Review: Adriana Zaharijević, ‘Judith Butler and Politics’
Review of Adriana Zaharijević’s Judith Butler and Politics (Edinburgh University Press, 2023) 248 pages
Abstract
Judith Butler and Politics by Zaharijević addresses the work of Judith Butler. It is based on a systematic reading of Butler’s work from the mid-1980s onwards, focusing on performativity, a liveable world and nonviolence. The main thread of the book is an ‘alternative ontology’ or social ontology of the body, here embedded in a discussion of interdependence, dispossession and vulnerability. In Judith Butler and Politics, the author scrupulously engages with the epistemological and political knots of Butler’s work and addresses the often polarised readings of Butler’s work, such as those concerning the place of the body and role of agency. Both the reading of Butler’s work and writing of Judith Butler and Politics are full of care in the sense of taking the challenges up rather than of writing them away.
Reviewed by Nina Perger
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Durkheim attempted to explain the reluctance sociology faced at the time at the time of its emergence. It was the reluctance of man to have to ‘renounce the unlimited power over the social order that for so long he ascribed to himself’ (1901/2013: 15–16). Opening the review of Judith Butler and Politics by Adriana Zaharijević with Durkheim, who is often considered one of the ‘fathers of sociology’—the history of science is indeed and noncoincidentally full of ‘fatherly’ figures—might seem peculiar. Perhaps, this is even odder when one considers the title of the book, which carries ‘the politics’ rather than ‘the social’. Giving sense to what appears as a detour from the very start, let us point to what haunts Durkheim in the included quote. It is the seeming necessity of using an either–or approach when thinking about sociality. This logic forces one to either think about the individual as having unlimited power over the world, as if the individual is somehow separated from the world and standing above the world, or, on the contrary, about the social world as having unlimited power over the subjects, determining their actions fully. Rather than one standing against the other, as implied by this type of reasoning, a relation between the one and other is of a different character, of one within the other and vice versa.
To circle back to Judith Butler and Politics, it is precisely the question of sociality—of human beings, who are necessarily socially embodied, of agents being and becoming amid social conditions not of their own making and choosing, of agents not having unlimited power over the order of the world and yet having some kind of power nonetheless—which appears to be one of the main, if not main, path Zaharijević follows. A Durkheimian detour then shows that the reach of Judith Butler and Politics—despite being philosophically grounded—transcends the usual institutionalised disciplinary boundaries and boundary-making that are of recent origin (see, e.g., Wallerstein, 1996), as the question of the social seeks its answer(s) beyond neatly divided disciplines.
Considering that the question of sociality is one of the main paths of the book, one might then wonder why the book carries ‘politics’ in the title. The question appears even more relevant when considering the absence of a straightforward conception of the political, the notion of which ‘remains relatively elusive’ in Judith Butler’s work, as recognised by Zaharijević herself (1, 112). Yet despite this absence of conceptual straightforwardness, the work of Judith Butler—and Zaharijević’s Judith Butler and Politics in particular—is not lacking in terms of the ‘political’. On the contrary, the ‘political’ is indeed strongly present, and it is so in a double sense.
First, following Butler, Zaharijević identifies a ‘fine thread’ connecting Butler’s political thought across diverse issues, and turns this thread into one of the main questions of the book itself: ‘How is it possible that some lives do not count as lives?’ (4). Behind this question lurks the social—as put forward above—its particular and taken for granted, not unchangeable, yet persistent configurations that shape particular power relations and distinctions through which some lives are (more readily) ‘derealised’ (189). Agents—to return to Durkheim’s suggestion and in opposition to dominant ‘liberal versions of ontology’ and their ideal of self-mastery (191; Zaharijević 2020)—do not have unlimited power over the social and its ordering of the world. Recognising that social norms shape reality and ‘equip us with intelligibility’ (17), assign meanings and distribute values, one enters the terrain of political questions on ‘how reality might be remade’. Namely, in reality as it is, ‘not all lives count the same’ (17). To address this, Zaharijević points out that the reality, the world as it is and the ways in which agents are ‘ordered’ and socially encouraged to make sense of themselves and the world need to be questioned. Second, the ‘political’ is present in commitment by Zaharijević, which is not tied to an attempt to provide ‘the most accurate interpretation’ of Butler’s work but rather to ‘offer Butler’s expansive thoughts through a frame of political imagination’ (vi). This is, as Zaharijević states, ‘a more than necessary requirement in the moment in which our world finds itself’ (vi).
Judith Butler and Politics is based on systematic readings of Judith Butler’s work from the mid-1980s onwards and is structured according to the chronological order of Butler’s work. As such, Judith Butler and Politics are divided into two main parts, with the first part focusing on performativity and encompassing discussions on bodies, norms and agency, here mostly referring to Butler’s work before 2001, and the second focusing on liveable world and nonviolence, here mostly referring to Butler’s work as developed after 2001, which has a stronger emphasis on ‘alternative ontology’ (191). However, time runs queerly rather than in a neat and linear fashion, and the ‘seemingly neat division into “before” and “after”’ (6)—based on topics in focus and on companions in theories that Judith Butler chooses to travel with in time and across issues—is, as Zaharijević notes, complicated. Regardless of the queer chronology, Zaharijević clearly explains the structure of the book in question, which follows the ‘two-step architectonic’ as reflecting a ‘double commitment’ (7) to philosophy and politics, both of which are distinctive but not entirely distinguishable in Butler’s work.
Considering the vast scope of Judith Butler’s work and, even more, the vast scope of studies devoted to Judith Butler’s work, it is a difficult task to place this book alongside the others that pursue the same aim of reading, understanding and interpreting Butler’s work. This is even more so because one must immediately forego the impossible task of providing a complete overview, which would call for a necessary failure because each attempt at reading and writing is already an attempt to grasp the work from particular angles, pushing some concepts and their implications to the foreground while necessarily leaving others behind. Whereas Zaharijević traces a ‘peculiar social ontology’ (4), others, for example Chambers and Carver (2008), predominantly focus on Butler as a troublemaker and turn their attention to subversion. Foregoing another impossible task—that of providing ‘the most accurate interpretation’ (vi)—Zaharijević rather goes with the body of Butler’s work to offer and invite readers to follow the path of social ontology and insurrection at the level of ontology in Butler’s work. Putting forward and untangling the ‘ontological’ turn, which has been less thematised in the field of studies devoted to Butler’s work, is also most—or one of—the significant contributions of Judith Butler and Politics.
To review what Judith Butler and Politics does, we will diverge from the usual review process. Instead of following the structure that the author has set up, we will instead follow the ‘bold statements’ made by Zaharijević throughout the book, statements that often go against the prevalent interpretations of Butler’s work but always do so extensively substantiated and carefully sculpted. In doing so, we will also explore Zaharijević’s readings of Butler’s work, in which interpretations seem to be particularly polarised.
One of those statements, which is particularly elaborated on in the first chapter, refers to the place accorded by Butler to the body in their theory of performativity, which is sometimes interpreted as neglecting the body and bodily dimension, with the further assumption being that the body was only later and subsequently given its proper place in Butler’s work. In contrast to this way of reading, Zaharijević claims that ‘bodies were there all along’ (4)—a bold statement indeed, considering that Butler themselves have stated that, whenever they wanted to think bodies, they ‘kept losing track of the subject’ (Butler, 1993: ix). However, by retracing Butler’s theoretical paths and those of their companions—through the works of de Beauvoir, Hegel, Rubin and the rest—Zaharijević argues that Butler’s take on performativity was already an attempt to ‘think bodies differently’ (54). Thinking bodies ‘differently’ undoes the fiction of the body as the abstracted ‘body as such’—no body in particular—of body as an individualised matter over which an individual has full possession, which is also an argument that can be traced back to one of Zaharijević’s recent work (2020). To ‘think bodies differently’ is to think of them as embedded in the mess of social reality—as becoming and doing so through social relations and powerful—sometimes fateful naturalised inscriptions, as embedded within the nexus of social norms, including those of gender, with their socially obligatory, constraining but also enticing and constitutive character.
This also brings us to the second ‘bold statement’ by Zaharijević, which argues that ‘gender is a posterior, subsequential concept, serving as an explanatory tool for a more primary object of Butler’s consideration’ (63). Indeed, by placing bodies and acts—‘what one does with one’s body’ (63)—as the cornerstone of Butler’s theory of performativity, Zaharijević traces a ‘fine thread’ connecting what is sometimes perceived and taken up as separated, that is, ‘Butler as gender theorist’ and ‘Butler as nonviolence theorist’ (Zaharijević, 2024: 522). With bodies and acts now clearly in the foreground—understood as coming into existence through socially structured and structuring practices—the social conditions of limited and limiting possibilities of becoming are highlighted. By their normative reach, by calling for and pulling certain ways of being into life while restricting the possibilities for others, norms make bodies ‘more or less exposed to precarity and dispossession’ (189), thus exposing their (also but not only) violent character, which is predominantly misrecognised as such.
Despite carrying the weight of fatefulness, norms and their ‘verdicts’ on becoming and being are not final and determinative; following this, Zaharijević dives into Butler’s account of agency. Once again, Zaharijević goes against the common interpretations that are often spread over one of the main—but ultimately—false antinomies. The antinomy of voluntarism and determinism, subjectivism and objectivism, appears as an antinomy that can, to paraphrase Bourdieu (Bourdieu and Chartier, 2015: 41), be only answered with the one against the other and with the other against the first. Zaharijević takes the reader through the polarised readings of Butler’s approach to agency that tend to twist the stick to one or the other way by reading Butler’s approach to agency either as a matter of a ‘great performer’ or as totally abolished (96). However, the answer to the question of antinomy lies neither in elevating one side against and over the other nor in some kind of compromise between voluntarism and determinism. ‘If we do have any agency, it is not to be found in the denial of the conditions of our constitution’, notes Zaharijević (121), but neither is agency completely lost in the determining nature of these very conditions, which are—by demanding repetitions to stay alive—inherently unstable, despite being terribly persistent. Thus, the answer lies in a register of a completely different kind of agency as being ‘intrinsically embodied and social’, as Zaharijević also puts it elsewhere (2021: 24).
Emphasising the social reality in which agency takes place, Zaharijević notes, leads Butler to elaborate on the major building blocks of a ‘social ontology of the body’: the ideas of interdependence, dispossession and vulnerability (119). These very same notions, including those of precariousness and precarity as the unequal materialisations of inherent dependence on the social to which agents are exposed, guide the call for nonviolence, to which Zaharijević turns in the last chapter. The call stems from acknowledging life as ‘precarious, bound to the world, in need of a relation, and in need of a relation that is not violent’ (173). In a way, this chapter enables Zaharijević to circle back to the Introduction, returning to the (possible) ‘leitmotif’ of Judith Butler and Politics, that is, ‘insurrection at the level of ontology’ (2). This insurrection takes the shape of becoming and doing differently, nonviolently, of sculpting out the relations, spaces and possibilities that do not yet exist but that can be brought into social existence in media res. Avoiding determinism—this time in relation to social reality rather than the agent—the call for nonviolence is guided by acknowledging the unnecessary shape of the world as it is, therefore, by acknowledging the possibility of the world ‘in which violence is not what socially configures us to fit into established social reality’ (188).
Reading Judith Butler and Politics through the main ‘bold statements’ and careful disentangling that Zaharijević makes can hopefully enable one to see what the book does. However, there is also a need to appreciate how Zaharijević takes up the oeuvre of Judith Butler. In this sense, two particular things greatly enrich Zaharijević’s work, that is, the way of writing and of reading.
First, and related to the way of writing, Zaharijević carefully guides the reader through many diverse theoretical paths while unravelling tightly woven, sometimes also contentious epistemological and political, knots. Rather than avoided or glanced over, these are scrupulously taken up, revealing their complexity while also acknowledging that some questions—that is, how to lead a good life—are only ever viable as long as they remain in the state of ambiguity and indefiniteness. Second, the world situating the book Judith Butler and Politics—the scientific, academic world—is particularly vulnerable to being inclined towards what Bourdieu has named ‘cynical readings’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 211), towards waging theoretical, analytical tools as weapons in symbolic battles and struggles for prestige, authority and symbolic capital. These very tendencies seem to make reading vulnerable to disfiguring into practices of fast readings and misreadings. In contrast to this, Judith Butler and Politics is full of careful reading, that is, of reading which reads carefully and in an attempt to understand and work with the challenges, dilemmas and gaps rather than against them.
Considering the scope of Judith Butler and Politics, its arduous task, and especially the distinctive ways of writing and reading in which this task is carried out, one can conclude by circling back to Zaharijević’s very opening words in the Introduction. Indeed, ‘it is not very often that reading a book leaves us with a feeling that something in us has changed’ (1), but reading Judith Butler and Politics might be one of those occasions.
References
Bourdieu P and Chartier R (2015) The Sociologist and the Historian. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bourdieu P and Wacquant L (1992) An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Butler J (1993) Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York: Routledge.
Chambers S and Carver T (2008) Judith Butler and Political Theory: Troubling Politics. London and New York: Routledge.
Durkheim É (1901/2013) The Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts on Sociology and its Method. New York: Free Press.
Wallerstein I (1996) Open the Social Sciences. Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Zaharijević A (2020) Becoming a master of an island again: On the desire to be bodiless. Redescriptions: Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory 23(2): 107–119. DOI: 10.33134/rds.322.
Zaharijević A (2021) On Butler’s theory of agency. In: Halsema A. Kwastek K and van den Oever R. (eds) Bodies that Still Matter: Resonances of the Work of Judith Butler. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 21–30.
Zaharijević A (2024) Butler traveling east: On practices of reading and translating. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 49(3): 511–533. DOI: 10.1086/727988.
Nina Perger is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana. Her research interests include gender and sexuality, sociology of everyday life and social theory. Her work has been published in various journals, and she is the author of a book titled ‘Expanding the Horizons of the Possible: On Nonbinary Gender and Sexuality Identities in Slovenia’ (published in Slovene by FDV Publishing House 2020).
Email: nina.perger@fdv.uni-lj.si
