The role of grief in Judith Butler's "ethical turn": subject's formation and its ethical-political implications

• Grant number: 22/04540-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: December 01, 2022
• Status: Discontinued
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy - Ethics
• Principal Investigator: Nathalie de Almeida Bressiani
• Grantee: Michele Teixeira Bonote
• Host Institution: Centro de Ciências Naturais e Humanas (CCNH). Universidade Federal do ABC (UFABC). Ministério da Educação (Brasil). Santo André , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 24/06134-3 - From Subjection to Relationality: mourning in Butler's ethical-political turn, BE.EP.DR

Abstract

The aim of this research is to understand the "ethical turn" that occurs in Judith Butler's work in the 2000s and the role that the concept of grief plays in it. In our master's degree (FAPESP 2018/19391-3), we tried to show how, in texts from the 1990s, Butler describes the process of formation of gender identities and the subject himself as a process of exclusion, subordination and domination, in which the gender norms play a position of centrality, in which the heterosexual is constituted from the denial of his homosexual opposite. In later texts, such as Precarious Life (2004), Undoing Gender (2004) and Given an Account of Oneself (2005), however, Butler seems to broaden her understanding of the subjectivation process by recognizing our vulnerability, interdependence and relationality to others. With this shift, she attributes greater importance to the bonds that make and unmake us, as subjects and as a community, and also starts to analyze the positive elements of this process of subjectivation. This allows her to discuss topics such as recognition, ethics, radical equality, non-violence, and even normativity, absent in her past work. In order to understand this important change, generally called the "ethical turn", this research aims to analyze whether it can be understood as an attempt to account for the ambiguity of the subjectivation process through a change in the role played by mourning and by the experience of loss.