Ethics without Normativity and Politics without Historicity

Abstract

This chapter talks about how the announcement that Judith Butler was awarded the Adorno Prize of the city of Frankfurt led to an intense controversy that engulfed officials of the German-Jewish and Israeli communities, members of academia, journalists, and public intellectuals. At issue was whether, given her support of the Israel Global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement (BDS), Butler should have been honored in the name of a Jewish-German refugee and one of the revered founders of the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. Nonetheless, Butler's achievement is to retrieve ethical imperatives toward a vision of cohabitation by reviving Jewish memories of exile and persecution, in that she reexamines long-forgotten distinctions between cultural and political Zionism.