Can one lead a good life in a bad life?
Judith Butler September 11 2012 Adorno Prize Lecture download
JB starts her talk with a quote from Theodore Adorno: Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen (Wrong life cannot be lived rightly).
She uses this quote to structure her talk firstly as a question of morality and ethics, what is it to live a good life? And secondly, “what form does this question take for us now? Or, how does the historical time in which we live condition and permeate the form of the question itself?”
Good life cannot be separted from the question of whose life? Life must be seen as that something which many who follow outside of the parameters that define life as such, do not even register. So what would this question mean for those who lives do not count properly as lives.
Taking the term as it stands: “good life” ambiguity surrounding this term. Those who claim to be living the good life may be living off the profits made off the back of workers, thus in relations of exploitation. The phrase “has become a vector for competing schemes of value.”
So where does JB go. She rejects Aristotelian formulation as too individualistic and on the other that ‘the good life’ has been too “contaminated by commercial discourse to be useful to those who want to think about the relationship between morality, or ethics more broadly, and social and economic theory.”
Ok so JB has cleared her slate to begin her theoretical investigation from perspective that as hinted earlier, begins from a perspective of the relationship between morality/ethics and social theory, as she quotes Adorno from his Problems of Moral Philosophy, that the individual “who exists pure for himself is an empty abstraction.” Butler thus is angling towards looking at how the broader “operations of power and domination enter into, or disrupt, our individual reflections on how best to live.”
Are we surprised? Of course not. Butler really does not waste any time in underscoring the importance of embedding the question “what is the good life” into a wider sociality. She intends to address the fact that a “good life” is dependent upon a wider social configuration of forces.
“And And so it makes sense to ask: which social configuration of ‘life’ enters into the question, how best to live? If I ask how best to live, or how to lead a good life, I seem to draw upon not only ideas of what is good, but also of what is living, and what is life. I must have a
sense of my life in order to ask what kind of life to lead, and my life must appear to me as something I might lead, something that does not just lead me. And yet it is clear that I cannot ‘lead’ all aspects of the living organism that I am, even though I am compelled to ask: how might I lead my life? How does one lead a life when not all life processes that make up a life can be led, or when only certain aspects of a life can be directed or formed in a deliberate or reflective way, and others clearly not?
Here Butler touches on all the themes that she will follow in her discussion: Life is something I must have a sense of, of something I can lead but at the same time, it is something that “leads me.” What are we to make of this?
Morality and Biopolitics
Biopolitics Butler broadly defines as management of life, “powers that differentially dispose lives to precarity as part of a broader management of populations.” 10
How am I to lead a good life?
1. lives are disposed to differential precarity
2. Whose lives matter? Whose lives do not matter, lives not recognizable as living or count only ambiguously as alive?
WE cannot take for granted that all living human beings bear the status of a subject who is worthy of rights and protections, with freedom and a sense of political belonging; on the contrary, such a status must be secured through political means, and where it is denied that deprivation must be made manifest. 10
Whose lives are grievable, and whose are not?
The biopolitical management of the ungrievable proves crucial to approaching the question, how do I lead this life? And how do I live this life within the life, the conditions of living, that structure us now?
At stake is the following sort of inquiry: whose lives are already considered not lives, or only partially living, or already dead and gone, prior to any explicit destruction or abandonment?
Grievability leads Butler to argue for the necessary structure of support that goes to sustaining a life.
Not worth protecting, or seen as worth under the “dominant schemes of value.”
Only a grievable life can be valued, and thus eligible for
– social and economic support
– housing
– health care
– employment
– rights of political expression
– forms of social recognition
– conditions for political agency
“… and one must be able to live a life knowing that the loss of this life that I am would be mourned and so every measure will be taken to forestall this loss.” 11
Do I establish myself in the terms that would make my life valuable, or do I offer a critique of the reigning order of values?
Modalities of social death
… the term ‘precarity’ can distinguish between modes of ‘unliveability’: those who, for instance,
– belong to imprisonment without recourse to due process;
– those living in war zones or under occupation, exposed to violence and destruction without recourse to safety or exit;
– those who undergo forced emigration and live in liminal zones, waiting for borders to open, food to arrive, and the prospect of living with documentation;
– those that mark the condition of being part of a dispensable or expendable workforce for whom the prospect of a stable livelihood seems increasingly remote, and who live in a daily way within a collapsed temporal horizon, suffering a sense of a damaged future in the stomach and in the bones, trying to feel but fearing more what might be felt.
How can one ask how best to lead a life when one feels no power to direct life, when one is uncertain that one is alive, or when one is struggling to feel the sense that one is alive, but also fearing that feeling, and the pain of living in this way? Under contemporary conditions of forced emigration, vast populations now live with no sense of a secure future, no sense of continuing political belonging, living a sense of damaged life as part of the daily experience of neoliberalism. 12