Determinismo, agencia y transformación social: Butler versus Bourdieu

Abstract

Bourdieu criticized Butler because she has not been able to release her approach from a deadly intellectualism heritage that does not give enough relevance to political work focused on body and affects. Nevertheless, we think that he only read, and also precipitately, Gender Trouble, as Butler had already specified the connections between discourse and corporality in others works. Butler, however, attain to admit, ironically, that she’s not a “good materialist” since she ends talking about language whenever she deals with body issue. What does Bourdieu propose to deal social change possibility? His response goes attached relentlessly to body as a dynamic repository of both social world’s normativity and axiology. Bourdieu demands that the emancipatory struggle aimed at demolish the established order must rest on an anti body training, just because we don’t only find resistances to transformation. The only thing that is still not very clear to us, despite the vehemence of accusations made by Bourdieu against Butler, is the existence of an insuperable abyss between both of them. In both of their thoughts the norm materializes, become reality on the bodies through its reiterated repetition. Bourdieu applies the habitus model; Butler speaks, instead, of a performative a 101 JUNIO 2016 iteration. Consider this confrontation and its possible theoretical and practical relevance will be the subject matter of the present paper.