An Invocation: Who Are You?

"The question we pose to the Other is simple and unanswerable: 

‘who are you?’ 

The violent response is the one that does not ask, and does not seek to know.

It wants to sure up what it knows, 

to expunge what threatens it with not-knowing,

what forces it to reconsider the presuppositions of its world, 

their contingency, their malleability.

The nonviolent response lives with its unknowingness about the Other

in the face of the Other, since sustaining the bond that the question opens

is finally more valuable than knowing in advance what holds us in common, 

as if we already have all the resources we need to know 

what defines the human, what its future life might be"

Judith Butler

Undoing Gender

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