Precarious Life. Judith Butler
the process of that imagining, although there are no grand utopian conclusions here. The first essay begins with the rise of censorship and anti-intellectualism that took hold in the fall of 2001 when anyone who sought to understand the “reasons” for the attack on the United States was regarded as someone who sought to “exonerate” those who conducted that attack. Editorials in the New York Times criticized “excuseniks,” exploiting the echoes of “peaceniks”—understood as naive and nostalgic political actors rooted in the frameworks of the sixties—and “refuseniks”—those who refused to comply with Soviet forms of censorship and control and often lost employment as a result. If the term was meant to disparage those who cautioned against war, it inadvertently produced the possibility of an identification of war resistors with courageous human rights activists. The effort at disparagement revealed the difficulty of maintaining a consistently negative view of those who sought a historical and political understanding of the events of September 11 much less of those who opposed war against Afghanistan as a legitimate response.
I argue that it is not a vagary of moral relativism to try to understand what might have led to the attacks on the United States. Further, one can—and ought to—abhor the attacks on ethical grounds (and enumerate those grounds), feel a full measure of grief for those losses, but let neither moral outrage nor public mourning become the occasion for the muting of critical discourse and public debate on the meaning of historical events. One might still want to know what brought about these events, want to know how best to address those conditions so that the seeds are not sown for further events of this kind, find sites of intervention, help to plan strategies thoughtfully that will not beckon more violence in the future. One can even experience that abhorrence, mourning, anxiety, and fear, and have all of these emotional dispositions lead to a reflection on how others have suffered arbitrary violence at the hands of the US, but also endeavor to produce another public culture and another public policy in which suffering unexpected violence and loss and reactive aggression are not accepted as the norm of political life.
The second piece, “Violence, Mourning, Politics,” takes up a psychoanalytic understanding of loss to see why aggression sometimes seems so quickly to follow. The essay pursues the problem of a primary vulnerability to others, one that one cannot will away without ceasing to be human. It suggests as well that contemporary forms of national sovereignty constitute efforts to overcome an impressionability and violability that are ineradicable dimensions of human dependency and sociality. I also consider there how certain forms of grief become nationally recognized and amplified, whereas other losses become unthinkable and ungrievable. I argue that a national melancholia, understood as a disavowed mourning, follows upon the erasure from public representations of the names, images, and narratives of those the US has killed. On the other hand, the US’s own losses are consecrated in public obituaries that constitute so many acts of nation-building. Some lives are grievable, and others are not; the differential allocation of grievability that decides what kind of subject is and must be grieved, and which kind of subject must not, operates to produce and maintain certain exclusionary conceptions of who is normatively human: what counts as a livable life and a grievable death?
“Indefinite Detention” considers the political implications of those normative conceptions of the human that produce, through an exclusionary process, a host of “unlivable lives” whose legal and political status is suspended. The prisoners indefinitely detained in Guantanamo Bay are not considered “subjects” protected by international law, are not entitled to regular trials, to lawyers, to due process. The military tribunals that have, at this date, not been used, represent a breach of constitutional law that makes final judgments of life and death into the prerogative of the President. The decision to detain some, if not most, of the 680 inmates currently in Guantanamo is left to “officials” who will decide, on uncertain grounds, whether these individuals present a risk to US security. Bound by no legal guidelines except those fabricated for the occasion, these officials garner sovereign power unto themselves. Whereas Foucault argued that sovereignty and governmentality can and do coexist, the particular form of that coexistence in the contemporary war prison has yet to be charted. Governmentality designates a model for conceptualizing power in its diffuse and multivalent operations, focusing on the management of populations, and operating through state and non-state institutions and discourses. In the current war prison, officials of governmentality wield sovereign power, understood here as a lawless and unaccountable operation of power, once legal rule is effectively suspended and military codes take its place. Once again, a lost or injured sovereignty becomes reanimated through rules that allocate final decisions about life and death to the executive branch or to officials with no elected status and bound by no constitutional constraints.
These prisoners are not considered “prisoners” and receive no protection from international law. Although the US claims that its imprisonment methods are consistent with the Geneva Convention, it does not consider itself bound to those accords, and offers none of the legal rights stipulated by that accord. As a result, the humans who are imprisoned in Guantanamo do not count as human; they are not subjects protected by international law. They are not subjects in any legal or normative sense. The dehumanization effected by “indefinite detention” makes use of an ethnic frame for conceiving who will be human, and who will not. Moreover, the policy of “indefinite detention” produces a sphere of imprisonment and punishment unfettered by any laws except those fabricated by the Department of State. The state itself thus attains a certain “indefinite” power to suspend the law and to fabricate the law, at which point the separation of powers is indefinitely set aside. The Patriot Act constitutes another effort to suspend civil liberties in the name of security, one that I do not consider in these pages, but hope to in a future article. In versions 1 and 2 of the Patriot Act, it is the public intellectual culture that is targeted for control and regulation, overriding longstanding claims to intellectual freedom and freedom of association that have been central to conceptions of democratic political life.
“The Charge of Anti-Semitism: Jews, Israel, and the Risks of Public Critique” considers one effort to quell public criticism and intellectual debate in the context of criticisms of Israeli state and military policy. The remark made by Harvard’s President, Lawrence Summers, that to criticize Israel is to engage in “effective” anti-Semitism is critically examined for its failure to distinguish between Jews and Israel, and for the importance of acknowledging publicly those progressive Jewish (Israeli and diasporic) efforts of resistance to the current Israeli state. I consider the consequential implications of his statement, one that expressed sentiments that many people and organizations share, for censoring certain kinds of critical speech by allying those who speak critically with anti-Semitic aims. Given how heinous any identification with anti-Semitism is, especially for progressive Jews who wage their criticisms as Jews, it follows that those who might object to Israeli policy or, indeed, to the doctrine and practice of Zionism, find themselves in the situation of either muting critical speech or braving the unbearable stigma of anti-Semitism by virtue of speaking publicly about their views. This restriction on speaking is enforced through the regulation of psychic and public identifications, specifically, by the threat of having to live in a radically uninhabitable and unacceptable identification with anti-Semitism if one speaks against Israeli policy or, indeed, Israel itself. When the charge of anti-Semitism is used in this way to quell dissent on the matter of Israel, the charge becomes suspect, thereby depriving the charge of its meaning and importance in what surely must remain an active struggle against existing anti-Semitism.
The public sphere is constituted in part by what cannot be said and what cannot be shown. The limits of the sayable, the limits of what can appear, circumscribe the domain in which political speech operates and certain kinds of subjects appear as viable actors. In this instance, the identification of speech that is critical of Israel with anti-Semitism seeks to render it unsayable. It does this through the allocation of stigma, and seeks to preclude from viable discourse criticisms on the structure of the Israeli state, its preconditions of citizenship, its practices of occupation, and its long-standing violence. I argue in favor of the cessation of both Israeli and Palestinian violence, and suggest that opening up the space for a legitimate public debate, free of intimidation, on the political structure of Israel/Palestine is crucial to that project.
“Precarious Life” approaches the question of a non-violent ethics, one that is based upon an understanding of how easily