Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t8hqh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T18:37:26.806Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Butler and Heidegger: On the Relation between Freedom and Marginalization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Aret Karademir
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Though the names “Judith Butler” and “Martin Heidegger” rarely come together in Butler and Heidegger scholarship, the critical encounter between these philosophers might help us conceptualize the relationship between freedom and marginalization. In this paper, I will read Butler from the perspective of the Heidegger of Being and Time and claim that what Butler's philosophy suggests is the radical dependency of one's freedom on the cultural resuscitation of socially murdered racial, sexual, ethnic, religious, and sectarian/confessional minorities. More specifically, I will claim that the socially sanctioned subject's freedom is dependent on the marginalized Other's freedom, and, conversely, the marginalized Other's freedom is dependent on the socially sanctioned subject's freedom.

Type
Open Issue Content
Information
Hypatia , Volume 29 , Issue 4 , Fall 2014 , pp. 824 - 839
Copyright
Copyright © 2014 by Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

I thank Ofelia Schutte, Charles Guignon, Stephen Turner, David Cheely, and the anonymous Hypatia reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.

References

Allen, Amy. 1998. Power trouble: Performativity as critical theory. Constellations 5 (4): 456–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Benhabib, Seyla. 1995. Subjectivity, historiography, politics: Reflections on the “feminism/postmodernism exchange”. In Feminist contentions: A philosophical exchange, ed. Benhabib, Seyla, Butler, Judith, Cornell, Drucilla and Fraser, Nancy. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of sex. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 1997a. Excitable speech: A politics of the performative. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 1997b. The psychic life of power: Theories in subjection. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 1999. Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity, 10th anniversary ed. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 2000. Antigone's claim: Kinship between life and death. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 2004a. Undoing gender. New York: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Butler, Judith. 2004b. Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 2005. Giving an account of oneself. New York: Fordham University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Butler, Judith. 2007a. Variations on sex and gender: Beauvoir, Wittig, Foucault. In The Judith Butler reader, ed. Salih, Sarah. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 2007b. Imitation and gender insubordination. In The Judith Butler reader, ed. Salih, Sarah. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 2012. Parting ways: Jewishness and the critique of Zionism. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Dreyfus, Hubert. 2006. Heidegger on the connection between nihilism, art, technology, and politics. In The Cambridge companion to Heidegger, 2nd ed., ed. Guignon, Charles. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Fraser, Nancy. 1995. False antitheses: A response to Seyla Benhabib and Judith Butler. In Feminist contentions: A philosophical exchange, ed. Benhabib, Seyla, Butler, Judith, Cornell, Drucilla and Fraser, Nancy. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Guignon, Charles. 1992. History and commitment in the early Heidegger. In Heidegger: A critical reader, ed. Dreyfus, Hubert and Hall, Harrison. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Heidegger, Martin. 1993a. The self‐assertion of the German university (1933). In The Heidegger controversy: A critical reader, ed. Wolin, Richard. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Heidegger, Martin. 1993b. “Only a God can save us”: Der Spiegel's interview with Martin Heidegger (1966). In The Heidegger controversy: A critical reader, ed. Wolin, Richard. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Heidegger, Martin. 2009. Logic as the question concerning the essence of language. Trans. Wanda T. Gregory and Yvonne Unna. Albany: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Ott, Hugo. 1993. Martin Heidegger: A political life. Trans. Allan Blunden. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Salih, Sarah. 2002. Judith Butler. New York: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stone, Allison. 2005. Towards a genealogical feminism: A reading of Judith Butler's political thought. Contemporary Political Theory 4: 4–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar