Judith Butler's Argumentative Analysis

2. Radical Political renegotiation through critical ruptures and one’s voice

In this section we are going to focus on more radical forms of political renegotiation, beyond the reformist liberal perspective, in particular on the work of Judith Butler and Adriana Cavarero. Butler is well known for having theorised a form of resistance and political re-negotiation as subversion of the subject against the normative system of forced choice, in which, the subject itself is defined. It is important to acknowledge the Hegelian root of her subject and political theory in order to understand Butler’s thought. Such Hegelian root is especially evident in her first work, Subjects of Desire. She also refers to Hegel in the book Contingency, Hegemony, Universality.

Consequently, for Butler, all political terms need to be contested, questioned, subverted and renegotiated. It follows that for Butler, the Hegelian recognition becomes an impossibility, a continuous process of struggle, and perhaps, a way of striving for the impossible. Her work can be understood as a form of resistance against the fixation of the ideological frame and the violence of subject formation. According to Butler, the subject appears as necessarily located within the symbolic structures, always wholly connected with the dominating structures of socio-linguistic-cultural and legal norms, as in the case of sex or gender. The latter are seen as normative linguistic constructions of the body.

In Frames of Wars, Butler writes five essays in response to war, where the themes of vulnerability and precariety and their denial become central themes. Butler argues that the linguistic and ideological frame, not only regulates reality, but also participates in producing reality and thus materiality and our bodies. An important point is that the frame leaves something cut out from it. Not all life is captured and recognised by the normative conditions of the frame. Rather, something exceeds the