Sunday, June 13, 2010

Violence, Mourning, Politics - excerpt from Judith Butler

'I find that my very formation implicates the other in me, that my own foreignness to myself, is paradoxically, the source of my ethical connection with others. I am not fully known to myself, because part of what I am is the enigmatic traces of others...I am wounded, and I find that the wound itself testifies to the fact that I am impressionable, given over to the Other in ways that I cannot fully predict or control'.

I need to come back to this paper - Butler posits that the disorientation of grief posits the 'I' in the mode of unknowingness, where mourning and grief furnish a politic, a sense of community of complex order. Loss makes a tenuous we of us all. Loss is a change that de-constitutes choice, it forces us to undergo a transformation the outcomes of which we cannot know in advance, something larger than our own cognitive plans, our own projects, our own knowings.

After exams.

Ref:

Butler, J. (2003). Violence, Mourning, Politics. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 4, 9-37.

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