Table of Contents

Preface vii

1 Aporetic dispossession, or the trouble with dispossession 1

2 The logic of dispossession and the matter of the human (after the critique of metaphysics of substance) 10

3 A caveat about the "primacy of economy" 38

4 Sexual dispossessions 44

5 (Trans)possessions, or bodies beyond themselves 55

6 The sociality of self-poietics: Talking back to the violence of recognition 64

7 Recognition and survival, or surviving recognition 75

8 Relationality as self-dispossession 92

9 Uncounted bodies, incalculable performativity 97

10 Responsiveness as responsibility 104

11 Ex-propriating the performative 126

12 Dispossessed languages, or singularities named and renamed 131

13 The political promise of the performative 140

14 The governmentality of "crisis" and its resistances 149

15 Enacting another vulnerability: On owing and owning 158

16 Trans-border affective foreclosures and state racism 164

17 Public grievability and the politics of memorialization 173

18 The political affects of plural performativity 176

19 Conundrums of solidarity 184

20 The university, the humanities, and the book bloc 188

21 Spaces of appearance, politics of exposure 193

Notes 198

Index 205

About the Author

Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Her previous publications include Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex". She is currently the recipient of the Andrew Mellon Award for Distinguished Academic Achievement in the Humanities.

Athena Athanasiou teaches in the Department of Social Anthropology at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences.

Reviews

"Full of fantastic and well-argued insights." LSE Review of Books "What makes political responsiveness possible? With their rich and distinct wealth of philosophical knowledge and continuous political engagements, leading feminist scholars Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou set out to answer this question. Beginning from an awareness that we are all relational and interdependent beings, their lucid, compelling exchanges encourage us all to reflect again on what feminist and queer theory can contribute to the search for forms of collectivity capable of intervening in battles against these cruel and precarious times." Lynne Segal, Birkbeck, University of London and author of Making Trouble "In a series of bite-sized conversations, Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou explore the concept of dispossession and show its links to subjectivity, relationality, occupation, precarity, bio-politics and collective protest. As they push each other for clarification and introduce a range of examples, they jointly craft a new vision of what 'performative politics' might entail." Vikki Bell, Goldsmiths, University of London