The notion of agency in Butler's theory of performativity

The presentation will address the notion of agency in Judith Butler’s work. Its central claim is that her political philosophy revolves around a specific understanding of agency, even a theory of agency, which has not as yet received due attention. The first part of the presentation examines two main thought traditions in which agency became an operational notion, through the lenses of intentionality and constraints, voluntarism and determinism. The second elaborates the centrality of the body, the social and power in Butler’s understanding of agency, conjoining agency with performativity. The presentation argues that agency in Butler exceeds freedom, autonomy and liberation, and has a potent political meaning of its own. Agency ceases to be replaceable with autonomy/freedom/emancipation/liberation, as it productively challenges both the substantivity of the subject and of power in continental philosophy, and the empty formalism of intentionality in analytic philosophy, as well as the pan-political resistance in the teleologies of emancipation.