Judith Butler: Let’s bring passion to the vision of equality, freedom, and justice

A few days after Judith Butler’s inspiring talk at a packed and buzzing Kypseli Municipal Market, Eteron – Institute for Research and Social Change, in collaboration with NEWS 24/7, releases an interview that professor Butler gave to the Institute’s project coordinators, Antonis Galanopoulos and Maria Louka.

Judith Butler, one of the most emblematic figures of contemporary critical theory, with a significant contribution to gender studies, queer theory, and political philosophy, speaks with their characteristic sharpness and dynamic insight about some of the most critical issues of our time:

• The rise of the global far right and its anti-gender strategy, which transforms gender into a “phantom” and a scapegoat, tapping into some people’s existential anxiety and concerns regarding their living conditions.
• The targeting of trans and non-binary persons, which constitutes one of the key pillars of contemporary reactionary rhetoric.
• The need for a feminism that recognises the complexity and openness of gender categories, instead of sliding into the pit of biological determinism.
• The authoritarianism of the Trump administration and the ongoing conflict that is taking place in American universities, which is putting academic freedoms under pressure while also restricting scientific and social research.
• The instrumentalisation of anti-Semitism by the Netanyahu regime and the importance of salvaging this accusation from bellicose and war-mongering uses.
• The genocide that is taking place in Gaza, the forms of resistance and the actions of support and international solidarity that alleviate the feeling of futility in the face of the unfolding tragedy.

The key message Judith Butler conveys through this interview is the need to continue imagining a world worth living in – a world with equality, freedom, and justice. We need to imagine it, describe it, and fight for it with passion, turning our dreams and claims into “objects of desire”, as they aptly put it.