The North American Sartre Society and the University of San Francisco are pleased to present

Judith Butler

speaking on

“Violence and Non-Violence:

Shadows of Algiers"

Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She
received her Doctorate in Philosophy from Yale University in 1984.

Her Ph.D. dissertation (YaleUniversity, 1984) was entitled “Recovery and Invention: The Projects of Desire in Hegel, Kojève, Hyppolite, and Sartre.” Two of her first important publications were “Desire and Recognition in Sartre's Saint Genet and The Family Idiot,Vol. 1” ( International Philosophical Quarterly (December 1986), 26(4)[104]: 359-374) and “Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex” ( Yale French Studies (Winter 1986), 72: 35-49).

She is the author of Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (Columbia University Press, 2000), Hegemony, Contingency, Universality, with Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek, (Verso Press, 2000), Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (Columbia University Press, 1987), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (Routledge, 1993), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (Stanford University Press, 1997), Excitable Speech (Routledge, 1997), as well as numerous articles and contributions on philosophy, feminist and queer theory.

Her recent project is a critique of ethical violence and an effort to formulate a theory of responsibility for a subject who cannot always know herself. This manuscript works with Kafka, Freud, Foucault, Adorno, and Levinas.

She has recently published a collection of writings on war's impact on language and thought entitled Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning with Verso Press (2004). The Judith Butler Reader appeared, co-edited by Sara Salih with Blackwell (2004). A collection of her essays on gender and sexuality entitled Undoing Gender is expected to appear with Routledge in the Fall of 2004. Her future work is on violence and non-violence, focusing on the work of Walter Benjamin.”

An excellent (and searchable) bibliography of her work is at the following address: http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/indiv/scctr/Wellek/butler/