49 pages • 1 hour read
Judith ButlerPrecarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2004A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Sociopolitical Context: The September 11, 2001 Attacks on the United States and the US “War on Terror”
The September 11 attacks, also commonly known as 9/11, were four coordinated attacks on the United States in 2001. Nineteen people associated with Al-Qaeda, a pan-Islamist militant group, hijacked four commercial airplanes. Hijackers crashed the first two planes into each of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. They crashed the third plane into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the US Department of Defense, located just outside of Washington, DC. Passengers on the fourth plane diverted the plane away from Washington, DC, where the White House or Capitol were the likely targets, and the plane crashed in rural Pennsylvania.
The attacks killed thousands of people, both passengers on the planes and people in the buildings that were targeted. The United States responded by waging a decades-long “war on terror” on various Muslim-majority nation-states. This campaign resulted in the displacement of 38 million people and the direct and indirect deaths of 4.5 million people (Mazzarino, Andrea. “What the War on Terror Has to Do With the Rise in Mass Migration.” The Nation, 2023). The war on terror has not had an official ending, but the United States stopped awarding the National Defense Service Medal for the global war at the end of 2022; operations related to the war continue.
Butler is critical of both the September 11 attacks led by Al-Qaeda and the subsequent war on terror led by the United States. The author argues that the context for the attacks—the United States’ imperialism—needs to be considered, though this context does not excuse the actions of the attackers. The attacks left the United States in a heightened state of vulnerability, and Butler begins Precarious Life with their theory that ethical opportunities lie in the painful experience of such heightened vulnerability. The United States, however, refused these opportunities in its immediate insistence on violence as a response.
Sociohistorical Context: Zionism and the Establishment of Modern Israel
Zionism is a late-19th-century movement focused on the “return” of Jewish people to Palestine, an area that generally covers the Biblical land known as Israel. Zionism became an official movement with the publication of Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State in 1897, gaining momentum at the end of the 19th century due to increasing antisemitism in Europe. From 1897 to 1948, Zionists focused on creating an official state for Jews in Palestine. After the creation of the modern state of Israel in 1948, Zionists became focused on protecting Israel.
Though there are many schools of Zionism (including political Zionism, religious Zionism, liberal Zionism, revisionist Zionism, and green Zionism), all Zionists believe that Palestine, or the area in the Hebrew Bible referred to as Israel, is the rightful homeland of the Jews and that Jews should have a state grounded in Jewish self-determination. Jewish people, dispersed across the globe for thousands of years, have a Biblically based claim to Israel as their homeland. Many elements of Zionism are embedded in the Israeli Declaration of Independence, the founding document of Israel, and the flag of the Zionist movement became the flag of the state of Israel.
Critics of Zionism, such as Butler, argue that Zionism is a racist, colonial ideology that has resulted in the displacement of Indigenous people from their own homeland and that it is based in a dangerous exceptionalism that assumes the area of Palestine “belongs” to the Jews, despite other groups having lived there for thousands of years. The Zionist-based creation of the Israeli state occurred through the theft of Palestinian lands and the displacement of the Palestinian population, many of whom were forced to live in refugee camps, as many Palestinians still do. Since the founding of Israel, the state has privileged Jews over other populations and has maintained Israel through violence. As a self-identified progressive Jew, Butler is deeply critical of both Zionism and Zionist-based Israeli violence.
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