Full Description
What would a Butlerian Marxism look like? Marxist criticisms of Butler range from careful comparisons of forms to the total dismissal of an unpolitical, merely cultural anarchy. None of these criticisms, however, focuses on what seems to most closely unite these two projects: the universal abolition of the universal. While Marxist communism is focused on the abolition of value and property, Butler is consistently concerned throughout their corpus with the abolition of the subject as the universal form of social relations, an abolition staged by way of a relational ontology and ethics. Their methodologies for achieving abolition, however, vary hugely. Butler's sees the performativity of subjects and power as an opportunity for differential assembly, Marxists are primarily concerned with the working class as a revolutionary vanguard that withdraws its labor from production.
Judith Butler and Marxism explores the possibility of a Butlerian Marxism, understood as abolitionist performativity, differential vulnerability, and generalized practices of care. The essays in this volume attempt to actualize the antagonistic persistence of social particulars, pursuing the abolition of the domination and violence that pervade society with increasing brutality. The three sections of this volumeare structured according to three pivotal political concepts in Butler's corpus: performativity, vulnerability, and care. Each essay contributes to a possible mutual development of Butler's and Marxism's concern with assembly, interdependence, and refusal, forming a revolutionary politics of care.
This is the first book to fully study the contentious link between the vastly influential projects of Judith Butler and Marxism.
Contents
Acknowledgments, Elliot C. Mason and Valentina Moro
Introduction, Elliot C. Mason and Valentina Moro
Part I. Performativity
Chapter 1. Performing Gender, Performing Capital, Bruno Monfort
Chapter 2. Assembling Antagonisms in Butler and Marxist-Feminism, Elliot C. Mason
Chapter 3. Diasporic Emanation, Unchosen Cohabitation: Judith Butler's Jewish-Marxist Critique of the Nation State, Fanny Söderbäck
Part II: Vulnerability
Chapter 4. Bodies in Space, Marina Vishmidt
Chapter 5. Enacting Vulnerability as Resistance, Mona Lloyd
Chapter 6. Politics of Finitude, Alfred Sköld and Peter Clement Lund
Part III: Care
Chapter 7. The Unfamiliar State in Times of Ungrievable Loss, Sara Edenheim
Chapter 8. Living Together, Elena Loizidou
Chapter 9. Care as Critical Methodology,Zona Zarić
Index
About the Editors
About the Contributors
