Judith Butler: Philosophie für Einsteiger by René Lépine (review)

Judith Butler: Philosophie für Einsteiger (Judith Butler: Philosophy for beginners) is a graphic voyage through the key tenets, foundational antecedents, and contemporary debates of Judith Butler’s scholarship. Written in German by René Lépine and illustrated by Ansgar Lorenz, this work renders Butlerian philosophy—traditionally viewed as esoteric and elitist—accessible to dilettantes. Interspersed with engaging graphics and forays into principal philosophies, this captivating book prepares the reader to adequately comprehend, contextualize, and engage with Butler’s claims.

Following an abbreviated version of Butler’s initial encounters with philosophy, Lépine facilitates an understanding of Butler’s complex thought by outlining the fundamentals of structuralism and its successor, poststructuralism. Essentially, Lépine highlights the power of language to shape our world perception, norms, and differentiations—the productive power of that which, generated interactively through language, would be termed discourse by Michel Foucault.

Butler, Lépine demonstrates, innovatively connects this discursive analysis to pragmalinguistics in her explosive work Gender Trouble (1989). Combining the theory of speech acts (in which performative utterances may describe or change a social reality) with Jacques Derrida’s notion of iterability (whereby a performative act must be repeated in order to evoke its signification), Butler locates a subversive opening in performativity. Deconstructing the superficially seamless relationship between sex and gender, Butler postulates the ability to uncouple the two through the re-signification of gender via iterated performativity. The conventional alignment of (discursively produced) sex and gender, Butler further claims, forms a compulsory heterosexual matrix; to be gendered and heterosexual translates to intelligibility, whereas to be dislocated from this matrix equates to social death. Consequently, Gender Trouble not only redefined feminist frameworks but forged the basis for queer theory.

Butler continues to theorize performativity, Lépine highlights, in her 1995 work Bodies That Matter. Performativity cannot be perceived as a single, conscious act that summons a subject into existence, Butler clarifies; rather, performativity is the continually repeated power of discourse to produce phenomena that it then regulates and restricts. Bodies was critiqued as ignoring the body as a material reality, though Butler claims that what constitutes legitimate bodies is inextricably situated in the matrix of intelligibility. Furthermore, Butler advocates here for a redefinition of the material, as a process of materialization that stabilizes over time. In The Psychic Life of Power (1997), Butler expounds that the situation of material bodies into the matrix of intelligibility provides a necessary orientation; though body and identity cannot be conceptualized together, they cannot be constituted separately. Furthermore, the psyche represents the authority of power that (invisibly) regulates the self—the resistance of which appears only when protecting the self against power’s demands.

As the last of Butler’s works to be featured, Excitable Speech (1997) is recapitulated by Lépine as a revisiting of discursive power and performance, and a collapse of the conceptual distance between physical integrity and speech; verbal violence targeted at one’s identity, Butler claims, can also be experienced corporeally. Moreover, those who are not recognized fully as subjects can face both social and political violence.

Following an extensive overview of her philosophies, Lépine situates Butler’s activism socially, as witnessed in public controversies. This contextualization includes her rejection of the Civil Courage Award at Christopher Street Day in Berlin in 2010 and the protests against her receipt of the Theodor W. Adorno Prize in 2012. Although debate stemmed from Butler’s stances against racism, Zionism, and imperialism, Lépine situates these advocacies among many: Butler railed against Islamophobia following 9/11 and drew attention to cases of indefinite imprisonment without trial at Guantánamo Bay.

Lépine and Lorenz culminate their work with ample resources, replete with appendices (on movements such as feminism, sexology, gay rights, and lesbian feminism), a bibliography of referenced works, and a glossary of relevant terms.

Given that Judith Butler’s philosophies are known to resist understanding, I applaud the authors for simplifying their multiplex nature. The...