Judith Butler Quotes & Sayings (Page 3)

“Events that get covered in the U.S. one way are not very important elsewhere or are given a completely different slant ,and one needs to have a kind of comparative way of thinking in order to arrive at a judgment that is not completely provincial, that doesn't end up ratifying one's own national perspective and hence, one's own national agendas.”

“Cameras help to minimize collateral damage, and very often, without a camera a missile cannot fire. Certainly, without a camera a drone can't function, which means that the very ways in which we wage war are determined in part by how cameras work and whether they work at all.”

“I don't think we have to have a personal relation to a life lost to understand that something terrible has taken place, especially in the context of war.”

“It will not do to say that international law is the enemy of the Jewish people, since the Jewish people surely did not as a whole oppose the Nuremburg trials, or the development of human rights law.”

“I think that every sexual position is fundamentally comic.”

“It seems, though, that historically we have now reached a position in which Jews cannot legitimately be understood always and only as presumptive victims.”

“I would say that I'm a feminist theorist before I'm a queer theorist or a gay and lesbian theorist.”

“Life has to be protected. It is precarious. I would even go so far as to say that precarious life is, in a way, a Jewish value for me.”

“There is a new venue for theory, necessarily impure, where it emerges in and as the very event of cultural translation. This is not the displacement of theory by historicism, nor a simple historicization of theory that exposes the contingent limits of its more generalizable claims.”

“A challenge to the right of Israel to exist can be construed as a challenge to the existence of the Jewish people only if one believes that Israel alone keeps the Jewish people alive or that all Jews invest their sense of perpetuity in the state of Israel in its current or traditional forms.”