Reading Greek Tragedy with Judith Butler

In his recent book, Reading Greek Tragedy with Judith Butler, Mario Telò explores the critical engagements that Butler makes with some of the canonical texts of Greek Tragedy, namely Antigone, The Bacchae and The Eumenides on matters of war, violence, kinship, desire, and action. In developing a ‘Butlerian reading’, Telò demonstrates his commitment to a radical strategy of reading Butler’s ‘readings’. This strategy aims to elaborate their analysis by taking inspiration from their method of interpretation. The project is defined by Telò in this way, ‘To be Butlerian in being non-Butlerian is to evade the re-inscription of possession and sovereignty while aligning oneself with, even being cathected to, the theorist who has most powerfully contested the tyranny of identity, autonomy and self-sufficiency’.

This online discussion between Judith Butler and Mario Telò will explore the space that is opened up as a result of the ‘agitated affect’ of the reading activity, a dynamic space often destabilised through psychoanalytic interventions. Through the combined lens of Butler/Telò, we realise just how vital Greek tragic texts are to contemporary questions of subjectivity, kinship, brutality, and injustice. This event will be chaired by The Freud Museum’s Research Manager, Tom DeRose.

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Mario Telò is Professor of Rhetoric, Comparative Literature, and Ancient Greek and Roman Studies, UC Berkeley. He is the author of Aristophanes and the Cloak of Comedy: Affect, Aesthetics, and the Canon (2016), Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy (2020), Resistant Form: Aristophanes and the Comedy of Crisis (2023), and Greek Tragedy in a Global Crisis: Reading Through Pandemic Times (2023).

Judith Butler is Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School, University of California, Berkeley. Butler is the author of several books, including “Who’s Afraid of Gender?” (2024) and “Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity” (1990). Butler has been active in several human rights organizations, including the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York and the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace and received the Adorno Prize from the City of Frankfurt (2012) for outstanding contributions to feminist and moral philosophy, the Brudner Prize from Yale University for lifetime achievement in gay and lesbian studies, and the Catalan International Prize in 2022. Butler is a member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Butler received their Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University in 1984 and holds 14 honorary degrees.

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