What the Performative Can’t Perform

On Judith Butler

Judith Butler's Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly (Harvard, 2015) is a series of occasional pieces which, taken together, show both the extraordinary range of her thought, and perhaps also some of its limitations. Here her thinking extends from questions of gender performativity, seen as an instance of precarity ...
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What the Performative Can’t Perform

2016 Heuss Lecture: The Dialectics of Progress

Rahel Jaeggi

How should we conceive of social change and moral progress? How do they come about? How are the two phenomena related to each other and how can they be evaluated—as change for the better? These are questions which have repeatedly preoccupied contemporary philosophical discussion and which seem to be indispensable for a critical ...
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2016 Heuss Lecture: The Dialectics of Progress

Vision and Reality in Bernie’s Revolution

“And the children swarmed to him like settlers. He became a land.” (Edward Lear, 1945) A certain classic exposition on moral political thought holds that men acquire control and certainty about their world and their own existence through justice, and that humans’ knowledge of the world is inseparable from their own ...
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Vision and Reality in Bernie’s Revolution

The Business of Being Made

Two weeks ago The New School’s Ferenczi Center hosted Katie Gentile and a panel of contributors to celebrate the launch of a new book and a new series. The book, The Business of Being Made: The Temporalities of Reproductive Technologies in Psychoanalysis and Culture, is the first to critically analyze ...
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The Business of Being Made

Nihilists with Good Imaginations

In what may be her most ambitious piece yet, Chiara Bottici recently published a call for a continuation of debates around intersectional oppression along the lines traced out by anarchist thought. Somewhat surprisingly, though, Bottici avoided making explicit reference to some of her previous work, which, though it may be ...

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Nihilists with Good Imaginations

Creating Compliant Subjects

What is permitted by whom?

This post is in relation to the Gender and Domination course in OOPS. Reading excerpts from Spinzoa’s Theological-Political Treatise, I am reminded of one of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s fundamental anxieties in The Brothers Karamazov, namely, that without the presence of God “everything is permitted.” Perhaps an even more apt quotation would be Dmitri Karamazov’s ...
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Creating Compliant Subjects

Althusserians Anonymous (the relapse)

1. Old versus Young Marx I am a recovering Althusserian. For decades now I have been Althusser-free, for the most part, but we all have our lapses. The first step to becoming a recovering Althusserian is to recognize that you have no control and are unconsciously always a little bit Althusserian ...
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Althusserians Anonymous (the relapse)