1. One must spell out Judith Butler

In December 1999, The Guardian announced that Judith Butler had been awarded the “bad writing” prize, annually given by the journal Philosophy and Literature. According to this newspaper, the prize aims at highlighting the worst passages, from a stylistic point of view, found in scholarly books and articles. The text by Judith Butler that served as a reference for this award was Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time, published in the journal Diacritics in 1997.

In February 1999, Martha Nussbaum published the famous and controversial article “The Professor of Parody” in The New Republic, accusing Butler of having a deliberately obscure literary style (cf. Henriques 2016, 83-126). In the context of the controversy Nussbaum’s criticism gave rise to, several other texts highlighted the same obscure aspect of Butler’s writing; for instance, Cathy Birkenstein (2010), notes that Nussbaum’s criticism is not even original since, in the previous year, Susan Gubar had already alluded to Butler’s obscurantism and, two years before that, Katha Pollitt had accused Butler and other academics of writing in such a way as to not being understood amongst them (cf. Birkenstein 2010, 271).

Given that language and its power, such as its performative power, is one of the main themes of Butler’s thought, how can one explain this convergence of views about its style and textuality? What theoretical reasons may support its alleged obscurity? I believe it is fair to say that Butlerian discursivity is related to a political and philosophical point of view, and cannot be reduced to a mere matter of stylistic elegance.

Butler acknowledges that there may have often been a discursive enclosure of a certain stream of literary criticism in the U.S., which spoke to a narrow circle of people, requiring acquaintance with the same texts and rhetorical resources in order to be understood. Having said that, however, from her point of view, clarity of expression should not be taken in absolute terms. In this context, on the one hand, she recognises that conveying a certain kind of content may require a struggle against standardised speech, but, on the other, she considers that it is important to question and deconstruct a language’s grammatical structure in order to uncover the constraint it places on us and of that we are not aware of because of the naturalisation which frames our relation to it. For this reason, she argues that a keen investment in interpreting authors and texts can be an important aspect of everyone’s training. Drawing on her experience as a student of continental philosophy, she talks about the interpretative path she had to follow to read Hegel and Heidegger, for example, and how that defined her training (cf. Butler 2005, 93-100).

One thing is clear to me: studying Judith Butler is an arduous enterprise which forces one to embark on multiple paths of investigation and understanding. And the way she conceives philosophical textuality does not help. This is why I turned to the idea of spelling, that is, of breaking down each line of thought into syllables, giving time the chance to allow for each path to be followed comprehensively. In addition, I looked for systematic support―using another way of reading to form a hermeneutical triangle―in interviews given by Butler, at key points in her intellectual life, where she reflects upon her ideas and work, clarifying its aims and content.

The spelling-out I propose to undertake here will be developed around three thematic nuclei which structure Butler’s thought: gender, violence, and grief, which, in turn, call for other themes that are also central to her thinking. Besides this first section, which works as a kind of introduction, the present text will include two more sections, divided into subsections dedicated to the selected themes, and one last section, a conclusive overview.

2. Gender and sex: Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter

In the early 1990s, Judith Butler published two books, with a three-year gap in between, which placed her centre-stage within contemporary debates. In 1990 she published Gender Trouble, her best-known work, and, in 1993, Bodies That Matter which, in my view, aims at establishing an interpretative limit to Gender Trouble.

In Gender Trouble, Butler assumes and radicalises the concerns which had come to be felt in the feminist movement in the mid-1980s. Following the book’s publication, the figure of Judith Butler became an idol for some groups which used her as a banner, often without having seriously grappled with her thought, and a demonic character for other groups, which vilified her, with no knowledge of her texts or arguments whatsoever. Butler’s public situation constitutes another reason for the need to spell out her texts and ideas, placing them in a field of rationality, and allowing for a critical and clear understanding of her intellectual legacy. What is all this public fuss about?

In an interview published in the Radical Philosophy journal in 1994 and republished in 2005 in a French anthology which brings together a set of her interviews (cf. Butler 2005), Butler gives us some information which helps to understand this situation, besides revealing how she relates to Gender Trouble’s reception, and with the reason for the appearance of Bodies That Matter.

To begin with, something interesting to point out in her answers is the fact that Butler was surprised by how successful and popular Gender Trouble was, while she thinks that such popularity comes from the fact that a misrepresentation of her views gained a life of its own and was generalised. She says:

I felt that the popularisation of Gender Trouble […] ended up being a terrible misrepresentation of what I wanted to say! (Butler 1994, 33)

In the same context, Butler suggests the possibility that her book’s acceptance and popularity are tied to a cultural factor. Gender Trouble would have shaped and, to a certain extent, awakened something which lay dormant within cultural dynamics. This reference is interesting for two reasons. On the one hand, for the awareness that the work gives shape to or expresses a demand of its time, which could be read, in Hegelian terms, as the breaking through of reality’s own force. But, on the other hand, for the acknowledgement of a text’s autonomy in relation to who writes it and of the path it can take, creating a field of meanings which goes beyond its author’s designs, and can indeed move in a direction which had not been thought of.

Despite other reasons, which most certainly exist, I believe that a legitimate explanation for what Butler refers to as a “misrepresentation” of what she wanted to say is anchored in the book’s discursive mode and its intrinsic interpretative difficulty. It is, in fact, a work of philosophy which is argumentatively intertwined with philosophical views of various origins, and which articulates them without conceding much to whoever may come to read it without any kind of philosophical training or knowledge. In this sense, and following Butler’s insight that the text’s content would be giving expression to something latent in society, I believe it makes sense to think that what might have been hidden and dormant may have turned into a hermeneutic reading principle, giving rise to a generalised interpretation which is, somehow, parallel to the work and project that brought it to life. In this context, I shall hereby present some lines of thought revolving around Gender Trouble.

a) Discursive mode and context

As previously mentioned, Gender Trouble is a work of philosophy which aims at questioning an epistemological/ontological system, as Butler states in its preface (cf. Butler 1990, xxx), thus unfolding in the discursive framework of epistemology and ontology. Its horizon of analysis and problematisation stems from two categories: critical genealogy and heterosexual contract/compulsory heterosexuality.[1] In this context, in the wide-ranging universe of theoretical references which make up the work’s intertextuality, names such as Michel Foucault and Monica Wittig stand out. And not because their views are accepted without further ado, but because both supply categorial tools with which Butler shapes her stance. Among her array of influences, the key importance of certain names, such as Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva, is also worth taking into account. And, again, not because Butler aligns herself with them, but because each of them represents disruptive or innovative views concerning the problem at hand, and Butler seems to want to bring their contributions to the fore, while distinguishing herself from them, for what she takes to be limitations or inconsistencies. The book develops two discursive strands: a critical analysis of a wide range of literature on the themes under scrutiny, and Butler’s own theoretical proposals. The first is very clear and is grounded in a deep knowledge of the authors invoked. Although, of course, each view is presented from the authors’ interpretative perspective, the reader can follow the arguments presented and understand what is at stake.

The second strand, concerning Butler’s proposals, does not have the same clarity or precision. What she wants to suggest is intertwined with the critical analysis she develops and is assumed within a framework of conceptual vulnerability ― the text’s main epistemological tenet ― which departs from any substantialist mode of thinking or one rooted in fixed and stable conceptual structures. On the contrary, Butler’s view emerges from within the idea of a constitutive vulnerability of thought tied to a way of understanding the contextual, not only as a condition of thought, but as its own medium.

The whole book departs from the binary mode of thinking, distinctive of a substantialist view, proposing the dissolution of categorial binomials: mind/body; nature/culture; masculine/feminine; surface/depth; inner/outer; natural/artificial... All fixed and stable categorial structures, all thought of unity and coherence, arise from a will to power and a reductive explanatory imposition. Thinking must be a process of differentiation in an environment determined by uncertainty and fusion, a process which sets itself apart from any foundation, from anything from which concepts or categories might be deduced or induced. There is never anything prior to discursive establishment which grounds it.

Within this framework, Butler’s proposals cannot be precise nor clearly defined, but rather represent, I would say, environments and nuances of understanding inscribed in another “category” which infuses the book and sustains it: the Derridean idea of différance.

b) Feminism as a place of analysis

Gender Trouble is a book which addresses feminisms and assumes the meaning of feminism. In the aforementioned interview, Butler presents herself, first and foremost, as a feminist. She says:

I would say that I’m a feminist theorist before I’m a queer theorist or a gay and lesbian theorist. […] Gender Trouble was a critique of compulsory heterosexuality within feminism, and it was feminists that were my intended audience. (Butler 1994, 32)

These statements are important because the book is organised around and grounded in a radical criticism of the so-called “subject of feminism” and its political effectiveness. Such criticism is developed on three interrelated fronts: (1) the universalistic view which sustains it, (2) the idea of identity which it subsumes, and (3) the very idea of the subject which represents a foundationalist model of thinking.

For Butler, feminisms’ need to configure a subject of action―in this case, women―highlights their affiliation with a modern way of thinking still dependent upon the Cartesian idea of a substantial, autonomous, unified, and coherent cogito, capable of featuring in its own actions. Butler distinguishes herself from this view, deconstructing the idea of the possibility of a unified and coherent subject, and also of an autonomy conceived as a cultural/temporal/linguistic priority. She does not entirely abandon the notion of the subject, not least because the performance she advocates presupposes an agent, but subtracts it from frames of unity, stability, and fixity, revealing it as an entity which is more an effect of action than its cause, as it is constructed by the actions it carries out. In this context, she highlights that feminisms should move away from what she calls “humanisms,” since they are grounded in an idea of a universal and abstract subject which, like an island, is completely decontextualized from the array of relations within which it is organised.

The idea of “women-subject” as an entity of claiming rights, on the one hand, stems from the masculine/feminine binarism, from their consistent differentiation and, therefore, grounds and promotes the idea of the naturalness of heterosexuality; on the other hand, it is, in itself, reductive and discriminatory, besides being wholly decontextualised, ignoring other aspects which are important for political action, such as class or ethnicity. In the context of these views, Butler states:

My suggestion is that the presumed universality and unity of the subject of feminism is effectively undermined by the constraints of the representational discourse in which it functions. Indeed, the premature insistence on a stable subject of feminism, understood as a seamless category of women, inevitably generates multiple refusals to accept the category. These domains of exclusion reveal the coercive and regulatory consequences of that construction, even when the construction has been elaborated for emancipatory purposes. (Butler 1990, 6)

Within this framework, Butler’s epistemological proposal constitutes a displacement of the feminist problematic, arguing that, instead of claiming a feminine identity, feminist political action should first look at the way identities are constructed, in the sense that claiming a women-subject corresponds to the reproduction and maintenance of a situation which has been naturalised. If feminist action aims at destroying the hierarchies which have dominated women, it must displace its critical target from the patriarchy and aim at unveiling the processes of identity construction, the forming of categories such as “gender” and “sex,” or the discursive constitution of bodies and sexual binarism. In other words, it must develop a critical genealogy of power mechanisms.

c) The Gordian Knot: gender

The theme which runs through and unifies Gender Trouble is the problem of identity,[2] here taken as gender identity. Now, “identity” and “gender” are precisely what Butler wants to problematise, that is, to agitate; she aims to uninstall certainties and force a questioning of established facts.

Given that “gender” was the categorial resource which gave feminisms an argumentative tool to claim the legitimacy of women’s rights, generating a whole cultural tradition and shaping its political action, it is understandable that Butler wants to undo that problematic knot.

Now, in order to constitute that resource, “gender” was thought of as distinct and separate from sex. In line with Beauvoir and her discursive invention on ne naît pas femme: on le devient, sex and gender were conceived of and worked on in separate spheres: the biological and the cultural.

In this work, as in others, such as “Variations on Sex and Gender. Beauvoir, Wittig and Foucault,” Butler (1987) confronts Beauvoir’s thought. And, despite suggesting that the question of identity is, in itself, a fiction which serves various power purposes, her treatment of the Beauvoirian stance allows us to appreciate its philosophical originality, even though, as far as I am concerned, Gender Trouble somewhat overplays the continuity between Beauvoir and Sartre. In the final part of her analysis of Beauvoir’s view, in Variations, Butler says the following:

In effect, to understand woman to exist on the metaphysical order of being is to understand her as that which is already accomplished, self-identical, static, but to conceive her on the metaphysical order of becoming is to invent possibility into her experience, including the possibility of never becoming a substantive, self-identical “woman.” (Butler 1987, 141)

This aspect is very relevant for Butler’s theorising, as Beauvoir’s view retrieves the idea of “being a woman” from a static ontological standpoint, of completeness and sameness. Despite questioning the theme of gender as choice, Butler emphasises that Beauvoir’s view does not imply that the figure of “woman gender” is necessarily inhabited by a body of the female sex. For Butler, the feminist movement’s take on Beauvoir’s discursive invention ended up replacing a biological destiny with a cultural one which takes sex as a starting point.

It seems fair to identify two aspects in Butler’s arguments. On the one hand, sex and gender are indistinguishable because sex is, and has always been, gender in the framework of cultural dynamics. Sex does not have a natural, biological identity on which a gender is inscribed. In this sense, gender subsumes sex. As Butler says, the body “is not a ‘being,’ but a variable boundary, a surface whose permeability is politically regulated” (Butler 1990, 189). Therefore, on the other hand, asking about gender-sex articulation, is, in a certain sense, inconsistent and unwarranted. Gender is never expression. Like the body, gender is not a stable entity: it is “a constituted social temporality” (Butler 1990, 191). The idea of stability and of an expressive relation between sex and gender is only an illusion derived from repetition.

If gender attributes, however, are not expressive but performative, then these attributes effectively constitute the identity they are said to express or reveal. The distinction between expression and performativeness is crucial. If gender attributes and acts, the various ways in which a body shows or produces its cultural signification, are performative, then there is no preexisting identity by which an act or attribute might be measured; there would be no true or false, real or distorted acts of gender, and the postulation of a true gender identity would be revealed as a regulatory fiction. That gender reality is created through sustained social performances means that the very notions of essential sex and a true or abiding masculinity or femininity are also constituted as part of the strategy that conceals gender’s performative character and the performative possibilities for proliferating gender configurations outside the restricting frames of masculinist domination and compulsory heterosexuality. (Butler 1990, 192-193)

This set of statements which closes Gender Trouble’s third chapter is absolutely crucial both for Butler’s own proposal and for what she described as a “misrepresentation” of what she wanted to say.

On the one hand, she is especially concerned with the defence of the ideas of gender performativity and its multiple structural possibilities, a defence which amounts, on the other hand, to the refusal of ideas of there being truer genders than others or a stable identity prior to the repetitive process which supports it. This view, linked to the statement that a body is not a being, but a politically regulated surface is certainly among the grounds for readings which, taking Butler as a reference, ignore the materiality of the body/sex, taking gender as totally free-floating. In this context, the appearance of Bodies That Matter in 1996 is also aimed at taking issue with readings of Gender Trouble which argue that there is no such thing as sex, that there is only gender and that the latter, being performative, is totally free-floating. So, in Bodies That Matter, Butler thought it important to come back to the category of sex and to the body’s materiality. She says:

I think that I overrode the category of sex too quickly in Gender Trouble. I try to reconsider it in Bodies That Matter, and to emphasise the place of constraint in the very production of sex. (Butler 1994, 32-33)

In the context of what one might call her intervention in the reception of Gender Trouble, especially in that of the idea of the body’s materiality, its constitution, and the constraint it determines, Butler insists, in Bodies That Matter, upon the issue of performativity. Within this theme’s framework, she distinguishes two aspects. The first is that of the distinction between performativity and performance which, from her point of view, many readings of Gender Trouble conflated. Performativity is the most radical instance, that which belongs to the order of discourse and aims to lay bare language’s capacity to produce what it names. She says:

I guess performativity is the vehicle through which ontological effects are established. Performativity is the discursive mode by which ontological effects are installed. Something like that. (Butler 1994, 33)

One of the aspects of language’s performativity manifests itself in the power of cultural norms in the constitution of the materiality of bodies, as developed in Bodies That Matter. In its turn, performance presupposes an agent and is also related to instituted norms which are, as she insists, its limit and condition. Cultural norms constrain the sense of the performance and, therefore, its reception. The sense of the performance is not established by its agent, by their possible intention, but by the cultural and normative framework within which it takes place (cf. Butler 2005, 123-126). Within the space of reflexivity constituted by Butler’s interviews―where she critically resumes her texts and explains her views very clearly―the structuring role norms play in how she conceives cultural determination, as well as the power of acting, by configuring the possibility and prospect of political intervention, become very clear.

3. Violence and grief: Precarious Life and Frames of War

At the beginning of the 21st century, Butler published two works which can be read as a direct political intervention: Precarious Life (2004) and Frames of War (2009) which, as far as I am concerned, under the guise of war, undertake an ethical reflection and a deep questioning of what is, after all, a human being, in addition to arguing for the urgency of a democratic public space, with room for dissent and criticism. In a 2003 interview, on peace as resistance, to the surprise of her interviewer, Butler answered the following:

I’m always glad to talk about gender […]. But it seems to me that, with the start of this war―which started just 72 hours prior to the start of this conversation―questions arise about how human beings characterize what they’re doing and, in particular, how people deal with violence: inflicting it, being on the receiving end of it, and how it gets made unreal somehow in the media. (Butler 2003, 99)

One can say these issues represent the agenda of these two works, proposing an ethical formulation which withstands violence and argues for a view of human beings’ constitutive vulnerability and exposure to violence.

a) Ethics of non-violence and precariousness of life

In an article called “Precarious Life,” included in the book with the same title, Butler develops a dialogue with Levinas which, according to her, aims at outlining a framework for the setting-up of a Jewish ethics of non-violence, in order to relate it to contemporary ethical issues. The process of dialogue and personal appropriation of Levinas’ thinking is, naturally, undertaken through the analysis of the problem of the “face,” exploring three lines of reflection: (1) the configuration of the sense and context of the notion of “moral obligation,” (2) the analysis of the dilemma implied in the idea of “ethical anxiety,” and (3) the link between representation and humanisation/dehumanisation.

The first line of thinking, in complete continuity with Butler’s earlier work, aims at establishing that ethics is not an individual task nor determined by a legislating will grounded in any subjectivity whose reflexivity is sovereign. Ethics is constituted in the space opened by otherness and by the first call coming from outside oneself. The sense of “moral obligation,” as an ethical imperative, is rooted in the priority that the other establishes through their call’s impact, a call which is completely unexpected, unavoidable, and unpredictable. In her words:

Indeed, this conception of what is morally binding is not one that I give myself; it does not proceed from my autonomy or my reflexivity. It comes to me from elsewhere, unbidden, unexpected, and unplanned. In fact, it tends to ruin my plans, and if my plans are ruined, that may well be the sign that something is morally binding upon me. (Butler 2004, 130)

It is, as previously mentioned, through the Levinassian theme of the “face” that her reflection unfolds. Such a “face” is not related to a specific empirical concreteness, that is, it isn’t anyone’s face, but a sign of the precariousness of human life. Butler explains that the “face” works as a catachresis. Borrowing Levinas’ words, she says:

[…] “face” describes the human back, the craning of the neck, the raising of the shoulder blades like “springs.” And these bodily parts, in turn, are said to cry and to sob and to scream, as if they were a face or, rather, a face with a mouth, a throat, or indeed, just a mouth and throat from which vocalizations emerge that do not settle into words. The face is to be found in the back and the neck, but it is not quite a face. The sounds that come from or through the face are agonized, suffering. So we can see already that the “face” seems to consist of a series of displacements such that a face is figured as a back which, in turn, is figured as a scene of agonized vocalization. (Butler 2004, 133)

So, the injunction of “face” in linguistic expression is issued by a command: “thou shalt not kill,” betraying the ontological complexity of “face” which, as Butler also stresses, Levinas always keeps separate from the order of being, characterising “face” by means of utterances with no verb and, crucially, with no copula.

Butler’s interpretation of Levinas, by exploring the theme of precariousness, is very interesting and leads directly to the issue of “ethical anxiety.” Although she stresses that it is not clear why Levinas thinks that the most immediate response to the precariousness of others is the desire to kill, she will use this idea in developing her reflection and setting up the theme of “ethical anxiety” as the dilemmatic conflict between the fear for one’s own life and the fear of having to kill:

There is fear for one’s own survival, and there is anxiety about hurting the Other, and these two impulses are at war with each other, like siblings fighting. But they are at war with each other in order not to be at war, and this seems to be the point. For the nonviolence that Levinas seems to promote does not come from a peaceful place, but rather from a constant tension between the fear of undergoing violence and the fear of inflicting violence. (Butler 2004, 136-137)

However apocalyptic this picture may seem, it nevertheless arises from two important requirements: on the one hand, a realism about the complexity of the human condition removed from any sort of angelism, and, on the other, a context of war within which Butler’s reflection takes place. The theme of precariousness leads directly to the question of the possible or impossible connection between representation and humanisation, developed more systematically in Frames of War, which she takes to be a continuation of Precarious Life. By using representations of specific faces which circulated in the United States in the context of the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, Butler argues that the representations of the individualised faces can altogether hide the reality of precarious living and be used to underline which human lives are worthy and have value, and which are worthless and valueless, thus indicating which lives can be mourned and which lack that right.

Butler analyses two types of “frames” released by the American press: (1) the faces of Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein and (2) the faces of Afghan women with no headscarf or burka. In both cases, there are personifications, or “frames of war,” that is, representations of human beings which, on the one hand, conceal their constitutive precariousness, and, on the other, are, at the same time, supported by normative schemes of intelligibility of what is, or should be, a human being so that their death may come to be mourned publicly.

The faces of Bin Laden and Hussein personify evil, in the shape of terror or tyranny. In this case, what is paradigmatic of the human being is what is not present. What is shown is a deformity, which is, possibly, legitimate to destroy. As for the Afghan girls, they personify, on the one hand, what women’s freedom and autonomy should be, and, on the other, glorify the victory of the American army in the function of liberator, thus also legitimising the war, while completely covering up the horror and destruction it entails. The faces of the Afghan girls showing their freedom conceal the pain and loss stemming from war. Therefore, there is in their exhibition a derealisation which consists in obliterating the suffering of war and the precariousness of life. In this context, these representations exert a double violence: by what they represent and by what they hide.

While developing her argument, Butler will, once again, explore the ambiguity of the status of “face” in Levinas’ thinking, affirming the paradoxical character of the representativeness of human beings who neither identify with what is represented nor with what cannot be represented. The value of the representation of human beings lies, precisely, in displaying the non-linearity between representation and humanity, and should instead make the ambiguity of the relation explicit. But the normative schemes of intelligibility of what is human may render people and populations not considered as belonging to humankind totally invisible, excluding them from the information the public is presented with, both in life and after death, thereby denying the legitimacy of being mourned and, so, denying them the possibility of public mourning.

The theme of precariousness of life and its unequal social and geographic distribution, as well as the right of all victims to be mourned and the right to public mourning, integrating the societies’ collective memory, will be resumed and developed by Butler in Frames of War, in which, as previously mentioned, she thinks that

[i]n some ways the book follows on from Precarious Life, […], especially its suggestion that specific lives cannot be apprehended as injured or lost if they are not first apprehended as living. If certain lives do not qualify as lives or are, from the start, not conceivable as lives within certain epistemological frames, then these lives are never lived nor lost in the full sense. (Butler 2009, 1)

b) Public mourning as discrimination and battlefield of power

The centre of Butler’s discussion of human thought is the idea of vulnerability. It is from it that Butler will set up a view which can serve a progressive understanding of a communal life which seeks ways of more peaceful coexistence, in the framework within which all human lives may be conceptualised and represented as such, as human. Proceeding, in a way, from the ideas of the chapter titled “Violence, Mourning, Politics,” in Precarious Life (cf. Butler 2004, 19 f.), the introduction of Frames of War expounds a conceptual framework supporting an intervention in the public space: on the one hand, in defence of democratic dissent and, on the other, on behalf of an idea of equality and rights which overcomes the frameworks of liberal individualism. Her line of argument merges two conceptual bundles: (1) apprehension, intelligibility, and recognition, and (2) representational touchstones/frameworks, selectivity/exclusion, and discriminatory power.

What holds these two works of Butler together is the following question: what makes us apprehend a life as a human life?, a question which is, in its turn, connected to another one: what makes a life worth living and worthy of being mourned, that is, that someone’s death is felt as a loss and liable to mourning? Within this framework, Butler will develop what she calls a social ontology. It is an ontology because it is a questioning of the body’s “being,” but it won’t be restricted to a formal description of the supposedly fundamental structures of that “being”; rather, it will look at it in the context of the social and political formations it is a part of, hence its social character. Butler explains the reasons for her view:

It is not possible first to define the ontology of the body and then to refer to the social significations the body assumes. Rather, to be a body is to be exposed to social crafting and form, and that is what makes the ontology of the body a social ontology. In other words, the body is exposed to socially and politically articulated forces as well as to claims of sociality […] that make possible the body’s persisting and flourishing. (Butler 2009, 3)

This social ontology will, therefore, deal with the human inequality of human beings and show that even death does not make them equal, because the normative frameworks which buttress our shared anthropological conceptions think of humanity as composed of beings which, even at a theoretical level, do not share the same degree of humanity. Thus analysed, the phenomenological structure of this bodily life reveals itself as having two specifications: finitude and precariousness. The finitude connected to the mortal aspect of human life. The precariousness connected to its exposure to the conditions of its existence which do not merely depend on an internal impulse to live. These are different instances, for precariousness is what makes human life structurally vulnerable and subject to all kinds of discrimination. Understanding this view requires paying attention to a set of particularities, such as the following[3]:

(1) that in order to become an individual, we must have been cared for, been initially taken in, and be radically dependent upon that initial reception.

(2) that we are physically dependent beings, exposed to something outside ourselves which, besides pointing to human constitutive interdependence, also manifests that each individual’s body, having originally been connected to the circumstances of its origin, has a public dimension, from which one can rebuild one’s body, as a body of one’s own.

(3) that individuation is a process and not a presupposition and, for that reason, not only can it never be taken for granted, but it is achieved in a framework in which one’s bodily self always carries with it ecstatic dimensions stemming from its origin and development circumstances and is, consequently, marked by a constitutive vulnerability.

In other words, human life is inherently precarious because it is defined by an initial helplessness and need which expose it to any kind of devastation, violence being precisely the exploitation of that feature:

[…] violence is, always, an exploitation of that primary tie, that primary way in which we are, as bodies, outside ourselves and for one another. (Butler 2004, 27)

So, to sum up, human life without social significance cannot persist. However, although all human life is precarious, there is a different geopolitical distribution of such precariousness of human life, so much so that, in certain places or situations, precariousness changes from an existential component to a permanent living condition of certain human groups which, for that reason, can be defined as precarious lives, lives which do not have human value and, for that reason, may not feature in the list of acknowledged deaths as victims worth remembering. In Butler’s words:

They cannot be mourned because they are always already lost or, rather, never “were,” and they must be killed, since they seem to live on, stubbornly, in this state of deadness. (Butler 2004, 33)

It is at this level that the importance of framings or touchstones, such as those of war, is constituted, for, besides being, as we have seen, impaired by existing limitations concerning representation and humanisation, they correspond to the mechanisms used by political forces to control the public sphere, deciding what can and cannot be in it, what can and cannot feature in it or, ultimately, which lives are worthy as lives and whose death can be mourned.

In Frames of War, Butler draws attention to the semantic field of being framed, which simultaneously means framing a picture and incriminating someone, whether they are guilty or not. In this sense, the framing of people and reality is never a linear and merely descriptive representation. On the contrary: it is an operation of power which aims at delineating what should appear publicly and on what terms, and doing it according to normative schemes of intelligibility. Butler says:

The “frames” that work to differentiate the lives we can apprehend from those we cannot (or that produce lives across a continuum of life) not only organize visual experience but also generate specific ontologies of the subject. (Butler 2009, 3)

In other words, the framework operations constrain what we perceive as a life and, in this way, the acknowledgement of who is and who is not worth mourning, who is “framed” to be seen in a “dying state.” Butler calls this process “derealisation,” as it transforms human beings into spectres. The human being’s process of derealisation, first of all, begins with the speech which, stemming from a dominant and normalising framework of what is human, goes on to dehumanise whoever does not fit in it. Once that speech is crystallised and the standardisation of what is human and what, for various reasons, does not fit into it is culturally settled, the conditions are set for their absolute exposure to any sort of violence, namely, material destruction. In this way, one can say that human beings’ process of derealisation is achieved in the framework of different levels and forms of violence:

(1) a form of discursive and normative violence grounded in the refusal to recognise humanity in its various expressions.

(2) a second form, of direct material violence, through actual destruction, by natural or military means.

(3) a third one, by means of erasing the cultural memory of the losses resulting from any kind of actual destruction, not allowing them to be publicly mourned and incorporated into the collective memory.

This aspect of public mourning as discrimination and battleground of power is crucial to understanding Butler’s ideas, both at the ethical and the political level, constituting an important hermeneutic guideline to read her study of Sophocles’ Antigone, published in 2000, and titled Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death. While Butler explores the disruption tragedy can cast, whether on the issue of the family as traditionally conceived or on the actual issue of gender and its possible roles, she also, of course, faces the Gordian Knot of the tragic plot: the prohibition of burying Polynices and Antigone’s act of breaking the law, that is, of transgressing norms. For Butler, all lives deserve to be mourned and, within her social ontology, mourning a loss must have a public side to it and cannot be restricted to a personal or family haven. I believe it is in this framework one can interpret Antigone’s claim.

4. The Final Balance

The path taken in this text was grounded in a direct dialogue with some of Judith Butler’s main works, a dialogue aided by the content of interviews she gave and where, as previously mentioned, she rethinks herself and clarifies her views. I sought to represent key themes of Butler’s thought, having developed some more than others. However, I am aware of this reflection’s incompleteness, especially concerning three themes: language, identity, and norms. Each of them makes up a wide field of investigation within Butler’s work and was merely outlined here.

In addition, as the main goal of this text was to make some Butlerian themes explicit, presenting them in a framework of rational analysis in order to rescue them from―all too often purely ideological―public debate, a critical view of Butler’s thought itself was not developed.

Finally, I would like to point out that this spelling out of Butler, which allowed me to have a very interesting perspective on the author, notably on the coherence of her path, even when there is a development in her views (as is, for example, the case of the problem of the universal or the legitimacy of the use of “woman/women” in certain situations) but, especially, to her deep political and social commitment to democracy and equality which never ceases to be the backdrop of her theorising.

[1] The term “compulsory heterosexuality” is taken from the title of Adrienne Rich’s article, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” (1980).

[2] The theme of identity is also central to Butler’s Giving Account of Oneself. In this work, the issue of identity appears in connection to those of recognition and of ethics as possibility of violence. She equally seeks to deconstruct the possibility of a unity and coherence of the so-called self, as well as shun the theory according to which the self is transparent and allows itself to be expressed in a narrative unity.

[3] Here, I resume part of an article published on May 10th, 2020, in the online newspaper Sete Margens, titled “‘Vidas precárias’ ou os Outros Humanos?”

Works Cited

Birkenstein, Cathy. “Reconsiderations: We Got the Wrong Gal: Rethinking the “Bad” Academic Writing of Judith Butler.” College English 72 (3), 2010: pp. 269-283.

Butler, Judith. “Further Reflections on Conversations of Our Time.” Diacritics 27 (1), 1997: pp. 13-15.

Butler, Judith. “Variations on Sex and Gender: Beauvoir, Wittig, and Foucault.” In Feminism as Critique: Essays on the Politics of Gender in Late-Capitalist Society, Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell (eds.). London: Polity Press, 1987: pp. 128-142.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Butler, Judith. “Gender as Performance: An Interview with Judith Butler.” Radical Philosophy 67, 1994: pp. 32-39.

Butler, Judith. Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.

Butler, Judith and Jill Stauffer. “Peace is Resistance to the Terrible Satisfactions of War: An Interview with Judith Butler.” Qui Parle 14 (1), 2003: pp. 99-121.

Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso Books, 2004.

Butler, Judith. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005.

Butler, Judith. Humain, inhumain: Le travail critique des normes – entretiens. Paris: Éditions Amsterdam, 2005.

Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?. London: Verso Books, 2009.

Henriques, Fernanda. “‘Vidas precárias’ ou os Outros. Humanos?” Sete Margens, May 2022. Available at: https://setemargens.com/vidas-precarias-ou-os-outros-humanos/

Henriques, Fernanda. “A modernidade normativa e universalista de Martha Nussbaum.” In Martha Nussbaum. Uma filosofia comprometida com a cidade, Henriques, Fernanda. Lisboa: Documenta, 2022: pp. 81-126.

Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Signs 5 (4), 1980: pp. 631-660.