Judith Butler: Performativity

Judith Butler: Performativity

Butler’s notion of ‘performativity’ is most famously associated with her views on gender and is important for critical legal thinkers because performativity is deeply entangled with politics and legality. Her focus on performance has been widely influential because...
Nancy Fraser: Subaltern Counterpublics

Nancy Fraser: Subaltern Counterpublics

Kirchner’s Weinstube Subaltern counterpublics are discursive arenas that develop in parallel to the official public spheres and “where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counter discourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of...
Hans-Georg Gadamer: Hermeneutics

Hans-Georg Gadamer: Hermeneutics

Hermeneutics concerns itself with the philosophy of interpretation, initially oriented toward the interpretation of texts. Indeed, though its origins lay in Greek antiquity, ‘advances in the formulation of methods of interpretation had to await the Reformation and the...
Jacques Derrida: Deconstruction

Jacques Derrida: Deconstruction

Key Concept Img: Annie Vought | annievought.com Deconstruction by its very nature defies institutionalization in an authoritative definition. The concept was first outlined by Derrida in Of Grammatology where he explored the interplay between language and the...
Agamben: The Messianic Kingdom

Agamben: The Messianic Kingdom

Key Concept In “The Messiah and the Sovereign: The Problem of Law in Walter Benjamin,” Agamben explicitly addresses the difference between the state of exception in which we are living where the law is in force, but does not signify anything, and the real state of...
Fanon — Revolution

Fanon — Revolution

Brahim Haggiag (center, with arm outstretched) as revolutionary leader Ali La Pointe in a scene from Gillo Pontecorvo’s THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS (1965). Photo courtesy Rialto Pictures. The naked truth of decolonisation evokes for us the searing bullets and...