Quote

Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact.

Judith Butler

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Judith Butler
Age: 68
Born: 1956
Born: February 24
Art Theorist
Feminist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Philosopher
Sociologist
University Teacher
Writer
Cleveland
Ohio
Judith P. Butler
Judith Pamela Butler
Face
Undone
Faces
Clearly
Desire
Grief
Seems
Case
Doe
Missing
Something
Stay
Always
Cases
Already
Intact

More quotes by Judith Butler

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Whether or not we continue to enforce a universal conception of human rights at moments of outrage and incomprehension, precisely when we think that others have taken themselves out of the human community as we know it, is a test of our very humanity.
Judith Butler
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Perhaps the promise of phallus is always dissatisfying in some way.
Judith Butler
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The real question is how do you survive at the same time you pose those risks? Because you need to survive. And it seems to me that you survive in community or in solidarity, with others who are taking the risk with you.
Judith Butler
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In fact in politics, sometimes the thing that will never happen actually starts to happen. And there have to be people who hold out for that, and who accept that they are idealists and that they are operating on principle as opposed to realpolitik.
Judith Butler
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I must say, I feel the reception of my work is none of my business.
Judith Butler
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Peace is a certain resistance to the terrible satisfactions of war. It’s a commitment to living with a certain kind of vulnerability to others and susceptibility to being wounded that actually gives our individual lives meaning.
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Photography has a relation to intervention, but photographing is not the same as an intervening.
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Gender is not something that one is, it is something one does, an act… a doing rather than a being.
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People who expect enmity to suddenly convert into love are probably using the wrong model.
Judith Butler
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Indeed, even if one believed that criticisms of Israel are by and large heard as anti-semitic (by Jews, anti-semites, or people who could be described as neither), it would become the responsibility of all of us to change the conditions of reception so that the public might begin to distinguish between criticism of Israel and a hatred of Jews.
Judith Butler
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When I was young there were lesbians who said Oh, I will free myself of all norms of masculinity, all norms of heterosexuality . And then, they ended up in very complex relationships that were maybe full of heterosexual power dynamics or full of lesbian forms of masculinity and they became very confused.
Judith Butler
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When we say gender is performed, we usually mean that weve taken on a role or were acting in some way and that our acting or our role playing is crucial to the gender that we are and the gender that we present to the world.
Judith Butler
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Parody by itself is not subversive, and there must be a way to understand what makes certain kinds of parodic repetitions effectively disruptive, truly troubling, and which repetitions become domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony
Judith Butler
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If you are asking whether states and state actors can only respond through revenge, then you are suggesting that diplomatic solutions are hopeless.
Judith Butler
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Surely binationalism is not love, but there is, we might say, a necessary and impossible attachment that makes a mockery of identity, an ambivalence that emerges from the decentering of the nationalist ethos and that forms the basis of a permanent ethical demand.
Judith Butler
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All of those who inhabit the world have a right to be here by virtue of their being here at all. To be here means you have a right to be here.
Judith Butler
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I think that many of the mobilizations against the wars waged by the US and its allies since 2001 have been non-violent and massive. We have seen them throughout European capitals and in the US, and in many other parts of the world as well. So it is not only imaginable, but already actual.
Judith Butler
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I think we won't be able to understand the operations of trans-phobia, homophobia, if we don't understand how certain kinds of links are forged between gender and sexuality in the minds of those who want masculinity to be absolutely separate from femininity and heterosexuality to be absolutely separate from homosexuality.
Judith Butler
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We need a legal and political understanding of the right of the refugee, whereby no solution for one group produces a new class of refugees - you can't solve a refugee problem by producing a new, potentially greater refugee problem.
Judith Butler
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I wonder about economic sanctions, though, since that is a way that states engage in boycotts against one another.
Judith Butler