I’m reading a great address that Judith Butler delivered in December 2009 at CGU, on the occasion of a conference on Alfred North Whitehead. It’s in preparation for my process theology/ethics final paper that I need to complete in less than a month.
Some money quotes: from her more recent work: “under what conditions do we recognize a life as lost or, indeed, as lose-able?”
Then: “I want to argue that if we are to broader social and political claims about rights of protection and entitlements to persistence and flourishing, we will first have to be supported by a new bodily ontology, one that implies the rethinking of precariousness, vulnerability, injurability, interdependency, exposure, bodily persistence and desire, work and the claims of language and social belonging.”
It’s fascinating to see this general turn toward finitude and a move beyond a certain narrow view of the political. Maybe, just maybe, theology has a shot still in the academy.
