This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. No cleanup reason has been specified. Please help improve this article if you can; the talk page may contain suggestions. (March 2010)

Judith Butler

Butler during a lecture at the University of Hamburg. April 2007
Born	(1956-02-24) February 24, 1956 (age 56) Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.
Era	20th / 21st-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Continental philosophy, Third-wave feminism, Critical theory, Queer theory, Postmodernism, Post-structuralism
Main interests	Feminist theory, Political philosophy, Ethics, Psychoanalysis, Discourse, Embodiment, Sexuality, Jewish philosophy
Notable ideas	Sex and gender as social construction, Gender performativity
Influenced by Michel Foucault, Theodor Adorno, J.L. Austin, Luce Irigaray, Gayle Rubin, Monique Wittig, Emmanuel Lévinas, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Simone de Beauvoir, Claude Lévi-Strauss
Influenced Eve Sedgwick, Michael Warner, Judith Halberstam, José Muñoz, Lauren Berlant, Kate Bornstein Grace Ji-Sun Kim

Judith Butler (born February 24, 1956) is an American post-structuralist philosopher, who has contributed to the fields of feminism, queer theory, political philosophy, and ethics. She is a professor in the Rhetoric and Comparative Literature departments at the University of California, Berkeley. Butler received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University in 1984, for a dissertation subsequently published as Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France. In the late-1980s she held several teaching/research appointments, and was involved in "post-structuralist" efforts within Western feminist theory to question the "presuppositional terms" of feminism.

Her research ranges from literary theory, modern philosophical fiction, feminist and sexuality studies, to 19th- and 20th-century European literature and philosophy, Kafka^[1] and loss, mourning and war.^[2] Her most recent work focuses on Jewish philosophy, exploring pre- and post-Zionist criticisms of state violence.^[3][4] Politically, she is a strong supporter of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel.^[5]

Biography[link]

Butler was born in Cleveland, Ohio ^[2] to a family of Hungarian and Russian ancestry.^[6] Her mother was raised in Orthodox Judaism, later turning to Conservative Judaism, and finally to Reform Judaism; Butler's father belonged to a Reform Synagogue since his childhood.^[5] As a child and teenager, she attended both Hebrew school and special classes on Jewish ethics where she received her "first training in philosophy." ^[5][7] Butler stated in a 2010 interview with Haaretz that she began the ethics classes at the age of 14 and that they were created as a form of punishment by her Hebrew school's Rabbi because she was "too talkative in class," "talk[ed] back," and was "not well behaved."^[5] Butler also stated that she was "thrilled" by the classes and chose to focus on Martin Buber. She also encountered the writings of Kant, Hegel, and Spinoza during these special sessions.^[5]

Butler attended Bennington College and then Yale University^[8] where she studied philosophy, receiving her B.A. in 1978 and her Ph.D. in 1984.^[9] Her dissertation was subsequently published as Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (1987).^[10] In Butler’s dissertation, she attempts to understand how gender comes into being and how gender comes to be seen as something naturally occurring rather than historical. Butler points out that it is possible for a person to choose the gender they desire to be, but society prevents us from choosing no gender.^[11]

She taught at Wesleyan University, George Washington University, and Johns Hopkins University before joining U.C. Berkeley in 1993.^[2] She will join the department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University as a visiting professor in the spring semesters of 2012 and 2013 and has the option of remaining as full time faculty.^[12][13][14] In 2009 she received the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Distinguished Achievement Award for her contributions to humanistic inquiry. The prize money of $1.5 million is supposed to enable the recipients to teach and research under especially favorable conditions.^[2][15] Since 2006 Judith Butler has been the Hannah Arendt Professor of philosophy at the European Graduate School (EGS) in Switzerland.^[7] She sits on the Advisory Board of the academic journal Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture.^[16] Butler is also working on critiquing ethical violence and trying to formulate a theory of responsibility “for an opaque subject that works with Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault and Fredrich Nietzsche”.^[8]

Personal life[link]

Butler currently lives with her partner, the political scientist Wendy Brown. Butler identifies as an anti-Zionist Jew and is a critic of Israeli politics.^[17]

Overview of works[link]

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (March 2010)

[edit] Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

Gender Trouble was first published in 1990, selling over 100,000 copies internationally and in different languages^{[citation needed]}. Alluding to the similarly named 1974 John Waters film Female Trouble starring the drag queen Divine,^[18] Gender Trouble critically discusses the works of Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, Monique Wittig, Jacques Derrida, and, most significantly, Michel Foucault. The book has also enjoyed widespread popularity outside of traditional academic circles, even inspiring an intellectual fanzine, Judy!^[19]

The crux of Butler's argument in Gender Trouble is that the coherence of the categories of sex, gender, and sexuality—the natural-seeming coherence, for example, of masculine gender and heterosexual desire in male bodies—is culturally constructed through the repetition of stylized acts in time. These stylized bodily acts, in their repetition, establish the appearance of an essential, ontological "core" gender.^{[citation needed]} This is the sense in which Butler famously theorizes gender, along with sex and sexuality, as performative. The performance of gender, sex, and sexuality, however, is not a voluntary choice for Butler, who locates the construction of the gendered, sexed, desiring subject within what she calls, borrowing from Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, "regulative discourses." These, also called "frameworks of intelligibility" or "disciplinary regimes," decide in advance what possibilities of sex, gender, and sexuality are socially permitted to appear as coherent or "natural."^{[citation needed]} Regulative discourse includes within it disciplinary techniques which, by coercing subjects to perform specific stylized actions, maintain the appearance in those subjects of the "core" gender, sex and sexuality the discourse itself produces.^[20]

A significant yet sometimes overlooked part of Butler's argument concerns the role of sex in the construction of "natural" or coherent gender and sexuality. Butler explicitly challenges biological accounts of binary sex, reconceiving the sexed body as itself culturally constructed by regulative discourse.^[21] The supposed obviousness of sex as a natural biological fact attests to how deeply its production in discourse is concealed. The sexed body, once established as a “natural” and unquestioned “fact,” is the alibi for constructions of gender and sexuality, unavoidably more cultural in their appearance, which can purport to be the just-as-natural expressions or consequences of a more fundamental sex. On Butler’s account, it is on the basis of the construction of natural binary sex that binary gender and heterosexuality are likewise constructed as natural.^[22] In this way, Butler claims that without a critique of sex as produced by discourse, the sex/gender distinction as a feminist strategy for contesting constructions of binary asymmetric gender and compulsory heterosexuality will be ineffective.^[23]

Thus, by showing both terms “gender “and “sex” as socially and culturally constructed, Butler offers a critique of both terms, even as they have been used by feminists.^[24] Butler argued that feminism made a mistake in trying to make “women” a discrete, ahistorical group with common characteristics. Butler said this approach reinforces the binary view of gender relations because it allows for two distinct categories: men and women.^[8] Butler believes that feminists should not try to define “women” and she also believes that feminists should “focus on providing an account of how power functions and shapes our understandings of womanhood not only in the society at large but also within the feminist movement”.^[25] Finally, Butler aims to break the supposed links between sex and gender so that gender and desire can be “flexible, free floating and not caused by other stable factors”.^[8] The idea of identity as free and flexible and gender as a performance, not an essence, is one of the foundations of Queer Theory.^[8]

[edit] Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (1993)

Bodies That Matter seeks to clear up readings and supposed misreadings of performativity that view the enactment of sex/gender as a daily choice.^[26] To do this, Butler emphasizes the role of repetition in performativity, making use of Derrida's theory of iterability, a form of citationality, to work out a theory of performativity in terms of iterability:

Performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability, a regularized and constrained repetition of norms. And this repetition is not performed by a subject; this repetition is what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal condition for the subject. This iterability implies that 'performance' is not a singular 'act' or event, but a ritualized production, a ritual reiterated under and through constraint, under and through the force of prohibition and taboo, with the threat of ostracism and even death controlling and compelling the shape of the production, but not, I will insist, determining it fully in advance.^[27]

Iterability, in its endless undeterminedness as to-be-determinedness, is thus precisely that aspect of performativity that makes the production of the "natural" sexed, gendered, heterosexual subject possible, while also and at the same time opening that subject up to the possibility of its incoherence and contestation.^[jargon]

[edit] Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997)

In Excitable Speech, Butler surveys the problems of hate speech and censorship. She argues that censorship is difficult to evaluate, and that in some cases it may be useful or even necessary, while in others it may be worse than tolerance.^{[citation needed]} She develops a new conception of censorship’s complex workings, supplanting the myth of the independent subject who wields the power to censor with a theory of censorship as an effect of state power and, more primordially, as the condition of language and discourse itself.^{[citation needed]}

Butler argues that hate speech exists retrospectively, only after being declared such by state authorities. In this way, the state reserves for itself the power to define hate speech and, conversely, the limits of acceptable discourse. In this connection, Butler criticizes feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon's argument against pornography for its unquestioning acceptance of the state’s power to censor.^{[citation needed]}

Deploying Foucault’s argument from The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, Butler claims that any attempt at censorship, legal or otherwise, necessarily propagates the very language it seeks to forbid.^[28] As Foucault argues, for example, the strict sexual mores of 19th century Western Europe did nothing but amplify the discourse of sexuality it sought to control.^[29] Extending this argument using Derrida and Lacan, Butler claims that censorship is primitive to language, and that the linguistic “I” is a mere effect of an originary censorship. In this way, Butler questions the possibility of any genuinely oppositional discourse; "If speech depends upon censorship, then the principle that one might seek to oppose is at once the formative principle of oppositional speech".^[30]

Butler also questions the efficacy of censorship on the grounds that hate speech is context-dependent. Citing J.L. Austin's concept of the performative utterance, Butler notes that words’ ability to “do things” makes hate speech possible but also at the same time dependent on its specific embodied context.^{[citation needed]} Austin’s claim that what a word “does,” its illocutionary force, varies with the context in which it is uttered implies that it is impossible to adequately define the performative meanings of words, including hate, abstractly.^{[citation needed]} On this basis, Butler rejects arguments like Richard Delgado’s which justify the censorship of certain specific words by claiming the use of those words constitutes hate speech in any context. In this way, Butler underlines the difficulty inherent in efforts to systematically identify hate speech.

[edit] Undoing Gender (2004)

Undoing Gender collects Butler's reflections on gender, sex, sexuality, psychoanalysis and the medical treatment of intersex people for a more general readership than many of her other books. Butler revisits and refines her notion of performativity and focuses on the question of undoing "restrictively normative conceptions of sexual and gendered life".

Butler discusses how gender is performed without one being conscious of it, but says that it does not mean this performativity is "automatic or mechanical". She argues that we have desires that do not originate from our personhood, but rather, from social norms. The writer also debates our notions of "human" and "less-than-human" and how these culturally imposed ideas can keep one from having a "viable life" as the biggest concerns are usually about whether a person will be accepted if his or her desires differ from normality. She states that one may feel the need of being recognized in order to live, but that at the same time, the conditions to be recognized make life "unlivable". The writer proposes an interrogation of such conditions so that people who resist them may have more possibilities of living.^[31]

In her discussion of intersex, Butler addresses the case of David Reimer, a person whose sex was medically "reassigned" from male to female after a botched circumcision at eight months of age. Reimer was "made" female by doctors, but later in life identified as "really" male, married and became a stepfather to his wife's 3 children, and went on to tell his story in As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl which he wrote with John Colapinto. Reimer committed suicide in 2004.^[32]

[edit] Giving an Account of Oneself (2005)

In Giving an Account of Oneself, Butler develops an ethics based on the opacity of the subject to itself; in other words, the limits of self-knowledge. Primarily borrowing from Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean Laplanche, Adriana Cavarero and Emmanuel Levinas, Butler develops a theory of the formation of the subject. She theorizes the subject in relation to the social – a community of others and their norms – which is beyond the control of the subject it forms, as precisely the very condition of that subject’s formation, the resources by which the subject becomes recognizably human, a grammatical "I", in the first place.

Butler accepts the claim that if the subject is opaque to itself the limitations of its free ethical responsibility and obligations are due to the limits of narrative, presuppositions of language and projection. "You may think that I am in fact telling a story about the prehistory of the subject, one that I have been arguing cannot be told. There are two responses to this objection. (1) That there is no final or adequate narrative reconstruction of the prehistory of the speaking "I" does not mean we cannot narrate it; it only means that at the moment when we narrate we become speculative philosophers or fiction writers. (2) This prehistory has never stopped happening and, as such, is not a prehistory in any chronological sense. It is not done with, over, relegated to a past, which then becomes part of a causal or narrative reconstruction of the self. On the contrary, that prehistory interrupts the story I have to give of myself, makes every account of myself partial and failed, and constitutes, in a way, my failure to be fully accountable for my actions, my final "irresponsibility," one for which I may be forgiven only because I could not do otherwise. This not being able to do otherwise is our common predicament" (page 78).

Instead she argues for an ethics based precisely on the limits of self-knowledge as the limits of responsibility itself.^{[citation needed]} Any concept of responsibility which demands the full transparency of the self to itself, an entirely accountable self, necessarily does violence to the opacity which marks the constitution of the self it addresses. The scene of address by which responsibility is enabled is always already a relation between subjects who are variably opaque to themselves and to each other. The ethics that Butler envisions is therefore one in which the responsible self knows the limits of its knowing, recognizes the limits of its capacity to give an account of itself to others, and respects those limits as symptomatically human.^{[citation needed]} To take seriously one's opacity to oneself in ethical deliberation means then to critically interrogate the social world in which one comes to be human in the first place and which remains precisely that which one cannot know about oneself. In this way, Butler locates social and political critique at the core of ethical practice.^{[citation needed]}

Reception[link]

Many scholars have praised Butler's work. She has been referred to as "a big-deal academic, ... and oft-cited academic superstar",^[33] "the most famous feminist philosopher in the United States," "the queer theorist par excellence," and "the most brilliantly eclectic theorist of sexuality in recent years."^[34] In addition, Lois McNay argues that, "Butler's work has influenced feminist understandings of gender identity (1999: 175)."^[34] Others, such as Susan A. Speer and Jonathan Potter claim that her research has given new insight in several areas, especially in the concept of heterosexism. However, although Speer and Potter find Butler’s work useful in this respect, they find her work too abstract to be usefully applied to “real-life situations.” For this reason, they pair a reading of Butler with Discursive psychology in order to extend Butler’s ideas to real-world scenarios.^[35]

Others are more critical. Susan Bordo has chastised Butler for reducing gender to language, arguing that the body is a major part of gender, thus implicitly opposing her conception of gender as performed.^[36] Peter Digeser argues that Butler’s idea of performativity is too pure to account for identity. Digeser doubts that pure performativity is possible, suggesting that in viewing the gendered individual as purely performed, Butler ignores the gendered body, which Bordo also argues is extremely important. He also argues that neither an essentialist nor a performative notion of gender should be used in the political sphere, as both simplify gender too much.^[37] Martha Nussbaum has argued that Butler misreads J.L. Austin's idea of performative utterance, makes erroneous legal claims, forecloses an essential site of resistance by repudiating pre-cultural agency, and provides no normative ethical theory to direct the subversive performances that Butler endorses.^[38] Finally, Nancy Fraser argued that Butler’s focus on performativity has distanced her from “everyday ways of talking and thinking about ourselves … Why should we use such a self-distancing idiom?”^[39]

Commentary on style[link]

Butler has become famous in some circles for her "impenetrable, jargon-ridden prose,"^[40] which has also generated some controversy, according to Sara Salih, lecturer in English at the University of Kent at Canterbury.^[41] The author ascribes this to the fact that the concepts she writes about are "philosophically challenging, often ‘counter-intuitive’, and not always described in immediately accessible language."^[42]

Harvard professor Steven Pinker, has cited her work as an example of confused, Postmodernist writing that detracts from the public appreciation and support of art.^[43]

In 1998, Denis Dutton's journal Philosophy and Literature gave Butler First Prize in its "Bad Writing Competition," which claims to "celebrate bad writing from the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles."^[44] Butler's 94 word long sentence, published in the journal Diacritics, for which she received the award was:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

Dutton discontinued the contest after being criticized for its apparently hostile spirit.^[45] Butler responded to Dutton's criticism, with a letter to the London Review of Books and an op-ed piece for The New York Times. She argued that writing clearly can make the author too reliant on common sense and as such make language lose its potential to "shape the world" and shake up the status quo.^[46][47]

Stanley Kurtz, in turn, argued against Butler's op-ed in a letter to the New York Times titled, "Bad Writing Has No Defense."^[48] Stephen K. Roney also responded that "many—indeed, most—generally recognized “great thinkers” have been clear and lucid in their writing [...] Is Butler claiming to be deeper than all of them?"^[49]

Nussbaum's "The Professor of Parody" essay also raised the issue of Butler's style, calling it "ponderous and obscure" and "dense with allusions to other theorists, drawn from a wide range of different theoretical traditions...It bullies the reader into granting that, since one cannot figure out what is going on, there must be something significant going on, some complexity of thought, where in reality there are often familiar or even shopworn notions, addressed too simply and too casually to add any new dimension of understanding."^[38]

In 1999, politically conservative literary journal The New Criterion cited Butler as one of a "triumvirate of absurd figures" including Homi K. Bhabha and Fredric Jameson, for bad writing.^[50]

Political activism[link]

In "No, It's Not Anti-Semitic," an August 2003 article published in the London Review of Books, Butler argued against statements by Harvard President Lawrence Summers who suggested that certain forms of criticism of Israeli policies is a form of anti-semitism. She responded by stating that it "will not do to equate Jews with Zionists or Jewishness with Zionism" and argued against the notion that Jews such as herself who were critical of Israeli policies are "self-hating." She also referred to Post-Zionism as a "small but important" movement in Israel. In addition, Butler also argued that, "a challenge to the right of Israel to exist can be construed as a challenge to the existence of the Jewish people only if one believes that Israel alone keeps the Jewish people alive or that all Jews invest their sense of perpetuity in the state of Israel in its current or traditional forms.” ^[51]

In a later 2004 article, "Jews and the Bi-National Vision," published in Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture, Butler attributes this vision to the writings of Martin Buber.^[52] On September 7, 2006, Butler participated in a faculty-organized teach-in at the University of California, Berkeley, against the 2006 Lebanon War.^{[53][dead link]} Butler is also a strong supporter of the 2005 international economic campaign, BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions).^[5]

In June 2010 Judith Butler refused the Civil Courage Award (Zivilcouragepreis) of the Christopher Street Day Parade in Berlin, Germany at the award ceremony, citing racist comments on the part of organizers and a general failure of CSD organizations to distance themselves from racism, and from anti-Muslim excuses for war specifically. Criticizing the event's commercialism, she went on to name several groups who she commended as stronger opponents of "homophobia, transphobia, sexism, racism, and militarism".^[54]

In October 2011, Butler attended Occupy Wall Street and, in reference to calls for clarification of the protesters' demands, said, "People have asked, so what are the demands? What are the demands all of these people are making? Either they say there are no demands and that leaves your critics confused, or they say that the demands for social equality and economic justice are impossible demands. And the impossible demands, they say, are just not practical. If hope is an impossible demand, then we demand the impossible — that the right to shelter, food and employment are impossible demands, then we demand the impossible. If it is impossible to demand that those who profit from the recession redistribute their wealth and cease their greed, then yes, we demand the impossible." ^[55]

Publications (incomplete)[link]

• 2011: The question of gender : Joan W. Scott's critical feminism : ISBN 0-253-35636-9
• 2011: The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere : ISBN 0-231-15645-6
• 2009: Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? : ISBN 1-84467-333-2
• 2009: Is Critique Secular?: Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech : ISBN 0-9823294-1-5
• 2007: Who Sings the Nation-State?: Language, Politics, Belonging (with Gayatri Spivak) : ISBN 1-905422-57-1
• 2005: Giving An Account of Oneself : ISBN 0-8232-2504-6
• 2004: Undoing Gender : ISBN 0-415-96923-9
• 2004: Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence : ISBN 1-84467-544-0
• 2003: Kierkegaard's Speculative Despair in The age of German idealism (edited by Robert C. Solomon): ISBN 0-415-30878-X
• 2003: Women and Social Transformation (with Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim and Lidia Puigvert) : ISBN 0-8204-6708-1
• 2002: The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages : ISBN 0-8047-4453-X
• 2002: Prejudicial Appearances: The Logic of American Antidiscrimination Law : ISBN 0-8223-2713-9
• 2000: Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (with Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek) : ISBN 1-85984-278-X
• 2000: Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death : ISBN 0-231-11895-3
• 1997: The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection : ISBN 0-8047-2812-7
• 1997: Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative : ISBN 0-415-91587-2
• 1993: Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" : ISBN 0-415-90365-3
• 1991: "Imitation and Gender Insubordination" in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories (edited by Diana Fuss): ISBN 0-415-90237-1
• 1990: Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity : ISBN 0-415-38955-0
• 1987: Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France : ISBN 0-231-06451-9

Films and video lectures[link]

• Judith Butler. "Cohabitation, Universality and Remembrance" Birkbeck College, London. May 24, 2010 (Audio only)
• Judith Butler. "Hannah Arendt, Ethics, and Responsibility." European Graduate School. Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Video Lecture. 97 minutes. 2009
• Judith Butler and Giorgio Agamben. "Eichmann, Law and Justice." European Graduate School. Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Video Lecture. 71 minutes. 2009
• Judith Butler. "Quién le canta al estado- nación." Buenos Aires International Book Fair. (Feria Internacional del Libro). Buenos Aires, Argentine. Video Lecture. 81 minutes. 2009
• Paule Zadjermann. "Judith Butler: Philosophical Encounters of the Third Kind." DVD. 52 minutes. Color. 2007
• Judith Butler. "Primo Levi for the Present." European Graduate School. Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Video Lecture. 90 minutes. 2006
• Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler and Larry Rickels. "About Psychoanalysis." European Graduate School. Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Video Lecture. 29 minutes. 2006
• Avital Ronell and Judith Butler. "The Contemporaneity of Philosophy." European Graduate School. Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Video Lecture. 23 minutes. 2006

Selected honors and awards[link]

• 2010: "25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World", Utne Reader^[56]
• 2008: Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award, University of California, Berkeley
• 2007: Elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society
• 2004: Brudner Prize, Yale University
• 2001: Rockefeller Fellowship^{[citation needed]}
• 1999: Guggenheim Fellowship^[2]
• 1998: The Philosophy and Literature Bad Writing Contest^[57]

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Chambers, Samuel A. and Terrell Carver. ''Judith Butler and Political Theory: Troubling Politics. New York: Routledge, 2008. : ISBN 0-415-76382-7
• Cheah, Pheng, "Mattering," Diacritics, Volume 26, Number 1, Spring 1996, pp. 108–139.
• Kirby, Vicki. Judith Butler: Live Theory. London: Continuum, 2006. : ISBN 0-8264-6293-6
• Eldred, Michael, 'Metaphysics of Feminism: A Critical Note on Judith Butler's Gender Trouble' 2008.
• Salih, Sarah. The Judith Butler Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. : ISBN 0-631-22594-3
• —. ''Routledge Critical Thinkers: Judith Butler. New York: Routledge, 2002. : ISBN 0-415-21519-6
• Thiem, Annika. Unbecoming Subjects: Judith Butler, Moral Philosophy, and Critical Responsibility, Fordham University Press, 2008. : ISBN 0-8232-2899-1

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Judith Butler

• Biography – University of California, Berkeley
• Biography – European Graduate School
• Interview of Judith Butler about her new book "Frames of War" on New Statesman
• Interview with Judith Butler: “Gender is Extramoral”, Barcelona Metropolis, Summer 2008.(English)
• Review of "Giving an Account of Oneself. Ethical Violence and Responsibility", by Judith Butler, Barcelona Metropolis Autumn 2010. (English)
• "Dictionary of Literary Biography on Judith P. Butler (page 3)"
• Interview with Judith Butler about politics, economy, control societies, gender and identity (2011)
• Radio interview on Philosophy Talk

Judith with the Head of Holophernes, by Cristofano Allori, 1613 (Royal Collection, London)

Judith with the Head of Holophernes, by Simon Vouet, (Alte Pinakothek, Munich)

Caravaggio's Judith Beheading Holofernes

The Book of Judith is a deuterocanonical book, included in the Septuagint and the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christian Old Testament of the Bible, but excluded by Jews and Protestants. The book contains numerous historical anachronisms, which is why many scholars now accept it as non-historical; it has been considered a parable or perhaps the first historical novel.^[1]

The name Judith (Hebrew: יְהוּדִית, Modern Yehudit Tiberian Yəhûḏîṯ ; "Praised" or "Jewess") is the feminine form of Judah.

In the Deuterocanon[link]

The Book of Judith has a tragic setting that appealed to Jewish patriots and it warned of the urgency of adhering to Mosaic law, generally speaking, but what accounted for its enduring appeal was the drama of its narrative. The story revolves around Judith, a daring and beautiful widow, who is upset with her Jewish countrymen for not trusting God to deliver them from their foreign conquerors. She goes with her loyal maid to the camp of the enemy general, Holofernes, with whom she slowly ingratiates herself, promising him information on the Israelites. Gaining his trust, she is allowed access to his tent one night as he lies in a drunken stupor. She decapitates him, then takes his head back to her fearful countrymen. The Assyrians, having lost their leader, disperse, and Israel is saved. Though she is courted by many, she remains unmarried for the rest of her life.

It is not clear whether the Book of Judith was originally written in Hebrew or in Greek. The oldest extant version is the Septuagint and might either be a translation from Hebrew or composed in Greek. Details of vocabulary and phrasing point to a Greek text written in a language modeled on the Greek developed through translating the other books in the Septuagint.^[2] The extant Hebrew language versions, whether identical to the Greek, or in the shorter Hebrew version, are medieval. The Hebrew versions name important figures directly such as the Seleucid king Antiochus Epiphanes, thus placing the events in the Hellenistic period when the Maccabees battled the Seleucid monarchs. The Greek version uses deliberately cryptic and anachronistic references such as "Nebuchadrezzar", a "King of Assyria," who "reigns in Nineveh," for the same king. The adoption of that name, though unhistorical, has been sometimes explained either as a copyist's addition, or a voluntary literary name assigned to the ruler of Babylon (more or less as Caesar, in the Gospel, was used for Tiberius in his quality of Roman Emperor).

The historicity and canonicity of the Book of Judith in early Christianity was never disputed before Jerome began to translate the Bible into Latin. The first quote of the Book can be found by the end of the 1st century AD in the First Epistle of Clement^[3] to the Corinthians: the story is briefly told by the fourth Pope, but the narration omits the name of the city of Bethulia and of the king of Nineveh. The book is quoted by Pope Clement I (1 Clement ch. 55) side-by-side with the canonical Book of Esther, and both are clearly assigned the same degree of historicity and canonicity. Judith was generally listed among the Anagignoskomena, i.e. those books (now called Deuterocanonical) which the Church believed to be authoritative despite not belonging in the Jewish Canon. Ambrose of Milan also quotes the book as canonical.^[4] The historical identity of Nebuchadrezzar was unknown to the Church Fathers, but some of them attempted an improbable identification with Artaxerxes III Ochus, not on the basis of the character of the two rulers, but because of the presence of a "Holofernes" and a "Bagoas" in Ochus' army. Jerome advanced some doubt regarding the historicity and inspiration of those books which were absent in the Palestinian Canon due to the principle Veritas Hebraica; yet Pope Gelasius I obliged Jerome to obey the canons of the so called third Council of Carthage, held in Africa under St. Augustine of Hippo in 397, which declared the canonicity of the Deuterocanon. The book was thus added by Jerome in his Vulgate, despite being translated from a different text (in Chaldean) than the LXX version used in the early centuries for the Old Latin translations. The Canons of the Council of Carthage were later confirmed by the Quinisext Council, which makes the book a part of the Orthodox Bible; while in the West, the book's canonicity was later ratified at the Council of Trent.

Even though the Book of Judith is not considered a part of the official Jewish religious canon, many Jewish scholars regard it as true reference to the background events relating to military struggle leading up to the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah. (See also 1 Maccabees and 2 Maccabees).

The city called "Bethulia," (properly "Betylua") and the narrow and strategic pass into Judea that it occupies (Judith IV:7ff VIII:21-24) are believed by many to be fictional settings^{[citation needed]}, but some suggest that a city called Meselieh is Bethulia.^[5]

Main characters[link]

Judith, the heroine of the book. She is a widow, once married to a certain Manasses. She uses her charm to become an intimate friend of Holofernes, but finally beheads him allowing Israel to counter-attack the Assyrians.

Holofernes, the villain of the book. He is a devout soldier of his king, whom he wants to see exalted in all lands. He is given the task of destroying the rebels who didn't support the king of Nineveh in his resistance against Cheleud and the king of Media, until Israel also becomes a target of his military campaign. Judith's charm occasions his death.

Nebuchadnezzar, claimed here to be the king of Nineveh and Assyria. He is so proud that he wants to affirm his strength as a sort of divine power. Holofernes, his Turtan, is ordered to take revenge on those who refused to ally themselves with him.

Bagoas, a Persian name denoting an official of Holofernes. He is the first one who discovers Holofernes' beheading.

Achior, an Ammonite king at Nebuchadnezzar's court; he warns the king of Assyria of the power of the God of Israel but is mocked. He is the first one to recognize Holofernes' head brought by Judith in the city, and also the first one to praise Hashem.

Oziah, governor of Bethulia; together with Cabri and Carmi, he rules over Judith's city.

In the Christian West from the patristic period on, Judith was invoked in a wide variety of texts as a multi-faceted allegorical figure. “Mulier sancta,” she personified the Church and many virtues – Humility, Justice, Fortitude, Chastity (the opposite of Holofernes’ vices Pride, Tyranny, Decadence, Lust) – and she was, like the other heroic women of the Hebrew scriptural tradition, made into a typological prefiguration of the Virgin Mary. Her gender made her a natural example of the biblical paradox of “strength in weakness”; she is thus paired with David and her beheading of Holofernes paralleled with that of Goliath – both deeds saved the Covenant People from a militarily superior enemy.

Later artistic renditions[link]

In literature[link]

The first extant commentary on The Book of Judith is by Hrabanus Maurus (9th c.). Thenceforth her presence in medieval European literature is robust: in homilies, biblical paraphrases, histories and poetry. An Old English poetic version is found together with Beowulf (their epics appear both in the Nowell Codex). At the same time she is the subject of a homily by the Anglo-Saxon abbot Ælfric. The two conceptual poles represented by these works will inform much of Judith’s subsequent history.^{[citation needed]} In the epic, she is the brave warrior, forceful and active; in the homily she is an exemplar of pious chastity for cloistered nuns. In both cases, her narrative gained relevance from the Viking invasions of the period. Within the next three centuries Judith would be treated by such major figures as Frauenlob, Dante, and Geoffrey Chaucer.

In medieval Christian art, the predominance of church patronage assured that Judith’s patristic valences as “Mulier Sancta” and Virgin Mary prototype would prevail: from the eighth century frescoes in Santa Maria Antigua in Rome through innumerable later bible miniatures. Gothic cathedrals often featured Judith, most impressively in the series of 40 stained glass panels at the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris (1240s).

In Renaissance literature and visual arts, all of these trends were continued, often in updated forms, and developed. The already well established notion of Judith as an exemplum of the courage of local people against tyrannical rule from afar was given new urgency by the Assyrian nationality of Holofernes, which made him an inevitable symbol of the threatening Turks. The Italian Renaissance poet Lucrezia Tornabuoni chose Judith as one of the five subjects of her poetry on biblical ficgures.^[6] A key example is the Judita of the Dalmatian humanist Marko Marulić (1450–1524), which inspired by the contemporary struggle of the Croats against the Ottomans.

A similar dynamic was created in the 16th century by the confessional strife of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Both Protestants and Catholics draped themselves in the protective mantle of Judith and cast their “heretical” enemies as Holofernes.

In sixteenth-century France, writers such as Guillaume Du Bartas, Gabrielle de Coignard and Anne de Marquets composed poems on Judith's triumph over Holofernes. The Catholic tract "A Treatise of Schisme" written in 1578 at Douai by the English scholar Gregory Martin included a paragraph in which Martin expressed confidence that "the Catholic Hope would triumph, and pious Judith would slay Holofernes". This was interpreted by the English Protestant authorities at the time as incitement to slay Queen Elizabeth I. It served as the grounds for the death sentence passed on printer William Carter who had printed Martin's tract and who was executed in 1584.

In painting and sculpture[link]

Judith Slaying Holofernes by Artemisia Gentileschi

The account of Judith's beheading Holofernes has been treated by several painters and sculptors, most notably Donatello and Caravaggio, as well as Sandro Botticelli, Andrea Mantegna, Giorgione, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Titian, Horace Vernet, Gustav Klimt, Artemisia Gentileschi, Jan Sanders van Hemessen, Trophime Bigot, Francisco Goya, Francesco Cairo and Hermann-Paul. Also, Michelangelo depicts the scene in multiple aspects in one of the Pendentives, or four spandrels on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

In music and theatre[link]

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

The famous 40-voice motet Spem in alium by English composer Thomas Tallis, is a setting of a text from the Book of Judith.

The story also inspired a play by Abraham Goldfaden, oratorios by Antonio Vivaldi, and W. A. Mozart, and an operetta by Jacob Pavlovitch Adler.

Alessandro Scarlatti wrote an oratorio in 1693, La Giuditta, as did the Portuguese composer Francisco António de Almeida in 1726; Juditha triumphans was written in 1716 by Antonio Vivaldi; Mozart composed in 1771 La Betulia Liberata (KV 118), to a libretto by Pietro Metastasio. Arthur Honegger composed an oratorio, Judith, in 1925 to a libretto by Rene Morax. Operatic treatments exist by Russian composer Alexander Sernov, Judith, and by German composer Siegfried Matthus.

In 1840, Friedrich Hebbel's play Judith was performed in Berlin. He deliberately departs from the biblical text:

I have no use for the biblical Judith. There, Judith is a widow who lures Holofernes into her web with wiles, when she has his head in her bag she sings and jubilates with all of Israel for three months. That is mean, such a nature is not worthy of her success [...]. My Judith is paralyzed by her deed, frozen by the thought that she might give birth to Holofernes' son; she knows that she has passed her boundaries, that she has, at the very least, done the right thing for the wrong reasons.^[7]

English playwright Howard Barker examined the Judith story and its aftermath, first in the scene "The Unforeseen Consequences of a Patriotic Act," as part of his collection of vignettes, The Possibilities. Barker later expanded the scene into a short play Judith.

Notes[link]

References[link]

• Robin, Diana Maury, Larsen, Anne R. and Levin, Carole (2007). Encyclopedia of women in the Renaissance: Italy, France, and England. ABC-CLIO, Inc. 

External links[link]

Greek Wikisource has original text related to this article: Book of Judith

Wikisource has original text related to this article: The King James Version of the Book of Judith

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Judith and Holofernes

• The Book of Judith Full text (also available in Arabic)
• Another text, this one including a link to download as a single document
• Jewish Encyclopedia: Judith
• Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia: Judith: Apocrypha
• Catholic Encyclopedia: Book of Judith
• World Wide Study Bible: Judith
• The New York Public Library's Judith Project

Sunaura "Sunny" Taylor (born March 21, 1982 in Tucson, Arizona) is an American painter and activist for disability and animal rights. She currently resides in Oakland, California, and has taught classes at the University of California, Berkeley.

Taylor's work has been displayed in the Smithsonian and in galleries across the United States.^[1] She is the recipient of a 2008 Joan Mitchell Foundation Award. In 2004, she received the Grand Prize in the VSA arts Driving Force juried exhibition for emerging disabled artists.^[2][3] A portion of her work deals with animal rights issues, as Taylor is an abolitionist vegan.^[4]

Taylor was born with arthrogryposis and uses a wheelchair. She has been active in the Society for Disability Studies and has participated in marches for disability rights. Her work on the disability rights movement has appeared in Monthly Review,^[5] and her Self Portrait with TCE was the first full-color image ever printed in the publication's long history. She has been featured on All Things Considered on National Public Radio,^[6] and the Georgia Public Television series State of the Arts. Her work has also been featured frequently in Flagpole Magazine in her home town, Athens, Georgia.

Taylor is also the sister of the filmmaker Astra Taylor,^[7] and appeared in her 2008 film Examined Life alongside philosopher Judith Butler.^[8]

References[link]

External links[link]

• Official website
• IMDB profile

This article about a painter from the United States is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

This biographical article about a United States activist is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

Micha Brumlik (2012)

Micha Brumlik (born 1947 in Davos, Switzerland) is professor of education at the Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main, Germany. From October 2000 to 2005 he was director of the Fritz Bauer Institute for the Study and Documentation of the History of the Holocaust.

Books (selection)[link]

• Die Gnostiker (1992) (German)
• Schrift, Wort, Ikone Wege aus dem Bilderverbot (1994) (German)
• Kein Weg als Deutscher und Jude Eine bundesrepublikanische Erfahrung (1996) (German)
• Vernunft und Offenbarung Religionsphilosophische Versuche (2000) (German)
• Deutscher Geist und Judenhaß Das Verhältnis des philosophischen Idealismus zum Judentum (2000) (German)
• Bildung und Glück Versuch einer Theorie der Tugenden (2002) (German)
• Aus Katastrophen lernen Grundlagen zeitgeschichtlicher Bildung in menschenrechtlicher Absicht (2004) (German)
• Wer Sturm sät. Die Vertreibung der Deutschen (2005) (German)
• Sigmund Freud Der Denker des 20 Jahrhunderts (2006)

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Micha Brumlik

• Brumlik's entry with Goethe University (German)

This biographical article about a Swiss academic is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

Template:Portal:Switzerland/Stub

Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt from a 1988 German stamp of the Women in German history series.
Born	(1906-10-14)October 14, 1906 Linden, Hanover, Germany
Died	December 4, 1975(1975-12-04) (aged 69) New York, United States
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophers
School	Continental Philosophy
Main interests	Political theory, modernity, philosophy of history
Influenced by Pre-Socratics, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Jesus, Paul, Duns Scotus, Saint Augustine, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Edmund Burke, Kant, Tocqueville, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Russell, Jaspers, Benjamin
Influenced Jürgen Habermas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Giorgio Agamben, Seyla Benhabib, Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Michael Jackson (anthropology), Reinhart Koselleck, Hanna Pitkin, Michael Marrus, Quentin Skinner, J. G. A. Pocock, Philip Pettit, Alain Finkielkraut, Julia Kristeva, Richard Sennett, Charles Taylor, Harrison, Michel Foucault, Alain Badiou

Johanna^[1] “Hannah” Arendt (October 14, 1906 – December 4, 1975) was a German American political theorist. She has often been described as a philosopher, although she refused that label on the grounds that philosophy is concerned with "man in the singular." She described herself instead as a political theorist because her work centers on the fact that "men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world".^[2] Arendt's work deals with the nature of power, and the subjects of politics, authority, and totalitarianism.

Biography[link]

Arendt was born into a family of secular German Jews in the city of Linden (now part of Hanover), and grew up in Königsberg (the birthplace of Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant, renamed as Kaliningrad and annexed to the Soviet Union in 1946) and Berlin.

At the University of Marburg, she studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger. According to Hans Jonas, her only German-Jewish classmate, Arendt embarked on a long and stormy romantic relationship with Heidegger, for which she was later criticized because of Heidegger's support for the Nazi party when he was rector of Freiburg University.^[3]

In the wake of one of their breakups, Arendt moved to Heidelberg, where she wrote her dissertation, under the existentialist philosopher-psychologist Karl Jaspers, on the concept of love in the thought of Saint Augustine. In 1929, in Berlin, she married Günther Stern, later known as Günther Anders; they divorced in 1937.

The dissertation was published in 1929. Because she was Jewish, Arendt was prevented from habilitating, a prerequisite for teaching in German universities. She researched anti-Semitism for some time before being interrogated by the Gestapo. Thereupon Arendt fled Germany for Paris. There she befriended the Marxist literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, her first husband's cousin. While in France, Arendt worked to support and aid Jewish refugees. She was imprisoned in Camp Gurs but able to escape after a few weeks.

With the German military occupation of northern France during World War II and the deportation of Jews to Nazi concentration camps even by the Vichy collaborator regime in the unoccupied south, Arendt was compelled to leave France. In 1940, she married the German poet and Marxist philosopher Heinrich Blücher, by then a former member of the Communist Party.

In 1941, Arendt escaped with her husband and her mother to the United States. They were relied on the life-saving visas, illegally issued by the American diplomat Hiram Bingham IV, who aided in this way approximately 2,500 other Jewish refugees. Another American, Varian Fry, paid for their travels and helped in securing the aforementioned visas. Upon arrival to New York, Arendt became active in the German-Jewish community. From 1941 to 1945, she wrote a column for the German-language Jewish newspaper, Aufbau. From 1944, she directed research for the Commission of European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction and traveled frequently to Germany in this capacity.^[4]

After World War II she returned to Germany and worked for Youth Aliyah^[5], an organization that had saved thousands of children from the Holocaust. She became a close friend of Karl Jaspers and his Jewish wife,^[6] developing a deep intellectual friendship with him. She began corresponding with Mary McCarthy.^[7]

In 1950, she became a naturalized citizen of the United States.^[8] Arendt served as a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, Princeton University and Northwestern University. In the spring of 1959, she became the first woman lecturer at Princeton. Arendt also taught at the University of Chicago, where she was a member of the Committee on Social Thought; The New School in New York City; Yale University, where she was a fellow; and, the Center for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan University (1961–1962,1962–1963).^[9] Arendt was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1962^[10] and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1964.^[11]

She died in 1975, at age 69, of a heart attack and was buried at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, where her husband taught for many years.^[12]

Arendt was instrumental in the creation of Structured Liberal Education (SLE) at Stanford University. She wrote a letter to the then president of Stanford University to convince the university to enact Mark Mancall's vision of a residentially-based humanities program.

Works[link]

Arendt theorizes freedom as public, performative and associative, drawing for illustration on the Greek "Polis", American townships, the Paris Commune, the civil rights movements of the 1960s, and the 1956 Hungarian uprising. She posits that freedom does not pre-exist the organised community but is rather constructed there, as the common space whereto its equal members bring their own uniqueness and "natality", and create something of lasting value such as a state. This natality signs the contingent, indeterminate and so political future that we don't know anything about.

The Origins of Totalitarianism

Arendt's first major book was The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), which traced the roots of Stalinist Communism and Nazism in both anti-Semitism and imperialism. The book was opposed by the Left on the grounds that it presented the two movements as equally tyrannical. She further contends that Jewry was not the operative factor in the Holocaust but merely a convenient proxy. Totalitarianism in Germany was in the end about megalomania and consistency, not eradicating Jews.

The Human Condition

Arguably, her most influential work, The Human Condition (1958), distinguishes between the concepts of political and social, labour and work, various forms of action, and explores implications of those distinctions. Her theory of political action, corresponding to the existence of a public realm, is extensively developed in this work. Arendt argues that, while human life always evolves within societies, the social-being part of human nature, political life, was intentionally constructed by only a few of these societies as a space for individuals to achieve freedom through the construction of a common world. These categories, which attempt to bridge the gap between ontological and sociological structures, are sharply delineated. While Arendt relegates labour and work to the realm of the "social," she favors the human condition of action as the "political" that is both existential and aesthetic.

Men in Dark Times

Her collection of essays Men in Dark Times presents intellectual biographies of some creative and moral figures of the 20th century, such as Walter Benjamin, Karl Jaspers, Rosa Luxemburg, Hermann Broch, Pope John XXIII, and Isak Dinesen.

Adolf Eichmann Trial

In her reporting of the Eichmann trial for The New Yorker, which evolved into Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), she coined the phrase "the banality of evil" to describe Eichmann. She raised the question of whether evil is radical or simply a function of thoughtlessness, a tendency of ordinary people to obey orders and conform to mass opinion without a critical evaluation of the consequences of their actions and inaction.

Arendt was sharply critical of the way the trial was conducted in Israel. She was also critical of the way that some Jewish leaders, notably M. C. Rumkowski), acted during the Holocaust. This caused a considerable controversy and even animosity toward Arendt in the Jewish community. Her friend Gershom Scholem, a major scholar of Jewish mysticism, broke off relations with her. Arendt was criticized by many Jewish public figures, who charged her with coldness and lack of sympathy for the victims of the Shoah/Holocaust. Due to this lingering criticism, her book has only recently been translated into Hebrew. Arendt ended the book with:

Just as you [Eichmann] supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations — as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world — we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.

On Revolution

Arendt published another book in the same year, On Revolution. In this analysis of the two major revolutions of the 18th century, Arendt went against the grain of Marxist and leftist thought by contending that the American Revolution was a successful revolution, whereas the French Revolution was not. When the masses of France gained the sympathy of revolutionaries, the French Revolution turned away from the legal stability of a constitutional government toward the lawless satisfaction of the constantly regenerating economic needs of these masses. Some saw in this argument a post-Holocaust anti-French sentiment. Nevertheless, it was inveterate in the history of political philosophy, echoing that of Edmund Burke.

Arendt also argued that the revolutionary spirit endemic to the founding fathers had not been preserved in America because the majority of people had no role to play in politics other than voting. She admired Thomas Jefferson's idea of dividing counties into townships. Arendt's interest in such a "council system"^[13], which she saw as the only alternative to the state, continued all her life.

On Violence Essay

Arendt's essay "On Violence" distinguishes violence and power. She maintains that, although theorists of both the Left and Right regard violence as an extreme manifestation of power, the two concepts are in fact antithetical. Power comes from the collective will and does not need violence to achieve any of its goals since voluntary compliance takes its place. As governments start losing their legitimacy, violence becomes an artificial means towards the same ends and is therefore found only in the absence of Power. Bureaucracies then become the ideal birthplaces of violence since they are defined as the "rule by no-one", with whom to argue against and therefore re-create the missing link with the people it rules over.

The Life of the Mind

Her posthumous book, The Life of the Mind (1978, edited by Mary McCarthy), remained incomplete. Stemming from her Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, it focuses on the mental faculties of thinking and willing, in a sense moving beyond her previous work concerning the vita activa.. In her discussion of thinking, she focuses mainly on Socrates and his notion of thinking as a solitary dialogue between Me and Myself. This appropriation of Socrates leads her to introduce novel concepts of conscience (which gives no positive prescriptions but instead tells me what I cannot do if I would remain friends with myself when I re-enter the two-in-one of thought where I must render an account of my actions to myself) and morality (an entirely negative enterprise concerned with non-participation in certain actions for the sake of remaining friends with one's self). In her volume on Willing, Arendt, relying heavily on Augustine's notion of the will, discusses the will as an absolutely free mental faculty that makes new beginnings possible.

Posthumous Legacy[link]

In the third volume, Arendt was planning to engage the faculty of judgment by appropriating Kant's Critique of Judgment ; however, she did not live to write it. Nevertheless, although we will never fully understand her notion of judging, Arendt did leave us with manuscripts ("Thinking and Moral Considerations", "Some Questions on Moral Philosophy,") and lectures (Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy ) concerning her thoughts on this mental faculty. The first two articles were edited and published by Jerome Kohn, who was an assistant of Arendt and is a director of Hannah Arendt Center at The New School, and the last was edited and published by Ronald Beiner, who is a professor of political science at the University of Toronto.

Her personal library was deposited at Bard College at the Stevenson Library in 1976, and includes approximately 4,000 books, ephemera, and pamphlets from Arendt's last apartment. The college has begun digitally archiving some of the collection, which is available at The Hannah Arendt Collection.

Commemoration[link]

• The asteroid 100027 Hannaharendt is named in her honor.
• The German railway authority operates a Hannah Arendt Express between Karlsruhe and Hannover.^[14]
• The German post office has issued a Hannah Arendt commemorative stamp.
• Hannah-Arendt-Straße in the Mitte district of Berlin is named in her honor.
• The Hannah Arendt Institute for the Research on Totalitarianism is named in her honor.