation and Its Discontents: H. Ross Perot’s Antipolitical Populism.” In The End of Politics? Explorations into Modern Antipolitics, edited by Andreas Schedler, 115-148. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Brown, Wendy. 2015. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books. Butler, Judith. 1997. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge. Cox, Michael. 2018. “Understanding the Global Rise of Populism.” Medium, February 12, 2018. https://medium.com/@lseideas/understanding-the-global-rise-ofpopulism-27305a1c5355. Accessed October 23, 2020. Derrida, Jacques. 1988. “Signature Event Context.” In Limited Inc, edited by Gerald Graff, translated by Jeffrey Mehlman and Samuel Weber, 1-23. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Donald J. Trump for President. 2016. “Trump Pledges to Drain the Swamp and Impose Congressional Term Limits.” Press release, October 18, 2016. https://web. archive.org/web/20161126093710/https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press-releases/ trump-pledges-to-drain-the-swamp. Accessed October 23, 2020. Gidron, Noam, and Bart Bonikowski. 2013. “Varieties of Populism: Literature Review and Research Agenda.” Weatherhead Working Paper Series, no. 13-004. Cambridge: Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. Greenberg, Stan. 2016. “Money.” E-mail Message to John Podesta, sent February 4, 2016 at 20:09. WikiLeaks. https://www.wikileaks.com/podesta-emails/ emailid/17478. Accessed October 23, 2020. Heilemann, John, and Mark Halperin. 2010. Race of a Lifetime. London: Penguin. Hofstadter, Richard. [1964] 2008. “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” In The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays, 3-40. New York: Vintage. Laclau, Ernesto. 2005. On Populist Reason. London: Verso Books. Mayhew, David R. 1974. “Congressional Elections: The Case of the Vanishing Marginals.” Polity 6, no. 3: 295-317. Moffitt, Benjamin. 2016. The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Mudde, Cas. 2004. “The Populist Zeitgeist.” Government and Opposition 39, no. 4: 541-563. Peetz, Julia. 2019. “Semi-Structured Elite Interviews with U.S. Presidential Speechwriters in Interdisciplinary Research on Politics and Performance.” SAGE Research Methods Cases. DOI:10.4135/9781526477569.

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Pew Research Center. 2019. “Public Trust in Government, 1958-2019.” April 11, 2019. https://www.people-press.org/2019/04/11/public-trust-in-government-1958-2019/. Accessed October 23, 2020. Politico Staff. 2016a. “Full Transcript: First 2016 Presidential Debate.” Politico, September 27, 2016. https://www.politico.com/story/2016/09/full-transcriptfirst-2016-presidential-debate-228761. Accessed October 23, 2020. —. 2016b. “Full Transcript: Second 2016 Presidential Debate.” Politico, October 10, 2016. https://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/2016-presidential-debatetranscript-229519. Accessed October 23, 2020. —. 2016c. “Full Transcript: Third 2016 Presidential Debate.” Politico, October 20, 2016. https://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/full-transcript-third-2016-presidentialdebate-230063. Accessed October 23, 2020. Rachman, Gideon. 2019. “Populism Faces its Darkest Hour.” Financial Times, January 7, 2019. https://www.ft.com/content/2350acc2-125c-11e9-a581-4ff78404524e. Accessed October 23, 2020. Rooduijn, Mattijs, Sarah L. de Lange, and Wouter van der Brug. 2014. “A Populist Zeitgeist? Programmatic Contagion by Populist Parties in Western Europe.” Party Politics 20, no. 4: 563-575. Saward, Michael. 2014. “Shape-Shifting Representation.” American Political Science Review 108, no.4: 723-736. —. 2010. The Representative Claim. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —. 2006. “The Representative Claim.” Contemporary Political Theory 5, no. 3: 297-318. Schwerin, Dan. 2015. “DRAFT: TPP Statement.” E-mail from “[email protected]” on behalf of Dan Schwerin to “Speech Drafts,” sent October 6, 2015 at 17:50. WikiLeaks. https://wikileaks.org/podesta- emails/emailid/17724. Accessed October 23, 2020. Time Staff. 2015. “Here’s Donald Trump’s Presidential Announcement Speech.” Time, June 16, 2015. https://time.com/3923128/donald-trump-announcement-speech/. Accessed October 23, 2020. Wolin, Sheldon. 2008. Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

About the Author Julia Peetz is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Warwick. She works on questions of political representation, democracy, and performance, particularly in the context of the US presidency and in Anglo-American relations. Among other places, her research has appeared in the Oxford Handbook of Politics and Performance, Contemporary Political Theory, Performance Research, and Contemporary Theatre Review.



Talking Back as an Accented Speaker? Reframing Butler’s Idea of Subversive Resignification Tingting Hui Abstract In this essay, I offer an analysis of the biblical story of the shibboleth incident and Amy Tan’s essay “Mother Tongue” (1996), both of which illustrate how accented speech is manipulated and construed as an act that pref igures violence and mistreatment. I interpret such violence as showcasing Judith Butler’s observation that language is able to act and even act against the speaker. However, whereas Butler understands the wounding power of language as a result of us being constituted in language, which may inflict on any linguistic being, I argue that we are not invariably vulnerable in different languages. I conclude by observing that accented speech, as a case of linguistic survivability, not only challenges Butler’s generalized account of linguistic vulnerability, but also raises the question of how to respond to the kind of violence that exploits precisely the incongruity between body and speech. Key words: accent, body, linguistic vulnerability, speech acts, resignification

Accented Speech Acts Among all the negative stereotypes that plague the image of the foreigner, the complaint about the alienness of the foreigner’s mother tongue is a typical one. In one of his seminars on hospitality, Jacques Derrida compares the foreigner to the sophist, saying that “it is as though the Foreigner were appearing under an aspect that makes you think of a sophist, of someone whom the city or the State is going to treat as a sophist: someone who doesn’t speak like the rest, someone who speaks an odd sort of language”

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(Derrida 2000, 5). The mother tongue of the foreigner is seen as a linguistic veil that isolates the speaker and masks his or her transparency. At the same time, to be a foreigner means to uproot the mother tongue and graft it onto a new language. The non-native accent, as a symptom of “transplant rejection,” thus appears as a “defensive reaction” of a tongue whose “immune system” alerts the speaker to the invasion of alien and potentially harmful substances. Thus, to the foreigner, the accented tongue is at once the veil and the revealer, the protection and the obstacle. One of the definitions of “accent” given in the Oxford English Dictionary reads: “A way of pronouncing a language that is distinctive to a country, area, social class, or individual.”1 Accent is, above all, a manner of speaking and a style of pronunciation that works at grammatical, phonetic, and prosodic levels. It can concern the infelicitous dropping of a syllable, an uncommon choice of words, or the idiosyncratic execution of the intonation and melody of a sentence. It can be a social marker, a geographical revelation, and an unwitting confession of one’s origin. Do we not sometimes arrive at certain opinions – after detecting someone’s accent – about a person’s education, social class, country of origin, and even sexuality (for instance, in the case of the so-called “gay lisp”)? Accent betrays the speaker: it gives more information than what the speaker provides or intends to provide. Accent makes audible the ruling norms, melodies, and discourses: often perceived as a linguistic deviation, an accent offers a “convenient” pretext for stereotyping and discriminating against someone. Here we are no longer dealing with accent in a purely linguistic sense. We are hurled into the everyday where accent loosely refers to any verbal feature that fails to conform to the ruling norms or to satisfy implicit expectations. “Every person has an accent,” legal scholar Mari J. Matsuda states in her article about accent and antidiscrimination laws. “Yet, in ordinary usage, we say a person ‘has an accent’ to mark difference from some unstated norm of non-accent, as though only some foreign few have accents” (Matsuda 1991, 1330). In this sense, having an accent means being unlike someone else, someone “normal,” familiar, and mainstream. Accent thus becomes associated with an “illegitimate” and even “pathological” form of speech that results from a speaker’s “incomplete” acquisition of a certain language. In the contemporary globalized world, while the accent of the native speaker is both tolerated and promoted, it is usually the accent associated 1 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “accent (n.),” accessed June 17, 2019, https://oed.com/view/En try/989?rskey=oIzbrk&result=1#eid.

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with a foreign body that triggers concern and hostility. As linguist Rosina Lippi-Green observes in her book English with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States (1997): “It is crucial to remember that it is not all foreign accents, but only accent linked to skin that isn’t white, or which signals a third-world homeland, that evokes such negative reactions” (238, emphasis in original). Compared with other indicators of foreignness (skin color, religion, dietary habits, et cetera), accent, which can remind one of a homeland and a mother tongue other than one’s own, seems to be a more acceptable incitement to xenophobia. Caroline Bergvall and Ciarán Maher’s language-sound installation Say: “Parsley,” first exhibited in Spacex Gallery in Exeter in 2001, for instance, critiques the social and cultural phenomenon of distinguished speech patterns and accents that “brings about” verbal abuse or physical assault. The installation took place in a bare and minimally decorated space, in which a mono-recording of fifty voices saying the phrase “rolling hills” was repeatedly played. Bergvall, compiling twelve poetic pieces of her installations into a book titled Fig (2005), writes in the chapter on Say: “Parsley”: In the culturally pluralistic, yet divided, and markedly monolingual society of contemporary Britain, variations in accent and deviations from a broad English pronunciation still frequently entail degrees of harassment and verbal, sometimes, physical, abuse, all according to ethnic and linguistic background. (Bergvall 2005, 51)

Thus, as Bergvall explains, accent is more than a piece of communicative noise or residue. It constitutes a particular form of speech – which I shall refer to as “accented speech” – that appears to trigger, invite, and even justify acts of hostility and violence against the speaker. In the scenario of a foreigner being discriminated against because of his or her accent, language is not simply a tool ready for use, but almost like an agent, able to act, to get out of control, and even to act against the speaker. Yet what does it mean to claim that one is hurt by one’s own speech? How to understand the susceptibility of the accented speaker to humiliation and discrimination? Is it possible to talk back with an accented foreign tongue? To answer these questions, I will first discuss Judith Butler’s take on linguistic vulnerability and agency, showing that her politics of performativity lays great emphasis on humans’ fundamental dependence on language, which constitutes, for Butler, a “scene of enabling vulnerability” (1997, 2) that makes it possible for a person – when being called a name, for instance – to respond and talk back. Second, I will examine accented speech as a case

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of linguistic survivability, which not only challenges Butler’s generalized account of linguistic vulnerability, but also raises the question of how to respond to the kind of violence that exploits precisely the incongruity between body and speech.

Language Wounds In the introduction to her book Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997), Butler poses the following question: When we claim to have been injured by language, what kind of claim do we make? We ascribe an agency to language, a power to injure, and position ourselves as the objects of its injurious trajectory. (Butler 1997, 1)

The kind of linguistic injury that here concerns Butler is hate speech, as exemplified by racial epithets, sexual slurs, pornography, and the banning of gay self-declaration in the military. Instead of asking which words wound, under which circumstances, and who gets to decide on this, Butler frames hate speech as showcasing humans’ primary vulnerability to language: “Could language injure us if we were not, in some sense, linguistic beings, beings who require language in order to be?” (1-2). We, as linguistic beings, depend on language. We are able to recognize ourselves through being addressed in the terms of language, which, as a consequence, constitutes the linguistic and social condition of our existence. Butler explains that even when we claim to be hurt by language, we have to do so by using language. Our a priori dependence on language is a linguistic condition which needs to be foregrounded before engaging in any discussion on linguistic survivability and agency. That language can wound and act against us, according to Butler, can be manifested at the bodily level. For instance, the overlap between linguistic and physical vocabularies in words and phrases – think of “tongue-lashing,” “words wound,” or “words cut deeper than knives” – demonstrates that, first, it is “difficult to identify the specificity of linguistic vulnerability over and against physical vulnerability,” and second, that the somatic dimension is crucial to our description and understanding of linguistic injury (Butler 1997, 5). Even though some of these phrases do not explicitly refer to the body, they function to invoke a physical sensation of pain so as to articulate the violence done and assisted by language. However, the interrelatedness between language and body is far more profound than a mere metaphorical connection. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s

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notion of the habitus – which refers to the way that a given culture inhabits and produces the body in the form of ingrained behaviors, habits, and dispositions – Butler understands the body as the site of an incorporated and sedimented history, which not only participates in the social field and reproduces sets of beliefs, but also embodies and normalizes ritualized activities through gestures and bodily stylistics. Butler explains: One need only consider the way in which the history of having been called an injurious name is embodied, how the words enter the limbs, craft the gesture, bend the spine. One need only consider how racial or gendered slurs live and thrive in and as the flesh of the addressee, and how these slurs accumulate over time, dissimulating their history, taking on the semblance of the natural, configuring and restricting the doxa that counts as “reality.” (Butler 1997, 159, emphasis in original)

Butler holds that hate speech provides the occasion where language registers its detrimental force at the level of the body. Indeed, hate speech produces a culturally stylized and historically crafted body, whose limbs and spine have to become bent and unnatural so as to stand in stark contrast to the “natural” and “normative” body, and to reinforce the distinction between what culture and society deem proper and improper. While acknowledging the capacity of social conventions to animate and reproduce the body, whose obviousness, naturalness, and predictability become effects of the incorporation of social norms and rituals, Butler nonetheless criticizes Bourdieu’s understanding of the bodily habitus as conservative and limiting because it overlooks the fact that the discursive formation of the body is not always successful. Butler argues that Bourdieu fails to address what happens when an interpellation misses its target, a possible scenario which she develops as follows: If that constitution fails, a resistance meets interpellation at the moment it exerts its demand; then something exceeds the interpellation, and this excess is lived as the outside of intelligibility. This becomes clear in the way the body rhetorically exceeds the speech act it also performs. (Butler 1997, 155)

Indeed, this excess points to Butler’s view of the body as irreducible and even incongruous to its statement and intention. In other words, the body can say something other than what it intends, and do something different from what it says. As Butler points out, her understanding of the bodily

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excess is influenced by Shoshana Felman, who, in her book The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages (2003), formulates the relation between speech and body as scandalous. Both for Butler and for Felman, it is futile to assume and expect a person to know and act in accordance with his or her words in a consistent fashion. What tends to scandalize the performance of the speech act is not only an intentional breach of the principle of sincerity, but also the fact that the body “as bearing unconscious fantasy” cannot be fully staged and known in speech and language (Butler 2003, 119). Tying her reflection on speech and body to hate speech, Butler proposes that the key to countering the wounding force of hate speech is to realize that the speaking body, insofar as it implicates the unconscious, cannot foreclose the gap between meaning and intention, and between speech and act. Furthermore, the addressee can respond to the injurious name-calling precisely by deploying the openness of meaning and by foregrounding the incommensurability between the name itself and the person being named. In Excitable Speech (1997), Butler does not give any example that would illustrate the addressed body’s subversive response at the scene of being called a name. However, in an interview with Gary A. Olson and Lynn Worsham, Butler does mention such a response. She says: I remember once walking on a street in Berkeley and some kid leaned out of a window and asked, “Are you a lesbian?” Just like that. I replied, “Yes, I am a lesbian.” I returned it in the affirmative. … To the extent that I was able very quickly to turn around and say, “Yes, I am a lesbian,” the power of my interrogator was lost. My questioner was then left in a kind of shock, having heard somebody gamely, proudly take on the term – somebody who spends most of her life deconstructing the term in other contexts. It was a very powerful thing to do. It wasn’t that I authored that term: I received the term and gave it back; I replayed it, reiterated it. (Olson and Worsham 2020, 760)

Butler’s politics of performativity, in a way, can be construed as the performativity of the body, which accentuates the capacity of the addressed body to resist the temptation of lending itself to incorporating the injurious and interpellative call, but instead restages, confounds, and subverts the hate speech by resignifying and misappropriating it for one’s own purpose. Butler stresses that using the term “lesbian” affirmatively is not tantamount to authorizing the term. In this way, she makes it clear that her politics of performativity is not predicated on a sovereign subject whose

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speech act can be considered authorized, original, and inaugural. Instead, she envisions both the speaker and the addressee as actors who neither write the script nor originate the performance of words and actions; they belong to the category of what she calls postsovereign subjects, whose agency is delimited and derivative from the outset. However, before celebrating the kind of linguistic agency that does not rest on sovereignty, I want to ask: if, for Butler, the unconscious body promises the disjunction between speech and act, which makes it possible to diffuse and counter the injurious force of hate speech, how does one respond to the kind of violence that exploits precisely the incongruity between body and speech, i.e., violence “triggered” by accented speech?

Performative Contradiction It is said in Judges 12:6 that around the eleventh century B.C.E., after the inhabitants of Gilead defeated the tribe of Ephraim, the Gileadites who guarded the fords of the Jordan forced people who attempted to cross to say “shibboleth.” Because of the phonetic difference in the pronunciation of / sh/, those who pretended to be Gileadites were quickly identified; forty-two thousand Ephraimites were killed at the passages of the Jordan (Speiser 1942, 85). The word “shibboleth” originally derives from the Hebrew word shibbolét, which literally means “river, stream, ear of grain, olive twig” (Derrida 2005, 22). However, in the biblical story, the word “shibboleth” is relevant not as a linguistic sign that signifies a corresponding referent, but as a code word which indexes the differences of the speaking body. It renders the speaking body as either congruous or incongruous with the intended sound, making life and death a matter of lip and tongue gymnastics. The shibboleth test provides an extreme case of accent as a gatekeeper which determines the survivability of the speaker. In everyday life, accent, together with the speaker’s particular ethnicity, still functions to shape the social relevance of that body. In her essay “Mother Tongue,” the American writer Amy Tan describes how her mother, a first-generation Chinese immigrant in the United States, was treated as inferior because she spoke a kind of English that people usually labeled as “broken” or “fractured”: I was ashamed of her English. I believed that her English reflected the quality of what she had to say. That is, because she expressed them imperfectly her thoughts were imperfect. And I had plenty of empirical evidence to support me: the fact that people in department stores, at

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banks, and at restaurants did not take her seriously, did not give her good service, pretended not to understand her, or even acted as if they did not hear her. (Tan 1996, 323)

Young Tan mistakenly believed that her mother’s “broken” English reflected the limitation of her thoughts, yet correctly observed that it made her mother invisible to American society and vulnerable to mistreatment. Like in the shibboleth test, Tan’s mother’s accent was deployed as a marker of difference, which further made her social existence irrelevant and insignificant. Unlike the shibboleth test, however, the scenario depicted above did not rely on a particular word chosen beforehand to identify the speaker. Tan’s mother’s “broken” English was like a voluntary, instead of a forced, confession of foreignness, revealing a condition of the foreign tongue as being not completely at home in the language. Here my discussion about the violence triggered by accented speech resonates with Butler’s view on hate speech, to the extent that these two modes of speech draw attention to the possibility of language to act on and against the body, raising the question of linguistic vulnerability and survivability. Nonetheless, my analysis of accented speech diverges from Butler’s account of hate speech: first, hate speech aims to transform the addressed body into a receptacle of violence, whereas in the scenario of accented speech, it is the speaking body, instead of the addressed one, that is betrayed and stigmatized. Second, these two modes of speech implicate the speaking body in the scene of linguistic violence in an opposing manner. While the utterer of hate speech often employs a mode of address which sounds imperative and sovereign, the accented speaker tends to hesitate and look for words. Third, they seem to convey disparate sensitivities to language and meaning. That an accent has the power to offend people has little to do with the content of the utterance. Rather, it is often the variations in pronunciation, intonation, rhythm, and pitch of the voice that evidence one’s foreignness while causing discomfort. Even though Butler makes it clear that, regarding hate speech, “linguistic injury appears to be the effect not only of the words by which one is addressed but the mode of address itself” (1997, 2), the difference is that in hate speech the phonetic and prosodic dimension of speech does not stand apart from what is said, but consolidates and intensif ies the intended meaning of offensive words. Above all, the rationale for bringing these two modes of speech together is that I think accented speech, in a way, exemplifies what Butler calls “the degraded speech situation” (86) which the addressee of hate speech often

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finds him- or herself in: that is, one has to respond to a speech act which purports to silence the one being addressed and disentitle him or her to the claim of being a proper and sensible speaker. In other words, hate speech aims at portraying the addressee as deviant from social norms, whose response is, from the outset, discredited as illegible, unworthy, and, in a way, “accented.” This complicates Butler’s idea of subversive resignification and misappropriation, for no matter whether the social subordination targeted at the addressee of hate speech is successful or not, he or she, in order to talk back, has to effect changes and transformations in a social context that marginalizes and disregards his or her capability to use words effectively. One example is given by the Russian writer Zinaïda Schakovskoy, who, looking back on her early days in Paris, recalls: Badly dressed, with a foreign accent, and looking younger than I was, I was robbed right and left … In cafés, they would never give me my change. I tried to protest, but my stuttering made my protest ineffectual and only provoked jeers. “She doesn’t even know how to talk and she still wants to complain!” (quoted in Beaujour 1989, 126, ellipsis in original)

Here Schakovskoy’s debilitating stutter and foreign accent are exploited to enforce an unfavorable image of the incompetent speaker and to dismiss her appeal for justice. Even though failure is always a possibility – and the only way to foreclose failure is to relinquish all action – the type of failure faced by the accented speaker, as is the case for the addressee of hate speech, is rather specific: he or she has to respond with a tongue commonly denounced as “broken” and “illegitimate.” Butler is not unaware of the linguistic and social constraints facing the addressee of hate speech. Similar arguments, as Butler notes, have been made by legal scholar Catharine McKinnon, who draws on the example of Anita Hill to show that pornography deprives the addressee of the power to speak in a convincing and authentic manner. In the Senate hearings of 1991, Hill’s testimony about the sexual harassment she faced was received as confessing her shame and complicity. In analyzing this case, Butler says: “This is what some would call a performative contradiction: an act of speech that in its very acting produces a meaning that undercuts the one it purports to make” (Butler 1997, 84). Even though Butler admits that hate speech may result in silencing and stigmatizing the speech of the addressee, she wonders if such linguistic vulnerability is not simply a universal linguistic condition. She asks: “If

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pornography performs a deformation of speech, what is presumed to be the proper form of speech?” (86) By posing this question, she shifts the discussion from “the degraded speech situation” facing the addressee to a rather general reflection on the open and polysemous nature of communication. According to Butler, the testimony of Hill, whose intended “no” was systematically taken as a “yes,” is not at all a unique case; the reversal of meaning is a risk that everyone has to take if one wants one’s voice to be heard. She disagrees with the idea of grounding politics in consensus, which is supposed to be achieved through creating an ideal and proper communicative situation in which meanings are univocal and pre-established. That one cannot know for sure in advance that what one says will be received univocally, is, for Butler, what makes language a potential site of contestation and resistance. Since no one is able to claim total ownership of language, even those whose speech is de-authorized and discredited can cite, restage, and respond to the injurious words so as to create a shift in meaning and context. However, at what price comes Butler’s politics of performativity that insists on the disjuncture between utterance and meaning? By framing the powerlessness of the addressee’s speech to convey and perform intended meanings as a fundamental linguistic vulnerability, Butler disregards the fact that not everyone has equal access to any and all language. The degree of our linguistic vulnerability varies, depending on whether we are dealing with a language we are familiar with or a foreign language (which does not have to be literally foreign – think, for example, of the legal language which Socrates claims is foreign to him),2 and on whether we are socially and politically recognized as being “entitled” to that language or not. The risk of naturalizing the incommensurability between words and meaning, and between speech and body, is that we fail to do justice to those whose linguistic vulnerability is not so much a human condition as it is a discursive construction. It is worth noting that my argument about the constructed nature of certain linguistic vulnerabilities does not imply that such constructions are static, unchangeable, or f inal. Instead, precisely because linguistic vulnerabilities are constructed, we can analyze, restage, and even transform them. However, the process is perhaps not as simple as resignifying and expropriating certain words and names, while hoping that one day 2 Derrida writes that Socrates defends himself by emphasizing that “he doesn’t know how to speak this courtroom language, this legal rhetoric of accusation, defense, and pleading; he doesn’t have the skill, he is like a foreigner” (Derrida 2000, 15).

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the social and discursive f ield will have been recontextualized and reformed. Rather, the task is to give hopefulness a concrete form, by struggling for the right to say what one means and to mean what one says, even if meaning is, in the end, always a matter of negotiation and translation.

Works Cited Beaujour, Elizabeth Klosty. 1989. Alien Tongues: Bilingual Russian Writers of the “First” Emigration. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Bergvall, Caroline. 2005. Fig. London: Salt. Butler, Judith. 1997. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York and London: Routledge. —. 2003. Afterword to The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages, by Shoshana Felman, 113-123. Translated by Catherine Porter. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 2000. Of Hospitality. Translated by Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford University Press. —. 2005. “Shibboleth: For Paul Celan.” In Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, edited by Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen, 1-64. New York: Fordham University Press. Felman, Shoshana. 2003. The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages. Translated by Catherine Porter. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lippi-Green, Rosina. 1997. English With an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States. London and New York: Routledge. Matsuda, Mari J. 1991. “Voices of America: Accent, Antidiscrimination Law, and a Jurisprudence for the Last Reconstruction.” The Yale Law Journal 100, no. 5, 1329-1407. Olson, Gary A., and Lynn Worsham. 2020. “Changing the Subject: Judith Butler’s Politics of Radical Resignification.” JAC 20, no. 4, 727-765. Speiser, Ephraim Avigdor. 1942. “The Shibboleth Incident (Judges 12:6).” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 85, 10-13. Tan, Amy. 1996. “Mother Tongue.” In Mother, edited by Claudia O’Keefe, 320-328. New York: Simon & Schuster Inc.

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About the Author Tingting Hui is a university lecturer of literary and cultural studies at Leiden University. Her fields of interest include literary theory, creative writing, performance studies and psychoanalysis. Her articles appeared in Third Text and in various edited volumes (New Cosmopolitanism, Ethnic Resonances, Tawada Yoko). She has received several prizes and honours, including Young Scholar Excellence Award from the Society for Multi-Ethnic Studies in 2016, and the Honourable Mention of the Horst Frenz Prize from American Comparative Literature Association in 2019.



What’s in a Name? Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and Private Romeo Roel van den Oever Abstract The f ilm Private Romeo shows two male cadets falling in love as they speak the lines of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. While intended as an affirmative depiction of gay love without any homophobia, the film for three reasons has the opposite effect. First, whereas the film’s main intertext (Shakespeare’s play) and key historical context (Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, here read through Butler’s Excitable Speech) foreground the significance of naming desire, no character in Private Romeo actually speaks the word “homosexuality.” Second, the image of two young men kissing is superseded by the primacy of the Shakespearean characters and their heterosexual romance. Third, even if the spectator chooses to ignore these first two reasons and takes Private Romeo as a representation of homosexuality, this can only be achieved by assuming a homophobic context for the portrayed romance. Keywords: homophobia, homosexuality, intertextuality, narratology, William Shakespeare, speech

Authorial Intentions Both in interviews and on the commentary track on the DVD, the director and actors of Private Romeo (Brown 2011) are transparent and of one mind in their conception of the f ilm. When eight male cadets are left behind at a military academy because they did not qualify for navigation exercises, two of them, Sam and Glenn, fall in love. The lovers and the other cadets voice their thoughts and emotions by solely speaking lines from William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet ([1597] 2009), the play they are

Halsema, Annemie, Katja Kwastek, and Roel van den Oever (eds), Bodies That Still Matter: Resonances of the Work of Judith Butler. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789463722940_oever

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reading in class. The film thus combines a contemporary representation of homosexuality on the visual track (two male bodies kissing) and an early-modern declaration of heterosexuality on the audio track (the cadets verbalize their desire as Romeo and Juliet). The dialogue is to be understood as giving expression to, as being instigated by, the cadets’ intentions and feelings. In the words of director Alan Brown: “The actors and I always worked from the foundation of their ‘cadet’ characters. … So the concept, which everyone embraced, was that of teenage boys using Shakespeare’s language to express what couldn’t be expressed in their own everyday language” (Brown 2012b). This concept has three diegetic implications. First, two semi-distinct story worlds are created, each given its own color treatment: the humdrum reality of everyday life at the military academy (standing at attention, eating food in the cafeteria) is shot in bleak colors, while the scenes that depict the developing love affair (with attendant Shakespearean speech) are colorsaturated. Second, one cadet can recite the lines of multiple Shakespearean characters in order to convey a particular motivation or sentiment. Hence, cadet Josh, who acts mainly in support of the two lovers, usually quotes Mercutio (Romeo’s friend), but in one instance speaks as Capulet (Juliet’s father) instructing his nephew Tybalt to let Romeo’s uninvited presence at the Capulet party go unchallenged. Third, a gap between the portrayed actions and the Shakespearean text opens up: the cadets call each other by their (shifting) Shakespearean names, and a raised fist on the visual track is referred to as a sword on the audio track. As actor Matt Doyle says: “The film becomes a very metaphorical tale in certain places. Sometimes the text flips and it’s absolutely miraculous how well it fits, and at other times it doesn’t fit so well” (Doyle 2012). Brown explains (away) this incongruence by positing that adolescents do not yet have the vocabulary to verbalize their feelings: “When one tries to talk about love and passion, about friendship and jealousies, the word comes out wrong” (Brown 2012b). In addition, they respond to events with a melodramatic intensity: “For teenagers, everything is a ‘life or death’ crisis emotionally. So, even though their ‘Tybalt’ (Carlos) isn’t ‘slaughtered,’ in their minds, he might as well be” (Brown 2012b). This explanation notwithstanding, Private Romeo is at times nearly Brechtian in its alienation of the spectator, requiring profound interpretive labor to match up the two story worlds, the cadets and the Shakespearean characters, and the portrayed actions and spoken words. This dissonance is perhaps most glaring regarding the film’s conclusion, which replaces the double suicide of Romeo and Juliet with a happy resolution for Sam and Glenn. The filmmakers decided on this revision in light

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Figure 2  Private Romeo (2011), film still: Cadet Josh (on the right) speaks as Capulet, addressing cadet Carlos as Tybalt

Courtesy of the copyright holder, Agathe David-Weill

of the public discussion on homophobia prevalent at the time of the film’s production. Brown states: We cast the film in the late spring of 2010, and shot it that summer, when the battle over repealing DADT [Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell], the military’s ban on gays serving openly, was still raging, and when mainstream media coverage of the “epidemic” of gay bullying in schools and teen suicides was at its peak. (Brown 2012a)

In reaction to this public attention for homophobia, director and actors wished to tell a gay love story free from phobic responses. As Doyle remarks: “It’s a really wonderful film because it’s joyous, and it’s just about brotherhood and love, and not about the bashing, and not about the hate, and not about the struggle” (Doyle 2010). Hence, when the other cadets at first respond disapprovingly to the sight of Sam and Glenn kissing, this must be chalked up to surprise, anxiety over a changing friendship, and/or individual unease, but not to homophobia. In Brown’s view, the other cadets “were less (or not at all) bothered by the ‘coming out’ of their cadet friends than by how this unexpected revelation and romance affected the group” (Brown 2012a). In short, the filmmakers aimed to present an affirmative gay love affair free from homophobia, with the actions of the cadets being primary and the Shakespearean text merely complementary. To my mind, however, Private Romeo actually achieves the opposite effect. For one, although its principle

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intertext (Shakespeare’s play) and chief historical context (Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, here read through Butler’s Excitable Speech) insist on the importance of naming desire, the film contains no verbal expression of homosexuality. Second, a narratological analysis of the film reveals that the visual representation of two male cadets kissing gets overridden by the primacy of the Shakespearean characters and their scripted heterosexual dialogue. Third, only by willfully ignoring these first two observations can Private Romeo be made to signify homosexuality. However, this homosexuality comes into discursive existence only if the spectator assumes a homophobic context.

The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name To start with Private Romeo’s main intertext and key historical context: both Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell-policy establish the importance of naming desire. Catharine Belsey calls Juliet “a Saussurean avant la lettre” (Belsey 1993, 133), because in the famous balcony scene she ponders the problematic of names. Having fallen in love with Romeo at first sight, only to discover that he is the son of her family’s sworn enemy, Juliet soliloquizes on the distinction between the name “Romeo” and the young man that it denotes: “O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo? / Deny thy father and refuse thy name” (Shakespeare [1597] 2009, 2.2.36-37). She continues: “Tis but thy name that is my enemy / Thou art thyself, though not a Montague. / What’s Montague? … O be some other name!” (2.2.41-43, 45), before metaphorically substituting a rose for Romeo, rhetorically asking: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet” (2.2.46-47). Juliet here grasps semiotics up to a point. She distinguishes between a sign and the object that it refers to, so between the name and the man, the word and the flower, and correctly holds that their relation is arbitrary. After all, there is no inherent reason why a rose should be referred to with the sign “rose”; in principle, any other word would serve equally well. By analogy, the name “Romeo” for Romeo is arbitrary, too, for any other name would do. Juliet overlooks one important factor, though, namely the role played by the larger language community. “Rose” works as a sign for a rose because it has been accorded this function in the English language and is used as such by all speakers of this language. Moreover, the collection of individual speech utterances is legitimated by, and in its turn performatively legitimizes, the overarching language system. If just one person were to employ a different sign for a rose, their utterance would become unintelligible in this respect.

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Instead, a significant number of speakers must adopt the new name for it to become a valid sign and the overarching language system to be amended. To take up the analogy between a rose and Romeo again: Juliet’s command to Romeo to “be some other name” (Shakespeare [1597] 2009, 2.2.45) is unlikely to be met with confirmation by the other members of their language community, i.e., their respective families and the citizens of Verona. Deciding on a different name will thus lead to unintelligibility at best, and social and literal death (Romeo is banished from Verona’s walls, the lovers die at the end of the play) at worst. Immediately following Juliet’s decree, then, “the play at once draws attention to the impossibility of discarding the name” (Belsey 1993, 134). Hearing someone reply to her soliloquy, Juliet asks her audience to identify themselves. Per her earlier request, Romeo responds with the shedding of his name: “By a name / I know not how to tell thee who I am” (Shakespeare [1597] 2009, 2.2.58-59). This namelessness cannot stand, however, and Juliet identifies Romeo after all: “My ears have yet not drunk a hundred words / Of thy tongue’s uttering, yet I know the sound. / Art thou not Romeo, and a Montague?” (2.2.63-65). A similar point is made after Romeo has slain Tybalt and hears from the Nurse that his name brings Juliet sadness. He consequently wishes to excise his name: “O, tell me, Friar, tell me, / In what vile part of this anatomy / Doth my name lodge? Tell me, that I may sack / The hateful mansion” (3.3.114-117). Of course, cutting out one’s name from one’s body is impossible; instead, the act would be suicidal. Hence, while names are arbitrary, they cannot be laid down by the individual, for they are communal in nature. Giving up one’s name therefore implies giving up one’s social existence (Romeo is banished from Verona), in Romeo and Juliet literalized as ending one’s physical life (cutting out a name from a body means killing that body; Romeo’s banishment to Mantua is instrumental in the tragic sequence of events that culminates in the lovers’ double suicide). Private Romeo’s main intertext thus insists on the inescapability of names. Its key historical context, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, adds the particular name “homosexuality” to the equation. The Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell-policy, which was in effect from 1994 till 2011, prohibited American military personnel from engaging in homosexual conduct, the latter including the speech act of self-identifying as gay. In the third chapter of Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997), Judith Butler discusses the performative effect that uttering the sign “homosexuality” thus acquired. She first outlines a paradox underlying Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, namely that in order to install the injunction that military personnel cannot declare themselves to be gay, the military must speak the word itself: “The very regulation in question, must

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utter the term in order to perform the circumscription of its usage” (Butler 1997, 104). Hence, saying the word is not forbidden per se, but only to those who identify with it: “The term is to remain a term used to describe others, but the term is not to be used by those who might use it for the purpose of self-description” (105). Why this limited proscription of the uttering of the word “homosexuality,” Butler asks? The reason is that the military assigns a performative power to the self-declaration of homosexuality. This is not the performative effect that gay activism ascribes to the speech act of coming out: to say that one is gay means to constitute a gay identity, to be gay. Rather, the military conflates the stating of “homosexuality” as a self-moniker with homosexual conduct, the latter in turn being conflated with a single homosexual act: “The military will discharge members who engage in homosexual conduct, which is def ined as a homosexual act, a statement that the member is homosexual or bisexual, or a marriage or attempted marriage to someone of the same gender” (quoted in Butler 1997, 111). Thus, in the context of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, saying “I’m gay” does not so much amount to being gay (as gay activism would have it), but rather entails acting out homosexuality, doing it (repeatedly). In other words, the speech utterance becomes a sexual act. Butler subsequently shows that two further paranoid assumptions cause the sexual act that is the utterance of the word “homosexuality” as selfidentification, to be understood as contagious. First, drawing on a routine homophobic scenario, the self-declaration of homosexuality is misread as an address: “The statement, then, ‘I am a homosexual,’ is fabulously misconstrued as, ‘I want you sexually’” (Butler 1997, 113). Second, in analogy to the homophobic discourse of AIDS as a gay disease, the supposed solicitation that doubles as a sexual act, is taken to be infectious, transmitting the forbidden desire/dreaded disease: “The one before whom the desire under taboo is spoken becomes immediately afflicted by the desire borne by the word …. The word – and the desire – is caught in precisely the way in which a disease is said to be caught” (114). In sum, the American military construes the speaking of “homosexuality” not as self-description, but as a sexual act (speech is conduct) that successfully spreads the seditious desire (homosexuality as a contagious disease). Combining this intertext and historical context, as Private Romeo does, leads to the following equation: uttering the term “homosexuality” as a self-moniker constitutes a sexual act, is homosexuality (Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell); and only “homosexuality” will do, for one cannot substitute another sign for the forbidden name (Romeo and Juliet). Naming homosexuality is precisely what the film does not do, though, for the cadets speak the Shakespearean

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script of heterosexual love. Consequently, homosexuality disappears from the film’s audio track. What is left, then, is a visual track that shows male bodies kissing, but as I argue below, the film lends primacy to the Shakespearean characters and dialogue over the visual representation of the cadets.

Now You See It, Now You Don’t In three ways, Private Romeo suggests that Shakespeare’s play (the film’s audio track) engenders the cadets’ actions (on the visual track) instead of the other way around. First, their reading of Romeo and Juliet is placed before the narrative proper. Employing terminology laid out by Mieke Bal (2017), one can distinguish between the sequence of events as presented to the reader (story) and the sequence of events as it unfolds chronologically in the story world (fabula). Initially, story and fabula seem to fully align in Private Romeo; in other words, the story appears to be told in chronological order. However, closer inspection reveals that the various classroom scenes, in which the cadets read out passages from Shakespeare’s play, in fact disrupt the chronological arrangement of the story. For instance, cadets Josh (as Mercutio), Carlos (as Tybalt), and Sam (as Romeo) sustain injuries when they fight in the basketball hall, i.e., Verona’s “public haunt of men” (Shakespeare [1597] 2009, 3.1.51), yet their bruises and bandages do not show on their bodies in the classroom scene that follows the altercation. With the occurrence of the first of the classroom scenes prior to the film’s title cards, I therefore take them as a pre-narrative site (the reading of Romeo and Juliet) from which the narrative proper springs (Sam and Glenn fall in love). This is also how Private Romeo has been understood in the handful of reviews. In the Observer, Rex Reed writes that, while “trying to ignore the impact it [the Shakespearian dialogue] is having on their lives,” “the two classmates reading the leads begin to take the Bard too seriously and live their roles as star-crossed lovers for real” (Reed 2012). Matthew Cheney takes this idea one step further in a blog post, observing that all utterance in the film is explicitly scripted. He refers to the inclusion of a lip-synch video, “ending with both characters staring like lost children into the camera, as if uncertain what to do without a song playing” (Cheney 2012). To add my own examples: when they do not speak in Shakespearean verse or lip-synch to songs, the cadets either recite marching orders or communicate in adolescent platitudes such as “I like your kicks, man” (Brown 2011). In this manner, Private Romeo highlights that all speech and action (whether it is standing at attention or falling in love) is culturally scripted.

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Second, the plot of Romeo and Juliet is so well-known that it seems to govern the events in Private Romeo rather than vice versa. For instance, in the play, the Nurse is worn-out when conveying to Juliet that Romeo wants to marry her at Friar Lawrence’s cell: “Jesu, what haste! Can you not stay a while? / Do you not see that I am out of breath?” (Shakespeare [1597] 2009, 2.5.31-32). In the f ilm, these lines are delivered by cadet Omar, who in the preceding scene is ordered to do f ifty push-ups and f ive tours around the track. For me, at least, this prompts the thought: “Ah, that’s a clever way to have the Nurse’s weariness make sense.” I thus take Omar’s push-ups to be in the f ilm because of Shakespeare’s play, rather than Omar quoting the Nurse about being out of breath because he has done the push-ups. In the words of Cheney: “The movie must fit its characters into some sort of story that can be evoked from Shakespeare’s text” (Cheney 2012). Third, not only the Shakespearean dialogue and plot developments are leading in Private Romeo, the same goes for the Shakespearean characters. It is strikingly difficult to distinguish the cadets from one another, which hinders what Murray Smith calls the narratological process of recognition: “The perception of a set of textual elements, in film typically adhering around the image of a body, as an individuated and continuous human agent” (1995, 82). In scenes that are often shot at night and/or in dimly-lit interiors, the cadets look and sound alike: male, short-cut hair, either in uniform (military or sports) or bare-chested, all equally adept at speaking Shakespearean lines. Nor does the film use prominent props, settings, or colors to indicate a particularized space belonging to an individual cadet. Not even skin color (six of the actors are white, one is Latino, and one African American) works as a means of differentiation here, for it is not discursively marked. In contrast, it is relatively easy to recognize the Shakespearean characters in Private Romeo, again because the plot of Romeo and Juliet is familiar, and because the dialogue contains numerous indications about the identity of both the speaker and the addressee, e.g., “Tell me, daughter Juliet” (Shakespeare [1597] 2009, 1.3.69). Thus, most reviewers refer to the characters by their Shakespearean names: Cheney opines that “Seth Numrich as the Romeo character is especially winning, though the best performance to my eyes is that of Chris Bresky as the Nurse” (Cheney 2012), while Jeannette Catsoulis writes in the New York Times, “Much better to focus on the tempestuous Mercutio (Hale Appleman, a standout), whose increasing volatility forms the perfect counterpoint to Mr. Doyle’s beaming Juliet and Seth Numrich’s sensitive Romeo” (Catsoulis 2012). Likewise, going over my own preparatory notes for this essay, I f ind Shakespearean names only. This primacy of

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Figure 3  P  rivate Romeo (2011), film still: Private Romeo as a conventional retelling of Romeo and Juliet, with male bodies speaking a heterosexual romance

Courtesy of the copyright holder, Agathe David-Weill

Shakespeare’s characters is embodied in the film’s title, which is Private Romeo after all, not Private Sam. With Romeo and Juliet instigating the plot events of Private Romeo rather than vice versa, the male bodies kissing on the visual track become an expression of the heterosexual romance on the soundtrack. To compound matters, the film’s split between cadets and Shakespearean characters evokes the restriction against actresses in the Elizabethan theater: during Romeo and Juliet’s original run in 1595, women were not allowed onstage, and all parts were therefore played by men. Read in this light, Private Romeo becomes a rather conventional performance of Shakespeare’s play, with male actors playing the roles of female characters, resulting in yet another retelling of that most famous of all heterosexual love stories.

No Homosexuality Without Homophobia So far, I have argued that the filmmakers’ aim to show a gay romance is not fulfilled in Private Romeo: despite the importance given to names in the film’s principle intertext and chief historical context, the word “homosexuality” is not spoken on the audio track; and the male cadets seen kissing on the visual track are upstaged by the heterosexual Shakespearean characters and dialogue. The only way to recuperate Private Romeo’s wished-for portrayal of homosexuality is to willfully ignore these two observations and instead

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read along with the filmmakers’ intentions: cadets are then primary to Shakespearean characters and in control of the Shakespearean dialogue that they utter; and while they never say the word, they mean to refer to homosexuality with their speech. The final point that I here wish to make is that, even if one adopts this double misreading, the result would be a portrayal of homosexuality that is embedded in homophobia, which again goes counter to the filmmakers’ aspirations. If Sam and Glenn indeed elect to verbalize their mutual attraction in Shakespearean verse, this raises the question what motivates them to do so. In the context of the military setting, the obvious answer to this question is that they speak in code to circumvent the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell-policy that forbids the utterance of the word “homosexuality” as a self-moniker. Homophobia thus becomes a key that solves a number of puzzling elements in Private Romeo. For instance, of all the cultural texts about romance, why do Sam and Glenn choose to voice their emotions by reciting a play-text about a forbidden love that is doomed from the start? And if the other cadets are not driven by the feud between Montagues and Capulets, what makes Carlos respond so negatively to the sight of the lovers kissing, and why do Josh, Gus, and Adam violently haze Glenn? Again, how to explain Sam’s worry that dreaming of Glenn will derail his plans of getting promoted to West Point military academy? Without Romeo and Juliet generating the cadets’ actions and emotions, the solution to these indeterminacies is homophobia: the attraction between Sam and Glenn violates the homophobic code of the American military. In this light, the film’s title acquires an additional meaning: Private Romeo is not just the story of a cadet who speaks in Shakespearean lines, but also of a cadet who attempts to keep his forbidden desires private. In the end, Private Romeo is a film about the ineffectuality of authorial intentions: Romeo and Juliet cannot rewrite their destiny as doomed lovers nor change their assigned names; following Butler, the American military cannot forbid the utterance of the word “homosexuality” without giving the term discursive life; the cadets cannot negate the primacy of the Shakespearean script from which they quote; and the filmmakers cannot ignore the intertext and historical context that inform the meaning of their film. In addition to this undermining of intentionality, my reading of Private Romeo suggests that homosexuality comes into discursive existence in relation to its homophobic counterpart. This should not be taken as a plea that we therefore should understand and experience desire outside of discourse altogether, for this would constitute a repetition of the mistake made by Romeo and Juliet (who attempt to escape their names), by the

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American military (that tries to remove a word from the lexicon), by the cadets in the film (who think they can control Shakespeare’s play instead of being controlled by it), and by the filmmakers (who underestimate the impact of the intertext and historical context that their film evokes). After all, discourse preexists us, it speaks us as much as we speak it, and we cannot escape it on pain of unintelligibility, i.e., a discursive death: Romeo and Juliet commit suicide, and the wished-for homosexuality of Private Romeo disappears from view. Instead, the lesson of Brown’s film is that desire is always culturally scripted (Sam and Glenn utter Shakespeare’s lines) and normatively encoded (the homophobia of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell). What is more, desire is in fact generated by iterating and embodying precisely these normative cultural scripts.

Works Cited Bal, Mieke. 2017. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. 4th ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Belsey, Catherine. 1993. “The Name of the Rose in Romeo and Juliet.” The Yearbook of English Studies 23: 126-142. Brown, Alan, dir. 2011. Private Romeo. TLA Releasing, 2012. —. 2012a. “The Courage of Private Romeo.” Huffington Post, February 10, 2012. Accessed January 29, 2020. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/private-romeo_b_1269300. —. 2012b. “Private Romeo: A Conversation with Alan Brown.” Interview by Tom Ue. Film International, May 4, 2012. Accessed January 29, 2020. http://filmint. nu/?p=4653. Butler, Judith. 1997. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge. Catsoulis, Jeannette. 2012. “Shirtless Cadets as Shakespeare’s Ill-Fated Young Lovers.” Review of Private Romeo, directed by Alan Brown. New York Times, February 9, 2012. Accessed January 29, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/10/movies/ private-romeo-directed-by-alan-brown.html. Cheney, Matthew. 2012. “Shakespeare on Screen: Coriolanus and Private Romeo.” Mumpsimus, June 22, 2012. Accessed January 29, 2020. http://mumpsimus. blogspot.com/2012/06/shakespeare-on-screen-coriolanus-and.html. Doyle, Matt. 2010. “Matt Doyle – ‘You Made Me Love you’ at Feinstein’s.” Video, 4:31. YouTube, July 28, 2010. Accessed January 29, 2020. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=25_D9qvxJ0c. —. 2012. “Actor Matt Doyle Talks About Playing Juliet in the Film Private Romeo.” Interview by Larry Murray. Berkshire On Stage, June 5, 2012. Accessed January 29,

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2020. https://berkshireonstage.wordpress.com/2012/06/05/meet-actor-mattdoyle-and-his-take-on-a-male-playing-juliet-in-film-private-romeo/. Reed, Rex. 2012. “Private Romeo: Every Soldier Is a Lover.” Review of Private Romeo, directed by Alan Brown. Observer, February 8, 2012. Accessed January 29, 2020. https://observer.com/2012/02/private-romeo-and-juliet-rex-reed-seth-numrich/. Shakespeare, William. 2009. Romeo and Juliet. Edited by Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. New York: Simon & Schuster. First published 1597. Smith, Murray. 1995. Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

About the Author Roel van den Oever is assistant professor of English literature at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is the author of Mama’s Boy: Momism and Homophobia in Postwar American Culture (Palgrave Macmillan 2012).



Rethinking Counseling from a Relational Perspective From Alleviating Suffering to “Becoming Human” Carmen Schuhmann

Abstract Counseling practices are guided by an aspiration to alleviate suffering and enhance well-being of clients. This entails a focus on minimizing vulnerability to others and on preservation from injury and violation. In the work of Judith Butler, too, there is a strong focus on the ethical importance of alleviating suffering, more precisely suffering related to oppression and social exclusion. Butler, however, also stresses the ethical limitations of attempting to preserve ourselves from injury and violation, in relation to her view that human beings are implicated and intertwined in each other’s existence. An exploration of how this perspective resonates in the domain of counseling suggests that the practice of ethical counseling may benefit from rethinking the aim of counseling in terms of “becoming human.” Keywords: counseling, psychotherapy, vulnerability, suffering, becoming (in)human

Counseling, Address, Account This essay grew partly out of my struggle with the ethical issues that I faced when working as a criminal justice counselor (Schuhmann 2015, 24): How should I respond to stories that are both stories of crime and stories of suffering? Is it appropriate to aim at alleviating the suffering of someone who has harmed others? And how do I react when I suspect that an offender is lying to me in order to evoke my sympathy? When I

Halsema, Annemie, Katja Kwastek, and Roel van den Oever (eds), Bodies That Still Matter: Resonances of the Work of Judith Butler. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789463722940_schuhmann

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got to know Judith Butler’s work – by then I was no longer working as a counselor – I felt that it offered relevant clues for addressing these questions. I found it helpful to read that responding ethically to a story does not require an evaluation of the “truth” of that story. I was also struck by the notion that recognizing someone is not so much related to knowing the other as it is to realizing that the other cannot be fully known. An especially thrilling – but also puzzling – idea in Butler’s work in relation to counseling concerns the place of vulnerability and suffering in life, as this requires rethinking the aim of counseling altogether. If, as relational beings, we cannot completely avoid vulnerability and suffering, then the notion that vulnerability and suffering are problems to be solved in counseling no longer holds. In this essay, I explore how some of Butler’s ideas resonate in the domain of counseling. I want to emphasize here that I take some freedom in applying Butler’s terminology and ideas to this domain: I interpret some of her concepts and ideas rather freely when exploring how these may inform a critical ethical perspective on counseling. In addition, for the sake of readability, I will use the terms counseling and (psycho)therapy interchangeably as there are no unambiguous criteria for distinguishing between psychotherapy and counseling (McLeod 2003, 8). I will generally use the term counseling to denote counseling and/or psychotherapy since counseling is associated with humanist traditions (Hansen, Speciale, and Lemberger 2014, 173) and, as I will argue below, developing an ethical critique of humanistic approaches to therapy requires particular elaboration. A suitable starting point for understanding counseling is the description of counseling as a practice that “takes place when someone who is troubled invites and allows another person to enter into a particular kind of relationship with them” (McLeod 2003, 15). In this light, Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself (2005) seems particularly promising for the purpose of developing an ethical critique of the practice of counseling. Butler in part elaborates on the question of what an ethical way of addressing another person entails and critically explores ethical aspects of giving an account of oneself to someone else, which, following John McLeod’s description, are central elements in counseling practice. First, there is the initial address – the “invitation” – of the counselor by the client that initiates the counseling process. Then, during counseling, the counselor addresses the client, and clients usually respond by giving an account of themselves. Butler’s critical considerations about addressing someone and giving an account therefore seem particularly relevant and useful for further exploring ethical issues in the practice of counseling.

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Ethical Reflections on Counseling from Within the Field Practices in general, and counseling practices in particular, are guided by an aspiration towards certain “goods” (MacIntyre 2007, 173). Any approach to counseling represents a moral vision of what is good for people and of how they may achieve having a good life (Christopher 1996, 18). Ethical reflection on a practice concerns, above all, reflecting on the goods that practitioners aim to contribute to. In the case of therapy and counseling, this good is generally understood in terms of alleviation of suffering (Gantt, 2000). Because of this focus on easing the client’s pain, on fostering the well-being of the client, counseling may well be considered a noble and nonviolent enterprise. Obviously, this is too simple an assertion. The humanistic perspective, for instance, emphasizes the potentially dehumanizing consequences when, in therapy, experiences and behaviors of clients are diagnosed and treated in terms of impersonal processes – whether these processes are cognitive, neurochemical, or stimulus and response (Cooper 2007, 11-12). The critique is that, when people are captured in impersonal, preconceived frameworks, they are easily objectified. Humanistic counselors point to the ethical importance of embracing a “spirit of antireductionism,” reflecting the assumption that human experiences and behaviors cannot be reduced to specific components or descriptions (Hansen, Speciale, and Lemberger 2014, 172). This involves recognizing the uniqueness of each person and engaging with clients in an appreciative way (Cooper 2009, 120-21). Over the last decades, a new line of critique has emerged in the domain of counseling, one that questions the ethical foundation of the main schools of thought in therapy, including the humanistic approach. Feminist therapists were probably the first to structurally challenge the benign view of therapy as a beneficial, nonviolent practice (Brown 1994; Miller 1987), arguing that therapy may well function as a means of oppression, particularly for women. When problems that people face in their lives are attributed to inadequate psychological functioning, the relation to oppressive societal structures is often overlooked. The increasing influence of postmodernism and social constructionism in the domain of therapy has reinforced feminist critique. Postmodern approaches to therapy (e.g. Anderson 1997; McNamee and Gergen 1992) emphasize that supporting a client’s well-being has a political dimension: who decides what counts as well-being and what counts as a legitimate way of achieving well-being? When this political dimension is left out of the picture, therapy risks becoming a site of oppression where dominant mental health norms are constantly reproduced.

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Mirrors, Transparency, and “Ethical Violence” in Counseling The ethical notion that counselors should embrace a spirit of antireductionism, as brought up in humanistic approaches to counseling, can be related to Butler’s understanding of recognition. Rethinking Hegel’s concept of recognition, Butler writes: In a sense, the ethical stance consists, as Cavarero suggests, in asking the question “Who are you?” and continuing to ask it without any expectation of a full or final answer. The other to whom I pose this question will not be captured by any answer that might arrive to satisfy it. (Butler 2005, 43)

In this view, an ethical address involves both recognizing the alterity of the other and fostering the desire to know the other. This relates to the humanistic ethics of antireductionism: counselors who embrace a “spirit of antireductionism” refrain from reducing clients to what they as counselors know about them. They work from a desire to empathically engage with the client, a desire that is not and cannot be resolved by any answer the client gives. The ethical task of the counselor is to keep this desire alive.1 Besides supporting the antireductionist ethics, however, Butler’s ideas concerning recognition also raise critical points. In humanistic counseling, the counselor facilitates processes of growth through maintaining a certain attitude towards clients. The crucial aspect of this attitude is congruence, a state of being in which we “represent our self and our self-experiences just as we experience them” (Mearns and Thorne 2007, 63). The idea is that, if the therapist is congruent, clients will eventually become congruent as well and drop the masks they use to protect their “true selves:” “The counsellor is giving herself as a mirror to her client” (Mearns and Thorne 2007, 91). Carl Rogers, founding father of humanistic therapy, emphasizes the importance of “clarity of the mirror” (1986, 376). This is reminiscent of what Butler describes as “the tacit operation of the mirror in Hegel’s concept of reciprocal recognition” (Butler 2005, 41). According to Butler, we need to be cautious when transparency and mirrors come into play in ethics, since they deny “our shared, invariable and partial blindness about ourselves” (Butler 2005, 41). In humanistic counseling, the client’s well-being is evaluated in terms 1 Unlike Butler’s work, the ideas of Emmanuel Levinas have been used to philosophically underpin ethical reflections in the domain of psychology. These reflections concern the importance of honoring the alterity of the “Other” in psychotherapy and counseling, and, more in general, psychology (Gantt 2000; Sayre 2005; Dueck and Goodman 2007; Cooper 2009; Harrist and Richardson 2011).

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of transparency, as is the quality of the counselor’s way of addressing the client. Humanistic therapies might therefore even be understood as involving what Butler calls “ethical violence,” i.e., in the name of ethics – here, in the name of clients’ well-beings – asking someone to become transparent, to give a transparent account of who they are (see also Adams 2010). In counseling approaches that are influenced by postmodern thought, the notion of transparency has a more ambiguous position. Narrative therapy, for instance, an approach which draws on narrative psychology and on postmodern ideas (in particular ideas by Michel Foucault), stresses that therapists are not fully transparent to themselves. This opacity is related to their inevitable entanglement in dominant discourses. In particular, their practices may well have oppressive aspects that they cannot completely account for: If we accept that we are simultaneously undergoing the effects of power and exercising power over others, then we are unable to take a benign view of our practices. Nor are we simply to assume that our practices are primarily determined by our motives, or that we can avoid all participation in the field of power/knowledge through an examination of such personal motives. (White and Epston 1990, 29)

This quote reflects Butler’s notion of “our shared, invariable and partial blindness about ourselves” (2005, 41) and undermines the idea of self-transparency that is prominent in humanistic therapies. Still, in postmodern and humanistic therapies alike, blindness or opacity is, above all, perceived as an impediment to ethical practice. In the case of narrative therapy, counselors cannot avoid all participation in the field of power/knowledge, but they can – and as postmodern therapists, they should – through critical self-monitoring minimize the chance of “blindly” participating in oppressive structures that are damaging to a client’s well-being (Payne 2006, 22). In other words, an ethical approach to clients requires a movement of the therapist towards self-transparency. So, although postmodern therapies do not involve the potential “ethical violence” of urging clients to become transparent, ethical practice is still associated with forever moving in the direction of transparency rather than embracing opacity.

Towards a Relational Perspective on Counseling The association of ethical practice with transparency is obviously not restricted to the practice of counseling. More generally, the ethical notion

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of taking responsibility is usually associated with self-transparency, with giving a “truthful” account of one’s actions. Butler, in contrast, develops a perspective in which a lack of transparency is not necessarily ethically problematic, and even becomes a central notion in ethics. She links opacity to a view of human beings as relational creatures, as she argues that others are implicated and intertwined in our existence in various ways that we cannot give a full account of. For instance, we cannot be held accountable for the stories that we tell about our birth and early infancy, stories that we heard from those who cared for us at the time and that we cannot verify: If we are formed in the context of relations that become partially irrecoverable to us, then that opacity seems built into our formation and follows from our status as beings who are formed in relations of dependency. (Butler 2005, 20)

Butler also points out the impossibility of capturing our bodily exposure to others in narrative form, and the social norms that are not of our making (but that we necessarily recur to when giving an account of ourselves). So, due to our relationality we cannot fully or definitively know or account for who we are, which makes us, to some extent, foreign and opaque to ourselves. For Butler, this is not ethically problematic but rather the starting point of ethics: “I find that my very formation implicates the other in me, that my own foreignness to myself is, paradoxically, the source of my ethical connection with others” (2005, 84). In this light – seeing people as inextricably implicated in each other’s existence – Butler asks what the ethical meaning of injury inflicted by others entails. Injury and violation are part of our emergence as a subject: we come into being through an unwilled, unchosen, overwhelming impingement by “the Other.” One way to react to such experiences of injury and violation would be to attempt to become invulnerable, to preserve ourselves from injury by avoiding exposure to others. According to Butler, though, such a quest for invulnerability is doomed to fail. As relational beings, we are necessarily exposed to one another and vulnerable to each other: “None of us is fully bounded, separate, but rather we are in our skins, given over, in each other’s hands, at each other’s mercy” (Butler 2005, 101). Moreover, Butler argues that a quest for invulnerability is ethically problematic as it leads to walling ourselves off from others: “One of the problems with insisting on self-preservation as the basic of ethics is that it becomes a pure ethics of the self, if not a form of moral narcissism” (Butler 2005, 103).

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These considerations by Butler resonate with critical remarks in the field of psychology concerning the danger of moral narcissism inherent in mainstream psychological theories (Goodman, Dueck, and Langdal 2010, 668-669). It is argued that these theories both arise from and contribute to a discourse of separate self and self-sufficiency, in which others are in the first place perceived as potential threats to the self (idem, 668). Accordingly, therapeutic approaches generally reflect and perpetuate a discourse of a separate self: “As clinicians we are trained to relate to the others in our client’s lives as issues” (Sayre 2005, 39). In particular, the focus is on minimizing vulnerability to others and on preservation from injury and violation. This raises the question of how to theorize counseling as a relational practice in which “others” are not seen as “issues” but as living human beings who are intertwined with and even constitutive of the client’s existence (see also Schuhmann 2016). How may we rethink the “good” that counselors aim for in terms of relational being, and what does this mean for the place of vulnerability, injury, and violation in counseling? Again, I turn to the work of Butler in search for answers.

“Becoming Human” in Counseling I mentioned before that the “good” that counselors aim to contribute to is generally understood as alleviation of the client’s suffering and fostering the client’s well-being. It obviously makes moral sense to promote the well-being of clients who feel overwhelmed by problems. In Butler’s work, too, there is a strong focus on the ethical importance of alleviating suffering, more precisely suffering induced by oppression and social exclusion. The relational perspective that she advocates, however, also entails that not all suffering can or even should be alleviated. This suggests that the concept of well-being, that is so central in counseling, may require reconsideration, since the conventional notion of (individual) well-being that comprises an avoidance of injury and violation is both unattainable and ethically problematic. Maybe we even need to replace the notion of well-being altogether and use different terminology when describing the ethical aim of counseling in a relational perspective. In Butler’s ethical thinking, the term “well-being” does not occur. Terminology that she does use, following Theodor Adorno, is that of “becoming human” and “becoming inhuman.” I will explore how these terms resonate in the context of counseling. Here I want to stress once more that this involves a rather free application and interpretation of Butler’s terminology and ideas.

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Butler relates the terms “becoming human” and “becoming inhuman” to the ways in which we respond to injury and violation. She describes becoming inhuman as the ultimate consequence of striving for invulnerability and self-assertion: “One seeks to preserve oneself against the injuriousness of the other, but if one were successful at walling off oneself from injury, one would become inhuman” (Butler 2005, 103). I understand this as an indication that, as we are relational beings, when we cut ourselves off from others – including those who injure us – we necessarily lose some of our humanity. If, on the other hand, we resist the urge for self-preservation, then “our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human” (Butler 2005, 136).2 In other words, if our humanity resides in our relationality and our exposure to others – an exposure which is necessarily, at times, injurious – then, in order to remain or become human, we need to develop a way of responding to those who injure us that does not cut us off from them. Butler explains this ethical response, this “willingness to become undone,” in terms of nonviolence: What might it mean to undergo violation, to insist upon not resolving grief and staunching vulnerability too quickly through a turn to violence, and to practice, as an experiment in living otherwise, nonviolence in an emphatically nonreciprocal response? (Butler 2005, 100)

In this light, I understand responding nonviolently to violation as refraining from retaliation and maintaining an ambivalent balancing movement between rejecting injury as outrageous and accepting injury as a necessary implication of our relationality. This view of ethical practice as refraining from confidently rejecting all injury as outrageous is provocative, in particular in relation to counseling. It challenges the assumption that “the good” that counselors aim for should be understood solely or primarily in terms of easing the client’s pain and suffering, and even implies that promoting individual well-being in counseling may sometimes be dehumanizing. Not only can counselors not save their clients from injury, but they also should not try to do so at all costs: when clients are successful at “walling themselves off from injury,” to use 2 These brief remarks on “becoming human” and “becoming inhuman” do not represent the complexity and subtleness of Butler’s explorations of these notions. For instance, the “human” and the “inhuman” are not to be understood as opposites, for the inhuman is implicated in the human; rather, “becoming human” and “becoming inhuman” represent different modes of responding to injury.

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Butler’s words, they may become inhuman. Consequently, ethical counseling practice would require a partial shift from focusing on relief from suffering to focusing on “becoming human.” This raises the question of what this change of focus would mean in concrete counseling practices. What would it mean to “foster a willingness to be undone in relation to others” in counseling? How may counselors invite clients to “become human”? What would practicing nonviolence mean to counselors, to clients? To me, it seems fruitful to elaborate on the theoretical notions of “becoming human” and nonviolence by drawing on (empirical research into) counseling practices. In these practices, indeed, actual people who have faced or are facing actual injury and violation, seek answers and ways to respond to their situation, supported by a counselor. Criminal justice counseling, for instance, seems a promising domain for such a dialogue between Butler’s theory and the practice of counseling. It is likely not coincidental that Butler mentions “institutions of punishment and imprisonment” (2005, 49) in relation to recognition and ethical judgment. In criminal justice counseling, devastating consequences of injury and violation in people’s lives come to the fore, which demonstrates the weight and complexity of the question of what a nonviolent response to injury entails in practice. Butler’s ethical perspective allows for the ambivalence of both rejecting and accepting injury, which offers criminal justice counselors a new perspective from which to address both violence inflicted by and violence inflicted on clients, and thus avoids the image of people being either a perpetrator or a victim that is currently dominant in the domain of criminal justice (Schuhmann 2015, 25-26). In conclusion, reading Butler’s work as an invitation to rethink (humanistic) counseling as a relational practice in which “becoming human” is the central aim, opens up an ethical perspective in which counselors support clients in honoring their relationality in the face of injury and violation. This is a promising perspective for counselors, as they often work with people who suffer from injury inflicted by others. The “humanizing,” nonviolent response to injury and violation that can be derived from Butler’s work is marked by ambivalence, by balancing between rejecting injury and accepting injury as part of relational life. Although such a response involves refraining from retaliation, promoting nonviolence in counseling does not come down to a naïve glorification of injury or to encouraging clients to passively undergo violation – rejecting the injury as outrageous is also part of nonviolent responses. The question remains, in concrete situations, how to put this into practice. What kind of injuries do we accept as the sort of inevitable injury that people, as relational beings, inflict on each other?

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What kind of injuries do we reject as outrageous, and how can we express this rejection if not by retaliating? Butler’s ethical perspective does not offer easy answers or clear guidelines on how to resolve ethical issues in counseling practice. In a way, this is only appropriate, as the aspiration to “become human” does not seem to be something to think lightly of: “As you can see, ‘becoming human’ is no simple task, and it is not always clear when or if one arrives” (Butler 2005, 103). If “becoming human” is a central aim in counseling, this includes ambivalence and opacity in counseling as part of ethical practice instead of as ethical inadequacy.

Works Cited Adams, Matthew. 2010. “Losing One’s Voice: Dialogical Psychology and the Unspeakable.” Theory & Psychology 20, no. 3: 342-361. https://doi.org/10.1177/09593​ 54310362825 Anderson, Harlene. 1997. Conversation, Language, and Possibilities: A Postmodern Approach to Therapy. New York: Basic Books. Brown, Laura S. 1994. Subversive Dialogues: Theory in Feminist Therapy. New York: Basic Books. Butler, Judith. 2005. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press. Christopher, John Chambers. 1996. “Counseling’s Inescapable Moral Visions.” Journal of Counseling & Development 75, no. 1: 17-25. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1556-​ 6676.1996.tb02310.x Cooper, Mick. 2007. “Humanizing Psychotherapy.” Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy 37, no. 1: 11-16. —. 2009. “Welcoming the Other: Actualising the Humanistic Ethic at the Core of Counselling Psychology Practice.” Counselling Psychology Review 24, no. 3-4: 119-129. Dueck, Alvin, and David M. Goodman. 2007. “Expiation, Substitution and Surrender: Levinasian Implications for Psychotherapy.” Pastoral Psychology 55, no. 5: 601-617. doi: 10.1007/s1189-007-0067-0 Gantt, Edwin E. 2000. “Levinas, Psychotherapy, and the Ethics of Suffering.” Journal of Humanistic Psychology 40, no. 3: 9-28. Goodman, David M., Alvin Dueck, and Julia P. Langdal. 2010. “The ‘Heroic I’: A Levinasian Critique of Western Narcissism.” Theory & Psychology 20, no. 5: 667-685. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959354310370238 Hansen, James T., Megan Speciale, and Matthew E. Lemberger. 2014. “Humanism: The Foundation and Future of Professional Counseling.” Journal of Humanistic Counseling 53, no. 3: 170-190. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2161-1939.2014.00055.x

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Harrist, Steve, and Frank C. Richardson. 2011. “Levinas and Hermeneutics on Ethics and the Other.” Theory & Psychology 22, no. 3: 342-358. doi: 10.1177/​ 0959354310389647 MacIntyre, Alasdair. 2007. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Third edition. London: Bloomsbury. McLeod, John. 2003. An Introduction to Counselling. Third edition. New York: Open University Press. McNamee, Sheila, and Kenneth J. Gergen, eds. 1992. Therapy as Social Construction. London: Sage. Mearns, Dave, and Brian Thorne. 2007. Person-Centered Counselling in Action. Third edition. London: Sage. Miller, Jean Baker 1987. Toward a New Psychology of Women. Second edition. Boston: Beacon Press. Payne, Martin. 2006. Narrative Therapy: An Introduction for Counsellors. Second edition. Los Angeles: Sage. Rogers, Carl. 1986. “Reflection on Feelings.” Person-Centered Review 1, no. 4: 375-377. Sayre, George. 2005. “Toward a Therapy for the Other.” European Journal of Psychotherapy, Counselling & Health 7, no. 1-2: 37-47. https://doi.org/10.1080/​ 13642530500087187 Schuhmann, Carmen M. 2015. “Stories of Crime, Stories of Suffering: A Narrative Perspective on Ethical Issues in Criminal Justice Counselling.” European Journal of Psychotherapy & Counselling 17, no. 1: 21-38. https://doi.org/10.1080/1364253 7.2014.996172 —. 2016. “Counseling in a Complex World: Advancing Relational Well-Being.” Journal of Constructivist Psychology 29, no. 3: 318-330. https://doi.org/10.1080/1 0720537.2015.1102109 White, Michael, and David Epston. 1990. Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends. New York: Norton.

About the Author Carmen Schuhmann is assistant professor at the University of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Previously, she received a PhD in Mathematics from Leiden University, the Netherlands, and worked as a humanist chaplain in the field of criminal justice. Her research interests include counseling and (humanist) spiritual care, meaning in life, and existential resilience.



Bridging Conversations “Paradigm Cases” of Dependency in Eva Kittay and Judith Butler Simon van der Weele Abstract Both Judith Butler and Eva Kittay have formulated an ethics centered around concepts of dependency and vulnerability. However, they take these concepts into divergent normative directions. I trace these differences back to the contrasting empirical examples that inform their respective takes on dependency. Borrowing the words of Eva Kittay, I analyze their arguments in terms of “paradigm cases” of dependency. For Kittay, the paradigm case supporting her thought is a person with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities; for Butler, it is a refugee. Drawing out these paradigm cases brings the theoretical tensions between Butler and Kittay into sharp relief. Rather than resolving them, I suggest using the paradigm cases as heuristic devices to examine dependency in actual care practices. Keywords: care, dependency, ethics, Judith Butler, Eva Kittay

“Nowadays, perhaps I no longer see my dependency as dependency, because it has been that way for years. So for me it’s just self-evident, while for outsiders it could perhaps look like dependency.” This is what Annemiek told me when I interviewed her for my research on the meaning of dependency in the daily lives of people with intellectual disabilities.1 Annemiek is a woman in her mid-twenties, who works for an academic 1 “Annemiek” is a pseudonym. My PhD project combines qualitative research (participant observation, photovoice interviews) with philosophical inquiry to explore the meaning of dependency for people with intellectual disabilities residing in assisted living homes.

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institute as an experiential expert and research assistant. She uses a wheelchair and is diagnosed with a mild intellectual disability; she lives in an assisted living facility that offers around-the-clock care. What could it mean, I wondered after our conversation, that such seemingly “matter-of-fact” dependencies no longer stand out to her – let alone bother her? To think through such questions, I turn to debates on dependency and care in and between fields such as liberal political theory (e.g. Nussbaum 2006), continental philosophy (e.g. Butler 2004a), ecophilosophy (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017), disability studies (e.g. Shakespeare 2000; Shildrick 2000), and ethics of care (e.g. Tronto 1993; Kittay 1999). Remarkably, some of these debates still take place in relative isolation from one another. For instance, in the edited volume Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy (Mackenzie, Rogers, and Dodds 2014), not one chapter grapples with Judith Butler’s writing on vulnerability and precariousness. In a footnote, the editors admit that Butler’s work is “highly suggestive,” yet defend their editorial choice by referring to Butler’s “resistance to normative ethical inquiry” (3). Clearly, some work is needed to bring these debates together.2 In the present essay, I will take up some of this work by opening the conversation between Butler and Eva Kittay. While Kittay and Butler both draw on vocabularies of dependency and care, their theories diverge in their ontological and normative implications. I will argue that these differences are brought about by their distinct choices of what Kittay has called the “paradigm case” of dependency relationships (1999, 31). According to Kittay’s theory, the paradigm “dependent” is the person with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities (PIMD), while in Butler’s – as far as I can claim that she uses one – it is the refugee. It will not be my aim to resolve their differences here; rather, I will show how I attempt to render their disagreement productive in my research. To do so, I will first outline Kittay’s and Butler’s respective theories of dependency and their contrasting ethical programs. Second, I will suggest that the differences in their normative trajectories can be explained by their respective paradigm cases of dependency. In the third and final section, drawing on Annemiek’s remarks, I will suggest that the conflicting paradigm cases provide heuristic tools by which to analyze dependency in actual practices of care. 2 There are some notable exceptions to this tendency. See, for instance, the work of Stacy Clifford Simplican (2015; 2017).

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Dependency and Care in Kittay and Butler Kittay’s engagement with dependency and care (1999; 2001; 2011) stems from her critique on liberal-philosophical notions of equality. In what she calls her “dependency critique” of equality, Kittay claims that by holding the untenable presumption of an association of autonomous equals, traditional notions of equality mask the “inevitable dependencies and asymmetries that form part of the human condition,” such as those of children and frail elderly people (1999, 14). In other words, such ideals of equality ignore fundamental asymmetries between persons as a result of inescapable corporeal dependencies (Whitney 2011). These observations lead Kittay to pursue a theory and politics of equality that heed to these inescapable dependencies. Kittay outlines her concepts of dependency and care in the context of her “dependency critique.” She is most concerned with “inescapable dependency,” by which she means dependency that is “unavoidable, either for survival or for flourishing” (1999, 29). It refers to a state of being in which sustaining one’s life hinges on the support of others. For Kittay, such dependencies are principally biological: they are the product of human corporeality. Dependency, for Kittay, is an unassailable condition of humans, emanating from their corporeal needs. This condition can be exacerbated periodically (as during infancy, old age, or illness) or even by particular social circumstances (such as some forms of physical disability), but it is not exceptional. All humans are on the receiving end of relations of dependency at one point or another. This brings me to dependency’s relation to care. Kittay puts it succinctly when she writes that “[d]ependents require care” (1999, 1). A dependent is someone who “cannot survive or function within a given environment … without assistance” (1999, 31). Care consists of tending to the corporeal needs of those who are dependent. For this reason, her remark that “dependents require care” functions at once as an observation and as an ethical demand: “dependents” will not persist without care and consequently, care is their due. Care thus gets linked to dependency both empirically and normatively. Kittay’s work on dependency and care stands in sharp contrast to the work of Butler, who is reluctant to formulate an ethics in terms of a normative program or set of virtues (Rushing 2010; Mackenzie, Rogers, and Dodds 2014). Her restraint in spelling out a moral program is undoubtedly one explanation for her relative absence in current normative discussions on dependency and care. Butler’s engagement with dependency and care is closely tied to her inquiries into the social constitution of subjects, which she believes renders subjects fundamentally dependent on one another. For Butler, denying or disavowing this constitutive link to others, which often

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remains opaque to us, amounts to a form of “ethical violence” (2005, 77). This exploration of ethical violence brings her to question liberal notions of equality – a point of commonality with Kittay. Butler poses the question of equality in terms of grievability and livability, as she asks how norms render some lives more grievable, intelligible, recognizable – and consequently, livable – than others, and expresses concern for a broadening of what might constitute a livable life (2004a; 2004b; 2010). As we will see, Butler turns to dependency to probe the limits of the liberal notion of equality, in search for what Sara Rushing calls “equal existential opportunity” (2010, 292), and Butler herself has called “a more egalitarian set of conditions for recognizability” (2010, 6).3 Butler theorizes the social constitution of subjects in terms of “precariousness,” which became part of her theoretical vocabulary in Precarious Life (2004a). Precariousness refers to the “social vulnerability” of bodies: the inevitable exposure of ourselves to other humans as a result of our corporeal vulnerability (Butler 2004a, 20). Humans, Butler argues, are “beings who are, by definition, physically dependent on one another, physically vulnerable to one another” (2004a, 27). “Precariousness” conveys this condition of corporeal vulnerability and social exposure. In Frames of War, Butler relates precariousness more concretely to human needs such as food and shelter. It therefore implicates dependencies “on people we know, we barely know, or not know at all” (Butler 2010, 14). This is why Butler proposes to think about equality in terms of precariousness: it denotes a relational, corporeal dependency that binds humans together. In this sense, precariousness is “a generalized condition whose very generality can be denied only by denying precariousness itself” (2010, 22). While Butler’s account of corporeal vulnerabilities seems to resemble Kittay’s, the normative cues they take from their respective accounts of dependency fundamentally differ. As we saw, Kittay derives from dependency the normative need for care, as well as a responsibility for caregiving. Although Butler does discern an ethical dimension in the condition of precariousness, she does not provide clear-cut normative directives, because vulnerability potentiates violence as much as care. She merely considers the “constitutive sociality” she describes as a source of ethical responsibility (Butler 2005, 77) – one that consists in the humility of knowing the limits 3 It is for this reason that Ann Murphy locates the contours of what she deems a “new humanism” in Butler’s work, one “that does not aspire to be absolute and immalleable, but that instead honors the contingency and imperfection that mark any attempt to think the human” (2011, 589).

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of one’s self, which is opaque to itself due to its boundedness with others. 4 Butler warns us that “it does not follow that if one apprehends a life as precarious one will resolve to protect that life or secure the conditions for its persistence and flourishing” (2010, 2). Apprehending precariousness does not entail care; and apprehending precariousness is not a given. In fact, care is so closely imbricated with violence that it cannot constitute a basis of ethical conduct (2004a, 31). For these reasons, she is more reluctant than Kittay to select dependency as a normative starting point.

Paradigm Cases of Dependency In spite of the resonances between their vocabularies of dependency, then, Kittay and Butler ultimately diverge in the direction their ethics take. How do such similar starting points lead to such different conclusions? To explore this question, I turn to what Kittay calls her “paradigm case of a dependency relationship” (1999, 31): the “limit case” of extreme dependency she uses to theorize dependency. While Kittay presents her paradigm case as an abstraction, I believe it actually contains a clear empirical example, or what Lolle Nauta would call an “exemplary situation” (1984, 365): an empirical reference point that informs philosophical thought but tends to remain implicit (see also Mol 2008). Moreover, I believe Butler’s argument to contain one, too. My claim is that different paradigm cases – a person with PIMD for Kittay, a refugee for Butler – lead them to contrasting normative conclusions. In Kittay’s paradigm, a dependent is someone who fully relies on the support of others for survival (1999, 30). Dependency thus precludes reciprocity in the paradigm case. This is not to say that dependency necessarily implies a one-sided care relationship: Kittay acknowledges that many actual dependency relations are reciprocal to some degree. It is also not to say that Kittay is unaware of the skewed power dynamics in relations of dependency; in fact, she discusses them in detail in Love’s Labor (1999, 33-34). However, in much of her work, the focus lies not on the trouble of care but on its necessity.5 She developed her paradigm case to underline the need for grappling with dependency of those “who are incapable of meeting their own needs” (2002, 241). It thus serves as a blueprint of care relationships. While Kittay admits that actual care relationships can and do diverge from her blueprint in 4 5

This thesis is developed in full in Giving an Account of Oneself (Butler 2005). See Simplican (2015) for an illustration of this tendency.

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practice, her philosophical starting point remains complete and one-sided corporeal dependency. “[T]he most fundamental dependency” is then also a kind of helplessness, seemingly devoid of agency (Kittay 1999, xiii). While Kittay appears to push dependency to its philosophical extreme here, her paradigm case is no thought experiment – at least not in her own conception. Her daughter Sesha, whose PIMD entails “total dependence” (2011, 52; 2009), served as inspiration. Sesha, Kittay writes, is “a sparkling young woman, with a lovely disposition,” and also “very significantly incapacitated, incapable of uttering speech, of reading or writing, of walking without assistance, or, in fact, doing anything for herself without assistance” (2011, 51). If Sesha is whom Kittay has in mind when she theorizes dependency, her reading of the concept is unsurprising: as she highlights total helplessness, she is thinking of her own daughter with PIMD, whose survival and flourishing are in the hands of those who care for her. For Kittay, the idea that “dependents require care” is more than an observation: it is a normative position, anchored by her desire to see her daughter’s humanity recognized in care practices. If the paradigm case informing Kittay’s normative understanding of dependency is her daughter with PIMD, I contend that Butler’s more hesitant stance is informed by a different exemplary situation, which I tentatively call Butler’s paradigm case of dependency. For clues, I turn to “Bodies That Still Matter,” a lecture delivered by Butler in 2017,6 and to her contribution to this volume of the same title. In both, she develops her notions of dependency and care in contradistinction to what she calls “a politics of vulnerability or a politics of care” (Butler 2021, 178).7 Butler hesitates to endorse such a politics, due to two interrelated concerns. First, Butler signals the paternalism inherent in care, which always threatens to erase the agency of those who are (made) dependent. Second, she draws attention to the structural conditions that render some more dependent on care than others. For these reasons, Butler will not vouch for Kittay’s claim that “dependents require care.” Instead, Butler emphasizes the moral ambiguity of care, as the unequal distribution of the need for care is political as much as it is biological, and care can sustain and smother life to an equal degree. “Care is not always consensual,” she suggests (Butler 2017): it can itself become 6 I rely on transcripts I wrote of a lecture recording archived by CLUE+, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. 7 Butler refrains from specifying the authors she has in mind here, but it is not far-fetched to assume she is addressing proponents of an “ethic of care.” At any rate, it seems clear that Butler is tackling critiques levelled at her for unreservedly embracing vulnerability as a political starting point. For one such critique, see Alyson Cole (2016).

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a form of violence and dehumanization and will not solve the “problem” posed by precariousness. Whom does Butler have in mind when she makes these remarks? The examples she brings up are of refugees, who, in the midst of the European refugee crisis, persist and even resist in spite of being subjected to structural conditions of precarity. “Those amassed along the borders of Europe are not precisely ‘bare life,’” she purports, contra Agamben (1998); to consider them merely “vulnerable,” obscures the political dimension of their vulnerability and reduces them to meek recipients of “care” from those who do wield power (Butler 2021, 182). It also serves to occlude the “rage, persistence, and resistance” they enact in the face of their dependency (2021, 181). This drives Butler to explore what might be “unbearable” about being dependent, as our boundedness to one another is rife with ethical ambivalence – it offers the promise of flourishing, but also of destruction (2017). If Butler’s paradigm case of dependency is indeed the refugee, her normative reluctance becomes easier to understand. In her account, the salient feature of dependency is not its inevitability, but its contingency. In the lecture, she said: “[w]hether a body that falters and falls is caught by networks of support or whether a moving body has its way paved without obstruction depends on whether a world has been built for both its gravity and mobility – and whether that world can stay built.” (Butler, 2017) Dependency is thus determined and exacerbated by historical and material conditions, rather than only by some fundamental corporeal vulnerability – although this inevitable precariousness still lies at the basis of its contingent intensification. If dependency arises from (and enables) forms of physical and ethical violence, care only becomes available to Butler as an ambiguous ethical concept.

Paradigm Cases as Heuristic Devices In spite of comparable vocabularies of dependency and care, Kittay and Butler propose seemingly irreconcilable ethical programs. I have attempted to show that these spring from their paradigm cases of dependency. Kittay’s paradigm case, modelled after her daughter Sesha, is a person with PIMD, whose total reliance on life-sustaining care and assistance urges Kittay to consider dependency principally as radically asymmetrical, one-sided, and non-reciprocal. Butler, conversely, takes as her paradigm case narratives of refugee persistence and resistance, which implore her to acknowledge the contingent conditions that shape dependency as much as the precariousness inherent to corporeal vulnerability. Their respective paradigm cases push

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these authors into conflicting normative stances: Kittay’s paradigm case allows her to tentatively embrace care as an ethical imperative, while Butler’s prompts her to approach care with caution. By opening the conversation between Kittay and Butler in this way, questions about their compatibility arise. Perhaps the most urgent of these is about the status of dependency itself. When Kittay and Butler employ the notion of dependency, to what extent are they referring to the same phenomenon at all? Can “dependency” contain both Kittay’s emphasis on the inevitable and Butler’s emphasis on the contingent? In addition, their respective qualifications of dependency appear to challenge each other. How, for instance, does Kittay’s normative conception of care stand up to Butler’s scrutiny? To what extent does her focus on the inevitability of dependency blind her to modes of resistance and agency in the lives of subjects deemed “dependent” or “vulnerable,” such as in Butler’s paradigm case? And to what extent does her version of care and dependency allow for an analysis of how care might be imbricated with violence, domination, and power? In the same vein, how can Butler’s theory respond to Kittay’s? Butler’s attention for what is contingent about dependency forces her to bracket in some way the fact that modes of self-sustenance, persistence, and resistance in spite of vulnerability are not available to all who are dependent. When do such inevitable dependencies become what she calls “unbearable” (Butler 2017)? Does such a distinction require normative, critical analysis, phenomenological accounts of dependency, or something else? Sustaining these tensions between Kittay and Butler can sensitize the analysis of care and dependency in actual care practices. When, for instance, Annemiek tells me that “nowadays, perhaps I no longer see my dependency as dependency,” I can understand that she has gotten used to her inevitable dependencies, such as her reliance on assistance, her wheelchair, and guide dog. Yet I can also see that in spite of her acceptance, Annemiek can nonetheless experience her dependency as unbearable: when she bemoans the lack of a private life within her assisted living facility, or when she expresses frustration about the many interns who have seen her naked body, she is making a point not about her inevitable corporeal vulnerability, but about how this dependency is amplified and made unbearable through contingent practices of (un)caring. Annemiek’s assertions are thus ambivalent in their ethical appeal. They tell me that “dependents require care” (Kittay 1999, 1), that such care is both necessary and welcome, and can even go unnoticed by its recipients. But they also tell me that “care is not always consensual” (Butler 2017) and that contingently structured dependencies can constitute their own forms

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of violence. In this way, opening the conversation between Kittay and Butler proves fruitful for capturing the complexities of the lived-through dependencies I try to make sense of with the participants in my research on dependency. The paradigm cases emerge as heuristic devices that can be mobilized to analyze how dependency is experienced and made sense of by people with intellectual disabilities. The complexity of these experiences, however, also hints at the philosophical limitations of thinking through only a single paradigm case. When exposed to Annemiek’s assertions, neither Kittay’s nor Butler’s normative stance remains fully tenable.8

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Butler, Judith. 2004a. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso Books. —. 2004b. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge. —. 2005. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press. —. 2010. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso. —. 2017. “Bodies That Still Matter.” Keynote lecture presented at the conference “Critical Theory in the Humanities: Resonances of the Work of Judith Butler,” Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, 5-7 April 2017. —. 2021. “Bodies That Still Matter.” In Bodies That Still Matter: Resonances of the Work of Judith Butler, edited by Annemie Halsema, Katja Kwastek, and Roel van den Oever, 177-193. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Cole, Alyson. 2016. “All of Us Are Vulnerable, But Some Are More Vulnerable than Others: The Political Ambiguity of Vulnerability Studies, an Ambivalent Critique.” Critical Horizons 17, no. 2: 260-277. Kittay, Eva Feder. 1999. Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality and Dependency. New York: Routledge. —. 2001. “When Caring Is Just and Justice Is Caring: Justice and Mental Retardation.” Public Culture 13, no. 3: 557-579. —. 2002. “Love’s Labor Revisited.” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 17, no. 3: 237-250. —. 2009. “The Personal Is Philosophical Is Political: A Philosopher and Mother of a Cognitively Disabled Person Sends Notes from the Battlefield.” Metaphilosophy 40, no. 3-4: 606-627. 8

I explore this thought in more detail in Van der Weele (2021).

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—. 2011. “The Ethics of Care, Dependence, and Disability.” Ratio Juris 24, no. 1: 49-58. Mackenzie, Catriona, Wendy Rogers, and Susan Dodds. 2014. “Introduction: What Is Vulnerability, and Why Does It Matter for Moral Theory?” In Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy, edited by Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers and Susan Dodds, 204-221. New York: Oxford University Press. Mol, Annemarie. 2008. “I Eat an Apple. On Theorizing Subjectivities.” Subjectivity 22, no. 1: 28-37. Murphy, Ann. 2011. “Corporeal Vulnerability and the New Humanism.” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 26, no. 2: 575-590. Nauta, Lolle. 1984. “Historical Roots of the Concept of Autonomy in Western Philosophy.” Praxis International 4, no. 4: 363-377. Nussbaum, Martha. 2006. Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria. 2017. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Rushing, Sara. 2010. “Preparing for Politics: Judith Butler’s Ethical Dispositions.” Contemporary Political Theory 9, no. 3: 284-303. Shakespeare, Tom. 2000. Help. Birmingham: Venture Press. Shildrick, Margrit. 2000. “Becoming Vulnerable: Contagious Encounters and the Ethics of Risk.” Journal of Medical Humanities 21, no. 4: 215-227. Simplican, Stacy Clifford. 2015. “Care, Disability, and Violence: Theorizing Complex Dependency in Eva Kittay and Judith Butler.” Hypatia 30, no. 1: 217-233. —. 2017. “Timing Problems: When Care and Violence Converge in Stephen King’s Horror Novel Christine.” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 32, no. 2: 397-414. Tronto, Joan. 1993. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York, NY: Routledge. Van der Weele, Simon. 2021 (in print). “Four Paradigm Cases of Dependency in Care Relations.” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 36, no. 3. Whitney, Shiloh. 2011. “Dependency Relations: Corporeal Vulnerability and Norms of Personhood in Hobbes and Kittay.” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 26, no. 3: 554-574.

About the Author Simon van der Weele is a PhD candidate at the University of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht, the Netherlands. His work is in care theory, empirical ethics, and philosophical anthropology. His dissertation, which combines philosophical inquiry with qualitative research, explores the ethical ramifications of dependency relationships in intellectual disability care.



Dancing the Image Complicity, Responsibility and Spectatorship Noa Roei Abstract This essay offers a close reading of Archive (2014), an hour-long performance by Israeli dancer and choreographer Arkadi Zaides, during which the artist conducts a corporeal dialogue with audio-visual documentation of human rights violations in the occupied Palestinian territories. I will point to the ways in which the work’s atypical engagement with the mediation of violence resonates Judith Butler’s thought on opaque subjectivities, collective responsibility, risk and complicity. I will further place Butler’s call for ethical responsibility in dialogue with current debates on the production, circulation, and reception of images of violence, both in the specific context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and in relation to more general conceptualizations of spectatorship. Keywords: collective responsibility, opaque subjectivity, violence, spectatorship, counter-visual strategies, Israel-Palestine

In Giving an Account of Oneself (2005) as well as in Precarious Life (2004), Judith Butler theorizes the notions of ethical responsibility and risk in relation to a subject who is not self-grounding, and who can never give a coherent and final account of herself. Butler’s understanding of subjects as fundamentally vulnerable, fundamentally “given over” to each other’s mercy, forms the basis of what she calls “collective responsibility” (2004, 29). Prevalent responses to injury, such as rage or guilt (“bad conscience”), work against such responsibility as they withdraw the subject into narcissism and foreclose the primary relation to alterity (Butler 2004, 29; 2005, 99-100). As an alternative, Butler offers vulnerability to (and risk of) loss as primary tools for “living otherwise” (2005, 100). “Mindfulness of this vulnerability,”

Halsema, Annemie, Katja Kwastek, and Roel van den Oever (eds), Bodies That Still Matter: Resonances of the Work of Judith Butler. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789463722940_roei

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Butler argues, “can become the basis of claims for non-military political solutions, just as denial of this vulnerability through a[n institutionalized] fantasy of mastery … can fuel the instruments of war” (2004, 29). She ends her contemplation on the conditions of accountability with the oft-quoted following words: Perhaps most importantly, we must recognize that ethics requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness, when what forms us diverges from what lies before us, when our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human. To be undone by another is a primary necessity, an anguish, to be sure, but also a chance – to be addressed, claimed, bound to what is not me, but also to be moved, to be prompted to act, to address myself elsewhere, and so to vacate the self-sufficient “I” as a kind of possession. If we speak and try to give an account from this place, we will not be irresponsible, or, if we are, we will surely be forgiven. (Butler 2005, 136)

For Butler, then, being open to the risk of loss by allowing oneself to be undone by others, is fundamental to the practice of ethical responsibility. In this essay I would like to offer a specific elaboration on the concepts of responsibility, risk and loss in relation to the notion of complicity. The loss that I will analyze below is the loss of an ethical self-image, and the Other to which the self is given over in this account will be one’s own repudiated alter ego. I further wish to consider Butler’s call for ethical responsibility in relation to debates on the production, circulation, and reception of images of violence, in the specific context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I will place Butler’s thought in dialogue with the work of visual culture scholars Nicholas Mirzoeff (2011) and Gil Hochberg (2015), who in different ways address resistance strategies to power structures that unevenly distribute the right to look and/or to be seen. Butler’s postulation of becoming undone when facing another, addressed in relation to the politics of the visual, offers a pertinent contribution to existing literature in the field. My inquiry takes place in the form of a close reading; an exploration of Archive, an hour-long performance by Israeli dancer and choreographer Arkadi Zaides (2014), in which the artist dances to sounds and images from the video archive of B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories. Founded in 1989, B’Tselem is an NGO that produces documentations and reports on human rights violations in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip (B’Tselem, n.d.). In 2007, the organization launched its “Camera Distribution Project,”

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Figure 4 Arkadi Zaides, Archive (2015)

Photo: Ronen Guter; courtesy of Arkadi Zaides and Ronen Guter

distributing video cameras and providing citizen-journalist trainings to Palestinian residents of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, where tensions are high and clashes between Palestinian residents, Israeli settlers, and border police are commonplace. Since its inception, the project has proved to be extremely influential, and footage shot by the project’s volunteers played a major role in generating both national and international public attention for cases of human rights violations and abuse (B’Tselem 2017).1 The Camera Distribution Project video archive is available to the public. It grows on a daily basis and by now includes thousands of hours of documentation.2 With the help of video artists Eff i Weiss and Amir Borenstein, Zaides compiled a collection of clips from this archive, that act as visual and conceptual background to his performance. The entire archive of the Camera Distribution Project is shot from the perspective of Palestinian citizen-journalists, and Zaides’ selection is limited to clips that show only Israeli protagonists on screen. This is a crucial detail for 1 For academic studies of the B’Tselem Camera Distribution Project, see for example Stein 2017, Desai 2015, Miretski and Bachmann 2014, and Kuntsman and Stein 2011. 2 A sample of videos from the B’Tselem archive is available online at https://www.btselem. org/video-channel/camera-project.

116 Noa Roei Figure 5 Arkadi Zaides, Archive (2014)

Photo: Ligia Jardim; courtesy of Arkadi Zaides and Ligia Jardim

Figure 6 Arkadi Zaides, Archive (2014)

Photo: Ligia Jardim; courtesy of Arkadi Zaides and Ligia Jardim

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understanding the performance, and it is emphasized by Zaides at the beginning of every performance as well as in every interview. Within the context of the B’Tselem Camera Distribution Project, the Israeli bodies that are caught on camera are typically those of settler youth and border police, filmed in order to document or deter violent encounters with Palestinian residents. Accordingly, the clips compiled for Archive do not refer to the Israeli body as such, but to a specific Israeli body that is, at the moment of documentation, a (potential) perpetrator. In what follows, I wish to point to the ways in which Archive’s hour-long corporeal dialogue with this specific bodily representation resonates with Butler’s thoughts on the ethics of risk and responsibility.

(Dis)Identification: Between the West Bank and Tel Aviv At the start of the performance, Zaides stands facing the audience at the left edge of the stage, that is bare except for a small table with a computer and cables on the left, and two blank screens at the back. Addressing the audience, Zaides offers the following information: Good evening. Thank you for coming. My name is Arkadi Zaides. I am a choreographer. I am Israeli. For the last fifteen years, I have been living in Tel Aviv. The West Bank is twenty kilometers away from Tel Aviv. The films that you are about to watch were filmed in the West Bank. All the people that you see in these clips are Israelis, like myself. The clips were selected from the video archive of an organization called B’Tselem.3

After these introductory notes, the translator leaves the stage, and Zaides turns his back to the audience, fiddles with the computer and switches on the two screens with a remote control. The screens are synchronized: the larger, more central one presents audio-visual footage from the archive, and the smaller, more peripheral one offers contextual information, including each video’s archival number, the name of the photographer, location, date, and short description of the event. The clips vary in quality and content, from an extremely blurry image accompanied by shouts, to a bird’s-eye view 3 The following description of Archive is based on video documentation of a general rehearsal of the performance’s debut at Festival D’Avignon, Avignon, France, on July 7, 2014 (Zaides 2014) and on my own experience of the performance at the Parktheater, Eindhoven, the Netherlands, on September 3, 2016.

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on a demonstration or gathering, to (closer to the end of the performance) documentation of stone throwing, border police actions, the chasing and scattering of a herd of sheep, and the burning of fields. Voices heard in the footage, in Arabic and Hebrew, are left untranslated, decipherable (and distinguishable) in this sense only to some. Zaides approaches the screens carefully at first, positioning himself explicitly as a viewer. Holding a remote control in his hand, he manifests both his distance from and authority over the images, deciding when a clip will be repeated or changed. A few minutes into the performance, he freezes the image, replays it, and begins to move with it as if for the first time, learning the movements of one of the clips’ protagonists. From here onwards, the audience becomes witness to a journey of bodily exploration. At first, Zaides struggles to find exact positions; with time, his movements become more smooth and secure. He follows different figures within every clip, and it is not always clear who is his referent. Most clips are played more than once, and with each replay Zaides absorbs the movements further: he shadows the figures at first, mirrors their movements later, and then breaks free from the screen and repeats the learned movements all across the stage. At times, one could argue that there are multiple dancers on stage, as Zaides’ movements duet with the screened figures, who are themselves choreographed through repetition, freeze frames, and backwards-play. At certain points in the performance, both screens turn blank and Zaides repeats the movements unaccompanied by visual mediation. As the performance progresses, the chosen clips present more overt acts of aggression and Zaides’ reaction is less hesitant and more absorbed, extending also to verbal utterances, echoing calls to “kill him” or “move away, move away!” in Hebrew accompanied by enthused movements. While there are moments of rest, overall tension is built to a point where Zaides breaks into an ecstatic dance, consumed by the movement and sound that he is now a part of. Then, at the very end of the performance, as a sort of epilogue, Zaides returns to his initial viewing position next to the computer, at the left edge of the stage. Panting, he watches two film scenes where the documented figures (settler children in one, a soldier in the other) are aware of, and respond to, the presence of a camera, returning once more the staged situation to the realm of spectatorship. 4 There are various ways in which Archive can be understood in relation to Butler’s critical thought. One trajectory, which I cannot develop fully here, would be to examine Zaides’ gestural repetitions as commenting on 4

For a more detailed breakdown of the performance, see Pouillaude 2016, 83-87.

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the discursive and bodily reiterations that mold the subject (in this case, the Israeli settler male youth) into being. Zaides’ gestural performatives are hesitant at first, but gain confidence and velocity with every repetition.5 Within the course of the performance, they become inscribed onto the body, naturalized if you will, only to spill over and take control, revealing themselves again as foreign to it. Embodiment is apprehended here as an emphatically cultural process of subjectivation in which “collective behaviors and beliefs, acquired through acculturation, are rendered individual and ‘lived’ at the level of the body” (Noland 2010, 9). The body, in turn, is presented simultaneously as “a subject’s most intimate experience, and her or his most inescapable form of public constitution” (Sturm 2014, 20). A second, related trajectory, has to do with the way Archive stages the attempt to give an account of oneself in a layered, relational, and fragmentary manner. Zaides’ initial self-grounding exposition, “I am a choreographer. I am Israeli,” spills over onto his onstage persona, while not completely conflating with it. Neither particularly transparent nor entirely fictional, the singular body dancing on stage is always and already discursively compound (Sturm 2014, 62). This complexity, in turn, feeds into Zaides’ intricate relation with the bodies that look at him from the audience, and with the bodies that he faces on the screen. The seemingly constative and identificatory statement at the start of the performance, “the people that you see … are Israelis, like myself,” is immediately countered by Zaides’ self-positioning as a resident of Tel-Aviv, Israel’s left and liberal hub, at a great ideological (if not geographical) distance from the settler population of the West Bank. The performance’s essence emerges from this contradiction in terms, and foregrounds a narrative of initial disidentification between seer and seen that is gradually put to the test through persistent and active iterations. Shifting between the position of an observing (liberal, Tel-Avivian Israeli) body and an observed (West-Bank, settler Israeli) body, Zaides’ performing figure metaphorically crosses the lines that separate (dis)identification and identity (Butler 2004, 145-146), offering multiple and unstable accounts of the self.6 Significantly, Zaides’ position vis-à-vis the screened footage remains ambiguous: he is both implicated by it, and distanced from it. The crux 5 For an account of gestural performatives in distinction from verbal or discursive ones, see Noland 2010, 21, 194-196. 6 “The one with whom I identify,” Butler writes, “is not me, and that ‘not being me’ is the condition of the identification … This difference internal to identification is crucial, and, in a way, it shows us that disidentification is part of the common practice of identification itself” (2004, 145-146).

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of the performance lies in the straddling of Zaides’ staged affiliation with and curiosity towards the documented bodies, and the latter’s status as perpetrators by virtue of their documentation. This conflictual relation is sustained throughout the performance by the use of the two synchronized screens, so that Zaides’ corporeal study of bodily movements in each clip is never removed from the images’ primary status as witnesses to specific (potential or actual) cases of abuse. The gestures of occupation and colonization are in this way never transfigured into decontextualized, abstract movement on stage. Rather, Archive’s persistent indictment of the violence that is inscribed in the screened figures’ movements, together with Zaides’ evident effort to address himself through their image, epitomizes Butler’s understanding of the ethics of risk involved in becoming undone in relation to others. Staging an intimate and formative encounter with the violent body on screen, Archive vacates the position of a “self-sufficient [ethical] ‘I’” (Butler 2005, 136) and foregrounds responsibility as an emphatically collective endeavor.

Politics of Spectatorship: Engaged Fields of Vision Archive’s contribution to discerning the ethics of risk and responsibility takes place within the specific context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and through a recourse to the politics of spectatorship. Zaides’ gestural reiterations, in their conjectures on subjectivity and selfhood, pull the archival image out of its habituated context of the already-known and already-seen. After all, the presented footage does not necessitate exposure as such: similar images of violence (and often more explicit ones) are frequently present in the news as part of the “international media spectacle of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” (Hochberg 2015, 6). This spectacle materializes within, and contributes to, an overdetermined visual field, involving an extremely uneven distribution of visual rights, in which the Palestinian “condition of radical invisibility [before the law] couples with an extreme inequality with regard to Palestinians’ right to look” (Hochberg 2015, 98).7 “The right to look” is a term coined by Jacques Derrida in 1985 and picked up by Nicholas Mirzoeff to denote “a claim to a subjectivity that has the autonomy to arrange the relations of the visible and the sayable” (Mirzoeff 2011, 474). Within the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the right to look would involve the undermining of Israeli visual dominance, understood 7

For a concise, but poignant, example of such invisibility, see Butler 2004, 35-36.

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as the dominance over the creation, circulation, and interpretation of images (Hochberg 2015, 6). B’Tselem’s Camera Distribution Project, from which Archive pulls footage, offers audio-visual corroboration of Palestinian narration of events in the face of contradictory official military and governmental accounts. In doing so, it partakes in a countervisual practice where Palestinian residents are the ones doing the looking, rather than being looked at.8 Yet even this mode of emancipated witnessing, however necessary, inadvertently takes part in what Gil Hochberg terms the “global project of rendering Palestinian suffering visible” (2015, 115). Hochberg argues that while countervisual practices are necessary in the face of Israeli visual dominance, they nevertheless contribute to an already saturated and mostly overdetermined, even fetishized, visual field (137). This cautious approach to the political promise of the documentary image is reinforced by Adi Kuntsman and Rebecca Stein’s recent study of Israeli social media channels, exposing that the proliferation of images of human rights violations in the occupied territories has led not to a change in Israeli public policy, but to a change in the way Israeli society deals with and manages the “public secret” of the occupation and its effects (Kuntsman and Stein 2015, 14-15, 88-89). Specifically, the challenge that the Camera Distribution Project presented to the general public in its unmasking of daily human rights violations has been dealt with by “a politics of digital suspicion,” read as ideologically motivated and thus instantly denounced (Stein 2017, 61; Kuntsman and Stein 2011, n.p.).9 Hochberg finds promise in artistic expressions that refuse to provide visual evidence, or in her words, “refuse to replicate and render visible a reality that is always already seen through the dominant gaze” (2015, 101). Archive clearly doesn’t fit this description, but it offers an alternative route to circumventing a visibility within which knowledge starts and ends with the gaze of a distant viewer and her settled, privileged political vantage point. In line with Butler’s understanding of the ethical subject as 8 The term “countervisual” should be understood as the visual equivalent to a “counter narrative”; it does not oppose the domination of the visual as such, but the authority of a specific (always and already politically inflected) presentation and interpretation of the visual (Mirzoeff 2011, 474, 476). 9 In different contexts, Butler makes parallel arguments regarding the partial essence of f ields of vision, see for example her interpretation of the Rodney King trial video evidence as one that is embedded within a “racially saturated field of visibility” (1993, 15) as well as her analysis of modes of effacement that occur, counterintuitively, through representation (2005, 147-148; 2009, 63-100).

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one that is given over to others, Zaides performatively gives himself over to the images he faces. His emphatically corporeal response to the footage offers an alternate, entangled mode of image consumption, not through the eye but through the body, not through representation but through re-enactment. The condition of the dominant gaze that, following Hochberg, persists even in cases of countervisual tactics, is challenged here through the metaphorical lack of (physical, emotional, and ethical) distance that needs to be kept in any act of visual interpretation. In reducing the gap between the spectating self and the spectated other, and in accepting the images’ invitation to imagine oneself otherwise, Archive unsettles the spectator’s supposedly disengaged field of vision. During the course of this journey, the audience is not spared; it cannot be, if the aim of the performance is, as I read it, to open up to alterity as a basis for collective responsibility. When Zaides draws attention to his use of the remote control, or when he stands bluntly with his back to the public that is watching his performance, blocking their view, looking with them at the images on the screen, he reiterates their perspective and function. Only later in the show does Zaides’ body interact and then fuse with the documented bodies, undoing the distance between onstage seer and seen; the starting point stages a familiar scene of zapping through bad news. Zaides’ corporeal journey into the screened archival footage is thus not presented to a distant audience, but rather stands for their own involvement with the figures onscreen. In this way, Archive broadens the thrust of its argument beyond the confines of internal Israeli identity politics. It stages complicity and vulnerability as inherent to the act of spectatorship as such, and asserts a “fundamental dependency,” in Butler’s terms, between all bodies present, that has the potential to interrupt the audience’s self-conscious account of themselves, Israelis or not, as distant from the bodies on display (Butler 2004, xii, 22-23).10 By way of denying the (critical) spectator a fantasy of mastery over an image’s dominant signification, which in this case stages the body of the perpetrator as distinct and distant from oneself, Zaides foregrounds his, and his audience’s, accountability. 10 Specifically, with regards to an international audience, Hochberg warns that “not all violence becomes easily visible to external viewers, and that some modes of violence systematically continue to fall out of sight” (2015, 13). She refers to images of non-spectacular, “slow violence” that are part of everyday life under Israeli occupation, and that may appear harmless, completely invisible as images of violence. The visual repertoire presented in Archive combines mediations of both spectacular and mundane violence, advancing a more porous distribution of visual sensibilities in this regard.

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Collective Responsibility: Addressing Oneself Otherwise Zaides’ refusal to distance himself (and, with him, his audience) from the protagonists on stage and on the screen echoes Butler’s understanding of the ethics of risk and responsibility, and answers her call for awareness to “the fundamental sociality of embodied life, the ways in which we are, from the start and by virtue of being a bodily being, already given over, beyond ourselves, implicated in lives that are not our own” (2004, 28). This is done in part through a recourse to the politics of visuality, by means of an aesthetic approach that refutes the notion of a disembodied eye as well as that of a distinct self-sufficient “I” as a kind of possession (Butler 2005, 136). Most poignantly, Archive’s focus on the figure of the perpetrator as part of the social fabric that constitutes the self, underscores the recognition of one’s complicitous implication in mechanisms of violence and their mediation, as a crucial step towards a conceptualization of collective responsibility. Such recognition of complicity, when, and only when in tandem with the notion of an incoherent, incomplete and opaque subjectivity, may circumscribe the debilitating effects of narcissistic shame or indignation, in much the same way as the recognition of an emphatically collective form of vulnerability may circumscribe the debilitating effects of rage or guilt, that would close off to alterity (Butler 2004, 29; 2005, 99-100). In Archive, the body that does the looking and the body that is looked at are both distinct and indivisible; separate and conjoined. This is a staged invitation to open up to alterity, to “what is not me,” not in order to redistribute blame, but rather to give an account of oneself from a position that cannot be comfortably located on stable, distant moral ground. Put differently, the realization of one’s body as socially constituted, and the understanding of the self as always and already given over to others, are underscored in Archive as ethically productive not only when they lead to the refusal to resolve vulnerability too quickly into violence, but also when they engender a refusal to locate violence as categorically foreign to one’s self. In this respect, it is important to attend more precisely to the place of forgiveness within the process of collective responsibility, hinted at by the very last sentence of Butler’s quote cited at the beginning of this essay. When understood in relation to guilt, or bad consciousness, which are forms of narcissism that close off to alterity (2004, 138), the wish for absolution that is encapsulated in the notion of forgiveness seems to “harness and exploit the very impulses [it] seek[s] to curb” (2005, 100). Butler, however, employs the term forgiveness against the grain, and in clear distinction from absolution, as an act of acceptance of one’s opaque, relational, and collectively-formed

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identity, that works against socially enforced modes of individualism (2005, 135). Indeed, following the broader trajectory of Butler’s thought, it is clear that a crucial aspect of the mobilization of non-violent ethics and politics involves coming to terms with the impossibility, even futility, of absolution. Archive’s emphasis on the self as partially constituted in convivial relation to violence resonates this trajectory, and can be understood as “forgiving” only in the sense of acceptance of one’s socially-constituted culpability, devoid of excuse or exoneration. Zaides begins his performance as a viewer of human rights violations in the West Bank, and along the way becomes (stands for) that very image. In between, there is a brief moment where the screen, as a boundary between the seer and the seen, is undone. In this moment, Zaides stands so close to the screen that his body both blocks the view and replaces it, as the image is projected on his back. In this synthesis of the seeing subject and the subject that is seen, Archive points to the vulnerability of any one of us to lose ourselves to perpetrators who seem to be safely positioned “on the other side” of the screen. However somber, I find Archive full of promise, as it opens up a chance, to come back to Butler, to be moved and to be prompted to act, to address oneself otherwise, in ways that are more responsible and less indignant than what the current political vocabulary of the (Israeli) left may allow.11

Works Cited B’Tselem. n.d. “About B’Tselem.” Accessed June 20, 2019. https://www.btselem. org/about_btselem. —. 2017. “About B’Tselem Video.” Last modified November 19, 2017. https://www. btselem.org/video/about-btselem-video. Butler, Judith. 1993. “Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia.” In Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising, edited by Robert Gooding-Williams, 15-22. New York and London: Routledge. 11 This research was partly funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie, grant agreement number 754340. It was finalized during a one-year fellowship at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS), University of Freiburg, Germany. Special thanks go to participants of the conferences “Risking the Future: Vulnerability, Resistance, Hope” at Durham University (2016) and “Critical Theory in the Humanities: Resonances of the Work of Judith Butler” at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (2017) for providing feedback on earlier versions of this essay. I am also deeply indebted to my anonymous peer reviewers and to the editors of this volume for their rigorous comments, and to the artist, Arkadi Zaides for his generous cooperation.

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—. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso Books. —. 2005. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press. —. 2009. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London and New York: Verso Books. Desai, Chandni. 2015. “Shooting Back in the Occupied Territories: An Anti-Colonial Participatory Politics.” Curriculum Inquiry 45, no. 1: 109-128. Hochberg, Gil Z. 2015. Visual Occupations: Violence and Visibility in a Conflict Zone. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kuntsman, Adi, and Rebecca L. Stein. 2011. “Digital Suspicion, Politics, and the Middle East.” Critical Inquiry (online feature on Arab Spring). http://criticalinquiry. uchicago.edu/digital_suspicion_politics_and_the_middle_east. —. 2015. Digital Militarism: Israel’s Occupation in the Social Media Age. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Miretski, Pini Pavel, and Sascha-Dominik Vladimir Oliver Bachmann. 2014. “The Panopticon of International Law: B’Tselem’s Camera Project and the Enforcement of International Law in a Transnational Society.” Osgoode Hall Law Journal 52, no. 1: 235-262. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 2011. “The Right to Look.” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 3: 473-496. Noland, Carrie. 2010. Agency and Embodiment. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Pouillaude, Frédéric. 2016. “Dance as Documentary: Conflictual Images in the Choreographic Mirror (on Archive by Arkadi Zaides).” Dance Research Journal 48, no. 2: 80-94. Stein, Rebecca L. 2017. “GoPro Occupation: Networked Cameras, Israeli Military Rule, and the Digital Promise.” Current Anthropology 58, no. 15 (supplement): 56-64. Sturm, Jules. 2014. Bodies We Fail: Productive Embodiments of Imperfection. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Zaides, Arkadi. 2014. “Archive – General Rehearsal – Festival d’Avignon – 7/07/2014.” Filmed July 2014 in Avignon, France. Vimeo video, 1:09:01.

About the Author Noa Roei is assistant professor at the Department of Literary and Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam. She is a research fellow at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. Her book Civic Aesthetics: Militarism, Israeli Art, and Visual Culture (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016) examines the relationship between civilian militarism and contemporary art in Israel.



Santiago Sierra’s Workers Who Cannot Be Paid Precarious Labor in Contemporary Art Friederike Sigler

Abstract Since the late 1990s, the artist Santiago Sierra has hired people from socially deprived milieus to perform physically exhausting acts. With Judith Butler’s concept of precariousness, Sierra’s controversial artistic practice emerges as an attempt to make visible two central dimensions of today’s working world: work as a technique that either substantially minimizes or maximizes the precariousness of bodies, and the global inequality that is expressed through different modes of work and precarity. Butler’s theory helps to grasp Sierra’s artistic practice and his critique of the modern world of work and at the same time locates possible new forms of resistance. Keywords: Santiago Sierra, precarious labor in art, delegated performance, global injustice

In 2000, Spanish Artist Santiago Sierra was invited to install a solo show at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. For Workers Who Cannot Be Paid, Remunerated to Remain Inside Cardboard Boxes, he recruited six asylum seekers from a local asylum seekers’ home who were willing to participate in his work by sitting inside cardboard boxes for four hours a day during the six-week period of the exhibition.1 Sierra had already worked with this concept twice before, in Guatemala City (1999) and in New 1 Sierra documents his works on his website, see https://www.santiago-sierra.com/20009_1024. php. The exhibition at KW lasted from October 1 until November 12, 2000.

Halsema, Annemie, Katja Kwastek, and Roel van den Oever (eds), Bodies That Still Matter: Resonances of the Work of Judith Butler. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789463722940_sigler

128 Friederike Sigler Figure 7 Santiago Sierra, Workers who cannot be paid, remunerated to remain inside cardboard boxes, KW Institute for Contemporary Art (2000)

Courtesy Estudio Santiago Sierra

York (2000).2 There the participants, mostly illegal workers or people with migration backgrounds, received a salary that was matched to the country’s minimum wage.3 In Berlin, the situation was different. Here, the actors were considered as “workers who cannot be paid.” Due to their legal status and the restrictions of the German Asylum Law, they were not allowed to work – any violation of this law could eventually turn into a justification for deportation (Goerens 2003, 31). In order to remunerate them regardless, Sierra paid them “in secret,” as he noted on his internet page (Sierra, n.d.). 4 2 The artist himself refers to the fact that all three works are based on the same concept. See https://www.santiago-sierra.com/20009_1024.php. The works in the G&T Building in Guatemala City and in the ACE Gallery in New York were titled 8 People Paid to Remain Inside Cardboard Boxes (1999) und 12 Workers Paid to Remain Inside Cardboard Boxes (2000). 3 In Guatemala City they received roughly nine dollars per day (for four hours of work), while the actors in New York were hired through a government employment agency and received the minimal wage specified by state law, which was ten dollars at the time. See https://www. santiago-sierra.com/994_1024.php; https://www.santiago-sierra.com/20005_1024.php. 4 Sierra commented further on these circumstances: “At KW our project – Workers Who Cannot Be Paid, Remunerated to Remain Inside Cardboard Boxes, 2000 – involved Chechen refugees who were not permitted to work, under threat of repatriation (which would, in most cases, lead to jail time or worse back home). Consequently, we could not openly state that we were paying the refugees, and in a sense the institution had become an ally, both to me as the artist and to the refugees” (Sierra 2002, 131).

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Employing people who are willing to “work” for very little money, undertake physically demanding actions, risk the socio-political conditions of their lives and enter precarious labor relations, has been a central strategy in Santiago Sierra’s work since the late 1990s (Medina 2000; Sileo and Henke 2017). Yet, the artist presents the actors’ labor by means of a precariousness that most of today’s critical theories have proven inadequate to address. It fits neither within the sociological concept of precarity, which is mainly concerned with the effects of the structural increase of short-term contracts and uncertain working conditions in the working field, nor within the philosophically influenced observations devoted to the psychopolitics of flexible neoliberalism (Marchart 2013; Han 2017). Instead, Sierra’s artistic practice displays precariousness as bodily vulnerability and, just as Judith Butler proposes, as a conditioned state. According to Butler, precariousness of bodies and lives is always inscribed in their conditionality, but can be either minimized or maximized by political techniques (2009, 2-3). Reading Sierra’s Workers Who Cannot Be Paid with Butler discloses how the artist successively exposes the techniques of precarious labor and demands a “new bodily ontology, one that implies the rethinking of precariousness, vulnerability, injurability, interdependency, exposure, bodily persistence, desire, work and the claims of language and social belonging” to render them visible (Butler 2009, 2). After all, Sierra’s artistic practice, I hold, is a critique of globalized and postcolonial capitalism; Butler’s theory of precariousness enables us to unpack this artistic strategy and to elaborate upon its political potential.

Ethical Demands and Involuntary Accomplices Upon entering the White Cube of the KW, spectators found themselves confronted with six cubic cardboard boxes arranged in one straight line at equal distance from each other. The boxes’ polyhedral forms, their seriality, and their geometric order evoked parallels to the Minimal Art of the 1960s and 1970s. By means of industrially manufactured simplistic forms and slick surfaces, Minimal Art sought to undermine the artistic paradigm of representation by creating “objective” and “neutral” patterns (Judd [1965] 2002). Sierra’s boxes, however, were anything but “objective.” Instead, they were full of holes and ruptures, porous rather than slick, ephemeral as opposed to stable, made of cheap material – and they weren’t empty. From time to time a cough was heard coming from the boxes and “if it was absolutely quiet, one could even hear them breath” (Fuchs 2000). If one peeked through the holes long enough, it was even possible to recognize the shape of a human

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body inside (Hannula and Vadén 2003, 96). With that in mind, Minimal Art’s maxim “what you see is what you see” could hardly be applied to Sierra’s boxes (Glaser [1966] 1995, 158). Rather, there was something happening inside, or, taking into account the very literal title of the artwork, there was someone working inside. Since the workers were shielded and concealed by the cardboard boxes, the spectators were unable to see them in the first place and their corporeity remained the only perceptible dimension. Although, or perhaps precisely because, the visitors were informed of the workers’ presence before entering the exhibition, these circumstances evoked a rather uncomfortable feeling and, besides that, produced a significant disparity between “us” being able to move around freely, and “them” being unable to do so; between us determining whether “we” peek inside or not and “them” being defenselessly exposed to the viewers’ gaze. A scenario such as this recalls the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas, which is of great importance to Butler’s concept of precariousness (Butler 2004, 128-141). For Butler, the notion of precariousness is always accompanied by the question of the value of and the ethical responsibility to life. Levinas is to provide the essential procedure whereby vulnerability no longer leads to exploitation but to responsibility. For him, Butler writes, it is crucial to perceive and approve the “face” of your vis-à-vis to create a feeling of responsibility towards the other (2004, 131). According to Levinas, “the face of the other in his vulnerability and defenselessness is the temptation to kill and at the same time the appeal for peace, the ‘Thou shalt not kill’” (quoted in Butler 2004, 134). The “face” produces both: the recognition of the vulnerability of the counterpart and the responsibility to ensure its unharmedness. Sierra’s scenario played with this apprehending responsibility. The actors were present, but found themselves in a situation where they could not perceive their spectators. Instead, their presence could only be perceived by the spectators. Any actual communication remained impossible, as the actors and spectators were separated by the boxes, which resulted in a disparate and hierarchical relationship. In addition, it was clearly recognizable from the outside that the situation inside the boxes must have been more than uncomfortable. The actors were confined to a narrow, dark, and extremely unpleasant space, in which they had to remain almost motionless for the duration of six hours a day. They were stuck in this situation, which turned them into vulnerable beings – a state that was further confirmed by the audiences’ reactions. The bodily presence of the actors combined with the impossibility of proper communication, let alone improvement of their situation, further restricted by the unwritten law of the “untouchable

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Figure 8 Santiago Sierra, Workers who cannot be paid, remunerated to remain inside cardboard boxes, KW Institute for Contemporary Art (2000)

Courtesy Estudio Santiago Sierra

artwork,” brought up many critical voices.5 Their reasoning demonstrated that the status of the actors as being imprisoned, exploited, and exhibited was seen as morally reprehensible and thus led to a reconsideration of the arts’ ethical responsibility in general. Yet this is precisely what Sierra was aiming for. His visitors were aware of the actors’ presence, their imperiled state in the boxes, and could observe them at least schematically through the holes and cracks. Looking at the endangered lives of the actors demanded the spectators to take ethical responsibility, to intervene in the situation, and to free them from their predicament – precisely because Levinas’ “face” is not limited to the face, but can include any other part of the body that identifies you as a vulnerable and protectable human being.6 At the same 5 Sierra mentioned the accusations in an interview with fellow artist Teresa Margolles: “Well, I have been called an exploiter. At the Kunstwerke in Berlin they criticized me because I had people sitting for four hours a day, but they didn’t realize that a little further up the hallway the guard spends eight hours a day on his feet” (Sierra 2004). Similar accusations have been made by art historians and art critics; for an overview, see Montenegro Rosero (2013). 6 Butler elaborates: “the face is neither reducible to the mouth nor, indeed, to anything the mouth has to utter. Someone or something else speaks when the face is likened to a certain kind of speech; it is a speech that does not come from a mouth or, if it does, has no ultimate origin or meaning here” (2004, 132-133).

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time, the spectators were discouraged to intervene by the cartons and regulations of the art institution. By putting the ethically intolerable position of the actors on display, Sierra tackled the spectators both with vulnerable beings who appealed to their vis-à-vis feeling of ethical responsibility to intervene and with the mechanisms or “frames” of the art institution, which – hypothetically – left them unable to intervene. Consequently, he turned the spectators into no less than accomplices in the artworks’ production of precarious life.

Delegating Art/Work It was not only the spectators who found themselves in the role of accomplices and exploiters, it was also the artist himself. For Workers, Sierra took on what art historian Claire Bishop has termed a “delegated performance” (2012, 219-239). Since the 1990s, Bishop notes, a “social turn” has taken place in contemporary art: in contrast to the singular performer in the performance arts of the 1960s and 1970s, a delegated performance focuses on the “collective body of a social group,” formulating an “artistic practice engaging with the ethics and aesthetics of contemporary labor, and not simply as a micro-model of reification” (Bishop 2012, 219-220, emphasis in original). The rise of the delegated performance in the 1990s also corresponded with the shift in economic conditions, more precisely with the “managerial changes in the economy at large, providing an economic genealogy for this work that parallels the art historical one” (Bishop 2012, 231). By resorting to the delegated performance, Sierra places labor, or, more precisely, the working conditions of the beginning of the twenty-first century, at the forefront of his artistic practice. In Workers Who Cannot Be Paid, he delegated the work, the performative actions, and thereby a significant part of the art production, to others. Moreover, he hired the workers himself, remunerated them and – this is the crux of the matter – put that process on display. By doing so, he took on a double role of being both the artist and the employer/exploiter. In comparison to other artists’ delegated performances, Sierra’s works are, to quote Bishop again, “stripped of the light humor that accompanies many of the projects” (2012, 222-223), because he consequently hires people who live below the poverty line, are from underprivileged backgrounds, and are willing to undertake precarious forms of labor for minimal pay. As such, Sierra does not only make the actors represent a precarious form of life, but also present their own socioeconomic reality or even expose it (Bishop 2012, 223). At the same time, he exhibits the conditions – or the frames, as

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Judith Butler puts it – that maximize the precarity their life is exposed to (Butler 2009, 5-12). Moreover, Sierra’s exhibition reinforces their precarious lives and thereby demonstrates that this precarity is conditioned both by the workers’ socio-economic reality, above all by their status as refugees, and through the activity they engage in, that is: labor. By making actors undergo grueling tasks for just a small amount of money, and by forcing their bodies to the physical extreme, Sierra’s labor conditions differ from “immaterial labor” in “cognitive” and “creative capitalism” brought up by the service sector and the so-called creative industries (Lazzarato 1996). The labor of his workers has nothing to do with the work that expresses itself in services, creativity, communication skills, and subjectivity that have largely replaced industrial work in the Western world since the 1970s at the latest. Sierra’s actors cannot fulfil this demand; on the contrary, the exhibition seems to seek to prevent any possible emergence of subjectivity. Rather, it echoes the physically demanding and underpaid labor in (advanced) developing countries’ sweatshops that is predominantly delegated and outsourced by the Western world. In other words, Sierra’s Workers recalls a type of work that no longer seems to be performed in the Western part of the world.7 Due to the large-scale de-industrialization in the Western world, most of the goods-producing industries have been abandoned, automated, or outsourced to places where the production costs are lower and labor is often performed in legally grey areas. Sierra resorts to this economic strategy of globalized capitalism – and reverses it in the exhibition space. With Workers, he brought the outsourced and delegated labor to Germany, an economic space where the delegation is usually primarily initiated and managed. Workers is, so to speak, a reversed and condensed version of the globalized working world. Sierra’s strategy, therefore, is to reproduce the working conditions that are typical to outsourced industries and to produce them within the art space.

Global Orders and the Matter of Their Remnants With his condensed version of global labor relations in the art space Sierra instantly creates an apparent geopolitical and economic juxtaposition: 7 I am writing here that this “seems” to be the case, because the two production modes can of course not be separated from each other by temporal-historical or territorial cuts. Rather, they are characterized by ongoing overlaps, which not only include the classic industry that is still operated in service societies, but also, for example, the numerous sweat shops in Southern Europe. See https://www.globalslaveryindex.org/2018/findings/country-studies/italy/

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the production of material goods taking place in the space of the service economy. By that, he emphasizes that both forms of work do not operate separately from each other, but as two components of one and the same global division of labor, in which one delegates work and the other carries it out. At the same time, Sierra’s display highlights the difference between both forms of work by reproducing not only the global labor division but specifically its hierarchical order. Because the artist predominantly hired refugees and people with a migration background who are willing to expose themselves to the grueling working conditions for minimal pay, he exposes this hierarchical order as one that follows racial and postcolonial patterns. By denying his workers any subject status and thus reducing them to the presence of their corporeality, Sierra stresses that the outsourced work is as invisible as the workers executing it. It is both globalized capitalism and the immaterializing process of production that maximize Sierra’s workers’ vulnerability and precarity. As Maurizio Lazzarato argues, immaterialization is not restricted to the professions within the service sector – it can now be considered to apply to labor of every kind, including the remaining goods-producing industries.8 Therefore, one could even argue that the “immaterial” has become the dominant paradigm of modern labor, forcing the “material” side of the production process to the background. This invisibility accounts for the lack of consideration of the material side of labor in theories about precarious work. Sierra sets in where Butler also does and with their appeal for a new ontology of bodies they provide a way to grasp the precarious nature of the outsourced work in all its complexity. In other words, Butler’s theory of precarity can help unpack the cruelty of the working and living conditions of Sierra’s workers in their full dimension and correlate them with more general precarious conditions faced by immaterial workers today. With his condensed version of global labor relations Sierra also creates new frames and new confrontations. He renders work that usually remains invisible visible and presents to the spectators the brutal vulnerability of bodies. This is reinforced by the fact that the workers are exposed to precarious labor conditions that are usually associated with manual or semi-engineered industrial production in outsourced industries, yet 8 Lazzarato describes this superposition as follows: “The ‘great transformation’ that began at the start of the 1970s has changed the very terms in which the question is posed. Manual labour is increasingly coming to involve procedures that could be defined as ‘intellectual’ … The old dichotomy between ‘mental and manual labour,’ or between ‘material labour and immaterial labour,’ risks failing to grasp the new nature of productive activity, which takes this separation on board and transforms it” (Lazzarato 1996, 132-133).

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here, in the art space, the workers are not producing any material goods. Instead, they are basically doing nothing but sit out the precarious labor conditions for nothing other but the sake of art. By including the art space in his work, the art institute, for Sierra, is no longer merely the scene of his artistic work, but has become part of the global machinery of neoliberal capitalism. The artist employs an art institution to exhibit the physical vulnerability of workers and to show visitors that they, the institution, and Sierra himself are all jointly involved in enacting, inviting, or tolerating precarious working conditions as such – in the art space and in their actual outsourced configurations. In doing so, Sierra strategically uses his workers’ precarious situation to appeal to the visitors’ political capacity to act. Judith Butler has depicted the great uprisings of the twenty-first century as an example of how precarious bodies formulate a clear demand in public places. The peculiarity is that the bodies become visible in their precariousness and thus inevitably step out of the discourse invisibility whereas their newly gained visibility becomes threatening. “Political claims are made by bodies as they appear and act, as they refuse and as they persist under conditions in which that fact alone threatens the state with delegitimation,” Butler argues (2015, 83), and this is exactly what Sierra demonstrates with his work: he publicly displays the precarious bodies and thereby enables them to make political demands. These demands are specif ically aimed at the techniques with which their precarity is maximized, but also at the exhibition visitors. For as Sierra provokes the visitors with the apparent impossibility of improving the precarious situation of his workers, at the same time he invites them to seek ways to intervene, by forming psychological alliances with these workers on a global scale, in order to challenge neoliberal capitalism. After all, Judith Butler’s concepts of precarity and precariousness allow the complex dimensions of precarious contemporary work in Santiago Sierra’s artistic practice – and, accordingly, the possibilities of resistance – to be explored to their fullest extent.

Works Cited Bishop, Claire. 2012. Artificial Hells. Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London and New York: Verso Books. Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso Books. —. 2009. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London and New York: Verso Books.

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—. 2015. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fuchs, Claudia. 2000. “Die Fremden. Die Galerie Kunstwerke in Mitte stellt sechs Asylbewerber in Pappkartons aus.” Berliner Zeitung, November 20, 2000. Glaser, Bruce. 1995. “Questions to Stella and Judd,” interview by Bruce Glaser. In Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, edited by Gregory Battcock, 148-164. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. First published 1966. Goerens, Kim. 2003. “Die Wohnsituation von Flüchtlingen.” In Verwaltet, entrechtet, Abgestempelt – wo bleiben die Menschen? Einblicke in das Leben von Flüchtlingen in Berlin, edited by Projekttutorien Lebenswirklichkeiten von Flüchtlingen in Berlin/Behörden und Migration, 27-33. Berlin: AStA, FU Berlin. Han, Byung-Chul. 2017. Psychopolitics. Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. London: Verso Books. Hannula, Mika, and Tere Vadén. 2003. Rock the Boat. Localized Ethics, the Situated Self, and Particularism in Contemporary Art. Köln: Salon Verlag. Judd, Donald. “Specific Objects.” In Art in Theory 1900-2000. An Anthology of Changing Ideas, edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, 824-828. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002. First published 1965. Lazzarato, Maurizio. 1996. “Immaterial Labour,” In Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, edited by Michael Hardt and Paolo Virno, 133-147. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Marchart, Oliver, ed. Facetten der Prekarisierungsgesellschaft. Prekäre Verhältnisse. Sozialwissenschaftliche Perspektiven auf die Prekarisierung von Arbeit und Leben. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2013. Medina, Cuauhtémoc. 2000. “Recent Political Forms: Radical Pursuits in Mexico. Santiago Sierra, Francis Alÿs, Minerva Cuevas.” Trans 8: 146-163. Montenegro Rosero, Andrés David. 2013. “Locating Work In Santiago Sierra’s Artistic Practice.” Ephemera 13, no. 1: 99-115. Sierra, Santiago. N.d. “Workers Who Cannot Be Paid, Remunerated to Remain Inside Cardboard Boxes,” Santiago Sierra’s Website, https://www.santiago-sierra. com/20009_1024.php. Accessed January 5, 2020. —. 2002. “A Thousand Words: Santiago Sierra.” Artforum International 41, no. 2: 131. —. 2004. “Santiago Sierra by Teresa Margolles,” interview by Teresa Margolles. Bomb Magazine 86: 62-69. Sileo, Diego, and Lutz Henke, eds. Santiago Sierra: Mea Culpa. Milano: Silvana Editorale, 2017.

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About the Author Friederike Sigler is assistant professor at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Her research interests include work, politics and (anti-)nationalism in contemporary art. Among her publications are Work in the series Documents of Contemporary Arts (Whitechapel Gallery/MIT Press 2017) and the anthology Strike with Dietmar Rübel (Edition Metzel 2021).



Rethinking Radical Democracy with Butler The Voice of Plurality Adriana Cavarero

Abstract In Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Judith Butler, by inserting the issue of bodily life and bodily needs into the Arendtian political category of space of appearance, allows us to trace unusual and interesting paths in our exploration of the territory of democracy. This exploration could start from what I call a reimagining of democracy’s germinal status. By pondering Butler’s claim that the gathering of people in a public space signifies in excess of what is said, this essay focuses on the topic of vocal crowds in order to investigate the difference between plurality and mass. In particular, by revisiting texts by Elias Canetti and Roland Barthes, it explores the soundscape of an embodied plurality uttering words or chanting. Does democracy, at its core, in its germinal status, allow for the voice of plurality to enact a distinctive political performance? Is it possible to speak of a democratic pluriphony? Keywords: democracy, pluriphony, plurality, crowds, voice

Spaces of Appearance: Political Squares In his autobiographical novel The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between (2017), Hisham Matar recounts his 2012 return from London, where he lives and writes, to his native Libya in search of the truth of what happened to his father, a dissident of the Gaddafi regime who was abducted in 1990 and “disappeared” in Libyan jails. Matar meets relatives and friends, among them his cousin Marwan, a judge in Benghazi who describes his

Halsema, Annemie, Katja Kwastek, and Roel van den Oever (eds), Bodies That Still Matter: Resonances of the Work of Judith Butler. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789463722940_cavarero

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personal involvement in the raising of the Arab Spring in Libya. On the night of February 15, 2011, just two days before the beginning of the Libyan revolution, Marwan, together with a dozen or so judges and lawyers, staged a protest against the arrest of Fathi Terbil, a lawyer who had represented the relatives of over a thousand political prisoners killed by the dictator. Marwan and the others stood on the steps of the Benghazi courthouse in the cold winter breeze and did the same the following night, fearing a crackdown. He recalls: Instead, what emerged through the surrounding dark streets were the families of the deceased, those whose cases Fathi Terbil had taken on. Hundreds of people came, and the following day the number grew into the thousands. On the 17th of February, the date after which the revolution was named, the authorities attacked and killed several demonstrators. Instead of scaring people away, it had the opposite effect. (Matar 2017, 111)

People kept gathering and protesting, their bodies not emerging any more from the dark but exposed in full light, standing, showing up, resisting. Matar reports how in those days a new newspaper was published, named Al-Mayadin, which means “squares.” Editors wanted to call it that because “the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and here all broke out from public squares” (112). Clearly, the journalists of Al-Mayadin understood that squares crowded by thousands of bodies claiming their right to appear and stand, living, sleeping, and eating for days in public spaces, was a central political issue. Watched worldwide on television, the Arab squares inspired movements across the world. In her insightful book, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015), Judith Butler revisits the concept of radical democracy in light of the geopolitical variety of public assemblies and demonstrations as we have seen in the Arab Springs, Gezi Park, Tahrir Square, the Occupy movements, the anti-precarity demonstrations, and the like. By framing them as forms of political practice centered in and enacted by bodily performativity, Butler stresses that, although these kinds of gatherings are often motivated by different political purposes and address different issues, they have a significant element in common: assembled in a crowd, participating in mass demonstrations that take place on the street or in the square, “bodies congregate, they move and speak together, and they lay claim to a certain space as public space” (70). In other words, by acting in concert, bodies enter a political space of appearance primarily constituted by their corporeal condition of plurality. This vocabulary is, of course, Arendtian and it is so

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not by chance. The way Butler engages with Arendt’s conceptual framework of politics, insisting on the structural link between plurality and space of appearance, is quite explicit here. This is a very promising but extremely difficult engagement to manage, as every Arendtian scholar interested in radical democracy, and in democracy as such, knows. As for Butler, who aims at putting at the center of the political space of appearance not only bodies but bodily needs and the precarity of bodily life, her main issue is with the notorious Arendtian distinction between the public sphere of plural action and the private – and hidden – realm of bodily life sustained and reproduced by labor. To formulate the question in Butler’s words: [T]hough Arendt theorizes the problem of the body, of the located body, the speaking body emerging into the “space of appearance” as part of any account of political action, she is not quite willing to affirm a politics that struggles to overcome inequalities in food distribution, that affirms right of housing, and that targets inequalities in the sphere of reproductive labor. (Butler 2015, 117)

It is worth reminding that both Arendt’s commendable determination to locate the speaking body in the space of appearance and her deplorable fault of dislocating bodily needs and works within the private realm come from her speculative strategy of reframing her own post-totalitarian concept of politics within the ancient Greek polis model. On the one hand, by calling on Athenian democracy, Arendt claims that politics, in its genuine and essential sense, consists of a shared space of appearance opened up, engendered, put into being by a plurality of incarnated human beings acting together with words and deeds (Arendt 1958, 175-207). On the other hand, she stresses that these very human beings can gather in the agora and speak, interact, see and be seen, hear and be heard within their actual plurality, just because they are free from labor and corporeal needs along with all of the things concerning bodily life which women and slaves are faced with (Arendt 1958, 28-33). Symptomatically, and setting aside her questionable attraction to a political model founded on slavery, so strong and firm is Arendt’s conviction of expelling the body from the sphere of politics that she applies it to her interpretation of Marx as well, blaming him for turning labor into a political issue (Arendt 2002). This is why, as Butler admits, thinking about radical democracy with Arendt means, more or less, thinking against or in spite of Arendt. Yet Arendt’s original and unprejudiced way of recasting the political provides conceptual tools whose critical effectiveness is hard to renounce. In addition,

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her focus on the direct, materially participated, and non-representative democracy of the Greeks results in a redefinition of politics in terms of embodied relationality that scholars interested in radical democracy can but appreciate, all the more so if their task, as in the case of Butler, is that of conceptualizing distinctive forms of politics characterized by the plural interacting and bodily exposure of a crowd within a public space of appearance. As Butler makes clear, the first step of such a speculative enterprise is that of approaching “a notion of plurality that is thought together with both performativity and interdependency” (2015, 151), which, in her book, means a shared precarity and a common concern for enacting the condition of livable lives on the very spot of public appearance. In fact, what matters most in Butler’s view of these politicized and crowded squares is not only the phenomenon of people gathering and demonstrating, but also their mutual commitment to produce in this place a new form of sociality in which bodily needs – food, shelter, protection from injury and violence – are cared for. In Arendt’s terms, plurality is a given, a fact of the human condition, an ontological status. “Men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world,” she claims, plurality is the law of the earth (Arendt 1958, 7). Made up of unique beings displaying their physical uniqueness from birth, plurality is a material trait of the human, a universal and objective trait, visible and audible “in the unique shape of the body and sound of the voice” (179). We are and appear unique: this is a fact, a common fact, primarily rooted in the event of natality which renders us equal insofar as we are ontologically unique and therefore plural. By interacting, with words and deeds in a public and shared space, we actualize this ontological dimension, that is, in Arendt’s words, we actively constitute a political space of appearance “in which we confirm and take upon ourselves the naked fact of our original physical appearance” (1958, 176-177). As a second birth, plural interaction turns the given of plurality into a political performance, politically disclosing and exhibiting it. Without doubt, in this performative scenario, bodies are materially on stage and they are so in their perceivable uniqueness and plurality. Butler is right in affirming that Arendt’s take on direct democracy postulates the located body, the speaking body emerging into the space of appearance, as part of any account of political action. Yet the problem remains. Although Arendt does insist on the physicality of the space of appearance, a space opened up by a plurality of agents who want and ought to be mutually seen and heard, she not only abstains from properly focusing on the body but also puts aside, programmatically, the various vital and concrete issues that the bodily condition carries with it. Excluded from the luminous space of appearance, such matters remain obscurely private and as such pre- and

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un-political. Going against Arendt, Butler claims instead that bodies which congregate in a public space, by exposing their precarity and producing “conditions under which vulnerability and interdependency become livable,” draw “critical attention to the conditions of bodily survival, persistence, and flourishing within the framework of radical democracy” (2015, 218). She also insists on the meaningful materiality of plural bodily performances, a “performativity of the human animal [that] takes place through gesture, gait, modes of mobility, sound and image, and various expressive means that are not reducible to public forms of verbal speech” (207). Thus, while Arendt, faithful to Aristotle’s definition of man as zoon logon echon, assumes that what essentially matters to the speaking body located in the space of appearance is speech, Butler observes that “the way we gather on the street, sing or chant, or even maintain our silence can be, is, part of the performative dimension of politics, situating speech as one bodily act among others” (207). Interestingly, concerning speech as verbal activity, Butler goes even further, emphasizing the primary role of vocality, that is, of plural bodies expressing their uniqueness and making themselves heard vocally. This is coherent with her main thesis that “forms of assembly already signify prior to, and apart from, any particular demands they make,” because their bodily performance “signifies in excess of what is said” (8). Linguistic performativity and bodily performativity do not coincide, according to Butler, and even the speech act is implicated in the embodied condition of life: “vocalization requires a larynx” (9). Within the assembled plurality, then, organs of phonation are necessary in order to either speak and be heard or to produce signifying sounds exceeding the realm of verbal expression. Bound as it is to a redefinition of politics related to the Arendtian concept of plurality, the topic is, in my opinion, an interesting one. It provides a new and challenging perspective to what I have elsewhere described as a “politics of voices” (Cavarero 2005, 165-212). Relating to Butler’s intention of empowering the vocal dimension, I here want to rearticulate her proposal by posing some basic questions. Let me formulate them bluntly: Does plurality have a voice? Does its soundscape consist of cacophony, symphony, harmony, polyphony, or other perceivable textures of plural vocal expression? Should we call it a pluriphony?

Political Soundscapes Butler agrees with Arendt on distrusting the phenomenon of people gathering and speaking in unison, and she justly notes that “usually, we associate

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the event of everyone speaking the same thing at the same time with forms of fascism or other compulsory forms of conformity” (2015, 166). “I am certainly not saying that all bodies collected in the street are a good thing or that we should celebrate mass demonstrations,” she crucially stresses, and: The phrase “bodies on the street” can refer equally well to right-wing demonstrations, to military soldiers assembled to quell demonstrations or seize power, to lynch mobs or anti-immigrant populist movements taking over public space. (Butler 2015, 124)

Tellingly, this is particularly apparent when people chant in unison while marching or standing up in a crowd, even if, as Butler admits, to chant, speak, utter, or phrase slogans together and simultaneously, although in a brief and transitory moment, happens to nearly all forms of assembled people, including those she focuses on. Linked as it is to the subject of vocal performativity within assembled crowds, the issue is intellectually stimulating for several reasons. To begin with, it warns us to always be cautious when adopting the Arendtian category of plurality, a category that, unlike that of the multitude, demands each human being’s uniqueness as its constitutive dimension. We are all human, Arendt declares, “in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live” (Arendt 1958, 8). Plurality and uniqueness belong to the same ontological knot and cannot be parted. Parenthetically, it is worth remarking that Arendt’s famous critique of the French revolution addressing the issue of starved people struggling for their bodily needs bears witness to this. They were not a plurality, she maintains, but a multitude united in one body, “for what urged them on was the quest for bread, and the cry for bread will always be uttered with one voice” (Arendt 1990, 94). In Arendtian terms, plurality is incompatible with whatever form of oneness or unity, especially the vocal unity that dramatically resonates in the cry for bread. Calling on Arendt’s argument, I dare say that, in principle, this incompatibility applies to all versions of a multitude compacting into a single body expressing itself vocally, including the special and conspicuously emotional vocal unity which the performance of people chanting in unison hints at. Let me here stress that vocal unity is the outcome of an effective emotion rather than a physical reality: even in crowds chanting in unison, each singular voice is and remains unique. Yet, notoriously, unison unchains perceivable if not enjoyable emotions that converge toward the substantiation of a sole bodily emission: as if each chanter’s uniqueness were actually longing

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for its nullification through the immersion in one de-individualized voice, a pleasurable immersion in something greater that exceeds the singular, incarnated body which becomes dislocated in a dimension of ex-tasis. The disquieting aspect of the voice of plurality is, of course, this very longing, this desire for blending into an amorphous collective body which expresses its unity with a single voice. As is well known, or at least according to a number of influential interdisciplinary studies (Borch 2012; Jonsson 2013), although the vocal realm represents it in a particularly efficacious way, such a drive for dissolving in a unity concerns the crowd’s attitude in general. Familiar to scholars who have explored the phenomenology of the crowd – or, to put it in more appropriate terms, the masses – at the age of its historical rising, not only was the topic all but new, but it could count on a tradition going back to seminal contributions by Gustave Le Bon and Sigmund Freud. Here, however, given his declared passion for the vocal and aural sphere, an irregular and multidisciplinary scholar like Elias Canetti seems to me a more suitable author to call on. Actually, Canetti’s description of the masses’ soundscape is quite revealing. In Crowds and Power (1981) he equates the crowd to the sea as a mass which entails “a yielding to others as though they were oneself, as though there were no strict division between oneself and them” (80). He stresses that the sea has an audible and distinctive “voice that sounds like a thousand voices,” whose most impressive character is persistence (80). Moreover, in his autobiographical novels, he speaks of his attraction to the voice of the crowd as part, the most enjoyable part, of his general and strong attraction to the crowd itself. Not by chance, criticizing Le Bon and Freud for their abstract and prejudiced approach to a phenomenon that they knew only in theory, Canetti remarks that he experienced the crowd in practice, knowing it from the inside: “I had unresistingly fallen prey to a crowd in Frankfurt,” he confesses, and since then “I had never forgotten how gladly one falls prey to the crowd” (Canetti 2000, 407). He had further occasion to fall prey to a crowd in Vienna, on July 15, 1927, by participating in a demonstration of workers which resulted in the burning of the Palace of Justice and ninety people shot dead by the police, an event that, as Canetti puts it, “was the closest thing to a revolution I have physically experienced” (484). “I became a part of the crowd, I fully dissolved in it,” he declares. “I heard a great deal,” he continues, “there was always something to hear; most cutting of all were the boohs when the police fired into the throng and people fell”; besides, he writes, people shouted at one another and “it sounded joyous, not shrill, not greedy, it sounded liberated”; “the roaring of the wave was audible all the time,” and “there was something

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rhythmic in the air,” a music, “a resonant wind” (487-488). This acoustic experience in Vienna was a momentous one for Canetti: from then on, he proudly declares, “I retained a sensitive ear for the voice of a crowd,” and “it was only the Fifteenth of July that had opened my ears” (492). In truth, as we read in his autobiographical works, Canetti was gifted with a fine ear since infancy, and, more importantly, with an ear extremely sensitive to vocal uniqueness and the sonorous plurality of languages. This is why I think that Canetti’s description of the voice of the crowd, to which he became sensitive after his shocking involvement in mass demonstrations, is particularly significant. He acoustically knows the difference between mass and plurality. Let me here pause for a brief but important terminological note: although the English translation renders it as crowd or crowds, Canetti, like Freud and almost all scholars who focus on the topic, speaks of die Masse, a German term whose etymological root works also in many other languages. Masse derives from the Greek maza, which means dough: it denotes a thing which is compact, undifferentiated, and uniform, that is, something whose proper form is a single and homogeneous unit. In the mass, in principle, individuality, not to mention uniqueness, is lost. Canetti recounts how, far from maintaining and exhibiting their uniqueness, people dissolve in the mass, their singular voices absorbed and submerged into the wave’s roar. And, crucially, he remarks how there is pleasure in this: unique human beings dissolve into a mass gladly, euphorically. With the Canettian concept of die Masse, therefore, we are on the perfect opposite pole of the Arendtian concept of plurality, or, perhaps, we are uncomfortably confronted with the prospect of a plurality that, in certain circumstances, seems to enjoy its own metamorphosis into a mass. The acoustic component of this enjoyment is so strong in Canetti that he delights in it either while being part of a crowd or when hearing the crowd’s voice from a distance. He recounts his excitement when listening to the shouts coming from the Rapid Stadium, a playing field not far from his house, where soccer matches were held on Sundays and holidays. “Throughout the six years that I lived in this room,” he says, “I missed no opportunity to listen to these sounds”; though “I never got habituated to the noise,” I was ravenous for the “loud nourishment that I received in this way” (493). Plausibly, Canetti’s sensitive ear for the voice of the crowd, opened up by his participation in mass revolution, works even better when he is in the position of the detached listener. “Canetti claims to be a ‘hear-er rather than a ‘see-er,’” Susan Sontag justly notes (1980, 195). As mentioned above, Canetti’s acoustic passion addresses

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not only the soundscape of the crowd but language in general, uniqueness of voices, and particular forms of vocal performance summoning the voice of plurality as well. We must not forget that Canetti is multilingual: born in Bulgaria in 1905 into a large Sephardic family that spoke Ladino, he lived in a multicultural environment where Bulgarian and Romanian were also spoken, and as a child he learned English when living in Manchester. He wrote in German, his parents’ secret idiom, taught to him by his mother when he was a teenager. This could explain his almost obsessive interest in the vocal sphere. Canetti repeatedly argued that the sonority of speech, its consisting of sounds emitted by the speaker’s voice, discloses itself particularly when we hear a foreign language we cannot comprehend. As distinct from the semantic code of language, the acoustic phenomenology of speech, all the more perceivable in the case of an unknown language, has a reality of its own which signifies beyond signification: “Canetti is not simply interested in voice as a supplement of language: he is particularly fascinated by those moments when this supplement stands alone – the experience of voice unaccompanied by understanding, the encounter with pure voice” (Gellen 2007, 25). In his autobiographical novel The Voices of Marrakesh (2012), Canetti tells of a peculiar aural experience. For him, hungry for “loud nourishment,” the city is a multifarious soundscape all the more fascinating because he understands neither Arabic nor any of the Berber idioms spoken by the inhabitants. He wants “to be struck by those sounds” for what they are, without the knowledge of their meanings nor the understanding of the language diminishing their force (27). While he is walking through the Jewish quarter of Marrakesh, he hears a thin noise that sounds at f irst like crickets, growing gradually louder: he thinks of “an aviary full of birds,” but soon discovers it is children. The trilling noise comes from a school. Hundreds of tiny little children sit crammed together; in groups of three or four they rocked violently backwards and forwards, reciting in high-pitched voices: “Aleph. Beth. Gimel.” The little backs darted rhythmically to and fro, one of them was always the most zealous … and in his mouth the sounds of the Hebrew alphabet rang out like a decalogue in the making. (Canetti 2012, 28)

From the mouths of these children, who vocalize it with their different voices, each unique language vibrates in its elemental sounds, making the voice of plurality heard. While he yields to the acoustic enjoyment of the

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sounds of language, a language giving itself here in its pure form because it is decomposed into its pure phonemes, and hence radically freed from the weight of meaning, Canetti can thus satisfy his thirst for the bodily emissions of plural voices. Canetti’s tale of his acoustic enjoyment of the voices of the children in Marrakesh finds an interesting echo in Roland Barthes’ The Rustle of Language (1989). Barthes recounts that, while watching Michelangelo Antonioni’s film on China (Chung Kuo-Cina, 1972), he suddenly experienced the rustle of language at the end of a sequence showing, “in a village street, some children, leaning against a wall, reading aloud, each one a different book to himself but all together” (1989, 76). “[T]he meaning was doubly impenetrable to me by my not knowing Chinese and by the blurring of these simultaneous readings,” Barthes claims, “but I was hearing, in a kind of hallucinated perception, … the music, the breath, the tension, the application, in short something like a goal” (76). In addition to the simultaneous speaking by all, which produces a cacophony, Barthes points out that the auditory scene has an erotics, “the élan, or the discovery, or the simple accompaniment of an emotion: precisely what was contributed by the countenance of Chinese children” (76). Just as the proper functioning of a motor car manifests as a musical entity, the rustle, so language has its peculiar rustle, too: “rustle is the noise of what is working well” (76). According to Barthes, the rustle of language forms a utopia – that of a music of meaning. Because of its utopian status, such music is indeed special: it consists of a vast auditory fabric in which the semantic, although made unreal, nevertheless does not disappear. The rustle of language allows the phonic, metric, vocal signifier to display all of its sumptuosity, he says, “without meaning being brutally dismissed, dogmatically foreclosed, in short castrated” (78). By rustling, language does not abandon a horizon of meaning. Rather, it signifies vocally by transporting yet exceeding the realm of speech. And there is an erotics in this performance, a vocal-acoustic enjoyment of plurality as such. The rustle of language, Barthes claims, consists of “the very sound of plural delectation” within the act of uttering words (78). Tellingly, this could be applied to the children of the Marrakesh Hebrew school, too. It is not by chance that, here, like in the case of the Chinese children mentioned by Barthes, it is the sonority of language, chanted by a plurality of voices, that delights both Canetti as well as the children. The enjoyable shudder of meaning makes itself heard precisely in this vocal exercise, emotional and plural, all the more if the listener does not understand the language it vocalizes.

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Germinal Democracy and Pluriphony Let me clarify the goal of my narrative by making some brief remarks. To begin with, I think that Canetti’s and Barthes’ common insistence on both the delightful sonorous effect of unknown languages and the special, enjoyable sound resulting from the voice of plurality is worth pondering. As for Canetti, I want to recall that the uniqueness of each voice, the expression of an embodied singularity breaking into the general order of the word, is not only often mentioned by him, but also described in detail and with particular precision in all of his novels. When he speaks of the voice of the crowd, he knows what he is speaking of: a powerful, pleasurable, yet terrifying human phenomenon turning vocal plurality into a single voice, be it perceivable as shouts, boohs, a wave’s roars, noise, chants, or words uttered in unison. There is neither symphony nor polyphony in this soundscape, but, as Canetti dares say, “an evil music” (Canetti 2000, 487). On his part, Barthes makes it clear that the sound emitted by children reading aloud, each one from a different book yet all read simultaneously, does not result in a cacophony, but in what he calls the rustle of language, in what we could perhaps rename pluriphony. Obviously the argumentative trend of both authors drifts toward the aesthetic, always a dangerous field for political discourses to have roots in. Yet, the coincidence of them mentioning children seems to me more than merely accidental, allowing us to trace unusual and interesting paths in our explorations of the territories of democracy, starting with a reimagining of its germinal status. As if the archetypical voice of plurality were a spring voice, so to speak, pure and full of hope, thrilling and felicitous. A voice whose erotics, far from dealing with the pleasure of dissolving into a single body, matters in the enjoyment of expressing bodily plurality and relationality vocally. As if the experience of radical democracy were a moment in which, as Arendt would say, plurality shares and manifests happiness “in its ability to restore for us a political imaginary that is generative and affirmative” (Guaraldo 2018, 398). This happiness has more to do with the pleasure we take in the company of others than with the blurring of the many into a unity. It is a pleasure that depends on the simple and fundamental fact that we need others, both in order to appear to them and to have confirmed by them our very existence. When this “happens” we experience happiness or, to put it in strict Arendtian terms, public happiness. Actually, I wonder if, when focusing on plurality and its political performance, be it vocal or not, we ought to dismiss the conceptual protocol of pleasure and turn instead to the category of happiness. Symptomatically enough, it is as a fulfillment

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of political happiness that democracy announces itself within Aristotle’s vocabulary. We should at some point question the fervor with which our discourses flirt – perhaps too much and prejudicially – with the rhetoric of pleasure, yet turn uncomfortable when the topic of happiness comes to the fore. Who is afraid of public happiness? By way of approaching my conclusion, let me go back to Hisham Matar’s memoir The Return. The book is set in the aftermath of the Libyan revolution, the brief interim between the dictatorship and the current devastating civil war in which tribal conflicts and outside powers are the principal actors. “Anything seemed possible,” Matar recalls about this hopeful interim, “and nearly every individual I met spoke of his optimism and foreboding in the same breath” (50). Hope is perhaps the appropriate word also for those who, like me, looked at the Arab Spring as an unexpected and welcome promise for democracy, even an innovative form of radical democracy, to use Butler’s vocabulary. We know that, unfortunately, things went differently. And we know as well that, if we were to value this kind of public assemblies on the basis of their success and historical outcomes, we would recurrently face frustrating failures. Symptomatically, Arendt warns us about this and, by arguing that action resembles a miracle, notes that the coming into being of public spaces of appearance opened up by interaction, even revolutionary interaction, is a rare and intermittent phenomenon in the history of mankind, a history in which a variety of systems of domination, some more violent than others, supplant politics. Although rare and fragile, temporary and transient, the opening up of a space of appearance, according to Arendt, is and remains the exemplary occurrence by which politics as such discloses itself. In this sense, I dare say that Butler is genuinely Arendtian, as she also is when she inserts the issue of bodily life and bodily needs into the political space of appearance. Butler’s project of reformulating the idea of political performativity by testing it on certain recent forms of public assemblies is clear and, in my opinion, tackles important issues. She is interested not only in the conditions for bodily survival, persistence, and flourishing within the framework of radical democracy, but also, and perhaps more urgently, in scenarios of nonviolent resistance “encountering violence without reproducing its terms” (Butler 2015, 187). If this type of nonviolent and hopeful plurality has a voice, I would conclude, it sounds very different from the voice of the masses. For sure, it is neither a single voice nor a deafening cacophony: rather, it is a pluriphony in which the rustle of language makes itself heard politically. And there is happiness and hope in this experience of vocalizing and hearing, which is often multilingual and therefore communicative and

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significant. As if the original bodily performance of democracy-in-themaking, its first and promising chant exceeding speech, were the vocal expression of plurality. As if pluriphony, and the public happiness it begets, heralded the germinal status of democracy.

Works Cited Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —. 1990. On Revolution. London: Penguin Books. —. 2002. “Karl Marx and the Tradition of Western Political Thought.” Social Research 69, no. 2: 273-319. Barthes, Roland. 1989. The Rustle of Language. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Borch, Christian. 2012. The Politics of Crowds: An Alternative History of Sociology. New York: Cambridge University Press. Butler, Judith. 2015. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Canetti, Elias. 1981. Crowds and Power. New York: Continuum. —. 2000. The Memoirs of Elias Canetti: The Tongue Set Free, the Torch in My Ear, the Play of the Eyes. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. —. 2012. The Voices of Marrakesh: A Record of a Visit. London: Penguin Books. Cavarero, Adriana. 2005. For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Gellen, Kata. 2007. “The Opaque Voice: Canetti’s Foreign Tongue.” In The World of Elias Canetti: Centenary Essays, edited by William Collins Donahue and Julian Preece, 23-46. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Guaraldo, Olivia. 2018. “Public Happiness. Revisiting an Arendtian Hypothesis.” Philosophy Today 62, no. 2: 397-418. Jonsson, Stefan. 2013. Crowds and Democracy. New York: Columbia University Press. Matar, Hisham. 2017. The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between. London: Penguin Books. Sontag, Susan. 1980. Under the Sign of Saturn. New York: Vintage Books.

About the Author Adriana Cavarero is honorary professor at the University of Verona, Italy, and held numerous visiting appointments, including at New York University and Berkeley. She is widely recognized for her writings on feminist theory,

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ancient philosophy, Hannah Arendt, theories of narration and vocality, and on a wide range of issues in political philosophy and literature. Among her books, in English translation, are: In Spite of Plato (1995); Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood (2000); Stately Bodies: Literature, Philosophy and the Question of Gender (2002); For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression (2005); Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence (2008); Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude (2016); Surging Democracy. Notes on Hannah Arendt’s Political Thought (2021).



Strategies of (Self-)Empowerment On the Performativity of Assemblies in and as Theatre Erika Fischer-Lichte Abstract By drawing on Butler’s concepts of assembly, appearance, and precarity, it is argued that the aesthetic assembly in theatre, quite often, is closely related to various forms of political assemblies, historical and recent, in encouraging self-empowerment of its spectators, and at times also its actors. To make the point, three periods in German theatre history from 1750 until today are considered: First, the theatre of the educated middle class in the eighteenth century. Second, the workers’ mass spectacles in the Weimar Republic. And third, some forms of choric theatre since the 1990s as well as Christoph Schlingensief’s productions featuring different kinds of people in a precarious status. Finally, as regards their capacity to self-empowerment, they are related to the Occupy movement. Keywords: self-empowerment, emotional communities, mass spectacles, bonds of solidarity, choric theatre, appearance of the socially invisible

The Occupy movements that emerged in different parts of the world over the last years inaugurated and shaped a new form of political protest. Until the beginning of the twenty-first century, people would voice their discontent by assembling and forming a demonstration, marching through the streets, shouting demands and carrying banners with apposite slogans. They would head to a specified public place where a meeting would take place before the demonstration dissolved. This was also the format of the so-called Monday demonstrations in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), which ultimately led to the reunification of the two German states. Taking place not only in Leipzig, but also in Dresden, Halle, Karl-Marx-Stadt (today’s Chemnitz), Magdeburg,

Halsema, Annemie, Katja Kwastek, and Roel van den Oever (eds), Bodies That Still Matter: Resonances of the Work of Judith Butler. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789463722940_fischer

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Plauen, Arnstadt, Rostock, Potsdam, and Schwerin, the people marched through the streets forming protest choruses and chanting the slogan “Freiheit!” (“Freedom!”) and “Wir sind das Volk!” (“We are the people!”).1 On October 9, 1989 – two days after the celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the GDR – a mass demonstration of about 130,000 citizens formed in Leipzig after a “prayer for peace” was held at several churches. The people left the service with burning candles in their hands as a sign of their peaceful intentions. The slogan had changed: now they were chanting “Wir sind ein Volk!” (“We are one people!”). From that point onward, the number of participants of the Monday demonstrations grew on a weekly basis. On November 6 the number had increased to 500,000 (Bahrmann and Links 1994, 32-47). Three days later the Wall fell. This is a particularly striking example of the enormous effect that this kind of a protest can have. After the disintegration of the old world order, which had been dominated by the global segregation between a “democratic” (i.e., Western) and a “communist” bloc, the situation in many parts of the world shifted over the next decades in a way that called for new forms of political protest. All over the world the so-called Occupy movements evolved in a highly diverse manner while always maintaining their core feature: the bodily co-living in a particular public space over the course of an extended period of time. This not only erases the sweeping differences between the private and the public sphere. Even though the bodily coexistence of the occupiers forms the very basis of their protest, the public co-living also expands the radius of its impact to include passers-by who, incidentally or intentionally, turn into spectators of the scene that is unfolding in that public space – in this case, people living together in a way that might elicit particular affective responses from the spectators, and performing diverse actions that might call for interpretation and understanding on their part. While I will come back to the Occupy movements and their effect on the political landscape at the end of this essay, its main goal is to take the situation they created by assembling in this particular manner in a public place as incitement for a specific historical investigation. I shall examine how, since the middle of the eighteenth century, theatre in the German states contributed to the introduction and molding of new forms of living together with regard to the middle class of the eighteenth century, the workers and the proletarians at the beginning of the twentieth century and, f inally, if only briefly, groups of marginalized people, such as the unemployed or migrants, from the end of the twentieth century until today. 1

Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

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I will demonstrate that the aesthetic assembly, in theatre, is closely interrelated to various forms of political assemblies, historical and recent, in encouraging a self-empowerment of its spectators – and at times its actors. To do so, I shall draw on Judith Butler’s concepts of assembly, appearance, and precarity, which feature prominently in her Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015) and which I have found to be productive tools not only with regard to an examination of contemporary social and political circumstances, but also in terms of a historiographic approach to theatre. Theatre constitutes a very particular kind of public place. It marks an aesthetic as well as a social space of great variability, in which two groups of people assemble – the actors and the spectators. The performance comes into being as an event that involves both of these groups. As Max Herrmann, the founder of German theatre studies, already noted: The original meaning of theatre refers to its conception as a social play – played by all for all. A game in which everyone is a player – actors and spectators alike … The spectators are involved as co-players. In this sense, the audience is the creator of the theatre. … Theatre always produces a social community. (Herrmann 1920, in Klier 1981, 19)

On this basis, I have defined the relationship between actors and spectators as that of an autopoietic feedback loop: whatever the actors do will elicit responses from the spectators, while the spectators’ behavior, too, will leave an impression on the actors. In this respect, the performance emerges out of their bodily co-presence, their interaction, and their interdependency. Accordingly, performances can be regarded as time-spaces, in which all involved have to find their way of living together. This holds true no matter whether the performance venue is a proscenium stage, a circus, or an urban public space (Fischer-Lichte 2008, 38-74, following my discussion of Butler’s concept of performativity).

From Emotional Communities to Political Assemblies: The Theatre of the Middle Class in the German States of the Eighteenth Century In the German states of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, theatre took place either as a courtly affair at the residence of the ruler or in a booth temporarily erected by wandering players – for instance, during trade fairs – on special permission by the town’s council. The courts usually

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hosted French or Italian companies – for acting or opera, respectively – while the wandering players used the German language and were thus understood by everyone visiting their booth, irrespective of their social class. From the mid-eighteenth century onwards, the heads of several of the troupes undertook attempts to build permanent theatres in some of the bigger cities and gave up traveling in order to establish themselves as permanent companies. Konrad Ernst Ackermann, one such successful troupe leader, for instance, applied to the senate of the Free City of Hamburg to become a citizen of Hamburg, to be permitted to build a comedy theatre at the Gänsemarkt (formerly the site of an opera house), and to be granted the exclusive privilege of performing German plays in Hamburg for the duration of twelve years. The building of his comedy theatre was completed in 1765. Other permanent theatres on the initiative of troupe leaders were built in Breslau, Berlin, Leipzig, Frankfurt upon Oder, Mannheim and Halle. These theatres can be regarded, and rightly so, as theatres for the emerging middle class, even if their designs emulated the court theatres, i.e., featuring boxes which divided the spectators according to their social rank. The high-ranking and wealthy public took their seats in the boxes, while the majority of the spectators, middle-class ordinary citizens (at first only men, but from around 1775 women were allowed, too) sat in the stalls, and workers (a group that in Hamburg often included sailors and dockers) watched from the gallery. The theatres in the cities mainly served the purpose of articulating, conveying and spreading the values of the middle class. In the second half of the eighteenth century, relationships between family members, strictly controlled by a patriarchal hierarchy, became highly emotionalized. The emotional distance between father and child decreased. Until well into the middle of the eighteenth century a father would maintain a considerable distance from his children. Now, however, the father began to enjoy the children’s presence. In Über den Umgang mit Menschen (1788), Adolph Freiherr von Knigge deems any distance between parent and child to be “highly unnatural and unwarrantable” (174) and describes the ideal conditions in the following terms: What can be more charming than to behold a tender father in the circle of his adult children, who pant after his wise and cheerful conversation, conceal none of their inmost wishes from him, who is their counsellor, their most indulgent friend. (Knigge 1788, 175)

In such remarks, the family appears, above all, as an emotional unit and a complex of feelings, rather than a system of control and authority. Even if

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its general definition and understanding had changed, the family continued to form the center of interest and attention. However, this was not true for all social classes. The new ideal of family community focused on the middle class, which clearly set itself apart from both the upper and the lower classes. Knigge writes that the kind of family life based on emotional exchanges that he envisaged was “only applicable to persons of the middle classes” for “the very high ranking and very rich people rarely have a sense for homely happiness, feel no longing in the soul and live, for the most part, in a very distanced relation to their spouses” (1788, 160). The middle class following the ideal of “homely happiness” consisted of professionals, such as officials, scholars, lawyers, priests, merchants and managers, on the one hand, and, on the other, the gentry and lower rural aristocracy, that is, noble landowners. For the middle class as a whole, the family values of subordination to the patriarch coupled with displaying tender bonds of emotion towards him were both obligatory and exemplary. Not only did the members of this group constitute the majority of the theatre audience, but the spectators now even found themselves confronted with their own reality on the stage. The heroes of countless stirring comedies, “portraits of the family,” and bürgerliche Trauerspiele (domestic tragedies) represented fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, who belonged, as did the spectators, to the middle class. Accordingly, the figures portrayed in the Trauerspiele no longer were kings and princes, but people “cut from the same cloth as we are,” as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing asserted in the seventy-fifth section of his Hamburg Dramaturgy from 1767 (Baldyga 2019, 240). The middle class distinguished itself from the nobility not only by exalting and promulgating these new family values but also through its capacity to consciously feel and show emotions. As such, the first and foremost aim of a performance was to arouse an emotional response in the spectators. The bürgerliche Trauerspiele were particularly well suited for this purpose. Lessing’s first bürgerliches Trauerspiel, Miss Sara Sampson premiered on July 10, 1755 in Lessing’s presence, staged by Ackermann’s troupe in Frankfurt upon Oder. Karl Wilhelm Ramler reported in a letter to Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim (July 25, 1755) on the unusually powerful effect of the play: “the audience sat for three and a half hours, silent as statues, weeping” (Schüddekopf 1907, 206). In Berlin, Miss Sara Sampson was performed in the fall of 1756 by the Schuch society. Friedrich Nicolai gave a detailed account of it in a letter to Lessing, including the performance’s effect on him: I must let you know that I was extremely affected; up to the beginning of the fifth act, I was often in tears, but by the end of the same act and

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throughout the whole scene with Sara, I was far too moved to be able to cry any more. This has never happened to me at any other drama, and confounds, to a certain extent, my own system, which generally resists being moved by tragedy. My feelings and my critical annotations both on your play and the actors were mixed in a wonderful confusion in my head. (Schulte-Sasse 1972, 52)

Lessing’s first bürgerliches Trauerspiel clearly provoked an unusually strong emotional response among the spectators. Documents on audience reception repeatedly record how affected the audience was, sobbing and crying. Another contributing factor to this effect would have been the new acting style that was being developed at the time. This psychological-realistic approach further facilitated the spectators’ immersion in the illusion that they were witnessing events taking place in their own world. What we must not forget is that back then the auditorium was illuminated. Not only were the actors visible to the spectators, but the spectators were also visible to each other as well as to the actors. This implies that the autopoietic feedback loop was operative not only between actors and spectators but also, and rather intensely, among the spectators. Their bodily co-presence provided the basis for emotional contagion, as already noted by the theatre theoreticians of the late eighteenth century. In his Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (General Theory of the Fine Arts), Johann Georg Sulzer claimed: It is certain that no circumstance creates livelier impressions and emotions in human beings than a public performance … Nothing in the world is more contagious and effective than the emotions sensed in a crowd of people. (Sulzer 1794, 254)

The spectators experienced their togetherness as an emotional community. Weeping together testified to their shared values that differed from that of the ruling class, the nobility. It showed them as truly human; being a member of the middle class meant defending and embodying genuine humanity. Reports on performances not only speak of weeping spectators, but also describe how, driven by their strong emotions, they got up to embrace each other, thus performing their strong alliance. The performances not only conveyed familial love as the model for relationships between human beings in general, but also allowed for the middle-class spectators to act out the emotional bond connecting them to each other. The crying assembly in the theatre, particularly in the stalls, constituted the new ideal form

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of living together propagated by middle-class intellectuals. As Lessing wrote in a letter to Nicolai in November 1756 about the aim of performing a bürgerliches Trauerspiel: The meaning of tragedy is this: it should develop our ability to feel empathy. … The man of empathy is the most perfect man; among all social virtues, among all kinds of generosity, he is the most outstanding. A person who can make us feel such empathy, therefore, makes us more perfect and virtuous, and the tragedy which moves us also makes us thus – or, it moves us in order to be able to make us thus. (Lessing 1973, 163, emphasis in original)

Understanding and def ining themselves as feeling human beings, the middle-class spectators not only emphasized their dissimilarity to the ruling class, the nobility, but also positioned themselves as the morally superior group since they were guided by truly human values. I therefore argue that in this regard the theatre performances served as a means of self-empowerment for the members of the middle class. They enabled and even encouraged them to experience themselves as members not only of a family – mirroring the characters on stage – but also of an emotional community that is formed by all citizens assembled in the theatre. It therefore does not seem too far-fetched to make a connection between the spectators in the stalls at the theatre and the delegates from the over twenty German states attending the Frankfurt National Assembly at the Paulskirche in Frankfurt upon Main from May 18, 1848 until May 31, 1849. Its aim was to formulate a constitution for a German nation state that was yet to take shape. The idea of such a nation state was being propagated mostly by members of the middle class as a follow-up to the Napoleonic Wars that ravaged most of the German states. The delegates, who were elected by the independent, male citizens of their respective states, hailed from the very same sections of the middle class as the spectators who set the tone at the theatre. The emotional community formed by the spectators at the Paulskirche thus had turned into a political assembly. Its delegates were entrusted with the task of formulating a constitution that could serve as foundation for a new political community, a nation state. However, they failed in this regard – but partly for reasons beyond their control (Wehler 1977, 703-779). Still, the self-empowerment of the members of the middle class via the theatre in the second half of the eighteenth century can be regarded as a decisive experience of an assembly’s performativity as a transformative force, which may have led the delegates to believe that the

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National Assembly’s performativity would release a similar transformative force. However, given the political situation, this remained an illusion.

Strengthening the Bonds of Solidarity: Workers’ Mass Spectacles in the Weimar Republic At the beginning of the twentieth century, Max Reinhardt, the undisputed “star” of middle-class theatre, left behind the conventional theatre buildings in search of new spaces that would allow him to realize a new genre – mass spectacles spanning spectators from all social classes. He staged Greek tragedies such as Oedipus the King (1910/11) and The Oresteia (1912) – the epitome of middle-class Bildungstheater – at the Circus Schumann in Berlin. The space allowed for about five thousand spectators. The choruses, consisting of hundreds of members, entered and exited the arena through the aisles in the sections for the spectators. The occupation of the whole space by the performers nullified certain differences between the actors and the spectators. The first moved among the latter and, thus, drew them into the action. The spectators hailed from all social classes. Princes August Wilhelm and Oscar of Prussia attended, as did middle-class spectators and workers. In this regard, it might be tempting to call this theatre actual Volkstheater – people’s theatre. However, the critics did not emphasize this aspect; instead, they focused on a rather different one, which points ahead to the 1920s. As one critic writes: The individual has no impact here. In this half light, only the crowd has an impact. One begins to understand what “the public” means. This is what Reinhardt needs. He believes the crowd is everything, subject and object. He rewards five thousand spectators by presenting a company of almost ten thousand. He presents the masses to the masses. He shows them to themselves in the exaggerated form of passion and costume. (Engel 1910)2

The production of Oedipus the King, in particular, was incredibly successful. It toured all over Europe, where it made an indelible impression. After the October Revolution in Russia, the actor Yurij Yurev revived Reinhardt’s production at St. Petersburg’s Circus Ciniselli, using the original set that 2 As regards the theatrical community that came into being not only between the actors and spectators, but first and foremost between the spectators hailing from different social classes, see Fischer-Lichte 2017, 107-126.

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had been preserved. In a way, this performance triggered the series of mass spectacles that took place in St. Petersburg between 1917 and 1920. Even the Thingspiel movement in Nazi Germany (1933-1936) and the American Zionist pageants (1932-1946) (Fischer-Lichte 2005, 89-204) can be regarded as – highly diverse – sequels to Reinhardt’s pre-war productions of Greek tragedies as mass spectacles. It is very likely that the performances by and for workers in the 1920s drew heavily on the experiences with Reinhardt’s mass spectacles, although the new context changed their social meaning as well as the rhetoric of the critics. Held as part of union festivals, workers’ sports events or May Day celebrations, they took place in open spaces on fairgrounds, inside stadiums, in amusement parks and at other sites, featuring up to five thousand performers and surrounded by up to sixty-five thousand spectators. With regard to the performance of War and Peace, for instance, a mass spectacle on the occasion of the Leipzig union festival of 1923, the critic of the Leipziger Volkszeitung writes: In order to become aware of themselves, large communities continuously require common rallies, joint celebrations, expressions of joy, sorrow, determination, of attack and defense with regard to things that affect all members of the community … The mass festival with speaking choruses is an important beginning in this respect or even more than a beginning. … Here proletarians are the performers … Here poets, performers and spectators unite in a great community of experience (August 14, 1923, quoted in Hoffmann and Hoffmann-Ostwald 1972, 93).

This new “festive culture” was seen to be part of a “socialist evolution of emotion,” as it was juxtaposed with the “overestimation of formal knowledge” deemed to be predominant in bourgeois culture (Franken 1930, 39). This latter statement is interesting, because it reveals that the middle class is now identified with formal knowledge, while the workers and proletarians are associated with emotions. While in the eighteenth century middle-class spectators were supposed to form an emotional, often sentimental community in order to set themselves apart from the ruling class, in the 1920s it was the proletarian spectators of mass spectacles that were reassured of their group’s solidarity by reiterating their common hatred of the class enemy and their will to change society. The quoted author continues: The worldview of a person arises from their emotional attitude. Emotions come before knowledge. Most workers joined the socialist movement due

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to emotions such as hatred, defiance, et cetera. … Will, too, is determined by emotion. To awaken and strengthen the will to act is what matters most. (ibid.)

It was once again the assembly’s performativity that was at work here, even more so since all involved, actors and spectators, were members of the working class. It transformed the individuals assembled here not only into a temporary emotional community, as Reinhardt’s Oedipus had done, but, on the basis of their common interest, into a solidary community ready to fight for their shared political goals. This applies not only to forms of choric mass theatre, but also to other kinds of agitational and agitprop theatre. In March 1919 Erwin Piscator founded a “Proletarian Theatre.” In the program note distributed as leaflet, the author states quite expressively that its goal was not to convey art to the proletarians but to act as propaganda. “We banned the word art radically from our program, our ‘plays’ were appeals and were intended to have an effect on current events, to be a form of ‘political activity’ (Piscator 1963, 45, emphasis in original). The worker-actors performed on minimal and simple stage sets in halls and assembly rooms in order to reach the masses directly in their living quarters, and thus to activate them. In these performances, Franz Jung, a critic of the Rote Fahne, saw realized a completely new kind of audience behavior: What is basically new about this theater is the curious way in which reality and the play merge into one another. You often don’t know whether you are in a theater or in a public meeting, you feel you ought to intervene and help, or say something. The dividing line between the play and reality gets blurred … the spectator is involved in the play (April 12, 1921, quoted in Piscator 1963, 54).

Even if Piscator refrained from calling his theatre “art,” he did invent exciting, new artistic devices in order to realize it and created a very special aesthetic that strove to activate the spectators physically and politically. Openly and offensively, he declared the aesthetic to be inherently political. He developed a new dramaturgy that was guided by the principles of montage as well as specific scenic devices, such as moveable stage architecture, projections, sound effects and, most notably, film. To describe his new form of theatre, Piscator coined the term “epic theatre,” which was later mistakenly attributed to Bertolt Brecht. In his “Proletarian Theatre” as well as in the two revues Revue Roter Rummel (Red Riot Revue, 1924) and Trotz alledem! (In Spite of Everything, 1925),

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Piscator served an exclusively proletarian audience aiming at strengthening their will to fight and the solidarity among each other. The Communist Party commissioned both revues, even though they did not believe in theatre as propaganda during the time of the Proletarian Theatre. The first was part of the campaign for the Reichstag election in 1924 and took place in different assembly halls across Berlin. The fourteen performances were an enormous success. “The audience plays along. Listen how they whistle, scream, rollick, cheer, sling their arms and help with their thoughts,” is what Jakob Altmeier wrote in 1986 (58). At the end of the performance, the spectators spontaneously got up and united in singing the Internationale. Theatre and life did not fall apart, but formed a unity, as did the actors and spectators. The second revue, on the occasion of the party convention, was designed as a “montage of authentic speeches, essays, newspaper cuttings, appeals, pamphlets, photographs and film of the War and the Revolution, of historical persons and scenes” (Piscator 1963, 94). It dealt with the time span between the outbreak of World War I and the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. It was performed in the Großes Schauspielhaus – the former Circus Schumann, which Hans Poelzig had rebuilt into a theatre environment for Reinhardt’s special purposes in 1919. Here, again, the spectators turned into co-actors: On opening night there were thousands in the Großes Schauspielhaus … The living masses were filled from the outset with wild excitement at being there to watch … But this inner willingness quickly turned into active participation: the masses took over the direction. The people who filled the house had for the most part been actively involved in the period, and what we were showing them was in a true sense their own fate, their own tragedy being acted out before their eyes. Theatre had become reality, and soon it was not the stage confronting the audience, but one big assembly, one big battlefield, one massive demonstration. It was this unity that proved that evening that political theatre could be effective agitation. (Piscator 1963, 96-97)

Piscator’s two revues marked the beginning of agitprop theatre in Germany. Soon after the performances of Revue Roter Rummel in different neighborhoods of Berlin, groups of young workers assembled spontaneously in order to organize “their” red riot. As a follow-up, hundreds of agitprop groups emerged that used the form of revues for their agitation – Das rote Sprachrohr (The Red Megaphone), Rote Raketen (Red Rockets), Die Roten Blusen (The

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Red Blouses), Die Nieter (The Riveters), Die Galgenvögel (The Gallow Birds), Kolonne links (Column Left), and many others. Another wave of such groups was founded in the wake of the guest tour of the Soviet agitprop group Die Blauen Blusen (The Blue Blouses), who traveled through Germany in 1927. This guest tour resulted not only in the emergence of new agitprop groups, but also in the reorientation of their aesthetics. Instead of fulllength revues, groups began experimenting with forms of cabaret: short, diverse and witty stand-alone scenes. They took recourse to elements of popular culture (e.g. punch or minstrelsy), to proletarian subculture, to the new medium of radio, LP records, and film, as well as to different kinds of mass entertainment. Revues, popular songs, jazz, step dance, montage, slapstick and other elements were used for agitational aims and changed accordingly. The central aesthetic category revolved around the concept of pace – the pace of the presentation corresponded to the fast rhythm at work due to the interminable conveyor belts, REFA (German acronym for Reichs Commission for the Determination of Working Hours), time measurement, and the acceleration of traffic, as well as by the hectic tempo of life in the metropolises. Joint singing with a pronounced rhythm served as another important device. It was meant to strengthen “the power of the collective and of collective action … Those who sing along or even just hum along or even just go along with the rhythm are already active in it” (Damerius 1977, 417-418). Groups performed on the backs of lorries and in backyards, where the spectators became part of the collective, ready to fight the class enemy and the society that produced the classes. Béla Balázs characterized the agitprop groups in 1930 as “one of the most important cultural-historical phenomena of our time,” due, most of all, to two circumstances (Balázs 1930, 119-120). First, to the emergence of a new popular culture: The workers write and improvise the pieces themselves. They pass them on between each other, alter them, they know no authors and no copyright. Workers’ theatre is the folk poetry of the class-conscious proletariat. (ibid.)

Second, he argued that it was due to the new role of the audience, to the special relationship between actors and spectators: Out of the audience’s existence, consciousness arises also in the form of theatre. That is why workers’ theatre is the only one in Europe today that has a unified audience. There are no random effects here. … New punch lines are coming, for which the slightest allusion is enough. This

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audience is well informed. New abbreviations emerge. Because these are current, common affairs. New symbols appear. Because this audience knows what is going on. So they bring along the conditions and create a new art for themselves. (Balázs 1930, 120)

The unity of performers and spectators in this theatre did not require a new concept of space and related aesthetic devices in order to emerge. In most cases, this unity was a given. This was all the more so because the performers did not see this agitation as an aesthetic endeavor or even a leisure activity. Many performers had been unemployed for years. In their precarious situation, they fought the same battle for survival as their spectators – and they fought with agitprop theatre as their weapon. Theatre turned into life practice, where they were able to articulate and express the class consciousness from which they derived their identity, thus strengthening and activating it in the spectators. This new proletarian culture took shape as the complete opposite of the bourgeois culture of the time. The people who assembled here formed a community based on their living and working conditions as well as their hatred of class society and the will to fight it. Still, it was the common bodily presence during the performances, their appearance before each other, in spaces close to their own living quarters that not only raised the awareness of this common situation, but also helped bring about emotional contagion. It strengthened their bond of solidarity and also, if not primarily, their will to jointly fight and change the given conditions that held them in their precarious state. In the case of the agitprop performances, theatre proved to be a highly effective weapon for and a decisive part of the class struggle.

The Appearance of the Invisible As different as the two sets of cases dealt with so far – eighteenth-century middle-class theatre and Weimar Republic mass spectacles – might be, they share at least two fundamental features. First, the majority of the spectators – and, regarding the proletarian theatre, even the actors – hailed from the same social class. Second, the particular aesthetics developed and displayed in the performances brought forth or strengthened an emotional community among those assembled. This emotional community was not conceived as an end in itself. Rather, it was supposed to empower its members to claim social agency and political power themselves.

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My third set of cases is different. Here, the spectators – mostly from the middle class – are confronted with actors who usually remain invisible to them, not just in the theatre, but also in social life: the unemployed, asylum seekers, the disabled, or the terminally ill – i.e., those living in a state of precarity. They appear on stage not as dramatic characters but as themselves. Since the 1990s, after the unification of the two German states, German theatre has been invaded by social reality even more. Now, those who were previously invisible appeared on the stage. Appearance, here, is to be understood in terms of Judith Butler: If we consider what it is to appear, it follows that we appear to someone and that our appearance has to be registered by the senses, not only our own, but someone else’s. If we appear, we must be seen, which means that our bodies must be viewed and their vocalized sounds must be heard: the body must enter the visual and audible field. (Butler 2015, 86)

When the bodies of those living in the margins of society become visible and are heard in the theatre, in the very same way as those of the other actors and the spectators, this raises several questions concerning how they are perceived by the others present in the same space, in particular the spectators. Does exposing the hitherto invisible to the gaze of the spectators invite an exoticizing attitude, comparable to that at Hagenbeck’s so-called Völkerschauen (colonial exhibitions) a hundred years earlier? Or does it grant them agency, maybe even power? And what happens to the spectators? Are they able to include “the others” in their assembly? And what kinds of transformations does this lead to? There is an abundance of examples from the last twenty years, but I shall refer to just two types of them in my discussion of the questions posed above: two of Christoph Schlingensief’s actions and performances on the one hand, and choric theatre on the other. On the occasion of the Vienna Festival in 2000, Schlingensief presented the action Bitte liebt Österreich – Erste europäische Koalitionswoche (Please love Austria – First European Coalition Week), which employed and satirized the televised voting model exemplified by the television show Big Brother. A container accommodating asylum seekers was set up on the square in front of the Vienna Opera – that is, the epitome of bourgeois culture. From time to time, celebrities such as the actor Sepp Bierbichler visited and interviewed them. Whatever was going on in the container was broadcast on a large screen, making it clearly visible to all who were present on the square. The spectators as well as the passers-by thus grew familiar with

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the asylum seekers inside the container. This seemingly neutral set-up was contradicted by a sign on top of the container reading “Foreigners, out!” It was announced that every day, the spectators and passers-by could vote off two of the inhabitants who were then, at least ostensibly, deported from Austria. Schlingensief deliberately left the audience in the dark about the actual consequences of their vote. This set-up created a rather awkward situation for all involved. The inhabitants of the container appeared on the screen and were exposed to the gaze of the public in their everyday lives. However, having been properly informed by Schlingensief beforehand that the voting would not carry any consequences for them, they could feel a sense of superiority towards the spectators. Being interviewed by celebrities gave importance to their individual histories and fates, their experiences, and hopes. This possibly led to a certain kind of encouragement or even empowerment. For the spectators, the situation was rather destabilizing. The sign could be read as an appeal to “ban” all “foreigners” from the country, no matter who they were and why they had come. The voting, as inhuman as it may be, still directed the attention to the individuality of the people inside the container. If a passer-by wanted to vote, they had to recognize that the group of “foreigners” was still composed of individual persons. A specific reason had to be identified for voting someone off beyond the common denomination that they were all “foreigners”; it had to apply just to this one individual, thus recognizing the person concerned as such. It was not the “community of the locals” versus “the foreigners,” but individual spectators who had to acknowledge “the foreigners” as individual human beings that were distinct from each other. A very different set-up was established for Schlingensief’s production Kunst und Gemüse. Theater ALS Krankheit (Art and Vegetables. Theatre A(L)S Desease), performed at the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in Berlin in 2004. As was customary for Schlingensief’s productions, the so-called Schlingensief family, that included some disabled people, appeared on stage. At the center of the performance was Angela Jansen, suffering from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). She was lying on a bed at the center of the auditorium. The insidious disease, already at an advanced stage, had left her completely paralyzed. She could only communicate with others through the movements of her eyes, which were interpreted by a computer. When the spectators realized that among them was a terminally ill woman, who did not hide herself nor her disease in a hospital, but preferred to communicate with them in this public space, which was not darkened, they initially displayed signs of irritation and dismay, but also of pity,

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fear, horror, and shame. However, over the course of the performance, the emotional states of the spectators gradually shifted. Neither the presence of Angela Jansen nor the messages she sent via the computer triggered enduring emotions of anxiety, fear, or shame. The situation grew to be increasingly “natural.” The assembly in the auditorium quite consciously and deliberately included Angela Jansen who, in fact, lay in their very midst. Over the course of the performance, the spatial arrangement turned into a very special emotional and social arrangement. The spectators – at least in the performance I attended – acknowledged that Angela Jansen did indeed have the right to appear among them and to demand their attention concerning her process of dying. As the performance unfolded, in spite of any initial sense of crisis, they succeeded in creating a serene atmosphere of emotional support for Angela Jansen. In Schlingensief’s actions and performances, those who are excluded from society because of their precarious state and rendered invisible in hospitals, camps, and day care regained their right to appear on stage and stand at its center, making themselves seen and heard by the assembled audience as particular individuals playing an important role – hopefully, not only in the performance. While Schlingensief’s work focuses on the individuality of the excluded and their right to appear in front of and be acknowledged by society, choric theatre deals with groups of people and especially the highly diverse relationship between two “collectives:” the audience and the chorus. Choric theatre was reintroduced to German stages by Einar Schleef, a former GDR citizen, in the 1980s. His 1986 production of The Mothers (a fusion of Euripides’ Suppliant Women and Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes) at the Schauspielhaus Frankfurt upon Main marked the revival of choric theatre. With new spatial arrangements and groups of marginalized people as chorus members, Schleef developed his choric theatre as a decidedly tragic theatre, wherein individual and community cannot be separated, no matter whether the community refers to the chorus members or the audience. The two are locked in an ongoing battle that can never be won (see Fischer-Lichte 2017, 315-327 on The Mothers). Thus, from the very beginning, this tragic theatre implied a political dimension. At the start of the new millennium, after Schleef’s untimely death in 2001, choric theatre turned into a prominent form of explicitly political theatre. In the former GDR, in particular, it evolved as a kind of topical revival of the Monday demonstrations. Volker Lösch’s choruses in his Oresteia in Dresden were described by one critic as “the protagonist,” but at the same time as the “representative of the audience on stage” (Merck 2003, 38). The precarious

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situations of the chorus members reminded the spectators of their similarly unstable state as a result of reunification. The first two choruses comprised fifteen men and thirteen women, mostly elderly citizens of Dresden, some unemployed, others pensioners. These individuals were granted visibility, agency, and a voice not only as members of the choruses. During the two intermissions they could be seen on monitors and in the theatre’s foyers and corridors talking about their lives, hopes, and disillusionment after the end of the GDR. In his later productions, such as Medea (2007) in Stuttgart with a chorus of Turkish women, and Marat/Sade in Hamburg (2008) featuring a chorus of poor and unemployed people in dripping raincoats, Lösch would incorporate their statements and thoughts into the text of the chorus, thus individualizing the chorus members even more. The choruses served as a powerful collective, as most of the critics also noted. They recognized that this meant “giv[ing] a voice to those … whose agency has been taken away, who consider themselves written off and pushed to the margins” (Gorgas 2003). The stage was given to those who are not usually recognized publicly. Thus, they could confront the spectators as a powerful collective, making itself visible to and heard by the public, and demanding its attention. The dynamic rhythmic movements and choric speeches released an energy that imposed itself on the spectators and in this way exerted power over them while also energizing them. As a collective, the citizens on stage, even if marginalized outside their membership in the chorus, drew the attention of the citizens in the auditorium to the problems and promises inherent to democracy, which they had all witnessed. While the shortcomings of democracy were blatantly exposed, the chorus nonetheless demonstrated its intrinsic potential for the citizens. In a way, it enacted a form of participatory democracy, in which individuals assembled in powerful and fluid collectives that allowed them to act as co-creators of what was happening in the theatre. In stark contrast to the more or less fixed collectives that were institutionalized in the GDR, but rather similar to the Monday demonstrations, the chorus in the Oresteia resembled a swarm that followed the principle of decentralized, rhythmic self-organization (Granovetter 1973; Rheingold 2002), which does not force its members to give up their individuality. In this chorus, the demands of the individual and of the collective went hand in hand. It could thus be seen as a kind of Blochian Vorschein of the utopia of a participatory democracy – as well as an urgent call for it. As different as Schlingensief’s performances and those of choric theatre in the new millennium might have been, both emphasized the transformative power of assemblies. In both cases, it was the assembly’s performativity, the

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appearance of the two collectives before each other, that granted visibility to the otherwise invisible, included the hitherto excluded, and gave them agency. They moved center stage and demanded public attention, openly calling for appropriate changes in society. This was a political act per se. Finally, let us link back these two cases to the ones discussed in the previous sections. Schlingensief could be understood as citing the aesthetics of empathy from the eighteenth century, transposing it and its application from middle-class families to those living in precarious situations today. Choric theatre in the new millennium alludes to the proletarian choric theatre of the 1920s. At least, as the Dresden example suggested, the spectators shared some of the chorus members’ experiences. However, even when there was a clear social distinction between chorus members and spectators – as in Lösch’s Medea in Stuttgart and his Marat/Sade in Hamburg – there were frequent moments uniting chorus and audience, whereas they would otherwise have confronted each other, in a single emotion or in other responses against a common “enemy” – such as Hamburg’s twenty-eight richest citizens cited by the chorus from Manager Magazin’s 2008 list during Marat/Sade (Wihstutz 2013, 182-184). Even if in both cases – Schlingensief and choric theatre – the allusion to a theatre genre of the past may be no more than an echo, it is still persuasive enough to demonstrate that in all of these examples, however diverse, the assembly in and as theatre has the power to unfold its transformative potential in a way that might even lead to changes in society at large. In this respect, the aesthetic assembly in theatre through its very aesthetics has the potential to turn into a political assembly. The different forms of choric theatre – be they Reinhardt’s or the workers’ mass spectacles or new kinds of choric theatre since the 1990s – take us back to the Occupy movements I addressed in the beginning. In the same way that the aesthetic assembly may turn into a political one, political assemblies such as the Occupy movements make ample use of aesthetic devices as developed in theatre and performance art. The choreography of the “Silent Standstill” held in Alexandria/Egypt on June 18, 2010 may serve as one example. Here, women and men, mostly dressed in black, lined up on the promenade, facing the sea and standing motionless without touching each other, simply appearing before those walking by as well as before the policemen, exposing their bodies to their view without returning their gazes. The “Human Mic” of the Occupy Wall Street movement in Zuccotti Park, New York City (since September 17, 2011), serves as another example. At the General Assembly, the speakers’ words were repeated and amplified by the chorus of all people assembled here – including Judith Butler’s when

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she attended on October 23, 2011. Not only was the voice of the individual speaker heard, but so were the voices of all members present at the assembly. The format of the chorus reflected both the equal importance of all voices and the fact that all individuals shared the same concerns and therefore spoke with “one voice,” even if there might have been dissent among them in other respects. For passers-by, at least, they made themselves heard as a united chorus. The choreography of the “Standstill” as well as the chorus of the “Human Mic” thus led to self-empowerment in view of another, often antagonistic group, such as the police and aggressive passers-by, as well as curious and empathetic spectators.

Works Cited Altmeier, Jakob. 1986. “Wie es anfing. Zur Geschichte des Piscator-Theaters.” In Piscator, Erwin, Zeittheater. Das politische Theater und weitere Schriften von 1915 bis 1966, edited by Manfred Brauneck and Peter Stertz. Hamburg: Rowohlt. Bahrmann, Hannes, and Christoph Links. 1994. Chronik der Wende: Die DDR zwischen 7. Oktober und 18. Dezember 1989. Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag. Balázs, Béla. 1930. “Arbeitertheater.” In Deutsches Arbeitertheater 1918-1933 (1972), vol. 2, edited by Ludwig Hoffmann and Daniel Hoffmann-Ostwald, 119-133. Munich: Rogner und Bernhard. Baldyga, Natalya, ed. 2019. The Hamburg Dramaturgy by G.E. Lessing: A New and Complete Annotated English Translation, translated by Wendy Arons and Sara Figal. London and New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 2015. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Damerius, Helmut. 1977. “Lernen zu Kämpfen – Lernen sich Mut zu Lachen. Die Agitprop-Arbeit der ‘Kolonne Links.’” In Wem gehört die Welt. Kunst und Gesellschaft in der Weimarer Republik, edited by Christian Borngräber and Götz Schwarzrock, 414-431. Berlin: Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst. Engel, Fritz. 1910. Without Title. In Berliner Tagesblatt, November 8, 1910. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. 2005. Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual. Exploring Forms of Political Theatre. London and New York: Routledge. —. 2008. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, London and New York: Routledge. —. 2017. Tragedy’s Endurance. Performances of Greek Tragedy and Cultural Identity in Germany Since 1800. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Franken, Paul. 1930. Vom Werden einer neuen Kultur. Aufgaben der Arbeiter-, Kultur-, und Sportorganisationen. Berlin: Laub.

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Gorgas, Gabriele. 2003. “Gewagt Gewonnen: Volker Lösch inszeniert ‘Die Orestie’ und macht die Bühne zum Schlachten-Forum.” In Sächsische Zeitung, November 3, 2003. Granovetter, Mark S. 1973. “The Strength of Weak Ties.” American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 6: 1360-1380. Herrmann, Max. 1920. “Über die Aufgabe eines theaterwissenschaftlichen Instituts.” In Theaterwissenschaft im deutschsprachigen Raum (1981), edited by Helmar Klier, 15-24. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Hoffmann, Ludwig, and Daniel Hoffmann-Ostwald. 1972. Deutsches Arbeitertheater 1918-1933, 2 vols., Berlin (GDR), 2nd edition. Knigge, Adolph Freiherr von. 1799. Practical Philosophy of Social Life, or the Art of Conversing with Men, London. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. 1973. Werke, vol. 4, edited by Herbert G. Göpfert. Munich: Hanser. Merck, Nikolaus. 2003. “Staatsschauspiel/Theater im Pfalzbau. Aischylos’ ‘Orestie’ in der Regie von Volker Lösch.” Theater der Zeit 12. Piscator, Erwin. 1963. The Political Theatre. A History 1914-1929, edited by Hugh Rorrison. Hamburg: Rowohlt. Rheingold, Howard. 2002. Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing. Schüddekopf, Carl, ed. 1907. Briefwechsel zwischen Gleim und Ramler, vol. 2, 1753-1759. Tuebingen: Literarischer Verein Stuttgart. Schulte-Sasse, Jochen, ed. 1972. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Moses Mendelssohn, Friedrich Nicolai: Briefwechsel über das Trauerspiel. Munich: Winkler. Sulzer, Johann Georg. 1794. Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste. Leipzig: Weidmann. Wehler, Hans-Ulrich. 1977. Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 2: Von der Reformära bis zur industriellen und politischen “Deutschen Doppelrevolution” 1815-1845/49. Munich: Beck. Wihstutz, Benjamin. 2013. “Other Space or Space of Others? Reflections on Contemporary Political Theatre.” In Performance and the Politics of Space: Theatre and Topology, edited by Erika Fischer-Lichte and Benjamin Wihstutz, 182-197. New York and London: Routledge.

About the Author Erika Fischer-Lichte is Professor in the Theatre and Performance Studies Department of Freie Universität Berlin and director of the International Research Center “Interweaving Performance Cultures.” Her research interests focus on the interweaving of performance cultures in the context

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of historical and contemporary forms of globalization; transformative aesthetics; performances of ancient Greek tragedies since 1800 worldwide; and performance-related concepts in non-European languages. She has published more than 30 books and 300 essays, including The Semiotics of Theatre (1992), History of European Drama and Theatre (2002); The Show and the Gaze of Theatre (1997), Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual. Exploring Forms of Political Theatre (2005), The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics (2008), Performativität. Eine Einführung (2012), The Routledge Introduction to Theatre and Performance Studies (2014), Dionysus Resurrected. Performances of Euripides’ The Bacchae in a Globalizing World (2014), Tragedy’s Endurance. Performances of Greek Tragedies and Cultural Identity in Germany Since 1800 (2017).



Bodies That Still Matter 1 Judith Butler Abstract The question of how best to name those who are most vulnerable to precarity and exploitation is both a conceptual and political one. It has been tempting in recent years to consider vulnerability as the foundation for a new politics, but that is an error. Vulnerability cannot be isolated as a new ground for politics. It is always contextual since it belongs to the organization of embodied and social relations. Vulnerability can neither be isolated from the constellation of rage, persistence, and resistance that emerges under specific historical conditions, nor can it be the basis for a new humanism. Rather, the differential exposure of bodies to abandonment, illness, and death, belong to a sphere of power that regulates the grievability of human lives, linked to the climate crisis and the demand for a new political vocabulary that moves beyond anthropocentrism. The differential scheme that governs the grievability of lives is a central component of social inequality at the same time that it belongs to forms of institutional violence that target communities and establish their precarity, if not their dispensability. If and when a population is (or is treated as) grievable, they can be acknowledged as a living population whose deaths would be grieved if their lives were lost. To assert the grievability of human life under conditions in which those lives have already been abandoned is to make a political claim against abandonment, for sustainable infrastructure, and for both the grievability and value of those lives. Mourning is thus linked with public protest, Vulnerability is the possibility of injury, but also of responsive and radical politics, one that asserts continued bodily existence as a form of persistence. Keywords: vulnerability, embodiment, grievability, life, inequality, violence, protest

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Some parts of this essay have appeared in Judith Butler, The Force of Nonviolence (Verso, 2020).

Halsema, Annemie, Katja Kwastek, and Roel van den Oever (eds), Bodies That Still Matter: Resonances of the Work of Judith Butler. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789463722940_butler

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We are living in a time of numerous atrocities and senseless death, and so the enormous ethical and political question becomes: what are the modes of political representation available to us? I want to caution against too quickly developing a politics of vulnerability or a politics of care as an immediate pathway for feminism or for the Left, although I am quite clear that we need to reconsider both notions, and that many people do suffer from disproportionate forms of vulnerability. It matters how we go about addressing this issue. Some would say that we have to identify vulnerable groups and offer them protection. I am never sure who “we” are in that formulation, even though I am not always opposed to that procedure. Neither vulnerability nor care can be the basis of a politics, in the sense of an ongoing and unconflicted human disposition or condition that can and should give rise, logically or temporally, to a political framework for feminism. It would perhaps be understandably easy and efficient if we could establish vulnerability as the foundation for a new politics, but it can neither be isolated from other terms, nor can it be the kind of phenomenon to serve as a foundation. If we think about the connection between vulnerability and resistance, we can see the limits of those accounts that either use vulnerability as a sociological adjective to describe certain groups or isolate it as a condition that gives rise to a specific version of the human creature. The task is not to rally as vulnerable creatures or to create a class of persons who identify primarily with vulnerability. In the context of human rights work and humanitarianism, we are given to understand that vulnerability sometimes applies to populations; sociologically considered, there are vulnerable populations and they are understood to be in need of protection and even care. Of course, we speak that way especially in light of those who are without basic human requirements, a mass number of refugees being abandoned by so many nation-states and transnational state formations, including the European Union. We also speak that way about the victims of feminicidio (or femicidio) in Latin America (especially Honduras, Guatemala, Brazil, Argentina, and El Salvador), which includes everyone who is brutalized or killed by virtue of being feminized, and that includes large numbers of trans women as well. Often these deaths are reported or sensationalist stories appear in newspapers, after which there is a momentary shock. There is horror, to be sure, but not always linked with an analysis that helps to mobilize against such widespread crimes. Sometimes the men who commit such crimes are said to be pathological, or the situation is considered to be tragic, or the story is treated as yet another periodic instance of the aberrant. Consider the description of feminists, however, who are trying to theorize the situation

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in order to know the terms by which it should be framed and understood. Montserrat Sagot, for instance, has argued that femicide expresses in dramatic form the inequality of the relations between feminine and masculine, and demonstrates an extreme manifestation of domination, terror, social vulnerability, and extermination with impunity.2 In her view, it will not do to explain assassinations such as these through recourse to individual characteristics, pathology, or even masculine aggression. Rather, these acts of killing have to be understood in terms of the reproduction of a social structure. She claims that this has to be described as an extreme form of sexist terrorism (Monárrez Fragoso 2002). For her, killing is the most extreme form of domination, and other forms, including discrimination, harassment, and battery, have to be understood as on a continuum with femicide. This mode of reasoning, however, leads us to a paradox, since if extermination is the goal, then the perpetrators no longer dominate, for the one who dominates requires one who can be subordinated, and whose subordination reflects back to them their dominance. Without the continued life of the subordinated person or class, the dominator becomes the norm, and a relation of imposed inequality gives way to genocide. No one dominates the dead. But let us note that femicide does not involve the killing of all women, although it establishes a climate in which any woman, including trans women, can be killed. So the living endure within that atmosphere of potential harm. The population of women who live on are terrorized by the prevalence of this killing practice, induced to subordinate to avoid that fate. The subordination is already linked to their status as “killable.” Subordinate or die becomes the imperative delivered to women under these conditions. It is this power to terrorize that is backed up, supported, and strengthened by the police who refuses to prosecute, or who inflicts violence on women who dare to make a legal complaint when they suffer or see violence. We call the killing “violence,” of course, but shall we also call the reproduction of institutionalized terror “violence”? If we call the latter violence, then we shift from one conception of physical violence to another that is institutional, although the two are, in fact, linked, bound to one another in a strengthening dialectic of terror. Here is where there is so much theoretical work to do: How do we understand the specificity of sexual terror? How does it relate to domination, and to extermination? Is there a general 2 “El femicidio expresa de forma dramática la desigualdad de relaciones entre lo femenino y lo masculino y muestra una manifestación extrema de dominio, terror, vulnerabilidad social, de exterminio e incluso de impunidad” (Sagot 2007).

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theory of sexuality and violence within which this phenomenon can be understood? All these questions help us to understand how there might be an intervention, global in scale, to demand a reconceptualization of these forms of murder, so that we can understand the forms of social power that are enacted in these circumstances. Only then will we know how to counter the stories that blame women for their own violent deaths, or that make the men into pathological characters, or provide a sympathetic account of their rage. As individual and awful as any of these losses may be, they belong to a social structure that has deemed women ungrievable. The categories that fail to grasp the operation of social power in such cases thus obstruct the effective political opposition to this condition. Of course, there are many questions that remain: the uses of human rights discourse, the recourse to legal regimes which often reproduce inequality, the necessity of understanding the possibilities of resistance that women have under such terrorizing conditions. And the necessity to create a global picture of this reality may well involve understanding the way such killings work, for instance, in US prisons and US streets, especially targeting women of color and trans women, the most vulnerable, but also those whose forms of political resistance may well prove to be among the most powerful. The growing feminist scholarship and legal jurisprudence in this area that is becoming more well-known and more accessible, has changed the legal and political landscape. I do not know what kind of revolution it would take to become more powerful than this form of terror. But it is an ideal that must stay alive as a thought, no matter how difficult that may seem.

How to Name Those Who Are Vulnerable? Is there then a way to name and counter forms of necropolitical targeting without producing a class of victims that denies women, including trans women, their networks, their theory and analysis, their solidarities, and their opposition (Mbembe 2003)? When we speak about vulnerable populations, we may be thinking that we make no ontological claim about this group, but only offer a provisional sociological or legal terminology for the purpose of description. The reasonable view seems to go something like this: A population is designated or demarcated that has become vulnerable under certain historical conditions, but that population can also be delivered from vulnerability if they are given proper infrastructural support, including safe refuge and legal rights. If and when that happens, that group loses its status as vulnerable, though other populations remain vulnerable because of

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their historical conditions. The task is to relieve them of their vulnerability, and that task is presumably undertaken by someone who is tasked with providing that relief. Do those called vulnerable still maintain and exercise their own power, or is it rather the power of paternalistic care that is now obligated to intervene? When we ascribe vulnerability to persons in that way, we abstract and isolate vulnerability as a defining feature of human lives under specific contingent historical conditions and, in so doing, we occlude the constellation of vulnerability, rage, persistence, and resistance that emerges under these same historical conditions. In other words, we all know that to receive aid or to declare a humanitarian crisis, vulnerable populations have to be named by those who wield the institutional and discursive authority to prompt aid, to engage legal structures, to facilitate media attention. At the same time, however, when a population is described in such a way, efforts at action, forms of solidarity, networks of support, and means of resistance are at risk of being effaced. So, under those conditions, the language by which these persons are represented risks misrepresenting them, locating power external to their own action. Thus, named as vulnerable, they are deprived of their power. And this is a bind, since we call them vulnerable because they have been deprived of power. How do we get around this conundrum? A similar situation affects the refugee populations detained in Europe or those abandoned to the Mediterranean. Whether we are speaking about people trapped in camps along the border of Syria, or launching into the sea where there is no guarantee of rescue, we are referring to populations that risk death and often die, and whose deaths are a calculable feature of what Mbembe has called a necropolitics. I will not elaborate on that notion here, but would like to call attention first to the organized character of deprivation and death that has taken place along the extended borders of Europe. More than three thousand people have died trying to cross the Mediterranean in the last few years, and these include the large numbers of Kurdish people seeking to migrate over the sea. The number of civilian deaths in Syria is enormous. Human Rights Watch reports the following: “The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a monitoring group based in the UK, estimated the death toll since the start of the war to be as high as 511,000 as of March 2018. Years of relentless fighting left 6.6 million displaced internally and 5.6 million around the world, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).” There are many examples on which I could draw to raise the question of how we come to name and understand the organization of populations primed for dispossession and death, and they would include the last decades in

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Colombia, the mass slaughter of the Rohingya, and the brutal treatment of Syrians and Kurds amassed on the border of Turkey or refused by European countries. The latter form of lethal abandonment by European states reflects the differential ways that anti-Muslim racism works in Europe and its convergence with anti-black racism that creates the notion of a disposable people, those who are considered on the cusp of death or already dead or never really considered as part of human life at all. We can decide to set up different categories for those who died in war and refugee deaths, but the refugee is tied to the war, is a war casualty – there is arguably no Syrian refugee without war – and the refugee is living out a condition produced by war – the precarious flight from war. Those who are killed are victims, to be sure, and those who somehow survive in the shadow regions of displacement and destitution live on in some way. What, then, are the conditions for that living on, and how do we understand that vulnerability in a condition of precarious survival? After all, it does happen that those who have lost their homes and countries or who are, as a consequence of military or economic destruction, without adequate infrastructural support, have nevertheless developed networks. Refugee activism involves a range of activities: communicating timetables, translation, learning legal and regulatory policies, international maritime and asylum laws in the Mediterranean to their advantage in order to move across borders, to plot a route and to connect with communities who can provide support of one kind or another. Arrival can mean confinement to detention centers or getting through only to squat in vacated hotels with accommodating anarchists or to become the new homeless. The names we use to describe such conditions of life matter. Those amassed along the borders of Europe are not precisely bare life – we do not recognize their suffering by further depriving them of all capacity. They are, for the most part, in a terrible situation, improvising forms of sociality, using cell phones, plotting and taking action when it is possible, drawing maps, learning languages, though in so many instances those activities are not always possible. Even as agency is blocked at every turn, there still remain ways of resisting that very situation, ways of making a political demand, though not in every instance. When they do make the demand for papers, for movement, for entry, they are not precisely overcoming their vulnerability – they are demonstrating it. They do not miraculously transform vulnerability into strength, but articulate the demand that life has to be supported in order to persist. Sometimes the demand is made with the body, showing up, refusing to move. The cell phone image that makes the virtual case for the embodied life. In other words, vulnerability

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is incorporated and manifest in the making of a political demand, in the action of resistance. The mistake that is sometimes made is to think that if there is action, vulnerability has been overcome. The vulnerable do not act; to act is strong. But perhaps we have to rethink the act of demonstrating, and the logic of demonstration itself, in order to re-evaluate these kinds of assumptions. Consider, for example, the German newspaper Daily Resistance, published in Farsi, Arabic, Turkish, German, French, and English, which contains articles by refugees who have formulated a set of political demands, including the abolition of all refugee camps, and the end of the German policy of Residenzpflicht (which limits the freedom of movement of refugees within narrow boundaries) to stop all deportations and to allow refugees to work and study. In 2012, several refugees in the city of Würzburg stitched their mouths shut, protesting against the fact that the government had refused to respond to them. That gesture has been repeated in several sites, most recently by Iranian migrants in Calais in March 2019 before the destruction and evacuation of their camp. Their view, widely shared, is that without a political response, the refugees remain voiceless, since a voice that is not heard, is not registered, and so is not a political voice. Of course, they did not put their claim in the propositional form that I just offered, but they made the point through a readable and visible gesture that muted the voice as the sign and substance of their demand. The image of the stitched lips shows that the demand cannot be voiced and so makes its own voiceless demand. It displays its voiceless-ness in a visual image to make a point about the political limits imposed on audibility. In some ways, we see again a form of theatrical politics that asserts the power of these people and the limits imposed on power at the same time. Consider an example from Turkey, the “standing man” in Taksim Square in June of 2013, who was part of the protest movements against the Erdogan government’s policies of privatization and its authoritarianism. The standing man was a performance artist, Erdem Gündüz, who obeyed the state’s edict delivered immediately after the mass protests not to assemble and not to speak with others in assembly. This edict by Erdogan sought to undermine the most basic premises of democracy: freedom of movement, of assembly, and of speech. One man stood, and stood at the mandated distance from another person, who in turn stood at the mandated distance from another. Legally, they did not constitute an assembly, and no one was speaking or moving. What they did was to perform compliance perfectly, hundreds of them, filling the square at the proper distance from one another. They effectively demonstrated the ban under which they were living, submitting

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to it at the same time that they displayed it for the cameras that could not be fully banned. Demonstration in this case had at least two meanings: the ban is shown, incorporated, enacted bodily – the ban becomes a script – but the ban is also opposed, demonstrated against. That demonstration was elaborated in and by the visual field opened up by cell phone cameras, the forms of technology that eluded the interdiction on speech and movement. The performance thus both submitted to, and defied, the interdiction in and through the same action. Fighting the censor, embodying its term, this could be called a subject knotted with legal powers, to be sure, but also manifesting defiance. Lives seeking to live on the margin of life seek to assert their existence. Sometimes the slogan is simply “we exist.” That public assertion of existence is meant to break through the denial that these are lives, that they deserve recognition, support, and legal status, and that they can be lost.

The Biopolitics of Grievability What then does it mean to say that a life, or lives, can be lost? On the one hand, this would seem to be a defining feature of all finite life, the very meaning of finitude. On the other hand, under conditions in which life is not sustainable, lives are more likely to be lost than not. Foucault distinguished in Society Must Be Defended ([1976] 2003) against two forms of death-dealing: one is sovereign and death follows upon a command or a sentence, the other is biopolitical and death is the consequence of a policy – or a set of policies – of abandonment and destitution. To assert the grievability of human life under conditions in which those lives have already been abandoned is to make a political claim against abandonment, for sustainable infrastructure, and for both the grievability and value of those lives. It is an awkward phrase: grievability. What does it mean to say that one population appears within a particular configuration of power to be more or less grievable? Obviously, we are speaking not generalizing about an existential condition nor are we referring to inherent attributes. Rather, we are referring to a way that populations are represented and treated within dominant schemes of power. For a population targeted in war, systematically detained, or abandoned or left to die, their lives do not count as lives worth sustaining or preserving. There is no social or public policy aimed at securing a livable life for them, and yet they live with the felt knowledge that their lives are, in the eyes of dominant power, disposable. Is there a clear way to distinguish on demographic grounds the grievable from the ungrievable?

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From within the terms of racism, those designations are made all the time. From within the framework of anti-racism, those distinctions are exposed and challenged all the time. Racist power can draw the line between grievable and ungrievable lives in several ways. Sometimes ungrievable lives are not even considered lives or living; they belong to the shadow regions of life, those who are already socially dead, or dying. Other times they are lives, but their value is considered less than other lives. These are two distinct forms of inequality. The one distinguishes between those who are more and less alive, the other distinguishes between those who exemplify the value of the human life more and less fully. Either way, some are more grievable than others. Put differently, some lives are regarded as if the prospective loss of that life would be a serious loss; they are the grievable. Others are regarded as if their loss would be no loss, or not much of a loss; they are in the category of the ungrievable. But those determinations are always made within frameworks of radical inequality, whether racist or misogynist or transphobic, that seek to preserve the fully human and valuable life, or the life fully alive, as a white and masculine prerogative. Of course, to speak of grievability is an awkward way to speak. It usually involves thinking about those who are already lost or dead: Will there be a gravesite, a monument, a public acknowledgement of some kind? But what if grievability characterizes the living? We are also used to asking whether subjects are capable of grieving, but we are less adept at asking whether people are eligible to be grieved. If the sense of being grievable is an experience that the living carry, that is, that they would be mourned if their lives were lost, then so too is the sense of being ungrievable, of not knowing whether the loss of one’s life would be marked or mourned. When we talk about the capacity to grieve, we are usually referring to individuals who have had to face a loss and now have to accept that hard fact. But we can talk about societies that way, and whole cultural worlds. The question of whether a people are capable of grieving was poignantly posed by the study published in Germany called The Inability to Mourn ([1967] 1975) by Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich. That text, building upon Freud’s work on melancholia, asked whether in postwar Germany there was a failure to mourn the massive losses inflicted by the Nazi regime, but also the losses borne by German civilians. It showed that melancholia might not only characterize an individual psyche, but a collective or shared condition or, more precisely, a national one, as well. Whereas mourning is characterized by the acknowledgement of loss – what Freud called the “verdict of reality” – melancholia refuses to hear or accept the verdict, refuses to acknowledge a loss that at some level is both registered and refused.

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When off icial EU boats turn back refugees in precarious vessels, do they regard the lives on that boat as grievable or ungrievable? How do their governments regard them? Does “national security” as a principle in such instances encode implicitly a refusal to grieve, to acknowledge the grievability of those persons? Grievability is relative to treatment, and treatment is relative to larger policies and schemes of social and racial inequality. If and when a population is (or is treated as) grievable, they can be acknowledged as a living population whose deaths would be grieved if their lives were lost. Those losses would be unacceptable, and even wrong, an occasion of shock and outrage, moral judgment, and political opposition. Grievability is a characteristic attributed to a group of people, perhaps a population, by some group or community, or within the terms of a discourse, epistemic framework, policy, or institution. That attribution is rarely a punctual event. Not one person with power explicitly proclaims that a population is not worth grieving, that their lives are not worth living. And yet such judgments are implied by immigration and health policies that regularly abandon populations, by military campaigns that target, abandon, or persecute populations or force them to flee without recourse to basic goods or entitlements. This can also happen through many different media and with variable force – it can also fail to happen, or happen only intermittently and inconsistently, depending on the context, or how the context shifts. But my point is that people can be grieved or bear the attribute of grievability to the extent that the wrongfulness of their lives becoming lost can be acknowledged and embodied in policies that seek to secure their living on; the fear of that loss, the effort to prevent that loss can only happen if the grievability of those lives can be acknowledged while they are alive. And that can happen only when the conditions of acknowledgement are established and maintained within an intersubjective field of some kind, whether a community, a network, a set of relations, a regional or religious set of institutions or, indeed, a state or international authority. However, seeking to acknowledge a loss when there are no established conditions for its acknowledgment, or where those established conditions have been destroyed or dispersed, is a practice of performative defiance. As such, it seeks to break through the melancholic norm to assert the existing and living characters of those who are deemed disposable and ungrievable. Such forms of social and existential solidarity activate a performative dimension of public grieving that seeks to expose and oppose the limits of the grievable and to establish new terms of acknowledgement that imply a commitment to infrastructural sustenance. This would be a form of militant existential declaration – “we exist!” or “we still exist!” – but also of producing

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public acts of grieving for those who are lost, the kind that breaks into public space and time, defying its melancholic prohibitions against mourning, inaugurating a new constellation of space and time of the grievable. We might prefer to avoid all this complexity and simply say that every life is grievable, and militate for an understanding of that basic equality. That is a good humanist solution, and it has its merits. But it cannot describe the radical form of inequality that must be challenged. We may want to insist that “every life is grievable” is a descriptive claim, that all existing life is equally grievable, but if we let that be the full extent of our description, we badly misrepresent present reality. “Every life is grievable” makes sense politically only if that is a call, a demand, and an explicit aspiration in a world in which structures of radical inequality are rampant. So, we should perhaps go frankly normative, without shame or hesitation, and say that every life ought to be grievable, thus positing a utopic horizon within which theory and description is obliged to work. If we want to argue that every life is inherently grievable and claim a natural or a priori value to this descriptive claim, then we ask the descriptive claim to carry a normative implication: every life should be grievable. That conflation, however, misses the chance to address the incommensurability between descriptive and normative claims and gives rise to a persistent question: Why do we ask the descriptive claim to do that normative work? After all, we have to point out the radical discrepancy between what is and what ought to be in order to demand that the world come to embody the normative aspirations we outline. So, it is better to keep them distinct, at least for these kinds of debates. After all, while theorizing within the terms of the present, it is radically untrue to make a descriptive claim that all lives are equally grievable. They are not. So let us move from what is to what ought to be, or at least start that movement, which posits a utopic horizon for our work.3 Of course, when one speaks about lives that are not equally grievable, one posits an ideal or measure of equal grievability. What notion of equality operates in such an assertion? There are at least two implications of this formulation that pose some critical problems. The first is that we have to ask whether there is a way to measure or calculate how much anyone is really grieved. How does one establish that one population is more grievable and that another is less? Given that grievability is always relative to a framework of social inequality, we would have to determine grievability in relation to the differentiating mechanism of that form of social power. Perhaps within a given framework, we could discern different degrees of grievability, but 3

My thanks to Drucilla Cornell for teaching me this point.

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any such determination would be historical, variable, and contingent, since even racist regimes have a way of coming to an end. Surely, it would be quite disturbing, if not fully counter-productive, to establish a calculus that could provide answers of this sort. That would be impossible, since it would abstract the attribute from the framework of power in which it operates. So the only way to understand the claim that some lives are more grievable than others, that some are, within certain frames and under certain circumstances, safeguarded against danger, destitution, and death more tenaciously than others, is to say precisely – with Derrida – that the incalculable value of a life is acknowledged in one setting and not in another, or that within the same setting (if we can set the setting) some are acknowledged as bearing incalculable value and others are subject to a calculation. Indeed, calculation is one of the mechanisms by which the grievable are distinguished from the ungrievable, so we cannot use a calculus to decide this distinction without deepening and strengthening the distinction itself. To be subject to any such calculation is already to have entered the grey zone of the ungrievable. A second implication of the formulation that not all lives are treated as equally grievable is that we have to revise our ideas of equality in order to take into account grievability as a social attribute that ought to be subject to egalitarian standards. In other words, we are not yet speaking about equality if we have not yet spoken about equal grievability, or the equal attribution of grievability. Grievability is a necessary condition for equality. It is also a dimension of inequality that is not acknowledged by those calculations that seek to establish social and economic inequality, although it belongs to both spheres. If we consider unequal grievability as a part of social and economic inequality, and if unequal grievability prepares, targets or abandons populations for dying and death, for life-extinguishing violence, then it follows that the struggle for equality is linked to the struggle against violence. It also implies a commitment to a new biopolitics, to a generalizable infrastructure of sustenance geared toward the sustaining of lives otherwise regarded as unworthy of living or unsustainable. When a population is regarded as ungrievable, it is first deprived of its status as a living population. Only the living can die, and if there is no marking of death, including potential death, then there is no life – or so it appears within frameworks governed by logics of this kind. If a population is (that is, is regarded as) in some sense socially dead, or if it has been subjected within and by a necropolitical episteme and practice, it can hardly be grieved under such conditions. Only that which has been regarded as living can be grieved, can be considered as a lost life. A life that is already

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lost, or that was lost from the start, cannot be lost in any meaningful way, and so cannot be grieved. Melancholic denial of the possibility of loss thus sets the stage for a living being whose life cannot be lost because it will never have truly lived. And yet, as we know, the life that is considered lost from the start can be grieved precisely because it was, quite without knowing it, lost before it had a chance to live, and lived out all its potentials as a form of perpetual loss. Hence, when we say that a life is ungrievable, we are not speaking only about a life that is already over. No, to live in the world as a grievable life is to know that one’s death would be mourned, could be mourned, and to have a sense of living in a world in which one’s life matters. But also, it is to know that this life will be safeguarded because of its value, that it will have the infrastructural ground that is required to live in a world with an open-ended future. This way of evaluating the unequal grievability of lives is part of biopolitics, and that means that we cannot always trace this form of inequality to a sovereign decision-making process. As mentioned above, Foucault’s 1976 lecture course, Society Must Be Defended, elaborates on the emergence of the biopolitical field in the nineteenth century. There we find that the biopolitical describes the operation of power over humans as living beings. Distinct from sovereign power, biopolitics or biopower appears to be a distinctively European formation. It operates through various technologies and methods for managing life, but also death. For Foucault, this is a particular kind of power, inasmuch as it is exercised over humans by virtue of their status as living beings. Sometimes he calls that living status a biological status, though he does not tell us which version of biological science he has in mind. Foucault describes the biopolitical as a power to “make live” or to “let die,” distinguished from the sovereign power to “take life” (or “made to die”) or “let live.” As in many instances in Foucault’s work, power acts, but not from a sovereign center. Rather, there are multiple agencies of power operating in a post-sovereign context to manage populations as living creatures, to manage their lives, to make them live or let them die. This form of biopower regulates, among other things, the very livability of life, determining the relative life potential of populations. This sort of power is documented in mortality and natality rates that indicate forms of racism that belong to biopolitics. 4 It emerges as well in forms of pronatalism and “prolife” positions that regularly privilege some sorts of life, or living tissue, over others, giving priority to the life of embryonic tissue over the lives of teenage or adult women. 4 “Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” (Gilmore 2007, 247).

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The radical inequality that governs the grievability of persons is part of the biopolitical, or one point where the biopolitical turns necropolitical. Those who are lost or violently effaced from life ought to be openly grieved, since that would accord those lives value, even if posthumously. As for the living, only by becoming grievable do they stand a chance of appearing as alive. To say that they are grievable is to say that they should not be lost, that this loss should not happen, should not have happened, and that the world needs to be organized in such a way to mark and forestall such a loss. Whereas the recognition of lost lives makes them grievable, establishing the possibility of mourning, the radical assertion of grievability among and by the living gives rise to performative defiance. This is a form of resistance to hyper-precarious life, to protracted modes of living death, to the differential susceptibility to sudden and violent injury, detention, death. This is a kind of resistance that is undertaken not simply in the name of life, or the right to live, but against the political conditions that arrange for mass deaths and cover them over as an implication of policies that may or may not operate according to sovereign forms of death-dealing. Such resistance takes form sometimes as railing against the censoring of lives by those whose voice, whose image, and whose theatricality seeks to break through the scheme of representation that leaves them unrepresentable. The bodies that resist the presumption of their ungrievability appear as such within the public as a political scandal. Their exposure to police and military force in the context of such demonstrations delineates the risk of death or deportation with which they live – it brings it to the fore. It makes the wager and the demand with its own performative and embodied persistence.

A Relational Body As we think about the future of resistance movements, the opening of the future that some of us call feminism, we might have to return to the body to understand better these forms of persistence and resistance. Perhaps going forward, our slogan can no longer be “my body, my self” since the body is not exactly property, its boundaries are not fixed, and the task is not just to defend individual liberty. For if we accept that part of what a body is (and this is for the moment an ontological claim), is its dependency on other bodies, on living processes of which it is a part, on networks of support to which it also contributes and from which it draws, then it is not altogether right to conceive of individual bodies as completely distinct

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from one another. Without conceptualizing the political meaning of the human body in the context of those institutions, practices, and relations in which it lives and thrives, we fail to make the best possible case for why murder is unacceptable, abandonment has to be opposed, and precarity alleviated. I am suggesting not just that this or that body is bound up in a network of relations, but that the boundary both contains and relates: the body, perhaps precisely by virtue of its boundaries, is differentiated from and exposed to a material and social world that makes its own life and action possible. When the infrastructural conditions of life are imperiled, so too is life precisely because life cannot be separated from the conditions that make it possible. I take this to be a materialist point we can deny only at our own peril. What difference does it then make if we understand the body in these terms? I want to suggest that if we understand bodies as defined by their interdependency, it follows that the body cannot really exist without another body. No one body is self-subsisting. The border, the boundary, is the site of its exposure to possible danger, but also a vector of relationality, including the possibility of contact, excitation, passion, the possibility of leaning, holding, even the wild sense that one might be caught in the middle of a fall. That “I” requires a “you” in order to survive and to flourish. These are social relations that ground the broader global obligations we bear toward one another. I cannot live without living together with some set of people, even though the form of that co-habitation varies. The fact that we are given over to one another without always choosing to be in that situation, that we do not choose our parents or our world, means that our lives are bound up with an unchosen vulnerability and an unchosen dependency. We catch a virus from someone we do not know; we extend compassion for those whose names we will never know. This sphere of the unchosen bond should not be lamented. Rather, it is a chance to dwell on the far side of contract. If we wish to see all of our relations as determined by our individual freedom, we will surely rail against this fact of unchosen interdependency, and act and argue as if we should all be in full control, engaging only with those with whom we have a consensual contract. That, however, is a liberal conceit that denies the conditions of embodiment itself. Vulnerability is not a simply subjective state or disposition, but is always related to an object, a prospect, an impinging world (and for that, “intentional” in the phenomenological sense). Vulnerability might take the form of excitability, susceptibility, longing, delight, fear, anxiety, or dread, but whatever form it takes, it is already and from the start a relational predicament. This body is already dependent on a body prior to any sense of its choice, and both are

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dependent on an infrastructure of sustenance; if one fails to be sustained, the other can fail as well, which means that our “equality” is bound up with our interdependency on each other as well as a sustaining organization of the world. Individualism fails to capture the condition of vulnerability, exposure, even dependency, that is presupposed by any claim to an individual “right” to life, and which corresponds, I would suggest, to a body whose boundaries are themselves fraught and excitable social relations. It is our social life that is indicated by our embodied existence outside of political and economic organizations of life. Whether a body that falters and falls is caught by networks of support or whether a moving body has its way paved without obstruction depends on whether a world has been built for both its gravity and mobility – and whether that world can stay built. The skin is from the start a way of being exposed to the elements, but what is done about that exposure is already a social and political relation: a relation to shelter, to adequate clothing, to health services. So if we seek to find what is most essential about the body by reducing it to its bare elements, we find that right there at the level of its most basic requirements, the social world is structuring the scene, impinging on psychic life at the level of fear and desire. Thus, the basic questions of mobility, expression, warmth, and health implicate that body in a social world where pathways are differentially paved, open or closed, modes of clothing and types of shelter that are more or less available, affordable, or provisional. It is from this uncertainty, this encroachment of death that the question emerges, am I a life? Does the loss of this life matter? Whose bodies matter, and why?

Works Cited Foucault, Michel. 2003. Society Must Be Defended. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76. Translated by David Macey, edited by Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana. London and New York: Picador. First published 1976. Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. 2007. Golden Gulag. Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mbembe, Achille. 2003. “Necropolitics.” Translated by Libby Meintjes. Public Culture 15, no. 1: 11-40. Mitscherlich, Alexander and Margarete. 1975. The Inability to Mourn. Principles of Collective Behaviour. New York: Grove Press. First published 1967. Monárrez Fragoso, Julia Estela. 2002. “Feminicidio Sexual Serial en Ciudad Juárez: 1993-2001.” Debate Feminista 25: 279-308.

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Sagot, Montserrat. 2007. Femicidio ( feminicidio). Diccionario de estudios de género e feminismos. Edited by Susana B. Gamba, Dora Barrancos, Eva Gilberti and Diana Mafía. Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos. —. 2017. “Un Mundo Sin Femicidios? Las Propuestas del Feminismo Para Erradicar la Violencia Contra las Mujeres.” In Feminismos, Pensamiento Crítico y Propuestas Alternativas en América Latina, edited by Montserrat Sagot Rodríguez, 61-78. Buenos Aires: CLACSO.

About the Author Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of numerous books, such as Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (1997), Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning (2004); Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009). Her most recent books include: Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2012), Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015), and The Force of Nonviolence (2020). She is active in gender and sexual politics and human rights, anti-war politics. She received the Adorno Prize from the City of Frankfurt (2012) in honor of her contributions to feminist and moral philosophy, the Brudner Prize from Yale University for lifetime achievement in gay and lesbian studies, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and The British Academy, as corresponding Fellow. She has received honorary degrees from 11 universities and her works are translated into 27 languages.



About the Contributors

Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of numerous books, such as Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (1997), Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning (2004); Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009). Her most recent books include: Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2012), Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015), and The Force of Nonviolence (2020). She is active in gender and sexual politics and human rights, anti-war politics. She received the Adorno Prize from the City of Frankfurt (2012) in honor of her contributions to feminist and moral philosophy, the Brudner Prize from Yale University for lifetime achievement in gay and lesbian studies, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and The British Academy, as corresponding Fellow. She has received honorary degrees from 11 universities and her works are translated into 27 languages. Adriana Cavarero is honorary professor at the University of Verona, Italy, and held numerous visiting appointments, including at New York University and Berkeley. She is widely recognized for her writings on feminist theory, ancient philosophy, Hannah Arendt, theories of narration and vocality, and on a wide range of issues in political philosophy and literature. Among her books, in English translation, are: In Spite of Plato (1995); Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood (2000); Stately Bodies: Literature, Philosophy and the Question of Gender (2002); For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression (2005); Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence (2008); Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude (2016); Surging Democracy. Notes on Hannah Arendt’s Political Thought (2021). Eyo Ewara is assistant professor in the department of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. His research explores the intersections between twentieth-century continental philosophy, critical philosophies of race, and LGBTQ thought and queer theory. His work has appeared in Critical Philosophy of Race, philoSOPHIA, and Black Women’s Liberatory Pedagogies.

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Erika Fischer-Lichte is Professor in the Theatre and Performance Studies Department of Freie Universität Berlin and director of the International Research Center “Interweaving Performance Cultures.” Her research interests focus on the interweaving of performance cultures in the context of historical and contemporary forms of globalization; transformative aesthetics; performances of ancient Greek tragedies since 1800 worldwide; and performance-related concepts in non-European languages. She has published more than 30 books and 300 essays, including The Semiotics of Theatre (1992), History of European Drama and Theatre (2002); The Show and the Gaze of Theatre (1997), Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual. Exploring Forms of Political Theatre (2005), The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics (2008), Performativität. Eine Einführung (2012), The Routledge Introduction to Theatre and Performance Studies (2014), Dionysus Resurrected. Performances of Euripides’ The Bacchae in a Globalizing World (2014), Tragedy’s Endurance. Performances of Greek Tragedies and Cultural Identity in Germany Since 1800 (2017). Annemie Halsema is associate professor of philosophy at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her research focuses on personal identity and embodiment in French phenomenology, hermeneutics and in feminist philosophy. She wrote two books on Luce Irigaray (in Dutch 1998, and Luce Irigaray and Horizontal Transcendence 2000), edited several volumes, among which a Dutch translation of Judith Butler’s essays (Genderturbulentie, 2000) and Feminist Explorations of Paul Ricoeur’s Philosophy (with Henriques, 2016). Tingting Hui is a university lecturer of literary and cultural studies at Leiden University. Her fields of interest include literary theory, creative writing, performance studies and psychoanalysis. Her articles appeared in Third Text and in various edited volumes (New Cosmopolitanism, Ethnic Resonances, Tawada Yoko). She has received several prizes and honours, including Young Scholar Excellence Award from the Society for Multi-Ethnic Studies in 2016, and the Honourable Mention of the Horst Frenz Prize from American Comparative Literature Association in 2019. Katja Kwastek is professor of modern and contemporary art history at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her research focuses on processual, digital and post-digital art, in the broader contexts of art history, media aesthetics, and the environmental humanities. She has published and edited many books and essays, including Ohne Schnur. Art and Wireless Communication (Revolver, 2004), Aesthetics of Interaction in Digital Art (MIT Press,

About the Contributors

197

2013), and a special issue of the Journal of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present on ‘Slowness’ (2019). She is one of the co-founders of the Environmental Humanities Center at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and associate editor of the journal Environmental Humanities (Duke UP). Jean-Luc Nancy is Professor emeritus of philosophy at the Institut de Philosophie in Strasbourg. He has held visiting positions at the Freie Universität in Berlin and at UC Irvine, and is also a member of the faculty at the European Graduate School. Nancy’s most influential works, aside from his book on community (The Inoperative Community, 1991), are The Experience of Freedom (1993), The Sense of the World (1998), Being Singular Plural (2000), and the two volumes of Deconstruction of Christianity (2008 and 2013). Two collections of essays have also been published in English: Birth to Presence (1993) and A Finite Thinking (2003). Other important texts include Corpus (on the body, 2008), The Muses and The Ground of the Image (on art, 1996) and The Truth of Democracy (on politics, 2010). Among his most recent publications are Sexistence (2017), Exclu le Juif en nous (2018) and La Peau fragile du monde (2020). Roel van den Oever is assistant professor of English literature at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is the author of Mama’s Boy: Momism and Homophobia in Postwar American Culture (Palgrave Macmillan 2012). Julia Peetz is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Warwick. She works on questions of political representation, democracy, and performance, particularly in the context of the US presidency and in Anglo-American relations. Among other places, her research has appeared in the Oxford Handbook of Politics and Performance, Contemporary Political Theory, Performance Research, and Contemporary Theatre Review. Noa Roei is assistant professor at the Department of Literary and Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam. She is a research fellow at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. Her book Civic Aesthetics: Militarism, Israeli Art, and Visual Culture (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016) examines the relationship between civilian militarism and contemporary art in Israel. Carmen Schuhmann is assistant professor at the University of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Previously, she received a PhD in Mathematics from Leiden University, the Netherlands, and worked as a humanist chaplain in the field of criminal justice. Her research interests include counseling and (humanist) spiritual care, meaning in life, and existential resilience.

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Friederike Sigler is assistant professor at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Her research interests include work, politics and (anti-)nationalism in contemporary art. Among her publications are Work in the series Documents of Contemporary Arts (Whitechapel Gallery/MIT Press 2017) and the anthology Strike with Dietmar Rübel (Edition Metzel 2021). Simon van der Weele is a PhD candidate at the University of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht, the Netherlands. His work is in care theory, empirical ethics, and philosophical anthropology. His dissertation, which combines philosophical inquiry with qualitative research, explores the ethical ramifications of dependency relationships in intellectual disability care. Adriana Zaharijević is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade. Her work revolves around issues in political philosophy, feminist theory and social history. She is the author of Who is an Individual? Genealogical Inquiry into the Idea of Citizen (2014) and Becoming a Woman (2010) (in Serbian). Her most recent book project is The Life of Bodies. Political Philosophy of Judith Butler (in Serbian).

Index abjection 11-12, 31-40 the abject 32, 37, 39 accent 65-67, 71-73 accountability 96, 114, 122 Adorno, Theodor 97 Agamben, Giorgio 109 agency 12, 14, 21-28, 67-68, 71, 108, 110, 167-168, 171-172, 182 agitprop 164-167 alterity 94, 113, 122-123 Altmeier, Jakob 165 anti-establishment 54-55, 58-61 apprehension 107, 119, 130 Arendt, Hannah 14, 24, 26, 28, 141-146, 148, 151-152 art 14, 127, 129-133, 135, 164, 167 art institution 132, 135 art space 133, 135 performance art 14, 132, 172, 183 assembly 11, 14, 145, 155, 157, 160-161, 164-165, 168, 170-173, 183 aesthetic assembly 14, 155, 157, 172 political assembly 14, 161, 172 asylum seekers 127, 168-169 Austin, J.L. 12, 56-59 Bal, Mieke 83 Balázs, Béla 166 Barthes, Roland 14, 141, 150-151 Beauvoir, Simone de 23-25 becoming (in)human 13, 91, 97-100, 114 Belsey, Catherine 80 Bergvall, Caroline 67 biopolitics 14, 184, 188-189 Bishop, Claire 132 Black Lives Matter 15 body 11, 13, 21, 23-28, 33-34, 36-37, 65, 67-72, 74, 81, 84, 109-110, 117, 119-120, 122-124, 130-132, 143-147, 151, 168, 182, 190-192 embodiment 87, 119, 160, 184, 187, 191 Bon, Gustave Le 147 Bourdieu, Pierre 56-57, 59, 68-69 Brecht, Bertolt 27, 78, 164 Brown, Alan 77-79, 87 Butler, Judith Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (2000) 12 Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993, second edition 2011) 11-12, 31-32, 35 Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997) 12, 54, 57, 59, 68, 70, 77, 80-81 The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind (2020) 177

Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009) 13, 31, 106 Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990, second edition 1999) 9, 11, 25, 31, 33-36, 42 Giving an Account of Oneself (2005) 13, 31, 92, 107, 113 Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015) 14, 32, 141-142, 157 Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004) 13, 31, 106, 113 The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (1997) 12, 31 Senses of the Subject (2015) 31 Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (1987) 31 Undoing Gender (2004) 13, 31, 37 Canetti, Elias 14, 141, 147-151 care 15, 103-110, 178, 181 Catsoulis, Jeannette 84 Cavarero, Adriana 14, 94 Cheney, Matthew 83-84 Clarke, Samuel 21-22 class 10, 58, 66, 155-164, 166-168, 172, 178-180 Clinton, Hillary 55, 57 communities 163, 177, 182 emotional communities 157 complicity 73, 113-114, 122-123 Cornell, Drucilla 187 counseling 13, 91-95, 97-100 Covid-19/Corona 15 Covino, Deborah Caslav 33 crowds 141-142, 144, 146-149, 151, 160, 162 dance 114, 118 democracy 14, 141, 143-144, 151-153, 171, 183 radical democracy 142-145, 151-152 dependency 28, 96, 103-111, 122, 190-192 Derrida, Jacques 44, 48, 59, 65, 74, 120, 188 disability 104-105 discourse 11-13, 23, 60-61, 66, 69, 74-75, 80, 82, 84, 86-87, 95, 97, 119, 135, 151-152, 180-181, 186 dispossession 181 Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell 12, 77, 79-82, 86-87 Doyle, Matt 78-79, 84 empowerment, (self-) 155, 157, 161, 169, 173 equality 105-106, 187-188, 192 ethics 10, 13, 32, 43, 91-100, 103-107, 109-110, 113-114, 120-124, 129-132, 178 ethical violence 94-95, 105, 109 ethics of care 104, 108 ethics of risk 117, 120, 123

200  Fanon, Frantz 36 Felman, Shoshana 70 femicide 15, 178-179 film 13, 77-80, 82-87, 117-118, 150, 164-166 Foucault, Michel 12, 24, 27, 95, 184, 189 Freud, Sigmund 11, 147-148, 185 gender 9-12, 25, 31, 34-35, 42-46, 69, 82 grievability 106, 177, 184-190 Hegel, G.W.F. 31, 94 Heidegger, Martin 44, 48 Herrmann, Max 157 Hill, Anita 73-74 Hochberg, Gil Z. 114, 121-122 Hofstadter, Richard 55 homophobia 34, 77, 79-80, 82, 85-87 homosexuality 77-78, 80-83, 85-87 human, the 13, 22, 37, 45, 67-68, 84, 91, 93, 96-98, 105-106, 129, 131, 143-146, 148, 151, 160-161, 169, 177-178, 181-182, 184-185, 189, 191 dehumanization 93, 98, 109 the human condition 13, 74, 105, 144 human rights 14, 113-115, 121, 124, 178, 180 identity 10-11, 32-34, 39, 42-43, 45-46, 53-54, 82, 84, 119, 124, 167 gender identity 11-12 identity politics 122 social identity 33, 36, 39 individualism 124, 192 inequality 13, 120, 127, 177, 179-180, 185-190 intelligibility 11, 32-33, 37-38, 69, 80-81, 87, 106 interdependency 129, 144-145, 157, 191-192 interpellation 12, 36, 69 intertext 77, 80-82, 85-87 invisibility 72, 120, 122, 134-135, 167-168, 170, 172 Israeli-Palestinian conflict 113-114, 120 justice 73-74 criminal justice 91, 99 Kim, David Kyuman 28 Kittay, Eva Feder 13-14, 103-111 Knigge, Adolph Freiherr von 158-159 Kristeva, Julia 31-34, 36 Kuntsman, Adi 121 labor 127, 129, 132-135, 143 Laclau, Ernesto 53-54, 59 language 11-12, 34-36, 44-45, 57, 65-70, 72, 74, 78, 80-81, 129, 148-152, 158, 181-182 of abjection 32 Larsen, Nella 35-36 Lazzarato, Maurizio 134 legibility 27, 73 legitimacy 53-54, 56-61 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 159-161 Levinas, Emmanuel 94, 130-131

Bodies That Still Matter

life 13, 25-28, 32-33, 44-46, 58, 60, 70-71, 78, 81, 86, 92-93, 99, 105-110, 122-123, 130, 132-133, 141, 143, 145, 152, 159, 165-167, 177, 179, 182, 184-185, 187-192 livability 11, 14, 28, 32, 106, 144-145, 184, 189 psychic life 32, 39, 192 social life 23, 168, 192 Lippi-Green, Rosina 67 Maher, Ciarán 67 Mahmood, Saba 23 masses 14, 109, 141, 147-148, 152, 162-166, 178, 182-183, 190 mass demonstrations 142, 146, 148, 156 mass spectacles 155, 162-163, 167, 172 Matar, Hisham 141-142, 152 Matsuda, Mari J. 66 Mbembe, Achille 181 McCain, John 55 McKinnon, Catherine 73 McLeod, John 92 Mirzoeff, Nicholas 114, 120 Mitscherlich, Alexander 185 Mitscherlich, Margarete 185 Moffitt, Benjamin 53-55, 59 mourning 11, 177, 185, 187, 190 narrative 83, 96, 109, 119, 121, 151 narratology 80, 84 Nauta, Lolle 107 necropolitics 181 Nietzsche, Friedrich 12, 25 normativity 9, 14, 25-26, 69, 87, 103-111, 187 normative structures 26-27 novel 35, 141, 147, 149, 151 Obama, Barack 54-55, 57, 61 Olson, Gary A. 70 other, the 13, 31-34, 36-38, 40, 42, 91-92, 94-99, 105-108, 114, 120, 122-123, 130, 147, 151, 168, 183, 185, 188, 190-191 performance 24, 26-28, 70-71, 145-146, 149-150, 153 as art 14, 84-85, 113-115, 117-120, 122, 124, 132, 157, 159-161, 163-165, 167-172, 183-184 political performance 54-56, 58-59, 61, 141, 144, 151 performativity 11-14, 21, 24-28, 53-54, 56, 58-61, 67, 70, 74, 142, 144-146, 152, 157, 161-162, 164, 171 Piscator, Erwin 164-165 plurality 14, 42, 141-153 pluriphony 141, 145, 151-153 populism 13, 53-56, 59-61, 146 precariousness 13-15, 27, 31-32, 38, 104, 106-107, 109, 127, 129-130, 132-135, 155, 167, 170, 172, 182, 186, 190 precarity 11, 13-15, 28, 31, 38, 109, 127, 129, 133-135, 142-145, 155, 157, 168, 177, 191

201

Index

protest 14, 142, 155-156, 177, 183 psychotherapy 92, 94 race 10, 12, 31, 33-36, 68-69, 121, 134, 186 racialization 31, 33-40 racism 31, 34, 37, 40, 182, 185, 189 recognition 32, 37, 68, 74, 84, 92-94, 99, 106, 108, 123, 130, 169, 171, 182, 184, 190 Reed, Rex 83 refugees 14-15, 103-104, 107, 109, 128, 133-134, 178, 181-183, 186 relationality 92, 95-99, 106, 119, 123, 144, 151, 190-191 representation 9, 13, 27, 54, 56-57, 59-61, 77-78, 80, 83, 93-94, 98, 117, 121-122, 129, 132, 144, 147, 159, 170, 178, 181, 184, 187, 190 resignification 27, 70, 73-74 responsibility 27, 96, 106, 113-114, 117, 120, 123-124, 130-132 collective responsibility 113, 122-123 Rogers, Carl 94 Rushing, Sara 106 Sagot, Montserrat 179 Sanders, Bernie 54-55, 58, 61 Schakovskoy, Zinaïda 73 Schneewind, Jerome 21 sex 11-12, 34, 42-46, 82 sexuality 10-11, 34, 66, 180 Shakespeare, William 13, 77-87 Sierra, Santiago 14, 127-135 signification 13, 39, 71, 80, 122, 141, 145, 149-150 Smith, Murray 84 solidarity 162-165, 167, 180-181, 186 Sontag, Susan 148 spectatorship 14, 77-78, 80, 113, 118, 120, 122, 129-132, 134, 155-173 speech 11-14, 46, 65-68, 70-74, 78, 80, 82-83, 86, 108, 131, 145, 149-150, 153, 183-184 accented speech 13, 65-67, 71-73

hate speech 11-13, 68-73 political speech 9, 14 speech acts 12-13, 15, 53-54, 57, 59-61, 65, 69-71, 73, 81-82, 145 Stein, Rebecca L. 121 subject, the 11-12, 22-24, 28, 31-35, 37-40, 44, 46, 70-71, 96, 105-106, 110, 113, 119, 121, 124, 134, 146, 162, 184-185, 188 subjection 31-33, 36-40 subjectivity 12, 23-25, 31, 36, 38, 113, 119-120, 123, 133, 191 suffering 13, 28, 45, 91-93, 97-99, 121, 178-179, 182 Sulzer, Johann Georg 160 Tan, Amy 65, 71-72 theatre 155-162, 164-168, 170-172 Trump, Donald 54-55, 58, 61 violence 13-14, 27, 36-37, 65, 67-68, 71-72, 86, 94-95, 98-99, 106-107, 109-111, 113-114, 117, 120, 122-124, 144, 152, 177, 179-180, 188, 190 nonviolence 9, 93, 98-99, 124, 152 visibility 120-122, 129, 134-135, 144, 160, 168, 171-172, 183 voice 14, 67, 72, 74, 77, 86, 118, 131, 141, 144-152, 155, 171, 173, 183, 190 vulnerability 13, 28, 67-68, 91-92, 96-98, 103-104, 106, 108-110, 113-114, 122-124, 129-130, 134-135, 145, 177-183, 189, 191-192 linguistic vulnerability 65, 67-68, 72-74 war 9, 11, 15, 114, 152, 161, 165, 181-182, 184-185 Worsham, Lynn 70 Young, Iris Marion 34, 36-37 Zaides, Arkadi 14, 113-115, 117-120, 122-124