A few years ago, a friend went to an academic conference and saw a reading of Anne Carson’s adaptation of “Antigone,” with the celebrated academic Judith Butler as the Theban king Kreon. “She was hilarious,” my friend, a theater professor, wrote to me. “Maybe she has a future onstage.”

The future is now.

Butler, a professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, currently stars in “Fragments, Lists & Lacunae,” a performance piece enjoying a brief run at New York Live Arts. Her role: A professor of comparative literature.

Over the course of the semester, in a series of punchy, truncated lectures, the professor hips her undergrads to the idea that “absences are more than merely meaningful; rather, they are the material that governs that which is present.” Her examples include doughnut holes, the Nixon tapes, Sappho. Pay attention. This is going on the final.

Divorced from an academic context, lectures have negative connotations. A lecture functions as a knuckle-rap, a don’t-do-it-again form of verbal deterrence. But lectures used to qualify as entertainment, with traveling speakers trekking from town to town, obliging a populace eager for diversion and instruction. P.T. Barnum built a lecture hall into his American Museum — alongside the trained bears and the mummified mermaid — as one more attraction.