Tag: Judith Butler

Everything Old is New Again

Posted on by Marie Snyder

by Marie Snyder

We’re being asked to believe six impossible things before breakfast. We have to reckon with several  upheavals at once: more conflicts, discrimination, poverty, illness, and natural disasters than many of us have ever seen in our comfortable lifetimes, and without a clear path forward. It’s unsettling. It feels necessary to find courage for this disquieting time. I was recently reminded of Maya Angelou’s words, “Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can’t be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.” It might help to look back to stories of those who were able to maintain their integrity in the face of prior adversities as we manage this collective anxiety. 

Emile Durkheim wrote about this feeling back in 1897.  Suicide is a book-length report on the four scenarios that provoke people to give up on life: egoistic, altruistic, fatalistic, and anomic. His discussion of anomy may be a useful warning for today:

“Whenever serious readjustments take place in the social order, whether or not due to a sudden growth or to an unexpected catastrophe, men [referring to all people] are more inclined to self-destruction. …. Man’s characteristic privilege is that the bond he accepts is not physical but moral; that is, social. He is governed not by a material environment brutally imposed on him, but by a conscience. … But when society is disturbed by some painful crisis or by beneficent but abrupt transitions, it is momentarily incapable of exercising this influence. … Appetites, not being controlled by a public opinion become disoriented, no longer recognize the limits proper to them. … The state of de-regulation or anomy is thus further heightened by passions being less disciplined, precisely when they need more disciplining. … A thirst arises for novelties, unfamiliar pleasures, nameless sensations, all of which lose their savor once known. … What blinded him to himself was his expectation always to find further on the happiness he had so far missed. Now he is stopped in his tracks; from now on nothing remains behind or ahead of him to fix his gaze upon. … He cannot in the end escape the futility of an endless pursuit. … Time is required for the public conscience to reclassify men and things.”

Abrupt transitions make it hard to think. Some political figures recognize a crisis as an opportunity because the public isn’t thinking clearly. We go into survival mode and become more animalistic, unable to organize in order to stop questionable policies. We thirst for novelty, using distraction to cope with the upheaval. Time may be required, but what do we do if it feels like there’s a never ending urgent crisis presented, one after another? More clever commenters recognize them as planted distractions to keep us confused, but that doesn’t significantly negate their effectiveness.   Read more »

Monday, June 3, 2024

Andrea Scrima’s LOOPY LOONIES At Kunsthaus Graz, Museum Joanneum, Austria

Posted on by Andrea Scrima

by Andrea Scrima

#1: SAYING NO

NO, Andrea Scrima. Graphite on paper, 35 x 35 cm. From the drawing series LOOPY LOONIES

In the talk Judith Butler gave upon receiving the Adorno Prize in 2012, she asks: “Can one lead a good life in a bad life?” Her question springs from a conclusion Theodor W. Adorno formulated in Minima Moralia: “Wrong life cannot be lived rightly” (“Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen”). Years later, he speculated whether modern humans were already too damaged to live in a right world, should such a world ever come into being. Butler nonetheless asks if it’s morally permissible to “wish simply to live a good life in the midst of a bad life,” but concedes that it’s not so simple. It would seem that to pursue the “good” life, one must reject the “bad” life and everything it demands from us. Yet isn’t the term “the good life” already far too tainted by consumerism to be of any real use?

Let’s speak instead of a “true life” as opposed to a “false life.” But what is the nature of this undertaking, and what would the true life entail? The fact that we are interdependent and vulnerable beings presupposes a set of conditions required for even a minimally decent life: food, shelter, clothing, a halfway functioning society, some kind of livelihood. Butler reminds us of Hannah Arendt’s observation that it’s not enough to be alive, to merely survive—that for a life to be considered a life, it has to be lived with meaning and purpose.

Thus, our demand must be not merely for life, but for a liveable life. And yet our lives are not entirely in our hands; they are subject to political and economic structures that rob individuals and entire peoples of their agency and doom them to precarity, and often worse. In Problems of Moral Philosophy, Butler reminds us, Adorno asks “how the broader operations of power and domination enter into, or disrupt, our individual reflections on how best to live.” Read more »

Monday, July 18, 2022

Fetus Fetish on the Firing Line: A Conversation

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

by Akim Reinhardt and Jennifer Ballengee

Human embryo at 4 weeks
Human embryo at 4 weeks

First Discussant: For anti-abortion extremists, abortion is a fetish. It’s a symptom that covers a repressed, secret, and socially unacceptable desire. What desire? I’m not sure; it’s their fetish, not mine. But whatever it may be, it drives anti-abortion protestors to scream about saving lives, to hold up posters of fully-formed fetuses (rather than the mass of cells you see in an ultrasound at six weeks or so), and to demand that we save those unformed lives. However, those images of fully-formed fetuses are a lie. They are visual metaphors which, as metaphors do, compare two unlike things: “life” in its social, meaningful context, and the bare life of any cell mass, whether an amoeba, plant, worm, or human. The “sacred” aspect of the human—which lends it the claim to human rights, or gives it its meaning in punishment or execution or “life”—is not innate but imagined. However, if we were to admit that we’re a mass of cells like any other life form, then we’d all have to be vegetarians, or cannibals.

The Respondent: I agree that anti-abortion extremism is a fetish, a form of idolatry where supplicants worship a non-sentient globule for its spiritual and even magical powers. I call this the Fetus Fetish. It’s actually more of an embryo fetish, but I like alliterations. Perhaps it’s not surprising since the vast, vast majority of extremists are very religious and typically espouse Christian notions of a divinely formed soul within every human being upon conception, leading them to entangle embryos with ideas about the sacred. That seems pretty straightforward. What grabs me is your implication that anti-abortion extremism is grounded in a form of religious speciesism. That only by replacing honest observation and rational thought with supernatural religiosity could one conclude that a tiny collection of microscopic, embryonic cells is somehow more worthy of a sacred life than an adult chicken, or that even a twenty-week old fetus, which despite the miracles of modern medical technologies absolutely cannot live outside a woman’s womb, is somehow on a par with, much less the better of, an adult cow or pig or dog. All you have to do is look an adult dog or pig in the eye to recognize you’re dealing with a mature, highly developed, self-sustaining, thinking mammal whose existence has infinitely more in common with your own than does an embryo or early stage fetus. Yes, either eat all the animals or none of them; or at least use that dichotomy as a starting point for some deep thought about your place in the universe. Read more »

Monday, November 1, 2021

On the Limits Of Edgelord Comedy

Posted on by Omar Baig

by Omar Baig

Dave Chappelle grapples with the intractability of gender norms in The Closer: his most recent and final stand-up special for Netflix. Early into the set, Chappelle recounts the one-sided fight he had at a nightclub with a lesbian woman. When she interrupts his conversation with a female fan, Dave assumes they’re a jealous boyfriend. He deescalates the situation, however, once he realizes they are actually a jealous girlfriend; yet his unintentional misgendering only antagonizes her more. She reacts by squaring up in “a perfect southpaw stance” and throws the first punch. Chappelle reflexively dodges, then reacts in kind, by knocking “the toxic masculinity” out of her.

This, ladies and gentle-folx, is Edgelord comedy at its spiciest. Now, was it okay for Dave to misgender this woman, even unintentionally? No. Did Chappelle have to respond by, “softly and sweetly,” telling her: “Bitch, I’m about to slap the shit out of you!” Also, no. Yet was he justified in “tenderizing those titties like chicken cutlets,” in self-defense, once she threw that first punch? In my opinion, yes. This anecdote illustrates that toxic masculinity, like public acts of jealousy or public aggression, is not only limited to men. It also features two of The Closer’s recurring motifs: (1) Dave’s respect of others as reciprocal to their respect for his personal boundaries (i.e., irrespective of sexual or gender identity); or (2) by all the ways that performing informs his personal, social, and creative interactions. Read more »