Thank you for the comment. A lot to respond to, indeed.

Yes, I agree that the academy and “the bar,” so to speak, are not mutually exclusive. Like I mentioned, this is what I appreciated about “Examined Life.” The film reminded me of this false divide by making this relationship visual. My frustration with Butler’s text emerged from my own existence within both the world of academia and activism. I don’t think it is an uncommon experience to look to someone like Butler and texts like “Bodies That Matter” for some relevancy within our everyday lives and political struggles. Your point that it is not an activist text is well-taken and I agree. Although I admit that there is and was an initial disappointment in expecting and hoping that Butler could be activated in ways beyond theoretical discussions. Maybe then it is a question of what other texts are discussed in addition to Butler. And this is partly why I appreciate more recent Butler work (I’m thinking of “Precarious Life: The Power Of Mourning and Violence”) because there is a way its accessibility lends itself to activity. Of course there are lessons that I and many others have learned through activism that can’t be replicated in seminar courses and visa versa – multiple sites of knowledge production that are both separate and connected.

I think the interview or more casual conversations in “Examined Life” create points of access for people who might not pick up these texts or who struggle with understanding them. I think this is exciting and does not negate the challenge of reading the texts themselves. Like you said, whatever helps people understand the concepts is important and it seems that “Examined Life” allows for understanding and reinterpretation that moves within and beyond the academy.

There’s a lot here I’d like to respond to, so I hope you won’t mind if, in the service of conversation, I move rather quickly.

It seems to me that the relationship you draw between “sterile walls of the academy and the communities that exist beyond those walls” is a caricature. First, because of course these two communities are by no means mutually exclusive (there are activists in school and academics “on the ground,” and there are struggles within the school and theoretical self-reflections in those “communities”); and second because the very “limited” or, as you say, “sterile,” quality of the classroom is referring to exactly what makes a seminar structure potentially productive – that is, delimitation of the field of discourse and the number of possible discussants, among other things.

Resistance consumes and develops the theories it needs. Indeed many highly theoretical forms of writing emerge out of political action, and aren’t somehow ancillary to it or separate from it (Many examples here…) Is it possible that the reason Butler in particular hasn’t made it into the activist “street” is not because it is difficult or bad writing (so what if it is – so is Marx difficult and turgid at times), but because it doesn’t put forward, alongside its theories of agency and identity, a real activist project? In fact I recall discussions amongst activists in the 1990s around this exact point; and indeed Nussbaum makes this point in her attack on Butler in 1999 – ad hominem and unkind Nussbaum may have been, but this particular criticism struck a chord for me. Her book is fine as a complex theorization of certain social and political relationships. But deep down Butler’s aren’t activist books.

I haven’t seen “Examined Life.” But isn’t there something to explore or question here about our desire to see theoretical writers humbled and humanized, “difficult” books redeemed by their appealing substitutes (interviews, etc.)? On the one hand, whatever helps you comprehend the ideas is fine; on the other, Butler is relevant in the books (in their very difficulty and form of articulation) or not at all. To think there’s some sublime and potentially activist essence beneath the turgid writing, some secret but hard to access “meaning” separate from the rhetoric, form and conditions of articulation, is to want a different book than Butler’s written.