Judith Butler Quotes on Life
Judith Butler, the American philosopher, has in recent work made the vulnerability and equal worth of lives a central theme, and the quotes gathered here present it. Butler holds that lives matter because they are to be valued equally, and that this equal value generates a shared obligation: we do not have to love one another to be obligated to build a world in which all lives are sustainable. She frames this as a social right, the right to persist, borne by all toward one another. Butler also stresses how thoroughly human beings are constituted by their relations and exposures, that we are, from the start, given over to the other, and she sets the task of nonviolence within a world saturated by violence. Drawn from her recent writing on nonviolence and precarity, these passages present life as vulnerable, interdependent, and equally to be valued.
Quotes
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Attributed to Judith Butler:
“Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something.”
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Attributed to Judith Butler:
“We are, from the start, given over to the other.”
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“Lives matter in the sense that they assume physical form within the sphere of appearance; lives matter because they are to be valued equally.”
Introduction | p. 12 -
“We do not have to love one another to be obligated to build a world in which all lives are sustainable. The right to persist can only be understood as a social right, as the subjective instance of a social and global obligation we bear toward one another.”
Chapter One | p. 64 -
“When the world presents as a force field of violence , the task of nonviolence is to find ways of living and acting in that world such that violence is checked or ameliorated, or its direction turned, precisely at moments when it seems to saturate that world and offer no way out.”
Introduction | p. 10 -
“Preserving seeks to secure the life that already is; safeguarding secures and reproduces the conditions of becoming, of living, of futurity, where the content of that life, that living, can be neither prescribed nor predicted, and where self-determination emerges as a potential.”
Chapter Two | p. 94