Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence

This chapter focuses on the question of what kind of community can arise out of the vulnerability to violence, loss, and the mourning that ensues. According to Butler, there is no “argument” to made against vulnerability and loss, as these are conditions of life.

In the context of the violence of 9/11 and the United States’ violent response to these attacks, Butler takes up several crucial questions in this chapter: “Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? And, finally, What makes for a grievable life?” (20).

Butler approaches vulnerability not only in its individuality, such as the vulnerability of individual bodies, but also in its social context. Humans are constituted politically precisely because they are socially vulnerable. This social vulnerability is grounded in being “socially constituted bodies” (20): People are attached to others and thus risk losing those attachments, and people are exposed to others, and thus at risk of violence because of that exposure.

With loss comes mourning. Freud originally theorized the success of mourning with interchangeability: A severed attachment could simply be replaced by another attachment. Butler acknowledges that they do not know what “successful” mourning is.