Judith Butler and Politics

Presents Judith Butler's interest in plurality of bodily lives and her search for a social transformation conducive to a more liveable world This book is the only monograph-length study of the work of Judith Butler to focus on the entire scope of her work, including the last decade of her writing. In light of these texts, it presents a fresh interpretation of Butler's political thought, oriented by the idea of an insurrection at the level of the real. Chapters on ontology, performativity, agency and precariousness, a liveable life and non-violence explain 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 her work for the twenty-first century as an ambitious and coherent egalitarian alternative to liberal political philosophy. Each chapter 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 book explores the potential of this conceptual framework in relation to not just the politics of gender but also questions of social inequality, structural violence and the experience of precarity. Designed for both researchers and students, it provides a comprehensive way of accessing what is radically original about this crucial political theorist. Adriana Zaharijevic is a Senior Research Fellow in the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory at the University of Belgrade, Serbia.