not-all Žižek
Dr. Judith Butler follow-up discussion the next day after 2012 Wall Exchange lecture at the Vogue Theatre in downtown Vancouver on May 24, 2012
Here is an extended answer on neoliberalism in relation to state, rejects role of public intellectual, and think tea party uses a mode of rationality which does not accord with her view of the world.
Dr. Judith Butler delivers the spring 2012 Wall Exchange lecture at the Vogue Theatre in downtown Vancouver on May 24, 2012
Livable life without positing single ideal for that life not based on essence, Donna Harraway, complex relationalities that constitute bodily life, we don’t need ideal forms of human, complex ways of understanding sets of relationships
Bodies form in networks of resistance, and produce structures of support and dependency also to evince
Key point on bodies, not only agentic, active cannot understand forms of relationality if we don’t understand complex relation vulnerability and activity of political resistance. We are vulnerable on the street, w/o permits opposing police/state … shorn of protection Critiques bare life is political exposure.
VULNERABILITY AND DEFIANCE women-vulnerability then petition paternal state. Invests state with responsibility for achievement of feminist goals.
Woman are vulnerable and capable of resistance. Feminist self-defence — slut walks, those who oppose harassment and injury. Good reasons to argue differential vulnerability
Are you a post-Feminist? the question that emerges HOW TO THINK THE VULNERABILITY OF WOMEN AND FEMINIST AGENCY
How to make feminist claim effectively, feminist resist modes of paternalism that re-instate modes of inequality. Gender-defining attributes vulnerability/invulnerability as distributed unequally under capitalism. Manage populations is to distribute vulnerability unequally, so that vulnerable precarious populations, and political strategies are devised to ameliorate conditions of precarity. Unveven Grievability of populations more worthy of memorialization and public grieving than others, populations ungrievable, whose labour is episodic or precarious, abandoned through negligence, injurable, with impunity, implict/explicit marking.
Redistributive strategies: invulnerable/impermeable without needs of protection. Effects of field of power that acts through bodies. Feminine – vulnerable, masculine = impermeable, invulnerable Psychoanalytic feminists forgetting of one’s own vulnerability and projection elsewhere. I was never vulnerable, and if it was it wasn’t true and I have no memory … political syntax of disavowal.
Some person or group denies vulnerability modes of denial/disavowal neoliberal economics act as if you are invulnerable to living with anxiety, dispossessed. Those who seek to expose others to vulnerability, obtain position of invulnerability for themselves. SHARED VULNERABILITY less as existential as claim BODIES ARE INVARIABLY dependent on social institutions/relations and instiutions.
Social Ontology Basis for new forms of coalition, seen in contemporary politics of the Street. Bodily vulnerable presupposes a social world, vulnerable to others, and institutions, a social modality through which bodies exist my vulnerability your vulnerability, vulnerability can be projected and denied, exploited and manipulated in the production of inequality.
social contract efforts to challenge and contest, under the name of precarity, takes aim at forms of rationality/representation and strategy that inform this condition
Differential modes of vulnerability
Not one subject does this to another, rather a set of strategies produce the situatioin in which the population cannot appear at all, in the USA native peoples, and Canada is related. Native peoples are given discursive life about founding of America, but these narratives become the means of effacement, acts of slaughter and killing which is still called Columbus Day. Re-Name Indigenous Peoples Day.
Comparative study of genocide, or comparable history of forcible displacement: Congo, Germany, will there be an memory, a memory maintained through discursive and transmissible means, to preserve the memory of vulnerability of bodies, requires a memorialization that must be repeated over time and space, memory is socially maintained and not cognitive. Its a social process.
Argentine: Mothers in Buenos Aires, to publicly protest disappearance of their children not identitarian nor maternalist, opposed brutality of the regime, protest any forgetting of that brutality.
Two points about vulnerability 1. vulnerability cannot be associated exclusive w/ injurability. Part of what a body does, is to open on to the body of another, set of others, bodies are not enclosed, always OUTSIDE themselves, dispossessed through the senses, lost in another, tactile/visual/auditory comport us beyond ourselves. Modes of ecstatic relationality 2. Body can be a site where memories are transmitted, body is a point of transfer, where your history passes through mine, I don’t have to experience your history to transmit your history, a certain operation of translation that doesn’t purport to translate everything. Bound up with one another. Mode or relationality
We not just as bodies these spatial and bounded creatures. We can never transcend that boundary completely, but we are also the histories we never lived, but we transmit in the name of the history of the oppressed. Israel prohibits expression of na’qba. They are seeking to regulate memory, to consign a form of dispossession and suffering to oblivion.
In all of these struggles the body is central to the fight against oblivion. No history can be inscribed on a body without vulnerability, the body not as substance and enclosure, but a site of injurability passionate exposure, receptivity
Body and Coalition
Vulnerability and ordinary discourse as episodic, the condition of our vulnerability is not precisely changeable a certain way of opening on to the world, asserts our existence as a relational one. A condition co-extensive with human/creaturely life. Vulnerability is a way of opening up to the world, it asserts our very existence as a relational one.
Adrianna Cavarerro One of the key moments of politics, constitutive ethical moment: WHO ARE YOU?? not necessarily a single person that poses this question, who are you space of appearance for the other, no pre-established category will be able to answer in advance the question that is posed. The who are you is infinitely open unanswerable in order to remain an ethical one.
Precariousness precarity is differentially distributed. Isabel Lorry, Larent Berlant, under conditions of neoliberalism. Maybe precarious is what we feel or rather not feel, and feel the impetus to not feel it, precarious those bonds that sustain forms of life. dispose them towards equality as ideal worth struggling for. A bond is flawed or frayed is lost irrecoverable.
The Tea Party rejoice about individuals who fail to take responsibility, will face death or disease as result. People who don’t take responsibility, will face death, rejoice clapping. At such moments a social bond has been destroyed, in ways that deny a shared precariousness, a shared ethos and politics, one that underscores local and global interdependence, and resists unequal distribution of precarity and grievability. We really need to see the precarity of the one who takes that sadistic joy, the bond of interdependency with the one whose death is being joyously imagined.
Break with lure of paternalism, not rejecting all the state. We cannot presume interdependency is same as social harmony. constituted from the inside, from the condition of a pre-contractual set of relations that pertain to social embodiment, negotiated in social/political/economic spheres.
Interdependency is not social harmony, not way to dissociate dependency and aggression once and for all. We require one another to live, our survinal and well being are negotiate in economic/political spheres, our precarious is what makes spheres blend into each other.
Seeking recourse to broad existential and humanist claims BUT, we see we have left existential domain, risk of statelessness, precarious defines our existence as POLITICAL beings, and political Whose lives preserved, protected valued, mourned, and whose disposable and ungrievable. Dependent on economic and social structures.
Precarity indissocialbe from that politics of interdependency … our common non-foundation, nothing founds us outside of a struggle to establish those bonds by which we are sustained. Political significance as assembling as BODIES, does not have to be organized on high, nor have a central message to assert a PERFORMATIVE FORCE we are HERE, we are STILL HERE, we have not yet been DISPOSED of, precarity with social and political forms of agency. When the bodies deemed disposable assembe in public view its a way of saying we have not disappeared. Political and public institutions are bound to represent the people, and EQUALITY as presupposition of existence.
Eygptian Revolution transitional military government, way a certain sociability was established in the square, horizontal relations, relations of equality became part of the very resistance.
Unchosen proximity to those we’ve never chosen to be close to a pre-contractual inter-dependency is at work, it is always necessary, and sometimes promising and alive. ends at 1:09 30 seconds
On Precarity producing possibility of lives not touched by other lives IMPERMEABLE TO INCURSION, militarism/nationalism, stoked by idea of never being attacked or one coming into territory that can do harm, anti-immigration discourses … dealing with situation of precarity at those moments, a spectre of being destoryed, penetrated, agressed upon suggests a level of political anxiety that focuses on body and capacity of body to be entered, aggressed upon, to have its solidity and control threatened at fundamental level. It is a political strategy to effectively externalize and deposit that felt sense of precarity in other populations and keep populations precarious who are feared and loathed. they end up increasing their own sense of precarity through a mode of subjugation that is unlivable in those who must live it.
Occupy Movement Occupy moment is not over, what are the new strategies, what are the new ways of occupying buildings, producing demonstrations and getting the word out. Armed revolutionary struggle?? What we are seeing are contours of a new form of conflict, it began as movement draw attention to differential levels of wealth, rich are getting richer and fewer and poor are getting larger and poorer. Police power became at forefront of movement when public space was taken away through police action. Traditional modes of civil disobedience and non-violence are not recognized, police don’t handcuff, they were thrown to ground and beaten. It effectively says traditions governing non-violent civil disobedience are no longer being honoured. Making protests larger, global, over-whelming, so actual legitimacy of state is called into question.
Non-Violence briefly is NOT passivity, it is the cultivation of the force of resistance, it involves bodily action, pressure and presence, and is not simply taking-it.
Strategic Essentialism I don’t think we are the 99% is strategic essentialism. Isn’t the only basis on which we mobilize together. It is an umbrella term to include differences without asserting economic oppression as the primary mode of oppression. There are struggles race/sexuality/gender … those struggles are absolutely necessary and we shouldn’t lament them. We are having those struggles and that is what unity means, unity means struggling. I resist the language of FRAGMENTATION, groups do leave, they can’t be in coalition together, Hanging IN, in coalitions where it isn’t easy, open conflict/struggle, that is UNITY, unity is agreeing to stay in and struggle, unity is not uniformity. Because they stay together because the STAKES are really high.
migrants The effort to de-politicize migrants, is a certain kind of training in good citizenship. Accept implicit forms of censorship as preconditions of your membership.
Vulnerability in a way I’m saying 2 things at same time: 1 vulnerability is shared condition that can not be denied, 2 vulnerability is a condition that is denied all the time.forms of torture that took place under Bush Administration, involved efforts to feminize the bodies of Arab men in out-sourced prisons. I think it is a complex issue, the way in which torture worked to emasculate at the same time it identified/consolidated the idea, that those tortured are homosexual/women. The position of intense vulnerability would be that of homosexual or woman.
Physical violence and vulnerability: I support non-violent forms of resistance, but one of most important things for me, was learning forms of self-defense. That I wouldn’t be ok on the street if I didn’t have skills of self-defense. When a cop is coming at you with a baton, or when you’re being sprayed, there is a right to self-defense and what is the form that takes. Forms of COLLECTIVE support, to make it difficult for that attack to take place. Interpose themselves in front of one another. Sometimes our act of defense will be re-named as provocation, there is no way to fully control how it will signify. Politically self-defense works in some ways I don’t agree with … use self-defense to legitimate every act of aggression. It’s a very vigilant practice to insist on self-defense and to make it not an alibi for the kind of violence we are opposing. Don’t replicate the violence we are opposing but to stop the violence.
Tea Party: I am in favour of freedom of assembly, I am anxious that freedom of assembly is being taken away in many parts of the globe. Should be for on the left and the right. I would defend the right of horrible people to collect on street, including Tea Party cause there’s a LIBERAL core to my Leftism. I hate it, but I wouldn’t take their right away.
Vulnerability of pre-contract: only ethically obligated to those with whom we are already contracted belong to same nation-state we are born into/legalized within. We have to think ethical/political obligations that exceed the forms of contract. Contracts tend to produce ideas of nation state that are exclusionary, what are my extra-nation obligations, who am I when I am not an individual, do I need another kind of political vocabulary. It’s always possible to say, well, if you think of sexually progressive circles, they make a contract to enter into an arrangement, they are vulnerable in a way they didn’t think, now can’t be in that contract … a kind of leftist conceit, we have the ideal form, consent to ideal form and find out its radically unlivable. What are the conditions of liveablity, how to communicate them, and how to live them. What are the concrete conditions of liveability, pertain to organizatio of our ethical and poltiical bonds. We are vulnerable in ways that can’t be accomodated by ideas of choice and knowledge that are presupposed by contract, we are already vulnerable to others that in effect define us as bodily and social beings and what does that say about our global responsibilities and what does that say about us as global creatures.
Dr. Judith Butler has a follow-up discussion with UBC Faculty at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at UBC
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
Leszek Kolakowski once wrote that man can be a moral being only insofar as he is weak, limited, fragile, and with a “broken heart” ― this is the liberal core of Levinas’s thought, a core to which Butler also subscribes when she focuses on the fragile symbolic status of a human subject, caught in the abyss of decentered symbolic representation, and whose very identity hinges on an external, inconsistent network. Precarious Life, London: Verso Books 2006.
It is this precarious status of subjectivity which functions as the zero-level of all ethics: the absolute call, the injunction, emanating from the vulnerable neighbor’s face. To be an ethical subject means to experience oneself, in one’s singularity, as the addressee of that unconditional call, as responsible and responding to it even when one chooses to ignore it.
[From a Christian perspective, we should go to the end here: if man is created in God’s image, the becoming-man-of-God means that the same goes for God: in Christ, God becomes a fragile absolute, precarious, vulnerable, and impotent.]
The first thing to note here is the basic asymmetry of the situation: the other’s face makes an unconditional demand on us; we did not ask for it, and we are not allowed to refuse it. (And, of course, what Levinas means by “the face” is not directly the physical face: a face can also be a mask for the face, there is no direct representation of the face.)
This demand is the Real which cannot be captured by any words; it marks the limit of language, every translation of it into language already distorts it. It is not simply external to discourse―it is its inner limit, as the encounter with the other which opens up the space for discourse, since there can be no discourse without the other. It is the real of a violent encounter that (as Badiou would put it) throws me out of my existence as a human animal. 827
[The irony here is that, with Butler, the encounter with the Other in its precariousness and fragility (finitude, mortality) has exactly the same structure as the Badiouian encounter of the Event which opens up the dimension of immortality or eternity.]
And Butler is fully justified in emphasizing that this ethical injunction, at its most basic level, is a reaction to the quasi-automatic reaction to get rid of the other-neighbor, to kill him (this urge can easily be accounted for in Freudo-Lacanian terms as the basic reaction to the encounter with the intrusive Neighbor-Thing)
But for Freud and Lacan (as was convincingly elaborated by Jean Laplanche), the traumatic encounter with the Other as a desiring which “interrupts the narcissistic circuit” is precisely the basic experience constitutive of desiring subjectivity―which is why, for Lacan, desire is a “desire of the Other.”
Thus Lacan’s “ethics of psychoanalysis” stands for his attempt to demonstrate that there is an ethical dimension discovered in the psychoanalytic experience, … Lacan’s option involves neither the aggressive thrust to annihilate the Other – Neighbor-Thing, nor its reversal into accepting the Other as the source of an unconditional ethical injunction. But why not?
🙂 constitutive of desiring subjectivity, is this initial approach what do you want. the enigma of the desire of the other which is mind blowing and throws us totally out of joint, we react as one would violently, or indifference, but the ethical call is to not forego hiding away, and to do something. This something as we have seen is within the 4 discourses 🙂
We should note that, in Levinas’s account, it is not me who experiences myself as precarious, but the Other who addresses me. This is why, in my very asymmetric subordination to the Other’s call, in my unconditional responsibility, in my being taken hostage by the Other, I assume supremacy over the Other.
Do we not encounter this wounded-precarious Other almost daily, in advertisements for charity which bombard us with images of starving or disfigured children crying in agony? Far from undermining the hegemonic ideology, such adverts are one of its exemplary manifestations. 828
Butler shows how the face itself can function as an instrument of dehumanization, like the faces of evil fundamentalists or despots (bin Laden, Saddam Hussein), and how the power regime also decides which faces we are allowed to see as worthy of grief and mourning and which not — it was pictures of children burning from napalm that generated ethical outrage in the US public over Vietnam. Today, the very fragility of the suffering Other is part of the humanitarian ideological offensive. 828
***
What must be added to the precariousness and vulnerability of the ethical subject is the notion of absolute fidelity, the reference to an absolute point of infinity, in accordance with Pascal’s well-known thought that man is a tiny speck of dust in the universe, but at the same time infinite spirit. 828
***
Fragility alone does not account for ethics ― the gaze of a tortured or wounded animal does not in itself make it an ethical subject. The two minimal components of the ethical subject are its precarious vulnerability and its fidelity to an “immortal Truth” (a principle for which, in clear and sometimes ridiculous contrast to its vulnerability and limitations, the subject is ready to put everything at stake)―it is only this presence of an “immortal Truth” that makes human vulnerability different from that of a wounded animal. Furthermore, to these two, we should also add the “demonic” immortality whose Freudian name is the (death) drive, the very core of the Neighbor-Thing. 829
[This is why, in psychoanalytic treatment, there is no face-to-face, neither the analyst nor his analysand sees the other’s face: only in this way can the dimension of the Neighbor-Thing emerge.]
Judith Butler with Bracha Ettinger At European Graduate School in 2011
The first is whether any of us have the capacity or inclination to respond ethically to suffering at a distance, and what makes that ethical encounter possible, when it does take place.
The second is what it means for our ethical obligations when we are up against another person or group, find ourselves invariably joined to those we never chose and responding to solicitations and languages we may not understand or even wish to understand.
… I am trying to underscore that something impinges upon us, without our being able to anticipate or prepare for it in advance, and this means that we are in such moments affronted by something that is beyond our will, not of our making, that comes to us from the outside, as an imposition, but also as an ethical demand. I want to suggest that these are ethical obligations which do not require our consent, and neither are they the result of contracts or agreements into which any of us have deliberately entered.
Can we understand the working of an ethical obligation upon our sensibilities. Indeed this word sensibility is one that Levinas reserves for that region of responsiveness that precedes the ego. A kind of response that therefore is and is not my response. To say it is my response is to lodge the ego as its source. But what we’re trying to talk about here is a form of responsiveness that implies a dispossession of the egological.
Ethical obligations that impose themselves upon us without our consent.
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.
My own thesis is that the kind of ethical demands that emerge through the global circuits in these times depends on this reversibility of the proximity and distance. Indeed, I want to suggest that certain bonds are actually wrought through this very reversibility. If I am only bound to those who are close to me, already familiar, then my ethics are invariably parochial, communitarian, and exclusionary.
If I am only bound to those who are “human” in the abstract, then I avert every effort to translate culturally between my own situation and that of others. If I am only bound to those who suffer at a distance, but never those who are close to me, then I evacuate my situation in an effort to secure the distance that allows me to entertain ethical feeling.
But if ethical relations are mediated – and I use that word deliberately here – confounding questions of location such that what is happening “there” also happens in some sense “here” and if what is happening “there” depends on the event being registered in several “elsewheres”, then it would seem that the ethical claim of the event takes place always in a “here” and “there” that are fundamentally bound to one another.
In one sense, the event is emphatically local, since it is precisely the people there whose bodies are on the line. But if those bodies on the line are not registered elsewhere, there is no global response, and also, no global form of ethical recognition and connection, and so something of the reality of the event is lost. It is not just that one discrete population views another through certain media moments, but that such a response makes evident a form of global connectedness, however provisional, with those whose lives and actions are registered in this way. In short, to be unprepared for the media image that overwhelms can lead not to paralysis but to a situation of (a) being moved, and so acting precisely by virtue of being acted upon and (b) being at once there and here, and in different ways, accepting and negotiating the multi-locality of ethical connections we might rightly call global.
Can we, then, turn to some versions of ethical philosophy in order to reformulate what it means to register an ethical demand during these times that is reducible neither to consent nor to established agreement and that takes place outside of established community bonds?
I am trying to articulate a version of cohabitation that follows from the account of ethical obligation I am describing. Turning to Palestine/Israel to suggest a set of Jewish views of cohabitation that demand a departure from communitarianism and even Jewish communitarianism and that may serve as a critical alternative during this time that state of Israel seeks to secure its claim to represent Jewishness.
Levinas’s position allows us the following conclusion: that the set of ethical values by which one population is bound to another in no ways depends on those two populations bearing similar marks of national, cultural, religious, racial belonging. It is interesting that Levinas insisted that we are bound to those we do not know, and even those we did not choose, could never have chosen, and that these obligations are, strictly speaking, pre-contractual.
Of course, this raises a question of how there can be an ethical relation to those who cannot appear within the horizon of ethics, who are not persons, or are not considered to be the kind of beings with whom one can or must enter into an ethical relation.
Here is where a most painful division within Levinas’s work continues to haunt those of us who seek ethical resources there. On the one hand, he tells us that we are claimed by others, including those we have never known, those we still don’t know, and that we are born into this situation of being compelled to honor the life of the other, every other, whose claim on life comes before our own.
On the other hand, he claims that this very ethical relation depends upon a specific set of religious and cultural conditions, Judaeo-Christian, and that those who are not formed within this tradition are not prepared for ethical life, and are not included as those who can make a claim upon those who belong to a narrow conception of the West. It is an agonizing contradiction at the heart of Levinas’s writing. But is it possible to take the ethical philosophy formulated there and deploy it against the very exclusionary assumptions by which it is sometimes supported? Can we, in other words, use Levinas against himself to help in the articulation of a global ethics that would extend beyond the religious and cultural communities that he saw as its necessary condition and limit?
Let us take as an example his argument that ethical relations are asymmetrical. In his work, the Other has priority over me. What does that concretely mean? Does the other not have the same obligation toward me? Why should I be obligated toward another who does not reciprocate in the same way toward me?
For Levinas, reciprocity cannot be the basis of ethics, since ethics is not a bargain: it cannot be the case that my ethical relation to another is contingent on their ethical relation to me, since that would make that ethical relation less than absolute and binding; and it would establish my self-preservation as a distinct and bounded sort of being as more primary than any relation I have to another. For Levinas, no ethics can be derived from egoism; indeed, egoism is the defeat of ethics itself.
I take distance from Levinas here, since though I agree in the refutation of the primacy of self-preservation for ethical thinking, I want to insist upon a certain intertwinement between that other life, all those other lives, and my own — one that is irreducible to national belonging or communitarian affiliation.
In my view (which is surely not mine alone) the life of the other, the life that is not our own, is also our life, since whatever sense “our” life has is derived precisely from this sociality, this being already, and from the start, dependent on a world of others, constituted in and by a social world.
In this way there are surely others distinct from me whose ethical claim upon me is irreducible to an egoistic calculation on my part. But that is because we are, however distinct, also bound to one another.
And this is not always a happy or felicitous experience. To find that one’s life is also the life of others, even as this life is distinct, and must be distinct, means that one’s boundary is at once a limit and a site of adjacency, a mode of spatial and temporal nearness and even boundedness.
Moreover, the bounded and living appearance of the body is the condition of being exposed to the other, exposed to solicitation, seduction, passion, injury, exposed in ways that sustain us but also in ways that can destroy us. In this sense the exposure of the body points to its precarity [precariousness].
At the same time, for Levinas, this precarious and corporeal being is responsible for the life of the other, which means that no matter how much one fears for one’s own life, preserving the life of the other is paramount.
If only the Israeli army felt this way! Indeed, this is a form of responsibility that is not easy while undergoing a felt sense of precarity. Precarity names both the necessity and difficulty of ethics.
It is surely hard to feel at once vulnerable to destruction by the other and yet responsible for the other, and readers of Levinas object all the time to his formulation that we are, all of us, in some sense responsible for that which persecutes us. He does not mean that we bring about our persecution – not at all. Rather, “persecution” is the strange and disconcerting name that Levinas gives for an ethical demand that imposes itself upon us against our will. We are, despite ourselves, open to this imposition, and though it overrides our will, its shows us that the claims that others make upon us are part of our very sensibility, our receptivity, and our answerability. We are, in other words, called upon, and this is only possible because we are in some sense vulnerable to claims that we cannot anticipate in advance, and for which there is no adequate preparation.
For Levinas, there is no other way to understand the ethical reality; ethical obligation not only depends upon our vulnerability to the claims of others, but establishes us as creatures who are fundamentally defined by that vulnerability and by that ethical relation. This ethical relation is not a virtue that I have or exercise; it is prior to any individual sense of self. It is not as a discrete individual that we honor this ethical relation. I am already bound to you, and this is what it means to be the self I am, receptive to you in ways that I cannot fully predict or control. This is also, clearly, the condition of my injurability as well, and in this way my answerability and my injurability are bound up with one another. In other words, you may frighten me and threaten me, but my obligation to you must remain firm.
This relation precedes individuation, and when I act ethically, I am undone as a bounded being. I come apart. I find that I am my relation to the “you” whose life I seek to preserve, and without that relation, this “I” makes no sense, and has lost its mooring in this ethics that is always prior to the ontology of the ego.
Another way to put this point is that the “I” becomes undone in its ethical relation to the “you” which means that there is a very specific mode of being dispossessed that makes ethical relationality possible. If I possess myself too firmly or too rigidly, I cannot be in an ethical relation to you. The ethical relation means ceding a certain egological perspective for one which is structured fundamentally by a mode of address: you call upon me, and I answer. But if I answer, it was only because I was already answerable; that is, this susceptibility and vulnerability constitutes me at the most fundamental level, and is there, we might say, prior to any deliberate decision to answer the call. In other words, one has to be already capable of receiving the call before actually answering it. In this sense, ethical responsibility presupposes ethical responsiveness.
Why bring a discussion of Levinas together with one regarding Arendt? 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.
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.
There is no one part of the population that can claim the earth for itself, no community or nation-state or regional unit, no clan, no party, and no race. As I have suggested, to make such a claim is to enter into a policy of genocide. 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.
But what is evident is that her views on cohabitation, federated authority, equality, and universality were in stark contrast to those who were defending nationalist forms of Jewish sovereignty, differential classifications for Jewish and non-citizens, military policies to uproot Palestinians from their lands, and efforts to establish a Jewish demographic majority for the state.
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.
For those who extrapolated principles of justice from the historical experience of internment and dispossession, the political aim is to extend equality regardless of cultural background or formation, across languages and religions, to those none of us ever chose (or did not recognize that we chose) and with whom we have an enduring obligation to find a way to live.
For whoever “we” are, we are also those who were never chosen, who emerge on this earth without everyone’s consent and who belong, from the start, to a wider population and a sustainable earth. 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.
In Sweden on May 27 2011 at the Nobel Museum Butler gave a similar talk and this is her paper here. IF you want to download it click here. Download a copy of Butler’s talk
What is coalition? Reflections on the conditions of alliance formation with Judith Butler’s work
In her groundbreaking book, Gender Trouble (1990), Judith Butler inaugurates and develops her critique of foundational reasoning – of identity categories such as (biological) sex, or of a transcendental subject such as “the woman” or even “women” (in the plural) – as a critique of identity politics in general, and of a women’s identity-based feminism in particular.
For this reason, her antifoundationalism appears as a critical practice that seeks not only to rethink the political – along with genders, bodies, subjects and agency – in terms of performativity rather than of representation, but also, and most importantly, to theorize alternatives to identity politics in terms of coalition building. Since then, we can consider that Butler has insistently returned to the action-oriented question of “what is coalition?” and further elaborated on the conditions of possibility of alliance formation – at least, as much as on the conditions of subversion – in order to move effectively toward what she calls a “progressive” or “radical democratic politics.”
This concern has become increasingly explicit in her responses to the 9/11 events – from Precarious Life (2004) and Giving an Account of Oneself (2005) to Frames of War (2010) in which she suggests that the Left consider shared human precarity as “an existing and promising site for coalition exchange” and for rights-claiming. Interestingly, this proposal centered on the yet existing inequalities in the distribution and recognition of precarity – and vulnerability – brings into new critical focus major political themes that have been running throughout her entire work, such as the relations between power, desire, norms for subject formation, and a non-naturalized conception of agency (e.g. Subjects of Desire, 1987; The Psychic Life of Power, 1997), or the question of violence, in particular state violence and public injury, as well as the issue of grieving in relation to the State, the law, war, to sovereignty and kinship arrangements (e.g. Excitable Speech, 1997; Antigone’s Claim, 2002).
Indeed, and according to Butler, a precarity-oriented politics involves not only a new ontology and social theory of the body-in-society in terms of radical interdependency (a claim that extends her discussion in Bodies that Matter, 1993), but also strong normative commitments:
This one-day conference aims to reflect – historically, sociologically, philosophically – on the conditions of possibility, on the objects, means and purposes of alliance formation – between minorities, with the State, political parties, and other public actors, or between disciplines, or even across species (e.g. animal-human), etc. –, of political transformation, and thus of a collective agency, in both domestic and international contexts, through the concrete and generic question of “What is coalition?” – with special interest for the ways in which critical perspectives inspired from feminist and queer theory can be made into productive tools to theorize the political at various levels, at different times and locations, but also to intervene and do better democratic work.
We encourage submissions from all research fields that present original material and engage, with creativity and precision, with both the theoretical and practical dimensions of the conference question with insights from – rather than directly on – Butler’s “political theory.
zizek in turkey, pt 6 at 3 min 19 seconds talk in Turkey, January 2012
Zizek just wrote a book on Hegel over 1000 pages book on Hegel. In this talk he also mentions Saroj Giri
Crucial for Hegel, the distortion of a notion to a distortion which is part of this notion itself.
critique of capitalism vs. moral critique. You become a theorist when you ask the crucial question: What is it in the system itself that makes the corruption possible. But if the possibility for possiblity for corruption is IMMANENT to capitalist system as such.
Property is theft: This is not that we have property then it can be stolen from us. The philosophical move is: What if property AS SUCH HAS A DIMENSION OF THEFT.
Enemies approach us commies and say, “you want to abolish marriage”, but isn’t bourgeois marriage a form of abolishment as such (formalized prostitution).
HEGEL’s TOTALITY: not a totalitarian notion as such. Totality means you should include into the system, the concept, all things that may appear to be deviations, antgonisms, etc.
by Judith Butler for Greek Left Review posted November 12, 2011
Of course, it is always possible, and very often the case, that the dominant media claims that a “fiscal crisis” has precipitated mass demonstrations, strikes, and new forms of political mobilization in Greece. Although it is true that there is fiscal crisis, it should not be understood as a periodic difficulty that a country or a region periodically passes through only then to re-enjoy the economic status que. What is emerging in fast and furious form is a constellation of neo-liberal economic practices that are establishing a new paradigm for thinking about the relation between economic and social forms as well as modes of rationality,morality, and subject formation. And the problem, that which pushes tens of thousands of people onto the street, is not simply the rise of technological modes of labor and new ways of calculating the value of work and life. Rather, neo-liberalism works through producing dispensable populations; it exposes populations to precarity; it establishes modes of work that presume that labour will always be temporary; it decimates long-standing institutions of social democracy, withdraws social services from those who are most radically unprotected – the poor, the homeless, the undocumented – because the value of social services or economic rights to basic provisions like shelter and food has been replaced by an economic calculus that values only the entrepreneurial capacities of individuals and moralizes against all those who are unable to fend for themselves or make capitalism work for them.
Continue reading “butler on greece”
Question:
If preserving the life of the other is a precondition of the self, are we not still arguing out of self preservation?
Judith Butler: (at 6:33)
If it’s the case that I only am obligated to preserve the life of the other because I must preserve my own life and if my own life is the final reason why I preserve the life of the other then you’re absolutely right (I’m a modernist egological Bush right-winger RT).
But if in preserving the life of the other I am articulating my social and political existence in the relation to the other then I have left an egological framework for a relational one and I have lost my bounded I, or rather recast it as a certain kind of relational practice, so I would be preserving my ‘self’ my new self my recast self as a secondary effect of preserving the life of the other since it would turn out that I am bound. But it would not be for myself rather than the other or on the basis of any other distinction between self and other that that act of preservation would occur.
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.
Butler, Judith. “Precarious Life and the Obligations of Cohabitation” The Neale Wheeler Watson Lecture 2011 Nobel Museum Stockholm Sweden, May 24 2011.
In his work, the Other has priority over me. What does that concretely mean?
Does the other not have the same obligation toward me? Why should I be obligated toward another who does not reciprocate in the same way toward me?
For Levinas, reciprocity cannot be the basis of ethics, since ethics is not a bargain: it cannot be the case that my ethical relation to another is contingent on their ethical relation to me, since that would make that ethical relation less than absolute and binding; and it would establish my self-preservation as a distinct and bounded sort of being as more primary than any relation I have to another. For Levinas, no ethics can be derived from egoism; indeed, egoism is the defeat of ethics itself. 8
I take distance from Levinas here, since though I agree in the refutation of the primacy of self-preservation for ethical thinking, I want to insist upon a certain interwinement (sic) between that other life, all those other lives, and my own – one that is irreducible to national belonging or communitarian affiliation.
In my view … the life of the other, the life that is not our own, is also our life, since whatever sense “our” life has is derived precisely from this sociality, this being already, and from the start, dependent on a world of others, constituted in and by a social world.
In this way there are surely others distinct from me whose ethical claim upon me is irreducible to an egoistic calculation on my part. But that is because we are, however distinct, also bound to one another. And this is not always a happy or felicitous experience. To find that one’s life is also the life of others, even as this life is distinct, and must be distinct, means that one’s boundary is at once a limit and a site of adjacency, a mode of spatial and temporal nearness and even boundedness.
Moreover, the bounded and living appearance of the body is the condition of being exposed to the other, exposed to solicitation, seduction, passion, injury, exposed in ways that sustain us but also in ways that can destroy us.
In this sense the exposure of the body points to its precariousness. At the same time, for Levinas, this precarious and corporeal being is responsible for the life of the other, which means that no matter how much one fears for one’s own life, preserving the life of the other is paramount.
If only the Israeli army felt this way! Indeed, this is a form of responsibility that is not easy while undergoing a felt sense of precarity. Precarity names both the necessity and difficulty of ethics.
Butler, Judith. “Precarious Life and the Obligations of Cohabitation” The Neale Wheeler Watson Lecture 2011 Nobel Museum Stockholm Sweden, May 24 2011.
Butler’s Thesis
I am trying to underscore that something impinges upon us, … from the outside, as an imposition, but also as an ethical demand. I want to suggest that these are ethical obligations which do not require our consent, and neither are they the result of contracts or agreements into which any of us have deliberately entered. 2
– Is what is happening so far from me that I can bear no responsibility for it?
– Is what is happening so close to me that I cannot bear having to take responsibility for it? If I myself did not make this suffering, am I still in some other sense responsible to it?
How do we approach these questions? … I want to suggest that the ethical solicitation that we encounter in, say, the photograph of war suffering brings up larger questions about ethical obligation.
… ethical obligation imposes itself upon us without our consent, suggesting that consent is not a sufficient ground for delimiting the global obligations which form our responsibility. 4
[What does it mean] to register an ethical demand during these times that is reducible neither to consent nor to established agreement and that takes place outside of established community bonds? 5
I hope it will become possible to understand an alternative set of Jewish views on co-habitation, ones that not only demand a departure from communitarianism but that may serve as a critical alternative to the views and practices of the state of Israel, especially its version of political Zionism and settler colonialism.
It is interesting that Levinas insisted that we are bound to those we do not know, and even those we did not choose, could never have chosen, and that these obligations are, strictly speaking, pre-contractual. And yet, he was of the one who claimed in an interview that the Palestinian had no face, and that he only meant to extend ethical obligations to those who were bound together by his version of Judeo-Christian and classical Greek origins. In some ways, he gave us the very principle that he betrayed. And this means that anyone and everyone are not only free, but obligated, to extend that principle to the Palestinian people, precisely because he could not. His failure directly contradicts his formulation of the demand to be ethically responsive to those who exceed our immediate sphere of belonging, but to whom we nevertheless belong, regardless of any question of what we choose or by what contracts we are bound, or what established forms of cultural belonging are available.
Of course, this raises a question of how there can be an ethical relation to those who cannot appear within the horizon of ethics, who are not persons, or are not considered to be the kind of beings with whom one can or must enter into an ethical relation. Here is where a most painful division within Levinas’s work continues to haunt those of us who seek ethical resources there. On the one hand, he tells us that we are claimed by others, including those we have never known, those we still don’t know, and that we are born into this situation of being compelled to honor the life of the other, every other, whose claim on life comes before our own. On the other hand, he claims that this very ethical relation depends upon a specific set of religious and cultural conditions, Judaeo-Christian, and that those who are not formed within this tradition are not prepared for ethical life, and are not included as those who can make a claim upon those who belong to a narrow conception of the West. 7-8
Can we, in other words, use Levinas against himself to help in the articulation of a global ethics that would extend beyond the religious and cultural communities that he saw as its necessary limit?