8/13/2023 0 Comments Judith butler 2016Butlers argument for a politics and ethics of non-violence, as presented in Dublin on thatcold Tuesday evening, has three parts. Judith Butler and Maeve Cooke during the Q&A after the first of the Agnes Cuming Lectures in University College Dublin, January 2019Įthics and politics are not here conflated but require one another if we are to speak and engage meaningfully with non-violence. Butler was doing what philosophers traditionally don’t: she did not police herself to the boundaries and understandings of a self-sufficient discipline, instead she was preaching for social change, knowing well her theory is tied to a political agenda, and cannot be separated from the outside world (Sandford, 2015). In her assertive, dedicative and calm voice Butler was not shying away from stating our political collective responsibility and obligation towards one another. Was Butler preaching about an aggressive form of non-violence? Militant pacifism? Or was it, as she called it herself a ‘militant humility’, which will keep us together whilst fighting destructive powers? These names each point to the same. In a huge lecture hall packed full of people on an icy cold Dublin evening, Butler gave an account, which left the majority of the people in the room with various ideas of what she was advocating. On the 29 thof January 2019, Butler delivered the first of two public lectures: entitled ‘Equality, Grievability and Interdependency’, as part of the annual Agnes Cuming Lecture at University College Dublin. This article is a re-telling of what some might consider a clowns account of the ethics and politics of non-violence, and others, may simply see it as a presentation given by Judith Butler, an “improper proper” philosopher. And what would happen if we lived in a world with no clowns, with no philosophers, with no one that held open such a possibility? She dares to ‘elevate principles that seem impossible, or that have the status of the impossible, to stand by them and will them’ (Butler in Filar, 2014). Butler is the kind of clown that takes you elsewhere, she’s the philosopher that deliberately brings you, not only academic insight, but also a sense of hope for what can come, instead of the rise of human meanness. They can each bring you to an imaginary place in which your problems, or those of our world, are forgotten, or they equally may confront you with a truth you’d rather stay without. Judith Butler – a clown or a philosopher? The two options she found attractive when asked what she wanted to be as a child. ‘Anti-capitalist, feminist, anti-imperialist, and radically democratic, Butler’s latest work has forced us, in a time of increasing nationalism, patriotic populism and the individuated-ness of precarity under neo-liberalism, to recognise the urgency to act globally, and to think of new forms of political obligation, not to the state, but to the world, and the global responsibilities that entails’. Çetinkaya’s article exceeds simply a report, and in and of itself is a plea for the revolutionary implications of the politics of non-violence Butler proposes both in her most recent writing as well as her public lectures. In this article Hasret Çetinkaya reports on Judith Butler’s recent Agnes Cuming lectures at University College Dublin in January 2019.
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