49 pages • 1 hour read
Judith ButlerPrecarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2004A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Vulnerability and Dispossession as the Foundation for Ethical Action
Butler begins Precarious Life in recognition that vulnerability, both physical and social, is a reality of life and thus cannot be argued against, though there are many ways of thinking about this vulnerability, which can be argued.
Humans are physically vulnerable beings by virtue of being mortal and are born into a state of “primary vulnerability,” beginning life as entirely physically and socially reliant on others. While individuals can “achieve” a level of autonomy, they never become fully autonomous, nor does Butler think that unequivocal autonomy is something to be desired.
Many political movements, such as those struggling for the abolition of slavery, women’s rights, and other aspects of human justice, have argued for the inviolability and autonomy of the individual human, insisting that everyone should “possess” their own body. Butler thinks that such a normative insistence on autonomy is necessary for human rights. Nonetheless, it does not capture the full experience of life, in which true autonomy does not exist, and thus Butler argues for an additional normative aspiration that recognizes interdependence and social vulnerability and, even more challenging, the “dispossession” people experience in relation to one another: “Let’s face it. We are undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something” (23).
This state of becoming undone or dispossessed is viscerally experienced during mourning. Mourning overwhelms, comes in waves, and transforms people. Butler thinks that rather than resisting mourning’s transformation, one should “submit” to its transformation. Part of this transformation is an “unknowingness” about oneself and the other. In the face of loss and the experience of mourning, one no longer knows who “I” am without “you,” and one simultaneously does not know “you,” either. People are precarious physically, socially, and in their very lack of understanding of themselves and others. At the core of Butler’s thesis is that these moments of heightened vulnerability in the experience of loss—whether in mourning or through physical violence and injury—though painful, are moments of profundity and provide an opportunity for ethical decision making.
The state of vulnerability is the foundation for ethical life, as it demands attention and an ethical response. Butler concludes their exploration of vulnerability with Emmanuel Levinas’s theory of “the face,” in which he develops a Jewish theory of nonviolence that emerges out of resisting the feelings of violence that are elicited innately in the apprehension of the other’s vulnerability. The vulnerability of the other, then, creates a tension within the self between the impulse toward violence and the anxiety over violence: This is where the possibility of nonviolence lies.
Vulnerability—rather than capacity or ability—is thus the foundation for ethics.
Mournability as Recognition of Realized Lives
Precarious Life is broadly interested in the United States’ refusal to respond ethically in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. This refusal, Butler theorizes, is grounded in a public mourning for American survivors of these attacks that is in tension with a public refusal of mourning for those killed in the United States’ response to those attacks, in which millions of people were killed.
Butler is interested in both the visceral, personal experience of mourning and the politics of mourning. Referencing psychoanalytic theory, Butler considers the “subject” of the individual and the political state in the context of mourning, even though the author acknowledges that these subjects are not identical.
While people cannot experience visceral grief and mourning of the deaths of those they never knew, they can nonetheless approach those they do not know as mournable beings; this does not require any kind of personal connection to these lives. In approaching others’ deaths as mournable, one recognizes their lives as lives and their deaths as losses.
Butler pays particular attention, then, to the politics of mourning. Mourning is generally thought of as private and privatizing—an internal and subjective experience kept in the domestic sphere and “at home” rather than brought out into public and political space. Yet the frameworks for mourning—and what deaths are considered as deaths and thus mournable deaths—are deeply political. War, for example, is enabled through the unmournability of the enemy. To mourn their deaths would be to acknowledge their lives as being as valuable as one’s own life, which would, potentially, mean the end of war.
Often, lives are derealized, so that they are not entirely denied but are forced into a category of being that is akin to the living dead. These people are recognized as technically alive, but because they have been derealized, these lives not do not matter as lives. Subsequently, their deaths are not apprehended as true deaths and thus are unmournable. This emptying of the subject empties the apprehender of a realization of life and death and ensures violence. To publicly mourn those who have been deemed unmournable is a radical political act, as it refuses the political state’s management of life and death, a theme of the classical Greek play Antigone, in which Antigone insists on publicly mourning and burying her brother, an enemy of the state.
Butler’s theory of unmournability focuses on human lives and deaths but has also been used in scholarship focusing on other species and the broader natural world, examining the ways that animals’ deaths, especially those exploited in labs and for food, are assumed unmournable, thus continuing their systemic exploitation.
Address by the Vulnerable Other as Ethical Impingement
Butler insists that people are both acted upon and actors: One is impinged upon by the world and must act out of the conditions in which one lives, and people are also agents who impinge on the world. Precarious Life is interested in what people do when acted upon violently. Specifically, Butler focuses on the United States’ decision to respond violently to the experience of violence during the 9/11 attacks and the decision of the state of Israel to create and maintain a political state in violence, arguably out of the experience of antisemitic violence. In both cases, there is an acting upon that engenders an unethical response.
In the final chapter, Butler turns to philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, whose theory of the “face” is grounded in an exegetical reading of the book of Genesis. Specifically, Levinas explores the commandment, “Thou shalt not kill” given to Moses by God and spoken through Moses. Levinas argues that the commandment both recognizes a primal human desire to kill and is a “call to peace” (134). Levinas thinks that the apprehension of the “face” of the other—the vulnerability of the other—engenders a desire to kill, though it is not clear why.
Butler reorients the reader away from a fixed, ethical position to which one must adhere and toward the unplanned address or appeal by the other. This address may not even have a distinct locus. It is in the impinging by the other on a person through which an ethical claim is made.
This address interrupts one’s plans and cannot be planned for, but one is nonetheless obliged to submit, a submission that is similar to what Butler earlier describes as the ethically generative submission to the transformative nature of mourning. For Levinas, the address by the other does not emerge from within but from without. For example, it is not in a person’s recognition of their own vulnerability that they are able to expand outward to a recognition of others’ vulnerability or extend care for others out of one’s own self-care. Instead, the origin of ethical action lies in the vulnerability of the other within their address to the person. This reorients away from the self as the locus of ethics and toward the other, not only as someone who must be considered in ethics, but the origin of the possibility of ethics itself.
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