February 1, 2007 | 6:00 PM | Anderson Hall, Room 7 | Temple University
The 2007 Alain Locke Lecturer: JUDITH BUTLER

"Said, Levinas, and the Ethical Demand of Post-Zionism"

The 2007 Alain Locke Lecturer will be Judith Butler, the Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California at
Berkeley.  The lecture will be held on February 1st, 2007 in Anderson Hall, Room 7, at 6:00 PM.

Professor Butler received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University in 1984. She is the author of Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France(Columbia University Press, 1987), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (Routledge, 1993), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (Stanford University Press, 1997), Excitable Speech (Routledge, 1997), Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (Columbia University Press, 2000), Hegemony, Contingency, Universality, with Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek, (Verso Press, 2000). In 2004, she published a collection of writings on war's impact on language and thought entitled Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning with Verso Press. That same year, The Judith Butler Reader appeared, edited by Sara Salih, with Blackwell Publishers. A collection of her essays on gender and sexuality, Undoing Gender, appeared with Routledge in 2004 as well. Her most recent book, Giving an Account of Oneself, appeared with Fordham University Press (2005) and considers the partial opacity of the subject, and the relation between critique and ethical reflection. She is currently working on essays pertaining to Jewish Philosophy, focusing on pre-Zionist criticisms of state violence. She continues to write on cultural and literary theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, feminism, and sexual politics.

Click here for an excellent and searchable bibliography of Judith Butler's work.

Click here for directions to Temple University.

In April 2005, the Alain Locke Lecture was inaugurated by Professor Leonard Harris of Purdue University, with a special introduction and commentary by Professor George Yancy of Duquesnes University.

Alain LeRoy Locke (September 13, 1886 to June 9, 1954) was one of the premier philosophers and social critics of the Harlem Renaissance. He was the first black Rhodes Scholar. After studying at Oxford and the University of Berlin, he earned his PhD in philosophy at Harvard University in 1918.  Locke served as chairperson of the Howard University Department of Philosophy from 1917 till 1953, and among his publications on culture and race relations are his works in aesthetics and value theory.  Many articles and several books have been written on him and his works and there is now an Alain Locke Society, of which Leonard Harris is President.  Locke was a native of Philadelphia's southside.

Click here for more information about Alain LeRoy Locke.