08:00
Birkbeck, University of London
November 5
Birkbeck Main Building, Malet Street
When: — Venue: Birkbeck Main Building, Malet Street
Abandoning their previous work on performative particulars, Judith Butler has increasingly turned to liberal celebrations of difference, positing a universal politics of particularity in their latest work, in which particulars all co-exist without a dominant universal. Marxism’s drive, conversely, has always been the universalization of antagonistic particulars, taking a dominated particular—the working class, or labor-power—and universalizing it as the abolition of the universal. The universalization of the particular abolishes universals.
In this talk, Elliot C. Mason takes Butler’s and Marxists’ criticisms of universality to the case of Palestinian particularity. Zionists dismiss Palestinian particularity as nothing but Arab universality; Palestinians can therefore be displaced to any Arab country. Meanwhile, Palestine is forcibly split into sealed enclaves, surrounded by militarized settlements, rendering Palestinian culture an infinite series of antagonistic particulars. These colonial maneuvers make claims on both Palestinian particularity and universality difficult to maintain without complicity in a Zionist agenda. This talk proposes an anticolonial abolitionism in the break between Butler and Marxism.
Elliot C. Mason is a postdoctoral researcher and activist based in Stockholm. Most recently, he is the author of Poetics of Value: The Primacy of Insurgency as Marxist Methodology (Brill 2025), and co-editor, with Valentina Moro, of Judith Butler and Marxism: The Radical Feminism of Performativity, Vulnerability, and Care (Bloomsbury 2025). He is a founding member of Workers and Students in Swedish Academia for Palestine (WASSAP).
Location: BCB (Birkbeck Central), Room G08
Time: 12-14:00
Contact name: Elena Loizidou
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