Description
Book SynopsisDispossession describes the condition of those who have lost land, citizenship, property, and a broader belonging to the world. This thought-provoking book seeks to elaborate our understanding of dispossession outside of the conventional logic of possession, a hallmark of capitalism, liberalism, and humanism.
Trade 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
Table of ContentsPreface vii
1 Aporetic dispossession, or the trouble with dispossession 1
2 The logic of dispossession and the matter of the human (after the critique of metaphysics of substance) 10
3 A caveat about the "primacy of economy" 38
4 Sexual dispossessions 44
5 (Trans)possessions, or bodies beyond themselves 55
6 The sociality of self-poietics: Talking back to the violence of recognition 64
7 Recognition and survival, or surviving recognition 75
8 Relationality as self-dispossession 92
9 Uncounted bodies, incalculable performativity 97
10 Responsiveness as responsibility 104
11 Ex-propriating the performative 126
12 Dispossessed languages, or singularities named and renamed 131
13 The political promise of the performative 140
14 The governmentality of "crisis" and its resistances 149
15 Enacting another vulnerability: On owing and owning 158
16 Trans-border affective foreclosures and state racism 164
17 Public grievability and the politics of memorialization 173
18 The political affects of plural performativity 176
19 Conundrums of solidarity 184
20 The university, the humanities, and the book bloc 188
21 Spaces of appearance, politics of exposure 193
Notes 198
Index 205
