Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence

Judith Butler (born 1956) is an American philosopher. Butler earned their PhD from Yale in 1984 and first became extremely influential in the field of gender studies, in which they published their first works. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity was published in 1990, with Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” following in 1993. Butler theorizes in these early works that gender is performative and thus behaved.

After these early works focusing on gender, Butler moved into different concerns regarding vulnerability, violence, and ethics in Precarious Life (2004), developed further in Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (2009) and The Force of Nonviolence (2020). In Precarious Life, Butler theorizes the relation between violence and nonviolence not as opposite ends of a spectrum, but instead theorizes, by way of Levinas, nonviolence as a struggle that incorporates the impulse toward violence, even as it resists that impulse, a theory grounded in Jewish thought and Levinas’s Talmudic commentary. In The Force of Nonviolence, Butler develops this train of thought, insisting that nonviolence is not passive, as often assumed. Instead, developing the theory Butler sketches out in Precarious Life, Butler insists that nonviolence is a “force” that is active, struggling, and moored in political life.