Judith Butler gave the 2025 Ian Watt lecture, an event held by the Center for the Study of the Novel, on Tuesday evening. As a professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, their research has largely focused on critical theory, gender, sexuality and the intersections thereof. While Butler is most known for their book, “Gender Trouble,” on gender performativity, they focused their lecture on distinctly literary matters.
The night began with introductions by Professor Héctor Hoyos, director of the Center for the Study of the Novel, followed by an introduction by English P.h.D. student Seyi Osundeko, who commended how Butler’s work resists the “profound pessimism” of our current time.
Butler’s lecture was one of great scope and complexity. The lecture was equal parts biographical, theoretical and political. The event’s pre-reading was a chapter from “The Meaning of Contemporary Realism,” a book by Marxist philosopher and literary critic Gyorgy Lukacs. In the chapter, Lukacs asserts that literary modernism, a tradition including writers like Kafka, proves inadequate. He argues that it presents a “distortion of human-nature” through strictly formal and subjective, ahistorical terms. In other words, it misses out on rendering the real societal and historical conditions that bring about the suffering of modernist characters. Butler’s lecture followed this excerpt, but then branched outwards, discussing the tension between the novelistic form and the reality (or individual experience) that it tries to depict.
Butler said the form of the novel is one of dissonance. Butler explained how, for Lukacs, the novel is grasping at the external world but always comes up short. The novel is attempting to represent life in its totality, but can only track a finite life segment, “defeated by the referent it seeks to represent”, as Butler described. In other words, novels are forever trying to capture a reality that is far too large for the form, which centers on a few characters and their perspectives.
For Lukacs, the novel’s struggle to grasp the real world is good and politically productive for advancing socialism, which is why realism (capturing objective reality) is to be preferred over modernism (capturing subjective experience by experimenting with form).
On this point, though, Butler notes that this conception is sharply gendered for Lukacs, who uses the word “virility” to describe his ideal novel: one that is ambitious in it’s realism, ones with reality-facing characters who struggle against their historical contexts. Butler defines the masculine virility as “relentless striving and perpetually falling short” — striving with the understanding that one will fail. Alternatively, novels which are feminine connote “failure to strive or the absence of striving itself.” In other words, the ideal form of the novel, for Lukacs, is this masculine striving found in realism, as opposed to the feminine passivity in Kafka and modernism.
Butler clearly respects much of Lukacs work, but they complicated Lukacs’s elevation of realism. On a fundamental level, Butler seemed to reject the idea that there is a static form that novels should aspire to. Instead, for Butler, fruitful forms emerge out of an ever changing history that creates them.
Putting pressure on Lukacs’ claim, Butler also provided a compelling defense of Kafka. Though Kafka’s works are historically nonspecific, Butler argues this anti-context itself may be what is useful about them. Novels like “The Trial,” for instance, do not assert that its characters’ sufferings refer to some permanent, existential fact of nature. Instead, it ignites the question of whether this suffering is natural and ahistorical. As Butler asserted, “No one shrugs their shoulders with acceptance after finishing ‘The Trial.’”
Later in the talk, Butler touched on Lukacs’ political stance and his complex relationship with Marxism. Lukacs supported then-controversial stances that the communist party ought to ally with democratic socialists and “bourgeois socialists.” Butler seemed inclined to agree, stating that “If there is a fight against fascism now, it will likely be composed of unlikely alliances.”
After the lecture finished, Butler answered a few audience questions. These included ones about how Kafka can be read from a marginalized perspective, especially the story “The Metamorphosis” and whether generative A.I. can create novels, to which Butler said yes, but not good ones.