Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence

Butler opens the chapter with an anecdote about a meeting in which a university president indicated that no one reads the humanities anymore. Butler notes while they felt as though they were being addressed, it was difficult to establish intent and voice within the meeting or determine who felt what way about the humanities, mirroring the state of the modern discursive texts under discussion. Butler argues not for a return to “tethering” authors to discourse—noting that they participated in that particular undoing—but takes up the experience of being addressed by the other and “a consideration of the structure of address itself” (129).

Butler then relates the mode of response to an address by the other to ethics. Rather than thinking of ethics as grounded in a righteous, moral position and sticking with that position, Butler is interested in a moral demand coming from somewhere beyond the self, maybe even from a place that cannot be defined. In thinking about the moral experience of being addressed by the other, Butler works closely with philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’s theory of the “face,” through which the author finds what they believe to be a theory of Jewish nonviolence.