Having and Being Judith Butler

Judith Butler & Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political
Polity Press, 240pp, 14.99, ISBN 9780745653815

Reviewed by Sarah Keenan

I had high hopes for this book. Iconic critical theorist and public intellectual Judith Butler
teaming up with exciting young feminist theorist Athena Athanasiou to work towards an
understanding of dispossession beyond the logic of possession. That is, to seek an
understanding of, and take a normative stance in relation to urgent political issues of
dispossession (such as forced migration, homelessness, foreclosures, and extreme disparities
in wealth) without resorting to an argument that rests on a counterclaim to possession of
whatever is lost. This is an excellent and worthwhile project, necessary for the progress of
debates on property that move past liberal solutions of redistribution, and helpful in thinking
through issues of settler colonialism and seemingly incommensurable competing claims to
the same areas of land. The book also promised engagements with recent uprisings from
Cairo to Zuccotti Park in a discussion of the politics of street protest.

Butler and Athanasiou deliver on this ambitious project to some extent, but on the whole this
book is more of an in-depth intellectual conversation on performativity, precarity and
protest rather than a real engagement with the various lived and conceptual aspects of
dispossession. Dispossession does not really make an argument, but rather is written as a
conversation between the two writers, AA and JB riffing off each other to some extent in
short chapters that cover topics from The logic of dispossession and the matter of the human
(after the critique of metaphysics of substance) to The university, the humanities and the
book bloc. I say to some extent because the conversation does often, understandably,
become more of a discussion between Butler and Athanasiou about Butlers previous work,
rather than a more equally weighted back and forth. The two rarely disagree, although they
do have points of divergence, which they elaborate on in productive and interesting ways.

The conversation is an engaging read, though somewhat unwieldy in its breadth of subject
matter. The text is at its strongest when the authors are directly addressing the question of
dispossession. Their questioning of how one can be against both the possessiveness of
property and also against land theft and territorial dispossession leads to interesting
discussions on biopolitical governmentality and the overlap between having and being (a
distinction which is also discussed by many feminist property theorists who do not get much
of a mention here). Troubling ideas of ownership, they argue that we owe ourselves to others,
and that this debt leads to vulnerability. To be dispossessed is to occupy the proper place of
non-being, and thus to be precarious. Dispossession implies our relationality and binding to
others and our structural dependence on social norms that we neither choose nor control.
Those social norms the spatial and temporal conditions of dispossession include gender
and sexuality, and must be understood as forms of power that are both constitutive and
regulatory. These discussions on the concept of (dis)possession of the self and its relation to
broader political issues of territorial dispossession are worthwhile and interesting.

From this framing of the question of how to re-conceive dispossession the authors turn to
performativity. This comes as something of a surprise in a book that is expressly
representing itself as addressing broad global political concerns of land theft, territoriality and
mass demonstrations. For the authors, performativity names the unauthorised exercise of a
right to existence that propels the precarious into political life, but while their conceptual
discussion of performativity is very rich here, their application of it to the Occupy movement
is a little romanticised. The authors approach spatial political issues through the concept of
performativity but without really addressing the issue of space. They attempt not only to
theorise dispossession and relate it to performativity, but also make it relevant to what they
construct as a particular point in history - the Arab Spring, Occupy and other anti-neoliberal
public demonstrations. To do justice to this project, the pair might need to write a manuscript
rather than publish their (albeit compelling) conversations around the issues.

The conversation regularly comes back to recent high profile protests. Although there is
reference to a number of activist groups and actions, the discussion does not really engage
with those groups and actions, and so comes across at times like Judith Butlers answer to
Paul Masons Why Its Kicking Off Everywhere (Verso, 2012). The problem here is that these
arguments try to make a very wide range of political activity fall within a particular theory
and temporality, when in fact the divergent groups protesting each have their own time and
space and many have been fighting for the same causes for decades. To bracket them into a
particular moment is inaccurate at best and appropriative at worst. I couldnt help but feel
that this project was in part a way for Judith Butler to solidify her on-the-ground political
relevance without doing the on-the-ground work that such relevance requires if it is to be
genuine.

This is epitomised in the closing pages of the book in which Butler throws in a reference to
the UK riots in a sentence about Occupy Wall Street and demonstrations without
demands, saying that the riots political significance cannot be underestimated when we
consider the extent of poverty and unemployment among those who were rioting. This
statement misrepresents the riots in significant ways they were not UK-wide, but only
occurred in England; the rioters were not all poor and unemployed; the riots were a direct
reaction to the police killing of a young black man, and they were the latest in a series of riots
that over-policed black communities in England have engaged in since the 1960s. It is
important not to attempt to make the riots legible to critical theory by casually referencing
them at the end of a book about performativity and political protest that has otherwise barely
dealt with issues of race or policing.

This study does an excellent job of articulating, in various ways, the need to conceptualise
dispossession outside the logic of possession. It is well worth reading for those working on
concepts of performativity, precarity and, to a lesser extent, protest. However those seeking
an engagement with political issues of territorial dispossession, land theft and property may
be disappointed.