Abstract
“Cultural survival” is a crucial phrase in Judith Butler's thought. In Gender Trouble it referred to an obligation whereby the subject is obliged to emerge within certain webs of power/knowledge (the heterosexual matrix, here), such that the process of subjectification is necessarily complicit in sustaining those dispositifs: the subject survives and, even because, she sustains those arrangements. This is an argument deeply indebted to Foucault, whose understanding of critique as an exploration of the conditions of acceptability of a system accompanied by an attention to its discontinuities continues to inform Butler's work. Through an elaboration of the notion of “survival”, it is argued that it is possible to understand the “turns” in Butler's work – paying particular attention to the “turn” to the ethics of Levinas – as well as to begin to understand what is at stake in some recent debates in the literature that pool around vitality and/of matter, but that may be reconfigured as, in their different ways, about environments and survival, or ecology. In relation to the first, the question of survival arises in Primo Levi's discussions of the ethical responsibility of those who survived the concentration camps, and relates therefore to Levinas' concern with the primary asymmetry of inter-human ethical relations. In relation to the second, I argue that the term cultural survival can be related to discussion of environment or ecologies in the work of Isabelle Stengers, drawing on A.N. Whitehead, which, it is argued here, enables a provocative reconfiguration of performativity.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
I am thinking of the murder of Lawrence King in California in February 2008.
For Nancy (2000) this is the “being-with”; he would interpret the incomprehension as an exposure which is also an exposition, a movement out of the “self-positioning” of the subject.
Incidentally, this would not be Levinas' own understanding of politics, which for him involves the third, the “cut”; hence the “leap” of Derrida and other followers of Levinas (see also Bell, 2007, Chapter 3).
Jane Bennett's current work reorientates political theory in this direction, employing Guattari's Three Ecologies centrally.
References
Adorno, T. and Horkheimer, M. ([1944] 1986). Dialectics of Enlightenment. London: Verso.
Agamben, G. (1998). Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Heller-Roazen, D. (trans.). Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Agamben, G. (1999). Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. New York: Zone Books.
Arendt, H. (1973). The Origins of Totalitarianism. San Diego, CA: Harvest, Harcourt, Brace and Co.
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Bell, V. (1999a). Mimesis as Cultural Survival: Judith Butler and Anti-Semitism. Theory, Culture and Society, 16, p. 2.
Bell, V. (1999b). Feminist Imagination: Genealogies in Feminist Theory. London: Sage.
Bell, V. (2001). On Ethics and Feminism: Reflecting on Levinas' Ethics of Non-(in)difference. Feminist Theory, 2 (2), pp. 159–171.
Bell, V. (2007). Culture & Performance. Oxford/New York: Berg, (Chapter 6: Performativity Challenged? Creativity and the Return of Interiority. [WWW document] http://eprints.goldsmiths.ac.uk/115/ (accessed 8 August 2008).
Boyarin, D. and Boyarin, J. (1993). Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity. Critical Inquiry, 19 (Summer), pp. 693–725.
Boys Don't Cry (1999). Film. Directed by K. Peirce. USA: Killer/Hart Sharp.
Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble. New York/London: Routledge.
Butler, J. (1991). Imitation and Gender Insubordination. In Fuss, D. (ed.) Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories (Introduction and Chapter 1). London: Routledge.
Butler, J. (1993). Bodies That Matter. London: Routledge.
Butler, J. (1997). The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Butler, J. (2002). What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault's Virtue. In Ingram, D. (ed.) The Political: Readings in Continental Philosophy. London: Blackwell.
Butler, J. (2004a). Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge.
Butler, J. (2004b). Precarious Life. London: Verso.
Butler, J. (2005). Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press.
Butler, J. (2008). Vulnerability, Survivability: The Affective Politics of War. Lecture at the Institute of Humanities, Birkbeck College, 13 February 2008.
Butler, J. and Spivak, G. (2007). Who Sings the Nation-State?. New York: Seagull Books.
DeLanda, M. (2002). Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. London: Continuum.
Deleuze, G. (1988a). Foucault. Hand, S. (trans.). London: Athlone, First published 1966.
Deleuze, G. ([1966] 1988b). Bergsonism. Tomlinson, H. and Habberjam, B. (trans.). New York: Zone Books.
Foucault, M. (1981). The History of Sexuality Volume One: An Introduction. Penguin: Harmondsworth.
Fraser, M. (2008a). Facts, Ethics and Event. In Bruun Jensen, C. and Rödje, K. (eds) Deleuzian Intersections in Science, Technology and Anthropology. New York: Berghahn Press.
Friedrich, B. and Herschbach, D. (1998). ‘Space Quantization: Otto Stern’s Lucky Star. Daedalus, 127, pp. 165–191.
Fraser, M. (2008b). Response to Mike Lynch. In Said Business School A Turn to Ontology? Oxford, UK, 1 September 2008. [WWW document] http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/events/A+Turn+to+Ontology.htm (accessed 5 August 2008).
Greco, M. (2005). On the Vitality of Vitalism. Theory, Culture & Society, 22 (1), pp. 15–28.
Grosz, E. (2004). The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely. Durham: Duke University Press.
Hardt, M. (1993). Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy. London: UCL Press.
Kirby, V. (1997). Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal. New York: Routledge.
Latour, B. (1993). We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Latour, B. (2004). Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Levi, P. (1987). If This Is a Man/The Truce (translations of Se questo è un uomo/La Tregun, 1958/1963). London: Abacus.
Levi, P. (1989). The Drowned and the Saved (translation of I sommersi e il salvati, 1986). London: Abacus.
Levinas, E. (1985). Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo. Cohen, R. (trans.). Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.
Levinas, E. and Kearney, R. (1986). Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas. In Cohen, R. (ed.) Face to Face with Levinas. New York: Suny Press, pp. 13–34.
Mol, A.-M. (2002). The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham: Duke University Press.
Nancy, J.-L. (2000). Being-Singular-Plural. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Prigogine, I. and Stengers, I. ([1984] 1985). Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature. London: Flamingo.
Rose, N. (2007). The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power and Subjectivity in the 21st Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Sartre, J.-P. (1995). Anti-Semite and Jew. An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate. (translation of Réflexions sur la question juive, 1946). New York: Schocken Books.
Stengers, I. (2000). The Invention of Modern Science. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Stengers, I. (2001). Whitehead and the Laws of Nature. Lecture delivered at Goldsmiths College, UK, March 2002.
Stengers, I. (2002). Beyond Conversation: The Risks of Peace. In Keller, C. and Daniell, A. (eds) Process and Difference: Between Cosmological and Poststructuralist Postmodernisms. New York: State University of New York Press.
Stengers, I. (2008). Experimenting with Refrains: Subjectivity and the Challenge of Escaping Modern Dualism. Subjectivity, 22, pp. 38–59.
Stenner, P. (2008). A.N. Whitehead and Subjectivity. Subjectivity, 22, pp. 90–109.
Traverso, E. (2003). The Origins of Nazi Violence. New York: Libri.
Whitehead, A.N. ([1926] 1985). Science and the Modern World. London: Free Association Books.
Whitehead, A.N. ([1933] 1935). Adventures in Ideas. London: Cambridge University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Bell, V. From Performativity to Ecology: On Judith Butler and Matters of Survival. Subjectivity 25, 395–412 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2008.31
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2008.31