What is a human being? Are you sure you can tell the difference between who counts and who doesn’t? Philosopher Judith Butler throws a wrench into the works of what seems like a simple matter. She tells us that dominant assumptions about things like gender, race and citizenship cast those who don’t fit our preconceived ideas of those categories into a no-man’s land, where they are in danger of having their humanity left unacknowledged. And why does that matter? Butler proclaims that the answer to that question gets at the very possibility of war, and of a meaningful peace. It also directs us toward a renewed understanding of injury, and of what it means to grieve.

Perhaps best known for her pioneering work on gender, Butler is the author of Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity and Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. Gender is not biological, she tells us, but rather is something assumed and performed, as well as cast upon bodies by norms and conventions that are larger than any given individual. Butler has also published widely in the arena of political theory, from her book Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative to recent articles in The Nation on the ramifications of the indefinite detention of accused terrorists at Guantanamo Bay. She is Maxine Elliot Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. This interview took place on March 22, 2003, in the Mission district of San Francisco. Judith Butler should be thanked for her patience with a cat named The Rhombus, who is not a human being, and whose contributions to the conversation have been removed. Ever the intrepid leaper, and more vocal than the average feline, he felt compelled to demonstrate his talents. No amount of reason could persuade him otherwise.

—Jill Stauffer

JILL STAUFFER: I was going to begin by asking you about your work on gender, and you indicated that you wanted to talk about philosophy and peace. So I guess it’s fair to ask: What does philosophy have to do with peace?

JUDITH BUTLER: I’m always glad to talk about gender—maybe we’ll get to that later. But it seems to me that, with the start of this war—which started just seventy-two hours prior to the start of this conversation—questions arise about how human beings characterize what they’re doing and, in particular, how people deal with violence: inflicting it, being on the receiving end of it, and how it gets made unreal somehow in the media. And I suppose these are philosophical questions if you ask at a basic level what our obligations are to other...