Indeed, it would be great if we could all be liberated through reason, but I think it only gets us part of the way. After all, someone may have a very logical view, but for other reasons we may still fail to hear what that person says, or we may turn their words around so that they are understood to say the opposite. The task is really to find ways of addressing deep-seated forms of fear and aggression that make it possible to hold to manifestly inconsistent views without quite acknowledging them.
Judith ButlerI am not sure that I know enough about the pre-history of 9/11 to agree or disagree. But I did think at the time that the [George W.] Bush administration took a number of cues from the Israeli government, not only by drawing on and intensifying anti-Arab racism, but by insisting that the attack on US government and financial buildings was an attack on "democracy" and by invoking "security at all costs" to wage war without a clear focus (why the Taliban?), and by suspending both constitutional rights and the regular protocol for congressional approval for declaring war.
Judith ButlerGender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself.
Judith ButlerAlthough the history of dispossession and exile for Jews is very different from the history of dispossession and exile for Palestinians, they both have recent and searing experiences which might allow them to come to a common understanding on the rights of refugees, or what it might mean to live together with resonant histories of that kind.
Judith Butler