Content area
Full text
This conversation was held in Pordenone, Italy, in September 2008, during a major cultural event that takes place every year. What follows is an expanded version of our conversation, including a few questions she received from the public and a few more questions that Judith Butler kindly took from us after the event. As she writes on contemporary politics, literary theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and feminism, our interview was conducted with little regard for academic boundaries. Butler's work is sliced by problem, not by discipline, and she masters different languages which, once specialized and authoritative within a given field, can be merged and applied to the discussion of such issues as the American wars, the nature of democracy, the Israeli/Palestinian schism, and the politics of gender. The authors of this interview-a literary theorist and a political theorist-prepared their questions so that realms could be straddled, boundaries dissolved, and theory restored to its original architectonic task. The choice of the topics to be discussed offers a biased and selected view, and our conversation remained focused on issues that Butler has critically explored in her recent writings: war, precarious life, and the subject(s) of responsibility.
We would like to go right away in medias res and ask you something about where you locate yourself intellectually. You engage with a number of European thinkers, especially in your recent work. For example, in Giving an Account of Oneself, you dialogue with such figures as Levinas, Hegel, Adorno, Cavarero, Laplanche, Foucault, etc. You studied with Gadamer in Germany and visit regularly European academic institutions. Is it correct (or does it make any sense) to call you an American philosopher?
It is true, though, that I studied European philosophy but I don't know whether I could describe my thinking as belonging to a nationality. Of course, I am a US citizen, and that accounts for many things, including my mobility and privilege. But even the notion of "America" is problematic for many reasons, as it includes Latin America, Canada, the Caribbean, and because it does not describe very well the differences it includes and effaces. So, I am not sure that I would choose nationality as a way to describing my thinking. Others may well describe me in that way, and that...