127 Quotes by Judith Butler

We lose ourselves in what we read, only to return to ourselves, transformed and part of a more expansive world.

If Lacan presumes that female homosexuality issues from a disappointed heterosexuality, as observation is said to show, could it not be equally clear to the observer that heterosexuality issues from a disappointed homosexuality?

What is most important is to cease legislating for all lives what is liveable only for some, and similarly, to refrain from proscribing for all lives what is unlivable for some.

In other words, they appeal to the state for protection, but the state is precisely that from which they require protection. To be protected from violence by the nation-state is to be exposed to the violence wielded by the nation-state, so to rely on the nation-state for protection from violence is precisely to exchange one potential violence for another. There may, indeed, be few other choices.

Precarity designates that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death.

I argue that even as the war is framed in certain ways to control and heighten affect in relation to the differential grievability of lives, so war has come to frame ways of thinking multiculturalism and debates on sexual freedom, issues largely considered separate from "foreign affairs.

The violence of language consists in its effort to capture the ineffable and, hence, to destroy it, to seize hold of that which must remain elusive for language to operate as a living thing.

Eğer toplumsal cinsiyet transvestit ise, ve eğer bu, yaklaşmayı denediği ideali düzenli olarak doğuran bir taklitse, o zaman toplumsal cinsiyet, bir içsel cinsiyet ya da öz ya da psişik toplumsal cinsiyet çekirdeği yanılsamasını doğuran bir temsildir; içsel derinlik yanılsamasını tende, jestle, hareketle, yürüyüşle (cinsiyetin takdimi olarak anlaşılan bedensel temsiller silsilesiyle) doğurur.

I'm no great fan of the phallus, and have made my own views known on this subject before, so I do not propose a return to a notion of the phallus as the third term in any and all relations of desire.