| Title | : | Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1844675440 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781844675449 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 168 |
| Publication | : | First published May 6, 2004 |
Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence Reviews
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Kodėl vienų gedime viešai, dėl jų sielvartaujam ir "amžinai prisimenam" (tautinės - visų tautų - klišės taip skelbia), o kitų mirčių iš vis nelaikom vertomis pastebėti? Čia tik pirmas, pradinis klausimas, nuo kurio prasideda aiškinimasis, kas šiandieną yra precarious life, ir ypač kariniuose konfliktuose. Knyga su daug daug faktinės informacijos ir gera (nors gana nuspėjama) interpretacija. Nėra vienodai įdomi visa knyga: vidurys, matyti, buvo skausmingai aktualus būtent prieš 14 ar gal dar prieš 10 metų, o dabar jau daugybė naujesnių ir ne mažiau neteisingų dalykų užgožė ir Irako karą, ir net Guantanamo fenomeną. Bet labai labai verta vis tiek paskaityti (o, pavyzdžiui, nedidelis skyrius apie Izraelio konfliktinę retoriką/ taktiką - dar vis aktualus).
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With Butler, I could easily flip back to the beginning and read again. Precarious Life, written just after the events of 9/11 in response to trauma, heightened vulnerability, fear, aggression, and our subsequent engagement in perpetual war, remains a timely and necessary read. The book is premised on what has come to constitute a human being: namely, as that which counts as a liveable life and a grieveable death. Anyone, or rather, anything that does not fall within those two categories, as a life worth living or a death worth grieving, is no longer regarded as human. In just five chapters, Butler confronts the rise in censorship within the media, public sphere, and the U.S. government, with particular emphasis on the harm of operating within binarism: that one is either for us or siding with the enemy, without possibility of a third way.
We move quickly—too quickly—from the experience of trauma and suffering to acts of aggression and violence. Butler asks, “what might be made of grief besides a cry for war?” The reality is that we don’t know what to do with grief. This is as much true for many of us individually as it is collectively true for the country as a whole. Butler addresses this in part by offering a psychoanalytic approach to understand why aggression so often follows the experience of loss. In doing so, she pulls from Levinas’ concept of the “face,” the notion that we can’t “will away” an Other because in doing so, we cease to be human. Which is to say, in our dehumanization of others, we are, in effect, dehumanizing ourselves. Zizek would affirm: we’re okay with the Other, insofar as he doesn’t intrude. That others around the world suffer extreme violence remains of little concern to us—so long as said violence does not affect us. Indeed, our own violence, that which we inflict on others, is justified as an act of self-defense, thus an act of noblity.
Butler highlights two current examples where we see the aforementioned themes at work: indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay and anti-semitism, in light of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. With the former, pulling from Foucalt’s notion of sovereignty and governmentality, we see that Guantanamo Bay operates within a suspension of the law that simultaneously suspends the political status of the detainee. They are not even considered “prisoners,” much less human. The example of anti-semitism provides Butler’s perspective of an attempt to “quell public criticism” by censoring speech in the public sphere so as not to offend. This particular section is also a testament to the operative binarism of being with us or against us; Butler, herself a Jew, has much to say on this point and remains hopeful for the potential and necessity of critical speech and thoughtful dialogue in the public sphere.
As Butler forewarns in the preface, there is no happy ending or resolution. Her final chapter is only an approach toward a non-violent, Levinasian-inspired, ethics that is based on the precariousness of life. In sum, she writes in hopes that we might begin to think both critically and publicly about the collective experience of trauma and the effects of war. Precarious Life is a call to responsibility, a call to work toward becoming political in the truest sense of the term. -
Still incredibly prescient, even though it was written in the wake of 9/11 and the American invasion of Afghanistan. The essay “Violence, Mourning, Politics” is one of the best pieces of writing from Butler that I’ve read (and I wrote a master’s thesis on her so I’ve done a decent amount of Butler reading) and it really helped me parse and think through the current Western reactions to Russia’s imperialist invasion of Ukraine vs those same reactions to America’s imperialist invasions in the Middle East.
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There are a few great ideas in this book, but they could have been expressed in about 3 pages. Or else she could have taken these great ideas and expanded them into an entire book. I was expecting more than it delivered.
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I received this kindle edition of Judith Butler's Precarious Life as part of my Verso book club subscription. In a series of essays, Butler responds to the ways in which the United States reacted to the 9/11 terrorist attacks and outlines the ways in which we determine who is human, and therefore who is grievable. A complex, thoughtful collection, although a little dense.
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This is Butler at her best: lucid, graceful prose that takes to task constructs of what constitutes a liveable life and a greiveable death in American news media: "The task at hand is to establish modes of public seeing and hearing that might well respond to the cry of the human within the sphere of appearance, a sphere in which the trace of the cry has become hyperbolically inflated to rationalize a gluttonous nationalism..." Butler's final chapter in which she grounds her critique in Levinas's concept of "the face" is one of the most beautiful pieces of prose I've read in a long time, especially in the wake of her earlier, much less stylized work in poststructural/gender theory.
Butler is sometimes criticized for the breadth of her scholarship, but I think her eclectic background culminates in _Precarious Life_ to produce an impassioned, thoughtful response that necessarily speaks across disciplines. I especially urge people doing media studies to read this. It's much less didactic than a lot of stuff out there. -
zapravo me najviše zanimao esej o žalovanju, i tu ima nekih zanimljivih poenti, a sve ostalo je onako, kao i sve sa batler : teme su politički zanimljive, ali iz njene vizure je to 'mlako', nedostaje kritika političke ekonomije i sve opet preteže na diskurzivnu problematiku
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Pleased to return to this book and find it just as erudite as the first time around… Butler‘s call for the humanities and cultural critics, as well as everyday consumers of media and political discourse, to examine the ways in which perpetual war, violence, cruelty, and dehumanization of the other are conveyed through disavowals of mourning, vulnerability, and the inherent fragility of human life. Certainly, the first two essays here are the strongest and offer the most (perhaps as theoretical points of view from which to continue working), however I also appreciated Butler’s insights into other political conflicts. They are certainly one of those people whom reading feels like having my opinions revealed to myself, more clearly and well-constructed than I might have imagined!
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Butler goes off every single time and this is no exception
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“Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something.”
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One of the reviews on the back of this book describes it as one of Butler's most accessible. I agree.
It was an easy and relatively quick read with a lot of insight into the "War on Terror," in the U.S., Middle East, and Guantanamo Bay. I especially liked the middle (and longest) essay for its explanation of a lot of Foucault's ideas around sovereignty and governmentality, set around the case study of indefinite detention.
The book didn't contain as much about "precarity" as I was hoping. It's an intriguing concept on its own and I didn't really feel like the book's title fit, except kind of in the last essay.
I'm looking forward to reading Frames of War! -
Is a Muslim life as valuable as legibly First World lives? Are the Palestinians yet accorded the status of "human" in US policy and press coverage? Will those hundreds of thousands of Muslim lives lost in the last decades of strife ever receive the equivalent to the paragraph-long obituaries in the that seek to New York Times humanize -- often through nationalist and familial framing devices -- those Americans who have been violently killed? Is our capacity to mourn in global dimensions foreclosed precisely by the failure to conceive of Muslim and Arab lives as lives ?
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Judith Butler stuns again, academic prose written so eloquently, full of emotion that you forget that this draws from the events of 9/11. The precarity of life is always through face of the other and by relating back to work from Foucault, Agamben and Levinas, her political philosophy is meaningful, powerful and always thoughtful. On page 22 she writes “who am I, without you?”, and just like that, she’s written every love story possible. Bravo Butler, as always you are my hero.
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Brilliant.
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An intervention into the question of the human, and, more intensely, Bush-era politics and foreign policy. This philosophical and theoretical text argues that the U.S. never "properly" grieved and mourned, but rather moved straight to lashing out, which created (and continues to create, I would argue, as others have, too) an incredible amount pain and suffering, and in the end did not help the U.S.'s mourning. Furthermore, Butler argues, the U.S. at the time of "9/11" (and the aftermath) had an opportunity to critically rethink itself -- the way it has been conducting itself -- as a military and economic global power. As we know, this was refused, and the U.S. chose to continue in its destructive ways. The text asks some important questions, which are still relevant now: "Who counts as human?" to "Why are only some lives grievable?" to "What do we lose in loss?" Here, I would like to quote a rather brilliant part of the text: "It is not as if 'I' exist independently over here and then simply loses a 'you' over there, especially if the attachment to 'you' is part of what composes who 'I' am. If I lose you, under these conditions, then I not only mourn the loss, I become inscrutable to myself. Who 'am' I , without you? When we lose some of these ties by which we are constituted, we do not know who we are or what to do. On one level, I think I have lost 'you' only to discover that 'I' have gone missing as well. At another level, perhaps what I have lost 'in' you, that for which I have no ready vocabulary, is a relationality that is composed neither exclusively of myself nor you, but is to be conceived of the tie by which those terms are differentiated and related" (22). I quote this to highlight one of the most valuable aspects of the book: relationality. Precarious Lives shows how we are in dense, yet fragile, relationality with others (many of whom are anonymous), and that we are "undone" by each other -- and in an unnumberal amount of ways. Indeed, life is precarious -- for us all. And there is nothing we can do about this situation, which becomes especially intense for those living on the borderlands of those who constitute the human. I argue that this important text can aid in the rethinking of how we live with each other and more.
To be sure, Precarious Life is even more important today: the drone wars,the violence in Syria, the current refugee issues, and the rise of Trump. It is required reading for anyone doing political science, ethics, any field in the humanities, and, simply, anyone who desires to go deeper into the issues and action of yesterday and today. Sadly, I think, it will always be a book that we will need to return to -- given our global, international corporate, war-drive economy world we currently live in. But perhaps, as Butler leaves open, there is a way to re-imagine the world -- one more inviting, accepting and inhabitable for all. -
This book reflects on the world after 9/11. It documents the return of the extra juridical power of sovereignty (as conceived by Foucault) and its impact on the precarization of life (naked life). As a response to this attack on life, Butler advocates an ethical responsibility focused on mutual-recognition and visibility of the excluded, even if the only way to do it is to mourn them.
Great to read along with Butler's Undoing Gender or Agamben's State of Exception. -
"Levinas writes:
"The approach to the face is the most basic mode of responsibility . . . The face is not in front of me (en face de moi), but above me; it is the other before death, looking through and exposing death. Secondly, the face is the other who asks me not to let him die alone, as if to do so were to become an accomplice in his death."
. . . So the face, strictly speaking, does not speak, but what the face means is nevertheless conveyed by the commandment, "Thou shalt not kill." It conveys this commandment without precisely speaking it. It would seem that we can use this biblical command to understand something of the face's meaning, but something is missing here, since the "face" does not speak in the sense that the mouth does; the face is neither reducible to the mouth nor, indeed, to anything the mouth has to utter. Someone or something else speaks when the face is likened to a certain kind of speech; it is a speech that does not come from a mouth or, if it does, has no ultimate origin or meaning there. In fact, in an essay titled "Peace and Proximity," Levinas makes plain that "the face is not exclusively a human face." To explain this he refers to Vassili Grossman's text "Life and Fate," which he describes as:"the story . . . of the families, wives, and parents of political detainees traveling to the Lubyanka in Moscow for the latest news. A line is formed at the counter, a line where one can see only the backs of others. A woman awaits her turn: [She] had never thought that the human back could be so expressive, and could convey states of mind in such a penetrating way. Persons approaching the counter has a particular way of craning their neck and their back, their raised shoulders with shoulder blades like springs, which seemed to cry, sob, and scream. (PP, 167)"
Here the term "face" operates as a catachresis: "face" describes the human back, the craning of the neck, the raising of the shoulder blades like "springs." And these bodily parts, in turn, are said to cry and to sob and to scream, as if they were a face or, rather, a face with a mouth, a throat, or indeed, just a mouth and throat, from which vocalizations emerge that do not settle into words. The face is to be found in the back and the neck, but it is not quite a face. The sounds that come from or through the face are agonized, suffering . . . The face, if we are to put words to its meaning, will be that for which no words really work; the face seems to be a kind of sound, the sound of language evacuating its sense, the sonorous substratum of vocalization that precedes and limits the delivery of any semantic sense.
At the end of this description, Levinas spends the following lines, which do not quite accomplish the sentence form: "The face as the extreme precariousness of the other. Peace as awakeness to the precariousness of the other." Both statements are similes, and they both avoid the verb, especially the copula. They do not say that the face is that precariousness, or that peace is the mode of being awake to an Other's precariousness. Both phrases are substitutions that refuse any commitment to the order of being. Levinas tells us, in fact, that "humanity is a rupture of being" and in the previous remarks he performs that suspension and rupture in an utterance that is both less and more than a sentence form. To respond to the face, to understand its meaning, means to be awake to what is precarious in another life or, rather, the precariousness of life itself. This cannot be an awakeness, to use his word, to my own life, and then an extrapolation from an understanding of my own precariousness to an understanding of another's precarious life. It has to be an understanding of the precariousness of the Other. This is what makes the face belong to the sphere of ethics. Levinas writes, "the face of the other in its precariousness and defenselessness, is for me at once the temptation to kill, and the call to peace, the 'You shall not kill'". This last remark suggests something quite disarming in several senses. Why would it be that the very precariousness of the Other would produce for me a temptation to kill? Or why would it produce the temptation to kill at the same time that it delivers a demand for peace? Is there something about my apprehension of the Other's precariousness that makes me want to kill the Other? Is it the simple vulnerability of the Other that becomes a murderous temptation for me? If the Other, the Other's face, which after all carries the meaning of this precariousness, at once tempts me with murder and prohibits me from acting upon it, then the face operates to produce a struggle for me, and establishes this struggle at the heart of ethics."
& later, toward the end of this enormously resonant essay "Precarious Life":
"We have been turned away from the face, sometimes through the very image of the face, one that is meant to convey the inhuman, the already dead, that which is not precariousness and cannot, therefore, be killed; this is the face that we are nevertheless asked to kill, as if ridding the world of this face would return is to the human rather than consummate our own inhumanity. One would need to hear the face as it speaks in something other than language to know the precariousness of life that is at stake." -
The book probably would have been more striking had I read it when it first came out-- and hence, not already heard (and/or made), in various forms, many of the awesome arguments Butler employs. Absolutely worth it, though.
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"violence, mourning, politics" chapter was very very good; the rest was eh.
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good discussion of mourning and violence but is marred by butler's postmodern blinders
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"Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something." (23)
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This is a very interesting book, although a bit dated. It compiles five essays Butler wrote on the first years after 9/11, commenting on the events as they were unfolding.
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An overall solid book about the post-9/11 world, written in the post-9/11 time. It was a scattershot time, and some of these essays are a little scattershot. They also get more dense as the book goes on, and a little less accessible. While this book is far more accessible than some of Butler's other work, there are times that if you're really not into Foucaultian terms like sovereignty and governmentality, your eyes will glaze over.
The first essay is about the self-censorship, and the shunning of anti-war narratives in the mass media of the time. We have infinitely more options than just cable news and the New York Times today, but the same kind of shaving the contours of debate you can see today. Look on how when Trump used the moab or any other military hardware and all of CNN is bedazzled with the weight of the office of President. With absolutely no concern that the military and wars... you know. Kill people, usually thousands upon millions.
The second essays asks why we acted the way we did after 9/11, i.e., violently. A lot of it is tied up in media-crit, but Butler takes a different route: examining mourning and psychoanalyzing it. I don't think this is a bad thing, this is a good worthwhile essay. Her point is who are we allowed to mourn publicly, in the media, on the news? Is it Palestinians getting mowed down by Israeli commandos? Is it the "collateral damage" to our invasions of foreign countries which come with substantial body counts? A good example of this is the way the number of those killed in 9/11 is repeated almost like catechism in the media, while humanizing body counts to our inhuman war-crimes is never really reported.
The third essay is when she almost loses me entirely, tying into discussion of infinite detentions at Guantomano Bay with Michel Foucalt's ideas about governmentality and sovereignty. A lot of this kind of post-modern philosophy is Butler's bread and butter. I think in this essay her style of over-complicating what to me are simple ideas really comes out. She ties governmenality, that is the idea that routinized government actions give rise to power and sovereignty. I'm not sure I quite understood all of it, this is the essay that took me the longest to read and digest. Maybe I'm writing this with the benefit of it being over 15 years later, but it seems to me there are far simpler explanations and theories on where the Bush administration got it's power to do that than reaching towards the ideas of Michel Foucalt.
What follows after is Buter writing about Larry Summers' equating critiques of Israel with anti-semetism. It's a solid essay. You can read what's basically a shorter version on Jewish Currents where Butler reviews Bari Weiss' book that essentially is just a book-long polemic on the ame subject. Butler treats Weiss seriously and rakes her across the coals as politely as possible in about a ten to fifteen minute read.
The last essay sees Butler being a little more obtuse again, bringing up another french philosophy of the 20th century to talk about how we empathize or don't empathize with those we deem others. While loss sometimes breeds violence, it is the ideas of Levinas that suggests a way to end the cycle. The essay doesn't really crystalize for me until the end when she talks about the images they were showing in American media at the time.
I gave this three stars and a lot of it is me complaining that Butler made a simple point too complicated or obtuse. It's probably more of a reflection of where I come from versus where she comes from and what she does. Invoking Foucalt or Levinas' ideas isn't invalid or bad. In fact upon rereading some sections for writing this review, their ideas are interesting if difficult to wrap your head around on a first reading. The parts that resonate for me are when Butler brings their ideas to bear on the media, and that's probably because I work in media and media critique is important and there isn't enough of it. -
Read parts of this collection of essays in uni and have come back to it 5 years later. I've been thinking about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and also lately about the refugees who are still locked up in indefinite detention by the Australian government. Found myself very troubled by the way Russian soldiers and civilians have been completely dehumanized online and in public discourse - I feel that this vitriolic attitude towards the 'aggressors' in the war constitutes a kind of horrible (and easy!) moral failure, that can only bring about more violence in future. Thus I was compelled to revisit this book. I find I still more or less agree with Butler's points. It's important to orient ourselves towards a future where every single human life is understood as precarious and grievable - any kind of us/them thinking can never be anything else than violence. Every life should be real. Mourned. Conflicts of values are necessary, because this is a condition of human life - interpersonal and intercultural discourse. Only from here can new ways of living emerge.
The esssay on indefinite detention is still entirely applicable to the situation here in Australia. Butler calls on Foucault's distinction between 'governmentality' (the everyday managing of people and goods and affairs and laws in a state) and 'sovereignty' (the unique and almost godlike power that operates over and above the law). When arbitrary government officials 'decide' to suspend the law and detain refugees indefinitely, having 'deemed' them potentially dangerous, they make use of this 'sovereign' power in the name of 'the state'. The refugees are rendered inhuman - stateless, powerless, they exist only to provide a reason for this terrible 'sovereignty' to assert itself, in order to uphold 'Australia' and 'Australian-ness'. I was reminded also by the way governments around the world called on this sovereign power to 'magically' supersede laws and create new conditions of living, in the name of the 'national emergency' Covid-19.
Butler's evocation of Levinas and the 'face' of the 'Other' as a foundation for ethics and action is still also very pertinent. I agree with the idea that the 'essence' or the 'truth' of the encounter with the Other is not something that can be adequately expressed by means of language or sound or image - it's something inexpressible and unfathomable, which we experience nonetheless. The reality of the Other is best represented by the extreme challenge which the encounter brings to our lives. I've always liked this line of thought.
All a bit daft really, in light of the awful war going on. Just trying to read stuff to provide some solidity to my thinking - like clutching on to driftwood. -
In this book, Judith Butler presents what I had previously believed to be an impossibility—an ability to derive from consciousness and empathy a principled, structured, and congruous political identity.
Butler encourages a return to both critical thinking and discourse. She leans into the necessity of having nuanced and difficult conversations about some of the most tenuous and tender topics facing the world. She presents carefully and thoughtfully, as well as through the lens of empathy and conscientiousness, that to avoid these conversations is to endanger those around the world who are the most vulnerable and to prolong their suffering simply to maintain our own comfort and good-standing in society.
The concept of suffering, which Butlers entangles expertly with the reality of humanity is the through line of all five essays and presents the point (that I believe) is the largest takeaway of the book itself. She presents a view of humanity based in difference and distance; an idea that, prior to my reading this book, I would have considered completely antithetical to my own personal worldview. She rebukes the concept of a universality of the human condition and instead implores the reader to dig their heels into the inherent and irreconcilable differences between individuals and cultures and to bridge that gap by becoming comfortable in that distance. She turns specifically to the event of suffering and presents it as a way to acknowledge these differences but to sit with that reality long enough to push past the impulse of dehumanization and othering and revenge into a realm in which suffering unites all of our differences in a way no other human experience can. She presents a future in which the experience of suffering can present a path and procedure for preventing the suffering of others in the future, no matter how different they may be from ourselves. She delves into the coupling of humanization and dehumanization as well as the ideas of “unlivable lives” and “ungrievable deaths” as a method of maintaining the current violence-prone status quo. She claims that in the acknowledgement of difference we can push past these characterizations and effectively procure a future in which violence, neither for the sake of preventing future violence nor for the sake of avenging past violence, is an acceptable occurrence.
It is not often that you read a book that fundamentally affects your personal worldview or the way you think and relate to others on a day to day basis, but this book did that for me. -
This is a brief and powerful book that largely focuses on ethical questions related to the wars that the USA began during George W Bush's first term as president. Having heard about Butler almost exclusively in relation to Woman/Gender Studies (Gender Trouble, mainly), I picked this up after reading the English translation of Cristina Rivera Garza's Grieving.
Although Butler has a reputation (at least in Gender Trouble) for writing pretty opaque prose, but this was fairly easy to follow (apart from when she is in really heavy dialogue with other philosophers). Although this was written almost 20 years ago, the discussions about humanizing enemies and not proclaiming truth and justice out of one side of our mouth while perpetuating horrible violence at the same time remain (unfortunately) very relevant. What Butler writes about in relation to Iraq and Afghanistan can be applied to the US-Mexico border in the current context, among other places in the world.
"Whether or not we continue to enforce a universal conception of human rights at moments of outrage and incomprehension, precisely when we think that others have taken themselves out of the human community as we know it, is a test of our very humanity" ("Indefinite Detention" 89-90). -
An interesting collection. I think some topics maybe haven't aged well, or at least are really more like sources for a specific time than necessarily have the staying power of other work. The essay about anti-semitism especially feels like it has been more ably taken up, including more recently by Butler herself in her essay about Bari Weiss's book, though both have an element of something missing in their articulations.
The title essay and "Violence, Mourning, Politics," were my favorites; the former also has a kind of incompleteness about it, and I think for me makes the most sense as the staging area for Butler's book about non-violence that came out this year (2020,) though it definitely leaves a lot to chew over. "Violence, Mourning, Politics" is the essay I'm most familiar with via citation, and it was good to read it in its entirety; it's clear why it's so heavily cited, and it's an essay I will definitely come back to. The other essays are fine, just didn't hit as much as those two, or felt like they have not aged as well/are not maybe as groundbreaking as they were in 2004. -
Quem já leu alguma coisa de Judith Butler sabe que esta não é uma leitura muito fácil. Some a isto o texto dela ter um delay de 20 anos, ou seja, ela estava discutindo as vidas precárias no rescaldo do 11 de de setembro de 2001 em seus ensaios e palestras reunidos aqui neste livro. Embora sejam temas prementes e necessários, por vezes a citação de alguns personagens se perdem no tempo histórico e a falta de referência a eles faz o leitor também se perder no contexto em que esses personagens históricos atuaram. Dá a impressão de que eles funcionam mais como textos up-to-date do que um material que seja mais perene. Além disso, os textos reunidos aqui parecem bastante díspares se forem apanhados juntos, levando a intuir que o livro Quadros de Guerra, da mesma autora, que trata de temas semelhantes, seja mais interessante que este. É bastante indagador o fato de este livro ter saído no Brasil, enquanto outros, mais importantes dentro da obra de Butler, como Excitable Speech, continuam inéditos. De qualquer forma, mesmo que este livros seja o menos impactante da bibliografia da filósofa, sempre existem agumas passagens valiosas de serem utilizadas em uma discussão acadêmica.
