The Philosophy of Judith Butler

If there is any need to offer a more precise description of the philosophy Judith Butler produces, we may provisionally call it ‘queer’. The use of mischievous vocabulary, concepts such as ‘sex’, ‘jettisoned life’ or ‘parody’, together with an emphatic, almost deliberate disrespect for strict boundaries between disciplines, their proper objects and language, fits well with the idea of queering. Butler weaves the ecstatic and improper movement of thought, to the point of sometimes questioning the standards of coherence, clarity and unity of text. Her writing is a performance in language, frequently spilling over into activist practices, which unintended ecstatic afterlife then gets woven back into the fold of following texts.

To write about Butler – to impose a sense of unity or coherence to her oeuvre – is to accept to write against the performativity of her thought. One can attempt to do a kind of bio-bibliographical inquiry, to collect data and trace textual trails that reveal the causal chains and intellectual influences on certain ideas. Any endeavour seeking to present large portions of an oeuvre must do precisely this kind of mining work, an excavation that of necessity straightens many of its curves. It seems that this straightening becomes particularly emphatic when the task is to present two transversal, deeply entangled sides of her thought: one belonging to philosophy, the other to politics. This chapter begins with a bold statement – Butler is a philosopher – and with an acknowledgement that some of the queerness in her philosophy must be lost in this process of mining and honing. Despite this, I hope to have preserved a double movement of philosophy and politics, organised as a two-step and sustained throughout the book – and specifically in this chapter, which is supposed to provide a kind of glossary of terms to help us move through the continual shifting of demands to think and act differently.

To insist on Butler's doing philosophy is also to go against her own somewhat ambivalent relationship towards it, which she has voiced on numerous occasions, but perhaps most prominently in a text with the suggestive title, ‘Can the “Other” of Philosophy Speak?’ (Undoing Gender, 2004b [hereafter UG]: 232–50) – where the ‘Other of philosophy’ seems to stand in for the subaltern.