The following lecture notes are from Queer/ing Ethics in the fourth week of class on February 8, 2011. This class summary was designed to introduce graduate students to Judith Butler as an ethicist.
Today serves as a small/partial introduction to J Butler’s engagement with ethics. We are discussing excerpts from Undoing Gender, Precarious Life and Frames of War. We are also discussing an interview she did with William Connolly on ethics and politics.
Here’s what I want to do today:
- Brief overview of some influences/traditions that Butler draws upon
- Introduction, through video clips, to some key themes
- Close reading of essays/troubling passages
An Overview of some influences/traditions/themes
- Jewish Philosophy: Spinoza
- Hegel and recognition/Subjects of Desire
- Foucault
- Nietzsche
- Frankfurt School of Critical Theory: Adorno/Horkheimer
- Ernesto Laclau and Radical Democracy
- ACT UP, Queer Nation
- Althusser and interpellation
- Levinas and the face
- Intelligibility and recognition
- Ambivalence
- Anxiety/difficulty
- Grief, mourning, melancholy
- Suffering
- AIDS
- 9/11
- Norms
- Non-violence
- Precariousness
- Bodies
- Livable life/possibility/unlivability
- Critique/dissent
- Unknowingness
- Trouble/being undone
- failure
- limits
- Agency/resistance
- Space/room to breathe/to live (freedom?)
- the human/non-human
- Struggle
Butler Speaks…
“It’s not a system” (at 5:10) from Judith Butler: Philosopher Encounters of the Third Kind.
What is meant by Undoing Gender? (2:27)
“What does it mean to take a walk?” (with Sunaura Taylor)
A close reading of some passages…
Here a few from me:
from Undoing Gender, page 12:
from “Precarious Life”:
(from 141)
(page 147)
(page 151)
Here’s a passage that might be helpful from the introduction to Frames of War (13)
and more from Frames of War:
page 77
