Judith Butler - Videos

Judith Butler and Micha Brumlik, moderated by Andreas Öhler, discussing the following questions: Is Zionism an integral part of Judaism? Can Zionism be saved? and Is there such a thing as a diasporic code of ethics? The audience asked: "Should we boycott products from the West Bank?", "Do Judith Butler's ethics have a theological dimension?". Is Zionism an Integral Part of Judaism? Fixing Positions in the 21st Century". A discussion at the Jewish Museum Berlin in cooperation with the Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Berlin. (German / English)

Dr. Judith Butler speaking about A Politics of the Street, delivering the spring 2012 Wall Exchange lecture at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at University of British Columbia, Vogue Theatre in downtown Vancouver, Canada. May 24, 2012.

Judith Butler discussing the global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement in solidarity with the Palestinian community against Israeli occupation, apartheid, and colonialism, as well as the role of anti-Zionist Jews in the struggle for peace, justice, & equality in Palestine/Israel. Tufts University, Boston. March 30, 2012

Judith Butler, Hélène Cixous, and Avital Ronell approach the notion of affinity through a discussion of disruptive kinship. Villa Gillet and The New School, School of Writing. October 24, 2011

Judith Butler, philosopher and author, talking about Franz Kafka's character Odradek in The Cares of a Family Man. In this lecture, Judith Butler discusses the muteness of language, paternal authority, neoliberalism, the spectrality of presence and life without a goal in relationship to Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx focusing on instrumentality, laughter, fear, gesture, body, death, nightmares, haunting, the pre-Oedipal, time and the One. European Graduate School EGS

Judith Butler, post-structuralist philosopher and author, talking about precarity and the ethical obligations of geographical proximity through the perspectives of Emmanuel Lévinas and Hannah Arendt, with a response by Bracha Ettinger. In this lecture, Judith Butler discusses our ethical response to suffering at a distance, ethical obligations, geographical proximity, ethics, images of war suffering, Lévinas and Susan Sontag on the war image, the media, grounds for global responsibility, consent and communitarianism, the media's role in proximity and distance, corporeal locatedness, mediated ethical relations, global connectedness, being moved, ethical philosophy and what it means to be ethical in these times; Lévinas on racial and cultural belonging, reciprocity - that egoism as the defeat of ethics itself, the life of the Other and the precarious and corporeal being, the call, vulnerability and ethical relations, cohabitation, the prerogative of genocide, politics and the necessity of cohabiting the earth, community, the notion of unwilled proximity and unchosen cohabitation, precarity, interdependency, ethics on a global scale. Bracha Ettinger responds with the subject and the body, the proto-ethical call and aesthetic phenomena, the uncanny anxiety, the vulnerability of the other, the non-I, transconnectedness, the self, the giving up of subjectivity, subjectivity as an encounter, the mode of co-emerging, affective access to the world. European Graduate School EGS

Judith Butler, philosopher and author, talking about Walter Benjamin's notion of the gesture in Franz Kafka's parables. In this lecture, Judith Butler discusses Benjamin's background, Kafka's elliptical literary style, the relationship between image and gesture, the possibility of completed action, theology and the Event of language in relationship to Jacques Derrida, Bertolt Brecht, Theodor W. Adorno, Samuel Weber and Karl Marx focusing on messianic time, commodity fetishism, Christianity, the antichrist, the structure of time and space, the Frankfurt School, Kabbalah, the trace, the enigmatic remainder and interruption. European Graduate School EGS

Judith Butler, Avital Ronell and Laurence Rickels talking about Kafka and the collapse of metaphysics. In this lecture, Avital Ronell, philosopher and author, discusses the play of presence and absence, the politics of friendship, the problem of departure and arrival, the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature, and the reciprocity of calling and being called in relationship to Franz Kafka, Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Martin Luther, Michel Foucault and Martin Heidegger focusing on the letter, destiny, Gesicht, history, authority, law, the panopticon, the Event, Abraham, hope, impossibility and laughter. European Graduate School EGS

Judith Butler, philosopher and author, talking about Kafka's parables and paradoxes. In this lecture, Judith Butler discusses the didactic function of the parable, the structure of command and the communicability and legitimacy of laws in relationship to Franz Kafka, Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Immanuel Kant, Jacques Derrida, Hannah Arendt, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Michel Foucault focusing on das Ziel, progressive history, teleology, the messianic, indeterminacy, the politics of arrival and departure, temporal progressions and spatial relations. European Graduate School EGS

Philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler speaking about Doing & Undoing Gender; War, Precarity & Grievable Life; and Jewish Anti-Zionist Critique, introduction by Prof Meg Samuelson, at the University of Stellenbosch, Conservatorium, July 21, 2011

Philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler speaking about "Queer Anarchism and Anarchists Against the Wall" as well as anarchism in Palestine, Jewish occupation, Zionism and disobedience at the Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies Conference. The New School University in New York. May 5, 2011

Judith Butler delivering the Sixth Annual Edward Said Memorial Lecture "What Shall We Do Without Exile" organized by the Department of English and Comparative Literature, American University in Cairo. November 7, 2010.

Judith Butler refusing the Civil courage prize / Zivilcouragepreis, arguing that the Christopher Street Day parade in Berlin had become too commercial, and was ignoring the problems of racism and the double discrimination suffered by homosexual or transsexual migrants.

Judith Butler speaking up against the collective punishment of the Palestinian population, the prolonged 32 month siege imposed by the Israeli government on Gaza, the closing of its borders, the tightening of policies regarding permission to exit Gaza for medical purposes, and the severe shortage of medications and other medical supplies, that destroys the Palestinian health system and endangers the lives and health of thousands of Palestinians. Judith Butler at the Associated Students of the University of California, arguing for a divestment campaign directed against US Companies enabling the Israeli military.

Butler inquires into the limits of government responsibility for the rights of the minorities living within its frontiers, and how policies meant to address the grievances of certain minorities may come to be applied by the same government to the detriment of other minorities, all under the auspices of National Identity. @ Goethe Institut Athen 16/12/2009

Butler examines the phenomena of appellation, name-calling, particularly, the pejorative labeling Hannah Arendt suffered after criticizing the way the state of Israel came into being in 1948. Butler asks whether cohabitation is at all possible, between Zionists and Israel-skeptics, and extends this inquiry into an inquiry into the acceptability of trans-gender in society.

Judith Butler teaching a class entitled Ethics and Politics After the Subject at the European Graduate School, in Saas-Fee, The first part of the class was given over to Hannah Arendt and the question of judgment, while the second half of the course dealt with contemporary politics as well as the role of gender and race.

Avital Ronell, Judith Butler and Laurence Rickels conducting a joint seminar in which they discussed Martin Heideggers essay What is Thinking? and how it relates to Hannah Arendt and her ideas on judgement. They spoke about Arendts feeling of not being welcome in the league of male philosophers and Arendts view that she was a political theorist and therefore public versus Heideggers solitary philosophy. They discussed the ontology of thought, as well as the active creation of ones being through thinking. Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS Media and Communication Studies department program Saas-Fee Switzerland Europe 2009 Judith Butler Avital Ronell Laurence Rickels

Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor in Examined Life (2008), a documentary by Astra Taylor, discussing about disability as not merely some physical status but largely a social status.

Slavoj Zizek starts off asserting the persistance of subjectivity in Freudian analysis, that transparency is impossible. Butler takes up Zizeks point about the inscription of the social field in her experience, and, further, Derrida's reflection on how psychoanalysis approaches suffering and mourning.

Judith Butler analyzes Primo Levi's confrontation with his experience in the death camps, especially in his books "Survival at Auschwitz" and "The Drowned and the Saved". Butler then applies these thoughts to current debates on antisemitism and the question of the legitimacy of the Jewish State of Israel, the especially the rhetorical mine field one must cross in attempting a critical appraisal of the situation.

2006 biographical documentary on Judith Butler, her life and her thought by Paule Zajdermann for German French TV Channel arte, includes interviews and sections of her lectures. (in English and French with French subtitles)