PRECARIOUS LIFE
PRECARIOUS LIFE
THE POWERS OF MOURNING
AND VIOLENCE
JUDITH BUTLER
This paperback edition first published by Verso 2020
First published by Verso 2004
© Judith Butler 2004, 2006, 2020
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
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ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-861-3
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ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-303-8 (UK EBK)
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For Isaac,who imagines otherwise
CONTENTS
1 EXPLANATION AND EXONERATION, OR WHAT WE CAN HEAR
2 VIOLENCE, MOURNING, POLITICS
4 THE CHARGE OF ANTI-SEMITISM: JEWS, ISRAEL AND THE RISKS OF PUBLIC CRITIQUE
I am grateful to the Guggenheim Foundation and the Princeton University Center for Human Values for funding the 2001–02 academic year when work on these essays began. I also thank Amy Jamgochian for her patient and thorough work on the manuscript and Benjamin Young and Stuart Murray for their helpful work. Wendy Brown and Joan Scott read many of these words, and their extraordinary persistence as vigorous interlocutors has been crucial to the completing of this work.
“Explanation and Exoneration” appeared first in Theory and Event, 5:4, and was reprinted in Social Text, no. 72. “Violence, Mourning, Politics” appeared first in Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 4:1, and represents a reworked version of the Kessler Lecture delivered in December, 2001 at the Center of Lesbian and Gay Studies at CUNY. “Indefinite Detention” appeared first in a reduced form in Victor Goldberg, ed., It’s a Free Country: Personal Liberties after 9/11, New York: RMD Press, 2002; an earlier version appeared in part as “Guantanamo Limbo,” in the Nation, April 1, 2002. “The Charge of Anti-Semitism” was published in reduced form by the London Review of Books, August 21, 2003.
The five essays collected here were all written after September 11, 2001, and in response to the conditions of heightened vulnerability and aggression that followed from those events. It was my sense in the fall of 2001 that the United States was missing an opportunity to redefine itself as part of a global community when, instead, it heightened nationalist discourse, extended surveillance mechanisms, suspended constitutional rights, and developed forms of explicit and implicit censorship. These events led public intellectuals to waver in their public commitment to principles of justice and prompted journalists to take leave of the time-honored tradition of investigative journalism. That US boundaries were breached, that an unbearable vulnerability was exposed, that a terrible toll on human life was taken, were, and are, cause for fear and for mourning; they are also instigations for patient political reflection. These events posed the question, implicitly at least, as to what form political reflection and deliberation ought to take if we take injurability and aggression as two points of departure for political life.
That we can be injured, that others can be injured, that we are subject to death at the whim of another, are all reasons for both fear and grief. What is less certain, however, is whether the experiences of vulnerability and loss have to lead straightaway to military violence and retribution. There are other passages. If we are interested in arresting cycles of violence to produce less violent outcomes, it is no doubt important to ask what, politically, might be made of grief besides a cry for war.
One insight that injury affords is that there are others out there on whom my life depends, people I do not know and may never know. This fundamental dependency on anonymous others is not a condition that I can will away. No security measure will foreclose this dependency; no violent act of sovereignty will rid the world of this fact. What this means, concretely, will vary across the globe. There are ways of distributing vulnerability, differential forms of allocation that make some populations more subject to arbitrary violence than others. But in that order of things, it would not be possible to maintain that the US has greater security problems than some of the more contested and vulnerable nations and peoples of the world. To be injured means that one has the chance to reflect upon injury, to find out the mechanisms of its distribution, to find out who else suffers from permeable borders, unexpected violence, dispossession, and fear, and in what ways. If national sovereignty is challenged, that does not mean it must be shored up at all costs, if that results in suspending civil liberties and suppressing political dissent. Rather, the dislocation from First World privilege, however temporary, offers a chance to start to imagine a world in which that violence might be minimized, in which an inevitable interdependency becomes acknowledged as the basis for global political community. I confess to not knowing how to theorize that interdependency. I would suggest, however, that both our political and ethical responsibilities are rooted in the recognition that radical forms of self-sufficiency and unbridled sovereignty are, by definition, disrupted by the larger global processes of which they are a part, that no final control can be secured, and that final control is not, cannot be, an