There are doubtless all kinds of ways of explaining why people want security, but I do not think … - Judith Butler

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A little noiseless noise among the leaves, Born of the very sigh that silence heaves.

Judith Butler

There are doubtless all kinds of ways of explaining why people want security, but I do not think we can start with the psychological explanations. Even psychological states like fear or desire for safety are conditioned by social and political forms of intimidation and scare-mongering that intensify those emotions, and even work to persuade people that nothing less than their survival is at stake.

Kinds, People, Persuade, Safety, Thinking, Ways

Same Author Quotes

Whether or not we continue to enforce a universal conception of human rights at moments of outrage and incomprehension, precisely when we think that others have taken themselves out of the human community as we know it, is a test of our very humanity.

Enforce, Incomprehension, Rights, Taken, Thinking, Universal

I think we have to accept a wide variety of positions on gender. Some want to be gender-free, but others want to be free really to be a gender that is crucial to who they are.

Thinking, Want, Gender, Wide, Crucial, Accept

I think we need a politics that allows us to risk what is intelligible. To be maybe slightly unintelligible, too be slightly "illisible". To take the risk of suggesting that the human form might take another form.

Allows, Needs, Risk, Suggesting, Thinking

So there might be a kind of collective effort that allows for those risks to be taken, pose a certain danger but not a suicidal one.

Collective Effort, Danger, Kind, Pose, Suicidal, Taken

Maybe one of the jobs of theory or philosophy is to elevate principles that seem impossible, or that have the status of the impossible, to stand by them and will them, even when it looks highly unlikely that they'll ever be realised. But that's ok, it's a service.

Jobs, Philosophy, Principles, Stand, Realised