Dwelling in Diaspora: Judith Butler’s Post-secular Paradigm

Abstract

This article aims to present Judith Butler’s theory of diaspora as a theological paradigm for post-secular social existence. Her accounts of dispossession, statelessness, and exilic identity all afford us a normative challenge for how to think politics and the theological together. We begin by framing Judith Butler’s diasporic theory of politics within Adriennes Rich’s poetic perspective on ecstatic identity. We proceed to argue that by emphasizing both the precariousness and interdependency of social life, Rich and Butler’s shared commitments to universalizing queer forms of collective belonging and affective relations offer an alternative post-secular paradigm to that offered so far by theorists such as Charles Taylor or Jürgen Habermas. Achieving a post-secular “state” may ultimately be a matter of embracing the failure of our own representations, particularly the failures of contemporary religion to represent either the divine or the human, or to constitute a society with its own political theology. It is paradoxically this kind of failure that can open us up to look at ourselves, and to focus on the precariousness and vulnerability of human existence that we see with our very eyes and reproduced by our very own hands.

Notes

1. Adrienne Rich, “Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity,” in Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose (New York: W.W. Norton, 1986), 122–23.

2. Adrienne Rich, “Notes toward a Politics of Location,” in Blood, Bread, and Poetry, 224.

3. Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 224.

4. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005).

5. Judith Butler, “Is Judaism Zionism?” in The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, ed. Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan Van Antwerpen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 70–91; Judith Butler, “Afterword,” in Bodily Citations: Religion and Judith Butler, ed. Ellen T. Armour and Susan M. St. Ville (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 276–392.

6. Butler, Parting Ways, 22–24, 117, 122–29, respectively.

7. Butler, Parting Ways, 151ff.

8. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007); Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Jürgen Habermas, “Notes on Post‐Secular Society,” New Perspectives Quarterly 25.4 (2008): 17–29; Jürgen Habermas, “An Awareness of What Is Missing,” in An Awareness of What Is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular Age, ed. Jürgen Habermas and Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 15–23.

9. Gregor McLellan, “The Postsecular Turn,” Theory, Culture & Society 27.4 (2010): 3–20.

10. Butler, “Is Judaism Zionism?” 278–80; and Butler, Parting Ways, 114–15.

11. Sarah Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 78.

12. Such gestures, it should be said, are, however, invaluable in another sense. See Gerard Loughlin, ed., Queer Theology: Rethinking the Western Body (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007).

13. See Butler’s comments on the failure of representations in her Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), 73–77, 138, respectively.

14. Judith Butler, “Critically Queer,” GLQ, A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1 (1993): 17–32; reprinted in Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), chap. 8.

15. Butler, “Critically Queer,” 21.

16. Butler, “Critically Queer,” 21.

17. David L. Eng, Judith Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz, “Introduction,” in “What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?” Special Issue, ed. David L. Eng, Judith Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz, Social Text 84–85 (2005): 3.

18. Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 3–9.

19. Butler and Athanasiou, Dispossession, 104–5.

20. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 30–31, 44–49; See also Butler, Frames of War, xxv, 37–38; and Judith Butler, “Performativity, Precariousness and Sexual Politics,” AIBR-Revista de Antropologia Iberoamericana 4.3 (2009): 1–13.

21. Rich, “Notes Toward a Politics of Location,” in Blood, Bread, and Poetry, 224.

22. Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” in Blood, Bread, and Poetry, 23–75.

23. Butler and Athanasiou, Dispossession, 10–11, 27, 35, respectively.

24. Butler and Athanasiou, Dispossession, 184–87.

25. Butler, Precarious Life, 19–25.

26. Butler and Athanasiou, Dispossession, 7–9; Butler, Parting Ways, 151–52, 214-15, respectively.

27. Butler, Precarious Life, 24–31; Butler and Athanasiou, Dispossession, 55.

28. Butler, Precarious Life, 46, 134, respectively.

29. Butler, Parting Ways, 166.

30. Butler, Parting Ways, 15, 18–27, respectively.

31. Butler, Parting Ways, 25.

32. Butler and Athanasiou, Dispossession, 3.

33. Butler, Precarious Life, 49.

34. Butler and Athanasiou, Dispossession, 55.

35. Butler, Precarious Life, 26.

36. In Mendieta and Van Antwerpen, The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, 70–91.

37. Butler, Parting Ways, 100–101, 176, respectively.

38. Butler, Parting Ways, 4.

39. Butler, Parting Ways, 5.

40. Butler, Parting Ways, 5–6.

41. Butler, “Is Judaism Zionism?” 74.

42. Butler, “Is Judaism Zionism?” 76.

43. Butler, “Is Judaism Zionism?” 77.

44. Butler, Parting Ways, 17.

45. Butler, Parting Ways, 15.

46. Butler and Athanasiou, Dispossession, 28, 137, respectively.

47. See the argument in Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997).

48. Butler and Athanasiou, Dispossession, 68.

49. Butler and Athanasiou, Dispossession, 167.

50. Butler and Athanasiou, Dispossession, 146.

51. Butler and Athanasiou, Parting Ways, 22.

52. Such a view can also be found in the object-oriented philosophy of Bruno Latour who places the stress upon faith as a network of relations between objects and not on belief as a metaphysical (onto-theological) proposition. See Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). The benefit of putting such an “object-oriented” system into dialogue with Butler’s work is that, by widening our attention to a network of relations between objects—which are all really subjects as well—we are able ethically to “see the faces” of so many more subjects than we might at first have been able to perceive, and thus to act more responsibly toward them. Extending our viewpoint in this way would also incline us toward making everyone (or everything) grievable, for example.

53. Butler, Parting Ways, 5.

54. Butler sees this as an inherent paradox of the impact of dispossession on Jewishness, Parting Ways, 5.

55. Johann Baptist Metz, Faith in History and Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology, trans. David Smith (New York: Seabury, 1980), 171. See also the development of this notion theologically in Lieven Boeve, God Interrupts History: Theology in a Time of Upheaval (London: Continuum, 2007).

56. Butler, Parting Ways, 6.

57. Butler and Athanasiou, Dispossession, 9, but also 35 and 91.

58. Butler, Parting Ways, 17.

59. Butler, Parting Ways, 17.

60. Butler, Parting Ways, 17.

61. Cf. Dan Colucciello Barber, On Diaspora: Christianity, Religion, and Secularity (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2011), as well as Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, Powers of Diaspora: Two Essays on the Relevance of Jewish Culture (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).

62. Mark L. Taylor, The Theological and the Political: On the Weight of the World (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2011).