Judith Butler: Then and Now
TALKING POLITICS
Catherine Carr
4.7 • 2.5K Ratings
🗓️ 13 August 2020
⏱️ 59 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week two conversations with the feminist theorist and writer Judith Butler: one recorded the week Trump won the presidency in 2016 and one recorded a few days ago, as his presidency (just maybe) approaches its end. We reflect on what has changed over the last four years, what has stayed the same, and whether our worst fears were realised. Plus Judith tells us what she sees when she sees Biden and what she hopes might come next. Two linked conversations about misogyny, racism, representation, empowerment, hope, rage, and the damage one man can do to democracy.
Further Learning:
- Judith Butler: on COVID-19, the politics of non-violence, necropolitics, and social inequality
- Judith Butler for the LRB on Trump’s death drive
- ‘Judith Butler wants us to reshape our rage,’ from The New Yorker
- Judith on performativity and Black Lives Matter
- Gender Trouble, Judith Butler
- Precarious Life, Judith Butler
- The Force of Nonviolence, Judith Butler
And as ever, recommended reading curated by our friends at the LRB can be found here: lrb.co.uk/talking
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, my name's David Rumsman and this is Talking Politics. |
| 0:10.9 | Today, two conversations with the great feminist theorist and writer Judith Butler. |
| 0:16.5 | One recorded nearly four years ago, just a week after Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. |
| 0:23.2 | The other one recorded this week, in which we think about the possibility that his presidency is approaching its end. |
| 0:33.3 | Talking Politics is brought to you in partnership with the London Review of Books, |
| 0:38.1 | Europe's leading magazine of books and ideas, |
| 0:41.3 | where you can read elegant and expansive essays on every subject imaginable. |
| 0:46.8 | From Amir Srinivasan on pronouns to James Meek on the WHO. |
| 0:52.1 | From Pankaj Mishra on Anglo-America to Catherine Rundell on the Greenland Shark. |
| 0:59.0 | Get 12 issues in print and online, that's half a year of the LRB, for just £12, with the URL, |
| 1:08.0 | lrb.me, slash talk. That's lrb.m. me slash talk. |
| 1:22.7 | We've been looking back over the Talking Politics Archive and picking out one or two of the most |
| 1:28.1 | memorable episodes, certainly the most memorable for us. And this is one, the original recording |
| 1:33.2 | we made with Judith Butler just after Trump's victory. We asked Judith if she would be willing |
| 1:39.9 | to talk now about some of the things that she raised back then and to our great pleasure, |
| 1:44.8 | she said yes. So the first conversation is one that was recorded in Cambridge, |
| 1:50.5 | face to face when that was still possible, how I miss it. The second one was recorded with |
| 1:56.3 | Judith a few days ago. She's in Berkeley, California. We'll come on to that one after the first one, |
| 2:03.4 | because we pick up on the themes of the original conversation. I think you'll be able to hear |
| 2:08.8 | when we spoke in November 2016 just how raw some of the emotions still were. And there |
| 2:16.5 | is a little bit of shock as well. And what's weird when I |
| 2:19.6 | listen back to it is the feeling that the shock hasn't completely gone away. So first of all, |
... |
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