In January, the American philosopher Judith Butler and the South African artist William Kentridge took part in a public conversation in Paris about atrocity and its representations. Before an audience at the École Normale Supérieure, they spoke for nearly two hours, in lulling abstraction and murmured mutual regard: Can we give the image the benefit of the doubt? What is the role of the object in thinking? After the event, a woman—a philosopher herself—approached Butler. Tight with tension, she gripped Butler by the arm.
“Vous menacez mes enfants,” she said, in Butler’s recounting. “You are threatening my children.”
Butler has regularly required personal security. In 2012, the city of Frankfurt awarded them the Theodor W. Adorno Prize for their contributions to philosophy. (Butler recently adopted they/them pronouns but doesn’t “police it.”) The general secretary of the Central Council of Jews in Germany decried the decision to give the award, named for a philosopher of Jewish descent who fled the Nazis, to a “well-known hater of Israel.” A demonstration was organized. Butler, a prominent critic of Zionism, responded by citing their education in a Jewish ethical tradition, which compelled them to speak in the face of injustice.
Denne historien er fra May 06, 2024-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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Denne historien er fra May 06, 2024-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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ART OF STONE
\"The Brutalist.\"
MOMMA MIA
Audra McDonald triumphs in \"Gypsy\" on Broadway.
INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
\"Black Doves,\" on Netflix.
NATURE STUDIES
Kyle Abraham's “Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful.”
WHAT GOOD IS MORALITY?
Ask not just where it came from but what it does for us
THE SPOTIFY SYNDROME
What is the world's largest music-streaming platform really costing us?
THE LEPER - LEE CHANGDONG
. . . to survive, to hang on, waiting for the new world to dawn, what can you do but become a leper nobody in the world would deign to touch? - From \"Windy Evening,\" by Kim Seong-dong.
YOU WON'T GET FREE OF IT
Alice Munro's partner sexually abused her daughter. The harm ran through the work and the family.
TALK SENSE
How much sway does our language have over our thinking?
TO THE DETECTIVE INVESTIGATING MY MURDER
Dear Detective, I'm not dead, but a lot of people can't stand me. What I mean is that breathing is not an activity they want me to keep doing. What I mean is, they want to knock me off. My days are numbered.