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Judith Butler’s “New Humanism”: A Thing or Not a Thing, and So What?

Judith Butler’s “New Humanism”: A Thing or Not a Thing, and So What? Judith Butler’s “New Humanism” A Thing or Not a Thing, and So What? Sina Kramer A few thinkers in the last few years, such as Stefan Dolgert and Miriam Leonard, but especially political theorist Bonnie Honig, have argued that Judith Butler’s most recent work (Antigone’s Claim, 2000; Undoing Gender, 2004; Precarious Life, 2005; Frames of War, 2009) institutes a new form of humanism, based on the universality of grief, mourning, vulnerability, and precarious- ness that Butler describes in these texts. These critiques call into question an incipient foundationalism in the feminist political theory Butler produces in these texts, one seemingly at odds with her previous antifoundationalist commitments. In this article I will argue that, while these critiques oversim- plify the relationship between politics and ethics or politics and ontology in their critique of Butler’s new mortalist humanism, the problem of the relation of politics to ethics or ontology—or, more exactly, the problem of the rela- tion of politics to its outside, or to its conditions—remains nevertheless a real problem in Butler’s work. This is because, without a clear account of a method of rendering foundations contingent, or of rendering ontologies provisional, we tend to repeat the political move to http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png philoSOPHIA State University of New York Press

Judith Butler’s “New Humanism”: A Thing or Not a Thing, and So What?

philoSOPHIA , Volume 5 (1) – Jun 7, 2015

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Publisher
State University of New York Press
Copyright
Copyright © State University of New York Press
ISSN
2155-0905

Abstract

Judith Butler’s “New Humanism” A Thing or Not a Thing, and So What? Sina Kramer A few thinkers in the last few years, such as Stefan Dolgert and Miriam Leonard, but especially political theorist Bonnie Honig, have argued that Judith Butler’s most recent work (Antigone’s Claim, 2000; Undoing Gender, 2004; Precarious Life, 2005; Frames of War, 2009) institutes a new form of humanism, based on the universality of grief, mourning, vulnerability, and precarious- ness that Butler describes in these texts. These critiques call into question an incipient foundationalism in the feminist political theory Butler produces in these texts, one seemingly at odds with her previous antifoundationalist commitments. In this article I will argue that, while these critiques oversim- plify the relationship between politics and ethics or politics and ontology in their critique of Butler’s new mortalist humanism, the problem of the relation of politics to ethics or ontology—or, more exactly, the problem of the rela- tion of politics to its outside, or to its conditions—remains nevertheless a real problem in Butler’s work. This is because, without a clear account of a method of rendering foundations contingent, or of rendering ontologies provisional, we tend to repeat the political move to

Journal

philoSOPHIAState University of New York Press

Published: Jun 7, 2015

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