Judith Butler and Politics

Judith Butler and Politics is the only monograph-length study of the work of Judith Butler to focus on the entire scope of their work, including the last decade of their writing. It presents a completely new interpretation of Butler’s political thought, oriented by the idea of an insurrection at the level of the real. In chapters on ontology, performativity, agency and precariousness, a liveable life and nonviolence, it explains how Butler’s thought has always been focused on embodied performances. Instead of seeing Butler as simply a thinker of the subversive performance of cultural scripts, the book frames their work for the twenty-first century as an ambitious and coherent egalitarian alternative to liberal political philosophy. In each chapter, it introduces a Butlerian concept, clarifying this in the context of critical debates, while explaining its contribution to a new social ontology whose key normative principle is a liveable life. The chapters then explore the potential of this conceptual framework not just in relation to the politics of gender, but also to questions of social inequality, structural violence and the experience of precarity. Designed for both researchers and students, the book provides a comprehensive way of accessing what is radically original about this crucial political theorist.