Quote

It seems, though, that historically we have now reached a position in which Jews cannot legitimately be understood always and only as presumptive victims.

Judith Butler

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Cannot
Victims
Seems
Jews
Always
Reached
Jew
Victim
Understood
Presumptive
Position
Legitimately
Though
Historically

More quotes by Judith Butler

Image
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
Image
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
Image
Photography has a relation to intervention, but photographing is not the same as an intervening.
Judith Butler
Image
... that gender is a choice, or that gender is a role, or that gender is a construction that one puts on, as one puts on clothes in the morning, that there is a 'one' who is prior to this gender, a one who goes to the wardrobe of gender and decides with deliberation which gender it will be today.
Judith Butler
Image
Although the history of dispossession and exile for Jews is very different from the history of dispossession and exile for Palestinians, they both have recent and searing experiences which might allow them to come to a common understanding on the rights of refugees, or what it might mean to live together with resonant histories of that kind.
Judith Butler
Image
I do think it's important that we experiment with new vocabularies. That new words help us conceptualize our social existence in a different way.
Judith Butler
Image
Gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts.
Judith Butler
Image
The important thing is to think about theory in life in that way. And I think we don't have to be theorists, we don't have to have gone to the academy, or to the university to learn theory and to be a theorist of gender.
Judith Butler
Image
I think we have to accept a wide variety of positions on gender. Some want to be gender-free, but others want to be free really to be a gender that is crucial to who they are.
Judith Butler
Image
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
Image
Perhaps the promise of phallus is always dissatisfying in some way.
Judith Butler
Image
Photographs can be forms of recruitment, ways of bringing the viewer into the military, as it were. In this way, they prepare us for war, even enlist us in war, at the level of the senses, establishing a sensate regime of war.
Judith Butler
Image
I think something happens only when people find that they are moved with others, find themselves linked or allied in new ways, showing up or speaking out in ways that resonate with one another. That resonating can be very compelling and lead to moving and speaking more emphatically and with sharper focus.
Judith Butler
Image
In the first instance, performativity must be understood not as a singular or deliberate ‘act,’ but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names
Judith Butler
Image
So there might be a kind of collective effort that allows for those risks to be taken, pose a certain danger but not a suicidal one.
Judith Butler
Image
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
Image
People who expect enmity to suddenly convert into love are probably using the wrong model.
Judith Butler
Image
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
Image
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
Image
What we need is a political and joyous alternative to the behaviorist discourse, the Christian discourse on evil or sin, and the convergence of the two in forms of gender policing that [is] tyrannical and destructive.
Judith Butler