Instructor: Judith Butler
The course will consider philosophical and psychoanalytic accounts of the kinds of violence that ethics seeks to contain as well as the violence that emerges within certain ethical frameworks. At issue is the question of whether the prohibition on violence invariably partakes of the violence it seeks to forestall. If so, is there a difference between the binding “force” of prohibition and the violence prohibited? We will seek to distinguish among conceptions of violence, non-violence, ethical violence.
