Judith Butler and Marxism: The Radical Feminism of Performativity, Vulnerability, and Care

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.

Elliot C. Mason is a communist writer and organizer based in Stockholm. He is the author of Poetics of Value: Temporalities of Sociality and Subjection in the Value-Form, and The Instagram Archipelago: Race, Gender, and the Lives of Dead Fish, and the editor of a South Atlantic Quarterly special issue dossier, Vol. 124:1, titled ＂Organizing Care in Sweden’s Crisis＂.

Valentina Moro is assistant professor in the philosophy department at Stony Brook University (USA). Her research intersects feminist philosophy, social and political philosophy, and classics (with a particular interest in the ancient Greek tragedy). She authored the monograph Il teatro della polis. Filosofia dell’agonismo tragico and co-edited the book Polis, Erōs, Parrēsia. Letture etico-politiche contemporanee della tragedia greca. Her current research project aims at elaborating a new political argument for a politics of care, by studying embodied vulnerability and practices of care performed by institutions, social movements, and collectivities.