On Judith Butler: A Phenomenology of Lived, narrated and Represented Embodiment

Abstract

In this paper we take Judith Butler’s thinking as a basis from which to consider the ideas of three authors. In our view, these authors complement Butler’s project of helping excluded people to fight for a dignified life, a “liveable life”; and specifically to the idea of using performative resignifications of discourses and practices. On one hand, we present the writings of Sarah Ahmed and Lanei Rodemeyer; they consider the spatiality and temporality of the lived body (Ahmed) and the relationship between the lived body and discourse (Rodemeyer). In both cases, “pure phenomenology” (and not hermeneutics) is applied to the question of sexual diversity. On the other hand, we delve into the works of Louise Bourgeois, for whom artistic creation is a way of exorcising pain and becoming free of socially constructed prisons. Starting from the paths opened by these authors, we believe that a phenomenology is possible in which there is place for what does not fit into the norm. this phenomenology would make it possible, on one side, to rend visibility to those who do not fit into the established norms and categories and, on another side, to contribute to a reformulation of discourse, such a transformation that allows the excluded to inhabit them. “Pure” phenomenology, that aims at going to “the things themselves” do not naturalise oppressions, but it is rather an ally to recognise, denounce and provide a reparation for them.