From neoliberal ethics to the embodied community of difference

Notes for thinking a politics of freedom from Judith Butler

Abstract

In her most recent work, Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street, philosopher Judith Butler questions the neoliberal ethics that underlies contemporary societies and states, opposing to it an ethics in which freedom is articulated
with equality. In this paper, we propose to reconstruct Butler’s refl ection on freedom by comparing it with the fundamental works that have founded neoliberal thought. This will allow us to verify the difference between a notion of individual freedom proper to neoliberalism and that proposed by Butler.