Polity Dispossession: The Performative in the Political: 17 (Conversations)

About the Author 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. Product Description This book seeks to elaborate our understanding of dispossession outside of the conventional logic of possession. It interrogates the agonistic and open-ended corporeality of the crowd as it assembles in cities to protest political and economic dispossession through a performative dispossession of the sovereign subject and its propriety. Review "A productive read and develops and discusses many key themes that cross disciplinary boundaries. The book will therefore prove useful to various readers."Feminist Review"An engaging read... does an excellent job of articulating, in various ways, the need to conceptualise dispossession outside the logic of possession"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