Quote

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.

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
Individual
Satisfaction
Living
Commitment
War
Meaning
Others
Gives
Satisfactions
Certain
Terrible
Susceptibility
Giving
Actually
Vulnerability
Kind
Peace
Wounded
Lives
Resistance

More quotes by Judith Butler

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Gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself.
Judith Butler
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Let me say one thing to clarify my position. I think we can take distance from norm but I think we are also mired in norm, empêtrés, I think you say in French. And I think the choices we can make are only in a certain struggle with the norms out of which we're constituted.
Judith Butler
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Maybe one of the jobs of theory or philosophy is to elevate principles that seem impossible, or that have the status of the impossible, to stand by them and will them, even when it looks highly unlikely that they'll ever be realised. But that's ok, it's a service.
Judith Butler
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I do think we need to allow for there to be room for subversive and ironic speech. We need to be able to put out plays in which we make fun of ourselves or in which we interrogate the words that injure us. And maybe give them another meaning.
Judith Butler
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All of us, as bodies, are in the active position of figuring out how to live with and against the constructions - or norms - that help to form us.
Judith Butler
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The state or global forms of power that seek to protect populations considered in danger may well extend their own power through those acts of protection.
Judith Butler
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I am much more open about categories of gender, and my feminism has been about women's safety from violence, increased literacy, decreased poverty and more equality.
Judith Butler
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The idea that speaking at all on the topic, demanding public space in which to have that debate, is itself an act of complicity with violence, and violence against Israelis, understood as synonymous with Jews, and so violence against Jews, clearly stops the speech with an unspeakable allegation.
Judith Butler
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It's important that if one opposes discriminatory speech, one opposes all kinds. That is that one decides on a principle that it will include all minorities. But if the protection of one minority against another minority is what is happening, then I worry about that.
Judith Butler
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I think that public grieving is a good thing. People need to be grieved loss needs to be acknowledged publicly, because it helps to confer a sense of reality on the loss but also because it makes it known that this was a real life.
Judith Butler
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I think maybe it's more important to know the traditional concepts we have for thinking about how bodies are feminine or masculine or how sexuality is, straight or gay. These categories very often fail to describe the complexity of who we are.
Judith Butler
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Perhaps the promise of phallus is always dissatisfying in some way.
Judith Butler
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We lose ourselves in what we read, only to return to ourselves, transformed and part of a more expansive world.
Judith Butler
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Not all bodies are born in male or female. There is a continuum of bodies and it seems to me that trying to persuade medical and psychiatrist establishments to deal with the intersex involves critique of the binary gender system. Similarly there continues to be extreme, sometimes very extreme violence against transgender people.
Judith Butler
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If gender is eradicated, so too is an important domain of pleasure for many people. And others have a strong sense of self bound up with their genders, so to get rid of gender would be to shatter their self-hood.
Judith Butler
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Race and class are rendered distinct analytically only to produce the realization that the analysis of the one cannot proceed without the other. A different dynamic it seems to me is at work in the critique of new sexuality studies.
Judith Butler
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Lacanian theory must be understood as a kind of “slave morality.
Judith Butler
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You could protect a religious minority against gays and lesbians. Or you could protect gays and lesbians against a religious minority. And then, it seems to me something political is happening. Because we're not really looking at the kind of speech that is injurious.
Judith Butler
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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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It is clear that whatever language of democracy [Barack] Obama and his administration use is very tactically deployed, and has as its main aim the extension of US power and interests.
Judith Butler