At the Gates of Europe: Sacred Objects, Other Spaces and Performances of Dispossession

Abstract

‘What makes political responsiveness possible?’ (2013: xi) ask Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, concluding the preface to Dispossession: The Performative in the Political. This series of dialogues offers two interpretations of dispossession: first, as deprivation, due to injustices (neoliberalism, conflict, environmental crises) stripping people of their material possessions; second, as the ways in which one can be separated from ‘the sovereign self. Extending Butler’s previous work on violence and ethics, dispossession recognises life as interdependent and vulnerable; it signifies how one is moved by what one is exposed to and thus ‘finds oneself transported elsewhere, into another scene, or into a social world in which one is not the center’ (2013: xi). For the two theorists, being affectively moved and dispossessed of the ‘sovereign self’ are necessary conditions for Western citizens to join resisting collectivities that demand the end of injustice.