By JUDITH BUTLER & ATHENA ATHANASIOU*
Preface by the authors to the book recently published in Brazil
1.
When Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou met in December 2009 in Athens, Greece, Judith was teaching a course for the Nicos Poulantzas Memorial of Poulantzas Institute, affiliated with Syriza (Coalition of the Radical Left), and also presented at the Department of Social Anthropology at Panteion University, where Athena is a professor.
We began a conversation about politics, theory, embodiment and new left political formations, focusing first on the question of how old left politicians never manage to answer feminist and queer questions when it comes to resisting precarity. This first conversation (published in Greece), “Questioning the Normative, Reconfiguring the Possible: Feminism, Queer Politics and the Radical Left”, was edited in the volume Performativity and Precarity: Judith Butler in Athens (Athens: Nissos, 2011).[1]
Athena Athanasiou's work focuses on feminist theory and radical social thought, drawing on insights from Luce Irigaray and Michel Foucault to critically consider the relationships between masculinity, technology and the human. Athena's publication, co-edited with Elena Tzelepis, Rewriting Difference: Luce Irigaray and the “Greeks” (Suny Press, 2010), moves from the trope derived from the myth of classical Greece toward the contemporary transnational, postcolonial, and corporeal context of critical practices.
In Greece, she published the book Life at the Limit: Essays on the Body, Gender, and Biopolitics (Ekkremes, 2007),[2] in which he offers a post-human and post-Lacanian psychoanalysis account of technology, difference, corporeality and bodies of knowledge, focusing on how these elements configure the contemporary social organization of vivibility, desire and gendered and sexualized subjectivity.
She also wrote a book (Crisis as a “State of Exception”: Critiques and Resistances. Savvalas, 2012)[3] on the bodily dimensions of the Greek debt crisis; there, she addresses the indefinite character of the state of exception to an instance of the rationality of neoliberal government, conducted in the name of economic emergency and involving forces of racialization and feminization that fundamentally structure the condition of “becoming precarious.”
Her work focuses on forms of queer deconstruction and feminist forms of performative politics, including nonviolent public displays of mourning and resistance to contemporary biopolitical regimes, such as the transnational and antimilitarist work of the Women in Black. Considering concrete manifestations of subversive gender performativity, Athena Athanasiou was inspired by Judith Butler's ethical-political philosophy, her work on gender and queer performativity, on corporeality, language, normative violence and violence of derealization, on the vulnerability of human life and the question of what makes a life livable.
And Judith Butler was challenged by Athena Athanasiou’s anthropological and philosophical perspectives, such as her readings of Irigaray and Heidegger and the geopolitical challenges of neoliberalism that were so acutely registered in Greece. Like Judith, Athena engaged with non-sovereign accounts of agency, of the relationality of the “self,”[4] freedom with others, on questions of recognition and desire, as well as on the implications of the bodily exposure of gendered, sexualized and racialized people. Our conversation persistently explored these issues, as we sought to convey and map the political and affective work of critical agency.
2.
We began the conversation with considerations about the poststructuralist position that we share, notably the idea that the unity of the subject serves a form of power that needs to be challenged and undone, meaning a style of masculinism that erases sexual difference and acts as master in the domain of life.
We both recognize that responsible thinking about ethics and politics can only emerge where the sovereignty and unity of the subject can be effectively challenged, and that fissuring the subject, or constituting it in its difference, proves central to a politics that challenges, in very specific ways, both property and sovereignty.
However, as much as we value the forms of responsibility and resistance that emerge from a “dispossessed” subject—one who acknowledges the differentiated social bonds by which she is constituted and to which she is obliged—we were also very aware of the fact that dispossession constitutes a form of suffering for displaced, colonized people, and therefore cannot be an unambiguous political ideal. We began by thinking together about how to formulate a political theory of performativity that could take into account the version of dispossession that we value, as well as the version that we oppose.
3.
This book represents a wide-ranging dialogue that took place over many months of meetings, conversations, and writing, mostly by email, until we met in London in February 2011 to plan what the path of this exchange would be. At the time of the London meeting, the Egyptian revolution was in full swing, and in the last weeks of writing this joint text, the Greek left has presented a serious challenge to the neoliberal politics of austerity, opening up the possibility of a new European left to oppose the differential distribution of precarity and the technocratic suppression of democracy.
Our reflections register these events obliquely, and in the course of this exchange we have referred to many political movements, demonstrations, and acts that have helped us formulate what we understand by the politics of the performative. Our approaches converge and differ. Athena Athanasiou’s geopolitical position shapes her reflections on modes of resistance and public mourning, and she draws on Irigaray’s work, Heidegger’s critique of technology, Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, and post-Lacanian psychoanalysis.[5]
Judith Butler’s work emerges from her reading of Michel Foucault, but also from speech act theory, critical gender theory, queer activism, and heterodox psychoanalysis. We both return to Greek myths to understand the present, which means that these myths are revived in new ways, as in the extraordinary film we discussed, Strella (directed by Panos Koutras, 2009), in which a transgender sex worker lives a contemporary version of the Oedipus myth in XNUMXst century Athens.
Along the way, we sought convergent ways of presenting Hannah Arendt to a left with which she would not have agreed, and we explored questions about affect and ethics by thinking about the political framework through recent forms of political mobilization. Together, we returned to the question “what makes political responsiveness possible?” The condition of being moved by what one sees, by what one feels, and by what one comes to know is always a condition in which one is transported to another place, another scene, or to a social world in which one is not the center.
And this form of dispossession is constituted as a form of responsiveness that gives rise to actions of resistance, of appearing together with others in an effort to demand an end to injustice. This injustice takes the form of systematic dispossession, for example, of people forced into immigration, unemployment, homelessness, occupation, and domination. Thus, we embrace the question of how to become dispossessed of the sovereignty of the “self” and enter into forms of collectivity that oppose forms of dispossession and systematically expel these populations from collective modes of belonging and justice.
*Judith Butler is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. She authored, among other books by Precarious life: the powers of mourning and violence (Authentic).
*Athena Athanasius is a professor of social anthropology and gender theory at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences.
Reference
Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou. Dispossession: The performative in politics. Translation: Batriz Zampieri. Technical review: Carla Rodrigues. São Paulo, Unesp, 2024, 254 pages. [https://amzn.to/4fSY0n5]
Notes
[1] Amfi svitontas to “Kanoniko,” Anadiamorfonontas to Dynato: Feminismos, Queer Politiki kai Rizospastiki Aristera. In: Epithelial sticotitis Episphaleia: I Judith Butler stin Athina.
[2] Zoe sto Orio: Dokimia gia to Soma, to Fylo kai ti Viopolitiki.
[3] I Krisi os “Katastasi Ektaktis Anagkis”: Kritikes kai Antistaseis.
[4] In earlier translations, whenever possible, “self-”, when it appears as a prefix, has been carried over to the Portuguese prefix “auto-”, while “self ”, noun, has been translated as “oneself”, following, for example, the solution of “oneself”, from French, a well-established option in the Portuguese language in different philosophical contexts. In the conversation of this book, however, we realized that this solution had limits, which led us to preferentially translate self as “I” to emphasize that both are operating with the relationship between “I” and “you” in order to think about the relationship with otherness. To translate “I”, we use the form Eu, in capital letters, an indicator of the individual sovereignty that the term carries.
[5] Cf. Athanasiou, Athena. Technologies of Humanness, Aporias of Biopolitics, and the Cut Body of Humanity. Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, v.14, n.1, p.125-62, 2003.
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