Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence

by Judith Butler

In her most impassioned and personal book to date, Judith Butler responds in this profound appraisal of post-9/11 America to the current US policies to wage perpetual war, and calls for a deeper understanding of how mourning and violence might instead inspire solidarity and a quest for global justice.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Politics, Feminism, Academic, Essays

168 pages, Paperback

First published May 6, 2004

About the author

Judith Butler is an American philosopher, feminist, and queer theorist whose work has profoundly shaped gender studies, political philosophy, ethics, psychoanalysis, and literary theory. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, to a Hungarian-Jewish and Russian-Jewish family, Butler was raised in a Jewish cultural and ethical environment that fostered an early engagement with philosophy, ethics, and questions of identity, attending Hebrew school and specialized ethics classes as a teenager. They studied philosophy at Bennington College before transferring to Yale University, where they earned a BA in 1978 and a PhD in 1984, focusing on German idealism, phenomenology, and French theory, including Hegel, Sartre, and Kojève. Butler taught at Wesleyan University, George Washington University, and Johns Hopkins University before joining the University of California, Berkeley in 1993, where they co-founded the Program in Critical Theory, served as Maxine Elliot Professor, directed the International Consortium of Critical Theory, and also hold the Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School. Butler is best known for Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, works in which they introduced the theory of gender performativity, arguing that gender is constituted through repeated social acts rather than a fixed identity, a concept that became foundational in feminist and queer theory. They have also published Excitable Speech, examining hate speech and censorship, Precarious Life, analyzing vulnerability and political violence, Undoing Gender, on the social construction of sexual norms, Giving an Account of Oneself, exploring ethical responsibility and the limits of self-knowledge, and Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, addressing public protest and collective action, while their 2020 book, The Force of Nonviolence, emphasizes ethical engagement in social and political struggles. Butler has engaged in global activism, supporting LGBTQIA rights, opposing anti-gender ideology, advocating for Palestinian rights, critiquing aspects of contemporary Israeli policy, and participating in movements such as Occupy Wall Street, while navigating controversies including critiques of their comments on Hamas and Hezbollah, debates over TERF ideology, and disputes over the Adorno Prize, illustrating the intersections of their scholarship and public interventions. Their work extends into ethical theory, exploring vulnerability, interdependence, mourning, and the recognition of marginalized lives, as well as the performative dimensions of identity and the social construction of sex and gender. They have influenced contemporary feminist, queer, and critical theory, cultural studies, and continental philosophy, shaping debates on gender, sexuality, power, and social justice, while also participating in public discourse and advocacy around education, political violence, and anti-discrimination. Butler is legally non-binary in California, uses they/them pronouns, identifies as a lesbian, and lives in Berkeley with their partner Wendy Brown and their son.

Reviews

[Khush · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think it is a great book. It achieves what it seeks. In this age of US versus Them, unfortunately, sane voices are curbed, ridiculed, and dubbed as naive across the globe. With thinkers like Butler, one can see what they are trying to do, and what truly motivates them. She tries to build things when most politicians want to erect walls by playing identity politics.

A few days ago, I read Dr. Jordan Peterson. I wonder what kind of conversation he will have with Butler. I can imagine him talking to Trump, though.

It is easy to convince when you start from the position of love, care, and concern. But who is listening to sane voices when bigotry has become the new norm.

Reading Butler makes me think that it is not too difficult to figure out how to live, love and be responsible in the world at any given moment.

[Stephanie Berbec · Rating 5 out of 5]

With Butler, I could easily flip back to the beginning and read again. Precarious Life, written just after the events of 9/11 in response to trauma, heightened vulnerability, fear, aggression, and our subsequent engagement in perpetual war, remains a timely and necessary read. The book is premised on what has come to constitute a human being: namely, as that which counts as a liveable life and a grieveable death. Anyone, or rather, anything that does not fall within those two categories, as a life worth living or a death worth grieving, is no longer regarded as human. In just five chapters, Butler confronts the rise in censorship within the media, public sphere, and the U.S. government, with particular emphasis on the harm of operating within binarism: that one is either for us or siding with the enemy, without possibility of a third way.

We move quickly—too quickly—from the experience of trauma and suffering to acts of aggression and violence. Butler asks, “what might be made of grief besides a cry for war?” The reality is that we don’t know what to do with grief. This is as much true for many of us individually as it is collectively true for the country as a whole. Butler addresses this in part by offering a psychoanalytic approach to understand why aggression so often follows the experience of loss. In doing so, she pulls from Levinas’ concept of the “face,” the notion that we can’t “will away” an Other because in doing so, we cease to be human. Which is to say, in our dehumanization of others, we are, in effect, dehumanizing ourselves. Zizek would affirm: we’re okay with the Other, insofar as he doesn’t intrude. That others around the world suffer extreme violence remains of little concern to us—so long as said violence does not affect us. Indeed, our own violence, that which we inflict on others, is justified as an act of self-defense, thus an act of noblity.

Butler highlights two current examples where we see the aforementioned themes at work: indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay and anti-semitism, in light of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. With the former, pulling from Foucalt’s notion of sovereignty and governmentality, we see that Guantanamo Bay operates within a suspension of the law that simultaneously suspends the political status of the detainee. They are not even considered “prisoners,” much less human. The example of anti-semitism provides Butler’s perspective of an attempt to “quell public criticism” by censoring speech in the public sphere so as not to offend. This particular section is also a testament to the operative binarism of being with us or against us; Butler, herself a Jew, has much to say on this point and remains hopeful for the potential and necessity of critical speech and thoughtful dialogue in the public sphere.

As Butler forewarns in the preface, there is no happy ending or resolution. Her final chapter is only an approach toward a non-violent, Levinasian-inspired, ethics that is based on the precariousness of life. In sum, she writes in hopes that we might begin to think both critically and publicly about the collective experience of trauma and the effects of war. Precarious Life is a call to responsibility, a call to work toward becoming political in the truest sense of the term.

[Virga · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kodėl vienų gedime viešai, dėl jų sielvartaujam ir "amžinai prisimenam" (tautinės - visų tautų - klišės taip skelbia), o kitų mirčių iš vis nelaikom vertomis pastebėti? Čia tik pirmas, pradinis klausimas, nuo kurio prasideda aiškinimasis, kas šiandieną yra precarious life, ir ypač kariniuose konfliktuose. Knyga su daug daug faktinės informacijos ir gera (nors gana nuspėjama) interpretacija. Nėra vienodai įdomi visa knyga: vidurys, matyti, buvo skausmingai aktualus būtent prieš 14 ar gal dar prieš 10 metų, o dabar jau daugybė naujesnių ir ne mažiau neteisingų dalykų užgožė ir Irako karą, ir net Guantanamo fenomeną. Bet labai labai verta vis tiek paskaityti (o, pavyzdžiui, nedidelis skyrius apie Izraelio konfliktinę retoriką/ taktiką - dar vis aktualus).

[küb · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Bu gerçekle yüzleşelim artık.Birbirimiz tarafından çözülürüz.Ve eğer çözülmüyorsak bir şeyler eksik demektir.”

Kırılgan Hayat muhteşem bir kitap.
Judith Butler benim 2015 yılında Cinsiyet Belası kitabıyla tanıştığım ve herkesin okumasını istediğim yazarlardan biri.

Kırılgan Hayat, etik değerler, duyarlı demokrasi, koşullar ve eylemler arasındaki ilişkiler, mağduru olmadığınız acılar için aktif bir role bürünecek eşiğe gelebilir misiniz, hassasiyet sahibi olmanın önemi, dikkate alınabilir kamu anlayışının yeniden inşaası, şiddete maruz kalmak ve bunu kullanmak arasındaki uçurumlar, hangi ölümlerin yası tutulur gibi bir çok konuda değerlendirmelerle dolu. Savaşın etkileri ve travmaların kolektif duyumları konularında bizi düşünmeye çağırıyor. Butler gene benim için herkesin düşünebilmesini ne çok istediğimi yüzüme vuran bir kalem oldu.

“… narin ve anlam ifade etme yetisinin sınırlarındaki- insan olana döndürmektir. İnsan olanın bilebileceğimizin, duyabileceğimizin, görebileceğimizin, hissedebileceğimizin sınırlarında belirişini ve yok oluşunu sorgulamamız gerekecek.”

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anderhalve week na de lezing van Butler (en ontmoeting!!!!!!) eindelijk deze essays uitgelezen. Mij vind je de komende maanden starend naar hun handtekening en het mezelf kwalijk nemend dat ik nooit zo intelligent zal zijn!!

[Michael · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are a few great ideas in this book, but they could have been expressed in about 3 pages. Or else she could have taken these great ideas and expanded them into an entire book. I was expecting more than it delivered.

[Lizzie S · Rating 3 out of 5]

I received this kindle edition of Judith Butler's Precarious Life as part of my Verso book club subscription. In a series of essays, Butler responds to the ways in which the United States reacted to the 9/11 terrorist attacks and outlines the ways in which we determine who is human, and therefore who is grievable. A complex, thoughtful collection, although a little dense.

[Lenore · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is Butler at her best: lucid, graceful prose that takes to task constructs of what constitutes a liveable life and a greiveable death in American news media: "The task at hand is to establish modes of public seeing and hearing that might well respond to the cry of the human within the sphere of appearance, a sphere in which the trace of the cry has become hyperbolically inflated to rationalize a gluttonous nationalism..." Butler's final chapter in which she grounds her critique in Levinas's concept of "the face" is one of the most beautiful pieces of prose I've read in a long time, especially in the wake of her earlier, much less stylized work in poststructural/gender theory.

Butler is sometimes criticized for the breadth of her scholarship, but I think her eclectic background culminates in _Precarious Life_ to produce an impassioned, thoughtful response that necessarily speaks across disciplines. I especially urge people doing media studies to read this. It's much less didactic than a lot of stuff out there.

[kate harvey]

“Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something.”

[Danny · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 essays written in 2003
1. An investigation into why was it seen as “treason” to look into the factors that lead into 9/11 and why the media went with it and manufactured consent
2. Why are some lives worth mourning and use as justification for war crimes while others are dehumanized and made into a death count number.
3. Investigation into how the US and somewhat the Geneva Convention allows stateless people to not have rights and be detained indefinitely
4. Why tying Zionism to Jewish identity is harmful to Jewish people around the world. This is written from a 2003 context but honestly most people now need this insight
5. What happens when mass death has no face and its effects on the population. And also what happens when we put faces on things for nationalism and their negative effects.

[Lia · Rating 4 out of 5]

took me 2 months to finally tackle the chapter on guantanamo bay. glad i did

[Anaclara · Rating 3 out of 5]

hmmmm misschien heeft mijn zus gelijk

[Beinrangel · Rating 4 out of 5]

"But sometimes these normative schemes work precisely through providing no image, no name, no narrative, so that there never was a life, and there never was a death".

[Nina White · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tragically as pertinent today as when it was written 20 years ago. Hard to not feel a sense of futility when the political and media landscape Butler outlines seems to have only worsened in the intervening years.

[Tia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pleased to return to this book and find it just as erudite as the first time around… Butler‘s call for the humanities and cultural critics, as well as everyday consumers of media and political discourse, to examine the ways in which perpetual war, violence, cruelty, and dehumanization of the other are conveyed through disavowals of mourning, vulnerability, and the inherent fragility of human life. Certainly, the first two essays here are the strongest and offer the most (perhaps as theoretical points of view from which to continue working), however I also appreciated Butler’s insights into other political conflicts. They are certainly one of those people whom reading feels like having my opinions revealed to myself, more clearly and well-constructed than I might have imagined!

[Maja Solar]

zapravo me najviše zanimao esej o žalovanju, i tu ima nekih zanimljivih poenti, a sve ostalo je onako, kao i sve sa batler : teme su politički zanimljive, ali iz njene vizure je to 'mlako', nedostaje kritika političke ekonomije i sve opet preteže na diskurzivnu problematiku

[Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the reviews on the back of this book describes it as one of Butler's most accessible. I agree.

It was an easy and relatively quick read with a lot of insight into the "War on Terror," in the U.S., Middle East, and Guantanamo Bay. I especially liked the middle (and longest) essay for its explanation of a lot of Foucault's ideas around sovereignty and governmentality, set around the case study of indefinite detention.

The book didn't contain as much about "precarity" as I was hoping. It's an intriguing concept on its own and I didn't really feel like the book's title fit, except kind of in the last essay.

I'm looking forward to reading Frames of War!

[Iza · Rating 4 out of 5]

i cannot help but feel hopeless seeing how little has changed since this book was written & how things have actually gotten worse. while i feel touched and encouraged by the propositions made by butler, i also wonder how the essays have ‘aged’ for them. nevertheless, i’m happy i can finally read them after my failed attempts during my 20s

[matteo · Rating 3 out of 5]

dieses buch hat mich nicht abgeholt, vielmehr hat es mich in einer philosophievorlesung stehen gelassen (ich wette es war eine gute philosophievorlesung aber ich war nicht ausreichend vorbereitet)

[Ivana · Rating 3 out of 5]

The girl has a point...but dear Lord, translating this could be some kind of a medieval torture

[Natasha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Judith Butler stuns again, academic prose written so eloquently, full of emotion that you forget that this draws from the events of 9/11. The precarity of life is always through face of the other and by relating back to work from Foucault, Agamben and Levinas, her political philosophy is meaningful, powerful and always thoughtful. On page 22 she writes “who am I, without you?”, and just like that, she’s written every love story possible. Bravo Butler, as always you are my hero.

[Faiqa Mansab · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliant.

[Rob Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

An overall solid book about the post-9/11 world, written in the post-9/11 time. It was a scattershot time, and some of these essays are a little scattershot. They also get more dense as the book goes on, and a little less accessible. While this book is far more accessible than some of Butler's other work, there are times that if you're really not into Foucaultian terms like sovereignty and governmentality, your eyes will glaze over.

The first essay is about the self-censorship, and the shunning of anti-war narratives in the mass media of the time. We have infinitely more options than just cable news and the New York Times today, but the same kind of shaving the contours of debate you can see today. Look on how when Trump used the moab or any other military hardware and all of CNN is bedazzled with the weight of the office of President. With absolutely no concern that the military and wars... you know. Kill people, usually thousands upon millions.

The second essays asks why we acted the way we did after 9/11, i.e., violently. A lot of it is tied up in media-crit, but Butler takes a different route: examining mourning and psychoanalyzing it. I don't think this is a bad thing, this is a good worthwhile essay. Her point is who are we allowed to mourn publicly, in the media, on the news? Is it Palestinians getting mowed down by Israeli commandos? Is it the "collateral damage" to our invasions of foreign countries which come with substantial body counts? A good example of this is the way the number of those killed in 9/11 is repeated almost like catechism in the media, while humanizing body counts to our inhuman war-crimes is never really reported.

The third essay is when she almost loses me entirely, tying into discussion of infinite detentions at Guantomano Bay with Michel Foucalt's ideas about governmentality and sovereignty. A lot of this kind of post-modern philosophy is Butler's bread and butter. I think in this essay her style of over-complicating what to me are simple ideas really comes out. She ties governmenality, that is the idea that routinized government actions give rise to power and sovereignty. I'm not sure I quite understood all of it, this is the essay that took me the longest to read and digest. Maybe I'm writing this with the benefit of it being over 15 years later, but it seems to me there are far simpler explanations and theories on where the Bush administration got it's power to do that than reaching towards the ideas of Michel Foucalt.

What follows after is Buter writing about Larry Summers' equating critiques of Israel with anti-semetism. It's a solid essay. You can read what's basically a shorter version on Jewish Currents where Butler reviews Bari Weiss' book that essentially is just a book-long polemic on the ame subject. Butler treats Weiss seriously and rakes her across the coals as politely as possible in about a ten to fifteen minute read.

The last essay sees Butler being a little more obtuse again, bringing up another french philosophy of the 20th century to talk about how we empathize or don't empathize with those we deem others. While loss sometimes breeds violence, it is the ideas of Levinas that suggests a way to end the cycle. The essay doesn't really crystalize for me until the end when she talks about the images they were showing in American media at the time.

I gave this three stars and a lot of it is me complaining that Butler made a simple point too complicated or obtuse. It's probably more of a reflection of where I come from versus where she comes from and what she does. Invoking Foucalt or Levinas' ideas isn't invalid or bad. In fact upon rereading some sections for writing this review, their ideas are interesting if difficult to wrap your head around on a first reading. The parts that resonate for me are when Butler brings their ideas to bear on the media, and that's probably because I work in media and media critique is important and there isn't enough of it.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

An intervention into the question of the human, and, more intensely, Bush-era politics and foreign policy. This philosophical and theoretical text argues that the U.S. never "properly" grieved and mourned, but rather moved straight to lashing out, which created (and continues to create, I would argue, as others have, too) an incredible amount pain and suffering, and in the end did not help the U.S.'s mourning. Furthermore, Butler argues, the U.S. at the time of "9/11" (and the aftermath) had an opportunity to critically rethink itself -- the way it has been conducting itself -- as a military and economic global power. As we know, this was refused, and the U.S. chose to continue in its destructive ways. The text asks some important questions, which are still relevant now: "Who counts as human?" to "Why are only some lives grievable?" to "What do we lose in loss?" Here, I would like to quote a rather brilliant part of the text: "It is not as if 'I' exist independently over here and then simply loses a 'you' over there, especially if the attachment to 'you' is part of what composes who 'I' am. If I lose you, under these conditions, then I not only mourn the loss, I become inscrutable to myself. Who 'am' I , without you? When we lose some of these ties by which we are constituted, we do not know who we are or what to do. On one level, I think I have lost 'you' only to discover that 'I' have gone missing as well. At another level, perhaps what I have lost 'in' you, that for which I have no ready vocabulary, is a relationality that is composed neither exclusively of myself nor you, but is to be conceived of the tie by which those terms are differentiated and related" (22). I quote this to highlight one of the most valuable aspects of the book: relationality. Precarious Lives shows how we are in dense, yet fragile, relationality with others (many of whom are anonymous), and that we are "undone" by each other -- and in an unnumberal amount of ways. Indeed, life is precarious -- for us all. And there is nothing we can do about this situation, which becomes especially intense for those living on the borderlands of those who constitute the human. I argue that this important text can aid in the rethinking of how we live with each other and more.
To be sure, Precarious Life is even more important today: the drone wars,the violence in Syria, the current refugee issues, and the rise of Trump. It is required reading for anyone doing political science, ethics, any field in the humanities, and, simply, anyone who desires to go deeper into the issues and action of yesterday and today. Sadly, I think, it will always be a book that we will need to return to -- given our global, international corporate, war-drive economy world we currently live in. But perhaps, as Butler leaves open, there is a way to re-imagine the world -- one more inviting, accepting and inhabitable for all.

[Aaron Dorsey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of essays locate the beginnings of humanity in our shared vulnerability, injurability, and thus in our grief. Responding to the violence of the US reaction to 9/11, Butler defends critical dialogue, examines the regulation of grief in public, and analyzes the ability of representation to either convey or obscure the ethical demands of the “Face” (Emmanuel Levinas). I found it moving on this reread as it provided me with a grammar to see the role of mourning in public life. My only critique is that the essay on Indefinite Detention is very repetitive.

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

“no national subject, exists apart from an international socius. A mode of self-determination for any given people, regardless of current state status, is not the same as the extra-legal exercise of sovereignty for the purposes of suspending rights at random. As a result, there can be no legitimate exercise of self-determination that is not conditioned and limited by an international conception of human rights that provides the obligatory framework for state action. I am, for instance, in favor of Palestinian self-determination, and even Palestinian statehood, but that process would have to take place supported by, and limited by, international human rights. Similarly, I am equally passionate about Israel giving up religion as a prerequisite for the entitlements of citizenship, and believe that no contemporary democracy can and ought to base itself on exclusionary conditions of participation, such as religion. The Bush administration has broken numerous international treaties in the last two years, many of them having to do with arms control and trade, and many of these abrogations took place prior to the events of September 11. Even the US's call for an international coalition after those events was one that presumed that the US would set the terms, lead the way, determine the criterion for membership, and lead its allies. This is a form of sovereignty that seeks to absorb and instrumentalize an international coalition, rather than submit to a self limiting practice by virtue of its international obligations. Similarly, Palestinian self-determination will be secured as a right only if there is an international consensus that there are rights to be enforced in the face of a bloated and violent exercise of sovereign prerogative on the part of Israel. My fear is that the indefinite detainment of prisoners on Guantanamo, for whom no rights of appeal will be possible within federal courts, will become a model for the branding and management of so-called terrorists in various global sites where no rights of appeal to international rights and to international courts will be presumed. If this extension of lawless and illegitimate power takes place, we will see the resurgence of a violent and self-aggrandizing state sovereignty at the expense of any commitment to global cooperation that might support and radically redistribute rights of recognition governing who may be treated according to standards that ought to govern the treatment of humans. We have yet to become human, it seems, and now that prospect seems even more radically imperiled, if not, for the time being, indefinitely foreclose.”

“Obviously, this has been a tactic for a long time as colonial states have sought to manage and contain the Palestinians and the Irish Catholics, and it was also a case made against the African National Congress in apartheid South Africa. The new form that this kind of argument is taking, and the naturalized status it assumes, however, will only intensify the enormously damaging consequences for the struggle for Palestinian self-determination. Israel takes advantage of this formulation by holding itself accountable to no law at the very same time that it understands itself as engaged in legitimate self-defense by virtue of the status of its actions as state violence. In this sense, the framework for conceptualizing global violence is such that "terrorism" becomes the name to describe the violence of the illegitimate, whereas legal war becomes the prerogative of those who can assume international recognition as legitimate states.

The fact that these prisoners are seen as pure vessels of violence, as Rumsfeld claimed, suggests that they do not become violent for the same kinds of reasons that other politicized beings do, that their violence is somehow constitutive, groundless, and infinite, if not innate. If this violence is terrorism rather than violence, it is conceived
as an action with no political goal, or cannot be read politically”

“So it is not simply that governmentality becomes a new site for the elaboration of sovereignty, or that the new courts become fully lawless, but that sovereignty trumps established law, and the unaccountable subjects become invested with the task of the discretionary fabrication of law.”

This book is like 25 years before it’s time. It’s only now even able to be heard. And yet it’s so right on. So well researched. The average reader just needs a basic understanding of “state of exception” and “bare life” before it all sinks in. Books like this force the next generation’s appropriation of people like Assata, Snowden, and Naomi Klein. Meaning, Butler quietly doing her work for all these years forces the others to be taken seriously, rather than thrown out as conspiracy like Butler has been for so long.

Writers like Butler make one realize that the history written about America in our own time period is not even heard of yet. It’s been written, it’s just so radical by today’s standards that people won’t even listen to it. Comparable maybe to the era of totalitarianism. But even back then intellectuals could be heard better than now, if they had objective proof and clarity to what they were saying. Those who had proof could be heard even in the early 1900s. Nowadays you can have all the proof in the world but you have to also be socially acceptable. Mainly because otherwise your form of truth will be dissolved, diluted, expropriated, or at best exploitatively appropriated.

This book is one of the most important in American history. Glad some people have heard of it now.

Also read: Homo Sacer by Giorgio Agamben

Americans who write on topics like Agamben writes on, are either not aware enough, due to poor American schooling and propaganda, or cannot be heard politically anyway. Authors like Butler in America, are left to write against their own financial interests.

[Zary · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can’t even find the words to describe this book and how it made me feel. So here are some quotes from the book (there are five different essays):

We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something.

The disorientation of grief— “Who have I become?” or, indeed, “What is left of me?”

Legitimate violence is waged by recognizable states or "countries," as Rumsfeld puts it, and illegitimate violence is precisely that which is committed by those who are landless, stateless, or whose states are deemed not worth recognizing by those who are already recognized. In the present climate, we see the intensification of this formulation as various forms of political violence are called "terrorism," not because there are valences of violence that might be distinguished from one another, but as a way of characterizing violence waged by, or in the name of,
authorities deemed illegitimate by established states.

The use of the term, “terrorism,” thus works to delegitimate certain forms of violence committed by non-state-centered political entities at the same time that it sanctions a violent response by established states. Obviously, this has been a tactic for a long time as colonial states have sought to manage and contain the Palestinians and the Irish Catholics, and it was also a case made against the African National Congress in apartheid South Africa.

This is a form of sovereignty that seeks to absorb and instrumentalize an international coalition, rather than submit to a self-limiting practice by virtue of its international obligations. Similarly, Palestinian self-determination will be secured as a right only if there is an international consensus that there are rights to be enforced in the face of a bloated and violent exercise of sovereign prerogative on the part of Israel.

Certain lives will be highly protected, and the abrogation of their claims to sanctity will be sufficient to mobilize the forces of war. Other lives will not find such fast and furious support and will not even qualify as "grievable."
A hierarchy of grief could no doubt be enumerated. We have seen it already, in the genre of the obituary, where lives are quickly tidied up and summarized, humanized, usually married, or on the way to be, heterosexual, happy, monogamous. But this is just a sign of another differential relation to life, since we seldom, if ever, hear the names of the thousands of Palestinians who have died by the Israeli military with United States support, or any number of Afghan people, children and adults. Do they have names and faces, personal histories, family, favorite hobbies, slogans by which they live? What defense against the apprehension of loss is at work in the blithe way in which we accept deaths caused by military means with a shrug or with self-righteousness or with clear vindictiveness? To what extent have Arab peoples, predominantly practitioners of Islam, fallen outside the "human" as it has been naturalized in its "Western" mold by the contemporary workings of humanism?

There are no obituaries for the war casualties that the United States inflicts, and there cannot be. If there were to be an obituary, there would have had to have been a life, a life worth noting, a life worth valuing and preserving, a life that qualifies for recognition.
Although we might argue that it would be impractical to write obituaries for all those people, or for all people, I think we have to ask, again and again, how the obituary functions as the instrument by which grievability is publicly distributed.
It is the means by which a life becomes, or fails to become, a publicly grievable life, an icon for national self-recognition, the means by which a life becomes note-worthy. As a result, we have to consider the obituary as an act of nation-building. The matter is not a simple one, for, if a life is not grievable, it is not quite a life; it does not qualify as a life and is not worth a note. It is already the unburied, if not the unburiable.

It is important to distinguish between anti-Semitic speech that, say, produces a hostile and threatening environment for Jewish students, racist speech which any university administrator would be obligated to oppose and to regulate, and speech that makes a student politically uncomfortable because it opposes a state or a set of state policies that any student may defend.
The latter is a political debate, and if we say that the case of Israel is different because the very identity of the student is bound up with the state of Israel, so that any criticism of Israel is considered an attack on "Israelis" or, indeed, "Jews" in general, then we have "singled out" this form of political allegiance from all the other forms of political allegiance in the world that are open to public disputation, and engaged in the most outrageous form of silencing and "effective" censorship.

The threat of being called "anti-Semitic" seeks to control, at the level of the subject, what one is willing to say out loud and, at the level of society in general, to circumscribe what can and cannot be permissibly spoken out loud in the public sphere.
More dramatically, these are threats that decide the defining limits of the public sphere through setting limits on the speakable. The world of public discourse, in other words, will be that space and time from which those critical perspectives will be excluded. The exclusion of those criticisms will effectively establish the boundaries of the public itself, and the public will come to understand itself as one that does not speak out, critically, in the face of obvious and illegitimate violence unless, of course, a certain collective courage takes hold.

[raluca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Is a Muslim life as valuable as legibly First World lives? Are the Palestinians yet accorded the status of "human" in US policy and press coverage? Will those hundreds of thousands of Muslim lives lost in the last decades of strife ever receive the equivalent to the paragraph-long obituaries in the that seek to New York Times humanize -- often through nationalist and familial framing devices -- those Americans who have been violently killed? Is our capacity to mourn in global dimensions foreclosed precisely by the failure to conceive of Muslim and Arab lives as lives ?

[Rui Coelho · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book reflects on the world after 9/11. It documents the return of the extra juridical power of sovereignty (as conceived by Foucault) and its impact on the precarization of life (naked life). As a response to this attack on life, Butler advocates an ethical responsibility focused on mutual-recognition and visibility of the excluded, even if the only way to do it is to mourn them.
Great to read along with Butler's Undoing Gender or Agamben's State of Exception.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Levinas writes:

"The approach to the face is the most basic mode of responsibility . . . The face is not in front of me (en face de moi), but above me; it is the other before death, looking through and exposing death. Secondly, the face is the other who asks me not to let him die alone, as if to do so were to become an accomplice in his death."

. . . So the face, strictly speaking, does not speak, but what the face means is nevertheless conveyed by the commandment, "Thou shalt not kill." It conveys this commandment without precisely speaking it. It would seem that we can use this biblical command to understand something of the face's meaning, but something is missing here, since the "face" does not speak in the sense that the mouth does; the face is neither reducible to the mouth nor, indeed, to anything the mouth has to utter. Someone or something else speaks when the face is likened to a certain kind of speech; it is a speech that does not come from a mouth or, if it does, has no ultimate origin or meaning there. In fact, in an essay titled "Peace and Proximity," Levinas makes plain that "the face is not exclusively a human face." To explain this he refers to Vassili Grossman's text "Life and Fate," which he describes as:

"the story . . . of the families, wives, and parents of political detainees traveling to the Lubyanka in Moscow for the latest news. A line is formed at the counter, a line where one can see only the backs of others. A woman awaits her turn: [She] had never thought that the human back could be so expressive, and could convey states of mind in such a penetrating way. Persons approaching the counter has a particular way of craning their neck and their back, their raised shoulders with shoulder blades like springs, which seemed to cry, sob, and scream. (PP, 167)"

Here the term "face" operates as a catachresis: "face" describes the human back, the craning of the neck, the raising of the shoulder blades like "springs." And these bodily parts, in turn, are said to cry and to sob and to scream, as if they were a face or, rather, a face with a mouth, a throat, or indeed, just a mouth and throat, from which vocalizations emerge that do not settle into words. The face is to be found in the back and the neck, but it is not quite a face. The sounds that come from or through the face are agonized, suffering . . . The face, if we are to put words to its meaning, will be that for which no words really work; the face seems to be a kind of sound, the sound of language evacuating its sense, the sonorous substratum of vocalization that precedes and limits the delivery of any semantic sense.

At the end of this description, Levinas spends the following lines, which do not quite accomplish the sentence form: "The face as the extreme precariousness of the other. Peace as awakeness to the precariousness of the other." Both statements are similes, and they both avoid the verb, especially the copula. They do not say that the face is that precariousness, or that peace is the mode of being awake to an Other's precariousness. Both phrases are substitutions that refuse any commitment to the order of being. Levinas tells us, in fact, that "humanity is a rupture of being" and in the previous remarks he performs that suspension and rupture in an utterance that is both less and more than a sentence form. To respond to the face, to understand its meaning, means to be awake to what is precarious in another life or, rather, the precariousness of life itself. This cannot be an awakeness, to use his word, to my own life, and then an extrapolation from an understanding of my own precariousness to an understanding of another's precarious life. It has to be an understanding of the precariousness of the Other. This is what makes the face belong to the sphere of ethics. Levinas writes, "the face of the other in its precariousness and defenselessness, is for me at once the temptation to kill, and the call to peace, the 'You shall not kill'". This last remark suggests something quite disarming in several senses. Why would it be that the very precariousness of the Other would produce for me a temptation to kill? Or why would it produce the temptation to kill at the same time that it delivers a demand for peace? Is there something about my apprehension of the Other's precariousness that makes me want to kill the Other? Is it the simple vulnerability of the Other that becomes a murderous temptation for me? If the Other, the Other's face, which after all carries the meaning of this precariousness, at once tempts me with murder and prohibits me from acting upon it, then the face operates to produce a struggle for me, and establishes this struggle at the heart of ethics."

& later, toward the end of this enormously resonant essay "Precarious Life":

"We have been turned away from the face, sometimes through the very image of the face, one that is meant to convey the inhuman, the already dead, that which is not precariousness and cannot, therefore, be killed; this is the face that we are nevertheless asked to kill, as if ridding the world of this face would return is to the human rather than consummate our own inhumanity. One would need to hear the face as it speaks in something other than language to know the precariousness of life that is at stake."