User:Laurier Rochon/readingnotes/butler precarious life

Judith Butler > Precarious Life

Preface

• "Written in response to the conditions of heightened vulnerability and aggression that followed from those events [9/11]. It was my sense in the fall of 2001 that the Unites States was missing an opportunity to redefine itself as part of a global community when, instead, it heightened nationalistic discourse, extended surveillance mechanisms an, suspended constitutional rights, and developed forms of explicit and implicit censorship.

• "One insight that injury affords is that there are others out there on whom my life depends, people I do not know and my never know."

• "There are ways of distributing vulnerability, differential forms of allocaiton that make some populations more subject to arbritrary violence than others."

• "To be injured means that one has the chance to reflect upon injury, to find out the mechanisms of its distribution, to find out who else suffers from permeable borders, unexpected violence, dispossesions, and fear, and in what ways."

• We are all connected, and will never be completely safe from injury because of this

• Trying to analyse and understand tragedies is often seen as an attempt to make exuses and is quickly condemned - this kills all potention for reflection. "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."

• "...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."

• "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."

• "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 cocneptions of who is normatively human: what counts as a livable life and grievable death?"

• "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"

• "So, it is not that mourning is the goal of politics, but that without the capacity to mourn, we lose that keener sense of life we need in order to oppose violence."

• "It is precisely because one does not want to lose one's status as a viable speaking being that one does not say what one thinks."

Explanation, exoneration, or what we can hear

• 1 "Since the events of Sept 11, we have seen both a rise of anti-intellectualism and a growing acceptance of censorship within the media."

• 2 "Either you're with us or you're with the terrorists"

• 3 "...histories must be recounted in their complexity"

• 3 "the use of flag as an ambiguous sign of solidarity with those lost on September 11 and with the current war, as if the sympathy translates, in a single symbolic stroke, into support for the latter."

• 4 "The articulation of this hegemony takes place in part through producing a consensus on what certain terms will mean, how they can be used, and what lines of solidarity are implicitly drawn through this use."

• 4 "But it is one matter to suffer violence and quite another to use that fact to ground a frameword in which one's injury authorizes limitless aggression against targets that may or may not be related to the sources of one's own suffering."

• 5 Narrative dimension to the framework to understanding violence -> we start by the tragic event (1st person view)

• 5 "Isolating the individuals involved absolves us from the necessity of coming up with a broader explanation for the events."

• 6 "There is no relevant prehistory to the events of Sept 11, since to begin to tell the story a different way, to ask how things came to this, is already to complicate the question of agency which, no doubt, leads to the fear of moral equivocation. [...] we have to start the story with the experience of violence we suffered."

• 7 "Can we find another meaning, and another possibility, for the decentering of the first-person narrative within the global framework?"

• 8 "Our fear of understanding a point of view belies a deeper fear that we shall be taken up by it, find its contagious, become infected in a morally perilous way bu the thinking of the presumed enemy."

• 10 "if we believe that to think radically about the formation of the current situation is it exculpate those who committed acts of violence, we shall freeze our thinking in the name of questionable morality. But if we paralyse our thinking in this way, we shall 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."

• 13 "'Terrorist' and 'slaughter' is a word that, within the hegemonic grammar, should be reserved for unjustified acts of violence against First World nations..."

• 14 "Some terms are not equivalent in the same context (i.e. slaughter)"

• 16 "our responsibility is heightened once we have been subjected to the violence of others. We acted upon, violently, and it appears that our capacity to set our own course at such instances is fully undermined."

• 18 "hearing beyond what we are able to hear"

• 18 "offering names for things that restrain us from thinking and acting radically and well about global options"

Violence, mourning, politics

• 19 "I propose to consider a dimension of political life that has to do with our exposure to violence, and our complicity in it, with out vulnerability to loss and the task of mourning that follows, and with finding a basis for community in these conditions."

• 20 What matters to Butler : "Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? What makes for a grievable life?"

• 21 "Perhaps, rather, one mourns when one accepts that by the loss one undergoes one will be changed, possibly for ever. Perhaps mourning has to do with agreeing to undergo a transformation."

• 21 When this occurs : "Something takes hold of you : where does it come from? What sense does it make? What claims us at such moments, such that we are not the masters of ourselves? To what are we tied? And by what are we seized? Freud reminded us that when we lose someone, we do not always know what it is in that person that has been lost"

• 22 Grief : "it furnishes a sense of political community of a complex order, and it does this first of all by bringing to the fore the relational ties that have implications for theorizing fundamental dependency and ethical responsibility"

• 23 "Let's face it. We're undone by each other."

• 24 Despite my affinity for the term relationality, we may need other langyage to approach the issue that concerns us, a way of thinking about how we are not inly constituted by our relations but also dispossessed by them as well.

• 29 President Bush on Sept 21 2001 : 'We have finished grieving and that NOW it is time for resolue action to take the place of the grief'

• 32 "After all, if someone is lost, and that person is not someone, then what and where is the loss, and how does mourning take place?"

• 33 Violence against the unreal : "They cannot be mourned because they are always already lost or, rather, never 'were' and they must be killed, since they seem to live on, stubbornly, in this state of deadness. Violence renews itself in the face of the apparent inexhaustibility of its object."

• 34 "If there were to be an obituary, there would have had to been a life, a life worth noting, a life worth valuing and preserving, a life that qualifies for recognition."

• 36 "Dehumanization's relation to discourse if complex. [...] There is less a dehumanizing discourse at work here than a refusal of discourse that produces dehumanization as a result."

• 37 "I am in favor of the public obituary but mindful of who has access to it, and which deaths can be fairly mourned there."

• 37 "We have to consider how the norm governing who will be a grievable human is circumscribed and produced in these acts of permissible and celebrated public grieving, how they sometimes operate in tandem with a prohibition on the public grieving of others' lives, and how this differential allocation of grief serves the derealizing aims of military violence."

• 38 "But at what cost do I establish the familiar as the criterion by which a human life is grievable?"

• 39 "Most Americans have probably experienced something like the loss of the First Worldism as a result of the events of September 11 and its aftermath. What kind of loss is this? It is the loss of the prerogative, only and always, to be the one who transgresses the sovereign boundaries of other states, but never to be in position of having one's boundaries transgressed."

• 40 "Indeed, in the very moment in which it claims to act consistently with the doctrine, as it does when it justifies its treatment of the Guantanamo Bay prisoners as 'humane', it decides unilaterally what will count as humane, and what openly defies the stipulated definition of humane treatment that the Geneva Convention states in print."

• 42 "This possibility has to do with demanding 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."