Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature and Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley.
Zeynep Gambetti is Associate Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Bogaziçi University.
Leticia Sabsay is Assistant Professor in the Gender Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature and Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley.
Zeynep Gambetti is Associate Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Bogaziçi University.
Leticia Sabsay is Assistant Professor in the Gender Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature and Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley.
Zeynep Gambetti is Associate Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Bogaziçi University.
Leticia Sabsay is Assistant Professor in the Gender Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Nonsovereign Agonism (or, Beyond Affirmation versus Vulnerability)
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Published:October 2016
This chapter seeks to displace the “affirmation versus vulnerability” schema by asking whether collective and collectively mobilized vulnerability would be a gesture that occasions (rather than finalizes) political action. It takes a closer look at vulnerability as aporia (what does this concept render admissible, and what does it render inadmissible regarding political subjectivity?) by focusing on feminist and antimilitarist activity in post-Yugoslavia, and, in particular, Women in Black’s enactments of cross-border camaraderie and mourning for those officially turned into “enemies” and violently disavowed as such. These activists’ mode of protest is about exposing the embodied losses—of bodies, communities, and possibilities—that haunt the common intelligibility of memorable life. To think vulnerability together with affirmation would prompt us to trouble the calculative reasoning that typically structures individualistic accounts of resistant subjectivity as sovereign free will. The text unravels the ways such complexities are crucial to activism and its losses, or activism marked by loss.
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