Dispossession

Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Her previous publications include Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex". She is currently the recipient of the Andrew Mellon Award for Distinguished Academic Achievement in the Humanities.Athena Athanasiou teaches in the Department of Social Anthropology at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences.

"A productive read and develops and discusses many key themes that cross disciplinary boundaries. The book will therefore prove useful to various readers."http://www.palgrave-journals.com/fr/journal/v109/n1/full/fr201452a.html"Feminist Review"An engaging read... does an excellent job of articulating, in various ways, the need to conceptualise dispossession outside the logic of possession"http://review31.co.uk/article/view/124/having-and-being-judith-butler"Review 31"Full of fantastic and well-argued insights."LSE Review of Books"What makes political responsiveness possible? With their rich and distinct wealth of philosophical knowledge and continuous political engagements, leading feminist scholars Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou set out to answer this question. Beginning from an awareness that we are all relational and interdependent beings, their lucid, compelling exchanges encourage us all to reflect again on what feminist and queer theory can contribute to the search for forms of collectivity capable of intervening in battles against these cruel and precarious times."Lynne Segal, Birkbeck, University of London and author of Making Trouble"In a series of bite-sized conversations, Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou explore the concept of dispossession and show its links to subjectivity, relationality, occupation, precarity, bio-politics and collective protest. As they push each other for clarification and introduce a range of examples, they jointly craft a new vision of what 'performative politics' might entail."Vikki Bell, Goldsmiths, University of London

• Preface vii1 Aporetic dispossession, or the trouble with dispossession 12 The logic of dispossession and the matter of the human (after the critique of metaphysics of substance) 103 A caveat about the "primacy of economy" 384 Sexual dispossessions 445 (Trans)possessions, or bodies beyond themselves 556 The sociality of self-poietics: Talking back to the violence of recognition 647 Recognition and survival, or surviving recognition 758 Relationality as self-dispossession 929 Uncounted bodies, incalculable performativity 9710 Responsiveness as responsibility 10411 Ex-propriating the performative 12612 Dispossessed languages, or singularities named and renamed 13113 The political promise of the performative 14014 The governmentality of "crisis" and its resistances 14915 Enacting another vulnerability: On owing and owning 15816 Trans-border affective foreclosures and state racism 16417 Public grievability and the politics of memorialization 17318 The political affects of plural performativity 17619 Conundrums of solidarity 18420 The university, the humanities, and the book bloc 18821 Spaces of appearance, politics of exposure 193Notes 198Index 205