Desposesión

Dispossession describes the condition of those who have lost land, citizenship, property, and a broader belonging to the world. Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, two of the greatest exponents of political philosophy and Queer Theory, explore in these dialogues the concept of dispossession, its links with subjectivity, collective protest, relationality, precariousness and biopolitics; concepts that move away from the conventional logic of possession, a hallmark of capitalism and liberalism. In the context of forced immigration, unemployment, homelessness, land occupation, and contemporary methods of conquest, dispossession opens up a performative condition in which we are affected by injustice and goaded into action. We are in a precarious situation, exposed to the police force, but we are also standing up and opposing dispossession. We insist on our collective position, we organize without and against the hierarchy and we refuse to be disposable. How can we free ourselves from the sovereign subject and enter the forms of collectivity that are opposed to the forms of dispossession that systematically expel entire populations from the protection of justice and collective belonging. This is the question from which Butler and Athanasiou start to elaborate a new vision of what "performative politics" could imply.