Judith Butler: Philosophical Encounters of the Third Kind (Video Recording Review‪)‬

Judith Butler: Philosophical Encounters of the Third Kind. Paule Zadjermann (filmmaker). 2007. First Run/Icarus Films. 52 minutes, VHS, color, Closed Captioned. Judith Butler (2) is one of the pivotal voices of contemporary feminist scholarship. She has been lauded as "one of the world's most important and influential contemporary thinkers in fields such as continental philosophy, literary theory, feminist and queer theory, and cultural politics (Zadjermann, 2007)." She is also one of the most awe inspiring scholars in the now specialized field of gender studies. (3) Her twenty-five year career of groundbreaking scholarship officially began in 1982 but she is perhaps best known for her bestseller Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (GT) published in 1990. Her works, which she warns "cannot be reconciled," also include 1993 Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (1993), and most recently, Precarious Life." The Power of Mourning and Violence and Undoing Gender (UG) both published in 2004 (Zadjermann). With such an outstanding and intimidating record of scholarship covering an extensive range of topics, Judith Butler has been widely criticized for producing "high" theory that is not useful to the feminist movement. The complexity of her works further lends strength to the implication that Judith Butler the person is unreal, not easy to relate to, and indeed inhuman. Paule Zadjermann's documentary film Judith Butler: Philosophical Encounters of the Third Kind could not have entered on to the academic scene at a better time.