Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly
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- $27.99
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- $27.99
Publisher Description
A Times Higher Education Book of the Week
Judith Butler elucidates the dynamics of public assembly under prevailing economic and political conditions, analyzing what they signify and how.
Understanding assemblies as plural forms of performative action, Butler extends her theory of performativity to argue that precarity—the destruction of the conditions of livability—has been a galvanizing force and theme in today’s highly visible protests.
“Butler’s book is everything that a book about our planet in the 21st century should be. It does not turn its back on the circumstances of the material world or give any succour to those who wish to view the present (and the future) through the lens of fantasies about the transformative possibilities offered by conventional politics Butler demonstrates a clear engagement with an aspect of the world that is becoming in many political contexts almost illicit to discuss: the idea that capitalism, certainly in its neoliberal form, is failing to provide a liveable life for the majority of human beings.”
—Mary Evans, Times Higher Education
“A heady immersion into the thought of one of today’s most profound philosophers of action…This is a call for a truly transformative politics, and its relevance to the fraught struggles taking place in today’s streets and public spaces around the world cannot be denied.”
—Hans Rollman, PopMatters
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
One of the boldest and most radical thinkers of our time, Butler (Bodies That Matter) examines the contemporary state of popular sovereignty, resistance, and other "concerted actions," as Hannah Arendt termed them, of political engagement in this series of essays expanding on her theory of performativity. Looking at recent mass protests, including events in Tahrir Square and the various Occupy movements, she explores what freedom of assembly entails in different spaces public, private, confined, and virtual while focusing on how individuals can take actual, not simply rhetorical, political action. In doing so, she draws on Arendt's concept of the political, Emmanuel Levinas's concept of ethical obligation, and Theodor Adorno's timeless question: can one "lead a good life in a bad life?" Mounting a defense of the right to assembly and of the practices of radical democracy, Butler concludes, "Bodies are not self-enclosed kinds of entities" and "our shared exposure to precarity is but one ground of our potential equality and our reciprocal obligations to produce together conditions of livable life." Her analysis emphasizes the potential for popular movements, rather than nation-states, to establish this equality. She also provides a compelling argument in favor of nonviolence as a political tactic. Butler's examination of popular sovereignty and public assembly is incisive and exigent.
