Judith Butler, “Why Preserve the Life of the Other?”

Tanner Lectures on Human Values - Interpreting Non-Violence
“Why Preserve the Life of the Other?”
Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California Berkeley. She served as founding director of the Critical Theory Program at Berkeley and is currently co-chair of an emerging International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs. Her published works include Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990); Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993); Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997); Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning (2004); Undoing Gender (2004); Who Sings the Nation-State? Language, Politics, Belonging (with Gayatri Spivak, 2008); Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009); Is Critique Secular? (with Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, and Saba Mahmood, 2009); Sois Mon Corps (with Catherine Malabou, 2011); Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2012); Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (with Athena Athanasiou, 2013); and most recently, Senses of the Subject (2015) and Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015). Future projects include study of messianic gestures in Kafka and Benjamin, philosophical fictions in Freud’s work, and gender in translation.
Butler has received the Andrew Mellon Award for Distinguished Academic Achievement in the Humanities, the Adorno Prize from the City of Frankfurt in honor of her contributions to feminist and moral philosophy, and the Brudner Prize from Yale University for lifetime achievement in gay and lesbian studies. In 2014, she was awarded the diploma of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters from the French Cultural Ministry and in 2015 she was elected a corresponding fellow of the British Academy and appointed to the International Board of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt.