{"id":8935,"date":"2012-04-08T21:02:16","date_gmt":"2012-04-09T02:02:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=8935"},"modified":"2012-04-08T21:13:24","modified_gmt":"2012-04-09T02:13:24","slug":"8935","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2012\/04\/08\/8935\/","title":{"rendered":"Geneva University Switzerland"},"content":{"rendered":"

What is coalition? Reflections on the conditions of alliance formation with Judith Butler\u2019s work<\/a><\/p>\n

In her groundbreaking book, Gender Trouble<\/em> (1990), Judith Butler inaugurates and develops\u00a0her critique of foundational reasoning \u2013 of identity categories such as (biological) sex, or of a\u00a0transcendental subject such as \u201cthe woman\u201d or even \u201cwomen\u201d (in the plural) \u2013 as a critique of \u00a0identity politics in general, and of a women\u2019s identity-based feminism in particular.<\/p>\n

For this reason, her antifoundationalism<\/strong> appears as a critical practice that seeks not only to rethink the political \u2013 along with genders, bodies, subjects and agency \u2013 in terms of performativity rather than of representation, but also, and most importantly, to theorize alternatives to identity politics in terms of coalition building. Since then, we can consider that Butler has insistently returned to the action-oriented question of \u201cwhat is coalition?\u201d<\/strong> and further elaborated on the conditions of possibility of alliance formation \u2013 at least, as much as on the conditions of subversion \u2013 in order to move effectively toward what she calls a \u201cprogressive\u201d or \u201cradical democratic politics.\u201d<\/p>\n

This concern has become increasingly explicit in her responses to the 9\/11 events \u2013 from Precarious Life<\/em> (2004) and Giving an Account of Oneself<\/em> (2005) to Frames of War<\/em> (2010) in which she suggests that the Left consider shared human precarity as \u201can existing and promising site for coalition exchange\u201d and for rights-claiming.<\/span> Interestingly, this proposal centered on the yet existing inequalities in the distribution and recognition of precarity \u2013 and vulnerability<\/span> \u2013 brings into new critical focus major political themes that have been running throughout her entire work, such as the relations between power, desire, norms for subject formation, and a non-naturalized conception of agency (e.g. Subjects of Desire<\/em>, 1987; The Psychic Life of Power<\/em>, 1997), or the question of violence, in particular state violence and public injury, as well as the issue of grieving in relation to the State, the law, war, to sovereignty and kinship arrangements (e.g. Excitable Speech<\/em>, 1997; Antigone\u2019s Claim<\/em>, 2002).<\/p>\n

Indeed, and according to Butler, a precarity-oriented politics<\/span> involves not only a new ontology and social theory of the body-in-society in terms of radical interdependency (a claim that extends her discussion in Bodies that Matter, 1993), but also strong normative commitments:<\/p>\n