The radical politics of Judith Butler A “turn towards the political”? Universality-to-come and precariou/s/ness

Abstract

In this article we address the increasing political dimension in the over thirty years of Judith Butler’s theoretical production, understanding Butler as a political thinker in their own right (Chambers and Carver, 2008) who has developed their own conception of radical politics (Moya Lloyd, 2009). Although Butler’s “ethical turn” on precariousness is the focal point among most interpretations, we argue that there is a previous turn in Butler’s work through their concept of universality-to-come: a “political turn” or “turn to the political” through which a certain ontological difference between politics and the political is admitted into Butler’s thesis. To what extent can it be asserted that Judith Butler is a radical political thinker? We consider that their critique on universality as a transcendentalizing function of historical and contingent contents drives the theory to an impasse in which it rejects what its politics requires, and that can only be overcome despite itself: introducing precariousness, a socio-ontological condition of constitutive openness as its own quasi transcendental.