The 2014 Edward Said Memorial Lecture with Dr. Judith Butler

The Discourse of Terror: An Interview With Judith Butler by Cihan Aksan and Jon Bailes

To what extent, in your view, do the ways in which mainstream media select and contextualise events determine the boundaries of public thinking?  You have said on one hand, regarding the “framing” of war and terrorism, that, “Efforts to control the visual and narrative dimensions of war delimit public discourse by establishing and disposing the sensuous parameters of reality itself”,[i] but also that “specters are produced that haunt the ratified version of reality”.[ii]

Judith Butler: There are surely many ways that this happens, but we can note at the most obvious level the way in which forms of resistance or violence get cast as “conflicts” that assume two sides that are fighting only against one another.  We are more often than not asked, for instance, to regard Israel and Palestine as in a conflict of this kind, a framing that sets each of them on equal footing, and implicitly analogises the political situation to a fist fight, a soccer match, or a domestic quarrel.  So if, then, the only two intelligible political positions are “pro-Palestinian” or “pro-Israeli,” the presumption is that one’s position is determined by a sentiment that wants one side to win over the other.  In the meantime, what is lost is any sense that the Palestinian resistance to Israeli colonial rule is waged from a situation of occupation or expulsion, that there is a military order that controls the boundaries of what would be a sovereign Palestinian state, that the land on which that state is now thinkable has been radically diminished by an ongoing practice of land confiscation and appropriation.  So we set the actors on the scene through the banal discourse of “conflict” in ways that fully deflect from the history and struggle of colonial resistance, refusing as well by that means to link the resistance to other forms of colonial resistance, their rationale, and their tactics.

Open Letter to James Nxumalo, Senzo Mchunu & Jacob Zuma on the Repression in Cato Crest, Durban

To:

James Nxumalo, Mayor, eThekwini Municipality, Durban, South Africa
Senzo Mchunu, Premier, KwaZulu-Natal
Jacob Zuma, President, Republic of South Africa

We are writing to you to express our grave concern at events unfolding in the Cato Crest shack settlement in Durban.

After an illegal eviction in Cato Crest by the eThekwini Municipality in March this year, shackdwellers occupied an adjacent piece of land. They named the settlement “Marikana”. Since then, two activists have been assassinated -Thembinkosi Qumbelo and Nkululeko Gwala. A third, Nkosinathi Mngomezulu, is in critical condition after being shot by the Land Invasions Unit. A number of activists have been seriously beaten by the police. Other activists, including Bandile Mdlalose and S’bu Zikode of the shack dweller movement Abahlali baseMjondolo who have been supporting the residents, have been threatened with death. 

Willing the impossible: an interview with Judith Butler

Judith Butler interviewed by Ray Filar, Open Democracy

By now, Judith Butler is used to improbable accusations. Among other things, she has been called a “useful idiot” for anti-Semites, a supporter of terrorism and – that old classic – a self-hating Jew.

These kinds of allegations are rarely levelled against post-structuralist philosophers. Yet the Maxine Eiliot professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California holds a special kind of renown within the academy. Her work on conflict, gender and the nation-state has dramatically transformed the way we think about society.

Judith Butler's Remarks to Brooklyn College on BDS

Judith Butler

Editors Note: Despite a campaign to silence them, philsophers Judith Butler and Omar Barghouti spoke at Brooklyn College on Thursday night. In an exclusive, TheNation presents the text of Butler's remarks.

Usually one starts by saying that one is glad to be here, but I cannot say that it has been a pleasure anticipating this event. What a Megillah! I am, of course, glad that the event was not cancelled, and I understand that it took a great deal of courage and a steadfast embrace of principle for this event to happen at all. I would like personally to thank all those who took this opportunity to reaffirm the fundamental principles of academic freedom, including the following organizations: the Modern Language Association, the National Lawyers Guild, the New York ACLU, the American Association of University Professors, the Professional Staff Congress (the union for faculty and staff in the CUNY system), the New York Times editorial team, the offices of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Governor Andrew Cuomo and Brooklyn College President Karen Gould whose principled stand on academic freedom has been exemplary.

Judith Butler - A Politics of the Street

Olivia Harrison on Parting Ways: Judith Butler and the Cause of the Other

Los Angeles Review of Books

ISRAEL'S RECENT MILITARY ASSAULT on Gaza serves as a reminder of the continuing urgency of the Palestinian question, which has been a topic of worldwide debate since the June 1967 war and returns to the center stage of global politics whenever Palestinian or Israeli blood is spilt. Something has changed in recent years, however, particularly after conflicts so disproportionate (the 2006 Israeli invasion of Southern Lebanon, the 2008-2009 Gaza war) that it becomes difficult to speak of two “sides” in a conflict involving a military force, on the one hand, and a majority of unarmed civilians on the other.

Judith Speaking in Stellenbosch in 2011