Judith Butler

I'm Judith Butler. I'm a distinguished professor in the Graduate School at the University of California at Berkeley. I'm also a writer, a scholar of gender studies, sexuality, continental philosophy, critical theory. I also teach literature and there's probably more to say about myself. But that's all that comes to mind at the moment.

Well, I would like to think that Madrid, that El Pais, is honoring my work, as a way of resisting the contemporary regime of violence that we see at the borders of Europe, in Palestine, in Ukraine and in Sudan. My hope is that my work will be part of a vision for the left, or for humanity more broadly, that values equality, freedom and justice, that values nonviolence, that values thought, critical thought and the university. I don't know if that's the case, but I think obviously we are living in a time in which there are many hatreds that are circulating in exciting ways. The hatred of gay, lesbian, trans people, the hatred of women, the hatred of minorities, of migrants, the hatred of Arab peoples, especially Palestinians. So we have, I think, a collective obligation to understand that kind of hatred, which is linked with fear on the one hand and violence on the other.

How do we approach people who are living with fear, hatred, and the desire to commit violence or are themselves committing violence in one way or another? I have thought throughout my career as a philosopher and as a literary theorist, that language and reason were the best instruments we had. We had to compel those who disagree with us, or those who are, engaged in the celebration of hatred.

We have to compel them with reason; calm them down and make them listen; make them read and form them better; ask them to lose their ignorance and gain knowledge, empathy, and a sense of common purpose on this earth. But I see that reason, argument, empathy do not always work. There are those who believes that empathy is a weak sensibility that we need to defend our own, our own nation, our own race, our own way of life at the expense of others.

There are those who believe that only elitists work with reason, and that those who insist on argumentation are trained in elite universities or are themselves part of an elite class. Their values sprang not from reason, but from other, wellsprings, other sources. So, I think, in fact, our approach has to be stronger. We have to ask people what kind of world do they want to live in and what kind of world do they want to live in together? In other words, what is a vision of a livable life, a habitable world, a world that is habitable, that can be lived in. What's the vision we should be striving for together? Will it be one dedicated to inequality, to patriarchy, to racism, to capitalist greed? Or will it be one that not only seeks to share the goods of this world in equal ways and to have, political equality, but also, honors its obligation to the earth, to the sky, to the water, to all the elements, all the living elements of this world that are endangered by human intervention.

I think on the left, we need to develop a vision, a way of imagining, a way of desiring and hoping for a different, transformed world. And we need to make that available to everyone, in every language and to whatever media, in order to compel people to give up their hatred, their commitment to inequality and their celebration of violence. There are other things to celebrate, and we should perhaps, make clear what we celebrate and why.

Well, I understand that some people believe that using the word “genocide” is irresponsible, or that it's an emotional, expression of some kind. But in fact, genocide has been defined by international law and was originally defined by Raphael Lemkin in 1948. And in that definition, which was then accepted as international law, it is clear that genocide involves an attack and an attempt to destroy a group to find ethnically, racially, or in some other way, a specific group, their form of life with the aim of stopping the life of that people. Now, there are different ways to attack and destroy a form of life. You can destroy their water. You can destroy their food, their food chains. You can destroy all their educational institutions, all their hospitals, or nearly all their hospitals. You can kill any number of people. There's no one number that constitutes a genocide. Some people think there is, but that's not true. If an action or a set of actions aims at destroying the life of a people, that is to say, their form of life, including all the infrastructures that allow a people to live, then that is genocide. It's a sign of genocidal intent. So, it's not only the case that so many people have been bombarded and killed in their homes, on the street, in their shelters, in hospitals, in Gaza, but every institution that is aimed at the continuation of life, the preservation of life in Gaza, has also been targeted. There's tactical starvation. There is a limit on how much water can be used. There's a limit on how much oil can be brought into Gaza to heat homes or to make transportation possible. The destruction of institutions and lives together show that it's not just an attack on the Palestinian people in the present, but it's also an attack on the very future possibility of Palestinian life. So, one thing that is being killed or killed off is the future of Palestinian life.

The fact that all educational institutions have been destroyed, all institutions of higher education and most institutions of schooling is a sign, according to Karma Nabulsi, of scholasticide, and scholasticide is part of genocide. Scholasticide is the destruction of education, which means that a people no longer have access to schooling, to reading, to writing, to thinking, to judging, to skills, mathematics, science, engineering, all the things that would allow for future life.

The destruction of education is also the destruction of imagination, a way of imagining the future and a way of preparing for it. So, it's not just that Palestinians are killed in the present and have, of course, been killed since 1948 and before, when settlers first came and committed massacres on that land, but their future is also being destroyed.

I think there is no way to deny that this is a genocide. It doesn't have to look like other genocides we have known. All genocides have their historical specificity, the genocide against the Armenian people, the genocide against native peoples in the United States, the genocide against the Jews, the Roma, the gay and lesbian people under the Third Reich. All of these, have very specific organizations, very specific forms. We don't compare those forms. What we do is we ask whether each of these genocides conforms with the definition. And we also revise that definition in light of new forms of genocide. And that's a complex interplay between international law and historical reality. And right now, we have before us a genocide and we also see that many nations, many European nations, have turned away from their human rights obligations, their obligation as representatives of human rights and refuse to impose boycott, divestment and Sanctions policies, and have in many cases continued to send arms and refuse to impose an embargo. But in fact, with the United States, European nations do have the power to stop this genocide. And I'm sorry to say that our governments have not used their power, and as a result, they are complicit. And in my case, in the United States, we are obviously funding this war to a very large extent. And we’ll be left with the horrific moral failure of having failed to stop this systematic killing.

I think, it’s not everyone who is afraid of feeling extreme anger. Some people feel extreme anger very easily. Some people allow their extreme anger to convert into violent action very easily. There's a disinhibited relationship to violence. Like: “I'm angry, I'm going to hit”. For those of us who identify with a leftist position or a feminist position of nonviolence, we might think that that means we are obligated not to be angry, that we should be not angry people, right? We should get rid of our anger and approach the world with compassion or love, or a spirit of repair, a spirit of care, but not anger. Well, there are many reasons that doesn't work. And one of them is that injustice makes us angry. And if injustice did not make us angry, something would be wrong. When we see or know something or feel something to be manifestly unjust, we react with anger: “That's not how the world should be”, and we seek to change the situation. Now, anger does move into action when injustice is manifest, or it should, if action is available. But to do that, anger has to be cultivated. Now, this is an important term, like ‛cult to cultivate anger’. What does that mean? It doesn't mean, oh, let's provoke anger, let's make ourselves angry. No, not quite. ‛To cultivate anger’ is to give it a form, to craft it, to direct it, to decide to make a judgment, like where is it going to go and what will it seek to achieve?, and how to maintain anger without replicating the form of injustice or indeed the form of violence that one opposes. So, it can't be revenge, because revenge usually replicates the form of violence that it opposes. It can't, it can't be an effort to damage or destroy other people, those who hold opposing views, precisely because, we want to live in a world in which we do cohabit the earth. Apart from our opposing views, we don't seek, we should not seek to annihilate those who disagree with us.

So, the question is how to live in a world where you are going to be angry with a certain group all the time. There will always be those with whom you are angry, or

there will always be conditions about which you feel anger. So, one can be consumed by anger, and that is a self-destructive process, right? Oh, I shouldn't express anger. That's wrong, to express anger. If we feel that way, then we turn it back on ourselves, which means we express it inwardly and we end up being self-destructive. If we haven't eradicated anger at such a moment, we have only turned anger against ourselves rather than expressing it in the world. So, if we must express it in the world, do we think anger is the kind of thing that just operates on its own? Or do we believe we have the power to cultivate and craft it? Now, I use language. I'm a writer. I'm a speaker. You can tell when I talk about genocide, I'm actually furious, but I'm not screaming. Doesn't mean I don't sometimes scream, I do scream. I do scream, I do cry, but what do I do with my scream and cry so that it can change or help to change something in the world?

The ideal of transformation has to be front and center. It has to be the focus of my action. It doesn't mean I eradicate anger. It doesn't mean I give it radical freedom to express itself in any form. I correct it even as I am overtaken by it. And that's a very hard thing to do, because we think, oh, if you're overtaken by a passion like anger, you can't craft the way it is formed, but think of it as a form of artistry, like ethical artistry. You're furious. You don't want to hit somebody. You don't want to destroy someone or something. You actually want to affirm justice. You want to affirm freedom. You want to affirm the lives of others. How do you hold that all together? it's an internal struggle. It's also a collective struggle, right? We can look at it psychologically, but we can also understand it as a political struggle. Like what are our strategies? What are our tactics? And we have to ask about our strategies and our tactics. Do they themselves reflect the world we want to embody and to materialize? Because you can't have a tactic that doesn't enact the world you want to live it. Tactics are also world making activities, right? My tactic reflects not only what my commitments are, but the world in which I want to live. So, we have to ask ourselves whether our tactics can contain our rage and our hope at the same time, and what kind of crafting collective crafting has to take place for that combination to exist together?

Well, first of all, children, unemployed people, uneducated people, all of them are working with gender every day. It's not a foreign concept. It's actually part and parcel of their lives. They make decisions on how to raise girls or boys. They make decisions about domestic life and how domestic labor is to be distributed. They make decisions about careers they're trying to achieve or how to live with others. They introduce themselves. They approach other people on the street in certain ways with presuppositions about who they are. They move as bodies in the world. They are crafted socially, politically, in ways that, very possibly express masculinity or femininity, or alter those terms, or perhaps fall outside those terms.

So, gender is something that happens in everyday life. It's not a fancy intellectual concept. It's a framework in which we live. It operates in the family, operates in religious institutions, in educational institutions. How boys and girls are named and separated, what kinds of expectations are made of what they will do in the classroom, and what they will do in life. Gender is already there, we might say, structuring our lives. So, the real question is how to make plain that gender can be a framework, an unmarked framework in which we live kind of taken for granted. But also, a framework that is profoundly disturbed.

People don't always correspond with our expectations of how they will act or how they will be according to their gender assignment. Right? So, you could use a word like gender assignment and maybe that sounds foreign or medical, but in fact, when we say, hey girl or chica. Mira, chica, you know, I mean, all the time we are gendering each other. All the time we talk about boys and girls and women and men, and, you know, this lady and that guy, you know, it's in our language, it's in our whole way of being. We might feel very happy about the gender we’re assigned. We might actually like that, like, oh, I'm going to be more of my gender today. I'm going to dress in a certain way. I'm going to move in a certain way. I'm going to dance in a certain way. Maybe that's very gendered and very exciting. Maybe in sexuality or in in dating or, you know, there's a kind of gendered appearance that is cultivated to produce certain effects. Or maybe we feel like, oh, I have no idea how to do this. And I know there's an expectation that I'm supposed to act in a certain way or appear in a certain way, but it's just not something I can do. I'm disidentified from this expectation. I don't know what to do with this social expectation. I have another set of desires or I'm responding to another set of expectations that come from my community that's not the same. So, they're disturbances and conflicts and every family have this, even the most conservative, or perhaps precisely the most conservative. Is the boy growing up in the way that a boy should? Is the girl growing up in the way that a girl should? Like, what's this activity? Why that haircut? Why that dress? You know.

It's there in our everyday life. So, when we talk about gender, we're not just talking about, like, my gender and your gender. We're actually talking about an entire framework in which certain social assignments are taken up, refused, recrafted in complex ways, and it varies historically and culturally. And it's a field of study precisely because there is so much variation and it's so interesting.

And it doesn't mean that we dismiss biology or genetics. Hardly. Most developmental biology now, except what is called epigenetic factors, that is to say, factors that come from the environment or society, they're interacting all the time with our genes and with our hormones, and these interactions are not always predictable, but we are a complex combination, we humans, in our in our gendered lives, we don't have to deny biology, and we don't have to say everything is language or culture. We just have to look at the interactions that constitute human complexity. And then we have a choice, you know? We can affirm human complexity as it is and try to understand it, or we can refuse it and impose categories that deny it. But then what are we doing? We're denying reality.

Yes, but they're doing their gender in a certain way, right? You just… I mean, these young men are trying to produce a certain form of masculinity or to reclaim a form of masculinity that they believe has been denied to them, or they have a form of masculinity that carries within it resentment and entitlement. And this is happening throughout the world. We can track it not just in the United States and in Spain, but we can track it in in Korea, we can track it in hidden parts of South Africa. I mean, you know, there are there are many places where this is happening. So, they may refuse gender as a topic. They don't want to use that word, or maybe they do want to use that word, but in a negative way. Okay. Then their opposition to gender defines who they are and even defines their gender. That doesn't mean they've escaped gender. Hardly. It just means they're producing masculinity in a certain way, and oddly enough, confirming my theory.

Well, it's very interesting because in English the word I use is phantasm, which is a kind of psychic reality, but I know that in romance languages “phantom” is more like a ghost, more like a specter. Like you're haunted by a phantom, right? So, I like I like that I didn't intend that. But it's interesting to me that what sometimes happens to a theoretical work when it enters into another language, it takes on meanings that the author never intended.

I don't have a theory that gender is a phantasm, no, what I'm saying is that for those who, are part of the anti-gender ideology movement, that is to say, for those who oppose gender, the teaching of gender, or the concept of gender, or the appearance of gender in public policy or law, those who are anti-gender, posit gender as a phantasm. They are the ones who are thinking that gender is a very powerful concept that will destroy society. They attribute to gender a kind of power, a destructive power, that goes way beyond anything, any gender studies scholar or any public policy regarding gender has ever imagined, right? So, they're attributing meanings that are excessive to this idea, this word, gender, that don't belong to it. So, they've made an enemy. They've made a frightening phantasm. They've made a destructive power. It will indoctrinate our children. It will destroy society as we know it. It will be like a nuclear bomb. It will destroy nature.

I'm sorry to laugh, but I mean, many of these attributive meanings have nothing to do with how the concept of gender works, either in education, in intellectual life, or in public policy. But they are afraid of some of the policies and politics associated with gender, like gay marriage, like, like legislation against rape, legislation against domestic rape, domestic violence, lesbian and gay parenting, the rights of trans people to appropriate health care and to legal status. All of these issues are political issues that we can’t debate.

I mean, I think they are all fundamentally just, you know, they're just political demands. But that's because I have feminist and queer and trans affirmative values. Okay. It's true. But gender is a concept, it’s not responsible for those policies. Gender has come to operate as an abbreviation for those policies and a belief which I call phantasmatic, that those policies have the power to destroy the world rather than make the world more livable for any number of people.

Listening is a practice relevant to me? If f we can listen, if we have the capacity to hear, listening is a way not only to register other human voices, but also non-human sounds. The sounds of the world, the sounds of nature, of animal life, of the ocean, which allows us, I think, to become smaller as human beings and to realize that not everything centers on the human. So, if we want to decenter the human, in the name of affirming interdependent life and the future, the ecological future of the world, then we do need to listen beyond, beyond the human voice to the sounds of the world.

I also think it is very difficult to listen to people with whom one disagrees. So, if we stay in the human sphere for a moment, it's very difficult to listen to those, with whom one disagrees. And sometimes I have the feeling that people don't listen because they're they are afraid of being infected by the words of the other, like the words of the other will get inside them and then become part of them as if a poison has entered the system.

But I have tried to listen, for instance, the trans exclusionary feminists who yell at me, I mean, I listen to the yelling, but I also try to listen to the words they use in order to understand what they're so angry about, what they fear that they are losing, what they think is being done when trans people seek to live openly with social and legal recognition and appropriate health care, and without discrimination. Why is that so frightening? I have tried, I don't just shut them down.

I have some very conservative students who talk about what it means for them to move from the university where they're learning all sorts of progressive ideas and then go home, say to their border town in Texas, where their white family has many racist ideas or even longs for authoritarian rule so that the border is more secure. And they say it's very hard to move between these worlds, but they belong to both worlds. They try, in their words one of them said to me: “I try to hold the humanity of the other”. I thought, oh, what is that? To hold the humanity of the other, right? You hold it meaning you do not deny their humanity. But what if you're holding the humanity of the other who will not hold your own? Or who is claiming they refused to hold the humanity of some group of people that could be trans, it could be migrants, could be both.

So, this is a difficult thing to do because you're disagreeing and you're even disagreeing vehemently with them, but you're not destroying them. You're still holding them in a way, in conversation, as interlocutors, and in that sense, you hold their humanity. That's another moment where something like the cultivation of anger might exist in combination with the cultivation of listening, listening to what is exceedingly hard to hear, knowing that you can survive what is being said and you can respond, even if sometimes means leaving the room or going elsewhere or deciding to change the world in some other space and time. But I do think listening is a way of staying responsive to the world.

I know friends now who say, oh, I can't read the newspaper, it's just too hard. I can't listen to the news. I can't watch the news. They shut down the senses because what they are hearing is too horrific. It's too terrible. But then there are others, who do listen to what is horrific, the slaughters in Gaza, the genocidal bombardments… They do listen, they do read. They do allow that entire acoustic universe to enter them without feeling that they are going to be destroyed by what they hear. They can still… It makes them, in fact, more responsive. They don't deny what is happening in the world, they respond.

And then, of course, the question is, what do you do with that responsiveness? Some people are so overwhelmed they can do nothing; they shut everything off. And others ask themselves, okay, I am horrified by what is horrific. I am touched and transformed by what I heard. What now do I do from this place of responsiveness? What responsibility can be derived from this responsiveness? And that is important. It keeps us as sensate beings who are responsive to the world, but it also allows us to take action to join in forms of solidarity or collective action that have as their primary aim the transformation of the world and see the cultivation of nonviolence as the only possible future.