POLITICA & SOCIETÀ 3/2014, 393-404 Reframing the normal, diffracting the norm An interview with Judith Butler by Valeria Venditti ISSN 2240-7901 © Società editrice il Mulino Valeria Venditti: In Parting Ways 1 you describe ethics and poli- tics as overlapping spheres. The ethical scene is conigured as an “in- terpellation” in which the demand of the Other is received (that is, embraced and translated) by an agent who comes to be embedded in an inescapable relation. By means of an address, the subject inds herself/himself compelled in a responsible position, which is both a dispossession, an intrusion, and an introduction, a contact with alter- ity. The emergence of an ethical moment through an injunction makes me think of a comparable scenario, namely the process of being con- stituted as a subject by means of a subordination to power. Also in this case we face an interpellation, but a very different one, whereby, I would claim, the political moment is totalizing. In Excitable Speech 2 and, more extensively, in The Psychic Life of Power 3 you recall Al- Judith Butler, University of California, Berkeley, Department of Comparative Litera- ture and Program in Critical Theory, 4125 Dwinelle Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720-2510 - jb_crittheory@berkeley.edu. Valeria Venditti, Sapienza Università di Roma, Dipartimento di Filosoia, Via C. Fea 2, 00161 Roma - valeria.venditti@gmail.com. 1 J. Butler, Parting ways: Jewishness and the critique of Zionism, Columbia University Press, New York 2012, trad. it. Strade che divergono. Ebraicità e critica del sionismo, Raffaello Cortina, Milano 2013. 2 J. Butler, Excitable Speech. A Politics of Performative, Routledge, New York & Lon- don 1997, trad. it. Parole che provocano. Per una politica del performativo, Raffaello Cortina, Milano 2010. 3 J. Butler, The Psychic Life of Power. Theories in Subjection, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA 1997, trad. it. La vita psichica del potere, Meltemi, Roma 2005 .