“Dispossession: The Performative in the Political” is a collaborative work consisting of a series of dialogues between Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, published in 2013. The book takes the form of an extended conversation between these two theorists, exploring questions of political subjectivity, precarity, resistance, and the conditions of contemporary life under neoliberalism and global capitalism. The work is structured as a back-and-forth exchange, with each author contributing substantial essays that respond to and build upon the other’s arguments, creating a dynamic intellectual engagement that models the kind of relational thinking the book advocates.
Core Themes and Arguments
The central concept organizing the book is “dispossession” itself, which Butler and Athanasiou develop as a term with dual and paradoxical meanings. On one hand, dispossession refers to the violent processes by which people are deprived of land, rights, belonging, livelihood, and the basic conditions for viable life. This is dispossession in its most straightforward sense: the forcible removal of what one has, the denial of what one needs, the systematic deprivation that characterizes contemporary forms of exploitation, occupation, debt peonage, and precarity. This form of dispossession is fundamentally injurious and is a primary mechanism of power under neoliberal capitalism and colonial/postcolonial regimes.
On the other hand, Butler and Athanasiou argue that there is another sense of dispossession that is constitutive of subjectivity itself and potentially enabling of political resistance. This is the dispossession that comes from our fundamental relationality—the fact that we are never fully self-possessed, autonomous individuals, but are always already constituted through our relations with others, our dependencies, our vulnerabilities, and our exposure to what is outside ourselves. We are, in a sense, always “beside ourselves,” never fully in control of who we are or what we become. This ontological dispossession—this fundamental lack of self-possession—can be a site of political possibility precisely because it opens us to others and to forms of collective action that don’t depend on the fiction of the sovereign, self-sufficient individual.
The book’s central theoretical and political challenge is to think these two forms of dispossession together: to acknowledge the violence of material and political dispossession while also recognizing that the fantasy of complete self-possession is both impossible and undesirable. The question becomes how to resist injurious dispossession without falling back on liberal notions of property, autonomy, and sovereignty that are themselves implicated in structures of domination.
Performativity and Political Action
Butler brings to this conversation her longstanding engagement with performativity, but here the concept is explicitly politicized in relation to questions of assembly, protest, and collective action. The performative dimension of politics refers to the ways in which political subjects are not simply pre-existing agents who then act, but are constituted through their very acts of appearing, speaking, and assembling. When people gather in public space to protest, they are not simply expressing a pre-formed political will; they are enacting and bringing into being a political subjectivity through the very act of assembly.
This performative understanding of politics is crucial for thinking about contemporary forms of resistance, particularly those that emerge from conditions of precarity. Butler discusses various protest movements—including Occupy, the Arab Spring uprisings, and protests in Greece during the debt crisis—as examples of how dispossessed populations enact their political existence precisely through forms of assembly that make visible their precarity and their interdependence. When people whose lives have been rendered precarious gather in public squares, they are performing a claim to public space and to political recognition that their very presence enacts, rather than simply represents.
The body becomes central to this analysis. Bodies in public space, particularly when they are vulnerable, exposed, and dependent on one another for support, make manifest the material conditions of political life. The act of gathering itself becomes a form of political speech, one that says: “We are here, we persist, we matter, despite the forces that would render us disposable.” This is performative politics in a strong sense: the performance doesn’t represent a political claim so much as it enacts and constitutes it.
Precarity and Grievability
The book develops an extended analysis of precarity as a political condition. Precarity refers to the condition of being vulnerable to injury, loss, and death, of having one’s life dependent on social and economic structures that may or may not support it. While precarity is a universal human condition—all lives are vulnerable—it is distributed unequally. Some populations are rendered systematically more precarious than others through political and economic arrangements that deny them access to employment, housing, healthcare, legal protection, and social recognition.
Butler has developed in her earlier work the concept of “grievability”—the idea that some lives are recognized as lives worth grieving when they are lost, while others are not. This concept is central to the arguments in “Dispossession” as well. The unequal distribution of precarity is linked to the unequal distribution of grievability: those whose lives are not recognized as fully human, as lives that matter, are those who are most exposed to violence, abandonment, and premature death.
The political question then becomes: how do we challenge these differential distributions of precarity and grievability? How do we make visible the lives that have been rendered invisible, make grievable the lives that have been deemed ungrievable? The performative politics of assembly that Butler describes is one answer: by appearing in public, by making their vulnerability visible, precarious populations can challenge the frameworks that render them disposable.
Athanasiou’s Contributions: Debt, Crisis, and the Greek Context
Athena Athanasiou brings to the dialogue a particular focus on the Greek debt crisis and the forms of dispossession enacted through austerity politics and debt peonage. Her contributions ground the book’s theoretical arguments in the concrete realities of contemporary European politics, particularly the ways in which entire populations have been subjected to forms of economic violence in the name of fiscal responsibility and debt repayment.
Athanasiou analyzes how debt functions as a mechanism of dispossession, creating forms of subjection that extend beyond the economic into the social and psychic realms. The indebted subject is one who is bound to the future through obligation, whose present is mortgaged to pay for a past that may not even be of their own making. In the Greek context, this has meant the systematic dismantling of social services, the privatization of public goods, and the imposition of conditions that render life increasingly precarious for large segments of the population.
She also brings attention to the gendered dimensions of austerity and dispossession. Women’s labor, both productive and reproductive, is particularly targeted by austerity measures, and women bear a disproportionate burden of the social reproduction that becomes necessary when state support is withdrawn. The feminization of poverty under austerity is not incidental but structural, linked to the ways in which women’s labor has historically been devalued and rendered invisible.
Athanasiou’s analysis extends to questions of migration, borders, and the production of “illegal” populations. She examines how the European border regime creates categories of people who are rendered rightless, whose very existence is criminalized, and who are subjected to forms of violence and abandonment that are justified through discourses of sovereignty and security. These populations exemplify the most extreme forms of dispossession: deprived not only of property and livelihood but of legal personhood and political standing.
Relationality and Ethics
A sustained thread throughout the book is an argument for relationality as both an ontological condition and an ethical-political orientation. Against liberal individualism’s fantasy of the self-sufficient subject, Butler and Athanasiou insist that we are fundamentally relational beings, constituted through our dependencies and our exposure to others. This is not a weakness to be overcome but a condition to be acknowledged and even embraced.
This relational ontology has ethical implications. If we are always already dependent on others, always vulnerable to what comes from outside ourselves, then ethics cannot be grounded in the autonomous will of the sovereign subject. Instead, ethics must begin from our exposure to others, our susceptibility to being affected by them, our responsibility to and for those to whom we are bound whether we choose it or not.
The book engages with Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of the face and the other, but also critiques the ways in which Levinas’s framework can remain too dyadic, too focused on the face-to-face encounter. Butler and Athanasiou are interested in forms of collective relationality, in the ways that our dependencies and vulnerabilities bind us to others in networks and assemblages that exceed the individual encounter. Political solidarity, they suggest, must be grounded in this recognition of our fundamental interdependence.
This relational ethics also requires rethinking notions of agency and resistance. If we are not sovereign subjects who act from a position of autonomy, then resistance cannot be understood as the assertion of individual will against power. Instead, resistance emerges from our relationality itself, from forms of collective action that acknowledge and work through our dependencies rather than denying them. The protest movements that Butler discusses exemplify this: people gathering to support one another, creating infrastructures of mutual care, enacting forms of solidarity that don’t depend on the fiction of self-sufficiency.
Biopolitics and Neoliberalism
The book situates its arguments within a broader analysis of biopolitics and neoliberalism. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of biopolitics—the ways in which modern power operates through the management and regulation of life itself—Butler and Athanasiou examine how neoliberal governance produces and manages populations through the differential distribution of precarity.
Neoliberalism, they argue, is not simply an economic doctrine but a political rationality that extends market logic into all domains of life. Under neoliberalism, individuals are responsibilized—made responsible for their own welfare, their own success or failure, their own survival. Social problems are individualized, and structural inequalities are reframed as matters of personal responsibility. This responsibilization is a form of dispossession: it strips away collective forms of support and solidarity, leaving individuals to fend for themselves in increasingly hostile conditions.
At the same time, neoliberalism produces populations that are deemed disposable, whose lives are not worth investing in, who can be abandoned to precarity and death. This is the dark underside of neoliberal responsibilization: those who “fail” to make themselves valuable in market terms are rendered surplus, excess, expendable. The book examines how this logic operates across multiple sites: in the dismantling of welfare states, in the criminalization of poverty, in the management of migrant populations, in the imposition of austerity measures.
Dispossession and Repossession
One of the book’s key interventions is to complicate the politics of repossession. A common response to dispossession is to demand repossession—to reclaim what has been taken, to assert ownership, to restore what was lost. But Butler and Athanasiou argue that this response can be problematic, particularly when it relies on liberal notions of property and possession that are themselves implicated in structures of domination.
The demand to repossess can reinscribe the very logics that enabled dispossession in the first place. If we respond to the loss of property by asserting property rights, we may end up reinforcing a system in which some people’s possession depends on others’ dispossession. If we respond to the loss of sovereignty by asserting sovereign rights, we may reproduce forms of exclusion and violence that sovereignty enables.
This doesn’t mean that all claims to repossession are problematic, but it does mean that we need to be careful about the terms in which such claims are made. The book suggests that we need forms of political struggle that don’t simply seek to restore a prior state of possession but that challenge the very frameworks of possession and dispossession. This might mean asserting claims to the commons rather than to private property, or demanding forms of collective support that don’t depend on individual ownership.
The question of land and indigenous dispossession is particularly fraught here. Butler and Athanasiou acknowledge that for indigenous peoples who have been violently dispossessed of their lands, the demand for repossession has a different valence than it does in other contexts. Indigenous claims to land are not simply claims to property in the liberal sense but are bound up with forms of relationality, with ways of being in the world, with modes of collective existence that precede and exceed liberal frameworks of ownership. The book gestures toward these complexities without fully resolving them, acknowledging that the politics of dispossession and repossession must be attentive to specific histories and contexts.
Gender, Sexuality, and Kinship
Butler’s longstanding engagement with questions of gender and sexuality inflects the book’s arguments throughout. The book examines how gender and sexual norms function as mechanisms of dispossession, rendering certain lives and certain forms of kinship illegitimate, unrecognizable, or impossible. Those who fail to conform to normative expectations of gender and sexuality are often subjected to forms of violence, exclusion, and abandonment that exemplify the injurious forms of dispossession the book analyzes.
At the same time, the book suggests that queer forms of life and kinship can model alternative ways of being in relation that don’t depend on normative frameworks of possession and property. Queer kinship networks, chosen families, and forms of care that exceed the nuclear family structure can exemplify the kinds of collective relationality that the book advocates. These forms of life acknowledge dependency and vulnerability, create structures of mutual support, and challenge the fantasy of the self-sufficient individual.
The book also addresses questions of reproductive politics and the ways in which women’s bodies and reproductive capacities have been sites of dispossession. From forced sterilization to restrictions on abortion to the appropriation of reproductive labor, women have been systematically dispossessed of control over their own bodies and reproductive lives. At the same time, the demand for reproductive rights can sometimes be framed in terms of bodily autonomy and self-possession that the book wants to complicate. The challenge is to assert claims to reproductive freedom without falling back on liberal notions of bodily sovereignty that deny our fundamental relationality and interdependence.
Palestine and Settler Colonialism
Butler’s engagement with the question of Palestine and Israeli occupation is present in the book, though not as extensively as in some of her other work. The book discusses the dispossession of Palestinians as an ongoing colonial project, one that involves not only the seizure of land but the systematic denial of political rights, the restriction of movement, the destruction of homes and infrastructure, and the rendering of Palestinian life increasingly precarious.
The Israeli occupation exemplifies many of the book’s themes: the violent dispossession of land and livelihood, the differential distribution of precarity and grievability, the ways in which some lives are rendered disposable while others are protected. The book also discusses forms of Palestinian resistance, including protests, demonstrations, and the creation of alternative infrastructures of support and solidarity.
The question of how to respond to settler colonial dispossession is particularly complex. The demand for return, for the restoration of what was taken, is central to Palestinian political claims. But the book also suggests that any resolution must grapple with the fact that multiple populations now inhabit the land, and that forms of coexistence must be imagined that don’t simply reverse the terms of dispossession but create new forms of collective life.
The Dialogic Form
The book’s form as a dialogue is itself significant. Rather than presenting a unified argument, the book stages an ongoing conversation between two thinkers who share many commitments but also bring different perspectives and emphases. This dialogic form enacts the kind of relationality that the book advocates: thinking emerges not from isolated individuals but from exchange, from the willingness to be affected by another’s thought, from the productive friction of different perspectives.
The dialogue form also allows for a certain tentativeness, a willingness to pose questions without fully resolving them, to acknowledge complexities and contradictions without forcing them into a neat synthesis. This is appropriate for a book that is skeptical of sovereign mastery and that insists on the limits of individual knowledge and control.
Butler’s Broader Project
“Dispossession” fits within Butler’s broader intellectual project, which has consistently challenged liberal humanist assumptions about the subject, agency, and politics. From her early work on gender performativity through her engagements with precarity, grievability, and political assembly, Butler has been concerned with how subjects are constituted through norms and relations, how power operates through the regulation of life, and how resistance can emerge from the very conditions of subjection.
The book continues Butler’s engagement with questions of vulnerability and interdependence, themes that have become increasingly central to her work. It also represents a deepening of her engagement with concrete political struggles and movements, moving from more abstract theoretical arguments to analyses of specific protests, uprisings, and forms of resistance.
The collaboration with Athanasiou brings Butler’s theoretical framework into dialogue with the specific context of the European debt crisis and Greek politics, grounding the book’s arguments in material realities while also showing how those realities can be illuminated by theoretical analysis.
Reception and Significance
“Dispossession” has been influential in critical theory, political philosophy, and activist circles concerned with questions of precarity, austerity, and resistance. The book’s dual theorization of dispossession—as both injurious deprivation and constitutive relationality—has provided a framework for thinking about contemporary political struggles that avoids both liberal individualism and a romanticization of loss.
The book has been particularly important for scholars and activists working on questions of debt, austerity, and economic crisis, offering tools for analyzing how neoliberal governance operates through the production and management of precarity. It has also contributed to ongoing debates about the politics of assembly and protest, providing a theoretical framework for understanding the significance of movements like Occupy and the various uprisings of the early 2010s.
The book’s insistence on relationality and interdependence has resonated with feminist theorists and activists concerned with care, social reproduction, and mutual aid. Its arguments about the limits of liberal frameworks of autonomy and self-possession have contributed to broader critiques of neoliberal subjectivity and to efforts to imagine alternative forms of collective life.
At the same time, the book has faced criticisms. Some readers have found its theorization of dispossession too abstract, insufficiently attentive to the material realities of economic exploitation and political violence. Others have questioned whether the book’s critique of repossession adequately addresses the claims of those who have been violently dispossessed and who demand the return of what was taken. The book’s engagement with questions of settler colonialism and indigenous dispossession, while present, is relatively brief, and some critics have argued that these questions require more sustained attention.
“Dispossession” represents an important contribution to contemporary political theory, offering a framework for thinking about subjectivity, resistance, and collective life under conditions of neoliberal capitalism and ongoing colonial violence. Its insistence on the political significance of vulnerability and interdependence challenges dominant frameworks of political thought and opens possibilities for imagining forms of solidarity and resistance grounded in our fundamental relationality rather than in fantasies of sovereign autonomy.
