Butler, Judith. “Precarious Life and the Obligations of Cohabitation” The Neale Wheeler Watson Lecture 2011 Nobel Museum Stockholm Sweden, May 24 2011.
In my view, ethical claims emerge from bodily life itself, a bodily life that is not always unambiguously human. After all, the life that is worth preserving, and safeguarding, who should be protected from murder (Levinas) and genocide (Arendt) is connected to, and dependent upon, non-human life in essential ways; this follows from the idea of the human animal, a different point of departure for thinking about politics.
If we try to understand in concrete terms what it means to commit ourselves to preserving the life of the other, we are invariably confronted with the bodily conditions of life, and so a commitment not only to the other’s corporeal persistence, but to all those environmental conditions that make life liveable.
The possibility of whole populations being annihilated either through genocidal policies or systemic negligence follows not only from the fact that there are those who believe they can decide among whom they will inhabit the earth, but because such thinking presupposes a disavowal of an irreducible fact of politics:
the vulnerability to destruction by others that follows from a condition of precarity in all modes of political and social interdependency.
We can make this into a broad existential claim, namely, that everyone is precarious, and this follows from our social existence as bodily beings who depend upon one another for shelter and sustenance and who, therefore, are at risk of statelessness, homelessness and destitution under unjust and unequal political conditions.
As much as I am making such a claim, I am also making another, namely, that our precarity is to a large extent dependent upon the organization of economic and social relationships, the presence or absence of sustaining infrastructures and social and political institutions. In this sense, precarity is indissociable from that dimension of politics that addresses the organization and protection of bodily needs. Precarity exposes our sociality, the fragile and necessary dimensions of our interdependency.
Whether explicitly stated or not, every political effort to manage populations involves a tactical distribution of precarity, more often than not articulated through an unequal distribution of precarity, one that depends on dominant norms regarding whose life is grievable, and worth protecting, and whose life is ungrievable, or marginally or episodically grievable and so, in that sense, already lost in part or in whole, and thus less worthy of protection and sustenance. In my own view, then, a different social ontology would have to start from this shared condition of precarity in order to refute those normative operations, pervasively racist, that decide in advance who counts as human and who does not. My point is not to rehabilitate humanism, but rather to struggle for a conception of ethical obligation that is grounded in precarity.
No one escapes the precarious dimension of social life – it is, we might say, our common non-foundation. And we cannot understand co-habitation without understanding that a generalized precarity obligates us to oppose genocide and to sustain life on egalitarian terms. Perhaps this feature of our lives can serve as the basis for the rights of protection against genocide, whether through deliberate or negligent means. After all, even though our interdependency constitutes us as more than thinking beings, indeed as social and embodied, vulnerable and passionate, our thinking gets nowhere without the presupposition of the interdependent and sustaining conditions of life.
It is, of course, one thing to claim this in the abstract, but quite another to understand what the difficulties are in struggling for social and political forms that are committed to fostering a sustainable interdependency on egalitarian terms. When any of us are affected by the sufferings of others, we recognize and affirm an interconnection with them, even when we do not know their names or speak their language.
At its best, some media representations of suffering at a distance compel us to give up our more narrow communitarian ties, and to respond, sometimes in spite of ourselves, sometimes even against our will, to a perceived injustice. Such presentations can bring the fate of others near or make it seem very far away, and yet, the kind of ethical demands that emerge through the media in these times depend on this reversibility of the proximity and distance.
Indeed, I want to suggest that certain bonds are actually wrought through this very reversibility.
And we might find ways of understanding the interdependency that characterizes co-habitation precisely as these bonds.