Precarious Life

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Judith Butler. Precarious Life

PRECARIOUS LIFE. THE POWERS OF MOURNING. AND VIOLENCE

JUDITH BUTLER

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PREFACE

1. EXPLANATION AND EXONERATION, OR WHAT WE CAN HEAR

2. VIOLENCE, MOURNING, POLITICS

3. INDEFINITE DETENTION

4. THE CHARGE OF ANTI-SEMITISM: JEWS, ISRAEL, AND THE RISKS OF PUBLIC CRITIQUE

5. PRECARIOUS LIFE

NOTES. 1 EXPLANATION AND EXONERATION, OR WHAT WE CAN HEAR

2 VIOLENCE, MOURNING, POLITICS

3 INDEFINITE DETENTION

4 THE CHARGE OF ANTI-SEMITISM: JEWS, ISRAEL, AND THE RISKS OF PUBLIC CRITIQUE

5 PRECARIOUS LIFE

INDEX

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PRECARIOUS LIFE

PREFACE

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To decide what views will count as reasonable within the public domain, however, is to decide what will and will not count as the public sphere of debate. And if someone holds views that are not in line with the nationalist norm, that person comes to lack credibility as a speaking person, and the media is not open to him or her (though the internet, interestingly, is). The foreclosure of critique empties the public domain of debate and democratic contestation itself, so that debate becomes the exchange of views among the like-minded, and criticism, which ought to be central to any democracy, becomes a fugitive and suspect activity.

Public policy, including foreign policy, often seeks to restrain the public sphere from being open to certain forms of debate and the circulation of media coverage. One way a hegemonic understanding of politics is achieved is through circumscribing what will and will not be admissible as part of the public sphere itself. Without disposing populations in such a way that war seems good and right and true, no war can claim popular consent, and no administration can maintain its popularity. To produce what will constitute the public sphere, however, it is necessary to control the way in which people see, how they hear, what they see. The constraints are not only on content—certain images of dead bodies in Iraq, for instance, are considered unacceptable for public visual consumption—but on what “can” be heard, read, seen, felt, and known. The public sphere is constituted in part by what can appear, and the regulation of the sphere of appearance is one way to establish what will count as reality, and what will not. It is also a way of establishing whose lives can be marked as lives, and whose deaths will count as deaths. Our capacity to feel and to apprehend hangs in the balance. But so, too, does the fate of the reality of certain lives and deaths as well as the ability to think critically and publicly about the effects of war.

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