In her groundbreaking book, Gender Trouble (1990), Judith Butler inaugurates and develops her critique of foundational reasoning – of identity categories such as (biological) sex, or of a transcendental subject such as “the woman” or even “women” – as a critique of identity politics in general, and of a women’s identity-based feminism in particular. For this reason, her antifoundationalism appears as a critical practice that seeks not only to rethink the political – along with genders, bodies, subjects and agency – but also, and most importantly, to theorize alternatives to identity politics in terms of coalition building. This concern has become increasingly explicit in her responses to the 9/11 events – from Precarious Life (2004) to Frames of War (2010) in which she suggests to consider shared human precarity as “a promising site for coalition exchange” and for rights-claiming.
Following Judith Butler’s intellectual journey, the present lecture will present some of the objectives and results of the book coedited with Cynthia Kraus: Politics of Coalition? Thinking Collective Action with Judith Butler (2016) where contemporary manners to “think”, “get political”, and build new and transformative “coalitions” (within and beyond feminism) are explored.