Thursday, September 14, a queue lengthens in the basement of Beaubourg, while the Parisian sky turns midnight blue. The crowd is pretty cool, students, gender fluid. Some have been waiting outside the four-hundred-seat auditorium since mid-afternoon. Which personality from the intellectual world moves young people in this way? There is only one: Judith Butler. Known worldwide for her work on gender, this 67-year-old American philosopher, professor emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley, is as close to a rockstar as an academic can be.
“ He is someone in whom a generation recognizes itself “, summarizes Mathieu Potte-Bonneville, who directs the multidisciplinary programming of the Center Pompidou, where he invites every year “ a great voice of contemporary thought » to collaborate with the museum. Judith Butler is his first “ intellectual guest » foreign. For the occasion, he slips, she took a pied-à-terre in Paris and French lessons. In line, a girl says to a boy: “ You at a gender conference ? » Him : “ Well, yes, that interests me. »
That evening, the inaugural conference of the cycle of four evenings organized in the Parisian institution did not, however, focus on gender. The programmatic title that Judith Butler initially proposed was “Mourning, Rage and the Collective Demand for Justice”. “ We said: “It’s a bit long anyway, it’s not a great seller”, confides Mathieu Potte-Bonneville, but it is on this that she wanted to take us, towards a reflection on mourning, in this moment when intimate loss becomes a collective subject and a possible vector of political mobilization. » In sneakers and a well-cut suit, Judith Butler makes the link between the demonstrations in Chile in memory of the victims of the Pinochet dictatorship and the shipwrecks of migrants in the Mediterranean. She talks about “ resistance to extinction “, of radical alliance of the oppressed, of violence.
Yet there is no escaping the subject that pursues her. When questions from the public arrive, a young woman thanks the philosopher for having allowed “ many identities to assert themselves » : “ Today, I see 10-year-old children who say they are non-binary and it’s wonderful. » France took a long time to do him these honors. The book that made her famous, Gender Trouble, was already fifteen years old when its French translation appeared, in 2005, under the title Gender trouble (Discovery). “ I remember that an editor had deemed it “unassimilable” and I found this choice of word very interesting. “, she says in a black leather jacket in the cozy offices of Flammarion, which publishes her next essay on October 18.
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