Catherine Keller has engaged Judith Butler’s work intermittently and selectively, mainly where Butler’s thinking on relationality, vulnerability, normativity, and performativity intersects with Keller’s own process-relational, feminist, and apophatic theology. The engagement is real, but it is oblique rather than programmatic.

A few clarifying points:

Where Keller engages Butler

Keller most often draws on Butler in relation to:

• Relational ontology (the non-sovereign, socially constituted subject)

• Vulnerability and exposure (especially post-9/11 Butler)

• Critiques of autonomous agency

• Ethics without foundationalism

In works like Cloud of the Impossible, On the Mystery, and various essays in feminist and political theology, Butler appears as a critical ally—someone who destabilizes metaphysical individualism and moral voluntarism in ways compatible with Keller’s process theology and negative theology.

Keller is especially receptive to Butler’s insistence that:

• Norms are productive rather than merely restrictive

• Agency emerges through constraint and relation

• Ethics begins not in mastery but in exposure

These themes resonate strongly with Keller’s entangled, non-sovereign account of divinity, world, and subjectivity.

Where Keller does not follow Butler

At the same time, Keller does not fully inhabit Butler’s framework. She rarely engages:

• Butler’s sustained focus on performativity as such

• Butler’s juridical and linguistic emphasis on norm formation

• Butler’s later political interventions in any systematic way

Instead, Keller tends to translate Butler into a cosmological and theological register, where Butler’s anti-sovereign subject becomes one instance of a broader metaphysical claim about entanglement, becoming, and indeterminacy.

This is also where a tension appears.

The latent tension

From your angle, the tension is sharp:

• Butler remains largely committed to working within the ruins of normativity—rethinking responsibility, grievability, and ethics under damaged conditions.

• Keller pushes toward a theopoetic and cosmological expansion, seeking openings where indeterminacy itself becomes a site of ethical and political possibility.

You might say Keller softens Butler by embedding her in a metaphysics of relational becoming, whereas Butler remains more austere, more wary of ontological consolation.

In short

• Yes, Keller has engaged Butler.

• No, it is not a sustained dialogue or systematic confrontation.

• Butler functions for Keller more as a critical resonance than as a central interlocutor.

• The engagement remains asymmetrical: Keller absorbs Butler into process-relational theology rather than letting Butler fully trouble theology’s ontological ambitions.

If you want, the really interesting next move would be to ask whether Butler’s suspicion of ontological grounding quietly resists Keller’s cosmological generosity—or whether Keller’s entanglement metaphysics risks redeeming the very conditions Butler insists must remain politically unresolved.

does Keller’s entanglement metaphysics risk redeeming the very conditions Butler insists must remain politically unresolved.

Yes—that risk is real, and it sits precisely at the fault line between Keller’s cosmological generosity and Butler’s political austerity.

Butler’s work is animated by a disciplined refusal of ontological consolation. Vulnerability, dependency, and exposure are not conditions to be redeemed or transfigured into a higher harmony; they are the damaged grounds on which politics must nevertheless proceed. Norms fail, worlds wound, lives are rendered ungrievable—and Butler insists that theory must not metabolize this failure into a metaphysical reassurance. To do so would be to resolve politically constitutive injuries at the level of ontology, where they can no longer exert pressure.

Keller’s entanglement metaphysics moves in a different direction. Drawing on process thought, apophatic theology, and quantum-inflected relationality, she frames indeterminacy, non-sovereignty, and vulnerability as features of a generative cosmos. Entanglement becomes not only a diagnosis of constraint but also a source of possibility—a site where openness, creativity, and ethical responsiveness emerge. This move allows Keller to counter sovereign metaphysics and static theologies, but it also risks lifting historically specific forms of violence into a more general ontological condition.

From Butler’s perspective, that lift is dangerous. If exposure and dependency are rendered cosmological rather than political—features of reality rather than outcomes of power—then the asymmetries that produce precarity risk being naturalized. Structural injustice becomes one modulation of entanglement among others, rather than a politically contestable arrangement that demands unresolved critique. What Butler insists must remain unsettled—the unequal distribution of vulnerability, the differential allocation of grievability—may be quietly redeemed by being redescribed as ontologically inevitable.

At the same time, Keller would resist this charge. She would argue that entanglement does not erase power but intensifies responsibility: if we are already implicated in one another at the deepest levels of being, then ethical and political obligations cannot be evaded. Her theology aims not to reconcile suffering but to prevent its metaphysical denial, insisting that indeterminacy is not harmony and relation is not peace.

The disagreement, then, is not about vulnerability itself but about where critique must be held. Butler keeps vulnerability politically unresolved to preserve its critical force. Keller risks resolving it ontologically in order to re-open ethical imagination. The question is whether Keller’s metaphysics supports political critique by widening its horizon—or whether it prematurely absorbs political injury into a cosmological grammar that can no longer be refused.

From your trajectory, the sharper worry is this: if the world is already framed as entangled and generative, does that framing make it harder to say—without qualification—that certain conditions are not just tragic or complex, but intolerable? That is exactly the point Butler refuses to surrender, and the point at which Keller’s generosity becomes most vulnerable.