Live stream lecture (link will be sent to registered attendees)

Note: this event is a keynote lecture for the 2026 GSSI Symposium: Feminisms Against Fascism, in person at The New School, April 23-25, 2026. Register here for Judith’s lecture, or follow the symposium link to register for the full symposium.

Fascist passions change historically. Yet some common features permit for them to be called fascist. The specific forms of sadistic exhilaration and revenge in operation now are passions undergone at psychic levels both involuntary and voluntary. They are also passionate reactions against social and legal movements and legal accomplishments that seek a restoration to forms of social hierarchy and exploitation (white supremacists, heteronormative, unrestrained capitalism).

Considered as forms of furious nostalgia, these phantasmatic scenarios structure practice and policy ratifying limitless acquisition, imperial expansionism, and unconstrained revenge against feminist left social movements. The transnational reproduction of unbridled masculinism requires a transnational strategy and solidarity. For that purpose, an analysis that links forms of rights-stripping as a strategy of an authoritarianism fueled by fascist passions. To counter this, anti-fascist passions are necessary not only to arrest fascism but to build an anti-fascist understanding of shared life.

Please note that the livestream link will be sent to everyone one hour before the event.

Judith Butler is Distinguished Visiting Professor of Philosophy at The New School and  Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley, where they also served as the Maxine Elliot Chair in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory. They are the author of many books, including: Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990); Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993); The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (1997); Excitable Speech (1997); Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning (2004); Undoing Gender (2004); Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009); Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2012); What World is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology (2022); and Who's Afraid of Gender? (2024). Their books have been translated into more than 27 languages. They received their PhD in philosophy from Yale University in 1984.

Butler has been active in several human rights organizations, including the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York and the Academic Council of Jewish Voices for Peace. They have been the recipient of numerous awards, prizes, and fellowships including  the Andrew Mellon Award for Distinguished Academic Achievement in the Humanities (2009-13), the Adorno Prize from the City of Frankfurt (2012) in honor of their contributions to feminist and moral philosophy; fellowships including Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Ford, American Council of Learned Societies, and at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and at Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. In 2014, they were awarded the diploma of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters from the French Cultural Ministry and subsequently reappointed as commandant. In 2025 they received the Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award from The American Council of Learned Societies.

This event is part of the New School for Social Research Festival of Ideas. Learn more HERE.