Chapter 2: Violence, Mourning, Politics

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Welcome to the Deep Dive.

Today, we're going to tackle a really powerful piece of writing.

It's Judith Butler's chapter, Violence, Mourning, Politics from her book, Precarious Life.

It's definitely a chapter that gets right to the heart of some big questions, you know, about being human, dealing with loss, violence.

Absolutely.

And how all that shapes our political world.

Yeah, the very structures of it.

It's heavy stuff for sure, but it feels essential for understanding, well, not just personal grief, but the bigger picture, the social and political landscape.

Right.

So our goal in this deep dive is really to unpack Butler's ideas, which can be quite complex.

They can be.

And connect them to examples, try to get a real grip on what she's arguing about, vulnerability, mourning, and their political weight.

Exactly.

We'll navigate the theory, but you know, the aim is to make it clear and insightful for you listening.

We're not here to simplify too much or to take sides on the specific political example she uses.

No, definitely not taking sides.

Think of it more like we're trying to build a framework together, a way to think about these issues more deeply.

Toolkit, maybe.

Yeah, a toolkit.

OK, so let's jump in.

Butler starts by outlining her goal, doesn't she?

Exploring how violence, loss, mourning are shared vulnerability.

How these things actually shape political life itself.

In community formation.

Right.

And what struck me is her point that these aren't just topics up for debate.

No, they're more fundamental.

She calls them the limits of the arguable.

Yeah.

Like they're the invisible boundaries that shape what we even can argue about politically.

It's like the ground rules we don't always acknowledge.

Exactly.

And she says the essay itself is kind of a pushback against this resistance she sees.

A resistance to acknowledging vulnerability,

the need for mourning.

So there's a political urgency there for her.

Yeah.

She sees a real need to rethink community, but based on these experiences, not by trying to pretend they don't exist.

And that leads straight into those core questions she keeps coming back to.

The big ones.

Who counts as human?

Whose lives count as lives?

And finally, what makes for a grievable life?

Those questions just hang over the whole chapter, don't they?

And she sees them as key to understanding violence globally.

Absolutely central.

OK, so from that starting point, she talks about this idea of a we.

But a tenuous one, she says.

A we that can actually emerge from shared loss.

Not based on shared beliefs necessarily.

No, more on the shared experience itself.

She links it to desire, love, even struggle.

It's the connection forged through having lost something important.

You know, like you see sometimes after a shared tragedy.

Right, that unexpected bonding.

But, and this is crucial, she immediately points out how uneven this vulnerability is.

Yeah, she highlights women and minorities, sexual minorities included.

Saying they're disproportionately exposed to violence or the threat of it, which underlines her point that our bodies aren't just private things.

They're politically constructed.

Yes, sites of desire, but also sites of exposure of potential harm.

OK, let's shift gears slightly to mourning itself.

She really digs into how complex it is.

She does.

She touches on Freud.

You know, his idea is changing over time.

Yeah.

Replacing the lost object versus incorporating it.

But her main point isn't really about just replacing or forgetting, is it?

No, not at all.

The emphasis for Butler is really on transformation.

Mourning involves accepting,

undergoing a change, potentially a permanent one because of the loss.

It's not something you can just manage or strategize your way through.

Exactly.

It reshapes you.

And she talks about the mystery of loss too, right?

Like not fully knowing what you've lost in the other person.

That lack of full understanding, she suggests, is part of what keeps the process of mourning going.

You're grappling with something that's not fully graspable.

And more than that, loss actually reveals how interconnected we are fundamentally.

How so?

Well, when you lose someone you're deeply tied to, it's not just that they are gone.

Part of you, the eye feels altered, incomplete.

Our relationships literally make us who we are.

So that challenges the idea that grief is purely private then.

Absolutely.

She argues it can actually foster a sense of political community by making our dependencies visible.

It throws that link, my well -being tied to yours, into sharp relief.

It highlights our ethical responsibilities to each other.

Okay.

And she contrasts this with how we often try to narrate our relationships.

Yeah, like we're detached observers telling neat stories about beginnings and ends.

But grief, she says, reveals the thrall these relationships hold us in.

The power they have over us.

Right.

It disrupts our self narratives, questions that of being a totally autonomous individual.

That phrase she uses, being undone by each other.

Yes.

And not just through grief, but desire too.

Gender, sexuality, they aren't just things we have, she suggests, but ways we are kind of given over to or defined by another.

Just possessed.

Exactly.

Which leads to that idea of being ecstatic.

Literally standing outside oneself.

And passion, grief, rage.

She sees this not as some fringe experience, but maybe a shared human condition.

A way we connect paradoxically by being outside our usual selves.

That raises an interesting tension though, that she explores next, between individual rights.

Protecting boundaries, fighting discrimination for specific groups.

And these intense experiences like grief or passion that seem to just flood over those boundaries.

Exactly.

She acknowledges how vital the fight for bodily integrity and self determination is for LGBTQ plus movements, feminism, anti -racism, anti -colonial struggles, all of them.

But she asks, is there another aspiration beyond just autonomy?

What about acknowledging our physical interdependence, our vulnerability to each other?

Yeah.

What are the political implications of that?

She really emphasizes the public nature of the body.

Even when we fight for rights over our bodies, they're never purely private.

Right.

Society shapes them, they relate us to others before we even consciously choose to.

Think about, you know, social norms around how bodies should look or behave.

And she connects this back to our earliest experiences as infants.

Reminding us that becoming an individual is something we achieve.

It's not the starting point, that initial dependence, that vulnerability has political weight.

So acknowledging that shared vulnerability could lead to a different idea of community.

That's what she suggests.

A community based on our mutual, even if unequal, vulnerability.

And this is where her analysis of violence gets really pointed.

Yeah.

She argues that violence fundamentally exploits that primary connection, that reliance we have on others.

It targets our interconnectedness.

So grief then becomes a moment of recognizing that interconnectedness, that inherent sociality.

Exactly.

Recognizing that dispossession.

It doesn't erase autonomy, but it qualifies it.

Which leads her to ask, can mourning, especially for movements that face repeated losses, offer a valuable perspective on our global situation?

A really challenging question.

She then turns directly to violence and vulnerability as pervasive conditions.

Right.

Inherent human vulnerability, but made much worse by social and political factors.

And she draws a contrast.

Being mindful of this vulnerability, she thinks, can lead toward non -military solutions.

Whereas denying it fuels what she calls a fantasy of mastery.

Which leads to war.

Yeah.

And she critiques attempts to just quickly dismiss grief, to banish melancholy, referencing figures like Safire and Bush after 9 -11.

She argues that doesn't work.

No.

She says that kind of forced resolution doesn't actually get rid of the grief.

It just pushes it down and trenches it, prevents real processing.

Which makes you think about her question.

What's the value of actually staying with grief, tearing with it, as she puts it?

Instead of rushing to violent answers,

could grief be a political resource?

Not in a passive way, though.

No, not resignation.

More like a slow development of empathy.

Identifying with the suffering of others, moving beyond just our own pain.

Considering others'

vulnerability.

And then critically examining the conditions that make some people more vulnerable, their lives less grievable.

Challenging those conditions.

And she suggests maybe a principle could emerge from that shared vulnerability.

A commitment to protect others from the violence we've known or seen.

Which brings us right back to that key concept.

Grievability.

Yes.

Central, really.

She goes back to that idea of common vulnerability, being there from birth, even before individuality.

Needing others for survival.

But she's quick to acknowledge that for many, that initial experience isn't care, it's abandonment or violence.

Right.

And oppression, she argues, exploits and twists that fundamental reliance on the other.

And this is where protected.

Their violation triggers outrage, defense, mobilizes people.

While other lives just don't qualify as grievable in the dominant view.

Their loss isn't marked, isn't mourned publicly, doesn't seem to register in the same way.

She mentions the hierarchy of grief, using obituaries as an example.

Yeah, how they often privilege certain life narratives, married, heterosexual, et cetera, and exclude others from that public recognition of loss.

And then the stark examples, the lack of widespread public mourning in the West for, say, Palestinian or Afghan victims of military violence.

Asking bluntly, are these lives even considered fully human within those dominant frameworks?

It's a very direct challenge.

And she links this to violence against LGBTQ plus people, trans individuals, disabled people, and anti -racist struggles against biased ideas of the human.

It's all interconnected for her.

Then she introduces another complex idea, derealization.

Right.

She distinguishes between simply excluding certain humans from a narrow definition.

And something deeper, questioning reality itself, whose lives are considered real.

Those deemed unreal, she argues, have already suffered a kind of violence, the violence of derealization.

Which raises disturbing questions about physical violence against them.

Yeah, if a life is already seen as unreal, is violence against it even perceived as injury?

Yet these lives persist, so they need repeated negation, repeated violence to maintain that unreality.

It's a chilling thought, that ungrievable lives can't be mourned because they never fully counted as lives in the first place.

Becoming like ghosts, spectral figures used to justify ongoing violence, like in the rhetoric around the war on terrorism.

How does this derealization work in practice?

Well, she contrasts explicit dehumanizing language with what she calls the violence of omission.

Just silence.

Yeah.

Deaths that aren't marked, aren't reported, aren't framed publicly.

She gives the example of Iraqi children killed during the Gulf War, their deaths largely unacknowledged in dominant Western media at the time.

And the obituary comes up again here.

As a tool for distributing grievability, even for nation building.

A life not deemed grievable is like unburyable in the public mind.

Not quite a life.

And this isn't just about language, she says.

No, it's a limit to discourse itself.

It sets the boundaries of what's humanly intelligible, what's worth mourning.

Certain deaths just vanish.

She mentions queer lives lost on 9 -11 being marginalized in the main narrative.

And the limited public mourning around AIDS historically and its ongoing toll, particularly in Africa.

Okay, so then she looks at the prohibition on grieving, how grief itself can be actively suppressed.

Using that really striking example of the San Francisco Chronicle, initially rejecting obituaries for Palestinian families killed by Israeli forces.

Why would public grieving be offensive?

What does that refusal tell us?

Butler connects it directly.

The prohibition on grieving is a form of dehumanization, another facet of the violence itself.

Silencing the impact is part of the violence.

She also critiques US journalism's role here.

Yeah, for often failing to adequately report civilian casualties from US military actions, sometimes aligning with the war effort narrative.

And she contrasts the immediate humanization of someone like Daniel Pearl.

With the namelessness of many Afghan or other victims.

Who qualifies as grievable?

What are the implicit rules?

This unequal grievability, she argues, creates a kind of generalized melancholia, a derealization of loss concerning those killed by the US and its allies.

And these prohibitions aren't passive, they actively construct the public sphere.

Exactly.

By deciding which images, names, losses are excluded, they shore up a particular kind of nationalism, often tied to military goals and suppressed dissent.

She points to the powerful humanizing narratives around 9 -11 victims, how they establish the grievability of the human within that specific frame.

And contrasts it with the lack of similar narratives for Arab lives lost elsewhere.

It forces us to ask,

what are the conditions for being seen as grievable?

How are they maintained through exclusion and erasure?

Then she reflects on why it might be easier for many in the West to mourn someone like Daniel Pearl.

Shared cultural references, familiarity.

And the challenge of forging that same connection with those who are culturally unfamiliar.

Posing that ethical question,

what's the cost of using familiarity as the benchmark for a grievable life?

This leads into her discussion of the loss of First Worldism after 9 -11.

Which she defines as losing that sense of immunity that is assumed right to cross others' borders without having yours crossed.

That feeling of invulnerability.

And the responses to that loss.

Anxiety, rage, the push for more security, border control, surveillance, often based on racial profiling.

All rationalized as self -defense.

So the loss of First World presumption is losing a certain worldview.

Yeah, seeing the world as a kind of national entitlement.

While she ethically condemns the 9 -11 violence, she saw that trauma as a potential moment to rethink U .S.

hubris.

An opportunity for more egalitarian international ties.

Which would require losing that sense of entitlement.

But she critiques the actual U .S.

response.

As doing the opposite.

Asserting sovereignty while showing weakness, undermining international agreements, acting unilaterally, creating a national subject that's sovereign, above the law, violent, self -centered.

And denies its own vulnerability by exploiting it in others.

Precisely.

Then she raises concerns about how feminism itself was being used.

Citing the Bush administration using women's liberation in Afghanistan to justify military action.

She brings in Spavec's critique here.

Yeah, that classic critique of white men saving brown women from brown men, seeing it as cultural imperialism, exploiting feminist ideas.

So Butler calls for disentangling feminism from those First World assumptions.

And using feminist theory instead to rethink connections, alliances within

counter -imperialist egalitarian framework.

Asking hard questions about how groups deal with vulnerability to violence.

What's the real cost of security?

How do cycles of violence work?

What are the alternatives beyond just appearing invulnerable or wishing for death?

Can we demand a world where vulnerability is protected, not erased?

That's the challenge she poses.

Okay, so by constantly emphasizing this shared bodily vulnerability, she knows it might sound like a new kind of humanism.

Right, but she pivots slightly.

Her focus becomes the necessity of recognition.

Meaning vulnerability only has ethical force if it's seen and acknowledged.

Exactly.

And that recognition isn't automatic.

It can even change what vulnerability means.

So the norms of recognition are crucial for constituting the human.

We need to fight for and expand those norms.

She draws on Hegel here, the struggle for recognition.

Yeah, suggesting it requires mutual recognition of shared need, which actually disrupts our fixed positions.

Community requires that mutual recognition.

And asking for recognition isn't just asking for affirmation of who you already are.

No, it's soliciting a becoming, starting a transformation in relation to the other.

She admits it seems like a quick jump between common vulnerability and how it's shaped by power and recognition.

But she insists that thinking about subject formation is crucial for understanding nonviolent responses and collective responsibility.

And while warning against simple state individual analogies.

She points out how the idea of the sovereign subject often underlies our models of agency and power.

Re -emphasizing our social nature, our orientation to a you, being shaped by culture.

Stressing the task for politically informed psychoanalytic feminism.

Analyzing vulnerability through power and recognition.

Explaining how the I emerges through dependence on a you and social norms.

And how even early difficult attachments are part of survival.

Framing the question of support for our vulnerability as ethical and political.

Arguing that our foreignness to ourselves, how we're shaped by others, is paradoxically the source of our ethical connection.

Leading to unknowingness of self and responsibility being relational.

And discussing how public grieving shapes our idea of the human and we're made by who we grieve and who we're told to ignore.

Referencing Antigone as someone who risked everything to defy a ban on grief.

Posing questions about cultural barriers to mourning losses that power wants us to ignore.

And how feminism must navigate this nexus of power and vulnerability.

Shifting towards the end, she talks about feminist opposition to militarism.

Emphasizing its diversity.

It doesn't need one single political language or agreement on everything.

She mentions women in black as an example.

And she brings in Mohanty's critique from under -Westernized.

Right, warning against equating feminist progress with just adopting Western ideas of agency and misrepresenting third -world women's experiences.

So Butler calls for rethinking international coalitions based on critiques like that.

Looking for new ways of cultural translation.

Not just appreciating fixed positions or seeking recognition of existing identities.

She suggests that intellectual debate and united action can coexist.

Yeah, even without full agreement on theory.

Like protesting for Indigenous women's rights together, even if groups have different philosophical starting points.

So many paths lead to political action.

Exactly.

No single model of communication or reason or the subject is required.

She advocates for an international feminist coalition that values thought and action.

And accepts a range of beliefs and ways of being.

Finally, she considers encountering the other and how the human is always sort of becoming.

Noting potential differences among women on the role of reason.

Citing Spivak on value sacred.

Cavarero on exposure over reason.

Questioning if the unified subject is the right model, when many experience it as multiple or fractured, does insisting on it erase dependency.

Posing that central question, what allows us to encounter each other?

What are the conditions for an international feminist coalition?

And the answers aren't in some fist human nature or language.

No, but in the hard work of cultural translation as an ethical responsibility when facing global dilemmas together.

Challenging simple third world divides.

Seeing the border as a place of complex identities.

And concluding with that really profound idea.

Being confounded by the you, the other, shows the you is already part of the me.

And the we emerges when we break down our own assumptions to try and know the other.

Leaving us with the thought that the human is something we're always in the process of discovering.

Something we have yet to fully know.

Wow.

Okay.

And with that, I think we really have reached the end of this deep dive into the entire chapter.

We have.

Violence, mourning politics from Butler's precarious life.

We've definitely covered all the key arguments, the limits of the arguable mourning, rights and bodies, violence and vulnerability.

Grievability, derealization, prohibitions on grieving,

familiarity versus unfamiliar.

Loss of first worldism, feminism's role, recognition, ethical responsibility, feminist opposition to militarism, encountering the other.

Yeah, all of it.

And the key terms too, precarity, grievability, ethical responsibility.

We looked at the political context, the case examples like the Chronicle obituaries, Daniel Pearl.

Explained the theory, linked it to real world implications, covered her critiques.

We aimed to skip nothing.

Absolutely, full coverage.

Okay, so to leave you, our listener, with something to mull over, our final provocative thought.

Spend some time reflecting on the ways, maybe the subtle ways, maybe the obvious ways, that the grievability of different lives is being constructed right now.

In the media you see, in the political talk you hear.

Who is presented as someone whose life matters, whose loss would be a tragedy, and who isn't?

And what are the implications of that?

For how we understand community, what we feel responsible for, and what justice even looks like in this interconnected world.