Butler, Judith. “Precarious Life and the Obligations of Cohabitation” The Neale Wheeler Watson Lecture 2011 Nobel Museum Stockholm Sweden, May 24 2011.
[Arendt] could not have predicted the 1.7 million who now have that refugee status within the West Bank and Gaza alone, but she did predict that nation-states that seek to regulate the racial or religious composition of their populations invariably produce new classes of refugees, and call into question their own legitimacy by expelling populations who do not conform to the national norm. Her call for co-habitation was meant quite clearly to counter not only the genocidal politics of National Socialism but the recurrent production of the stateless by any and all nations that purging themselves of heterogeneity. And though she would have never argued that Israel is like Nazi Germany, and she would have opposed all such analogies, she was clear that Israel was continuing a project of settler colonialism in the name of a national liberation project, producing hundreds of thousands of refugees that would not only delegitimate any claims to democracy made by that state, but keep the state embroiled in conflict for decades to come. 17
And this condition, paradoxically, yields the radical potential for new modes of sociality and politics beyond the avid and wretched bonds formed through settler colonialism and expulsion. We are all, in this sense, the unchosen, but we are nevertheless unchosen together. It is not uninteresting to note that Arendt, herself a Jew and refugee, understood her obligation not to belong to the “chosen people” but rather to the unchosen, and to make mixed community precisely among those whose existence implies a right to exist and to lead a liveable life.
Precarity only makes sense if we are able to identify as clearly political issues bodily dependency and need, hunger and the need for shelter, the vulnerability to injury and destruction, forms of social trust that let us live and thrive, and the passions linked to our very persistence.
If Arendt thought that such matters had to be relegated to the private realm, Levinas understood the importance of vulnerability, but failed to really link vulnerability to a politics of the body. Although Levinas seems to presuppose a body impinged upon, he does not give it an explicit place in his ethical philosophy. And though Arendt theorizes the problem of the body, of the located body, the speaking body emerging into the “space of appearance” as part of any account of political action, she is not quite willing to affirm a politics that struggles to overcome inequalities in food distribution, that affirms rights of housing, and which targets inequalities in the sphere of reproductive labor.