Dispossession: The Performative in the Political

Dispossession describes the condition of those who have lost land, citizenship, property, and a broader belonging to the world. This thought-provoking book seeks to elaborate our understanding of dispossession outside of the conventional logic of possession, a hallmark of capitalism, liberalism, and humanism. Can dispossession simultaneously characterize political responses and opposition to the disenfranchisement associated with unjust dispossession of land, economic and political power, and basic conditions for living?

In the context of neoliberal expropriation of labor and livelihood, dispossession opens up a performative condition of being both affected by injustice and prompted to act. From the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa to the anti-neoliberal gatherings at Puerta del Sol, Syntagma and Zucchotti Park, an alternative political and affective economy of bodies in public is being formed. Bodies on the street are precarious - exposed to police force, they are also standing for, and opposing, their dispossession. These bodies insist upon their collective standing, organize themselves without and against hierarchy, and refuse to become disposable: they demand regard. This book interrogates the agonistic and open-ended corporeality and conviviality of the crowd as it assembles in cities to protest political and economic dispossession through a performative dispossession of the sovereign subject and its propriety.

Author: Judith Butler, Athena Athanasiou
Publisher: Polity Press
Published: 04/01/2013
Pages: 240
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.90lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.50w x 0.56d
ISBN: 9780745653808

About the Author
Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Her previous publications include Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. She is currently the recipient of the Andrew Mellon Award for Distinguished Academic Achievement in the Humanities.

Athena Athanasiou teaches in the Department of Social Anthropology at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences.

This title is not returnable