Judith Butler and Marxism

The Radical Feminism of Performativity, Vulnerability, and Care

Elliot Mason, Valentina Moro

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9798881856625
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy
• Index: Social Sciences

What would a Butlerian Marxism look like? Marxist criticisms of Butler range from careful comparisons of forms to the total dismissal of an unpolitical, merely cultural anarchy. None of these criticisms, however, focuses on what seems to most closely unite these two projects: the universal abolition of the universal. While Marxist communism is focused on the abolition of value and property, Butler is consistently concerned throughout their corpus with the abolition of the subject as the universal form of social relations, an abolition staged by way of a relational ontology and ethics. Their methodologies for achieving abolition, however, vary hugely. Butler's sees the performativity of subjects and power as an opportunity for differential assembly, Marxists are primarily concerned with the working class as a revolutionary vanguard that withdraws its labor from production.
Judith Butler and Marxism explores the possibility of a Butlerian Marxism, understood as abolitionist performativity, differential vulnerability, and generalized practices of care. The essays in this volume attempt to actualize the antagonistic persistence of social particulars, pursuing the abolition of the domination and violence that pervade society with increasing brutality. The three sections of this volumeare structured according to three pivotal political concepts in Butler's corpus: performativity, vulnerability, and care. Each essay contributes to a possible mutual development of Butler's and Marxism's concern with assembly, interdependence, and refusal, forming a revolutionary politics of care.
This is the first book to fully study the contentious link between the vastly influential projects of Judith Butler and Marxism.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Butlerian Marxisms Elliot C. Mason and Valentina Moro
• Part I: Performativity
• Chapter 1: Performing Gender, Performing Capital
• Chapter 2: Assembling Antagonisms in Butler and Marxist-Feminism
• Chapter 3: Diasporic Emanation, Unchosen Cohabitation: Judith Butler’s Jewish-Marxist Critique of the Nation-State
• Part II: Vulnerability
• Chapter 4: Bodies in Space
• Chapter 5: Enacting Vulnerability as Resistance
• Chapter 6: A Politics of Finitude
• Part III: Care
• Chapter 7: The Unfamiliar State in Times of Ungrievable Loss
• Chapter 8: Living Together
• Chapter 9: Care as Critical Methodology: Debating Butler
• Index
• About the Editors
• About the Contributors