Judith Butler: Ethics, Law, Politics

by Loizidou; Elena

• ISBN13: 9781904385455
• ISBN10: 1904385451
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-04-17
• Publisher: Cavendish Pub Ltd

Summary

The first to use Judith Butler?s work as a reading of how the legal subject is formed, this book traces how Butler comes to the themes of ethics, law and politics analyzing their interrelation and explaining how they relate to Butler?s question of how people can have more liveable and viable lives. Acknowledging the potency and influence of Butler?s ?concept? of gender as process, which occupies a well developed and well discussed position in current literature, Elena Loizidou argues that the possibility of people having more liveable and viable lives is articulated by Butler within the parameters of a sustained agonistic relationship between the three spheres of ethics, law and politics. Suggesting that Butler?s rounded understanding of the interrelationship of these three spheres will enable critical legal scholarship, as well as critical theory more generally, to consider how the question of life?s unsustainable conditions can be rethought and redressed, this book is a key readfor all students of legal ethics, political philosophy and social theory.

Author Biography

Elena Loizidou is a Lecturer in the School of Law, Birkbeck College, University of London.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	p. ix
Table of cases and statute	p. xi
Introduction	p. 1
Gender performativity as method	p. 17
Historiography, language and bodies	p. 21
Gender performativity and its genealogy	p. 26
Ethical sisters	p. 45
Ethics: a brief genealogy	p. 48
The briefest history of the subject	p. 61
Ethical ambivalence	p. 74
Double law	p. 87
Legal suspensions and the question of violence	p. 93
Law, sovereignty, governmentality and the question of life	p. 110
The melancholic drag queen and its political potential	p. 129
The political	p. 130
Bodies figural and material	p. 140
Resistance	p. 149
Butler's reception	p. 157
Bibliography	p. 169
Index	p. 177
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.