I Do Not Follow Closely

There Are Ordinary Spaces Where People Do, More Or Less, Share Neighbourhoods. In Haifa, There Are Whole Communities That Are More Or Less Integrated. But Of Course That Is With Palestinian Israelis Who Have, For The Most Part, Accepted Certain Kinds Of Cooperative Models, And Also Accept Second-class Citizenship.

It's Not My Concern. It's Your Concern. I Just Keep Working. I Keep Posing Certain Questions And I Think There Are Times When People Think "what Happened To The Judith Butler I Used To Know?" Or "she's Not Doing Gender Trouble. Does That Mean She Refuses It Or She's Disavowed It?" And I Would Say No. I Have Not Refused Or Disavowed Anything.

I Never Did Like The Assertion Of The "innate" Inferiority Or Women Or Blacks, And I Understood That When People Tried To Talk That Way, They Were Trying To "fix" A Social Reality Into A Natural Necessity. And Yet, Sometimes We Do Need A Language That Refers To A Basic, Fundamental, Enduring, And Necessary Dimension Of Who We Are, And The Sense Of Sexed Embodiment Can Be Precisely That.

The Problem With Antigone Is That She Stood Up To The Despot Creon, But In Such A Way That She Ended Up Dying. So She Bought Her Defiance With Her Death. The Real Question I Ended Up Asking Was, "what Would It Mean For Antigone To Have Stood Up To Creon And Lived?" And The Only Way She Could Have Lived Is If She Had Had A Serious Social Movement With Her. If She Arrived With A Social Movement To Take Down The Despot, Maybe It Would Have Taken 18 Days Only, Like In Egypt. It's Really Important To Be Able To Re-situate One's Rage And Destitution In The Context Of A Social Movement.

One Of The Things That Neoliberalism Does Is, It Relies On Flexible Workforces Who Are Hired And Fired At Will And Who Are Basically Disposable Labor. You Can Use Them. You Can Get Rid Of Them. They Have No Rights; They Have No Security. Their Lives And Well-being Are Made And Unmade At The Whim Of Those Who Are Exercising The Calculus. So, Instead Of Looking At The Institution And Objecting To That Kind Of Organization, People Just Go, "i'm A Failure;"; "i'm Not Working Hard Enough"; Or, "i'm Not As Smart As The Next Person."