Who are you? Between Judith Butler and Edward Said

Abstract

The following article is framed within the study of my doctoral thesis, in the Doctorate of Philosophy, on the recent formulation of Judith Butler around an ethics of cohabitation. One of the moments of this research is the discussion around the cultural norms that delimit the field of the human. I am referring to the “recognition frames” (Butler, 2010) that operate as a cut of the real, from which the category of human is differentially distributed. Although we are all vulnerable and need institutions and others to survive, not all of us are vulnerable in the same way. There are those who are not considered worthy lives and their life and death happen without globally awakening moral outrage at the violence they suffer. Considering current human cartography, the article sets out to investigate the logic of opposition between the West and the Middle East, where Arab-Muslim lives are considered less than human and therefore not meritorious. In this task, I propose a possible dialogue between the philosopher Edward Said and Judith Butler, recovering from the first his concept of “orientalism” (Said, 2008), important to the analysis of the cultural frames that delimit the border of the human.