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- Herausgeber: Autêntica Editora
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
Judith Butler beyond gender is philosophy in motion. There is nothing superfluous about this book. Nor is there any pretension of displaying erudition. What one will read here is political philosophy, which is philosophy itself, according to the author. She takes personal and collective mourning as an object of research and reflection. In this project, she joins Judith Butler, a philosopher who has been approaching mourning as a necessary and crucial issue for political criticism for quite some time now. We live in a time when mourning has a great meaning. The covid-19 pandemic has already caused the death of millions of people around the world, hundreds of thousands in Brazil. An immense collective loss. We are hopelessly constituted by our losses and absences. We are also constituted by our memories. Carla Rodrigues also makes us think about all these issues. She makes us reflect on inequality in death, on the lives that matter as well as those that are lost; on which lives are grievable. There is no denying this desolate scenario, even when some insist on it. We share this collective mourning. It is about claiming the right to experience it. "Finding ways to defend a more egalitarian society requires a public policy on mourning and memory," says Carla. Guacira Lopes Louro
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Ähnliche
se dependesse daqueles versos
o céu não ia cair nunca
haveria mãos fortes de quem lavra
a terra e cultiva
a vida dos que um dia nos deram
vida haveria o canto a impedir
o colapso como quem colhe os frutos
como quem não esquece
as primeiras canções criadas
mas ouve bem
o céu
já caiu
Danielle Magalhães
Versos de “houve a queda”, em Quando o céu cair (7Letras, 2018)
quem sobrevive
é sempre
outro
em qualquer lugar
a sobrevivência está presa
à alteridade
e à morte
nós
somos matáveis
enquanto deveríamos ser
apenas
amáveis
Danielle Magalhães
Versos de “amáveis”, em Vingar (7Letras, 2021)
Só o que morreu é nosso, só é nosso o que perdemos.
Jorge Luis Borges
Trecho de “Posse do ontem”, em Los conjurados, 1985
(Tradução de Josely Vianna Baptista, Poesia, Companhia das Letras, 2009)
This book is dedicated to the ones I lost,who are alive within me.
Foreword
In a sufficiently broad sense, writing had begun on this book a long time ago, since the philosopher Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity was first published in translation in Brazil in 2003. The work arrived here after having made the rounds on Feminist circuits in the United States, where it was first published in 1990, provoking, since then, polarized responses. Initially received by critics as a sign of the “end of Feminism,” Butler’s arguments, which seemed to threaten Feminists, in practice animated the resumption of debate concerning sexual difference, its political uses, and its binary limitations. For those, like me, who came from a trajectory that mixed Feminist engagements with a critical attitude, the Brazilian edition of Gender Trouble offered some breathing space. In the discussions proposed by Butler, I found echoes of many of my own concerns. I closely followed some of these arguments since my first academic publication (Rodrigues 2008), and to which I have regularly returned along my philosophical career.
My interest in Butler’s work gained steam in 2010, after the defense of my dissertation, when another memorable work appeared: Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death. In 2016, for personal reasons, I decided to take it up in the classroom. Grieving the loss of my partner, who died in 2015, I made mourning a research focus for the doctoral program in philosophy at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), where I teach, and I began with Antigone’s Claim.1 The years that followed were occupied with working on mourning, deepening my interest in the theme, which I understand to be central to Butler’s political philosophy (Rodrigues 2017a). Many times my research caused uncanny reactions when, asked about the theme of my work, I would answer: “mourning”. There was, I believe, a difficulty in understanding the possibility of approaching the problem through political philosophy, dislocating mourning from the clinical context and framing it within an ethical-political register, at the same time, without giving up the dialogue with psychoanalysis.
It is precisely this approach and this dislocation that I had been following in the movement of Butler’s thought after September 11, in which Butler weaves hard criticisms of the way that the government of the United States turned mourning into a motor for violent and discriminatory reactions. Over the past twenty years, Butler (2000, 2004a, 2009, 2015a, 2020) developed her work around mourning as a right, as an operator between the distinction of livable life from “killable” life—a separation operative in the naturalization of deaths—, and above all around loss as an experience of helplessness and dispossession, which are fundamental for the recognition of our interdependency and our ethical responsibility. Connecting subjects of desire, mourning, and dispossession, as well as the helplessness which is constitutive of us, Butler writes: “Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something. This seems so clearly the case with grief, but it can be so only because it was already the case with desire” (Butler 2004a, 23).
In a stricter sense, the idea of transforming this research into a book began to be elaborated on the morning of March 15, 2018, the day of the funeral for the councilwoman Marielle Franco, held in Cinelândia on the steps of the Municipal Chamber of Rio de Janeiro, where her assassinated body laid the prior evening. In that moment, the shock of her death and that of her driver, Anderson Gomes, was so profound that a majority of those present could only express revolt and misery for the loss of a woman whose strength and leadership represented a gust of renovation for politics in Rio de Janeiro. For the entire day, until the cortège left the cemetery, the full square exercised the right to publicly mourn the death of a Black woman, who emerged out of the favela of Maré, and was elected by the Socialism and Liberation Party (PSOL) with 46 thousand votes, the third largest vote total of Rio de Janeiro’s municipal elections in 2016. Brutally executed with four bullets, Marielle was a leader on the rise, working on one of the region’s most sensitive political themes: the high rate of lethal police action that prejudicially targets Black people in the peripheries.2
On that day, I also launched the project “Judith Butler: from Gender to State Violence”, unfolding research that was being developed since 2015.3 In a certain way, this trajectory follows the steps of the author that I dedicated myself to study: my pathway is expressed in an itinerary from gender studies to a criticism of state violence, following the trailblazing work of Butler. I followed the funeral of Marielle Franco for at least two reasons: the first, to express solidarity and indignation that swept over a large part of Rio de Janeiro’s populace and soon manifested itself in state capitals throughout the country; the second, to begin amplifying this research to embrace the politics of mourning Marielle Franco as a phenomenon observed within the ambit of this project. Little by little, as I collected material about the innumerable demonstrations of mourning Marielle Franco, I was able to find examples that aided in confirming my initial hypothesis: the work of mourning Marielle Franco furnished a paradigm for thinking of the unequal distribution of public mourning and grief, yet another, perhaps the sharpest, inequality in Brazilian society (Rodrigues and Vieira 2020).
*
Many of the available expressions by which we refer ourselves to mourning—process, work, elaboration—bear the idea of progress in a more or less implicit way, here understood as a linear path beginning at an initial point and directed towards an end, guiding the subject of sadness to return to what is called normal life. This conception of mourning, what we can call a positivist comprehension, in no way resembles the experience of losing an object of love. Instead of a steadily rising trajectory, the route is erratic, marked by a to-and-fro—better days, worse days—in which each subject is attempting to discover what to do with the loss, the lack, and the emptiness, themes of the final chapter of this volume. Mourning bears a circularity, going, returning, improving, worsening, advancing, receding, flow, ebb. Processes of mourning follow a separate temporality; they change our perception of time, which may be what makes them—concept and process—difficult to comprehend in the abstract. Understanding this wandering character springs from within its experience, as is described by Julian Barnes:
Grief-work. It sounds such a clear and solid concept, with its confident two-part name. But it is fluid, slippery, metamorphic. Sometimes it is passive, a waiting for time and pain to disappear; sometimes active, a conscious attention to death and loss and the loved one; sometimes necessarily distractive […] And you have never done this kind of work before. It is unpaid, and yet not voluntary; it is rigorous, yet there is no overseer; it is skilled, yet there is no apprenticeship. And it is hard to tell whether you are making progress; or what would help you do so. (Barnes 2013, 70)
Nothing is more opposed to mourning than the idea of progress. To be in mourning is to be within a compass of waiting, to have patience with your own pain, to accept sadness as a part of life. To neither change nor continue, just bearing this strange temporality in which there is nothing to do and nothing to be done. There is only the state of mourning.
In the Brazilian edition of Mourning and Melancholy published by Cosac Naify, the translator, Marilene Carone, notes the doubled sense of the German term ‘Trauer’ used by Freud: it could mean both a feeling of “deep sadness for the loss of someone” as well as the exterior markings of a state of mourning (Freud 2011 [1917], 44). The ambiguity of the German term mirrors the ambiguity of uses of the Portuguese word ‘luto,’referring to sadness or grief (“I am grieving” [estou de luto] synonymous with “I am sad because of the death of someone”) and to mourning [enlutamento], as implying rituals oriented to pay tribute to and to protect the memory of those who have gone.
Perhaps it is not apparent at first glance, but this superposition of meanings for the same signifier also is related to the temporality of mourning [luto]. For psychoanalysis, time is logical (and not chronological), differently oriented, to a large extent, by the understanding that, in the unconscious, there is no distinction between past, present, and future in the same manner that we make these separations of historical time. If mourning is a memorial act—a perduring process of separating what to remember and what to forget—it is because the work is continuous. In a very specific manner, the dead claim on the living an actualization in/of time.
The observation with respect to the duplicity of the term ‘luto’ [grief/mourning] leads to an estrangement: the singularity by which a subject responds to each of the griefs [lutos] that are felt over the course of a life and the way that a new work of mourning [luto] convokes and updates prior griefs. These grief and mourning [lutos] are the same and different at the same time. We arrive, then, at a moment to retrace the meaning of ‘uncanny’ [‘infamiliar’] as the Brazilian translation for ‘Unheimlich.’ (Freud 2019 [1919]). The loss is of the other object, but it is up to the subject to encounter again the loss and the emptiness that are brought forth by each loss, one by one. There is a familiar element in the experience and there is something unfamiliar or uncanny [‘infamiliar’] in each new loss.
The psychoanalyst Jean Allouch (1995) claims that there is a transformation in the way that Freud thought of mourning as a work of restituting a subject’s capacity to direct her libidinal investment toward a different object. Allouch wants to dislocate mourning from a space of work in order to transform it into an act. In reinforcing the idea of mourning as an act, I appeal to Vladimir Safatle (2020), whose fundamental argument in defense of the emancipation of the political subject is based upon the transposition, for politics, of the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis: identification, jouissance, transference, and act, summarized here as “to be capable of placing myself in relation with that which dismisses me” (Safatle 2020, 122). I am interested in relating Allouch's claim—to shift mourning from work to act—to Safatle's proposition of elevating the concept of act, in psychoanalysis, to politics. These are points that permit a better understanding of what I mean in thinking of mourning beyond the clinic, yet without sundering it from psychoanalysis: an ethical and political act, act of memory and recognition. Mourning as act would help me to say that the merely ‘going on’ in a normal way and the indifference towards the dead violate the right to sadness of those who remain and the right to memory of the departed.
I think, nevertheless, that the actuality of this book is given, unfortunately, in a tragic mode, by the manner in which the Brazilian government has demonstrated its profound indifference for more than five-hundred thousand deaths from COVID-19 between March of 2020, when the first COVID-related fatality was registered in the country, and June of 2021. Here, the long route taken by this research pursues an urgent debate about the foundational violence of a Nation-State. Each news article, each bulletin from the World Health Organization (WHO), each official statistic transforms a singular individual loss into an innumerable series, attempting to deny that each dead person had a unique history.4 In the daily routinization of death there lingers a trace of the indifference and the historical condition of Brazil’s colonial violence.
To insist on the mere continuation of life as if nothing had happened—as if death, in being the natural end of life, were not also a nameless brutality— is to deny the dead their memorial place. To those who are placed in the work of mourning, death haunts, because mourning is also a way of learning to live with that which has survived, in us, of our dead.
Freud holds that, initially, grief demands the acceptance of the reality of the loss. The instruments for this acceptance include funerary rituals, which are different across time, space, histories, cultures, and religions. The radical transformation provoked by COVID-19 in the forms of honoring the dead could be an indication that the pandemic might have the force to establish a different mode of dying, one of the forms of perceiving the end of the world. The philosopher Jacques Derrida, in a book dedicated to paying tribute to departed friends, (Derrida 2003) refers to the feeling of loss as an experience of the end of a shareable world, indicating how death produces an inexorable transformation in the living. In surveying the alterations in modes of dying that have taken place over the last five hundred years, the sociologist Norbert Elias perceives the increasing solitude of the dying person: “Birth and death—like other animal aspects of human life—were more public, and thus also more sociable, events than today; they were less privatized” (Elias 1985, 18). To a large extent, the privatization identified by Elias 40 years ago has accelerated along with the expansion of medical technologies connected to birth and death, removing these two moments from any “animal aspects of human life.” These transformations have been accentuated within the pandemic. One of the many traumas produced by COVID-19 is the solitary location of the moribund, intubated in Intensive Care Units (ICUs), without possibility of familial tenderness, support, or the opportunity to say goodbye.
In order to resist naturalizing the loss of lives, the exigency of mourning as an ethical position became evident during the pandemic but only because it already was so. The tragedy of COVID-19 deaths in Brazil is twofold, both in its disregard for life and in its contempt in relation to the dead, expressed in the absence of public demonstrations of mourning. The lack of practices of celebration and remembrance is a mark of the collective helplessness that adds to the individual helplessness of the subject of mourning. If the tallying of COVID-19 deaths is terrifying because of its monstrous grandiosity, the recounting of the assassinations committed by the Military Police [Policia Militar] is startling because of their persistence. In Rio de Janeiro alone, the Institute for Public Safety [Instituto de Segurança Pública] registered five deaths per day in 2020 of people assassinated in police interventions, a historical record for the Institute that began tracking this data in 1998. To the horror of these numbers there is no corresponding public indignation. Rather, a chorus of “so what?” echoes and reiterates, everyday, that we have always been a society marching under the banner of economic imperatives, as discussed in the chapter below “Interdependence and Morality: a debate with and against Butler,” in a proposed dialogue between Paulo Arantes and Achille Mbembe.
*
The path that resulted in this book was only made possible through the support I receive from UFRJ [Federal University of Rio de Janeiro], where I teach, and from foundations such as the Research Support Foundation for the State of Rio de Janeiro [FAPERJ] and the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), with whose support I have developed and continue to develop research projects. To the resources necessary for the sustainability of research in public universities is added love, as conceived by the feminist bell hooks, for whom to overcome the lack of love, both in personal relationships and in political struggle, is an affective-revolutionary task.5 “When small communities organize their lives around a love ethic, every aspect of daily life can be affirming for everyone,” writes hooks (2000, 99), proposing daily practices guided by principles of a loving ethics. The lack of love is, for hooks, by and large responsible for the structuration of authoritarianism disseminating across our daily practices. This book is the result of the formation of small reading, study, and research communities and it is with this love that I thank all of the students, teachers, and friends with whom I had the opportunity to learn so much, as well as those who welcomed my writings before they arrived in this format, whose objective is to reflect a path of research rather than present a completed project, a way of mourning the totality, the completion, the fall in language. Its precarious unity, thus, performes experiences of dispossession.
Judith Butler Beyond Gender: Mourning in Between the Clinic and Politics has some similarities with the dozens of books published by Judith Butler. One of her characteristics as an author is to gather in one volume a conjunction of works previously presented or even published. That was the choice that I made here, in order to indicate how this research is a permanent process, in conversation with the pairs, with the classroom or in lectures and debates capable of reframing the questions, to open new approaches, to reformulate ideas, to incorporate and respond to provocations.6
This book, which reunites texts whose original composing covers the period between 2018 and 2020, is organized into three sections: “Why Judith Butler,” “Mourning and Dispossession,” and “Feminist Encounters.” The first, formatted into two chapters, introduces the reader with my reading of Butler. “A Brief Introduction to the Author,” originally written at the invitation of Yara Frateschi in order to be integrated into an online encyclopedia of feminist philosophers hosted by the State University of Campinas Campinas (UNICAMP), required me to briefly synthesize research that I had been developing over two decades. In this volume, this chapter functions as an introduction and a reading guide for this book. In its sequence, “Butler Beyond Gender Trouble” functions as an introduction to Butler’s work. An initial version of this chapter was published in the journal Em Construção (State University of Rio de Janeiro,UERJ) with the title: “Para além do gênero: anotações sobre a recepção da obra da Butler no Brasil [“Beyond gender: notes on the reception of Butler’s work in Brazil”].
“Towards a Political Theory of Mourning” opens the second section. The original version appeared in a special edition of the journal O Que Nos Faz Pensar (Pontifical University of Rio de Janeiro, PUC-Rio), edited by Pedro Duarte in August of 2020. It was then called “Towards a Political Philosophy of Mourning” and has been extended in this book by the inclusion of a discussion of the political function of mourning Marielle Franco. “Melancholies” had a first version in English (“Writing Around Ghosts”), which first saw the light of day in a debate forum in the journal Contexto Internacional (PUC-Rio), organized by Roberto Yamato and Jimmy Casas. In turn, the unedited “Interdependence and Morality: a Debate with and against Judith Butler,” expanded the research with Brazilian themes and resulted in the perception that, in order to treat the theme of State violence, it would be necessary to interrogate the colonial and historical violence of Brazil. The second part concludes with the chapter , “Dedemocratizations,” is a modified version of the article “The death and the Death of Western Democracy” [“A morte e a morte das democracias ocidentais”] co-authored with Isabela Ferreira de Pinho and edited by Mariana Ruggieri, Marcos Natali, and Tiago Guilherme Pinheiro in the dossier, “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Democracy” [“De um tom apocalíptico adotado há pouco na democracia”] for the journal Remate de Males (Institute of language studiesUni, IEL-UNICAMP).
The third section, “Feminist Encounters,” revisits questions with which I had been working since the beginning of my research on Butler. “The Unhappy Body” is the result of the desire to return to the importance of Hegel’s philosophy in the work of Butler. Published in the journal Letra Magna (University of Sao Paulo, USP) at the invitation of Jair Zandoná, and co-authored with Gabriel Lisboa Ponciano, to whom I thank for the valuable contribution, and has been lightly modified for this volume. The chapter “Being and Becoming: Butler as Reader of Beauvoir” was published in Cadernos Pagu, in an dossier organized by Maria Lygia Quartim de Moraes and Magda Guadalupe dos Santos, whom I thank for their invitation and support. Closing the third section, “Feminisms and Their Subjects,” was initially coauthored with Ana Emilia Lobato and published in a special edition of the journal Principios (Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, UFRN), organized by Maria Cristina Longo. The text was modified for this volume in order to focus on the resumption of feminist debates from the 1990s.
My interest in the work of Judith Butler began from these questions and with them I reaffirm my alignment with her claims:
Feminist theory is never fully distinct form feminism as a social movement. Feminist theory would have no content were there no movement, and the movement, in its various directions and forms, has always been involved in the act of theory. Theory is an activity that does not remain restricted to the academy. It takes place every time a possibility is imagined, a collective self-reflection takes place, a dispute over values, priorities, and language emerges. (Butler 2004b, 175-6)
I think of this volume as a result —partial, contingent, in construction and deconstruction—of my desire to contribute to a Feminist theory put into action, taking the criticism of heteronormativity as an element that operates as a framework that casts certain lives as unintelligible and, moreover, as discardable; it partakes of the right to mourn and grievability as that which authorizes the separation between the management of life; and in presenting the critique of neoliberal rationality as that which, by a moral route, relegates certain lives to precarity and consigns them to a permanent process of precarization. In this way, mourning becomes the central operator of an articulation between ethics and politics I pursue in the work of Butler, just as I previously pursued it in the philosophy of Jacques Derrida (Rodrigues 2011b; 2013a).
Closing this volume, “From the Beginning to the Ends of Mourning”, the first version of which was edited by Paulo Roberto Pires, in a special edition of the journal Serrote (July 2020), addresses my singular experience of mourning, an articulation between theory and practice, between act and love. It offers a conclusion that points, again, to incompleteness as a premise of this work.
The confluence of these texts in one book was only made possible thanks to the thorough, dedicated, and delicate editorial work of Isabella Marcatti. Her readings were fundamental for us to arrive at a final form, sharing decisions and choices. I also thank Carolina Medeiros, dedicated daughter and translator, for her valuable contribution. The bibliography is organized into three parts: original works of Butler, works of other authors, and my own titles that, in some form, complement the course of this text and point to research that is open and in movement, what I hope will be its best qualities.
Carla RodriguesNiteroi, July 2021
A Brief Introduction to the Author7
Judith Butler is a philosopher from the United States, born into a Jewish family in Ohio on February 24, 1956.8 Their partner is the political scientist Wendy Brown (1955). Together, they share parental responsibilities for Isaac, honored in some of Butler’s books (the dedication of Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, for example, says: “For Isaac, who imagines otherwise”). Butler studied philosophy at Yale University and made their career as a Professor of Comparative Literature in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, which also houses the Program in Critical Theory and houses the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs. Butler holds the Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School, in Switzerland. They are also a member of the American Philosophical Society, Jewish Voice for Peace, and the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Butler has received numerous awards, including the Theodor W. Adorno Prize, bestowed in Frankfurt in 2012, for their contribution to feminism and ethical philosophy, and the Brudner Prize, from Yale University, for their studies on homosexuality, a theme that unites Butler’s research and their political activism in defense of gay, lesbian, and trans rights.
The beginning of Butler’s interest in philosophy happened in dialogue with Judaism. In their adolescence, Butler had problems at school: as a punishment for bad behavior, one teacher suggested counseling with a local rabbi. From these conversations, what had been an emerging interest in philosophy developed and intensified through Butler’s engagements in social and political movements until they arrived at Yale University, where they had Selya Benhabib as an interlocutor—an important debate between the two is presented in the chapter “Feminisms and Their Subjects”9—and where they participated in the Yale School of Deconstruction. In 1984, at 28 years old, Butler defended their doctoral dissertation Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (Butler 1999b), still unpublished in Brazil.
I would like to submit the proposal that Butler is a thinker in transition. Their first research transits between Hegel’s Germany and France in the early twentieth century, where, since 1930, philosophers such as Jean Wahl, Alexandre Koyré, Alexandre Kojève, and Jean Hyppolite were responsible for new interpretations and translations of Hegel, especially the Phenomenology of Spirit. This first generation of French readers of Hegel influenced philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir, all of whom feature in Butler’s research. For Butler, the question of the subject is a theme that flows from two other tributaries: in their doctoral thesis, the subject of desire, in Hegel, disturbs the subject of traditional philosophical reason; already in dialogue with the “linguistic turn,”10 the subject comes to be understood as an open network of successive interpretations. In this way, Butler transits, again, between Idealism and Post-Structuralism, which she studied at Yale as a student of Derrida and Paul de Man. I argue that Butler has a deconstructive style, a way of reading texts and authors as a means for going beyond them, a mode of reading summarized in the citation of Gayatri Spivak in one of the epigraphs to Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’:
If I understand deconstruction, deconstruction is not an exposure of error, certainly not other people’s error. The critique in deconstruction, the most serious critique in deconstruction, is the critique of something that is extremely useful, something without which we cannot do anything. (Spivak apud Butler 1993, 27)
Although, as “style,” this is not a method, it is a telling characteristic of the post-structuralist approach, which has often been confused in other authors with destruction or annihilation. Through this misconception, Butler has been labeled as a “bad reader” of Beauvoir, since, from their reading of The Second Sex, Butler operates a deconstruction of the sex/gender pairing, supposedly merely disregarding that the concept of gender does not appear in the French philosopher (Femenías 2012). However, there would be no radicality in Butler’s thought without a double gesture: to read Beauvoir both with and against her. Not to criticize her—in a vulgar sense—, but to make Beauvoir’s philosophical criticism the point of departure for Butler’s own formulations. It is in this way that I understand the postulation: “Beauvoir’s theory implied seemingly radical consequences, ones that she herself did not entertain” (Butler 1990, 142), the theme of the chapter “Being and Becoming: Butler’s Reading of Beauvoir” in this volume.
Mobilized by the conception of the subject in Existentialism, Butler established a productive debate with Beauvoir in the first part of Gender Trouble, published in the United States in 1990 and, since then, a landmark work for Feminist philosophy. One of the philosophical consequences of this work was to disrupt the concept of ‘gender’ which Feminist theories had seemed, more or less comfortably, to accept. Although it might seem that Butler’s first interrogations amount to the end of Feminist movements, the unfolding of the debates in this field reveal that this initial gesture, with the argument that Feminisms cease to be formulated only in the name of female subjects, will be fundamental for their renewal. If we understand that the mode in which Butler problematizes the concept of gender is inscribed in a canonical philosophical debate—the question of subjectivity, as is discussed in this volume in the chapter, “Feminisms and their Subjects”—, we will approach the dimensions of Butler’s contributions to philosophy.
In spite of turning its author into an academic celebrity on the occasion of its original publication, Gender Trouble was not exactly well received. Butler was then dedicated to dialogue with their critics. This effort produced three books, which appeared in the following order: Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (Butler 1993), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Butler 1997c), and Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (Butler 1997a), the last still unpublished in Brazil. In the first, the author developed the argument that conceiving of gender as performative does not impede recognizing how much bodies matter in forms of discrimination; in the second, the author revived the problem of the subject, focusing on power structures that shape our psychic life and sustain heteronormativity; in the last, the author explored the performativity of language as articulated by J. L. Austin and re-read by Derrida, the origin of the notion of performativity of gender presented in Gender Trouble.
This dialogue led Butler to transgress disciplinary boundaries, transiting, again, between different fields. Feminist anthropologists have a strong presence in Butler’s thought. Gayle Rubin, for example, is a source for Butler’s critique of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism and the centrality of the Oedipus complex in Freud. In the 1975 classic, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex” (Rubin 1975), Rubin rejects the anthropology of a totemic matrix, in which Freud bases the Oedipus complex, and the structuralist anthropology of Lévi-Strauss, an explicit influence on the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, in order to question the pairing of sex/gender as a result of the mode in which Lévi-Strauss describes elementary structures of kinship. Fifteen years later, Butler added a new problem to the sex/gender pairing in order to criticize the idea of “intelligible genders” as those capable of instituting and sustaining relations of coherence and continuity between sex, gender, sexual practice and desire, which would only be possible if we were able to discern biological, psychical, discursive, and social elements. Or, in Rubin’s terms taken up by Butler (2000), in Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death, if we were able to separate nature and culture.
This same work compares investigations of gender in the anthropology of Marilyn Strathern (1992). Butler, close to Feminist Anthropology, reinforces Strathern’s criticisms of Lacan, proposing, to a certain extent, the possibility of alternative psychoanalyses from out of a different conception of the symbolic. The range of dialogues with psychoanalysis expands, and Butler gathers theorizations of Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Jean Laplanche, and Melanie Klein. In 2003, the publication of Gender Trouble in Brazil was initiated by the psychoanalyst Joel Birman, coordinator of the collection Sujeito e História [Subject and History], in which the translation of Gender Trouble was issued, stimulating a significant dialogue in Brazil with psychoanalytic theory (Porchat 2007; Greiner 2016; Fidelis 2018).
Although Hegel never loses relevance for Butler, the Foucauldian concepts of subjectivity and biopolitics thicken in their later work, and Butler was brought nearer to writers connected with Critical Theory, such as Theodor Adorno. Ideas of “Jewishness”—through Emmanuel Levinas, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt or even in Derrida—became constitutive ethico-political elements for Butler. During the first twenty years of the twenty-first century, Butler has sharpened their critique of neoliberalism, in large part in dialogue with the work of Wendy Brown. In this period, Butler published eleven books, the most recent (as of this writing) being The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind (Butler 2020).
Other authors appear infrequently across her texts—such as the sociologist Erving Goffman, an influence behind Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (Butler 2009), the Palestinian theorist Edward Said, in Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (Butler 2012b), or the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Butler transits within post-colonial thought, in dialogue with Gayatri Spivak, with whom they published Who Sings the Nation-State? Language, Politics, Belonging (Butler and Spivak 2007), which presents a reading of Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhaba and Achille Mbembe. Concerning the critique of State violence, Butler incorporates many aspects of Arendt’s philosophy. Recalling the Arendtian theme of binationalism (Butler 2012), they propose a way out the State violence of Israel against Palestine and repeat a double gesture made in relation with Beauvoir: to think with and against Arendt, with whom they argue in order to propose bodily performativity and public manifestations of exposing precarity (Butler 2015a).
There are readers that are more comfortable approaching Butler’s philosophy after it has been divided into two parts, leaving behind the problems of gender, as if, at the dawning of the twenty-first century after September 11, their philosophy ultimately can be confined to ethical-political questions. In this division, there would be an obstacle to understanding gender as a philosophical issue. I refuse this division because it bears at least two misconceptions: 1) the abandonment of problems of gender in favor of a political philosophy depends upon a comprehension of gender as a subordinated or minor issue; 2) it would be necessary to sustain the argument that gender is a theme restricted to Feminist theory, an argument completely opposed to Butler’s work. In the perspective that I adopt here, there are at least three movements in relation to the concept of gender. The first is to downgrade it as a central category of Feminist theory by its inevitable connection with the binaries of the sexual difference masculine/feminine. This perspective points to heteronormativity as a critical operator in diverse forms of discrimination, widening the focus of Feminist theory towards such topics as bodily coherence and the choice of object of desire, in addition to race, in a dialogue with Black Feminists who formulate intersectional positions (Crenshaw 1989). In the second movement, Butler creates
