Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence

“The point I would like to underscore here is that a frame for understanding violence emerges in tandem with the experience, and that the frame works both to preclude certain kinds of questions, certain kinds of historical inquiries, and to function as a moral justification for retaliation.”

Butler is interested in the “frame” that people create for understanding violence, especially when this violence is experiential. The dominant frame in the United States for understanding violence has been one that precludes questions of the United States’ own terrorism, refuses an understanding of the context in which others attack the United States, and functions as justification—rather than ethical inquiry—regarding violent retaliation.

“In order to condemn these acts as inexcusable, absolutely wrong, in order to sustain the affective structure in which we are, on the one hand, victimized and, on the other, engaged in a righteous cause of rooting out terror, we have to begin the story with the experience of violence we suffered.”

Butler is interested not only in the broad frame in which society construct its understanding of experiential violence, and in particular the violence of 9/11, but the author is more specifically interested in the narrative structure that enables this structure for thinking. The narrative structure hinges on the first-person story of the experience of violence. This involves an insistence on the re-centering of the first-person narrative, internationally, which was decentered in the attacks. This re-centering, however, precludes the questions that should be asked in the experience of violence. Butler is interested in what, ethically, could be generated out of the experience of decentering, an experience that is refused by the United States.

“Our acts are not self-generated, but conditioned. We are at once acted upon and acting, and our ‘responsibility’ lies in the juncture between the two. What can I do with the conditions that form me? What do they constrain me to do? What can I do to transform them?”

Butler explores the relation between the conditions in which we exist, nationally and individually, and actions. Nations and individuals are both active agents at the same time they are passively acted upon. We must actively determine our actions within the conditions in which we exist, which we cannot control: This determination is Butler’s definition of responsibility.

. “In a certain way, and paradoxically, our responsibility is heightened once we have been subjected to the violence of others. We are acted upon, violently, and it appears that our capacity to set our own course at such instances is fully undermined. Only once we have suffered that violence are we compelled ethically, to ask how we will respond to violent injury.”

The experience of violence—of being acted upon—renders people vulnerable at the same time it also renders them responsible. This is a paradox because it seems that the experience of vulnerability would abnegate the “victim” of responsibility, but Butler insists that the experience of violence compels one to ask how they will respond to it. Thus, in the wake of victimization lies responsibility.

“I propose to consider a dimension of political life that has to do with our exposure to violence and our complicity in it, with our vulnerability to loss and the task of mourning that follows, and with finding a basis for community in these conditions.”

Butler is interested in the politics of mourning and how people might create communities through the act of mourning, which entails Americans, in particular, learning to identify with the suffering of others. Butler’s use of the word “task” implies that this work is both difficult and necessary.

“We cannot precisely ‘argue against’ these dimensions of human vulnerability, inasmuch as they function, in effect, as the limits of the arguable, even perhaps as the fecundity of the inarguable.”

Vulnerability is a condition of all creatures’ lives and cannot be argued against. Vulnerability should not only be approached as a weakness or lack of something, however, but as foundation for the generation of ethical imagining.

“If I am struggling for autonomy, do I not need to be struggling for something else as well, a conception of myself as invariably in community, impressed upon by others, impinging upon them as well, and in ways that are not fully in my control or clearly predictable?”

Butler acknowledges that a political and legal recognition of individual autonomy is necessary for human rights. Otherwise, systemic abuses such as enslavement and rape can be upheld. However, the notion of individual autonomy is also a fiction, as humans depend on one another, impinging on one another’s autonomy as others impinge on one’s own autonomy. People must simultaneously struggle for the right to bodily autonomy as while recognizing human interdependence.

“We have to wonder under what conditions public grieving constitutes an ‘offense’ against the public itself, constituting an intolerable eruption within the terms of what is speakable in public? What might be ‘offensive’ against the public itself, constituting an intolerable eruption within the terms of what is speakable in public?”

Public mourning is policed in many ways, including within the genre of the obituary, in which only certain deaths can be acknowledged and mourned. Those who are not considered mournable are not “speakable” within the obituary and thus are refused this public acknowledgment.

“By insisting on a ‘common’ corporeal vulnerability, I may seem to be positing a new basis for humanism.”

All humans share in the state of bodily vulnerability, which could potentially be a new way to define humanism and the human. Butler here opens their own inquiry to the recognition of other species’ bodily vulnerability and their own species-specific ways of attending and also violating these vulnerabilities.

“Don’t I need to know myself to act responsibly in social relations? Surely, to a certain extent, yes. But is there an ethical valence to my unknowingness? I am wounded, and I find that the wound itself testifies to the fact that I am impressionable, given over to the Other in ways that I cannot fully predict or control. I cannot think the question of responsibility alone, in isolation from the Other; if I do, I have taken myself out of the relational bind that frames the problem of responsibility from the start.”

Butler again attempts to show how two seemingly opposed ways of being must exist simultaneously. The narrative of individual autonomy must be maintained as protection against the exploitation and attempt to possess the Other’s autonomy, most egregiously in the system of slavery, even though humans’ lived reality is one of interdependence. Here, Butler explores the ways that people need to be self-aware even though ethical experience often renders us feeling lost and “unknowing.” This state is as important as a state of self-knowledge.

“Or better formulated: the historical time that we thought was past turns out to structure the contemporary field with a persistence that gives the lie to history as chronology.”

The seeming anachronism of sovereign power is not actually relegated to the past as history moves “beyond” it in a progressive chronology. The eruption of sovereign power within governmentality in Guantanamo, specifically, speaks to the ways that history is not linear.

“It is not, literally speaking, that a sovereign power suspends the rule of law, but that the rule of law, in the act of being suspended, produces sovereignty in its actions and as its effects. This inverse relation to law produces the ‘unaccountability’ of this operation of sovereign power, as well as its legitimacy.”

Sovereign power not only suspends law, but the law is also used as a tool to validate sovereign power. Further, because sovereign power exists outside of law—even international law—there is no body or entity to enforce responsible or ethical behavior of those who wield this power.

“‘Indefinite detention’ is an illegitimate exercise of power, but it is, significantly, part of a broader tactic to neutralize the rule of law in the name of security. ‘Indefinite detention’ does not signify an exceptional circumstance, but, rather, the means by which the exceptional becomes established as a naturalized norm.”

Butler refers to rhetoric that circumvents the law, positing “detainees” rather than prisoners, thus establishing an extra-legal state of existence that becomes normalized.

“What counts as ‘dangerous’ is what is deemed dangerous by the state, so that, once again, the state posits what is dangerous, and in so positing it, establishes the conditions for its own preemption and usurpation of the law, a notion of law that has already been usurped by a tragic facsimile of a trial.”

In the illegal detention centers of Guantanamo, detainees are held because sovereign powers “deem” them dangerous. This “deeming” is arbitrary and without legal oversight, yet the action of “deeming” someone dangerous replaces the legal action of charging with a crime, with few concerns about this illegal replacement of the legal.

“The Geneva Convention is, in part, a civilizational discourse, and it nowhere asserts an entitlement to protection against degradation and violence and rights to a fair trial as universal rights.”

Butler stresses that the Geneva Convention, often turned to as the document outlining humane treatment even in conditions of war, is itself more about what counts as civilization and therefore who is civilized enough to be treated humanely than a panoramic protection of all humans.

“The use of the term, ‘terrorism,’ thus works to delegitimate certain forms of violence committed by non-state-centered political entities at the same time that it sanctions a violent response by established states.”

The Geneva Convention defines “legitimate” governments’ violence as, in turn, legitimate, and “illegitimate” non-state centered violence as illegitimate and, therefore, “terrorism.” Legitimate states, by definition, cannot commit terrorism, while those who are not members of a state, by definition, can only commit terrorism.

“The Jewish effort to criticize Israel during these times emerges, I would argue, precisely from this ethos. And though the critique is often portrayed as insensitive to Jewish suffering, in the past and in the present, its ethic is wrought precisely from that experience of suffering, so that suffering itself might stop, so that something we might reasonably call the sanctity of life might be honored equitably and truly. The fact of enormous suffering does not warrant revenge or legitimate violence, bust must be mobilized in the service of a politics that seeks to diminish suffering universally, that seeks to recognize the sanctity of life, of all lives.”

Butler calls on the Jewish experience of suffering as the felt experience out of which justice and nonviolence can be sought. Butler argues that the experience of suffering should give rise, ethically, to the attempt to stop others’ suffering rather than the attempt to cause more suffering.

“In holding out for a distinction between Israel and Jews, I am calling for a space of critique and a condition of dissent for Jews who have criticisms of Israel to articulate, but I am also opposing anti-Semitic reductions of Jewishness to Israeli interests.”

As a progressive Jew, Butler is trying to create room for Jewish critique of the state and military of Israel. Butler notes that conflating Jewishness and Israeli interests is itself an antisemitic maneuver, as critical thought and protesting violence and suffering are inherently Jewish acts.

“One is threatened with the label, ‘anti-Semitic,’ in the same way that within the US, to oppose the most recent US wars earns one the label of ‘traitor,’ or ‘terrorist sympathizer or, indeed, ‘treasonous.’”

Butler draws a comparison between the ways that valid criticism of the US “war on terror” suffocates through the labeling of those who dare to voice this criticism as allies of the attackers and the labeling of those who criticize Israel’s violent policies as antisemitic. Dissent is refused in both cases through this rhetorical “terrorism” that can be psychologically devastating and serves to discipline populations.

“The threat of being called ‘anti-Semitic’ seeks to control, at the level of the subject, what one is willing to say out loud and, at the level of society in general, to circumscribe what can and cannot be permissibly spoken out loud in the public sphere. More dramatically, these are threats that decide the defining limits of the public sphere through setting limits on the speakable.”

Rather than setting limits through discussion itself, limits are set in the determination of what is speakable to begin with, a significant theme throughout Butler’s book. Fear of being labeled antisemitic quashes dissent against the policies and government of Israel, so violent actions go unchallenged.

“So, if we think that moral authority is about finding one’s will and standing by it, it may be that we miss the very mode by which moral demands are relayed. That is, we miss the situation of being addressed, the demand that comes from elsewhere, sometimes a nameless elsewhere, by which our obligations are articulated and pressed upon us.”

Morality lies not in the demands that one places upon oneself in adopting a moral position but, instead, in responding to the moral demands that the other places upon them. If responding to the vulnerability of the other is at the heart of ethics, moral potential thus arises in relation with the other and from outside the self.

“There is fear for one’s survival, and there is anxiety about hurting the Other, and these two impulses are at war with each other, like siblings fighting. But they are at war with each other not to be at war, and this seems to be the point. For the nonviolence that Levinas seems to promote does not come from a peaceful place, but rather from a constant tension between the fear of undergoing violence and the fear of inflicting violence.”

The fear for one’s own survival, which might necessitate injury or killing, and the anxiety about this harm are in tension with one another. This tension, or “war,” between fear and anxiety is precisely what prevents war itself: Nonviolence is created out of this tension.

“How do we come to know the difference between the inhuman but humanizing face, for Levinas, and the dehumanization that can also take place through the face?”

The representation of an actual face can be the means of dehumanization when it empties the fullness of vulnerability from that representation. The fullness of vulnerability does not necessarily require a human face, according to Levinas.