Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence

This chapter focuses on the question of what kind of community can arise out of the vulnerability to violence, loss, and the mourning that ensues. According to Butler, there is no “argument” to made against vulnerability and loss, as these are conditions of life.

In the context of the violence of 9/11 and the United States’ violent response to these attacks, Butler takes up several crucial questions in this chapter: “Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? And, finally, What makes for a grievable life?” (20).

Butler approaches vulnerability not only in its individuality, such as the vulnerability of individual bodies, but also in its social context. Humans are constituted politically precisely because they are socially vulnerable. This social vulnerability is grounded in being “socially constituted bodies” (20): People are attached to others and thus risk losing those attachments, and people are exposed to others, and thus at risk of violence because of that exposure.

With loss comes mourning. Freud originally theorized the success of mourning with interchangeability: A severed attachment could simply be replaced by another attachment. Butler acknowledges that they do not know what “successful” mourning is. Rather than a task that one sets out to accomplish, mourning is often overwhelming, as the “transformative effect” of loss cannot be planned and exceeds one’s own agency. If there is any “success” in the process, it may be in “submitting” to the transformative nature of mourning.

If mourning exceeds agency and transforms a person, loss itself is “enigmatic”: People often do not know what they have lost. The enigma of loss not only lies in what is lost, but within the self. In mourning, one becomes “inscrutable” to the self. This inscrutability foregrounds that there is not simply a relation in which individuals or entities exist independent of one another, but there are ties that bind one to another, and these ties “constitute” us as humans, even as we lose them.

While the general approach to mourning is that it is private and “privatizing,” Butler insists again that mourning is political. Mourning foregrounds “relational ties” that articulate dependency and ethical responsibility. If people are constituted by one another and by the ties that are created and lost, this relationality is a fact of existence, and thus existence is undeniably social and political.

This dissolution of bonds in loss results in an unutterable narrative, where one is not sure how to present a first-person account of the self. People are both “in thrall” to one another and “undone” by one another. Continuing with this train of thought, Butler asserts that people are “dispossessed” by mourning and, more broadly, by these ties. They are dispossessed of a clear understanding of these relational ties and themselves.

Butler holds this dispossession up against the claims to individuality and bodily autonomy that are central to many political movements. Butler does not discount the need for these movements or the need for bodily autonomy that they seek. At the same time, this understanding of people as autonomous beings does not fully comprehend humans’ existence. Butler is thus calling for an alternative “normative aspiration” that acknowledges and supports the “dispossession” of relations. People must both struggle for autonomy as well as for a communal existence in which people acknowledge and celebrate our vulnerability and dependence on one another. People are more than discrete, autonomous, “bounded” beings, as their past “primary others” (such as parents) live on in the very fiber of “the boundary that contains me” (28).

Returning to the “opportunity” that violence affords, as discussed in Chapter 1, Butler asks Americans whether there is “something to be learned about the geopolitical distribution of corporeal vulnerability from our own brief and devastating exposure to this condition” (29). Americans’ exposure as a nation is minimal compared to most of the world, which lives in much greater vulnerability. Contrary to the fear of mourning and desire to eradicate it to “return” to “normal” is Butler’s insistence on mourning as a political “resource” in which Americans slowly identify with suffering and an “unknowingness” about the other, ties with the other, and themselves. Grief is disorienting: One no longer has a sense of what “I” am in the face of the loss of the other and may feel as though they don’t know at all who the other was.

This question of vulnerability and loss leads Butler to a discussion of humans whose lives do not register as lives and thus whose deaths do not register as losses. These are lives designated as “unreal.” Those who are considered “unreal” have already, in this very designation, experienced violence. Once life is derealized, “from the perspective of violence, it fails to injure or negate those lives, since those lives are already negated” (33). At the same time, the lives of those who have been derealized are never securely derealized and thus must be negated constantly. This derealization is a state of undeadness, from the perspective of violence, that requires a constant replenishing of violence. This state of undeadness can be witnessed, for example, in the genre of the obituary, where certain deaths are not allowed to be mourned publicly and thus refused mournability.

Butler here offers the example of the San Francisco Chronicle refusing to publish an obituary or even statements “in memoriam” for two Palestinian families killed by Israeli troops on the grounds that publication would “offend.” This refusal demonstrates the relation between dehumanization and discourse, which centers not on dehumanizing discourse itself but a “refusal of discourse that produces dehumanization as a result” (36). The refusal to publish the obituary recognizing the lives and deaths of the two Palestinian families derealizes these lives.

Butler returns to the question of the United States’ response to the violence of 9/11 and the “opportunity” of this trauma. The loss is not only that of lives but of the United States’ “sovereign entitlement.” This is a “grandiose” and “narcissistic” fantasy that must also be mourned as a loss. Rather than mourn the loss of this fantasy, the United States chose to shore it up.

Butler then turns toward how there might be a “way out of the circle of violence altogether” (42). This would entail a world in which “bodily vulnerability is protected without therefore being eradicated and with insisting on the line that must be walked between the two” (42). This may be seen as a new definition of humanism that hinges on shared corporeal vulnerability, but Butler points out that a recognition of vulnerability is dependent on “existing norms of recognition if it is to be attributed to any human subject” (43).

Butler ultimately describes the “foreignness” of the self as ethically charged. While this ignorance of self may initially seem like a problem, Butler is not dismissing the need to know something about oneself as necessary for political action. At the same time, this unknowingness or foreignness of self that may be experienced most profoundly in mourning testifies to a “woundedness” and the fact that responsibility cannot be thought of in isolation. Returning to the United States’ response to 9/11, Butler briefly references Sophocles’s Antigone, highlighting the enormous risks Antigone takes in trying to bury her brother, determined an enemy by Creon; thus, a public mourning goes against his wartime edict. A struggle to resist derealization entails a public refusal of prohibitions on mourning.