Judith Butler stirred up a bit of debate earlier in the course, relating to readability, obscurantism, and other relevant concerns, but also served to supplement the beginning of the class’s ongoing discussion of disability. I found this essay recently by Martha Nussbaum, an important and frequently quoted political and legal feminist philosopher, raising some very interesting criticisms of Butler’s method and conclusions. This also reminded me that Nussbaum was included in the same documentary of which Butler’s walk with Sunaura Taylor was a part, the very thought-provoking and beautifully composed “Examined Life.” What struck me about this mutual discovery/rediscovery was how similar Nussbaum’s piece in “Examined Life” was to Butler’s, considering her polemic objection to Butler’s work in the essay.

The thrust of Butler’s discussion with Sunaura Taylor was that, rather than society being composed of self-sufficient individual agents working for their own benefit in a public sphere of socio-economic exchange, with marginal disruptive aberrations on that structure in the form of disabled subjects, we are all dependent, and we exist in a network of interdependence and contingency. This served as a critique of individualistic programs of thought that continually attempt to entrench normative prejudices relating to ability, sexuality, and embodiment into society. Nussbaum makes a very similar argument. “The theorists of the social contract…assumed that the parties to [the social contract] really are roughly equal in physical and mental power,” she argues, continuing to criticize this Enlightenment individualistic position by not only asserting that it leaves out consideration of unequal capacities, particularly people with disabilities, but that “it’s all of us– when we’re little children, and when we age.” The ubiquity of interdependence and the importance of inclusive social structures runs through both philosophers’ contributions to “Examined Life.”

I was wondering a couple things as potential points of discussion. 1.) Where do Butler and Nussbaum’s arguments about disability and society diverge in these videos, if at all? Is it purely a difference in scope or method, or is there a real difference in position? and 2.) What arguments of Nussbaum’s, in her critical article on Butler, can be vindicated, and what, if any, arguments in Butler show Nussbaum’s criticism to be incorrect or insufficient?

Two or so years ago in the process of having my political mind entirely changed forever by reading Giorgio Agamben’s brilliant Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, I came across a lively section on the archetypal wolf-man, or werewolf. Agamben’s thesis in the book is essentially that, since Enlightenment thought and the construction of statehood as a rational institution subject to a code of normative ethics, sovereign state power has been based upon the principle of “exception.” The individual subject is theorized in Enlightenment political literature as being the result of the imposition of a political structure upon a natural “bare life.” Agamben counters this top-down theory by proposing that “nature” or “bare life” only becomes intelligible through the apparatus of sovereignty. The “natural” that lingers outside of the polity or municipality is always already formulated within state terms. The “state of exception”, popularized in World War II era by political scientist Carl Schmitt, is the concept of an emergency structure put in place, outside and beyond the written law, in particular situations (a recent example would be George W. Bush and Barack Obama’s suspension of international human rights laws, through torture and unjust imprisonment, in the name of defending “freedom” in wartime.) Agamben’s theory postulates, however, that state sovereignty is always already a state of exception: “rights,” as the bedrock of law, are always constructed by and “enforced” by the same powers that are supposedly equally subject to them. Thus state power is always already “outside” rights and the law. The rights that are based in “nature” and the natural sovereignty of the individual are codified by state power. The state is thus a liminal between-space, with nature and the political not as two poles but as between and within each other.

Agamben illustrates this theory with the archetype of the werewolf. The werewolf acts as a symbol of state sovereignty as the threshold between bios and nomos, between nature and the political. “It is a threshold of indistinction and of passage between animal and man, physis and nomos, exclusion and inclusion: the life of the bandit is the life of the loup garou, the werewolf, who is precisely neither man nor beast, and who dwells paradoxically within both while belonging to neither.” The werewolf embodies the concept of liminality upon which state sovereignty is founded. Pretty cool, right? I realize I spent more time explaining Agamben’s central thesis than on the werewolf paradox, but it’s something to consider when thinking about the ways in which (fictional and nonfictional bodies) are simultaneously “natural” and continent/political.