Precarious Life. Judith Butler
by us. Such coalitions do not conflict with US supremacy, but confirm it, stoke it, insist upon it, with long-term implications for the future shape and possibility of global cooperation.
Perhaps the question cannot be heard at all, but I would still like to ask: Can we find another meaning, and another possibility, for the decentering of the first-person narrative within the global framework? I do not mean that the story of being attacked should not be told. I do not mean that the story that begins with September 11 should not be told. These stories have to be told, and they are being told, despite the enormous trauma that undermines narrative capacity in these instances. But if we are to come to understand ourselves as global actors, and acting within a historically established field, and one that has other actions in play, we will need to emerge from the narrative perspective of US unilateralism and, as it were, its defensive structures, to consider the ways in which our lives are profoundly implicated in the lives of others. My friends on the Left joke about having lost their First World complacency. Yes, this is true. But do we now seek to restore it as a way of healing from this wound? Or do we allow the challenge to First World complacency to stand and begin to build a different politics on its basis?
My sense is that being open to the explanations, poorly circulated as they are in the United States, that might help us take stock of how the world has come to take this form will involve us in a different order of responsibility. The ability to narrate ourselves not from the first person alone, but from, say, the position of the third, or to receive an account delivered in the second, can actually work to expand our understanding of the forms that global power has taken. But instead of remaining open to a consequential decentering of First Worldism, we tend to dismiss any effort at explanation, as if to explain these events would accord them rationality, as if to explain these events would involve us in a sympathetic identification with the oppressor, as if to understand these events would involve building a justificatory framework for them. Our fear of understanding a point of view belies a deeper fear that we shall be taken up by it, find it is contagious, become infected in a morally perilous way by the thinking of the presumed enemy. But why do we assume this? We claim to have gone to war in order to “root out” the sources of terror, according to Bush, but do we think that finding the individuals responsible for the attacks on the United States will constitute having gotten to the root? Do we not imagine that the invasion of a sovereign country with a substantial Muslim population, supporting the military regime in Pakistan that actively and violently suppresses free speech, obliterating lives and villages and homes and hospitals, will not foster more adamant and widely disseminated anti-American sentiment and political organizing? Are we not, strategically speaking, interested in ameliorating this violence? Are we not, ethically speaking, obligated to stop its further dissemination, to consider our role in instigating it, and to foment and cultivate another sense of a culturally and religiously diverse global political culture?
Part of the problem the United States is up against is that liberals quietly lined up behind the war effort, and supplied in part the rationale that keeps US state violence from being labeled as terrorist. It is not only the conservative Republicans who did not want to hear about “causes.” The “just war” liberal Left made plain that it did not want to hear from “excuseniks.” This coinage, rehabilitating the Cold War rhetoric about Soviet Russia, suggests that those who seek to understand how the global map arrived at this juncture through asking how, in part, the United States has contributed to the making of this map, are themselves, through the style of their inquiry, and the shape of their questions, complicitous with an assumed enemy. But to ask how certain political and social actions come into being, such as the recent terrorist attacks on the United States, and even to identify a set of causes, is not the same as locating the source of responsibility for these actions or, indeed, paralyzing our capacity to make ethical judgments on what is right or wrong.
No doubt there are forms of Left analysis that say simply that the United States has reaped what it has sown. Or they say that the United States has brought this state of events on itself. These are, as closed explanations, simply other ways of asserting US priority and encoding US omnipotence. These are also explanations that assume that these actions originate in a single subject, that the subject is not what it appears to be, that it is the United States that occupies the site of that subject, and that no other subjects exist or, if they exist, their agency is subordinated to our own. In other words, political paranoia of this kind is just another articulation of US supremacy. Paranoia is fed by the fantasy of omnipotence, and we see this evidenced in some of the more extreme explanations of this kind, that is, the attacks on September 11 were masterminded by the CIA or Mossad, the Israeli secret police. It is clear, though, that bin Laden did apprentice to the CIA and that the United States supported the Taliban since the 1990s, when it was deemed strategically useful. These links are not precisely causal explanations, but they are part of an explanatory framework. They do not translate into the notion that the United States performed these acts, but one can see how the connection becomes the occasion for the causal reduction, and a certain paranoia amplifies itself by seizing upon part of a broader explanatory picture.
What is generally heard when these opinions are expressed is that the United States is the culpable agent, that it is, effectively, the author of these events, and that the United States is solely responsible for this global outcome. This kind of reasoning is unacceptable to the press, and to the public in general, because it seems to blame the victim in this instance. But is this the only way to hear this point of view? And is this the only form this point of view takes? It seems that being most precise about this point, and publicizing it where one can, will be crucial for any effort by the Left to offer an anti-war viewpoint within contemporary public discourse.
If we believe that to think radically about the formation of the current situation is to exculpate those who committed acts of violence, we shall freeze our thinking in the name of a questionable morality. But if we paralyze our thinking in this way, we shall fail morality in a different way. We shall fail to take collective responsibility for a thorough understanding of the history that brings us to this juncture. We shall thereby deprive ourselves of the very critical and historical resources we need to imagine and practice another future, one that will move beyond the current cycle of revenge.
When President Arroyo of the Philippines on October 29, 2001, remarks that “the best breeding ground [for terrorism] is poverty,” or Arundhati Roy claims that bin Laden has been “sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid waste by America’s foreign policy,” something less than a strictly causal explanation is being offered. A “breeding ground” does not necessarily breed, but it can. And the “spare rib” that is said to emerge from a world laid waste by US foreign policy has, by definition, emerged in a strange and alchemical fashion. It is from waste that this rib is formed, as if the bone belongs to the dead, or is itself the animation of skeletal remains. This form of alchemical making is not the same as God creating Eve from the rib of Adam, life generating life, but has to be understood as death generating death through a means that is figural, not precisely causal. Indeed, both of them make use of figures—grounds and bones—to bespeak a kind of generation that precedes and exceeds a strictly causal frame. Both of them are pointing to conditions, not causes. A condition of terrorism can be necessary or sufficient. If it is necessary, it is a state of affairs without which terrorism cannot take hold, one that terrorism absolutely requires. If it is sufficient, its presence is enough for terrorism to take place. Conditions do not “act” in the way that individual agents do, but no agent acts without them. They are presupposed in what we do, but it would be a mistake to personify them as if they acted in the place of us. Thus, we can say, and ought to, that US imperialism is a necessary condition for the attacks on the United States, that these attacks would be impossible without the horizon of imperialism within which they occur. But to understand how US imperialism figures here, we have to understand not only how it is experienced by those who understand themselves as its victims, but how it enters into their own formation as acting and deliberating subjects.
This is the beginning of another kind of account. And this seems to be, for instance, what Mary Kaldor in The Nation points to when she claims that “in many of the areas where war takes place and where extreme networks pick up new recruits, becoming a criminal or joining a paramilitary group is literally the only opportunity for unemployed young men lacking formal education.”2 What effect did the killing of an