Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence

Governmentality and sovereign power are terms used by philosopher Michel Foucault in his identification and analysis of different forms of political power.

Governmentality refers to the management of populations, including the distribution of essential goods. Sovereign power is a concentrated and locatable power that exercises ultimate authority, including matters of life and death. The sovereign, traditionally a monarch, consolidates power in their body, and thus this power can be taken away through regicide. Sovereign power, Foucault argues, has been replaced by a modern and diffuse form of power that appears to be much more “humane” precisely because it is so diffuse. Butler contends that sovereign power still exists and is exemplified by the detention of suspects at Guantanamo Bay.

Indefinite detention refers to the suspended state of existence at Guantanamo Bay and other detention facilities in the United States post-9/11. People suspected of violence against the United States were detained under a suspension of law in which they were not entitled to due process. The term detention is used rather than imprisonment because imprisonment, at least theoretically, recognizes the prisoner as a legal subject, entitled to certain rights. A “detainee,” however, exists in an “indefinite” suspended state of existence in which they are not considered legal subjects and thus are awaiting, indefinitely, that from which they have been removed. The discourse of indefinite detention marks sovereign power, in which a few bureaucrats can decide, with no oversight, to detain, torture, and kill. Indefinite detention is an extra-legal mode of enacting dehumanization, in which all human rights are suspended.

Mournability refers to the recognition of loss in the death of the other, who thus becomes mournable. While the processes of grieving and mourning are generally assumed to be private and personal, Butler is interested in the politics of both mourning and mournability. If one is not mournable, then death is not registered as loss, and life is not livable. Thus, mournability is an ethical power. Mournability is both cultivated and prohibited in the public realm, with the prohibition of mourning enabling violence, as violence enacted on one whose death does not matter is not “true” violence because death is not a “true” death. This results in what Butler calls the derealization of life, in which others become “unreal.” This means that “from the perspective of violence” there is no injury or harm done to one whose life is “already negated” (33). At the same time, however, derealization is not unequivocal, and the derealized nonetheless remain somewhat animated, thus requiring repeated negation and violence.

The face is a complex theory developed by Emmanuel Levinas of interrelational ethics grounded in the other’s “address.” For Levinas, the face may be an actual human face, but it does not have to be. “The face” exceeds discourse and exudes the vulnerability of life. This apprehension of vulnerability in “the face” inspires violence in the apprehender. Thus, vulnerability and violence, among humans, go hand in hand. This violent response to vulnerability necessitates nonviolence, which is always involved in a wrestling with violence.