Butler, Judith. “Precarious Life and the Obligations of Cohabitation” The Neale Wheeler Watson Lecture 2011 Nobel Museum Stockholm Sweden, May 24 2011.
Both Levinas and Arendt take issue with the classically liberal conception of individualism, that is, the idea that individuals knowingly enter into certain contracts, and their obligation follows from having deliberately and volitionally entered into agreements with one another. This view assumes that we are only responsible for those relations, codified by agreements, into which we have knowingly and volitionally entered. 11
And Arendt disputes this view. Indeed, it was the substance of the argument that she made against Eichmann. He thought he could choose which populations should live and die, and in this sense he thought he could choose with whom to co-habit the earth. What he failed to understand, according to Arendt, is that no one has the prerogative to choose with whom to co-habit the earth. We can choose in some ways how to live and where, and in local ways we can choose with whom to live. But if we were to decide with whom to co-habit the earth, we would be deciding which portion of humanity may live, and which may die.
If that choice is barred to us, that means that we are under an obligation to live with those who already exist, and that any choice about who may or may not live is always a genocidal practice, and
though we cannot dispute that genocide has happened, and happens still, we are wrong to think freedom in any ethical sense is ever compatible with the freedom to commit genocide.
The unchosen character of earthly co-habitation is, for Arendt, the condition of our very existence as ethical and political beings. 13
Arendt stands for this plurality when he argues that none of us may choose with whom to co-habit the earth; we can surely choose with whom to share a household and perhaps also with whom to share a neighborhood or a region, or where to draw the boundary of a state, but we are not in such instances deciding against the right to live for those who are outside of those communities.
But when people decide that they will not share the earth, that means that they are committed to
eradicating a population from the face of the earth. Not only is this choice an attack on co-habitation as a precondition of political life in Arendt’s view, but it commits us to the following proposition:
we must devise institutions and policies that actively preserve and affirm the non-chosen character of open-ended and plural co-habitation.
Not only do we live with those we never chose and to whom we may feel no immediate sense of social belonging, but we are also obligated to preserve those lives and the open-ended plurality that is the global population. 13
Arendt … has offered … an ethical view of co-habitation that serves as a guideline for particular forms of politics. In this sense, concrete political norms and policies emerge from the unchosen character of these modes of co-habitation. The necessity of co-habiting the earth is a principle that … must guide the actions and policies of any neighborhood, community, or nation. The decision to live in one community or another is surely justified as long as it does not imply that those who live outside the community do not deserve to live.
In other words, every communitarian ground for belonging is only justifiable on the condition that it is subordinate to a noncommunitarian opposition to genocide.
The way I read this, every inhabitant who belongs to a community belongs also to the earth, and this implies a commitment not only to every other inhabitant of that earth, but we can surely add, to sustaining the earth itself. And with this last proviso, I seek to offer an ecological supplement
Arendt’s anthropocentrism.
it appears that “belonging” must actually no know bounds and exceed every particular nationalist and communitarian limit. Both the arguments against genocide and the arguments for the rights of the stateless depend upon underscoring the limits of communitarianism. 15
This means that unwilled proximity and unchosen cohabitation are preconditions of our political existence, the basis of her critique of nationalism, the obligation to live on the earth and in a polity that establishes mode of equality for a necessarily and irreversibly heterogenous population. Indeed, unwilled proximity and unchosen cohabitation serve as well as the basis of our obligations not to destroy any part of the human population, and to outlaw genocide as a crime against humanity, but also to invest institutions with the demand to seek to make all lives liveable. Thus, from unchosen co-habitation, Arendt derives notions of universality an equality that commit us to institutions that seek to sustain human lives without regarding some part of the population as socially dead, as redundant, or as intrinsically unworthy of life and therefore ungrievable. 15-16
Although it is so often taught that Israel became an historical and ethical necessity for the Jews during and after the Nazi genocide, and that anyone who questions the founding principles of the Jewish state shows an extraordinary insensitivity to the plight of the Jews, there were Jewish thinkers and political activists at the time, including Arendt, Martin Buber, Hans Kohn, and Judah Magnus, who thought among the most important lessons of the Holocaust was an opposition to illegitimate state violence, to any state formation that sought to give electoral priority and citizenship to one race or religion, and that nation-states ought to be internationally barred from dispossessing whole populations who fail to fit the purified idea of the nation. 16