Last Friday, renowned critical theorist and author Judith Butler spoke to a packed auditorium in the West Hollywood Public Library, as part of the CalArts Politics and Aesthetics Masters Program series (which days prior featured a lecture by French philosopher Jacques Ranciére). Although highly theoretical, Butler addressed the demonstrations in Ferguson, the #BlackLivesMatter campaign, Occupy Wall Street, French “Universalist” feminism, undocumented immigrants, and the Egyptian revolution, raising questions about the “right to appear” and the “constitution of the public.”
Some highlights from her lecture:
“When strategic alliances require regarding one group as terrorists on one occasion and as democratic allies [or freedom fighters] on another, we see that democracy as a term can be very easily treated as a discursive strategy.”
“‘The people’ are not a given but are constituted, so even when a group or assembly or orchestrated collectivity calls itself ‘the people,’ they wield discourse in a certain way, making presumptions about who’s included, who is not…which means there is always another population which is not ‘the people.'”
“The filming of police actions has surely become a key way to expose the state-sponsored coercion under which freedom of assembly currently operates.”
“One reason critics sometimes said that the Occupy Movement was at fault, or weak, or not very political, was that there were no demands….But when bodies gather as they do to express their indignation or enact their plural existence in public space, they’re making broader demands: they’re demanding to recognized, to be valued, they’re exercising a right to appear, to exercise freedom.”
“The question of recognition is an important one, for if we can say that all human subjects deserve recognition, we presume that all human subjects are equally recognizable. But what if the field of human appearance that is highly regulated does not admit everyone?”
“Those who fought against the expulsion of the Roma from France just last year spoke not only for the Roma but against the violent and arbitrary power of the state to expel a stateless segment of its own population. (Something similar, I think, is happening now in Germany.) Similarly, we can say that state authorization for the police to arrest and deport veiled women in France is another example of a discriminatory action that targets a minority, a religious minority, which clearly denies their rights to appear in public as they will.”
For more information about the series and upcoming lectures, click here.