The presidential election victory last November of Donald Trump has hogged world headlines ever since, with a relentless series of controversies on the national and international stage even before his arrival in office.
His opponents in the US and abroad have loudly voiced their consternation and alarm at both his behaviour and comments and over his hardline policy pledges, such as the building of a wall along the border with Mexico or the deportation of millions of immigrants without legal residence status.
To better understand the phenomenon that Trump represents, Mediapart contributor Christian Salmon, a writer and researcher at the Paris Centre for Research in the Arts and Language, turned to the American thinker and academic Judith Butler for her analysis of the maverick new president. Butler, 60, a gender theorist, feminist and professor of Comparative Literature and Rhetoric with the University of California, Berkely, the author of numerous essays including Excitable Speech: a politics of the performative, warns that if Trump “puts deeds to words, then we have a fascist government”.
Trump, she says here, “allows for an identification with someone who breaks the rules, does what he wants, makes money, gets sex when and where he wants it” and concedes that “many of us took his arrogance, his ridiculous self-importance, his racism, his misogyny, his unpaid taxes, to be self-defeating characteristics, but all those were frankly thrilling for many who voted for him”.
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Christian Salmon: Can it be said that Donald Trump is a sort of image that emerges from your analyses published over the past 20 years? Is he not a ‘Butlerian’ subject, par excellence?
Judith Butler: I am not sure that Trump is a very good object for my kind of analysis. I do not think that there is, for instance, a fascination with the person of Trump. And if we consider his speech, then we have to consider more specifically the effect of his speech on one part of the US public. Let us remember that he was elected by less than one quarter of the public, and that it is only as the consequence of an outmoded Electoral College that he is now on way to becoming the President.
So we should not imagine that there is widespread popular support for Trump. There is widespread disillusionment with participatory politics, and there is some serious contempt for both of the major US parties. But Hillary Clinton won more votes than Trump. So when we ask about support for Trump, we are asking how a minority in the US was able to bring Trump to power. We are asking about a deficit in democracy, not a popular groundswell. In my view, the electoral college should be abolished so that our elections more clearly represent the will of the people. Our political parties also have to be rethought so that there can be greater popular participation in the process.
So the minority that supported Trump, the minority that were able to achieve an electoral success, were enabled not only by their own disaffection with the political field, but the disaffection of about 50% of eligible voters who did not vote. Perhaps we should be talking about the loss of participatory democracy in the US.
My own sense is that Trump unleashed a rage that has several objects and several causes, and we should probably be sceptical of those who claim to know the true cause and the exclusive object. The condition of economic devastation and disappointment, the loss of hope about an economic future brought on by economic and financial movements that leave whole communities decimated is surely important. But so too is the increasingly demographic complexity of the US, and forms of racism old and new. The desire for “strength” is, on the one hand, about enhancing state power against foreigners, undocumented workers, but it is coupled with a desire to get government off our backs, a slogan that serves both individualism and the market.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
C.S.: If the Trump phenomenon can be compared to fascism, it is above all regarding the relationship between the leader and the masses which made him. In truth, the big fascist leaders were not at all inventors of fascism, but rather they took hold of a scenario, that of the small and middle bourgeoisie which had great difficulty living with their fall in status caused by the defeat in war and the crisis of the 1920s, and which their frustration found expression in their hate for the proletariat. I recently by accident came across a text by Leon Trotsky in which he describes the fascist leader and which, it seems to me, portrays pretty well the Trump phenomenon: “His political thoughts were the fruits of oratorical acoustics. That is how the selection of slogans went on. That is how the programme was consolidated. That is how the “leader” took shape out of the raw material.” Cannot the same be said of Trump?
J.B.: This may well be a moment to distinguish between old and new fascisms. What you have described are the mid twentieth-century forms of European fascism. With Trump, we have a different situation, but one which I would still call fascist. On the one hand, Trump is wealthy, and those who voted for him were primarily not wealthy. And yet, workers identified with him – he worked the system and succeeded. Take the example of his ability to leverage his debts so that he would not have to pay taxes. Clinton was mistaken to think that ordinary people who pay taxes would be outraged by this fact. But they actually admired him for finding a way to avoid paying taxes. They would like to be that person.
The fascist moment comes, however, when he arrogates to himself the power to deport millions of people or even to put Hillary in jail after he assumes office (he has now taken that back), to break trade agreements at will, to insult the government of China, to call for the re-introduction of “water-boarding” and other modes of torture. When he speaks that way, he acts as if he has the sole power to decide foreign policy, to decide who goes to jail, to decide who will be deported, which trade agreements will be honored, which foreign policy will be broken and made.
But also, when he claims that he would hit or kill someone who interrupts him at a crowd, he bespeaks a murderous desire that, quite frankly, thrills many people. When he normalizes non-consensual sex or calls Hillary a “nasty woman”, he gives voice to long-standing misogyny, and when he figures Mexican immigrants as murderers, he gives voice to long-standing racism. Many of us took his arrogance, his ridiculous self-importance, his racism, his misogyny, his unpaid taxes, to be self-defeating characteristics, but all those were frankly thrilling for many who voted for him. No one is sure he has read the constitution or even cares about it. That arrogant indifference is what attracts people to him. And that is a fascist phenomenon. If he puts deeds to words, then we have a fascist government.
C.S.: Donald Trump did not campaign with poetry, to coin the phrase of the late New York Governor Mario Cuomo. Rather, like all the fascist leaders, Trump campaigned with slang, inventing his own sociolect, a mixture of jokes, grimaces, scatological allusions, mutterings, slogans and curses. His rhetoric corresponds with a sort of ‘branding’ of exclusion. He communicates less by structured speech than by signals, an amalgamation of slogans and insults brandished like a weapon of mass de-legitimisation of minorities. How do you analyse the slogan “You’re fired!” used by Trump in his TV series The Apprentice?
J.B.: Once again, the speech act presumes that he is the one in power to deny people of their jobs or their positions or their power. So part of what he managed to do is to communicate that sense of power that he delegated to himself. Speech acts such as the one you cite do precisely that. Let us also remember that the anger against cultural elites takes the form of an anger against feminism, against the civil rights movement, against religious tolerance and multiculturalism. All these are figured as “super-egoic” constraints on racist, misogynist, passions.
So Trump “liberated” hatred from the social movements and public discourses that condemn racism – with Trump, one is “free” to hate. He put himself in the position of the one who was willing to risk and survive public condemnation for his racism and sexism. His supporters wish to be shamelessly racist as well, which is why we saw the sudden increase of hate crimes on the street and in public transportation immediately after the election. People were “liberated” to shout their racism as they wish. How then to liberate ourselves from Trump, “the liberator”?
C.S.: By concentrating on the rhetoric, we run the risk of forgetting a second, corporal, dimension, the very great bodily character of his performances in meetings or on talk shows. There’s no need to add comment about his hairstyle and its orange tinge, but there is the movement of his hands, his mouth, a mannerism that is expressed in inappropriate mimicry, gestures, a sort of exaggerated demonstration of his personage, that of the world of TV reality shows. Do not the statues of Trump in the nude that were erected in public places across American towns consecrate a form of kitsch sacredness intended for a sort of hateful contagion, a corporal provocation? In seeing that I thought of Franz Kafka’s phrase: “One of the most effective means of temptation that Evil possesses is the challenge to struggle against it.” How do you analyse the sudden emergence of this reality show personage onto the political stage?
J.B.: It seems clear that the presidency has become increasingly a media phenomenon. One question is whether many people treat voting the way they treat the Facebook option to “like” or “dislike.” Trump takes up space on the screen, becomes a looming figure, and this was brought out well by the Saturday Night Live satire in which Alec Baldwin roams around the stage, appearing to almost attack Hillary from the rear.
That kind of looming and threatening power draws as well on his practices of sexual harassment. He goes where he wishes, he says what he wants, and he takes what he wants. So even though he is not charismatic in any traditional sense, he gains size and personal power through taking up the screen in the way that he does. In this sense, he allows for an identification with someone who breaks the rules, does what he wants, makes money, gets sex when and where he wants it. The vulgarity fills the screen, as it wishes to fill the world. And many rejoice to see this awkward and not very intelligent person posturing as the centre of the world, and gaining power through that posturing.
C.S.: When accused of lying, Trump defended himself by saying he practices “truthful hyperbole”. European media increasingly use the phrase “post-truth” politics to designate the lack of distinction between what is real and what is false, between reality and fiction which the late political theorist Hannah Arendtsaid was particular to totalitarianism. Social media created a new context, characterized by the advent of word bubbles, independent of each other, making a sort of closed-door information chain, propitious for the wildest rumours, plots and lies which are inaccessible to media fact-checking. During his campaign, Trump addressed these small republics of resentment via twitter and Facebook and brought them together into a hyper-charged wave. What do you think of this concept of “post-truth” politics?
J.B.: Somehow I cannot believe that those are Trump’s own words, but someone who is trying to normalize and even applaud his cavalier relation to truth. I am not sure we are in the middle of post-truth. Trump seems to me to attack the truth, and to show that he does not show evidence for his claims or even a logic to what he says.
His statements are not utterly arbitrary, but he is willing to change positions at will, bound only to the occasion, his impulse and his efficacity. So for instance, when he said of Hillary Clinton that once he became president, he would “lock her up” that brought cheers from those who hated her; it even allowed them to hate her more. Of course, he does not have the power to “lock her up” and even as President, he does not have the power without a rather lengthy criminal proceeding and the judgment of a court. But at that moment he is above all juridical proceedings, exercising his will as he wishes, and so modelling that form of tyranny that does not really care whether she committed a punishable offense. The evidence so far suggests that she did not. But he is not living in a world of evidence.
Similarly, his claim that Clinton would not have won the popular vote if it were not for the millions of illegals who voted for her cannot possibly be substantiated. At that moment, though, he exposes his own narcissistic wound in public, and seeks to de-ratify the popular vote. At the same time, the idea that votes in his favour were ever illegal is radically discounted. On the one hand, it does not matter whether or not he contradicts himself or whether it is obvious that he rejects only those conclusions that diminish his power or popularity. Both the brazen and wounded narcissism and the refusal to submit to evidence and logic make him all the more popular. He lives above the law, and that is where many of his supporters also want to live.
C.S.: In your book "Excitable Speech: a politics of the performative"you analyse the verbal violence of homophobic, sexist and racist speech which sets out to crush and exclude those it targets. You also demonstrate how this verbal violence aims to redraw the frontiers of a people, meaning a discursive operation that excludes, traces, delimits and yet also configures. That is to say, to bring about the emergence of a homogenous, mono-coloured, heterosexual figure of a fantasized people. But you also explain that this performance can be turned inside out, and open up the space for a political struggle and a subversion of identity labels. What do you believe are the levers for this?
J.B.: Perhaps we have to think about xenophobic nationalism as one way to assert and define “the people.” There was support for Trump among the economically disenfranchised ad well as those who understand themselves as having lost the privileges of whiteness, but many wealthy people also voted Trump with the belief that more markets would open and that more wealth could be had. We can focus on his speech, and that matters, but it is not his speech alone that draws people to him.
I thought Elizabeth Warren, the senator from Massachusetts, was right, however, to respond to his insulting comment about Clinton, “she’s a nasty woman”, with the rejoinder: “Get this, Donald. Nasty women are tough. Nasty women are smart. And nasty women vote. And, on November 8, we nasty women are going to march our nasty feet to cast our nasty votes to get you out of our lives forever.” That was doubtless an exhilarating moment of public feminism, but it was clearly not enough.
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C.S.: Since 2011, we have seen the resurgence on an international scale of movements like Occupy, Indignados, Nuit Debout and the Arab Spring. In your last book, “Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly”, you analyse the conditions for the emergence of these movements and their political implications, in continuation of your analyses of political performance. You write that when bodies rally together, they are bestowed with a political expression that is not limited to the demands or discourse of the actors involved. What are the forces that prevent or make possible such plural action, and what is the democratic nature of these movements?
J.B.: [...] Although demonstrations and assemblies are often not enough to produce radical change, they do alter our perceptions about who “the people” are, and they assert fundamental freedoms that belong to bodies in their plurality. There can be no democracy without freedom of assembly, and there can be no assembly without the freedom to move and gather. So bodily mobility and capacity is assumed by this freedom.
So many of the public demonstrations against austerity and precarity present bodies in the street and within the public view who are themselves suffering from displacement and disenfranchisement. They also assert political agency in common by gathering as they do. So though we can think about parliamentary assemblies as part of democracy, so too can we understand the extra-parliamentary power of assemblies to alter the public understanding of who the people are. Especially when those appear who are not supposed to appear, we see as well how the sphere of appearance, and the powers that control its borders and divisions, is presupposed in any discussion of who the people are. In this regard, I agree with Jacques Rancière.
C.S.: Michel Foucault analysed the democratic crisis at the turn of the 5th and 6th centuries BC in Athens as being both a discursive problem – the paradox of speaking the truth in democracy (“parrhesia” is perverted) – and as a shifting of the “scene” of politics, from the “agora” to the “ecclesia”, meaning from the citizens’ city to the court of sovereigns. Can one consider that the development of these new democratic phenomena that have appeared since 2011 to be the revenge of the agora against the ecclesia?
J.B.: To speak truth to power is not fundamentally an individual act. To speak truth to power means that one appropriates power in speaking as one does. And that the structures of power can be taken over or redeployed in the service of “talking back.” So we may think of the speaking subject as an individual who speaks, it is an anonymous and shifting position that potentially includes any number of people. Before we ask what it means to speak truth to power, we have to ask who can speak. Sometimes the very presence of those who are supposed to remain mute in public discourse breaks through that structure.
When the undocumented assemble, or when those who have suffered eviction assemble, or those who suffer unemployment or drastic cuts in their retirement, they assert themselves into the imagery and the discourse that gives us a sense of who the people are, or should be. Of course, they make specific demands, but assembly is also a way of making a demand with the body, a corporeal claim to public space and a public demand to political powers. So in a way, we have first to break into discourse before we can speak truth to power. We have to break upon the constraints on political representation in order to expose its violence and oppose its exclusions.
As long as “security” continues to justify the banning and dispersion of demonstrations, assemblies, and encampments, security serves the decimation of democratic rights and democracy itself. Only a broad-based mobilization, a form of embodied and transnational courage, we might say, will successfully defeat xenophobic nationalism and the various alibis that now threaten democracy.
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- This interview, in which Judith Butler replied in English to questions in French, is available in a French-language version here.