Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence

Judith Butler’s Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, first published by Verso in 2004, is a philosophical monograph that contains five essays that explore violence and both unethical and ethical reactions to violence. Butler is an American philosopher and gender theorist who received their PhD in philosophy from Yale in 1984. Butler is one of the most well-known philosophers of the 20th century.

Precarious Life approaches the question of violence and argues that, though counterintuitive, with the experience of increased vulnerability as a result of violence comes increased responsibility. This responsibility occurs in the fact that with the direct experience of violence, the survivor must make a decision as to how to respond; this increased responsibility is part of the very fabric of the experience of violence. In their essays, Butler explores themes that include Vulnerability and Dispossession as the Foundation for Ethical Action, Mournability as Recognition of Realized Lives, and Address by the Vulnerable Other as Ethical Impingement.

This study guide refers to the 2006 edition of Precarious Life published by Verso.

Summary

In the Preface, Butler introduces the five essays of Precarious Life, which they wrote after the September 11, 2001 (9/11), attacks on the United States, amid Butler’s sense that the nation was missing an opportunity to rethink its place in the world and how it would use its power. Rather than responding responsibly to these attacks, Butler argues, the United States lashed out in a desire to refuse its heightened vulnerability. This refusal ensured the unmournability of those against whom it waged war, including civilians, and the concomitant “indefinite detention” of those suspected of violence at Guantanamo Bay and other detention centers maintained unlawfully. Later in the book, Butler turns their attention to Israel and the pervasive and dangerous accusation of antisemitism that attached to criticism of Israel. Through the essays, Butler examines the post-9/11 political and media landscapes, exploring how, and whose, vulnerability is depicted within—or hidden from—the public sphere as the author attempts to define a theory of nonviolence situated on the precariousness of the lives of others.  

Chapter 1, “Explanation and Exoneration, or What We Can Hear,” begins with the fundamental question of what, politically, can be generated out of grief aside from war. Butler grounds this question in an examination of the anti-intellectualism and censorship that arose in the wake of 9/11 in the United States. Those who attempted to think through the conditions that contributed to—but did not cause—the attacks were accused of exonerating the attackers. Butler insists that it is not morally relativistic to explore the context in which these attacks occurred. This kind of inquiry can help to distribute vulnerability, rarely experienced nationally at this level in the United States, more equitably. Instead, though, the United States waged war on multiple countries, ultimately increasing the disparity of the global distribution of vulnerability.

Chapter 2, “Violence, Mourning, Politics,” considers why violence is so often a response to heightened vulnerability and loss. Butler argues that there is no way around humans’ innate vulnerability, as we are born into a primary vulnerability. Like the unequal distribution of vulnerability across the globe, mournability is also unequally distributed. Butler examines the political function of the genre of the obituary, for example, that publicly acknowledges and grieves deaths. Yet this genre also polices grievability, disallowing public mourning for certain populations. Butler gives the example of two Palestinian families killed by Israeli forces who were denied publication of both an obituary and memorial by the San Francisco Chronicle.

Chapter 3, “Indefinite Detention,” examines the suspension of legal rights for those “detained” by the United States as part of its self-proclaimed “war on terror.” Those detained are not even considered prisoners, as this detention occurs outside the law, under which prisoners are recognized as legal subjects. Yet it would not be enough, either, for international law to take over, as the oft-referenced Geneva Convention only recognizes those who are members of a “legitimate” state. The most vulnerable humans are denied legal subjectivity and thus membership in the legal category of the human and access to human rights.

Chapter 4, “Jews, Israel, and the Risks of Public Critique,” examines attempts to quash public criticism of Israel by way of charges of antisemitism. In accusing those who voice valid criticism of Israel of antisemitism, the Jewish tradition of intellectual criticism itself is squelched. Jewishness is not identical to Israel, and anti-intellectual accusations of antisemitism only enable real antisemitism to flourish, and such accusations are themselves antisemitic in their refusal of critical engagement. Criticism of Israel is thus rendered unspeakable, as the charge of antisemitism is an “uninhabitable identification.”

Chapter 5, “Precarious Life,” attempts to sketch out a theory of nonviolence that understands how violence is not emptied out of nonviolent action but is, in fact, an intrinsic part of that struggle. Butler draws on philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’s Jewish theory of nonviolence in which ethics begin with the ethical address or demand of the other in all the other’s precariousness. This address impinges on us and incites violence in the apprehension of the other’s vulnerability. Butler concludes with their own development of Levinas’s theory, further developed in Butler’s 2020 book, The Force of Nonviolence.