With the same intellectual courage with which she addressed issues of gender, Judith Butler turns her attention to speech and conduct in contemporary political life, looking at several efforts to target speech as conduct that has become subject to political debate and regulation. Reviewing hate speech regulations, anti-pornography arguments, and recent controversies about gay self-declaration in the military, Judith Butler asks whether and how language acts in each of these cultural sites.

Towards a form of aggressive nonviolence
Judith Butler’s new book shows how an ethic of nonviolence must be connected to a broader political struggle for social equality. Further, it argues that nonviolence is often misunderstood as a passive practice that emanates from a calm region of the soul, or as an individualist ethical relation to existing forms of power. But, in fact, nonviolence is an ethical position found in the midst of the political field. An aggressive form of nonviolence accepts that hostility is part of our psychic constitution, but values ambivalence as a way of checking the conversion of aggression into violence. One contemporary challenge to a politics of nonviolence points out that there is a difference of opinion on what counts as violence and nonviolence. The distinction between them can be mobilised in the service of ratifying the state’s monopoly on violence.
Considering nonviolence as an ethical problem within a political philosophy requires a critique of individualism as well as an understanding of the psychosocial dimensions of violence. Butler draws upon Foucault, Fanon, Freud, and Benjamin to consider how the interdiction against violence fails to include lives regarded as ungrievable. By considering how ‘racial phantasms’ inform justifications of state and administrative violence, Butler tracks how violence is often attributed to those who are most severely exposed to its lethal effects. The struggle for nonviolence is found in movements for social transformation that reframe the grievability of lives in light of social equality and whose ethical claims follow from an insight into the interdependency of life as the basis of social and political equality.

‘When we claim to have been injured by language, what kind of claim do we make?’ - Judith Butler, Excitable Speech
Excitable Speech is widely hailed as a tour de force and one of Judith Butler’s most important books. Examining in turn debates about hate speech, pornography and gayness within the US military, Butler argues that words can wound and linguistic violence is its own kind of violence. Yet she also argues that speech is ‘excitable’ and fluid, because its effects often are beyond the control of the speaker, shaped by fantasy, context and power structures.
In a novel and courageous move, she urges caution concerning the use of legislation to restrict and censor speech, especially in cases where injurious language is taken up by aesthetic practices to diminish and oppose the injury, such as in rap and popular music. Although speech can insult and demean, it is also a form of recognition and may be used to talk back; injurious speech can reinforce power structures, but it can also repeat power in ways that separate language from its injurious power. Skillfully showing how language’s oppositional power resides in its insubordinate and dynamic nature and its capacity to appropriate and defuse words that usually wound, Butler also seeks to account for why some clearly hateful speech is taken to be iconic of free speech, while other forms are more easily submitted to censorship.
In light of current debates between advocates of freedom of speech and ‘no platform’ and cancel culture, the message of Excitable Speech remains more relevant now than ever.
This Routledge Classics edition includes a new Preface by the author, where she considers speech and language in the context contemporary forms of political polarization.
Review
"In her extraordinary new book, Excitable Speech, Judith Butler... looks conceptually at speech, and she has plenty to say... Excitable Speech offers a thoughtful consideration of the ways in which speech and speaking are used by all points on the political spectrum to further political ends." - The Bay Guardian
"Makes a valuable contribution... No-one should ignore Judith Butler's analysis and conclusions." - The Women's Review of Books
"Butler's exploration of racist, sexist, and homophobic language is hence of acute significance to anyone concerned with the sociopolitical and theoretical implications of hate speech." - The Lesbian Review of Books
"This book offers a challenging analysis of the free speech debates. As she moves from the often frightening contradictions in legal arguments to the visceral pain caused by hate speech, Butler makes a compelling case that our laws--and our lives--are determined by conceptual frameworks." - Lambda Book Report
"This sober and subtle work draws us into the dark heart of a world where words wound, images enrage, and speech is haunted by hate. Butler intervenes brilliantly in an argument that tests the limits of both legal claims and linguistic acts. She explores the link between 'reasons' of state and the passions of personhood as she meditates on utterance as a form of incitement, excitement, and injury. There is a fine urgency here that expands our understanding of the place of the 'affective' in the realm of public events." - Homi K. Bhabha, Harvard University, USA
"Judith Butler has brilliantly challenged us to rethink our conventional ideas about the power of speech. As is to be expected of Butler, Excitable Speech is original, witty, and lucidly argued. This book is essential reading for anyone concerned with the politics of free speech." - Drucilla Cornell, Rutgers University School of Law, USA
"If to speak is to act, what follows? In this shrewd and compelling book, Judith butler, the philosopher of Queer Theory and the performative theory of gender, takes up the thorniest problems of our day concerning the relation between speech and action, such as hate speech, pornography, and the military's policy that makes a declaration of homosexuality a punishable act. Her analyses are brilliant engagements that refuse to oversimplify and show us that politics requires serious thinking." - Jonathan Culler, Cornell University, USA
"Flag burning and cross burning; pornography and coming out; racial taunts and AIDS education; using 'racial classifications' and remaining 'race blind': this book will provide constitutional and legislative debates about regulating these forms of 'injurious speech' with a brilliantly nuanced analysis of language as action. Butler has provided us with a sustained demonstration that we should fill in the moat that separates law schools from the human sciences, and quickly." - Janet Halley, Harvard Law School, USA
"In this relentlessly intelligent analysis of hate speech, Judith Butler proposes a speech act theory of verbal injury that is not dependent on the grammar of accountability. There is never a slack moment in this brilliant book." - Barbara Johnson, Harvard University, USA

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 broadens the theory of performativity beyond speech acts to include the concerted actions of the body. Assemblies of physical bodies have an expressive dimension that cannot be reduced to speech, for the very fact of people gathering “says” something without always relying on speech. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s view of action, yet revising her claims about the role of the body in politics, Butler asserts that embodied ways of coming together, including forms of long-distance solidarity, imply a new understanding of the public space of appearance essential to politics.
Butler links assembly with precarity by pointing out that a body suffering under conditions of precarity still persists and resists, and that mobilization brings out this dual dimension of corporeal life. Just as assemblies make visible and audible the bodies that require basic freedoms of movement and association, so do they expose coercive practices in prison, the dismantling of social democracy, and the continuing demand for establishing subjugated lives as mattering, as equally worthy of life. By enacting a form of radical solidarity in opposition to political and economic forces, a new sense of “the people” emerges, interdependent, grievable, precarious, and persistent.

This unique volume presents a debate between four of the top feminist theorists in the United States today. Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell and Nancy Fraser discuss some of the key questions facing feminist theory. Each articulates her own position in an initial essay, then responds to the others in a follow-up essay, making possible a conversation between these influential feminist thinkers. Begun as a symposium on the issue of feminism and postmodernism, the volume evolved into a discussion of broader issues such as the usefulness of postmodernism as a theoretical concept; the role of philosophy in social criticism; how historical narrative is best conceptualized; the status of the subject of feminism; and the political effects of different formulations of all these issues. Unlike many collections which assume a given topic and ask various thinkers to respond to it, this format enables the contributors themselves to articulate their own views on the key questions facing feminist theory and distinguish their views from others.

This book brings together a group of Judith Butler's philosophical essays written over two decades that elaborate her reflections on the roles of the passions in subject formation through an engagement with Hegel, Kierkegaard, Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche, Merleau-Ponty, Freud, Irigaray, and Fanon. Drawing on her early work on Hegelian desire and her subsequent reflections on the psychic life of power and the possibility of self-narration, this book considers how passions such as desire, rage, love, and grief are bound up with becoming a subject within specific historical fields of power.
Butler shows in different philosophical contexts how the self that seeks to make itself finds itself already affected and formed against its will by social and discursive powers. And yet, agency and action are not necessarily nullified by this primary impingement. Primary sense impressions register this dual situation of being acted on and acting, countering the idea that acting requires one to overcome the situation of being affected by others and the linguistic and social world. This dual structure of sense sheds light on the desire to live, the practice and peril of grieving, embodied resistance, love, and modes of enthrallment and dispossession. Working with theories of embodiment, desire, and relationality in conversation with philosophers as diverse as Hegel, Spinoza, Descartes, Merleau-Ponty, Freud, and Fanon, Butler reanimates and revises her basic propositions concerning the constitution and deconstitution of the subject within fields of power, taking up key issues of gender, sexuality, and race in several analyses. Taken together, these essays track the development of Butler's embodied account of ethical relations.

In the Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin writes that his work is “related to theology as blotting pad is related to ink. It is saturated with it.” For a thinker so decisive to critical literary, cultural, political, and aesthetic writings over the past half-century, Benjamin’s relationship to theological matters has been less observed than it should, even despite a variety of attempts over the last four decades to illuminate the theological elements latent within his eclectic and occasional writings. Such attempts, though undeniably crucial to comprehending his thought, remain in need of deepened systematic analysis. In bringing together some of the most renowned experts from both sides of the Atlantic, Walter Benjamin and Theology seeks to establish a new site from which to address both the issue of Benjamin’s relationship with theology and all the crucial aspects that Benjamin himself grappled with when addressing the field and operations of theological inquiry.

Dispossession describes the condition of those who have lost land, citizenship, property, and a broader belonging to the world. This thought-provoking book seeks to elaborate our understanding of dispossession outside of the conventional logic of possession, a hallmark of capitalism, liberalism, and humanism. Can dispossession simultaneously characterize political responses and opposition to the disenfranchisement associated with unjust dispossession of land, economic and political power, and basic conditions for living? In the context of neoliberal expropriation of labor and livelihood, dispossession opens up a performative condition of being both affected by injustice and prompted to act. From the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa to the anti-neoliberal gatherings at Puerta del Sol, Syntagma and Zucchotti Park, an alternative political and affective economy of bodies in public is being formed. Bodies on the street are precarious - exposed to police force, they are also standing for, and opposing, their dispossession. These bodies insist upon their collective standing, organize themselves without and against hierarchy, and refuse to become disposable: they demand regard. This book interrogates the agonistic and open-ended corporeality and conviviality of the crowd as it assembles in cities to protest political and economic dispossession through a performative dispossession of the sovereign subject and its propriety.

A collection gathering readings for discussions on an end to gender: not the proliferation or liberation of gender, but its catastrophic cancellation. The reader brings together writings as old as 1883 and as recent as 2015, juxtaposing nihilist, radical feminist, queer, trans, anticolonial, communizing and insurrectionary approaches with other unclassifiable textual/existential disruptions. Many of the readings are out of print or have only appeared online or in zine form, and include: Adrienne Rich, Monique Wittig, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, A.R. Stone, Paul B. Preciado, the entities known as Radicalesbians, Gender Mutiny, Baedan, Ehn Nothing, Laboria Cuboniks and, as always, Anonymous. Also includes “My Preferred Gender Pronoun is Negation,” “Gender Nihilism” by Aidan Rowe, and the gender nihilism anti-manifesto that inspired the collection.

The use of theory' in feminist analysis has been said to threaten feminism as a political force. This collection of work by leading feminist scholars engages with the question of the political status of poststructuralist theory within feminism. Against the view that poststructuralism necessarily weakens feminism, Feminists Theorize the Political affirms the contemporary debate over theory as politically rich and consequential. The essays in Feminists Theorize the Political speak to the questions that emerge from the convergence of feminism and poststructuralism: What happens to feminist critique when traditional grounds and foundations - experience, history, universal norms - are called into question? Can feminist theory problematize the notion of the subject without losing its political effectivity? Which version of the subject is to be questioned, and how does that questioning open up possibilities for reformulating agency, power, and sites of political resistance? What are the consequences of a specifically feminist reformulation of difference? What are the uses and limits of a poststructuralist critique of binary logic for the theorization of racial and class differences, the position of the subaltern?

Since its publication in 1990,
has become one of the key works of contemporary feminist theory, and an essential work for anyone interested in the study of gender, queer theory, or the politics of sexuality in culture. This is the text where Judith Butler began to advance the ideas that would go on to take life as "performativity theory," as well as some of the first articulations of the possibility for subversive gender practices, and she writes in her preface to the 10th anniversary edition released in 1999 that one point of
was "not to prescribe a new gendered way of life [...] but to open up the field of possibility for gender [...]" Widely taught, and widely debated,
continues to offer a powerful critique of heteronormativity and of the function of gender in the modern world.

The pandemic compels us to ask fundamental questions about our place in the world: the many ways humans rely on one another, how we vitally and sometimes fatally breathe the same air, share the surfaces of the earth, and exist in proximity to other porous creatures in order to live in a social world. What we require to live can also imperil our lives. How do we think from, and about, this common bind?
Judith Butler shows how COVID-19 and all its consequences—political, social, ecological, economic—have challenged us to reconsider the sense of the world that such disasters bring about. Drawing on the work of Max Scheler, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and critical feminist phenomenology, Butler illuminates the conditions in which we seek to make sense of our disorientation, precarity, and social bonds. What World Is This? offers a new account of interdependency in which touching and breathing, capacities that amid a viral outbreak can threaten life itself, challenge the boundaries of the body and selfhood. Criticizing notions of unlimited personal liberty and the killing forces of racism, sexism, and classism, this book suggests that the pandemic illuminates the potential of shared vulnerabilities as well as the injustice of pervasive inequalities.
Exposing and opposing forms of injustice that deny the essential interrelationship of living creatures, Butler argues for a radical social equality and advocates modes of resistance that seek to establish new conditions of livability and a new sense of a shared world.

As a form of power, subjection is paradoxical. To be dominated by a power external to oneself is a familiar and agonizing form power takes. To find, however, that what “one” is, one's very formation as a subject, is dependent upon that very power is quite another. If, following Foucault, we understand power as
the subject as well, it provides the very condition of its existence and the trajectory of its desire. Power is not simply what we depend on for our existence but that which forms reflexivity as well. Drawing upon Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Foucault, and Althusser, this challenging and lucid work offers a theory of subject formation that illuminates as ambivalent the psychic effects of social power.
If we take Hegel and Nietzsche seriously, then the "inner life" of consciousness and, indeed, of conscience, not only is fabricated by power, but becomes one of the ways in which power is anchored in subjectivity. The author considers the way in which psychic life is generated by the social operation of power, and how that social operation of power is concealed and fortified by the psyche that it produces. Power is no longer understood to be "internalized" by an existing subject, but the subject is spawned as an ambivalent effect of power, one that is staged through the operation of conscience.
To claim that power fabricates the psyche is also to claim that there is a fictional and fabricated quality to the psyche. The figure of a psyche that "turns against itself" is crucial to this study, and offers an alternative to describing power as “internalized.” Although most readers of Foucault eschew psychoanalytic theory, and most thinkers of the psyche eschew Foucault, the author seeks to theorize this ambivalent relation between the social and the psychic as one of the most dynamic and difficult effects of power.
This work combines social theory, philosophy, and psychoanalysis in novel ways, offering a more sustained analysis of the theory of subject formation implicit in such other works of the author as
and
.

begins where Butler’s
left off: on the idea that we cannot grieve for those lost lives that we never saw as lives to begin with. In this age of CNN-mediated war, the lives of those wretched populations of the earth—the refugees; the victims of unjust imprisonment and torture; the immigrants virtually enslaved by their starvation and legal disenfranchisement—are always presented to us as already irretrievable and thereby already lost. We may shake our heads at their wretchedness but then we sacrifice them nonetheless, for they are already forgone.
By analyzing the different frames through which we experience war, Butler calls for a reorientation of the Left toward the precarity of those lives. Only by recognizing those lives as precarious lives—lives that are not yet lost but are ever fragile and in need of protection—might the Left stand in unity against the violence perpetrated through arbitrary state power.

Alors que le recours à la violence est souvent présenté comme le mode de résistance le plus radical, Judith Butler propose de régénérer la non-violence comme idéal. La non-violence, ce n’est pas la passivité ni le renoncement à l’action. Ce n’est pas le pacifisme naïf ni l’aspiration inconséquente à une forme de pureté morale. Ce serait plutôt une entreprise politique agressive de rupture avec le monde et ses propres impulsions.
Défendre la non-violence comme idéal, serait-ce idéaliste ? Pour Judith Butler, la non-violence est au contraire nécessaire dans des temps comme les nôtres, quand ceux qui prennent position pour la violence reproduisent les cadres et les pratiques institués.
Judith Butler propose ainsi de constituer la non-violence comme nouvel imaginaire politique. À travers ses discussions de Fanon, Freud, Benjamin, Arendt, Foucault..., elle entreprend de fonder une éthique politique sur les notions d’interdépendance, d’égalité et d’anti-individualisme.
Ce livre s’est imposé dès sa parution comme un classique de la théorie politique contemporaine.

From a global icon, a bold, essential account of how fear of gender is fueling reactionary politics around the world.
Judith Butler, the pioneering theorist whose iconic book Gender Trouble redefined how we think about gender and sexuality, confronts one of the most pressing issues of our time. So-called “gender ideology”—and its supposed dangers—has provoked reactionary backlash across the world. Global networks spread the idea that gender is a dangerous, if not diabolical, ideology threatening to destroy families, local cultures, civilizations—and even "man" himself. Inflamed by the rhetoric of religious leaders, politicians, and public figures, this movement has taken aim at the rights of queer and trans people and sought to restrict the freedoms of women, pushing anti-gender legislation and at times perpetuating violence.
But what, exactly, is so scary about gender? In their monumental book, Butler examines, with characteristic rigor and verve, how “gender” became a convenient catchall boogeyman—a phantasm—for myriad overlapping, and often contradicting, anxieties. From former colonial states in Africa and Asia classifying gender as a Western imposition to the Vatican’s warnings that gender erodes traditional values, Butler powerfully demonstrates how the fears surrounding gender not only are misguided and uninformed but also sow the seeds for authoritarian control and the erosion of public discourse.
An urgent intervention, a bold call for a freer and more allied world, Who's Afraid of Gender? is a landmark work of social and political analysis that is both timely and timeless—a book only Butler could write.