and welcome to the wall exchange my name
is Janice Sarah and I'm the director of
the Peterborough Institute for Advanced
Studies and a professor of law the Royal
Exchange is a series of downtown
lectures sponsored by the Peter wah
Institute of Advanced Studies at the
University of British Columbia and it's
really dedicated to trying to advance
innovative and fundamental research by
bringing people together in a fulsome
conversation about timely topics that
are highly important to us as members of
society and certainly tonight's
conversation promises I think to
generate a provocative and stimulating
debate I'd like to thank the Georgia
Strait magazine for co-sponsoring this
event and to thank CBC Radio one ideas
program its producer Kathleen flattery
en
I would ask you to please turn your cell
phone ringer Soph I know people might be
tweeting and things but we'd really like
not to have the noise so just briefly to
talk about the program this evening dr.
Butler is going to speak for about 50
minutes Charlie Smith will then serve as
moderator for a 45-minute question and
answer period Charlie Smith is an
accomplished journalist senior editor of
the Georgia Strait and former associate
producer of CBC Radio one it gives me
great pleasure to introduce Judith
Butler dr. Butler is the Maxine Elliot
professor in the department's of
rhetoric and comparative literature and
co-director of the program of critical
theory at the University of California
Berkeley she holds the Hannah Aaron
chair at the European Graduate School in
Switzerland she received her PhD in
philosophy from Yale University and has
been awarded the brudno Prize for
lifetime achievement at that University
Judith Butler has been called simply one
of the most probing challenging and
influential thinkers of our time one of
America's pre-eminent philosophers she
has challenged the financial beliefs
that anchor our cultural norms a
prolific scholar of diverse interests
she has published significant works on
feminist and queer theory literary
theory modern philosophy political
ethics warning and a course war
dr. Butler applies her extraordinary
theoretical knowledge to real-world
situations and her ideas and insights
have both informed and transformed
current thought she currently holds the
Andrew Mellon Award for distinguished
academic achievement in humanities in
her recent article in title dr. Butler
wrote on precarity embodiment in the
politics of public space to quote her
when bodies gather as they do they
express their to express their
indignation and to enact their plural
existence in public space they are also
making broader demands they are
demanding to be recognized and to be
valued they are exercised
a right to appear and to exercise
freedom they are calling for a livable
life
these values are presupposed by
particular demands but they also demand
a more fundamental restructuring of our
socio-economic and political order
please join me in welcoming dr. Butler
thank you
thank you very much
I'm enormous ly pleased to be here in
Vancouver today and I want first of all
to thank the Peter Wall Institute for
this wonderful invitation I'd like also
to acknowledge that we are on the
traditional lands of the Coast Salish
peoples
I'm particularly grateful to Joanna
Forbes and Janice Sara of the Peter wall
Institute the wall family including
Sonja wall who I believe is with us this
evening and the kind people at the vogue
see her at Georgia Strait and of course
the fabulous people of Vancouver thank
you I have said that I would speak about
bodies in the street and that is surely
what I plan to address but I want to
take a moment with you to pause and
think about what such a lecture can be
an attempt to set aside some of the
misconceptions that can easily arise
from such a title it may be thought that
I will say that bodies in the street are
a good thing that we should celebrate
mass demonstrations and that bodies
together on the street form a certain
ideal of community or even a new
politics worthy of praise though
sometimes bodies assembled on the street
are clearly cause for joy even for hope
let us remember that the phrase bodies
on the street can refer equally well to
right-wing demonstrations as military
soldiers assembled to quell
demonstrations and two forms of military
occupation so from the start we have to
be prepared to ask under what conditions
do we find bodies assembled on the
street to be cause for celebration or
what forms of assembly actually work in
the service of realizing greater ideals
of justice and equality minimally we can
say that those demonstrations that seek
to realize justice and equality are
worthy of praise but even then we are
called upon to define our terms since as
we know there are conflicting views
about justice to be sure and there are
sure then there are many disparate ways
of thinking and valuing equality to more
problems immediately present themselves
in certain parts of the world political
asylum alliances do not or cannot take
the form of Street assemblies think
about conditions of intense police
surveillance or military occupation
crowds cannot swell on the streets
without risking imprisonment injury or
death and so alliances are sometimes
made in other forms ones that seek to
minimize Bottle the exposure to violence
at the same time that demands for
justice are made hunger strikes within
prisons as we recently saw in Palestine
our forms of resistance that must take
place in spaces of enforced confinement
they are themselves bodily demands for
public space and public freedom so let
us remember that heightened bodily
exposure is not always a political good
or at least not always the most
successful strategy the Israeli
occupation of Palestine is a case in
point further we have to consider as
well that some forms of political
assembly do not take place on the street
or in the square precisely because
streets are not at the center of that
political action for instance a movement
may be galvanized for the purposes of
establishing adequate infrastructure we
can think about the continuing shanty
towns of South Africa Kenya Pakistan in
sites constructed outside the border of
Europe but also the Barrios of Venezuela
or the baracus of Portugal these are
more often than not groups of people
immigrants squatters and/or Roma who are
struggling precisely for running water
working toilets paved streets for work
and provisions indeed the street is not
the only site that
we can take for granted for certain
kinds of public assemblies because the
street is also a public good for which
people fight an infrastructural
necessity that forms one of the demands
of certain forms of mobilization and I
would add certain forms of mobilization
against precarity and yet I think we can
see that in such situations with or
without streets some basic requirements
of the body are at the center of
political mobilizations
we could certainly make a list of those
bodies require food and shelter
protection from injury and destruction
freedom to move employment healthcare
bodies require other bodies for support
for passion for survival and it matters
what age those bodies are and whether
they are able-bodied since in all forms
of dependency bodies require not just
one other person but social systems of
support that are complexly human and
technical but if I say this then another
set of questions emerge emerges are we
speaking only about human bodies and can
we speak about bodies at all without the
environments of the machines and the
complex systems of social
interdependence e upon which they rely
which form the conditions of their
existence and survival and finally even
if we come to understand and enumerate
the requirements of the body do we
struggle only for those requirements to
be met or do we struggle as well for
bodies to thrive it is one thing to
demand that bodies have what they need
to survive and indeed survival is a
precondition for all the other claims we
might make and yet it seems that we
survive precisely in order to live and
life as much as it requires survival
must be more than survival in order to
be livable so how do we think about a
livable life without positing a single
or uniform ideal for that life
it is not a matter in my view of finding
out what the human really is or what the
human really should be since it has
surely been made plain that humans are
animals too and that they're very bodily
existence depends upon systems of
support that include human and non-human
dimensions so to a certain extent I
follow my colleague Donna Haraway
in asking us to think about the complex
relation a letÃ­s that constitute bodily
life and to suggest that we do not need
any more ideal forms of the human but
rather complex ways of understanding
those sets of relations without which we
do not exist at all
perhaps I've gotten ahead of myself
or perhaps I keep lagging behind the
topic that forms the purpose of my
remarks this evening but I wanted to
pause at the beginning to make sure that
there are no unnecessary
misunderstandings although there are
those who will say that active bodies
assembled on the street constitute a
surging multitude one that in itself
constitutes a radical Democratic event
or action I am only partially in
agreement with that view there are all
sorts of surging multitudes I don't want
to endorse and they would include racist
or fascist congregations and mass
movements I don't think the point of
politics is simply to surge forth
together constituting a new sense of the
people although sometimes for the
purposes of radical Democratic Change
which I do endorse and for which I
struggle it is important to surge forth
in ways that claim and alter the
attention of the world something has to
hold together such a group some demand
some felt sense of injustice some lived
experience of the possibility of change
and that change has to be fueled by a
resistance to
minimally existing and expanding
inequalities ever increasing conditions
of precarity for many populations both
locally and globally resistance to forms
of authoritarian and security and
control that seek to suppress democratic
movements on the one hand there are
bodies that assemble on the street or
online or through other less visible
networks of solidarity especially in
prisons whose political claims are made
through language action gesture and
movement through linking arms the
refusing to move to forming bodily modes
of obstruction to police and state
authorities in making contact in ways
that are difficult to trace and in this
sense we can say that these bodies form
networks of resistance together
remembering that bodies are not just
active agents of resistance but also
fundamentally in need of support so
those movements when they work provide
provisional support in order to
facilitate the broader demand for forms
of support that make life livable so on
the one hand bodies assemble precisely
to show that they are bodies and they
let it be known politically what it
means to persist as a body in this world
what requirements must be met for bodies
to survive and what conditions make of
bodily life which is the only life we
have finally livable so on the one hand
as I'm saying bodies form in networks of
resistance on the other hand as I hope
to make clear bodies form in order to
produce not only structures of support
and in dependency but to events or enact
ideas of community and equality for
which the movement struggles it's not
only or primarily as abstract subjects
bearing rights that we take to the
streets we take to the streets because
we need to walk or move there we need
streets to be structured so that whether
or not we are in a chair we can move
and we can move there without
obstruction harassment administrative
detention fear of injury or death if we
are on the street it is because we are
bodies that require infrastructural
support for our continuing existence and
for living a life that matters so if I
caution against an easy celebration of
active bodies
I'm also cautioning against the idea
that activism requires that we think of
the body only as active as a Gentek if
the body were by definition active then
we would not need to struggle for the
conditions that allow the body it's free
activity in the name of social and
economic justice and though I do not
want to rest easily with an idea of the
body as vulnerable or indeed as passive
I do think that we cannot understand the
forms of interrelation allottee that
constitute our bodily lives if we do not
understand the complex relation between
vulnerability and those forms of
activity that come to constitute our
political resistance indeed even in the
moment of appearing on the street we are
vulnerable this is especially true for
those who appear on the street without
permits who are opposing the police or
the military or other security forces
one is shorn of protection to be sure
but this does not mean that one is
reduced to some sort of bare life on the
contrary to be shorn of protection is a
form of political exposure at once
concretely vulnerable and potentially
defiant how do we understand this
connection between vulnerability and
defiance within activism of course
feminist theorists have for a long time
argued that women suffer social
vulnerability disproportionately and
though there is always a risk in
claiming that women are especially
vulnerable given how many of
groups can certainly make that claim
there is perhaps something important to
be taken from this tradition of
argumentation the claim can sometimes be
taken to mean that women have an
unchanging and defining vulnerability
and that and that kind of argument makes
the case for paternalistic protection if
women are especially vulnerable then
they seek protection it becomes the
responsibility of the state or other
paternal powers to provide that
protection on that model feminist
activism not only petitions paternal
Authority for special dispensations and
protections but affirms that inequality
of power that situates women in a
powerless position and by implication
men in a more powerful one or it invests
the state with the responsibility for
facilitating the achievement of feminist
goals such a view is very different from
one from one that claims for instance
that women are vulnerable and capable of
resistance that vulnerability and
resistance can and do happen at the same
time as we see in certain forms of
feminist self-defense or even in certain
openly political movements of women in
the public sphere where they are not
generally allowed to appear we can think
of the walks or we can think about
those who oppose harassment or injury by
virtue of appearing as they do this
would in my mind also include Muslim
women wearing full veils in France who
are unjustly subject to to arrest and
and and and fines of course there are
good reasons to argue for the
differential vulnerability of women they
do suffer disproportionately from
poverty and literacy two very important
dimensions of any global analysis of
women's condition so when I'm asked for
instance are you a post feminist I say
well as long as women suffer
disproportionately from from poverty and
literacy and our disproportionate
vulnerable to violence I'm still a
feminist so the question that emerges
and forms the focus of my question here
is how to think about the vulnerability
of women in conjunction with feminist
modes of agency and how to think both in
light of global conditions and emerging
possibilities of Global Alliance this
task is made all the more difficult as
state structures and institutions of
social welfare lose their own resources
thus exposing more populations to
homelessness unemployment illiteracy and
inadequate health care so the struggle
in my view is how to make the feminists
claim effectively that such institutions
are crucial to sustaining lives at the
same time that feminists resist modes of
paternalism that reinstate relations of
inequality in some ways vulnerability
has been regarded as a value in feminist
theory in politics
this means neither that women are more
vulnerable than men nor that women value
vulnerability more than men do rather
certain kinds of gender defining
attributes like vulnerability and
invulnerability are distributed
unequally and for purposes of shoring up
certain regimes of power that
disenfranchised women we think about
goods as as distributed unequally under
capitalism we think about opportunities
distributed unequally under capitalism
we think about natural resources
especially water distributed unequally
but we should also surely consider that
one way of managing populations is to
distribute vulnerability unequally in
such a way that vulnerable populations
are established within discourse and
policy more recently we note that social
movements and policy analysts refer to
precarious populations and that
political strategies are accordingly
devised to think
about ameliorating conditions of
precarity as we extend the economic
notion of unequal distribution to
broader social and cultural spheres we
are also confronted especially during
times of war with the uneven grieve
ability of populations that is the idea
that certain lives if lost are more
worthy of memorialization and public
grieving than others populations
targeted for injury and destruction in
war are often considered unbelievable
from the start but so too are
populations whose labor is episodic and
precarious or who are considered
abandoned through systematic forms of
negligence when vulnerability is
distributed unequally then certain
populations are effectively targeted as
endurable with impunity or disposable
without reparation this kind of explicit
or implicit marking can work to justify
the infliction of injury upon them as we
see in times of war or in state violence
against undocumented citizens or we can
see such populations as responsible for
their own position or conversely in need
of protection from the state or other
institutions of civil society it's
important to note that when such
redistributive strategies abound than
other populations usually the ones
orchestrating or affecting the processes
of redistribution posit themselves as
invulnerable if not impermeable and
without any such needs of protection
this approach takes vulnerability and
invulnerability as political effects
unequally distributed effects of a field
of power that acts on and through bodies
if vulnerability has been culturally
coded feminine then how are certain
populations effectively feminized when
designated as vulnerable and others
construed as masculine when laying claim
to impermeable
once again these are not essential
features of men or women but processes
of gender formation effects of power
that have as one of their aims the
production of gender differences along
lines of inequality this has led
psychoanalytic feminists to remark that
the masculine position construed in such
a way is effectively built through a
denial of its own constitutive
vulnerability this denial or disavowal
requires the political institution of
oblivion or forgetfulness
more specifically the forgetting of
one's own vulnerability its projection
and displacement elsewhere the one who
achieves this impermeability
erases or externalizes all trace of a
memory of vulnerability the person who
considers himself by definition to be
invulnerable aspect effectively says I
was never vulnerable and if I was it
wasn't true and I have no memory of that
condition an obviously contradictory
statement it nevertheless shows us
something of the political syntax of
disavowal but it also tells us something
about how histories can be told in order
to support an ideal of the self one
wishes were true
such histories depend on disavowal for
their coherence and this coherence is
also thereby rendered suspect although
psychoanalytic perspectives such as
these are important as a way of gaining
insight into this particular way that
vulnerability is distributed along
gender lines it only goes part of the
way toward the kind of analysis needed
here since if we say that some person or
some group denies vulnerability we are
assuming not only that the vulnerability
was already there but also that it is in
some sense deniable of course one cannot
make an easy analogy between in
vidual and group formations and yet
modes of denial or disavowal can be seen
to traverse them both for instance to
certain defenders of the military
rationale for the destruction of
targeted groups or populations we might
say you act as if you yourself were not
vulnerable to the kind of destruction
you caused or to defenders of certain
forms of neoliberal economics you act as
if you yourself could never belong to a
population whose work and life is
considered disposable precarious who can
suddenly be deprived a base of basic
rights of access to housing or health
care or who lives with anxiety about how
and whether work will ever arrive in
this way then we assume that those who
seek to expose others to such positions
of Honor ability or those who seek
deposit and maintain a position of
invulnerability for themselves deny a
vulnerability by which they are in fact
bound to the ones they seek to subjugate
this last claim it's a claim I'm willing
to make moves in the direction of a
common or shared vulnerability but this
has meant less as an existential thesis
than as a general claim about how bodies
are invariably dependent upon enduring
viable social relations and institutions
for their survival and their well-being
although this claim can be understood as
an existential one it belongs in my view
more properly to the articulation of a
social ontology that I am trying in a
preliminary way to suggest can become
the basis for new forms of coalition one
that we see episodically instanced in
the contemporary politics of the street
even though i see the two levels of this
analysis i want to suggest that these
are not two forms of vulnerability
rather i want to argue that for
bodily vulnerability presupposes a
social world that we are as bodies
vulnerable to others and to institutions
and that this vulnerability constitutes
one aspect of the social modality
through which bodies persist and then
secondly I want to suggest that the
issue of my vulnerability or your
vulnerability implicates us in a broader
political problem of equality and
inequality since vulnerability can be
projected and denied psychological
categories but also exploited and
manipulated social and economic
categories in the production of
inequality this is what is meant by the
unequal distribution of vulnerability
vulnerability constitutes one aspect of
the political modality of the body where
the body is surely human understood as a
human animal vulnerability to one
another that is to say even when
conceived as reciprocal marks a pre
contractual dimension of our social
relations this means as well that at
some level it defies the instrumental
logic that claims I will only protect
your vulnerability if you protect mine
according to which politics becomes a
matter of brokering a deal or making a
calculation or strategically entering
into a contract in fact it constitutes
the conditions of sociality and
politically fit of political life that I
would argue cannot be contractually
stipulated and whose denial and
manipulable 'ti constitutes an effort to
destroy or manage a condition of
potential equality I don't mean to
suggest by this last formulation that
there's a single subject sovereign who
allocates vulnerability differentially
or unequally these modes of allocation
and even disavowal can be built into
institutional rationalities and stress
oh geez and so become forms of power
that operate without this the conceit of
a single deciding subject and so efforts
to challenge and contest these issues
something that happens more often than
not under the name of precarity takes
aim not only at individuals who make
policy but more fundamentally at the
forms of rationality representation and
strategy that inform this condition so
the way this differential allocation of
vulnerability works doesn't always
presuppose a dyadic frame one person or
group does something to another on those
occasions when there are groups who do
not appear at all or who do not count
whose bodies do not matter then the
institutionalized forms of a Faceman at
issue cannot readily be described
through recourse to the category of the
subject so it's not that one subject
does this to another whether the subject
is understood is singular or plural it's
rather that a set of strategies produce
the situation in which a population
cannot appear as a subject at all in the
US for instance the history of Native
peoples tends to fall into this category
and the history in Canada is of course
related yet distinct Native peoples are
described and given discursive life
through national narratives about the
founding of the Americas and yet this
very description these very narratives
more often than not become the means of
effacement as we know since Spain was an
imperial power before the u.s. that the
colonization of the Americas brought
with it acts of slaughter and killing
that are regularly denied on what is
still called in the u.s. Columbus Day
and now of course there is a popular
movement that has achieved rather
widespread success in renaming that day
indigenous peoples day
when we speak about a face meant we are
also speaking about the regulation of
memory and entering into another
formulation of disavowal there was no
slaughter for radical dispossession and
even if there were I do not remember it
or there is no reliable archive or it is
not among the histories that any of us
know or tell but if we were to enter
that history into a comparative study of
genocide or a comparative history of
forcible displacement then would we we
would see how the killing of whole
populations in Congo and Nazi Germany
and Armenia in the early part of the
20th century or the more recent
histories of the disappeared in Chile
Argentina or even the political murders
of Franco's Spain regularly become
matters for historians to dispute will
there be an institutionalized memory or
not and in such cases it's not a matter
of memory as something that is held in
the mind by someone who has experienced
this destruction directly rather it is a
memory that is maintained through
historical record through discursive and
transmittable means through
documentation image and archive to
preserve the memory of the vulnerability
of bodies under such conditions requires
a form of memorialization that must be
repeated and re-established over time
and space and this means that there is
no one memory that memory is not finally
a property of cognition but rather that
memory is socially maintained and
transmitted through certain forms of
documentation and exhibition through
media in this sense we might say that
the historical vulnerability of those
who were exploited whose land was
confiscated or whose lives were lost is
always at risk of disappearing this is
why Walter benjamine thought there that
there that a struggle must be waged for
the history of the oppressed precisely
because under modern conditions that
history runs the risk of
appearing always into oblivion it is
this Benjamin Ian Maxim that was and is
enacted by the madres de Plaza de Mayo
who beginning in 1977 started to meet
every Thursday in that large square in
Buenos Aires the site of Argentina's
government publicly to protest the
disappearance of their children those
suspected of activism against the
dictatorship illegally and persistently
they walked in nonviolent demonstrations
taking back public space and even making
use of their public exposure as mothers
precisely to defy the regime as they
walked they chanted we want our children
we want them to tell us where they are
the moderates said no matter what our
children think they should not be
tortured they should have charges
brought before them we should be able to
see them visit them the movement and
numbers of women whose children had
disappeared grew and in their weekly
demonstrations in those demonstrations
some carried pictures of the missing
children later they wore white scarves
to sell it to symbolize the white dove
of peace which they argued can unite all
women and yet this movement was neither
primarily identitarian nor maternal list
it opposed the brutality of the regime
and even when the regime finally fell in
1983 they continued weekly and even
continue now with other generations
joining them to protest any forgetting
of that brutality and for trials that
will bring all the torturers to justice
suffering a moralization
and political resistance mark that
ongoing public demonstration and yet it
is also a demonstration that claimed
public space when it was forbidden and
claims it still maintaining it as a
political right so I hope I am now able
to make clear at least two points about
Valle
ability that seek neither to idealize
nor to discount its political importance
the first is that vulnerability cannot
be associated exclusively with injure
ability that all responsiveness to what
happens including the responsiveness of
those who document the losses of the
past is a function and effect of
vulnerability of being open to a history
that is not told or being open to what
another body undergoes we can say that
these are matters of empathy but I want
to suggest that part of what a body does
to use the phrase of Delors derived from
his reading of Spinoza is to open onto
the body of another or asset of others
and for that reason bodies are not self
enclosed kinds of entities they are
always in some sense outside themselves
exploring or navigating their
environment extended and even sometimes
dispossessed through the senses if we
can become lost in another or if our
tactile or visual or auditory capacities
comport us beyond ourselves that is
because the body does not stay in its
own place and because dispossession of
this kind characterizes bodily life more
generally it is also why we have to
speak sometimes about the regulation of
the senses as a political matter there
are certain photographs of injury or
destruction of bodies in war that are
often forbidden to be seen precisely
because there is a fear on the part of
the state that regulates such matters
that some body will feel something about
what those other bodies underwent or
that some body in its sensory
comportment outside itself will not
remain enclosed monadic and individual
indeed we might ask what kind of
regulation of the senses what I would
call modes of ecstatic relationality
might have to be regular
related for individualism to be
maintained as an ontology required for
both economics and politics this is also
why certain forms of public
documentation in print and media in
museums and art spaces or even the art
space of the street become important in
the battle against historical oblivion
my last point here is that the body can
and does become a site where the
memories of others are transmitted no
memory is preserved without a mode of
transmission and the body is a point of
transfer in which your history becomes
mine or where your history passes
through mine I do not have to experience
your history history - to transmit
something of your history the
temporality of your life can and does
cross my own and a certain operation of
translation makes that possible one that
does not purport to translate everything
it is also because we are or can be
bound up with one another
which is very different from being
bounded as individual subjects thus the
possibility of transmitting a memory
under political threat the political
threat of oblivion depends upon the
transitivity of that memory its taking
shape and exercising an effect on bodies
that were not there and could not be
there this is not the same as the kind
of testimony given by those who were
there but it does suggest that testimony
depends upon transmission to survive in
time thus we might see the ways that the
memories of others arrive for us or even
in us as a mode of relationality we
might further understand this capacity
to receive and convey what the other
documents about history as a function of
our own corporeal relatedness across
time and space to those whose words we
carry we carry them in ourselves those
history become part those histories
become part of who we are but we also
carry them in spite of ourselves
so we're not just as bodies these
spatial and bounded creatures we can
never transcend that boundary completely
I agree but we are also the histories
that we never lived but which we
nevertheless transmit in the name of the
struggle to preserve the history of the
oppressed and to mobilize that history
in our struggle for justice in the
present when for instance the Israeli
government prohibits prohibits any
mention or memorialization of the Nakba
the forcible dispossession of more than
750,000 Palestinians from their homes in
1948 often in the middle of their meals
or in the middle of their night with no
warning and no justification in order to
produce domiciles for Jewish citizens of
the new state what precisely are they
doing they are surely seeking through
passing a law to regulate memory to
consign an historical and persisting
form of dispossession and suffering to
oblivion and to refuse the historically
demonstrated link between the forcible
dispossession of one people in order to
produce a Liberatore narrative for
founding a nation for another it would
be one thing if the dispossession
happened once but it inaugurated forms
of land confiscation and transfer that
happened continually and as we see in
the expansion and legalization of the
illegal of the illegal settlements
indeed all their settlements are illegal
the redrawing of territorial lines and
the new demands for loyalty oaths on the
part of Palestinians to Israel as a
Jewish nation and even in in the now
very public debate about transferring
those Palestinians who still live within
the boundaries of Israel to the occupied
territories of course there are many
different histories to be told here and
I cannot do justice to that to any of
them this evening but what I want to
suggest in a more modest way is that in
all of these struggles the body is
central as it is central
to the fight for the history of the
oppressed the fight against oblivion
what has happened to bodies is being
transmitted through various media and
those who openly struggle against the
faced past are themselves in a bodily
position of vulnerability being
impressed upon by a history and in this
sense being outside themselves even in
spite of themselves as they carry what
belongs to others no history can be
inscribed on a body or conveyed through
it without vulnerability an inscription
makes the body bend cave suffer and
respond even take new form in light of
that pressure the body then is not is to
be thought not as substance and
enclosure but perhaps as site of injury
ability receptivity passionate exposure
even ethical transport so I propose to
return now to the question of
vulnerability and to understand what
relation it might have to contemporary
coalition's and how the body figures
prominently in any idea of coalition we
may imagine for the present although we
often speak this way I do not think we
can consider vulnerability as a purely
contingent circumstance of course it's
always possible to say oh I was
vulnerable then but I'm not vulnerable
anymore sometimes that's even true and
we say that in relation to specific
situations in which we felt ourselves to
be at risk or enjoyable they can be
economic or financial situations when we
feel that we might be exploited lose
work find ourselves in conditions of
poverty or they can be emotional
situations certainly the political ones
are emotional or the economic ones are
deeply emotional to in which we are very
much vulnerable to rejection but later
find that we have lost that
vulnerability it makes sense that we
speak this way vulnerability seems
episodic it also makes sense that we
treat with caution the seductions of
ordinary just
course at such moments since though we
may feel that we are vulnerable in some
instances and not in others the
condition of our vulnerability is itself
not precisely changeable at most there
are times when our vulnerability becomes
apparent to us but that is not the same
as saying that we are only vulnerable at
those times we can be vulnerable without
knowing it and indeed that not knowing
it is part of vulnerability itself
vulnerability cannot be understood
restrictive ly as an effect restricted
to a contingent situation nor can it be
understood merely as a subjective
disposition as a condition that is I
would suggest coextensive with human
life understood a social life understood
as creaturely life and is bound to the
problem of precarity vulnerability is
the name for a certain way of opening
onto the world in this sense it's not
you know not only designates a relation
to the world but it asserts our very
existence as a relational one to say
that any of us are vulnerable beings is
to establish our radical dependency not
only on others but on a sustaining
sustainable world this has implications
for understanding who we are as
passionate beings as sexual as bound up
with others of necessity but also as
beings who seek to persist and whose
persistence can and is can be and is
imperiled when social economic and
political structures exploit or fail us
drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt
adriana cavarero the italian philosopher
tells us that one of the key moments of
politics what we might even identify as
its constitutive ethical moment is the
emergence of the question who are you we
asked this question implicitly or
explicitly when we seek to bring a
population into discourse or establish a
language of representation it's not
necessarily a single person who poses
this question an institution a dis
course an economic system that asks who
are you
seeks to establish a space of appearance
for the other to ask who are you is to
avow that one does not know in advance
who you are that one is open to what
comes from the other and that one
expects that no pre-established category
will be able to answer in advance the
question that is posed indeed I would
suggest in a certain of a nasty way the
question who are you has to remain an
infinitely open question unanswerable in
order to remain an ethical one it will
be important to keep active the
relationship between the various
meanings of the precarious if we are to
think how vulnerable 'ti relates to
coalition during this time
precariousness is a function of our
social vulnerability the condition of
our exposure that always assumes some
political form precarity is
differentially distributed and so one
important dimension of the unequal
distribution of conditions required for
a livable life precariat ization is also
an ongoing process as Isabel Isabel
Laurie has argued precariat ization
allows us to think about what Lauryn
Berlin has called the slow death
undergone by targeted or neglected
populations under conditions of
neoliberalism and it is surely a form of
power without a subject prokaryote
ization which is to say that there is no
one Center which propels its direction
and force of destruction if we only
considered the term precariat ization
I'm not sure we could account for the
structure of effect that is named by
precarity and if we decided to rally
under the name of the precarious as a
new identity or community formation we
might then be we might then draw
attention away from the globally
specific ways that precarity has lived
as a social political condition cloaking
some way that form of power
works so maybe precarious is what we
feel or would rather not feel and then
its analysis has to be linked to the
impetus to become impermeable as so
often happens within the discourse of
military nationalism and the rhetoric of
security and self-defense and yet it
will be important to call precarious
those bonds that support forms of life
those that should be structured by the
condition of mutual need and exposure
that bring us to forms of political
organization that sustain living beings
on terms of equality or at least dispose
them toward equality as an ideal worth
struggling for what seems finally more
important than any form of existential
individualism is the idea that a bond is
flawed or afraid or that it is lost or
irrecoverable and we see this I think
very prominently when for instance the
the Tea Party politicians in the United
States overtly rejoice over rejoice
about the idea that individuals who have
failed to take responsibility for their
own health care may well face death and
disease as a result apparently this was
this was mentioned at a at a tea party
congregation people who don't take
responsibility for their own health care
will face death and disease as a
consequence of their lack of
responsibility and the group rose up and
clapped joyously joyous clapping
rejoicing rejoicing we have to think
about that particular effect may be the
effect studies people will help us
okay at such moments I want to say I
want to say at such moments a social
bond has been cut or destroyed in ways
that deny a shared precariousness the
very particular ethos and politics that
ideally should follow from from that is
one that underscores local and global
interdependence II and actively resists
the radical radically unequal
distribution of precarity and grieve
ability okay so it's I mean of course
yes we need to think about sadistic
forms of joy at the thought of other
people lacking healthcare and dying as a
consequence but but what we really need
to see I think in that moment is that
the precarity of the one who takes that
sadistic joy is also denied as well as
the bond the the bond of interdependency
with the one whose death is being
joyously imagined such a struggle would
be at once opposed to forms of security
rien logics as well as the old and new
paternalism that are now linked to the
promise of security but this resistance
can happen only if modes of coalition
grounded in interdependency the in the
stem struggles against precarity and for
equality exercised power in ways that
break with the lure of paternalism this
cannot mean refusing all forms of state
and institutional support that form of
anti institutional politics
unfortunately allows with the
destruction of social democratic goods
and the idea of economic rights and
these forms of destruction the
destruction of those goods and rights
are precisely those that are being of
course undertaken and produced by
neoliberalism and secured terian
politics alike so yes one must struggle
for social democracy but in the context
I would suggest of a radical Democratic
politics and they are
friend we cannot presume that
interdependency is some beautiful state
of coexistence it's not the same as
social harmony
inevitably we rail against those on whom
we are most dependent and there is no
way to dissociate dependency from
aggression once and for all these may
not even be happy alliances or or
particularly joyous coalition's but they
are constituted from the insight I would
say the insight from the from the from
look from the condition of a pre
contractual set of relations that
pertain to social embodiment we require
one another to live this means that our
survival and well-being both are
invariably negotiated in the social
economic and political spheres indeed
our negotiations are the very sites
where those spheres converge and lose
their distinctness we can make this idea
popular by seeking recourse to broad
existential and humanist claims well
everyone is precarious but once we ask
about what this means or what forms
precarity assumes we see that we have
from the start left the existential
domain to consider our social existence
as bodily beings who depend upon one
another for shelter and sustenance and
who therefore are at risk of
statelessness homelessness and
destitution under unjust and unequal
political conditions in other words
precarious defines our existence as
political beings our survival depends
upon political arrangements and politics
especially as it becomes bio politics
and the managing of populations is
concerned with the question of whose
lives will be preserved protected and
valued and eventually mourned or
regarded in advance as potentially more
noble and whose lives will be considered
disposable and unbreathing all in this
way our precarity is to a large extent
dependent upon the organization of
economic and
social relations the presence or absence
of sustaining infrastructures and social
and political institutions modes of
struggling for them that produce and
sustain alliances so what I'm trying to
suggest is that precarity is indecisive
all form that dimension of politics that
addresses the organization and
protection of bodily needs precarity
exposes our sociality the fragile and
necessary dimensions of our
interdependency and this has
implications for how we join together in
struggle when we do no one escapes the
precarious dimension of social life that
is we might say our common
non-foundation indeed nothing founds us
outside of a struggle to establish those
bonds by which we are sustained so when
people take to the streets together they
form something of a body politic and
even if that body politic does not speak
in a single voice even when it does not
speak at all or make any claims it still
forms asserting its presence as a plural
and obdurate bodily life what is the
political significance of assembling as
bodies stopping traffic or claiming
attention or moving not as stray and
separate individuals but as a social
movement of some kind it does not have
to be organized from on high the
Leninist presumption and it does not
need to have a single message the logo
centric can seat 4 assembled bodies to
exercise a certain performative force in
the public domain the we are here that
translates that collective bodily
presence might be read as we are still
here meaning we have not yet been
disposed of such bodies are precarious
and persisting which is why I think we
have always to link precarity with forms
of social and political agency where
that is possible when the bodies of
those deemed disposable assemble into
public view they are saying
we have not slipped quietly into the
shadows of public life we have not
become the glaring absence that
structures your ordinary life in a way
the collective assembling of bodies is
an exercise of the popular will and a
way of asserting in corporeal form one
of the most basic presuppositions of
democracy namely that political and
public institutions are bound to
represent the people and to do so in
ways that establish equality as a
presupposition of social and political
existence so when those institutions
become structured in ways in such a way
that certain populations become
disposable or are interpolated as
disposable deprived of a future of
Education of stable and fulfilling work
of even knowing what space one can call
a home then surely the Assemblies
fulfill another function not only the
expression of justifiable rage but the
assertion in their very social
organization of principles of equality
in the midst of precarity I am aware
that the fate of the Egyptian revolution
remains uncertain and sometimes
extremely dispiriting especially as the
transitional military government refuses
to honor its deadlines for ceding to
civil rule even in the midst of our
elections whether the elections we're
seeing right now
indeed it continues to unleash its
police force on demonstrators and retain
power over who may or may not run for
election who may or may not be accepted
as elected I want to underscore
nevertheless two aspects of the
revolutionary demonstrations in Tahrir
Square that emerged so clearly in the
winter before last and which still
despite all odds continue to this day
the first has to do with the way a
certain sociability was established
within the square a division of labor
that broke down gender difference that
involved rotating who would speak and
who would clean the areas where people
slept in eight developing a work
schedule for everyone to maintain the
environment and to clean the toy
in short what some would call horizontal
relations among the protesters formed
methodically and even easily introducing
relations of equality into the very form
of resistance those included an equal
division of labor between the sexes and
became part of the very resistance to
the Mubarak regime and its entrenched
hierarchies including the extraordinary
differentials of wealth between the
military and corporate sponsors of the
regime and the working people and those
subject to the violence of police forces
and to the belt Ageha hired thugs that
do the government's dirty work
so the social form of the resistance
began to incorporate principles of
equality that governed not only how and
when people spoken acted for the media
and against the regime but how people
cared for their very their various
quarters within the square the beds on
pavement the makeshift medical stations
and bathrooms the places where people
ate the places where people were exposed
to violence from the outside these
actions were all political by breaking
down conventional distinctions between
public and private in order to establish
relations of interdependency that were
supportive and sustaining and in this
sense they were incorporating into the
very social form of resistance the
principles for which they were
struggling on the street and for the
future the second the second dimension
of of of that assembly I want to call
attention to is the careful relation to
violence when up against violent attack
or extreme threats many people chanted
the words sumia which comes from the
root verb Salima which means to be safe
and sound unharmed unimpaired intact
safe and secure but also interestingly
to the unobjectionable blameless
faultless and yet also to be certain
established clearly proven the term
comes from the noun seen si l M which
means peace but also interchangeably and
significantly the religion of Islam one
variant
of the term is of us soon which is
Arabic for pacifism most usually the
chanting of Samia comes across as a
gentle exhortation peaceful peaceful
although the Revolution was for the most
part nonviolent it was not necessarily
led by a principled opposition to
violence rather the collective chant was
a way of encouraging people to resist
the mimetic pull of military aggression
and the aggression of the gangs by
keeping in mind the larger goal radical
Democratic change to be swept into a
violent exchange of the moment was to
lose the patience needed to realize the
revolution what interests me here is the
chant the way in which language worked
not to incite an action but rather to
restrain one the chant structures effect
in the direction of community and
non-violence calling for an enacting a
nonviolent mode of politics of course an
ambiguity emerges precisely there since
resisting a violent attack does take
some force one has to sometimes forcibly
resist a forcible attack and this means
that non-violence is not a form of
passivity but rather the thoughtful
cultivation of forceful resistance that
refuses to replicate the aggression it
opposes and where restraint itself must
be understood as the nonviolent
cultivation of force although some may
wager that under conditions of new media
or social networking the exercise of
rights now takes place quite at the
expense of bodies on the street that
Twitter and other virtual technologies
have led to a disembodiment of the
public sphere I disagree and as I've
argued elsewhere I want to suggest that
the media requires those bodies on the
street to have an event even as the
street requires the media to exist in a
global arena but under conditions when
those with cameras or internet compress
and or tortured or deported then the use
of the technology effectively implicates
the body
not only must someone's hand tap and
send but someone's body is on the line
if that tapping and sending gets traced
in other words localization is hardly
overcome through the use of a media that
potentially transmits globally and if
this conjuncture of street and media
constitutes a very contemporary version
of the public sphere then bodies on the
line have to be thought as both there
and here now and then transported in
stationary with very different political
consequences following from these two
ways of being positioned in space and
time finally then bodies on the street
are precarious they're exposed to police
force and sometimes endure physical
suffering as a result the risk is there
and it seems to be increasing now that
police regularly clear out the
encampments of the Occupy movement
through forcible means or or clamp down
on free assembly supported by laws and
policies that claim that free assemblies
are security risks one way to obliterate
a fundamental right those bodies are
also obdurate and persisting they insist
on their continuing and collective their
nasur hereness and in these recent forms
organizing themselves without hierarchy
and so exemplifying the principles of
equal treatment they are demanding of
public institutions in this way in this
way those bodies enact the message
performative Lee even when they sleep in
public or when they organize collective
methods for cleaning the grounds they
occupy as happened both interior and
Zuccotti Park if there's a we who
assembles there at that precise space
and time there's also a we that forms
across the media that calls for the
demonstrations and broadcasts its event
so some set of global connections are
being articulated a different sense of
the global from the globalized market
and some set of values are being enacted
in the form of a collective resistance
a defense of our collective precarity
and persistence in the making of
equality and the many voiced and
unvoiced ways of refusing to become
disposable when this happens we act from
a sense of precarity we also act against
a sense of precarity reacting coalition
and often in unchosen proximities to
people we've never chosen to be close to
indeed in a situation where a pre
contractual interdependency is at work
sometimes this is experienced as a
relief and an exhilaration sometimes it
is uneasy and conflicted but it is in my
view always necessary and sometimes
promising and alive thank you
thank you
Thank You dr. Butler my name is Charlie
Smith I'm editor if the charges straight
and we have two microphones one on the
left and one on the right so if people
want to ask questions they can go to the
microphone and I'll just start with one
question to get things going
dr. Butler why is it that so many people
in North America seem to have difficulty
acknowledging their own precarity agree
with well it's not very much fun is it I
can follow up with another question
um no I'm happy to answer your question
although I'm not sure I could answer in
a satisfying way but but but but but
certainly I mean I do think that there
are forms of amassing wealth and
economic and political security and
protection that are very much about
producing the possibility of lives that
will not be touched by other lives or
lives that will be impermeable to
incursion right we can think about gated
communities but we can also think more
generally about forms of of militarism
or nationalism that are stoked by the
ideal of of never being attacked are
never never having anyone come into
one's territory who might do harm and I
think one can find it as well in
virulent anti-immigration discourses and
and I'm not
sure that most people would understand
themselves as dealing with a situation
of precarity at such moments but in fact
I think that there's there's a specter
of being destroyed or being destabilized
or of being penetrated or aggressed upon
that does suggest a level of enormous
political anxiety that that that focuses
on on the body and and and the capacity
of the body to be suddenly aggressed
upon or to be entered to be - - to have
its its solidity and control threatened
at a very fundamental level and and and
I and I do think that it is a political
strategy - to effectively externalize
and deposit that felt sense of precarity
in in other populations and to try to
keep other populations precarious
especially those who are who are in some
sense feared or loathed and of course
people in dominant in dominant positions
who do that know that they are also all
the more subject to aggression from
those they subjugate so what they
actually end up doing is increasing
their own felt sense of precarity
through a mode of subjugation that is
unlivable for those who who who live it
so you know I I think we could we could
answer the question at both the
psychological and a political level but
my my my wager is that the psychological
and the political work in tandem it's
not always easy to show how that works
I'm not interested in the kind of group
psychology exactly but I
but I am interested in seeing how that
can work out I don't I don't know if I
answered your question okay so what I
would say you did I mean I'll try again
yeah happy to know well there is the
psychological aspects - yes that failure
to acknowledge but what I'll do is we
have people who want to ask questions
and where what I would ask each person
who asks a question if you could keep it
relatively concise so that we can get
more questions in the amount of time
available so we'll start on the right
one of the chants I heard at the Occupy
movements in Vancouver the people United
will never be defeated and if there's
one thing I learned it's that in that
instance the people were defeated and
maybe you might disagree with me but we
need only refer to our mutual friend
Hegel and the battle between the law of
the heart in the way of the world to
graph onto this see what I think can be
characterized is the fact that we we
have the law of the heart the occupiers
keeping in reserve the virtue the fact
that the people will never be defeated
well the way of the world will always
triumph over that because of the nature
of it being a sham fight to this extent
my question is is this kegeling
characterization correct and if so to
what extent will these occupiers and
these carceral archipelagos need to
traverse the fantasy that non-violence
can actually edify radical Democratic
Change okay you know I my guess is that
others heard you better you were
standing just a little bit too far away
from that microphone for me but I
I and I understand it but I got it that
it was very articulate but I'm just but
I'm sorry
what I understand you to have said is
that the the the the so-called occupiers
were falsely believed that if they
remain united they would not be defeated
but indeed they were defeated which
means that there's something wrong with
the tactic but what I don't understand
is what you're you're claiming is wrong
with the tactic what I'm claiming is
that the the movement is subject to a
fantasy that nonviolent change can
actually edify radical Democratic Change
is that correct and if it is not correct
where am I going wrong well look first
of all as far as I'm concerned the
Occupy movement is not over and but the
Occupy movement is has to work through
certain kinds of in in in in in an
episodic way and the encampment episode
has been an extremely important one the
end of encampments is not the end of the
Occupy movement and the real question is
what are the new strategies and and and
what are the new ways of occupying
buildings temporarily or producing
demonstrations or continuing to get the
word out in in different ways so so you
know I think we have certain ideas of
what success is Oh Occupy movement
failed because police power came in and
wiped them out and they were defenseless
against police power now you could say
oh they needed to take arms or what we
need is a armed revolutionary struggle
or or something along those lines
but I think I think in fact what we are
seeing is the common the contours of a
new form of the conflict to remember
what what really began as a movement
that was trying to draw attention to
differential levels of wealth and in
particular showing that the rich are
getting richer and fewer and the poor
are getting larger and poorer suddenly
found itself up against police power
right and that the analysis of police
power and the resistance to police power
was not at the forefront of the movement
and suddenly became at the forefront of
the movement when public space was taken
back by the state time and again through
forcible police action so no and and it
seems to me that in in many of the
student movements as well which are to a
certain degree linked to occupy and to a
certain degree independent we're also
seeing police action against free
assembly and I gather the new montreal
law has actually now effectively
criminalized protests as as a kind of
security threat which is to me extremely
frightening so the real question for me
is okay what's what now we're not just
dealing with differentials in wealth
we're also dealing with a state a set of
economic and state powers that are
invested in the destruction of dissent
and legal assembly through using the
violent arm of the state which is the
police and and that point and those
police forces are increasingly in
several cities as we know
being trained by military forces so we
actually have the militarization of the
police and the criminalization of
protests happening at the same time
which means that the analysis of power
and the ways of resisting that power are
going to have to adapt but we're in the
middle of a process we're in the middle
of a process and and and it's also a
problem because traditional modes of
civil disobedience and nonviolent
resistance are no longer being
recognized as legitimate so for instance
on the Berkeley campus when people and
you know they actually you know gave the
police their wrists thinking okay you
know a handcuffed me take me away this
is what's done this is what happened in
the civil rights movement they were
thrown to the ground and beaten which
which is an historically really
important moment given free speech at
Berkeley because what it what it
effectively said it says is that
traditions governing non nonviolent
civil disobedience are no longer being
honored it seems to me that the only way
to overcome that kind of militarization
and criminalization of protest is
through making protest more amenable
making it larger making it global making
it overwhelming so that the the actual
legitimacy of the state is called into
question I think there I I think we
would have to have a longer discussion
about violence and non-violence and what
I was trying to suggest briefly today is
that non-violence is not just passivity
it is the cultivation of the force of
resistance and and in that sense it in
it involves bodily action pressure and
and presence and it is not simply taking
it but I we need more time for that
okay I don't know if this is a big
question or if it's actually a pretty
straightforward question but just
thinking about leftist politics it is
related to the last question on occupy
um any kind of leftist or progressive
politics whatever we want to call it um
it seems to obviously be in when it's up
against right-wing politics it's
necessarily fragmented because of our
recognition of difference within a group
and then I've often thought of your
notion of strategic essentialism in
terms of a way of bringing a group
together and then something like occupy
I just kind of want to ask you with some
with kind of a phrase we are the 99% as
a kind of example of what I understand
to be strategic essentialism I would ask
if do you think that that has proven a
kind of politically efficacious form of
the use of strategic essentialism or do
we lose something in something like we
are the 99% well I don't think we are
the 99% is strategic essentialism
because it doesn't say that our being
99% is essential to who we are or is the
only basis on which we mobilize together
I think in fact it seeks to be a kind of
umbrella term that is supposed to
actually include all kinds of
differences without asserting economic
oppression as more primary than all
other forms of oppression so I saw it as
trying to circumvent the more classical
leftist effort to to make economic
oppression primary and then to have
secondary oppressions but of course as
we know within many of the encampments
and within the movements there are
struggles about race about sexuality
about gender and and and I guess I want
to say that those struggles are
absolutely necessary
and that we shouldn't lament them I
don't think we should we should think oh
it's too bad we're still having those
struggles and we're not yet unified I
think if we're having those struggles
that is what Unity means Unity means
struggling right and so you know I I
tend to kind of resist the the language
of fragmentation even though sometimes
it's exactly right right that groups do
leave they can't be in coalition
together it's impossible and yet
it seems to me that hanging in hanging
in in coalition's where it's not easy
and when where those issues continue to
remain open and where there's there's
open conflict and struggle that's that's
what we can that's what is meant by
unity unity is not uniformity unity is
agreeing to stay in and struggle or
finding that the struggle is worth it
not just because different groups need
to recognize each other or understand
each other better
but because the stakes are really really
high because what is happening
economically and politically is is
absolutely unacceptable and one has to
keep that in mind at the same time that
one is engaged in that open-ended
struggle I first of all I never I never
felt so vulnerable that asking a
question you're you're safe with me
just the vulnerability asset choice and
being a student here as an immigrant and
a queer migrant the the first thing that
I was told when I attended a student
international student meeting was never
to attend a protest or any sort of
social or political event and waste of
like some the tactics of fear applied to
by the state but also by the
institutions to depolarize migrants as a
way of preventing any action to happen
that's one of and but also the
vulnerability as a choice so every time
I go to a protest
which I do all the time there's a choice
of me of being a greater choice of
actually being deported if anything goes
wrong so there's that that there's
always that fear but also vulnerability
as a as a place of birth of any
resistance so how do you play that
performative side of performativity
within like the tactics that are applied
by the state and by the institutions to
deploy to ties migrants mm-hmm good
question
seems like you could probably tell me
more about that question that I could
tell you but I do I do think that the
that the the effort to depoliticize
migrants as you've described it is also
a certain kind of training in good
citizenship
right and we have to ask what version of
citizenship is being inculcated at such
moments and whether whether you're also
being asked to accept implicit forms of
censorship as the precondition of your
membership and and that's that's really
tricky you don't even need a law to say
you you know you may I mean of course
there's the problem of the law but there
doesn't even have to be an explicit
censoring but I think in fact one I had
these conversations with with students
on the on the East Coast in the US who
did a number of public public actions
they were undocumented and they did
public actions that did put them in a
precarious position but also drew
attention to the precarious position
they were in and which was for them not
acceptable right and and so we have to
think about both dimensions of that and
what was interesting is that certain
students could do it and those were the
ones who for whatever reason felt that
their chances of deportation were
or that they were possibly protected by
the institutions they were part of or
who are willing to take the risk for
whatever reason and others felt they
could not do that but wanted to support
the effort in ways that didn't
necessarily put their own bodies on the
line and let's remember that every
public demonstration requires its non
public support system right there's a
non public support system and there's a
way to be supportive and to be you know
to be to be assisting and to be active
in in in in ways that that that feel
manageable depending on what the level
of political risk really is for the
individual or for the four other groups
so so I don't think there's one I don't
think there's simply one form of of
being mobilized on that issue
and one has to and and who no one can
prescribe no one can prescribe to you
what risk to take but if someone tells
you never to take a risk then you know
you have to wonder what norm is being
inculcated at such a moment
allowing permanent like permanent
residents can no like can be actually
deported if they're like even citizens
that went through process of refugee or
permanent resident before yes could be
deported like there's no it the status
of permanent resident or our citizen is
not even like it goes farther than just
being a I am aware I'm we we now have
retractable forms of citizenship yes
these are the retractable conditions of
citizenship and they are expanding and
and and and that is that is that that is
hugely worrisome and and and very very
difficult I understand that hi dr.
Butler I don't have a specific question
but I was wondering if you could speak
to what you said earlier in your lecture
about the link between feminization of
different nations and I'm totally
drawing a blank here
vulnerability of those nations so just
the link between the two I was wondering
if you could speak briefly about those
because I was curious about that um well
I suppose um you know let me just you
know clarify that I think you know in a
way I'm I'm I'm saying two things at the
same time and I want to be able to say
them both and one is that vulnerability
is something like a shared condition
that cannot be denied and I also want to
say that vulnerability is a condition
that is denied all the time and and and
I I do i I don't think we can deny what
is not in some sense there the link that
I was making in my own mind was one of
physical safety I don't know what
physical safety yeah because physical
safety is a concern for many women I
mean it's a concern for everybody
but I was wondering if that was
something that you were thinking of when
you made this whoa what I did have in
mind
is that certain forms of torture that
that took place under the Bush
administration involved involved efforts
to feminize the the bodies of of Arab
men in in out sourced prisons and and I
think that it's a very complex issue the
way in which torture work to to
emasculate at the same time that it
identified or consolidated the idea that
that those who are tortured are
homosexual or women like you become a
homosexual you become a woman
by being tortured and that the effect of
the torture was to do that so it it was
operating within that idea that the
worst possible social position or the
position of intense vulnerability would
be that of a homosexual or of a woman so
that kind of subservience well that kind
of inability to protect yourself against
violent assault okay thank you we've got
three more okay I just thank you I just
wanted to know what your thoughts were
on the connection between physical
violence in protests whether on the side
of protestors or the authorities and its
connection with the vulnerability so for
example could it displace the
vulnerability of those protesters or
does it rather reveal the vulnerability
of both the protesters and
otherwise impermeable authorities at the
same time or just what your thoughts
were generally between the connection on
physical violence in protests and the
vulnerability which you spoke of okay
um
in general I think I am
I support non non violent forms of
resistance at the same time I want to
say that one of the most important
things for me as a and indeed for many
people in my generation was learning
forms of of self-defense and that I
wouldn't be okay on the street if I
didn't know that I had skills of
self-defense when we think about
self-defense and we think about it on
the street we think about it in
demonstrations we think about it what
when a when a policeman is coming at you
with a baton or when you were being
sprayed of course there's a right to
self-defense and the question is what
form does that take and what I'm most
interested in our collective forms of
support at moments of police attack so
that people they link together to make
it difficult for the attack to take
place or they support one another or
they actually catch each other or or
interpose themselves in front of one
another there are there ways of thinking
about self-defense not just as an
individual practice which many of us had
to learn but also as a kind of
collective practice and it is it's a
delicate and difficult practice and I
don't think anyone can completely
prescribe it in advance although there
are a lot of people who have worked on
this for a very very long time and there
are other social movements too to
reference at this moment especially in
South Africa so I think using the body
as a force to stop a blow or to
to deflect a blow is extremely important
at what point does that become a blow
what's what's the defense and what's the
what's that what's the the act I want to
say that there's force on all sides of
that and that there's no way especially
in the confrontation with the police
that we can eradicate the field of force
we can only navigate the field of force
as ethically and and carefully and as we
can and sometimes our ex of self-defense
will be called provocation they will be
renamed after the fact and videos
brought like oh that's a provocation
well it seemed to me that person is
being beaten or that's a price don't you
see the left you know but there's no way
to control it especially in the visual
you know documentation there's no way to
fully control how it will signify and
that is of course a huge problem and I'm
also aware that politically self-defense
works in some ways that I don't agree
with right so that highly militarized
nations can say they had to assault a
population out of self-defense or they
use self-defense to legitimate every act
of aggression so self-defense can become
an alibi for aggression so that I don't
I don't have a good answer for you all I
want to say is that it's a very vigilant
practice to to insist on self-defense
and to make sure or to try as hard as
possible for it not to be an alibi for
for the kind of violence we are opposing
right because the whole point is not to
replicate the violence one opposes just
but it but to stop the violence right
that that's it
I was just wondering if you could
explain when you say that the Tea Party
for example has vicious appreciation for
the vulnerability of the other of those
who are not going to be able to afford
health care and such and you say that
that actually exemplifies their own
vulnerability and the fragility of their
own states I'm wondering why then you
included right-wing protests in your
caveat as to why not all bodies on the
street are positive and you included
them with violence and with military and
with three percussive bodies on the
street um just just tell me that again
what well the question is why why do you
include right-wing protests and
right-wing demonstrations in your caveat
about why not all bodies on the street
are a positive thing why is it it seemed
to me that you are saying that left-wing
protests that Occupy movements and such
are a good thing to have and yet it
seems that you think things I see
protest like tea party and things aren't
positive things to have I see what
you're saying okay I'm sorry
that's okay it's a good question because
it helps me clarify something I I am I
am in favor of the freedom of assembly I
am very anxious right now that the
freedom of assembly is being taken away
in many parts of the globe and that
security Rhian logics and and and and
state and economic interests are very
interested in quelling freedom of
assembly so I am in favor of freedom of
assembly which means that I want the
right to be enjoyed by people who are on
the left and the right and I probably
even defend the right of some pretty
horrible people to collect and you know
on the street okay but the fact that I
defend the right of right-wing people to
collect on the street of including the
Tea Party as I absolutely do because you
know there's a big liberal core to my
left ism
well you know I mean we are what we are
right we come out of I would come out of
complex histories but anyway there is
one I do defend their right and I would
right against it and I would a pour it
and I would hate it but I wouldn't take
the right away right and and that's
that's the line that's the line so and
when I started the talk I said look I'm
not rejoicing I'm not gonna rejoice
about the Tea Party on the street
I'm not going to oppose it legally and
I'm going to oppose any legal effort to
restrain them from from from going on
the street but I'm not gonna I'm not
gonna I'm not gonna celebrate that's all
okay basically out of time but you've
been very patient so if we can make this
really quick that would be terrific okay
well I I was interested in you're
talking about vulnerability as a pre
contractual thing that we share okay ah
there okay sorry so you you were
saying that vulnerability is a pre
contractual shared State I'm interested
in thinking about the language of
contracts in the context of what you're
saying cuz it seems in a certain way
contracts our way of denying
vulnerability in that they imply we have
control like we get to say this is what
we're entering into and then we're
taking responsibility of what happens to
us
it caught allows for a just world
hypothesis and it this sort of
contractual 'ti which easily ends up in
shoring up neoliberalism often invades
language of consent whatever sort of
consent sexual consents medical consent
and I think that they're sorry
obviously there's something really
important ethically about consensual 'ti
and about consensus and I'm wondering if
you have any insight into how we should
talk about that that gets away from this
problematic element of contractual 'ti
yeah thank you
I've been I've been working on that
issue in the last weeks I gave us
seminar on sexual consent actually in
France where we we talked a bit about
the Dominique strauss-kahn issue and and
and and how consent was projected and
what consent means so there's lots to be
said but but let me let me just say two
things that I think are relevant for us
this evening the first is how do we
think about global obligations of
obligations that we we have to one
another as inhabitants of the of the
globe when when we're not necessarily
part of the same nation state or we're
not necessarily part of the same
community or we've never entered into an
explicit contract with one another and
it seems to me that it cannot be the
case that were only ethically obligated
to those with whom we are already
contracted ie those who belong to the
same nation state that we have agreed to
join or that or that we've been born
into and and and legalized within we we
have to think about ethical obligations
and political obligations in ways that
exceed the terms of contract it's also
true that most forms of contract not all
tend to individualize those who enter
into them or certain forms of social
contract tend to produce ideas of a
nation-state which are exclusionary so
that Purdue
- two problems well what are my extra
national obligations and Who am I
when I am NOT just an individual am I
not related to others in ways for which
I need a different kind of political
vocabulary so so that seems terribly
important but you know it's always
possible to say well I mean if you think
about what happens in sexually
progressive circles where people they
make arrangements to have this or that
kind of sexual relationship and they
come enter into a contract and everyone
agrees and then you know something
happens and someone finds that they're
horribly vulnerable in a way that they
had no idea they they didn't expect it
all and they can't be in that contract
and whatever made them think they could
be in that contract and I mean it's
something we all know right and and it's
a kind of and I also think it's a kind
of leftist conceit but oh well we can
find the ideal form and then we we
consent to the ideal form and then we
live the ideal form because we think
it's right and then we find that it's
radically unlivable so so what would it
mean what would it mean say in a context
like that to return to a different kind
of question like what are the conditions
of livability right what are the
conditions of livability and how to
communicate them and how to live them
right which without going back to
completely conservative structures or
thinking oh I guess that Social Forum is
actually right no I mean it's really -
instead of asking what what it is
rationally I believe I should be able to
do what are the concrete conditions of
livability I want to say that this
question is something that not only
pertains to sexual life and the
organization of sexuality but it does
pertain to the organization of our our
ethical and our political bonds
especially with those you know we don't
know or never chose right I mean in a
way we are we are vulnerable in ways
that we can't that can't be accommodated
by ideas of of choice and knowledge that
are presupposed by contract we are we
are already and before any question of
choice vulnerable to others in ways that
that that in effect define us as bodily
and social beings and I'm trying to
think what does that say about our
global responsibilities and how might we
rethink ourselves as as global creatures
in in light of such a claim thank you
for your attention
Judith
judith on behalf of all of us thank you
for an extraordinary evening an
extraordinary conversation Thank You
charlie in the Georgia Strait and on
behalf of the Peter wall stitute for
Advanced Studies thank you to all of you
for joining in the conversation and
thank you for coming and safe travels
back and stay posted for future lectures
of the wall exchange ones coming up in
October about the cosmic universe in the
21st century but thank you again tutor