welcome back to the deep dive today we are not
just stepping into a topic we are uh stepping
into what feels like a battlefield and i really
don't say that to be dramatic no it's true we
are looking at a figure who occupies a space
in the modern world that is well it's almost
impossible to reconcile on one hand you have
a philosopher who receives the adorno prize which
is the highest cultural honor in Germany. A huge
deal. A huge deal. And on the other hand, you
have a person who, while visiting Brazil for
a conference on, of all things, democracy, was
burned in effigy by a furious mob in the streets
of São Paulo. It is. I mean, it's a level of
polarization that you usually reserve for heads
of state or, you know, revolutionaries, not for
an academic who spends their time analyzing French
post -structuralism and German idealism. Exactly.
We are talking about Judith Butler. Now, if you've
set foot on a university campus in the last 30
years or if you've scrolled through some of the
darker corners of Twitter, you know the name.
Yeah. You definitely know the buzzwords. Gender
is a construct. Performativity. Queer theory.
These phrases have become cultural shorthand.
And that's precisely the problem, isn't it? When
ideas become shorthand, they lose their texture,
they lose their rigor. Butler has become a symbol
for a certain kind of culture war, a stand -in
for everything people love or hate about modern
progressivism. Right. But the actual work, it's
dense, it's challenging, and it's surprisingly
different from the slogans you see on the T -shirts.
That is our mission today. We're going to strip
away the memes and the outrage and actually look
at the text. We have a massive stack of sources
here. Biographies, the dense theoretical books
from the late 80s, the political writings post
9 -11, all the way up to the 2024 release, Who's
Afraid of Gender? It's a huge body of work. It
is. And we want to understand not just what Judith
Butler thinks, but how they think and why this
specific thinker has become the lightning rod
for global debates on everything from, you know,
bathrooms to foreign policy. And it's worth noting
that while gender is... the headline, the scope
is so much broader. Butler gives us a toolkit
for understanding violence, mourning, language,
and really what it actually means to be a human
subject in a world that is constantly trying
to define you. So I have to ask the question
that I know is on everyone's mind before we start.
Butler is legendary for being difficult to read,
right? I remember hearing about a bad writing
award years ago. They absolutely did win that
award back in the late 90s. And we're going to
talk about that because Butler actually has a
fascinating defense for why the writing has to
be difficult. Oh, I'm interested to hear that.
But my promise to you and the listeners is that
today we are going to do the translation work.
We're going to take those complex sentences and
hopefully... Turn them into those aha moments.
I love that. So let's rewind the clock. Because
when I look at the biography, I sort of expected
to see someone born in a Parisian cafe, you know,
debating Sartre. But the origin story is much
more American heartland. Cleveland, Ohio, 1956.
That is where it begins. But to understand the
environment, you really have to look at the lineage.
Butler was born into a family of Hungarian Jewish
and Russian Jewish descent. And this isn't just
trivia. It's foundational. Most of the maternal
grandmother's family was murdered in the Holocaust.
Wow. So that shadow of state violence, of just
catastrophic loss, it's there before Butler even
speaks a word. It's the atmosphere of the home.
Butler grew up in a practicing Reform Jewish
household, went to Hebrew school, the whole nine
yards. But there is this incredible anecdote
from their childhood that I think is the skeleton
key to understanding Butler's entire intellectual
life. The punishment story? I saw this in the
notes and I couldn't believe it was real. It's
very real. So imagine a young Judith Butler in
Hebrew school, extremely bright, but also what
the teachers called talkative. A troublemaker.
A bit of a clown. Butler was the kid asking too
many questions, disrupting the flow. So the rabbi
decides that Butler needs to be disciplined.
Okay, usually that means detention or writing,
I will not talk in class on a blackboard a hundred
times. Not for this rabbi, no. He assigned Butler
special ethics tutorials. It was essentially
a private philosophy class as a punishment. That
is the best punishment I ever heard of. Right,
but here's where it gets wild. At age 14, Butler
wasn't just reading the basics. They asked the
rabbi to study three specific topics. First,
why Baruch Spinoza was excommunicated from the
synagogue. OK, that's a heavy hitter for a 14
-year -old. Spinoza is not light reading. Not
at all. Second, whether German idealism. The
high philosophy of Kant and Hegel could be held
accountable for the rise of Nazism. And third,
existential theology. My God. At 14, I was trying
to figure out how to get out of gym class. Butler
is asking if the entire structure of German rationality
accidentally created the Third Reich. Exactly.
And just think about what that signals. It signals
a mind that is deeply engaged with its own community.
Butler didn't run away from the synagogue. They
dug deeper into it. But it's also a mind that
is obsessed with the failures of authority. Right.
Why was this guy kicked out for thinking differently?
Why was Spinoza kicked out? How did this civilized
philosophy of Germany fail to stop or maybe even
enable the Holocaust? It's this constant questioning
of the rules, even the rules of your own team.
It sets the stage perfectly. It's this blend
of like insider knowledge and outsider critique.
It's a rebellion, but a scholarly rebellion.
Precisely. Intellectual DNA takes Butler to Bennington
College and then to Yale for a PhD. And interestingly,
the early work isn't about gender or sexuality
at all. It's about that heavy German stuff, Hegel,
phenomenology, the mechanisms of desire and recognition.
Which is, I guess, the direct line from those
punishment tutorials. It really is. It's all
about how we become who we are in relation to
others and to power. Which brings us to the late
80s, the moment the academic earth shook. We
have to talk about the book that launched a thousand
dissertations, Gender Trouble. We do. But to
really, really grasp Gender Trouble, which dropped
in 1990, we need to look at a precursor essay
from 1988 called Performative Acts and Gender
Constitution. This is where the concept of performativity
is born. Okay, let's unpack this. Because performativity
is one of those words that everyone uses, but
I feel like 90 % of us are using it wrong. When
I hear performance... I think of a stage play.
I think of an actor putting on a costume. Right.
And that is the most common misunderstanding.
People think Butler is saying, I wake up in the
morning, I go to my closet, and I decide to perform
man today. Tomorrow I might perform woman. As
if it's a singular voluntary choice, like putting
on a hat. And Butler says, that is not it. Butler
explicitly rejects that. To understand performativity,
you have to go back to linguistics. There's a
philosopher of language named J .L. Austin who
talked about speech acts. Speech acts, okay.
He pointed out that there are some things you
say that don't just describe the world, they
actually do something in the world. They bring
something into being. Like what? Give me an example.
Okay, so the classic example is when a judge
says, I sentence you to 10 years in prison. The
judge isn't describing a prison sentence that
already exists. His words create the sentence.
They make it real. Or when a couple says, I do
at a wedding. Exactly. The words change their
legal status. They aren't just reporting on a
feeling. They're performing an action that has
consequences. Those are performative utterances.
Okay, so the language creates the reality. I'm
with you so far. Now, apply that to gender. Butler
argues that gender is not an internal truth.
It's not a soul or a biological destiny radiating
from your core. Instead, gender is a set of acts
repeated over time. It is the way you walk, the
way you speak, the way you sit, the way you dress,
all of these things. So it's a script. It is
a script that has been rehearsed for centuries.
And this is the key. We perform it so often and
everyone around us performs it so consistently
that we forget it's a script. We start to believe
that the acts are the result of an internal gender.
Ah. Butler flicks it. The acts create the illusion
of the internal gender. The repetition of the
performance is what makes gender feel real and
natural. So when a doctor says, it's a girl.
That isn't a description of the baby. No. Butler
argues that it's a girl. It's a performative
speech act. It is the first command. It's the
director yelling action. It sets the script in
motion. The pink blanket, the name, the tone
of voice used, the expectations, the girling
of the child begins immediately. That is a mind
bending shift because the old feminist slogan
was sex is biological. Gender is social. Sex
is the hardware. Gender is the software. Right.
The classic distinction. Sex is between the legs.
Gender is between the ears. That was the consensus.
And Butler. blew that up in gender trouble. They
argued that sex itself, the biological categorization,
is also socially constructed. Hold on. How can
biology be socially constructed? Bodies are real,
right? I mean, chromosomes, hormones, they exist.
Oh, absolutely. And this is a huge point of confusion.
Butler isn't saying bodies don't exist. They
aren't saying matter isn't real. But they are
saying that we can never access the body raw.
We always, always view the body through the lens
of our culture, our language, our expectations.
So we're wearing gender glasses all the time.
You are. When a doctor looks at an ultrasound
or a newborn, they aren't just seeing tissue.
They're looking for specific signs that allow
them to categorize that tissue into a binary
system, male or female, that our society invented
and is deeply invested in. So the binary isn't
a fact of nature. It's a grid we place over nature.
Exactly. And because we are so committed to that
grid, we ignore, or even surgically correct,
the complexity of biology. Things like intersex
traits, hormonal variations, to force everything
into those two neat boxes. So it's less a scientific
fact and more a regulatory system. It's a regulatory
system. And that system creates trouble for anyone
who doesn't fit. Yeah. If you don't perform the
script correctly, you are punished. You are seen
as wrong or unnatural or sick. Your very existence
is called into question. But if it is a script...
Scripts can be rewritten, right? That seems to
be the hopeful part of the theory. That was the
glimmer of hope Butler offered. If gender is
built through repetition, doing the same acts
over and over again, then maybe we can disrupt
it by subversive repetition. By doing the acts
wrong. By glitching the system. And this is where
the drag queens come in. This is where Paris
is Burning comes in. The seminal 1990 documentary
on New York's drag ball culture. Butler analyzes
this film to make a crucial point about imitation.
Which is? Well, people often think drag is a
fake version of a real woman. It's a man imitating
a woman. That's the common understanding, yeah.
Fultler says no. Drag reveals that being a woman
is itself a performance. When a drag queen exaggerates
the walk, the makeup, the hair, the mannerisms,
they're exposing the fact that cisgender women
are also performing those things. They're just
performing them in a way that's considered natural.
So there is no original. Exactly. Yeah. We're
all copying a copy of a copy. Drag just admits
it exposes the imitative structure of all gender.
It pulls back the curtain. I can see why this
blew people's minds. I mean, it's a fundamental
reordering of how we think about identity, but
it also led to that criticism we touched on.
The idea that gender is just a whim. Gender voluntarism.
Right. And this was a huge problem for Butler.
Critics said, oh, so I can just change my gender
like I changed my socks. Yeah. It was a massive
and I think often willful misreading of the work.
So Butler had to come back and say, no, that's
not it at all. They spent the next decade saying,
no, that is not what I meant. And that leads
us to the 1993 book, Bodies That Matter. This
was basically the sequel written to fix the misunderstandings
of the first movie. The correction. It was the
clarification. And this is where Butler introduces
a concept called conspitative constraint. Okay,
that sounds dense. Break it down for me. It means
we are made by norms we didn't choose. You are
born into a language you didn't invent. You're
born into a body you didn't select. You're constrained
by what Butler calls the matrix of intelligibility,
the rules of what makes a person make sense to
others. You can't just wake up one morning and
decide to step outside of that instantly. So
we are improvising, but we are improvising inside
a straitjacket. Or at least inside a very rigid
stage set. You can push the walls, you can bend
the bars, but you are formed by the very things
that limit you. Performativity isn't a free -for
-all. It is repetition under pressure. The materiality
of the body is real, but we can only understand
that materiality through the language and culture
available to us. That pressure, I imagine, creates
a lot of psychological weight. And this leads
us to the late 90s work, Sophistically Excitable
Speech from 1997. This is where Butler starts
talking about language and censorship. And this
work is incredibly relevant right now. I mean,
we are constantly debating hate speech, cancel
culture, and what the government should or shouldn't
ban. And usually the progressive stance is ban
hate speech. Use the state to protect vulnerable
people. And Butler, the ultimate progressive
icon, says, wait, be careful. Why? That seems
counterintuitive. Butler relies on Foucault here.
The argument is about power. If you ask the state
to define what hate speech is, you are giving
the state the power to define the limits of all
language. And the state might not always be your
friend. Exactly. That's a massive understatement.
If you create a legal weapon to ban injurious
speech, that weapon can be turned around and
used against you. A conservative government might
decide that teaching about systemic racism is
injurious speech against white students. Or that
displaying a pride flag is hate speech against
religious people, which is not hypothetical.
We are seeing that happen right now. We are.
Butler warned that marginalized groups should
be very, very wary of giving the state the power
of censorship because the state usually protects
the status quo. By appealing to the state for
protection, you may end up reinforcing the very
power that oppresses you. There's a paradox there.
A huge one. But there's a deeper point in excitable
speech, too. Something Butler calls the linguistic
I. The I, as in myself. Yes. Butler asks a really
fundamental question. How do we become a subject
who can say I? How do we get an identity in the
first place? I've never really thought about
that. Butler argues that we form ourselves through
a kind of primal censorship. We learn to speak
by learning what not to say. As children, we're
told, don't say that. We don't talk like that.
We prune away the parts of ourselves that are
unspeakable or unacceptable just to become intelligible
to others. So becoming a normal person involves
a kind of self -violence, a cutting away of possibilities.
A melancholic loss, yes. We sacrifice parts of
our potential humanity to fit into the norms
of language and society. And this happens so
early we don't even remember it. That is profound.
It connects right back to the gender theory.
We kill off the parts of us that don't fit the
boy or girl box just to survive socially. Precisely.
And that theme of survival, of who gets to survive
and who doesn't, takes a very dark and literal
turn as we move into the 2000s. September 11,
2001. The world changes. And looking at the bibliography,
Butler's work changes too. It pivots from gender
theory to political philosophy and war. It does.
Though Butler would say it isn't a pivot. but
an expansion. The question moves from how are
bodies gendered to how are bodies destroyed?
The key texts here are Precarious Life from 2004
and Frames of War from 2009. And the central
question that haunts these books is, when is
life grievable? Such a powerful question. Think
back to the days immediately after 9 -11 in the
U .S. The New York Times ran the portraits of
grief. We saw the faces, the names, the favorite
hobbies, the little life stories of the people
who died in the towers. It was heartbreaking.
They were fully humanized. We were invited to
mourn them as individuals. They were publicly
mourned. Their lives were framed as grievable.
Now, contrast that with the response. The U .S.
began bombing Afghanistan and later invaded Iraq.
Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of civilians
died. Did we see their photos in The New York
Times? Do we read about their favorite hobbies?
No. We saw numbers, collateral damage, faceless
casualties. Butler argues that those lives were
cast as ungrievable. It isn't just that they
died. It is that they were framed from the outset
as lives that never truly counted in the first
place. Their deaths were not registered as a
loss in the same way. They are ghosts before
they are even dead. Exactly. And the danger is
that if a life is ungrievable, you can destroy
it without it being considered a crime, a tragedy,
a murder. If you kill a grievable person, it
is murder. If you kill an ungrievable person,
it is just... It is just war. It's national security.
And Butler focuses a lot on Guantanamo Bay in
this period. Yes. As the perfect example of this,
the state of exception. This is a concept Butler
explores deeply. The U .S. government created
a legal black hole in Guantanamo. The detainees
weren't criminals within the U .S. justice systems.
They didn't have rights to a trial. Right. But
they also weren't classified as prisoners of
war under the Geneva Convention. So they were
legally nothing. They had no status. They were
stripped of personhood. They were living, breathing
bodies with no legal existence. Butler argues
that the state produces its sovereignty, its
ultimate power, by deciding who gets to have
rights and who doesn't. By suspending the law
for these people, the state shows it is above
the law. So if the reaction to injury like 9
-11 is to lash out, to make ourselves invulnerable,
and to make others ungrievable, What is the alternative?
Because that desire for revenge, for security,
it feels very human. It is human. But Butler
argues that the quest for total invulnerability
is a fantasy that leads to endless war. You can
never be completely saved, so you will always
find another enemy to destroy. Instead, Butler
proposes vulnerability as a resource. That sounds
counterintuitive. Usually vulnerability is a
weakness we're told to overcome. Butler reframes
it. We are all, by definition, vulnerable. We
are precarious. My body can be hurt by you. Your
body can be hurt by me. We need food, shelter,
and other people to survive. We are fundamentally
interdependent from the moment we're born. So
we are fragile by design. We can't escape it.
Yes. And instead of trying to armor ourselves
against that reality, which is impossible, Butler
suggests we should build our ethics upon it.
If I recognize that you are just as precarious
as I am, that our bodies are equally fragile,
That creates a shared responsibility. It's an
ethics of shared fragility. Exactly. It is a
plea for nonviolence based not on high ideals
or religious commandments, but on the brute physical
reality of our bodies. And this idea of making
life livable bridges the gap back to the gender
work, doesn't it? In 2004, Butler published Undoing
Gender. Yes, and this book is often described
as being a bit more accessible than gender trouble.
It's less focused on deconstructing French philosophy
and more on the human cost of these rigid norms.
The central question seems to be, what does a
person need to have a livable life? Right. It's
not just an academic theory. It's about survival.
If you are recognized as a valid subject, if
you're trans or intersex or gender nonconforming,
your life can become unlivable. You face violence,
discrimination, a lack of medical care, a sense
of profound alienation. There is a specific case
in Undoing Gender that I found absolutely heartbreaking
and really clarifying. The David Reimer case.
It is a tragedy, but it is essential to understanding
Butler's view on the nature versus nurture debate.
David Reimer was born male in the 1960s. As an
infant, a botched medical procedure destroyed
his genitalia. And the doctors... specifically
a famous expert named John Money, decided that
since gender is learned, they could just make
him a girl. It was the ultimate test of the blank
slate theory. It was nurture in its most extreme
form. They castrated him, named him Brenda, and
told the parents to raise him as a daughter.
Give him dolls, put him in dresses, never tell
him the truth. The theory was that the social
script would override everything else. And it
failed. Catastrophically. Spectacularly and tragically.
David, as Brenda, never felt female. He was miserable,
bullied, and felt deeply wrong. Eventually, as
a teenager, he discovered the truth, transitioned
back to living as a man. But the trauma was so
severe, he eventually died by suicide. Now, I
can hear the critics screaming right now. See?
Judith Butler is wrong. Biology is real. You
can't just perform gender. This proves it. But
that is the most fascinating part. Butler analyzes
this case to argue the exact opposite of what
you might expect. Butler doesn't side with the
doctor, with the nurture argument. Butler sides
with David. Wait, really? Yes. Butler argues
that David Reimer's story proves the violence
of norms. The doctors tried to force a gender
script on a body, on a person, that rejected
it. That coercion, that forcing, is the violence
Butler fights against. So it doesn't matter what
the script is, the violence is in the forcing
of the script. Exactly. The enemy is the system
that says you must be this. Butler defends the
right of the individual to determine their own
reality against the medical and social authorities
who claim to know better. It's an argument for
radical self -determination. That is a crucial
nuance. It's about autonomy. And speaking of
autonomy and identity, we should mention Butler's
own evolution here. The notes say Butler is now
legally non -binary. Yes, in California. Butler
uses share and they them pronouns, but has expressed
a preference for they them. And they've said
in interviews that they were never at home with
the assignment of female at birth. Which just
adds such a layer of personal resonance to all
this high theory. When Butler writes about being
homeless and language are not fitting the categories,
it isn't just abstract. It is lived experience.
And that brings us right to the present day.
Because if you thought the gender wars of the
90s were intense, the 2020s are a supernova.
And Butler is right in the center of it with
the 2024 book, Who's Afraid of Gender? This book
feels like Butler entering the ring against the
modern anti -gender movement. We see this global
rise of rhetoric in the U .S., in Hungary, in
Italy, in Russia, railing against gender ideology.
Butler analyzes this phenomenon and calls it
a phantasm. The ghost, a phantasm. A created
monster. Butler argues that for the far right,
the word gender has been detached from its actual
meaning. It has become a container for every
anxiety people have about modernity, about change,
about the economy, about national identity. It's
the boogeyman. It's the scapegoat for everything.
It is portrayed as a foreign force. It's often
called Western in the East or Marxist in the
West. It is coming to destroy the family, destroy
the nation, destroy God, and even destroy biology
itself. It sounds like a classic conspiracy theory.
It functions exactly like one. And Butler points
out the fundamental incoherence of the movement.
Think about it. On one hand, critics say gender
is fake. It's a construct. It's weak nonsense.
It's just feelings. Oh, right. They dismiss it.
But on the other hand, they claim it is a terrifyingly
powerful ideology that can brainwash children
instantly and topple entire civilizations. So
it's both weak and strong at the same time. Pathetic
and all -powerful. Which, as Butler points out,
citing the scholar Umberto Eco, is a classic
feature of fascism. The enemy must be simultaneously
ridiculed as weak and feared as an existential
threat. This confusion, this contradiction, is
a feature, not a bug. It allows leaders to mobilize
pure, unthinking anxiety. And this rhetoric has
very real -world consequences. We mentioned the
effigy burning in Brazil earlier. 2017. Sao Paulo.
Butler was there for a conference on democracy.
Not even on gender. But a mob gathered outside
the venue. They built a puppet of Butler dressed
as a witch. They burned it in the street. That
is medieval imagery. A witch burning. Absolutely.
They held signs calling Butler the Antichrist
and accusing them of coming to destroy the identity
of children. It shows how visceral this phantasm
has become. Butler wasn't a person to that crowd.
Butler was a symbol of existential dread. And
this tension spills into the media, too. There
was a controversy with The Guardian in the UK
in 2021 regarding a comparison to fascism. Yes,
this is a big one. In an interview, Butler compared
the anti -gender movement, specifically including
TERF ideology, which is trans -exclusionary radical
feminism to fascism. That is a very volatile
comparison to make. A very charged comparison.
Butler argued that both groups share a structure
of thought. The desire to purge the impure to
save a pure category, whether that category is
the nation or womanhood. The Guardian published
the interview, but after a massive backlash from
gender -critical activists online, they deleted
that specific section of the interview. Just
scrubbed it from the article. Gone. Vanished.
Which, of course, triggered the Streisand effect.
The Internet exploded. People asked, why is a
major liberal newspaper censoring a world -renowned
philosopher for making a philosophical argument
about political structures? It proves Butler's
point about censorship from excitable speech.
It really does. It showed that even discussing
the structure of these arguments is considered
so dangerous it must be silenced. Eventually,
the paper reinstated the quote, but the whole
affair was incredibly revealing. Controversy
really does follow Butler everywhere, and we
cannot do a deep dive without addressing the
other major pillar of Butler's activism and,
well, controversy, Israel and Palestine. This
is a huge part of their public life, and arguably
the most polarizing, even more so than the gender
theory. As we established, Butler is Jewish.
Their ethics are deeply rooted in Jewish thought
and the memory of the Holocaust, but they are
a staunch critic of Zionism. Butler supports
BDS boycott, divestment, sanctions against Israel.
They describe their position as post -Zionist.
They argue for a Judaism that is distinct from
state violence. The ethical mandate of never
again, in Butler's view, must apply to everyone,
not just to Jews. And this came to a head in
2012 when Butler won the Adorno Prize. Theodore
Adorno is a giant of critical theory, himself
a German Jewish intellectual who fled the Nazis.
Winning that prize is a massive honor. But when
Butler was announced as the winner, the backlash
was fierce. The Israeli ambassador to Germany
called it a disgrace. Major Jewish groups accused
Butler of anti -Semitism for their support of
BDS. Which must be an incredibly Butler responded
forcefully. They wrote essays, gave interviews,
and argued that criticizing the policies of the
State of Israel is not anti -Semitism. They refused
to let the Israeli state speak for all Jewish
people or define what authentic Jewish identity
is. And this has continued right into the current
conflict, the 2023 -2024 war in Gaza. It has
been extremely contentious. Butler condemned
the October 7 massacre by Hamas. They called
it... terrifying and revolting. There was no
ambiguity in their emotional reaction to the
violence against civilians. I thought of a but.
There was a but. Butler insisted on contextualizing
the violence within what they call 70 years of
horrors of the occupation. And in a climate of
raw grief and anger, many people hear context
as justification. There was a specific comment
in Paris in March of 2024 that really set people
off. Yes. This created a firestorm. Butler was
speaking at a meeting and got into a debate about
definitions. Butler argued that the October 7
attack should be described as armed resistance.
They stated it was not a terrorist attack in
the traditional definition, although they did
acknowledge it was an uprising and an attack
on civilians. That feels like splitting hairs
in a burning building. To a normal person, saying
it wasn't a terrorist attack seems designed to
enrage people. Butler was trying to make a technical
academic point about asymmetric warfare, about
how we define terror when a non -state actor
fights a powerful state. But to the families
of victims and to many, many observers, it sounded
like a denial of the atrocity's nature. It sounded
like an academic game being played over dead
bodies. And the consequences were real. The U
.S. Department of Education is now probing UC
Berkeley, where Butler teaches for anti -Semitism.
And Butler is named in that probe. And true to
form, Butler condemned the university for cooperating,
calling them an informant. So, yes, Butler is
fighting this battle on every single front. There
is also that old clip from 2012 that always resurfaces
in these debates. The one where Butler is accused
of calling Hamas and Hezbollah part of the global
left. It haunts them. The clip is real. Butler
was at a teach -in and was asked if those groups
belong to the global left. Butler said, yes,
it's possible. Which to most people sounds like
an endorsement. I like these guys. They're on
my team. And that is how it is heard. But Butler's
clarified this repeatedly over the years. It
was a descriptive statement, not a normative
one. It was a taxonomy question. These groups
describe themselves as anti -imperialist. The
left is traditionally anti -imperialist. Therefore,
in the academic taxonomy of political science,
they sit on the left. So it's a categorization,
not a thumbs up. Exactly. Butler emphasized that
you can be on the left and still be violent,
wrong, misogynistic, homophobic, reactionary,
and worthy of total criticism. But again, it
is the philosopher answering a taxonomy question
while the public is hearing a moral question.
It is the peril of the celebrity academic. You
are speaking in footnotes, but the world is listening
in soundbites. Which brings us to the footnotes
themselves. We teased the bad writing award at
the beginning of the show. 1999, Dennis Dutton,
a philosopher, gives Butler the first prize for
bad writing. The critique is that the prose is
impossible. It's a dense forest of jargon and
convoluted sentences. I have read Gender Trouble.
It is chewy. It requires a lot of effort. It's
not a beach read. So why do it? Why not just
write simply, gender is a script? Boom, done.
Easy to understand. But Butler has a defense
for this, and it is actually quite compelling
whether you agree with it or not. Butler argues
that common sense is built into common language.
How so? Our everyday grammar subject, verb, object,
reinforces the way we see the world. I hit the
ball, the boy kissed the girl. The grammar reinforces
the idea of a stable, pre -existing doer. behind
the deed. It reinforces the binary. It makes
the world seem simple and fixed. So if you write
simply, you are just reinforcing the status quo
with every sentence. That's the argument. Butler
believes that to challenge the common sense that
oppresses people, you have to break the language
that produces that common sense. You have to
make the reader stumble. You have to make them
work to understand the sentence because that
very work shifts their thinking away from the
default settings. So the difficulty is a feature,
not a bug. It is a political strategy. Though,
honestly, many of their peers have criticized
it, too. Martha Nussbaum, another giant of philosophy,
wrote a scathing takedown called The Professor
of Parity. Ouch. That's a title. She accused
Butler of quietism. She basically said, you are
sitting in a room playing these complex word
games while real women out in the world are suffering
from violence and poverty. Your philosophy offers
no clear path to legal reform, no path to better
wages. It just offers subversive performance.
It is the classic clash, revolution of the mind
versus revolution of the streets. And that debate
is still raging in activist and academic circles.
Does high theory help the revolution or does
it just create a new elite club of people who
know the secret password? So we have gone from
the troublemaker in Hebrew school to the professor
of parody. to the target of effigy burnings.
We've covered gender, censorship, war, and the
definition of the human. When you look at this
whole arc, what is the through line? What connects
it all? I think the through line is the resistance
to the unlivable. Say more about that. Whether
it is the gender binary that forces a person
like David Reimer to suicide or the definition
of citizenship that leaves a Guantanamo prisoner
indefinitely detained in a legal black hole or
the definition of grievable that allows a bomb
victim in Gaza to go unmourned. Butler is always
looking at the system of norms and asking. Who
is this system killing? Who is being erased?
This life is being made impossible. And then
trying to stretch the frame, stretch the language,
stretch the law, stretch our empathy to let those
people in, to make their lives livable. That
is a powerful legacy, even if the prose is hard
to read. Even so. Before we go, I want to leave
our listeners with one final thought. We've talked
about a lot of heavy political stuff. But there
is a concept from Butler's book, Giving an Account
of Oneself, that I think is really beautiful
on a personal, human level. Ah, yes. The concept
of opacity. We live in a world that demands transparency.
Tell me who you are. What is your identity? Put
it in a bio. Kitsch yourself. We want a neat,
clean story. We want the elevator pitch of the
soul. We want coherence. We want people to make
sense to us instantly. But Butler argues that
we can never fully have that. Not for others
and not even for ourselves. Right. Because we
are formed by forces outside our control, by
parents we didn't choose, by a language we didn't
invent, by a history we didn't live through but
that shaped us anyway, we can never fully know
ourselves. I am a mystery to myself. You are
opaque. You cannot tell a fully coherent story
of you because you are a collision of a million
things you don't even understand. There are gaps
and contradictions in your own narrative. That
sounds anxious, like I don't have control. But
Butler flips it. Butler says, what if instead
of demanding total clarity from each other, explain
yourself to me, justify your existence. We based
our ethics on that shared mystery. So I admit
that I don't fully know myself, and because of
that, I should be more gracious about the fact
that you don't fully know yourself either. Exactly.
A humility born of opacity. We stop demanding
that everyone fit into a box we can easily understand.
We acknowledge that we are all unfinished, all
dependent, all struggling with scripts we were
handed at birth. It is a call for a little less
judgment and a little more acceptance of the
messiness of being human. Precisely. And in a
world that wants to burn effigies and draw hard
lines in the sand, that might be the most radical
idea of all. I love that. Thank you for unpacking
this with me. This was a heavy one, but I feel
like I finally understand why that effigy was
burning and why those books are still flying
off the shelves. It was a pleasure. A real deep
dive. And thank you for listening to The Deep
Dive. Go find some opacity in your life today.
We'll see you next time.