Presentation: Judith Butler's Violence, Mourning, Politics

Psychoanalytic understanding of loss to see why aggression sometimes seems to quickly to follow

• Problem of primary vulnerability
  • Cannot will away without ceasing to be human
• Contemporary national sovereignty: seeks to overcome impressionability/violability
  • Ineradicable dimensions of human dependency and sociality
• Dichotomy between certain griefs being nationally amplified while other losses regarded as unthinkable/ungrievable
• Argument: national melancholia
  • (disavowed mourning)
  • follows upon the erasure from public representations of the names, images, and narratives of those the US has killed
• Losses: US
  • Consecrated publicly
• Different allocation of what is considered grievable
  • Produces/maintains certain exclusionary conceptions of who is normatively human

Butler's Goal

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

1. Look at the intersection of violence and politics
2. Examine how mourning and loss affect our political actions and beliefs
3. Establish a case for community following traumatic events

The Human Condition (20)

Who counts? Whose lives matter? What makes for a grievable life?

• Loss is a human universal: the degrees and circumstances of loss may vary, but all have experienced loss in some fashion throughout their existence
• Vulnerability is another universal: minority groups are especially vulnerable to those around them, and are face with the threat of violence
• Loss and vulnerability both occur as a result of the relationships humans create, and the proximity in which we live to one another

Loss and vulnerability seem to follow from our being socially constituted bodies, attached to others, at risk of losing those attachments, exposed to others, at risk of violence by virtue of that exposure

Butler on Mourning (20-2)

Freud first says mourning is successful when one object has been replaced with another; later he claimed incorporation was essential

• In Butler's mind, successful grieving does not include replacement. Mourning can be identified by acknowledging that loss has the potential for permanent change in an individual, and submitting to this transformation.
• Transformative effect of loss
  • Cannot be charted or planned
  • Reveals more about who we are, what ties who have to others, and how these ties have (up until the point of loss) defined us
• Enigmatic dimension of loss
  • Freud says when we lose someone we don't always know what in that person has been lost
  • The experience of being unable to identify what has been loss is in part what maintains the state of mourning

How do we fathom loss? It is not simply asking what did I lose in you; who am I without you?

Butler on Grief (23-4)

• Privatizing vs. Communal
  • Many think grief is privatizing, and therefore depoliticizing; Butler believes it furnishes a sense of political community of a complex order
  • The communal aspect of grief arises from an inability to separate your fate from the fate of those around you. This resulting we highlights the relations we have with one another.
• Dependency
  • We live in relation to others, are both constituted and dispossessed by our relations
  • To deny these relations would be to deny a human condition.
• Suspends understanding of one's self

Political Predicament (24-6)

Typically, rights are established as they pertain to individuals, but we argue as a group or class.

• We present ourselves as bounded beings: distinct, recognizable, delineated, subjects before the law, a community defined by some shared features (24)
• This language may establish us in a legal framework, but it doesn't take into account the emotions that undo us (grief, passion, rage), blurring the line between the 'Other' and the 'self'.
• Political movements often rely on claim of bodily integrity and self-determination. The claim to autonomy is important for establishing rights at a human level.

Autonomy (26-7)

• Body implies mortality, vulnerability, and agency.
  • We struggle for the right of autonomy, but the body is not even truly our own; there is an invariable public dimension to each body in which we are constituted as a social phenomenon in the public sphere.
  • To determine autonomy is to establish how your body exists in relation to others.
• Individuation is an accomplishment, not a presupposition, and certainly no guarantee.
• Demands of physical interdependency; violence is an exploitation of that primary tie.

Violence, Grief, and All the Rest (28-49)

• Violence surrounds the United States: The war on terrorism exposes our nation's response to violence—we participate, we perpetrate, and we are exposed to it.
  • A touch of the worst order; primary human vulnerability to other humans exposed in its most terrifying way. Violence is a rude awakening to the notion that we are a state separated from others, or somehow protected. To experience violence is to understand that our safety can be breached at any point in time, and that we are, at least in part, dependent on the actions of others. Political and social conditions exacerbate this vulnerability. (29)

• Grief: When grieving is something to be feared, our fears give rise to the impulse to banish it in the name of action/follow hasty impulses. The desire to rid oneself of grief is more powerful than our actual understanding of grief.
• Butler asks: Is there something to be gained from grieving? By exposing ourselves to grief, may we develop better responses to the traumas? By accepting grief, will we lessen its disorienting features? (30)
• Vulnerability: emerges with life itself, both in the physical and emotional sense. (31)
  • The existence of life comes with potential threat; vulnerability.
  • Oppression acts as proof of vulnerability; a human cannot be oppressed without there being some acknowledgment of an innate vulnerability being exposed.
• Grief can be seen as a hierarchy to view humanity, a concept itself based off of favorable cultural frames.
  • What is considered real? Which lives are considered unreal?
• Unreal: Lives that do not fit within cultural expectations, or pose a potential threat to the normative environment we have created. These are the Other.
  • Violence against those perceived to be unreal is negated because they have no reality to begin with. This can be seen through a lack of obituaries; acknowledgement of the lives lost as human beings, and therefore real. Public grievance of these unreal lives is forbidden because it creates tension within the community.
• Real: Human lives that fit within the cultural norms, and are permissibly grievable.
  • For instance, World Trade stories establish what lives are considered to be human and negate the possibility of lives presented differently to be regarded with similar compassion.
  • The real qualities of some lives allows for the negation of other human lives.
• Loss: Manifestation of terror as our reliance on what we perceive to be our innate right to protection is violated. 9/11 showed how violence could permeate our borders.
  • Everyone is free to imagine and identify the source of terror (39)
  • Rationalizes self-defense

Normative Aspiration

Can mourning supply a perspective by which to apprehend the contemporary global situation? Butler calls for the recent trauma to be a movement towards establishing more radically egalitarian ties (41)

• Recognition of vulnerability: must occur in order to come into play in an ethical encounter
• Recognition has power to change the meaning/structure of the vulnerability