Social Ontology: Butler via Arendt via Loidolt

Adriana Zaharijević

doi:10.2298/FID2002146Z

Authors

Adriana Zaharijević Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.2298/FID2002146Z

Keywords:

Judith Butler, social ontology, spaces of meaning, private, public

Abstract

This short contribution is written on the occasion of the book discussion of Sophie Loidolt’s Phenomenology of Plurality: Hannah Arendt on Political Intersubjectivity (2018) at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory. It presents an attempt to read the two key notions Loidolt elaborates in her book – spaces of meaning and spaces of the public and private – from a critical perspective offered by Judith Butler’s taking up of Arendt’s work. Offering Butler’s conception of social ontology through several major points of contestation with Arendt, I argue against an all too simple reduction of her understanding of the political and normativity to poststructuralist ones.

References

Arendt, Hannah (2005), “Socrates”, in The Promise of Politics, ed. by J. Kohn, New York: Schocken Books, pp. 5–39.
Butler, Judith (2015), Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press.
—. (2012), Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Violence. New York: Columbia University Press.
—. (2011), Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York and London: Routlegde.
—. (2009), Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London and Ney York: Verso.
—. (2004), Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, London and New York: Verso.
—. (1999), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and London: Routledge.
—. (1997), Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York and London: Routledge.
Butler, Judith and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (2007), Who Sings the Nation-State? Language, Politics, Belonging. London, New York and Calcutta: Seagull.
Loidolt, Sophie (2018), Phenomenology of Plurality: Hannah Arendt on Political Intersubjectivity. New York and London: Routledge.
Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel (1995), “Conformism, Housekeeping, and the Attack of the Blob: The Origins of Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social”, in B. Honig (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, pp. 51–82.
Zerilli, Linda (1995), “The Arendtian Body”, in B. Honig (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, pp. 167–194.