Judith Butler and Marxism: The Radical Feminism of Performativity, Vulnerability, and Care

This is the first book to fully study the contentious link between the vastly influential projects of Judith Butler and Marxism. What would a Butlerian Marxism look like? Marxist criticisms of Butler range from careful comparisons of forms to the total dismissal of an unpolitical, merely cultural anarchy.None of these criticisms, however, focuses on what seems to most closely unite these two projects: the universal abolition of the universal.While Marxist communism is focused on the abolition of value and property, Butler is consistently concerned throughout their corpus with the abolition of the subject as the universal form of social relations, an abolition staged by way of a relational ontology and ethics.Their methodologies for achieving abolition, however, vary hugely.Butler’s sees the performativity of subjects and power as an opportunity for differential assembly, Marxists are primarily concerned with the working class as a revolutionary vanguard that withdraws its labor from pr