Dispossession: The Performative in the Political 1st Edition

Favorite Butler.

situated in the tradition of philosophical dialogue, noted philosopher, judith butler, and social anthropologist, athena athanasiou, range over a wide number of contemporary social topics, circling the globe with what they describe as `instances' of acts of resistance, `performatives', in political space.there's no easy way to describe a performative. for the sake of entering the text, i'll quote judith butler, `We might say: the performative emerges precisely as the specific power of the precarious--unauthorized by existing legal regimes, abandoned by the law itself--to demand the end of their precarity.' the precarity before us, is dispossession. dispossession is of two versions, loss and affective. the loss of property, identity, rights, or homeland. the affective is psychic and emotional often resulting in a spontaneous unplanned and unintended action, and this version of dispossession leads to mental activity.athanasiou's style, in particular, requires patience and diligence, her penchant for clustering abstract and collective nouns reshaping words grammatically into near neologisms, while managing the organization of the conversation with repetition and reminder. serving as a kind of participant interviewer, she opens the dialogue with an inquiry into aporetic dispossession and then takes her cues from judith butler, who as early as 1988 was writing about performatives.no single word in their dialogue is pinned with one meaning, multiple meanings abound, with many words subjected to derridean word play. what begins as inquiry into, say, responsibility, leads to an inquiry into response, the discussion continues as an entwinement until some form of logic is perceived. language is silenced and silence becomes, as a form of resistance, language. some of the instances seem so sparse, almost to appear flimsy in content. i want to call them discrete connectives, engendering speculations of past and future, and point out the application of one of the discrete connections with an example.athanasiou speaks of not moving as agency, as a form of resistance, instancing rosa parks' own words from her autobiography, parks' description of her not moving as saying she was tired, her being tired she clarifies as not a physical condition but a psychological condition, being tired, as not in the mood to tolerate the authority and laws avowing she must move, must make her seat available to a white person. but how is moving/not moving as agency, either as a rule of law or a personal act of resistance, enacted by a person with a disability? later butler explores a topic human animality. a remark by her, `...we cannot understand human life without understanding that its modes are connected up with other forms of life by which it is distinguished and with which it is continuous.' a conversation can pick up from here on disabled persons within precarious political situations and police dogs and seeing eye dogs.some of the topics and persons mentioned are disposable people, occupied palestine, neoliberalism, the biopolitical, queer genealogy in the film Strella, directed by panos koutras, the philosophers, fanon and foucault, mourning, a street performance by mary zygouri, and the work of guatemalan performance artist regina josé galindo.a good practice is to create a vocabulary list early in the reading, of how the authors, to nod toward the late poetry critic, john ciardi, `mean' their words. `catachresis' `precarity' althusser's `interpellation' `poietic' `teratological' are some of the terms used.

Judith Butler has been writing on neoliberal governmentality for some time now, but this book is unique in the sense that her work is literally put into conversation with Athena Athanasiou, an accomplished scholar of feminist and queer theory in her own right in her native Greece. The two met, we are told, in December 2009, when Butler delivered a series of talks in Greece (p. vii). From there Butler and Athanasiou corresponded "mainly on email" (p. x) about their shared theoretical interests and what they might have to say about ongoing social movements protesting neoliberal austerity, capitalist privatization, and various regimes of dispossession.I was skeptical about this project at first insofar as most of it was composed remotely and not by way of face-to-face dialogue. But my prejudgment was quickly put to rest as I got into the substance and texture of Butler's and Athanasiou's exchanges, which manage to be conversational without sacrificing theoretical rigor. This was a welcome (and stark) contrast to Butler's staged dialogue with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (also published in book form), which I found pedantic rather than pedagogical. This book addresses similar issues to that previous work, but it is far superior in content and style.Butler and Athanasiou cover terrain that scholars of neoliberalism (from anthropologists to queer theorists) will be generally familiar with: "precarity as a condition of induced inequality and destitution" (p. 20); "discursive configurations that pathologize and blame the victims [by] attribut[ing] dire economic conditions of poor people to their deficient or inept personalities" (p. 114); and "the idea that individual `responsibility' increases as social services and infrastructures fail, [with the consequence] that the domain of morality absorbs and deflects the economic and political crisis" (p. 103). But while these points may be familiar to some scholars, their compact, interrelated articulation in this book makes it a valuable resource for anyone invested/interested in the global Left's horizon of possibility. And that reach is not outside the realm of imagination: for as one chapter illuminates, recent EU and US protests have been marked by activists using "book shields" (titles by Adorno, Derrida, Woolf, Beckett, and Butler herself) to defend their collective body against police crackdowns (p. 189).Beyond its synoptic, "usable" form, this book also adds to contemporary thought on neoliberalism a necessary theorization of performativity. Butler, of course, is well-regarded as a theorist of (gender) performativity, and here she and Athanasiou describe the performative dimensions of different forms of (neoliberal) resistance. In my opinion, Butler and Athanasiou are at their best when they theorize performativity alongside examples drawn from street protest, cinema, and performance art. Their dialogue on Panos Koutras's Strella (2009) features some of Butler's best writing on a cultural object in years, while their explication of Palestinian Queers for BDS offers one of the best critiques of homonationalism I've read.Other, more abstract, examples falter, such as Butler and Athanasiou's distanced theorization of suicide bombing. And a few chapters, such as the one on "Sexual Dispossessions," detract from the volume's cohesiveness. Still, these are minor obstacles in an otherwise surprisingly lucid book. I recommend it to those interested in joining a dialogue on how we can imagine ways of resisting neoliberalism's total dominion over social and political life.

une exellente analyse feministe dela crise grecque et de ses pistes de sortie , un debat fecond entre le philosophie politique de judith Butler et sacollegue grecque

This is a dense book that perhaps should be approached as a 'stream of consciousness' perhaps more than anything else, as Athena Athanasiou discusses with Judith Butler a further development of Left politics with particular regard to feminist and queer issues.The discussion is very 'european' in manner as would be expected, often meandering and ill-focussed but at other times deeply rich in thought and enquiry. As with such transcripts you have to take the rough with the smooth- it reminded me at times of Zizek at his most obtuse and meandering- but there is some good, sound thought in here worth digging for although you may well have to be prepared for much of it to wash over you in order to have them revealed to you. A worthy discussion, but perhaps a little more clarity would have been useful to get the thinking across....whatever, ideal for those who want to sit down with a complex analysis of Leftist thought and where it could go in the next few years.

What I loved about this book was the choice to revisit the Classical dialogue format to present its arguments. It gives the chapters - which are all fairly concise - a natural motion and progression, making some quite challenging ideas accessible, dynamic and illuminating. It does suffer from a certain density of language - why use plain English when you can throw in a handful of sociological buzzwords to obfuscate every sentence? - but it comes with the territory, and it doesn't spoil an otherwise rewarding read.As for the content, it couldn't come at a better time - drawing on contemporary events, and speaking to the power (as well as poverty) of dispossession, it offers both the problem and the solution, in the form of group action. An excellent, thought-provoking read.

This book is unlikely to attract the casual reader, but then again it is aimed at an academic audience. Nonetheless I found the style unhelpful with over-complex language being unnecessarily used almost to feed the authors ego. The result is a book which, thankfully, has concise and progressive chapters, but has a dense style which requires close reading.The discussion on the left and queer and feminist theories is pretty insightful and relevant. However, I’d like the book to be more grounded in empirical evidence than appearing to be largely conjectural. As such I’d recommend only to a subject expert.

Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou's Dispossession: The Performative in the Political etc- is a discourse on the timeless arguements surrounding the political and historical patterns which have structured western societies.Dispossession takes an academic feminist perspective and looks at where we have come from and where we are heading as conflicting groups within society battle it out to be heard and impact on the status quo. Not an easy read and rambling at times but fascinating nevertheless.