Vikki Bell

On Speech, Race and Melancholia: An Interview with Judith Butler

In this interview, Judith Butler speaks about her most recent work, especially Excitable Speech (Routledge, 1997), in terms of how it represents a continuation of certain themes and how it represents moves into new terrains of debate. In particular, she addresses both possible critiques of her work, expecially around the issue of the possibility of political visions and the attention to speech when theorizing subjectification, and responds to questions around certain related themes such as: just what is the possibility of using the same analytical framework to talk both about racializing and gendering processes? How useful is the concept of melancholia? How are textuality and visuality interconnected?

Interrogating incest : feminism, Foucault and the law

Winner of British Sociological Association Philip Abrams Memorial Prize 1993 Within feminism incest has often been subsumed under a discussion of sexual violence and abuse. Yet, important as this is, there has been little account of how feminist work itself relates to other ways of talking about and understanding incest. In Interrogating Incest Vikki Bell focuses on the issue of incest and its place in sociological theory, feminist theory and criminal law. By examining incest from a critical Foucauldian framework she considers how feminist discourse on incest itself fits into existing ways of talking about sex. Closely surveying the historical background to incest legislation and the theoretical issues involve, Vikki Bell delineates their practical implications and shows what uncomfortable questions and important dilemmas are raised by the criminalisation of incest.

Governing childhood: neo-liberalism and the law

Recent legal movies - stemming from the Gillick decision and incorporated into the Children Act 1989 - appear to champion the right of the mature child to autonomy. This article argues that these have been contradictory manoeuvres, both at the level of statute and in practice. Although (some) childrens wishes are being listened to, the shift toward giving children independence in decision making about their lives has not been straigtforward. However, these contradictions can be understood as consistent with a contemporary mode of governmentality that treats members of a family as individuals but also befriends ‘the family’ as a unit. Responding to the problems encountered by welfarism, ‘neo-liberalism’ offers increased distanciation between ‘the State’ and ‘the family’. At the same time, the family is problematized as a political site, and those subordinated by classical liberalism are offered routes by which to challenge the arbitrariness of familial power.

Declining Performativity Butler, Whitehead and Ecologies of Concern

This article explores what might happen to the concept of performativity within arguments that are understood as ‘topological’. It argues that we might ‘decline’ performativity, which is to say, elaborate the concerns that are expressed in the concept, but inclining it more boldly towards the complexities of a world whose elements are always in process of constitution, of reiterative enfolding. Taking a cue from Isabelle Stengers’ recent work in which she posits the notion of ecologies of practice, on the one hand, and Whitehead’s concept of concern, on the other, the paper argues that emergent entities have differential requirements – not least according to the disciplines to which they appeal – and subtend different modes of implied obligation. An adherence to these requirements needs to be accompanied by persuasive presentation that obliges a community to affirm any entity. On many levels of abstraction, ecologies need to show concern for an entity to facilitate its emergence and to sustain its mode of being. In an expanded vision, then, human and non-human entities at all levels enter into multifarious relational modes of becoming, but these become of sustained consequence only through persuasion of communities, sometimes organized into disciplines. The survival of entities requires forms of differentiation, division and of value. The paper relates these arguments to forms of sociological enquiry that give glimpses of how sociology might respond. It ends with a hesitation around the radical anti-anthropomorphism of the stance developed, and argues that this does not entirely eclipse the importance of political hope.

New Scenes of Vulnerability, Agency and Plurality: An Interview with Judith Butler

IT HAD been ten years or more since the last formal interview I conducted with Judith Butler for TCS, but nonetheless, had she declined, I would not have pressed the point. One among the very many requests sent in her direction – for lectures, manuscripts, articles, comments, responses, endorsements and the like – mine was hopeful rather than insistent. Still, ten years is hardly pestering and, happily, Judith agreed to another demand on her time, asking only a few months more peace from me before we met, at her home in Berkeley, California, to sit for some several hours, drinking tea and taking stock. Living by words doesn’t necessarily make the writer comfortable with the spoken interview format; indeed, the academic interview is a peculiar endeavour, attempting to elicit both spontaneity and brevity that are not the common habits of its subject. Judith Butler, however, has an impressive ability to speak extemporaneously, and with the broad canvas that this interview afforded her, she ranges, as I had hoped she would, over a wide terrain. Making connections between the various philosophies she engages – Foucault, Fanon, Arendt, Laplanche are all mentioned here – as well as with the present political configurations to which she feels one should attend, Judith Butler eloquently conveys a sense of her restless need to think the present, to try to comprehend it through, but also as a question for, philosophy. This, more than any concern for the consistency of argument, characterizes Judith Butler’s work and her own reflections on it. Yet there are some consistencies, concerns that have remained throughout her career to date. The terms of the title we have chosen for the interview – vulnerability, agency, plurality – are offered in an attempt to capture a few of those

On ethics and feminism Reflecting on Levinas’ ethics of non-(in)difference

In this article I argue that, if one is persuaded by the arguments of Emmanuel Levinas, the pursuit of something called ‘ethical feminism’ is rendered difficult, for, according to Levinas, there is a hiatus between ethics and politics in so far as politics does not flow from ethics. Indeed, politics obliges one to engage in the non-ethical, so that the ethical cannot be understood as a basis for feminist politics. I contend that one can argue that it is in the way that the dangers of the non-ethical are handled that politics begins. If this is so, one can refigure the question of ethics within feminism. Ethics becomes a check on freedom and politics rather than its originary source. However, I argue, along with Michel Foucault and William Connolly, that ethical responses, while coming from the other, have also to be subjected to genealogical critique, so that their conditions of possibility are not naturalized.

On the Critique of Secular Ethics: An Essay with Flannery O'Connor and Hannah Arendt

Referring to Hannah Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem, the Southern US fiction writer Flannery O’Connor expressed the effect of the revelations about the horrors of Nazi Germany as ‘haunting’. Taking this comment and her admiration of Arendt as a cue, this article rereads Flannery O’Connor’s fictional depiction of secular characters. Usually lauded or critiqued for her entanglement in ‘otherworldly’ concerns, here these concerns become comprehensible as much as political intervention as motivated by ‘religious’ belief. O’Connor’s frequently humorous use of her fiction as a retort to the secular world was inflected by her reading of Eric Voegelin’s contemporary secularization thesis with its criticism of all ‘isms’. In this context, O’Connor’s admiration for Arendt becomes all the more intriguing (since Arendt’s interpretations of the human condition clashed with Voegelin’s), and allows one to stage a theoretical meeting in order to explore O’Connor’s depiction of the secular in relation to a speculative exploration of how Arendt might have responded to the fiction of O’Connor. Such a staging is accomplished here via a reading of O’Connor’s short story ‘The Lame Shall Enter First’ read against Arendt’s concerns, principally those expressed in The Human Condition.

Spectres of Peace: Civic Participation in Northern Ireland

Understanding the Civic Forum in Northern Ireland as part of a new modeof governance that the Belfast Agreement and the Northern Ireland Act 1998 sought to make possible, the Forum can be analysed as a technology of Peace that has in turn invited the fashioning of a new democratic subject. This ‘subject’, moreover, is operating not merely within a new institutional space and within new processes but within a new ethical landscape. Thus while the participatory ethos links the Forum’s work to much wider changes in the notion of ‘democracy’, the specificities of the Forum’s context - its role as part of the Peace process set against Northern Ireland’s history of conflict - give its work a further particular purpose with a complex temporal dimension. The new landscape is one in which the ‘call to Peace’ is foregrounded, initiating a complex relationship to what has been, what ‘is’ and what the future potentially holds. Peace, it is argued here, requires a performative call to the future, a call for a new spirit. But this new spirit is one that cannot be simply conjured, marketed and distributed like an easy sentimentality, not least because sentimentality simply ignores the present’s tie to the past. Rather, the pursuit of Peace has to be sought in the messiness of the present, and has therefore to be open to the heterogeneity of ‘the past’. Competing injunctions arise from the spirits of the past, urging those in the present to follow divergent paths. Following Derrida’s Spectres of Marx(1994), it is argued that these ghosts cannot be simply banished. As this study of the Civic Forum illustrates, how the Forum positions itself, both institutionally and procedurally, necessarily involves the negotiation of notions of past and future. The successful pursuit of Peace will be dependent upon how those in the present receive the ghosts of the past and how they can allow for their enjoining as a condition of that future’s very possibility.

The Violence and the Appeal of Raciologies: Colonialism, Camps and Cosmopolitan Utopias

AT A Lecture at Goldsmiths College, London, in 2001 Paul Gilroy mentioned in passing the peculiar nostalgia that some analyses of racism betray wherever their imagery and vocabulary approach the present through analyses formed in relation to moments in the past. By contrast, his own work reveals an awareness that the present poses new configurations and new questions for the anti-racist cultural historian and theorist. But this does not mean that Gilroy dismisses past analyses, of course. Indeed, Gilroy draws much of his approach to the analysis of contemporary life and its deployment of racisms from past critical thinkers. Paul Gilroy’s Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race mentions many of these inspirations, but one in particular might be seen as central. Gilroy’s book is in several ways an extended conversation with Frantz Fanon, and it is for this reason that I wish to discuss the various theses pursued in this work alongside a review of David Macey’s detailed biography Frantz Fanon: A Life.

Contemporary Art and Transitional Justice in Northern Ireland: The Consolation of Form

Contemporary artworks in Northern Ireland are explored here as critical constellations, in Walter Benjamin’s sense, that engage the cultural processes of transition through their problematization of it. It is argued that the artworks become sites in which the assumptions of transition are opened up for critical reflection, requesting attention to the foreclosing of the meanings of memory, of past-and-future, of community. A mode of critical questioning of the present renders the present problematic not in terms of exclusions nor with reference to a past that cannot or will not be erased, but in terms of the present’s inability to be conceived through a linear conception of time. That is, the past and its relation to both the present and to the future are set in oscillation as artworks explore the complex temporalities of a present self-consciously attempting to narrate itself away from the past. The artworks, ‘without the bigotry of conviction’ as Seamus Deane put it, suggest that the task of dealing with the past is flawed wherever the past is conceived as a history that can be rendered present to be judged by subjects who are thereby placed beyond it. That is the illusion of a present ‘no-time’ that dovetails with the desires of commercial enterprise and neo-liberal conceptions of freedom. If this suggests an unceasing restlessness, the consolation is that this questioning does take a form, not as judgement or political decision but as artworks which by definition, remain open to reinterpretation and new understandings. These issues are discussed with reference to the work of four artists in Northern Ireland: the paintings of Rita Duffy, the photography and installation work of Anthony Haughey, and the sculptural works of Philip Napier and Mike Hogg.