Thoughts from Marga van Mechelen

Below are some thoughts from Marga van Mechelen which she would have liked to contribute to the 3rd meeting of the Usual Suspects with Judith Butler: [please do not cite without the author's permission]

“Living with and without Judith Butler
Let me first say that my opinion about Butler changed a lot since let say 1986-1993, the years in which I published an article about the concept of Empathy (Einfühlung) in the work of Julia Kristeva( 1986) and my dissertation in 1993. I criticized her for her very restricted, short by the curve interpretation of Kristeva, apparently caused by not knowing her work entirely. This criticism does not play a role anymore in what I wrote in my Appel book, as you can read underneath. This year I read for the first time Jonathan Culler  “Philosophy and Literature: The Fortunes of the Performative”.

Judith experts

At the 10 Nieuwespiegelstraat

One discussion group heats up

Another discuss the image of feminism on the terrace

Reiterating

The upcoming non-lecture is the first to have “invited” a speaker yet living! With this in mind, I could hardly overlook the fact that, if I were to NOT be invited to my own lecture, under the precondition that I was not going to attend in any case, I would be somewhat…miffed. Therefore, I tentatively extended the invitation to our Usual Suspect, Judith Butler, who was, while perhaps taken aback by the audacity of the conditions under which she was being presented in absentia, still interested in the non-event itself. Perhaps she will attend after all…

Below is an interesting reading I was referred to by a friend recently by Dutch academic, Iris van der Tuin’s

Jumping Generations: on second and third-wave feminist epistemology

Australian Feminist Studies,24:59,17 — 31 (2009)

Feminist iterations, anyone?

The third Usual Suspect in our series is something of an institution:
Judith Butler will, in absentia, present the possibilities and limitations of reiterating Feminist positions in a moment of the supposedly post-political. The temporal conditions of artistic and curatorial practice require a certain agility in the performance of feminist approaches to them. Where is the place of personal politics under the usual umbrellas?