Ellen Armour is the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Chair in Feminist Theology and 
Director of the Carpenter Program in Religion, Gender, and Sexuality. Her research interests are in feminist theology, theories of sexuality, race, gender, disability and embodiment, and contemporary continental philosophy. She is the author of Deconstruction, Feminist Theology, and the Problem Of Difference: Subverting the Race/Gender Divide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) and co-editor of Bodily Citations: Judith Butler and Religion (Columbia University Press, 2006), as well as a number of articles and book chapters. Her current book project, tentatively entitled Signs and Wonders: Theology After Modernity, will diagnose and craft a theological response to the shifts in our understanding of "man" and "his" others (sexed/raced, animal, and divine) as modernity declines.

"Becoming Terri Schiavo"
The notion of “becoming” initially seems to open onto a utopian horizon. It invites us to imagine a future wherein we escape the limits of those regimes (of sexuality, gender, race, and religion, for example) within which we have come to be; a future comprised of new forms and ways of being. But I want to call attention to a more ambivalent instance of becoming – one that is available to us here and now (though I doubt any of us would want to embrace it). Yet it, too, cracks open our current regimes in distinctive and, I will argue, productive if sobering ways. I speak of the controversy that centered around Ms. Theresa (“Terri”) Schiavo, a severely disabled woman, who in 2005 became a cause celebre for the religious right because of an internecine battle between her husband and her parents over whether she should live or die. I find Judith Butler’s work helpful in understanding the particularly volatile mix of kinship, sexuality, race, gender and religion that constitute the drama. But I am particularly interested in bringing to bear on this controversy Butler’s insights into psychic, social and corporeal vulnerability. What might they have to offer in this instance? What questions or challenges does Ms. Schiavo’s case – or, really, its larger implications for all of us -- raise for them?

Jeffrey Bell holds the Fay Warren Reimers Professorship and is Professor of Philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University. His books include Philosophy at the Edge of Chaos: Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of Difference and Deleuze’s Hume: Philosophy, Culture and the Scottish Enlightenment. Bell has also co-edited Deleuze and History with Claire Colebrook and has published numerous essays and chapters on intellectual history, cultural theory, and the philosophy of film. Bell is currently at work on his next book, Subject to a Revolution, where he is exploring, among other themes, the emergence of the creative subject in the eighteenth century and its implications for understanding contemporary political theory.

"Modes of Violence Whitehead, Deleuze, and the Displacement of Neoliberalism"
This essay examines Whitehead’s claim in Modes of Thought that the ‘understanding has two modes of advance, the gathering of detail within assigned pattern, and the discovery of novel pattern with its emphasis on novel detail’ (MT 57-8). What is argued is that an important way to understand these modes of thought is to interpret them in light of Whitehead’s critique of the traditional subject-predicate form of analysis. Understood in this way, it becomes clear that Whitehead’s thought bears striking similarities to Bergson’s understanding of the violence involved as one turns towards intuition and metaphysics, a violence that is easily susceptible, as Deleuze argues, to the violence of normalization and stratification. There are thus two modes of violence, and, as this essay will attempt to show, for Whitehead, Deleuze, and Judith Butler the key is to avoid actualizing either of the two modes of violence. By way of example we will show how Aristotle, Adam Smith, and Butler each attempts to set forth an effective understanding of human relations—economic, political, and otherwise—that is able to avoid becoming actualized as one of the two modes of violence. When seen in this Whiteheadian light, Smith’s thought in particular will emerge not as the intellectual justification for neoclassical economics and neoliberalism for which Smith is often credited, but rather it becomes a powerful tool that can be used in criticizing the premises that underlie many contemporary economic and political theories.

Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University in 1984. She is the author of Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (Columbia University Press, 1987), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (Routledge, 1993), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (Stanford University Press, 1997), Excitable Speech (Routledge, 1997), Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (Columbia University Press, 2000), and Hegemony, Contingency, Universality, with Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek, (Verso Press, 2000). In 2004, she published Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning, with Verso Press which considered questions of war, representation, and ethics. That same year, The Judith Butler Reader appeared, edited by Sara Salih, with Blackwell Publishers. In 2004, collection of her essays on gender and sexuality, Undoing Gender, appeared with Routledge. Her most recent book, Giving an Account of Oneself, appeared with Fordham University Press (2005) and considers the relation between subject formation and ethical obligation, situating ethics in relation to critique and social theory. She is currently working on essays pertaining to Jewish Philosophy, focusing on pre- and post-Zionist criticisms of state violence, under contract with Columbia University Press. She is also working on a set of essays on current wars, focusing on the relation between violence, non-violence, sexual politics and allied forms of resistance. She hopes to write a small book on Kafka's parables in the future. She continues to write on contemporary politics, cultural and literary theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, feminism, and sexual politics.

Daniel A. Dombrowski is Professor of Philosophy at Seattle University. His doctorate is from Saint Louis University and he joined the Seattle University Philosophy Department in 1988. Dr. Dombrowski is the author of fifteen books and over one hundred articles in scholarly journals in philosophy, theology, classics, and literature. His latest books are Rethinking the Ontological Argument: A Neoclassical Theistic Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006) and Contemporary Athletics and Ancient Greek Ideals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). His main areas of intellectual interest are history of philosophy, philosophy of religion (from a neoclassical or process perspective), and ethics (especially animal rights issues).

"Which Lives Are Grievable?"
The above question is a major concern for Judith Butler in at least two recent books: Precarious Life (hereafter: PL) and Frames of War (hereafter: FW). Indeed, these two works can be seen, as Butler admits, as one extended response to this and related questions (e.g., when is life grievable?, etc.). It will be the purpose of the present paper to respond to these questions by way of what has come to be known as the argument from marginal cases (hereafter: AMC). Sometimes this argument is also known as the argument from species overlap. In my defense of this argument I will eventually indicate where it can be improved as a result of Butler’s two books. And I will also eventually indicate, with a great deal of trepidation, where Butler’s responses to these questions might be improved as a result of AMC.

Roland Faber is the Founder of the Whitehead Research Project. He is Professor of Process Theology at Claremont School of Theology, and Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Claremont Graduate University, also Co-Director of the Center for Process Studies. His fields of research and publication include Systematic Theology; Process Thought and Process Theology; Poststructuralism; Interreligious Discourse, especially Christianity & Buddhism; Comparative Philosophy of Religion; Philosophy, Theology, Spirituality, and Cosmology of the Renaissance; and Mysticism. He has published four books and edited two. Upcoming: God As Poet of the World: Exploring Process Theologies (2008).

"Khora and Violence: Revisiting Butler with Whitehead"
In revisiting Butler’s critique of Plato’s khora in her reading of Derrida, Kristeva, and Irigaray in Bodies that Matter with Whitehead’s use of khora in Adventures of Ideas, we ask the questions whether Whitehead’s understanding and use of khora repeats the heterosexual regime of intelligibility that Butler finds to be engrained in Plato’s contrasting opposition of khora and Ideas—the autogenesis of the Law of the father. While khora might remain a moment of the regulative mechanisms of phallogocentrism, as Butler argues against Kristeva and Irigaray, Whitehead's account of her confronts us with another possibility: that she suggests an invitation for refiguring and transmuting all metaphysical categories involved—like Ideas, sensible things, matter, place, Law—as void traces in her mutually immanent movement of the overcoming of their constitutional violence secured by her exclusion from the phallogocentric economy. As Butler suggests for Benjamin, Whitehead's khora wants to confront us with a “sacred transience” (suffering happiness) of life that is always in the process of overcoming this violence of exclusion.

Jeremy Fackenthalis a PhD student at Claremont Graduate University in the Philosophy of Religion and Theology program. He is interested in interreligious dialouge, particularly Jewish-Christian relations, and in using process philosophy and theology as a means of entry into such dialogue. His other interests include post-structuralist thought, subjectivity and multiplicity, and eco-theology.

"Ethical Engagement and the Adventure of Ideas: Creative Possibility within the Limitation of Discourse"
From out of the limitation of discourse found within the work of Judith Butler and Alfred North Whitehead, emerges an opening for creative understandings of the attempt to give an account of oneself and a creative entry into ethical engagement. This paper explores this limitation and its effects as described by Butler and Whitehead before turning to uncover ways in which both thinkers move beyond the limits of discourse. The limits of language and rhetoric as variously described by Whitehead and Butler form a tenuousness and tension out of which arises an impasse, a rupture, serving as a catapult for creative possibilities, for an adventure of ideas, characterized by the search for better ideals for ethical engagement as constitutive of one’s own becoming

"Deconstruction and Multiplicity of Selves: Searching for Political and Ethical Possibilities in de Man, Butler, and Whitehead"
This paper connects A.N. Whitehead's deconstruction of the doctrine of the 'enduring soul' with postmodern deconstructions of 'self' and 'identity' found in Paul de Man and Judith Butler.  De Man's reading of Nietzsche regarding the creation of the self as metaphor correlates to Butler's notions of gender performativity, while Whitehead's work in Process and Reality similarly destabilizes the notion of a unitary and static 'self.'  By reading the three philosophers together, the paper will argue that the deconstruction of 'self' actually results in the recognition of an infinite multiplicity of (types of) selves.  Because no self exists disconnected from materiality, there are political, legal, and ethical ramifications of the deconstruction of 'self' that must seriously be addressed.  The paper will conclude with a brief discussion of the possibility for discourse surrounding the competing notions of universal human rights and cultural autonomy based on the recognition of the 'self' as both multiple and continually (re)produced.

Sigridur Gudmarsdottir received her Ph.D. from Drew University, NJ in 2007. The dissertation is called "Abyss of God: Flesh, Love and Language in Paul Tillich". She has taught theology at Drew, University of Winchester, UK and the University of Iceland, but is currently publishing her dissertation and doing independent research while serving a parish in the Lutheran church of Iceland. Sigridur writes in areas of mysticism, ecofeminism, queer theory, philosophia prima and poststructuralist theology.

"Opacity and Phallacy of Misplaced Closetness: Coming Out with Butler and Whitehead"
“Seek simplicity and distrust it,” Alfred North Whitehead once advised in Concept of Nature (1920). If Whitehead searched for a way to give account for the complexity of nature, Judith Butler has argued that concepts and identities of gender and sexuality are neither simple nor fully fixable to the insides and outsides of the closets of Western sexuality. As Butler writes in “Against Proper Objects” (1994): “These are rifted grounds, a series of constituting differentiations which at once contest the claim to autonomy and offer in its place a more expansive, mobile mapping of power.” The paper uses the image of the closet to express the oppression and silence of the bodies that do not fit into heterosexual narratives within the Christian tradition. The paper points to a collage of theological closets in the Christian narratives of incarnation and resurrection. It reads apocalyptic signs narrated by the Evangelist Matthew at the hour of Jesus death (split rocks, torn and flapping veils in the darkness, open doors and opaque bodies that preempt the savior's own resurrection) as types for instability and fissuring epistemological grounds in describing human nature and sexual bodies. The paper reads the Matthean signs as a possible graphic antidote to theological closetness and suggests Butler´s opacity to transgress simplistic epistemologies of emancipation, “rifted grounds”, as it were.

Michael Halewood is a lecturer in sociology at the University of Essex, UK, where he is a member of the Centre for Theoretical Studies. His main areas of interest are the work of A. N. Whitehead, philosophy and social theory, the materiality of subjectivity. His recent publications include "Being a Sociologist and Becoming a Whiteheadian: Concrescing Methodological Tactics," in Theory, Culture and Society 24:4 (2008) and a collection of papers on Whitehead for Theory, Culture and Society.

“Language, the Body and the Problem of Signification”
In this paper I want to explore the philosophical and political importance of the relation of language and the body. The work of Butler constitutes one of the most vital contributions to the re-conceptualization of this relation and, crucially, stresses the power relations which suffuse the concepts and the reality within which bodies and language appear. However, I will suggest that there is a tension in the work of Butler generated by, on the one hand, the recognition of the primacy of the body, the bodily, and processes of incarnation, and, on the other, the attempt to describe the iteration of these in terms of norms which are themselves utterly social. Such a distinction would seem to assume a gap between the sociality of the enactment of norms and that which enacts those norms, a gap which is best expressed and problematized in terms of signification. The argument to be made in this piece is that the very notion of signification operates through the positing of a distinction which it can never bridge. This in turn, makes the gap between language and the body the starting point of analysis and the problem which needs to be solved. I wish to suggest that Whitehead’s notion of symbolism is one which starts from a very different place and does not assume that signification relies on any notion of a gap, gulf or distinction. Instead, Whitehead states that the body is the basis for the very operation of symbolism, and that, furthermore, such bodies and symbolism are not limited to humans. In this way, he provides an alternative and productive way of re-thinking the supposed lacuna between language and the body. Hence, the aim of this paper is to suggest that Whitehead’s account of symbolism may offer a way of approaching the question of symbols, language and the body which is not predicated on signification and avoids the tensions inherent in aspects of Butler’s account. It will be argued that by combining Whitehead’s approach with Butler’s trenchant political critique of forms of violence, it will be possible to develop more forceful accounts of the bodily, the materiality of the body, and the operation of symbolism and language itself.

Christina Hutchins teaches process thought, poetry, and American Congregational thought. She has articles in several books (SUNY, Columbia UP, Ashgate) that bring together various facets of Butler’s and Whitehead’s thought. Her dissertation “Departures: Using Judith Butler’s Agency and Alfred North Whitehead’s Value to Read Temporality Anew” is undergoing renovations toward publication. She is the poet laureate of Albany, CA, and has published widely in literary journals.

“Feeling Faring Forth: Reading Departures as Thresholds of Radiant Aftereffect and Essential Humanity”
Utilizing a Bergsonian method of intuition to extend insights drawn from Alfred North Whitehead and Judith Butler, thresholds of human becoming can be read in their temporal extension by drawing a composite pair of “arrival” and “departure.” Mobilities of agency (Butler) and value (Whitehead), theorized as a plural “feeling forth” from loss, compel a shift of temporal perspective such that departures can be read across the threshold of a subject-event’s becoming for/through/into its always plural relational “aftereffects.” Drawing on Whitehead’s notions of “superject,” prehension in the mode of “causal efficacy,” and the function of “propositions” as lures for further feeling, and extending Butler’s articulations of the “ecstatic,” “excess,” and “translation,” vectors of agency and value become apparent as affective legacies of a subject-event’s departure from itself. These radiant, temporal aftereffects, the felt residues of perished subject-events, are read as a mode of transcendence, as essential expansions of the public realm.

Catherine Keller has taught for over two decades in the Theological School of Drew University and its Graduate Division of Religion. After studies in Europe and in seminary, she did her doctoral work at Claremont Graduate University with John Cobb. In her teaching, lecturing and writing, in a multiplicity of religious and secular, scholarly and activist settings, she seeks to midwife a theology of becoming. As director of the annual Drew Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquium since its inception in 2000, she works with colleagues and students to foster a hospitable local setting for planetary conversations. Her books include On the Mystery: Discerning Divinity in Process, God and Power: Counter-Apocalyptic Journeys, and The Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming.

"Undoing and Unknowing: the widening relations of J Butler and A N Whitehead"
Picking up a clue from a medieval poet, this paper explores the fold between our inescapable unknowing and our constitutive relations. Following Butler’s deconstruction of the substantial subject in her movement through the performative iterativity to the social ontology of the subject, it discerns friendly analogue in Whitehead’s notion of repetition as the way the becoming subject feels its constitutive relations. If Butler draws attention to the unknowing that shadows these relations, Whitehead supports a dramatic widening of relationality beyond the human. And the medieval poet may remind us that the width stretches painfully and desirously toward an apophatic infinity.

Deena Lin is Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy of Religion and Theology at Claremont Graduate University. She is interested in mysticism, interreligious dialogue, theology, and poststructuralist thought.

“Prehending Precarity: Presenting a Social Ontology that Feels Beyond the Frame”
In Frames of War Judith Butler provides a genealogical elucidation of how the nation state creates a ‘justifiable’ motive to enact violence against subjects within our global community. Through her analysis of the processes of justification done in the name of security of the state and its citizens, she exposes the state and its war-mongering practices as having no regard for the shared precariousness of all life. This shared precariousness is based on a social ontology that is built on the interrelatedness of subjects, for there is no demarcation of where one’s identity begins and the external ends in Butler’s work. Her insistence on this mutual vulnerability exposes those in power as having an ability to enact an aggressive stance towards their victims only by virtue of the power they’ve been given to do so. It is power rather than an origin in some virtuous place outside of the relational social ontology in which we live. For Butler, there is no outside to the interrelatedness of life, and this is the very place where the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead is relevant.

My objective is to present how incorporating Whitehead’s theory of prehension within Butler’s own frame as presented in FW, can offer a different (perhaps more robust) elucidation of the precarity of life. By incorporating a deeper sense of interrelatedness, this may stoke the fires that shine a light on the narrow vision of those seeking to defend one life at the expense of another.

Astrid Lorange is a second year PhD candidate at the University of Technology, Sydney in Australia, where she also teaches. This semester she is a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania in the English Department. She is researching Gertrude Stein, early twentieth-century philosophical sciences and contemporary poetics.

"'Lovely snipe and tender turn': Reading a Steinian grammar-event as subversive bodily act"
This paper looks at the work of Gertrude Stein, particularly her prose-poem chapbook Tender Buttons, and how the experimental poetic of a Steinian grammar might exemplify the kind of “subversive bodily act” explored by Judith Butler in the third chapter of Gender Trouble. I look to Whitehead’s event-theory and his ‘actual entities’ of experience, with a gesture also to Charles Olson’s Whitehead-inspired poetic ethos of ‘objectism’. The paper attempts a methodological and epistemological pastiche, in which a set of texts engage with a set of ideas—all poetic-philosophical preoccupations of my own—in order that relationships of interconnectivity and dissonance might emerge and produce the material for new thinking.

Andrea M. Stephenson is a PhD candidate in Philosophy of Religion and Theology at Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA. Her interests include poststructuralist philosophy, particularly the work of Gilles Deleuze and Judith Butler, social justice issues in theology, and the intersection between practical and academic theology. Her publications include "Can We be Wolves? Intersections between Deleuze's Difference and Repetition and Butler's Performativity" in Secrets of Becoming: Negotiating Whitehead, Deleuze, and Butler (Roland Faber and Andrea Stephenson, eds, forthcoming). She is currently working on her dissertation, "Post-Structuralist Spirit and Christian Holy Spirit: A Dialogue", on poststructuralism, theology, and the Holy Spirit.

"An Ethic of Connectedness and Narrativity in Whitehead and Butler"
This paper seeks to explore possible intersections in the thought of A.N. Whitehead and Judith Butler. In particular I will examine the idea of the “doctrine of connectedness” in Whitehead’s Adventures of Ideas with relation to the notions of “perishing is the imitation of becoming” and “social order”. This aspect of Whitehead’s thought will be placed in conversation with Butler’s concepts of “primary relations” and “norms” in narrativity in Giving an Account of Oneself.  This exploration will involve questions concerning subjectivity and objectivity, “stubborn fact” and “eternal objects”, and the possible agency of the subject. Finally, I hope to show that these interrelated concepts in Whitehead and Butler are important for philosophers and theologians seeking to develop a concept of the world, society, and self that includes an ethical dimension.

Alan Van Wyk is currently a PhD candidate at the School of Religion, at the Claremont Graduate University, working in the Theology, Ethics, and Culture program. His research is in religious and cultural theory, in particular exploring the intersection of religious and political subjectivities. His dissertation is being written under the direction of Prof. Faber, and is entitled "Becoming Subjects: Conversion and the Production of Possibility." Currently he is adjunct professor of religion at Hamline University, in St. Paul, MN. He recently co-edited Creativity and Its Discontents: The Response to Whitehead's Process and Reality.

Judith Butler has become and remains one of the pre-eminent thinkers of power and subjectivity. In this her own thought has often developed within and as an extension of the thought of Michel Foucault, especially when and where she thinks not simply power and subjectivity but more directly power and embodied subjectivity. There are, quite narrowly, two moments where Butler takes up Foucault in order to think power and embodied subjectivity that are of importance here: first, in the opening moments of Bodies That Matter and second, in the more recent work “Bodies and Power Revisited.” In both of these moments Butler attempts to think power first as a doubled movement, one which both produces and forms bodied subjects, and second as specifically a movement, a movement of materialization. And in both of these moments she attempts this thought by borrowing from Foucault the conceptualization of power as vectored. To determine power as vectored is then to determine power as the productive doubling of subjection and as a movement of materialization.

These become, even in their brevity, incredibly enticing moments for thinking Butler together with Alfred North Whitehead. For Whitehead also determines power as a vector, specifically in the context of determining power as the condition for the concrescent achievement of a materialized subject-superject. Whitehead, of course, does not borrow this language from Foucault, but rather appropriates it into his metaphysics from his own earlier work in mathematics and physics. Yet by the time of Process and Reality the determination of power as vectored has come to be the means for thinking power as productive, prehensive feeling: as vectored, power is the feeling of what was there and then, here and now. To determine power as vectored is then, for Whitehead, to determine power as a movement of productive feeling by which embodied subject-superjects become.

If this is an enticing conceptual coincidence from which to begin thinking with Butler and Whitehead, it also one fraught with difficulty. First, this is, it seems, a coincidence with no common ground. It becomes necessary, then, to begin by finding a common ground within which to understand this coincidence, a common ground that can be provided, it is argued, within Foucault’s decision to think the immanence of power. Once this common ground is established, though, there remains the larger difficulty arising from the fact that for Butler the determination of power as vectored appears for only a brief moment, and, it seems, appears only to be left behind in order to think power as power/discourse. Whitehead himself never abandons the vectoring of power, remaining within a thought of power as the feeling through which the subject-superject is achieved. We are left then with the possibility of thinking what might have been but was not thought; or rather, more specifically, the possibility of thinking the vector of power as the feeling of what matters in Butler and Whitehead.