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Butler and Heidegger: On the Relation between Freedom and Marginalization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Aret Karademir
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Abstract

Though the names “Judith Butler” and “Martin Heidegger” rarely come together in Butler and Heidegger scholarship, the critical encounter between these philosophers might help us conceptualize the relationship between freedom and marginalization. In this paper, I will read Butler from the perspective of the Heidegger of Being and Time and claim that what Butler's philosophy suggests is the radical dependency of one's freedom on the cultural resuscitation of socially murdered racial, sexual, ethnic, religious, and sectarian/confessional minorities. More specifically, I will claim that the socially sanctioned subject's freedom is dependent on the marginalized Other's freedom, and, conversely, the marginalized Other's freedom is dependent on the socially sanctioned subject's freedom.

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Open Issue Content
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Hypatia , Volume 29 , Issue 4 , Fall 2014, pp. 824 - 839
Copyright
Copyright © 2014 by Hypatia, Inc.

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Footnotes

I thank Ofelia Schutte, Charles Guignon, Stephen Turner, David Cheely, and the anonymous Hypatia reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.

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