When Judith Butler was serving as my dissertation adviser at the University of California in the late 1990s, they did not yet go by “they.” No one in my circle did, and at the time that circle included one of the most forward-thinking spaces in the world when it came to matters of gender: Butler’s dissertation seminar, which met every …
The categories violence and nonviolence pose enormous philosophical and ethical challenges. State violence The American philosopher and feminist, Judith Butler, makes a major advancement in the debates on nonviolence in her latest book, The Force of Nonviolence. She argues that to understand nonviolence one has to first admit that attributing something as violence is predetermined within interpretive frames which confer …
