“Perhaps most importantly, we must recognize that ethics requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness, when what forms us diverges from what lies before us, when our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human. To be undone by another is a primary necessity, an anguish, to be sure, but also a chance—to be addressed, claimed, bound to what is not me, but also to be moved, to be prompted to act, to address myself elsewhere, and so to vacate the self-sufficient ‘I’ as a kind of possession. If we speak and try to give an account from this place, we will not be irresponsible, or, if we are, we will surely be forgiven.”
Category: precarity
butler interview 2010 march
Nathan Schneider interviews Judith Butler, March 2010
Her latest book, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009), reflects on the past decade’s saga of needless war, photographed—even fetishized—torture, and routine horror. It treats these practices as issuing from a philosophical choice, one which considers certain human beings expendable and unworthy of being grieved. The concluding chapter confronts the paradoxical nature of any call for nonviolent resistance—paradoxical because the very identities that we claim and resist on behalf of were themselves formed by violence in the past. Butler does not mistake nonviolence for passivity, as so many critics do. At its best, she writes, nonviolent resistance becomes a “carefully crafted ‘fuck you,’” tougher to answer than a Howitzer.
We had this exchange over a series of emails, during which she traveled to the West Bank and back on a research trip.
Nathan Schneider for Guernica
Guernica: This book, you write, is a response to the policies under the Bush administration. How different would a book about the Obama administration be? Have we learned at all how to expand our circle of grief? Have we adjusted our frames?
Judith Butler: The fact is that the war in Afghanistan has escalated under the Obama administration, and though it seems as if there is a firmer policy against torture, and a clear condemnation of torture on the part of the administration, we still are responsible for an extraordinary number of brutal deaths by war. This administration was fully silent during the massacre on Gaza. And Obama himself has agreed not to disclose the full narrative and visual archive on U.S. torture—we have to ask why. I think we have to learn how to separate our impressions of Obama the man as both thoughtful and inspiring from the policies of the Obama administration. Perhaps then we can begin to see that the politics of the administration are very separate from the impression of the man. This is a painful lesson to learn, and I wonder whether the U.S. public and its European allies will actually learn it.
Perhaps we should cease to ask the question of what kind of person he really is and focus on what he does.
Guernica: That kind of distinction between the man—well, as you say, impressions of him—and the administration is something one hears disappointed progressives making a lot lately. But many still feel that, in Obama, they have an ally on the inside who is doing the best he can against political inertia. Can one afford to trust him? Not doing so could undermine his ability to undo that inertia.
Judith Butler: Those explanations that try to locate all the inertia outside of Obama don’t take into account his own unwillingness to speak and act in face of certain urgent issues. His inability to condemn the onslaught against Gaza was not a matter of some external constraint upon him. No one coerced him into escalating the war in Afghanistan, nor was it a matter of externally situated inertia when he abandoned stronger versions of universal healthcare. Perhaps we should cease to ask the question of what kind of person he really is and focus on what he does. He speaks, he acts, and he fails to act; he is explicitly thwarted by entrenched relations. But let us not make excuses for the man or his administration when his actions are weak or, indeed, when he fails to act at all.
Guernica: Obama has performed his presidency as a thinker, a reflecting person, perhaps most ironically when deciding how many tens of thousands more troops to send to Afghanistan. Do you find this heartening?
Judith Butler: With Obama, there is thinking. But it seems to me mainly strategic, if not wholly technical. He has surrounded himself with technocrats, especially on his economic team. So how do we understand the disconnect between the domain of principle and that of policy? What is the relation between the moral vision and principles he espouses and the kind of policy he implements?
All I really have to say about life is that for it to be regarded as valuable, it has to first be regarded as grievable.
Guernica: Let me turn that question back at you. In a world ever more specialized, should articulating a moral vision still be expected of politicians? Might mere bureaucratic competence at the service of their constituent’s interests be enough?
Judith Butler: A president is part of a team, and he chooses those with whom he will act in concert. Summers and Geithner were choices, and they were ones that clearly put technocratic free market thinking above questions of social justice and the kind of political thinking it would take to implement norms of justice. One has to be competent at implementing one policy or another. But there is always the question of which policy, and this is a matter of principle.
Guernica: In the book’s introduction, you set out a principled vision for how we might go about defining life—
Judith Butler: I am not at all sure that I define life, since I think that life tends to exceed the definitions of it we may offer. It always seems to have that characteristic, so the approach to life cannot be altogether successful if we start with definitions. All I really have to say about life is that for it to be regarded as valuable, it has to first be regarded as grievable. A life that is in some sense socially dead or already “lost” cannot be grieved when it is actually destroyed. And I think we can see that entire populations are regarded as negligible life by warring powers, and so when they are destroyed, there is no great sense that a heinous act and egregious loss have taken place.
My question is: how do we understand this nefarious distinction that gets set up between grievable and ungrievable lives?
Guernica: How does your understanding of life differ, for example, from that of the pro-life movement?
Judith Butler: I distinguish my position from the so-called “pro-life” movement since they do not care about whether or not life is sustainable. For me, the argument in favor of a sustainable life can be made just as easily for a woman or girl who requires an abortion in order to live her life and maintain her livelihood. So my argument about life does not favor one side of that debate or another; indeed, I think that debate should be settled on separate grounds. The left needs to reclaim life, especially given how many urgent bio-political issues face us now.
I am trying to contest the notion that we can only value, shelter, and grieve lives that share a common language or cultural sameness with ourselves.
Guernica: What do you mean by “separate grounds”? Must we draw a line between death by abortion and death by war? As opposed, for example, to the “seamless garment” of life in Catholic social teaching?
Judith Butler: We cannot decide questions of reproductive technology or abortion by deciding in advance where life begins and ends. Technologies are already re-deciding those basic issues. We have to ask what kinds of choices are made possible by social configurations of life, and to locate our choices socially and politically. There is no way around the question, “What makes a life livable?” This is different from the question of what constitutes life. At what point in any life process does the question of rights emerge? We differ over how to answer that question.
Guernica: Your account of life depends on being intertwined with other lives; does it really then call on us to be more concerned for the lives of others in distant places and conflicts?
Judith Butler: Along with many other people, I am trying to contest the notion that we can only value, shelter, and grieve those lives that share a common language or cultural sameness with ourselves.
The point is not so much to extend our capacity for compassion, but to understand that ethical relations have to cross both cultural and geographical distance. Given that there is global interdependency in relation to the environment, food supply and distribution, and war, do we not need to understand the bonds that we have to those we do not know or have never chosen? This takes us beyond communitarianism and nationalism alike. Or so I hope.
Guernica: Yes, but surely the lines of interdependency are much deeper and immediate between me and my friends, family, and local community than between me and the average Iraqi in Iraq. Can’t I be excused for at least grieving the Iraqi less, proportionate to my dependence?
Judith Butler: It is not a question of how much you or I feel—it is rather a question of whether a life is worth grieving, and no life is worth grieving unless it is regarded as grievable. In other words, when we subscribe to ideas such as, “no innocent life should be slaughtered,” we have to be able to include all kinds of populations within the notion of “innocent life”—and that means subscribing to an egalitarianism that would contest prevailing schemes of racism.
Guernica: What does the grief you call for consist of? How does it act upon us?
Judith Butler: If we were to start to grieve those against whom we wage war, we would have to stop. One saw this I think very keenly last year when Israel attacked Gaza. The population was considered in explicitly racist ways, and every life was considered an instrument of war. Thus, a unilateral attack on a trapped population became interpreted by those who waged war as an extended act of self-defense. It is clear that most people in the world rejected that construal of the situation, especially when they saw how many women and children were killed.
The vast majority of feminists oppose these contemporary wars, and object to the false construction of Muslim women “in need of being saved.”
Guernica: On your recent trip to the West Bank, did you observe any instances of grief at work?
Judith Butler: I certainly saw many commemorations on the walls of Nablus and Jenin. The question is whether the mainstream Israeli press and public can accept the fact that their army committed widespread slaughter in Gaza. I heard private confirmation of that among Israelis, but less in public. Some brave journalists and writers say it. The organization, Zochrot, that commemorates the deaths and expulsions of Palestinians in 1948—the Naqba—does some of this work, but so much of it remains partially muted within public discourse. There is now a resolution under consideration in Israel attempting to ban public funding for educational and arts projects that represent the Naqba—this is surely a state effort to regulate grieving.
Guernica: Forms of grief are deployed, through certain deplorable exemplars, to justify a military regime—the Holocaust, for example, and now 9/11. Why, then, can’t grief just as easily be used to justify more war?
Judith Butler: Well, I do worry about those instances in which public mourning is explicitly proscribed, and that invariably happens in the context of war. I think there were ways, for instance, of producing icons of those who were killed in the 9/11 attacks in such a way that the desire for revenge and vindication was stoked. So we have to distinguish between modes of mourning that actually extend our ideas about equality, and those that produce differentials, such as “this population is worth protecting” and “this population deserves to die.”
Guernica: The hawkish wing in the “war on terror” has quite effectively claimed the banner of feminism. Is feminism as it has been articulated in part to blame for this?
Judith Butler: No, I think that we have seen quite cynical uses of feminism for the waging of war. The vast majority of feminists oppose these contemporary wars, and object to the false construction of Muslim women “in need of being saved” as a cynical use of feminist concerns with equality. There are some very strong and interesting Muslim feminist movements, and casting Islam as anti-feminist not only disregards those movements, but displaces many of the persisting inequalities in the first world onto an imaginary elsewhere.
Guernica: After millions of protesters around the world could do nothing to prevent the Iraq War, what do you think is the most effective form of protest? Disobedience? Or even thinking?
Judith Butler: Let us remember that Marx thought of thinking as a kind of practice. Thinking can take place in and as embodied action. It is not necessarily a quiet or passive activity. Civil disobedience can be an act of thinking, of mindfully opposing police force, for instance. I continue to believe in demonstrations, but I think they have to be sustained. We see the continuing power of this in Iran right now. The real question is why people thought with the election of Obama that there was no reason to still be on the street? It is true that many people on the left will never have the animus against Obama that they have against Bush. But maybe we need to protest policies instead of individuals. After all, it takes many people and institutions to sustain a war.
Guernica: Anyone who went to an anti-war protest during the Bush administration surely saw the violence of the anger directed personally against the president. People have a need to personalize. It seems to me the strength of your book, though, is that it counter-personalizes, turning our focus not so much to policies or policy-makers as to victims and potential victims.
Judith Butler: It is personal, but it asks what our obligations are to those we do not know. So in this sense, it is about the bonds we must honor even when we do not know the others to whom we are bound.
Guernica: Your account of nonviolence revolves around recognizing sociality and interconnection as well. Does it also rely on the kind of inner spiritual work that was so important, for instance, to Gandhi?
Judith Butler: I am not sure that the work is “inner” in the way that Gandhi described. But I do think that one has to remain vigilant in relation to one’s own aggression, to craft and direct it in ways that are effective. This work on the self, though, takes place through certain practices, and by noticing where one is, how angry one is, and even comporting oneself differently over time. I think this has to be a social practice, one that we undertake with others. That support and solidarity are crucial to maintaining it. Otherwise, we think we should become heroic individuals, and that takes us away from effective collective action.
Guernica: What can philosophy, which so often looks like a kind of solitary heroism, offer against the military-industrial complexes and the cowboy self-image that keep driving us into wars? At what register can philosophy make a difference?
Judith Butler: Let’s remember that the so-called military-industrial complex has a philosophy, even if it is not readily published in journals. The contemporary cowboy also has, or exemplifies, a certain philosophical vision of power, masculinity, impermeability, and domination. So the question is how philosophy takes form as an embodied practice. Any action that is driven by principles, norms, or ideals is philosophically informed. So we might consider: what practices embody interdependency and equality in ways that might mitigate the practice of war waging? My wager is that there are many.
Guernica: Last year, for one, the Mellon Foundation awarded you $1.5 million which you are using to found a critical theory center devoted to scholarship about war. How is it progressing? What are your goals?
Judith Butler: I am trying to bring together people to think about new forms of war and war waging, the place of media in the waging of war, and ways of thinking about violence that can take account of new forms of conflict that do not comply with conventional definitions of war. This will involve considering traditional definitions of war in political science and international law, but also new forms of conflict, theories of violence, and humanistic inquiries into why people wage war as they do. I’m also interested in linking this with studies of ecology, toxic soil, and damaged life.
Guernica: Do you mean to say that the concept of war might be recovered, as William James proposes, for instance, in “The Moral Equivalent of War”? Is war’s ferocity of commitment possible without the bloodlust and the bloody victims?
Judith Butler: Perhaps the issue is to become less ferocious in our commitments, to question certain forms of blind enthusiasm, and to find forms of steadfastness that include reflective thought. Nonviolence is not so much about the suppression of feeling, but its transformation into forceful intelligence.
aboriginal women in canada
That hundreds of aboriginal women can disappear without any popular concern or consternation is proof they lack recognition as properly human. For Canada to take conscious note of the plight of aboriginal woman requires a mutation in the modality of the liberal subject. To this extent, Antigone is not the thousands of Aboriginal women who remain nameless, faceless, less than human, Antigone has yet to arrive. Antigone will emerge simultaneous with a new field of the human, that is when a properly political act succeeds in rupturing the facade of the symbolic, when an aboriginal woman emerges so as to appear monstrous, psychotic, a true ‘terrorist’ of theCanadian way of life.
butler 2008 italy
Excerpt from “Antigone’s Claim: A Conversation With Judith Butler”
Theory & Event Volume 12, Issue 1, 2009
This conversation was held in Pordenone, Italy, in September 2008, during a major cultural event that takes place every year. What follows is an expanded version of our conversation, including a few questions she received from the public and a few more questions that Judith Butler kindly took from us after the event.
Your work has attracted much attention both in America and outside of America, and your books are translated in many languages. What kind of audience do you have in mind when you write philosophy (We are still thinking of Giving an Account of Oneself)? Who is your implied reader?
Judy Butler: Let me say two things in response. I’m not sure I set out to write philosophy. I think sometimes I write philosophically. But those might be different things, to write philosophically and to write philosophy. When one writes philosophy one usually tries to stay within a genre that will be regarded as philosophical, or in accord with a protocol that has been accepted as part of philosophy. In either case, one writes in relation to the norm that governs philosophical thought at a given time. I consider philosophy as a resource, and it remains true that some of the questions I pose are derived from philosophical traditions. But it is very rarely the case that I actually write for a philosophy audience. Who, then, is my reader? When I write, I’m asking that question. Are you there? Who are you? I don’t have an image of the reader in mind; writing is more like an open petition, trying to find out whether there is someone there, opening up the place of the other within one’s own writing.
Maybe it would be worthwhile for me to go back for a moment to talk about what the questions are, because sometimes when I write I’m posing a set of questions to a reader, but that presupposes that the reader and I share some set of cultural predicaments. For instance, consider Simon De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex: do we call that philosophy or not? Is it a philosophical work? I would say yes. Does it stay within the boundaries of philosophy? No. She is asking relevant questions: what is a woman? Is a woman a person? Can she become a person? What does it mean to become a woman? In her work I saw that someone could take a philosophical question and bring it to bear on a concrete cultural and political problem. Consider Antigone. As we know, she buried her brother in spite of Creon’s order, and then, when she is asked to deny that she has done this, she enters a very interesting and particular position. Because she is not a citizen, she is not allowed to speak; she is prohibited from speaking, and yet she is compelled by the sovereign law to speak. So, when she does speak, she defies that law, and her speech exceeds the law that governs acceptable speech. To what extent, then, can Antigone figure for us in the position of the speaker who is outside of the accepted discourse, who nevertheless speaks, sometimes intelligently, sometimes critically, within and against that discourse? Perhaps the norms that govern philosophy work that way, producing a mimetic excess that questions the legitimacy of those norms. More broadly, these questions may have larger appeal and prove relevant to any number of people who are in minority positions or understand themselves as excluded from official public discourse – but somehow are still talking.
We read with great interest an unpublished paper in which you address a point that keeps coming up in your work, at least since the early 1990s. It is the question “who is the subject of responsibility?” In our post-Kantian world, the individual, by definition is subject of responsibility, while it seems that you question this standard assumption, criticizing its premises.
Judy Butler: Perhaps we might rephrase the question by asking, who qualifies as the subject of responsibility today? I know that under the Bush regime, the government promoted a very strong discourse about responsibility: the moral rationale for the devastation of the social welfare state was that individuals should take responsibility for themselves; the moral rationale for unilateral military incursions into sovereign nations has been that the US is understood to be responsible for the free world (I’m not sure, though, that the US will take its fair share of responsibility for the current economic crisis as a result of the deregulation of the stock market). The word is used in political ways that are quite interesting. In France and in Italy there is the term called ‘responsabilization’, which is the process of making citizens responsible for themselves – a process which would seem to contradict the very idea of selflegislation and self-formation that follows from Kantian notions of moral autonomy. “Responsibilization” is a way of describing a government procedure for the making of moral subjects. Not only is the government’s agency occluded by this term, but moralization in general seeks to ground behaviour and action in individual agents and so to deflect from the power of government in the regulated making of such subjects. It deflects as well from nongovernmental powers, including NGOs, that regulate who may become a subject of responsibility and who may not. In the US, we assume responsibility for the lives of those who are like us (and here “responsibility” means “compelled to make an intervention on behalf of”); we assume responsibility for the lives of Americans, but we don’t always recognize as a life those whose cultural backgrounds do not transparently conform to prevalent images of “our own,” especially when it is a question of racial difference and religious alterity.
The questions,’to whom am I responsible?’, ‘for whom am I responsible?’, seem, in these cases, to be limited in advance by the question, ‘with whom can I identify?’. And implicitly, if not forcibly, identification within the national frame assumes the kind of subject already recognizable to me, a subject, in other words, who poses no challenge to the norms of recognizability with which I operate. I confess that when I first started to think about responsibility I was worried primarily about forms of moralism, especially on the Left, where individuals with certain “subject positions” were held responsible for the entire history of social domination. I wanted then to think about a different idea of responsibility, one surely influenced by Levinas, but perhaps also by Arendt, that would not make responsibility into a purely individual matter. What interested me most was the idea that when I’m asked to take responsibility for my actions, I’m asked by someone, and this is also true when I pose such a question to myself. Derrida surely makes this clear in bringing out the sense of “response” in “responsibility”: I’m asked to respond to another human being, so I am already in a social situation. And if I am the one who asks myself to assume responsibility, I have become, through my own doubling, a social creature at the moment in which I pose the question. It is not just the fact of alterity, however, that makes the exchange a social one, but the fact that I am asked in a specific language or through a specific medium, and so am compelled to take responsibility in a language or medium that is understandable to the person who asks this of me; in that sense my efforts to take responsibility for myself are socially prompted and mediated, if not socially constructed, in a specific sense. Within such frameworks, we can situate moral theory within social theory essentially – and not contingently. I would suggest that the same holds for politics and political theory as well, since we have to ask about the political context in which the notion of responsibility emerges – and be able to parse the various meanings of “responsibility”. This is not, however, in my view, an effort to relativize and vanquish the use of the term, but to understand the concrete changes in political conditions that are necessary to establish responsibility on non-cynical grounds. The changing of those conditions is itself a responsibility, but it also leads to a realization of responsibility as part of the very process of instituting a more egalitarian and just organization of social life. This allows us to distinguish between spurious and non-spurious uses, even though the “spurious” is a risk to which any operative notion of responsibility is subject.
We see this most starkly when “responsibility” becomes one of the instruments for sustaining the condition of global irresponsibility, i.e., when under the Bush regime the US actively distinguishes between those populations worthy of protection and grief and those who are not. Let us hope that this modality changes substantially under the Obama administration.
We understand that the notion of “precarious life” is critical to your attempt at identifying the subject of responsibility. In fact, my life is precarious so long as I, as a subject, “am already in the hands of the other.” Could you elaborate on this point? If I, as a subject, am already in the hands of others, it means that I’ve lost a fundamental normative prerogative, meaning to consider my actions as consititutionally mine.
Judy Butler: (yay go judy!)
In the last two wars that the US has been fighting in Iraq and in Afghanistan, it has become very clear that the lives of US citizens, who were killed in 9/11, or the lives of US soldiers, are considered to be precious, are considered invaluable, grievable, openly grievable in public, and therefore made into heroic lives. But the lives that were taken in Iraq — and right now we can see it very clearly, when US army bombed a village in Pakistan, our ally, and it continues to disavow responsibility for this — are not considered lives at all, they are already dead before we killed them, they are already non-living before we deprive them of life. This is kind of schism that characterizes US foreign policy, but also public discourse in a number of venues, including the popular media. If we offer an alternative to this schism between lives that are grievable and lives that are ungrievable, it seems to me that we start with the presumption that human life is precarious life — I could also say that non-human life is also precarious life and that maybe precariousness links human and non-human life in ethically significant ways. When we start understanding our lives as precarious, we understand that we are linked to one another, but how can I take responsibility, how can I assume responsibility if I do not recognize that link?
When I say that we are already in the hands of others, or others are already in our hands, I’m saying that there is a link and that link is precariousness and it is by virtue of that link that we must assume responsibility for shared life.
You ask about what is properly “my own” – I think we can only lay claim to what is “my own” if there is someone before whom the claim is made and/or a language through which the claim is made legible. In this sense, “mineness” is made possible by sociality, and it is only secured through social and political arrangements; otherwise, it becomes a kind of madness.
Question:
You are wary of invocations of “global responsibility” since it is on the basis of such invocations that some countries seek to bring or install democracy in other countries. Carl Schmitt famously argued that “whoever invokes humanity is trying to cheat”… You see a moral puzzle in the ways people invoke global responsibility, and you point to a difficulty in determining whether such invocations are “responsible.” Is this talk of precarious life a way to go about the notion of “human rights” by possibly avoiding some of the difficulties (moral and theoretical) that such a notion (inevitably) involves?
Since I am, in general, less sure than Schmitt about who is cheating or how the cheat takes place, I would suggest that invoking humanity is ambivalent. For instance, when we (any of us) respond with horror when we witness the destruction of human life, is it because we recognize our common or shared “humanity” with those destroyed? Or is it that we become “humane” (and so give evidence to our own humanity) in reacting with a moral sentiment such as horror? What is less evident, but everywhere pressing, is the tacit framework presupposed by this burst of fierce and sudden sentiment. To the degree that certain scenes of destruction compel our horror more than others (equally destructive), it makes sense to ask, who is, without question, included and who is excluded from that humanity? In other words, which lives emblematize humanity, and which ones cannot so easily wield that signifying power?
So, one has to be critical about how and when the notion of humanity is invoked, but I am not convinced that it is always a lie or, indeed, a way of cheating. It is important to ask what it occludes, and how whatever it illuminates presupposes a consequential occlusion – one that turns the idea of “humanity” against the universality by which it is supported and seems, invariably, to reinstitute a certain anthropocentrism. As a result, I think it might be more helpful to consider instead a term such as ‘precarious life’ which, though it has strong resonances with the idea of humanity, functions very differently. There are at least two differences: the first is that
precarious life is a life that is shared in a specific sense: “shared life” is not simply a “life” that functions as a common element in which individuals participate on the order of a mathesis. Rather, it is common in the sense that we are reciprocally exposed and invariably dependent, not only on others, but on a sustained and sustainable environment.
Humanity seems to be a kind of defining ontological attribute, who I am, or who we are, that properly belongs to us as persons, and in that sense, it keeps the human within the humanistic frame. But what if our ontology has to be thought otherwise? If humans actually share a condition of precariousness, not only just with one another, but also with animals, and with the environment, then this constitutive feature of who we “are” undoes the very conceit of anthropocentrism. In this sense, I want to propose ‘precarious life’ as a non-anthropocentric framework for considering what makes life valuable.
Even when we ask the question, who is the human in human rights? In an effort to ground human rights in the conception of the human, we fail to ask what the human “is” such that it requires certain kinds of protections and entitlements. The “human” is not so much the presupposition of such a discourse, but a continually contested and rearticulated term. As a result, you find political organizations that at once expose the limits of the concept of the human and call for its reformulation: women’s human rights, the human rights of gays and lesbians, or the human rights of the physically challenged or the sans-papiers. Such populations are not only outside some conception of the “human” and requesting inclusions, but they are also establishing that precarious “outside” as the site from which certain kinds of claims can and should be made. If there is a language in which the claim is made, and if it is made before someone, then it establishes a social domain that exceeds the idea of the social presupposed by an historically contingent notion of human rights. Antigone, again, to be sure.
Question:
In your recent work, the focus on the “national subject” or the subject of violence or, for that matter, the subject of responsibility, has eclipsed the notion of a gendered subject, that had been a quite dominant issue in your work for almost twenty years. Here in Italy many people still think of Judith Butler as a feminist philosopher. Do you think this definition is still a valid one?
I am quite sure that I am a feminist thinker of some kind. Sometimes I am a feminist philosopher. I continue to work in feminism, and I will always work in feminism, there is no question about that. And maybe I am not always thinking in feminist terms, but if I am thinking that is probably a feminist achievement (laughs). I continue to work on transgender issues, on questions of violence on women, on sexual minorities; I work with clinical psychoanalysts to rethink the explanatory frameworks and categories that tend to pathologize sexual and gender minorities. That’s surely part of my ongoing work, and it will always be.
I would add that the idea of precarious life also emerges from a certain kind of feminist perspective, a critique of a certain presumptively masculine idea, embedded in classical liberal political forms, of the subject who is selfsufficient and a-social. Surely the critique of the idea that any of us can exist outside a condition of dependency is an important, enduring contribution of feminist theory and politics.
Perhaps what links my work on gender and my more recent work on war has to do with how social ontologies are regulated. I have been interested in how certain kinds of heterosexual frames and normative gender schemes make certain kinds of lives unliveable and ungrievable. That was an important dimension of AIDS activism, and remains one now, especially in light of the sufferings and losses on the African continent: it is very often a struggle to make certain kinds of lost life publicly grievable. The deaths by AIDS were not shameful deaths, but horrible deaths that deserved and deserve a public mourning. In a way, that point brought me to consider Antigone, her insistence on burying her brother even when the open public burial and grieving was against the law. The politics of mourning within war is clearly linked to that question of the distribution and regulation of grievable lives. How do we think about who is grievable and who is not, who is allowed to grieve openly and who is not? And what kind of public speech, parrhesia, is needed to call attention to the horrifying way that our capacity to feel horror is differentially distributed and naturalized?
As we titled this conversation “Antigone’s Claim”, so we may ask what would Antigone’s claim be for the present and how we understand her claim in the present. It seems to me that in insisting on the public grievability of lives, Antigone becomes for us a war critic who opposes the arbitrary and violent force of sovereignty. In a way, she stands in advance for precarious lives, including new immigrants, the sans-papiers, those who are without health insurance, those who are differentially affected by the global economy, questions of poverty, of illiteracy, religious minorities, and the physically challenged. That she, in some sense, becomes a figure through whom we can think what it means to understand certain lives as more precarious than others, who live out a precariousness so that others can engage in the fantasy of their impermeability and omnipotence.
Question:
Would it be possible to define your concept of “precarious life” as a new form of “humanism”?
Currently, I do not want a new humanism. If we ask what the human could be beyond humanism, then it seems we resituate the human within the non-human, not as a contingent fact of existence, but as a necessary ontology, an ontology that articulates certain constitutive bonds and binds. So I am struggling toward a non-anthropocentric conception of the human, if that is possible – even a non-anthropocentric philosophical anthropology. The other way of saying this is that wherever the human is, it is always outside of itself in the non-human, or it is always distributed among beings, among human and non-human beings, chiasmically related through the idea of precarious life. So we can neither lodge the human in the self, nor ground the self in the human, but find instead the relations of exposure and responsibility that constitute the “being” of the human in a sociality outside itself, even outside its human-ness.
Question:
You are defining the human in its frailty and at the limits of its capacity to make sense of the world. It’s a weak subject (although not in the sense of Vattimo’s). Do you see a form of universalism (perhaps the only one) in this idea? The universality of frailty, of mourning and loss? Are we relapsing though in a form of essentialism? Moreover, does this frailty entail a negative counterpart: the universality of violence, oppression, subjugation?
I am amused by this idea of a “relapse”! What is at stake is a way of thinking about what is ‘essential’ that implies a dispossession of the self. What strikes me as much more problematic is the idea of a self-aggrandizing subject, the kind that gets nationally instituted at times of war. But I am not just working with grief and frailty, but also with aggression and the various forms it takes. The point is to think about the frailty, the necessity, and the demands of the ties by which we are bound
In your book, you comment on Adriana Cavarero’s work, as much as she borrows from you in her Orrorismo, for instance regarding the vulnerability of the subject or the ethics of self-narrative. In spite of the transatlantic divide between European essentialism and Anglo-American postmodernism (or non-foundational post-structuralism), there are several points of convergence for the definition of an ethical and political (feminist) agenda. Which one do you think is the more prominent and relevant, but also do you see any major point of disagreement between you and Cavarero?
Cavarero is the one who has read Arendt and Levinas quite effectively to show that the singularity of the “you” requires a certain story. I am most interested in this move, and I have been led to rethink my own relation to these figures by virtue of her compelling analyses. Perhaps my own work tried to think more about the social and political conditions under which horror and grief are regulated, and this might be a bit different from hers, which tries to establish an ethical framework for moral sentiments. But yes, as you can imagine, the link between our work is an important one.
When you talk about war and conflict, you seem to adopt a language that has religious rather than simple ethical undertones. When you talk about non-violence, to break the cycle of revenge, for instance in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which implies forgiveness, you seem to open up your discourse to an ethical ground that resonates with a broad Judeo-Christian frame of reference. How do you stand in relation to religion and the new centrality of religious in contemporary thought, considering that it has become a central issue and concern for many intellectuals like Habermas, Zizek, Vattimo and others?
I don’t see a term like “forgiveness” as necessarily implicated in a religious framework. Maybe that seems odd, but it seems to me that the term, whatever its religious background, has and does travel outside of explicitly religious circles and can operate within ostensibly secular contexts. There will be those for whom the resonance exists, but I think we have to consider more closely, for instance, how reparation works in the theory of Melanie Klein, or how “forgiveness” operates in various international human rights commissions. What interests me most are modes of operating within conflict that find ways of expressing rage without retribution. This problematic is articulated in the Oresteia and, if I am right, marks a certain distinction between matters of justice and ideas of religious authority.
That said, I think it is important that we take note of the ways in which religious discourse informs many of our secular understandings of politics, and to see how such terms become resignified over time and through the shifting of contextual frames. I have been interested in Walter Benjamin’s appropriation of ‘forgiveness’ in some of his early writings on aesthetics. There, it is actually linked with the eradication of traces of guilt and the inauguration of a new temporal modality. Perhaps there continues to be ways of thinking revolution in such terms.
In recent years you have been writing and speaking about Israeli politics, and the problem of the ‘anti-Semitic’ charge to quell public criticism of Israel that it is almost inevitably advocated in many quarters. Anti-Semitism is indeed an oversensitive issue in the collective Western consciousness. How do you place yourself, being Jewish but anti-Zionist, in reference to this? And do you see the danger of a ‘culture of victimhood’ in the critical political discourse?
I want to suggest that public criticisms against gratuitous state violence form an important, if underappreciated, dimension of Jewish values, and that ideals of co-habitation with the non-Jew are also central to early strains of Zionist thought and to contemporary dissenting positions within Jewish intellectual life. I understand that my position is difficult to defend, since it would be important to know what is meant by “Jewish” here. But I want to suggest that the term refers to both secular and religious positions, but also to historical situations that are agnostic both in relation to secularism and religious belief. Within this broad domain, public criticism of gratuitous state violence has been crucial to a number of Jewish intellectual positions. I wish to underscore both the risks and obligations of public criticism, since whatever the motivations are for levelling criticisms against certain forms of state violence, it remains true that the criticism of Israeli state violence, for instance, can be construed in any number of anti-Semitic ways. This situation became acute, for instance, for Primo Levi, whose criticisms of Israel were exploited by those who covered the walls of Turin, his home town, with anti-Semitic slogans. How, then, does one unequivocally oppose anti-Semitism at the same time that one revives and furthers that Jewish tradition of public criticism that is formulated as a critique of state violence, an opposition to the forcible dispossession of minority populations? It is clearly impossible to accept anti-Semitism, just as it is to jettison key values furnished by this internally complicated Jewish tradition of public criticism. Much depends on our ability to distinguish between forms of public criticism that are part of democratic deliberation and those that propose violent and non-democratic means to achieve political ends. So perhaps my hope is that active and internal dissension among Jews on the topic of Israel can work in tandem with other political efforts to oppose the occupation and the radical disenfranchisements of 1948. In a way, this is to shift the “moral” discourse from persecution\victimization to an affirmative responsibility for cohabitation that links not only with precarious life as a social ontology, but also with a new fathoming of global responsibility for this time.
butler interview february 2008
Italian interview Feb 2008 in Monthy Review Magazine (wow, times are a changin)
This interview took place in February 2008 on the occasion of talk by Judith Butler at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB).
F.B.: Could you explain your conception of critical thought and its relation with Foucault’s famous words: I do not know if today it is necessary to say that critical work still implies faith in the Enlightenment; I consider that it must always work on our limits, that is, a patient labour that forms the impatience for freedom”? In one of your latest texts you refer to this; perhaps you could relate the task of critical thought and its connection with feminism.
J.B.: The critical task demands a preoccupation with limits, and Foucault was particularly interested in the problem of how this delimited field shapes the subject. Thus, if we are formed as obedient subjects, if the state or some other regulated form of power imposes itself on us and we accept it, we become obedient subjects. But in the moment we begin to ask ourselves about the legitimacy of this power we become critical, we adopt a point of view that is not completely shaped by the state and we question ourselves about the limits of the demands that can be placed on us. Foucault is very clear in this respect: questioning the demand for obedience made of us by the state means questioning our ontology as subjects.
And if I am not wholly formed by this power of the state, in what way am I, or might I be, formed? Asking yourself this question means you are already beginning to form yourself in another way, outside this relation with the state, so critical thought distances you to some extent. When someone says “no” to power, they are saying “no” to a particular way of being formed by power. They are saying: I am not going to be subjected in this way or by these means through which the state establishes its legitimacy. The critical position implies a certain “no”, a saying “no” as an “I”, and this, then, is a step in the formation of this “I”.
Many people ask about the basis on which Foucault establishes this resistance to power. What he is saying to us is that in the practice of critical thought we are forming ourselves as subjects, through resistance and questioning. Foucault does not presuppose a pre-existing subject that can say “no” and criticise authority. Rather that the subject forms him or herself through the practice of criticism.
And, in my view, some forms of criticism involve a questioning of the intelligibility of the norms that constitute us as people. If the powers that be address me as a citizen or as a non-citizen, in terms of a gender or a racial category, I must fight against this social determination. The norms establish my social intelligibility, the categories through which I understand myself and other people. If, from the very outset, a gender is attributed to me, if I am called a “girl”, then I actively am a girl; the “I” that emerges through this gender is intelligible, in part, as a social being: the gender attributed to me guarantees my intelligibility and my legibility as a person, and if I question this gender, I risk a certain unintelligibility, risk losing my place and my social legibility as a particular person.
However, the “I” could say “no” or could ask “why?” With what means, for what end have I been generated, with what right has this medical establishment attributed a particular gender to me, or with what right has the law attributed this gender to me? The “I” steps back from these gender norms, even if such norms are the conditions that have determined its formation; that is, it does not abandon or destroy them, but it does wrestle with them. Is it possible to reconstruct gender? And if so, can this be understood as a practice of freedom?
Can it be understood as a way of becoming? And if so, what other formations are possible? In my opinion, feminism implies thinking about the practices of freedom: when we object to discriminatory practices at work, to forced reclusion within the private domain, when we protest about violence against women. . . , it is not only because we want women to achieve equality, to be treated justly. Equality and justice are very important norms, but there are more: we want certain freedoms for women so they are not totally limited to the established ideas of femininity or even of masculinity. We want them to be capable of innovating and creating new positions. Insofar as feminism has been, at least in part, a kind of philosophy, it is crucial that it develops new notions of gender. If feminism suggests that we cannot question our sexual positions or affirm that we have no need of the category of gender, then it would be saying, in some sense, that I should accept a particular positionality or a particular structure — restrictive for me and for others — and that I am not free to make and remake the form, or the terms in which I have been made. And it is true that I cannot change these terms radically, and even if I decide to resist the category of woman, I will have to battle with this category throughout my whole life. In this way, whenever we question our gender we run the risk of losing our intelligibility, of being labelled ‘monsters’. My struggle with gender would be precisely that, a struggle, and that has something to do with the patient labour that forms the impatience for freedom. Thus, gender perfomativity can be understood: the slow and difficult practice of producing new possibilities of experiencing gender in the light of history, and in the context of very powerful norms that restrict our intelligibility as human beings. They are complex struggles, political in nature, since they insist on new forms of recognition. In fact, from my experience of feminism, these political struggles have been being waged for the last hundred years, at the very least. I only offer a radical language for these struggles.
F.B.: Speaking about performativity and the possibility of new forms of being, the question arises of how to evaluate the diverse innovative forms of agency, because not everything that is novel is necessarily ‘good’. In your Undoing Gender you speak a little about this, but is there any single criterion that will allow us to make this distinction? Is it pertinent here to speak of universality?
J.B.: If we are referring to the various ways in which gender is understood as a form or a cultural interpretation of the body, I believe it is not appropriate to speak of good or bad genders: gender is extra-moral. Those who wish to establish the distinction between normal genders and pathological genders, or who set out to regulate gender are making a mistake. They are absolutely and universally wrong. There are illegitimate operations of power that attempt to restrict our idea of what gender might be, for example in the areas of medicine, law, psychiatry, social policy, immigration policy, or the policies against violence.
My commitment involves opposition to all restrictive and violent measures that are used to regulate and restrict the life of gender. There are certain types of freedoms and practices that are very important for human flourishing. Any excessive restriction of gender limits, or undermines, the capacity of humans to flourish. And, what is more, I would add that this human flourishing is a good thing. I am aware that there I am taking a moral standpoint here; I know that I have a strong normative structure, but this has nothing to do with saying “this kind of gender is good and this one is bad”. To do so would constitute a dangerous use of morality; rather, I am trying to shift the moral structure towards another framework in which we can ask ourselves: how does a body survive? What is a flourishing body? What does it need to flourish in the world? And it needs various things: it needs to be nourished, to be touched, to be in social settings of interdependence, to have certain expressive and creative capacities, to be protected from violence, and to have its life sustained in a material sense.
Today there are many people with modalities of gender that are considered unacceptable — the sexual or gender minorities — and who are discriminated against, considered abnormal, by the discourses of psychiatry or psychology, or who are the object of physical violence. These people are not being given the opportunity of having their lives recognised as worthy of being protected or helped, not even as lives that deserve to be mourned. I question the norms of gender that prevent us or make us incapable of recognising certain lives as being worth living, and which stop us providing the material conditions necessary for these lives to be lived, to flourish. For these lives to be publicly recognised also means their being understood as lives whose disappearance would be felt as a loss.
The same thing happens in war: certain lives are deemed worthy of being protected, while others are considered expendable, of negligible importance, radically dispensable.
One could say that all my work revolves around this question: what is it that counts as a life? And in what way do certain restrictive norms of gender decide for us? What kind of life is worth protecting and what kind of life is not?
F.B.: In recent years important changes have taken place in many aspects of the lives of gays, lesbians and even transsexuals. For example, in our country same-sex marriages have been made legal. In the light of your reflections about the way in which a broader context of intelligibility has ontological consequences, it might be useful to ask to what extent this recognition could end up leading to new forms of restriction, other forms of normality.
J.B.: Of course, if marriage exists, then homosexual marriage should also exist; marriage should be extended to all couples irrespective of their sexual orientation; if sexual orientation is an impediment, then marriage is discriminatory. For my part, I don’t understand why it should be limited to two people, this appears arbitrary to me and might potentially be discriminatory; but I know this point of view is not very popular. However, there are forms of sexual organisation that do not imply monogamy, and types of relationship that do not imply marriage or the desire for legal recognition — even if they do seek cultural acceptance. There are also communities made up of lovers, ex-lovers and friends who look after the children, communities that constitute complex kinship networks that do not fit the conjugal pattern.
I agree that the right to homosexual marriage runs the risk of producing a conservative effect, of making marriage an act of normalisation, and thereby presenting other very important forms of intimacy and kinship as abnormal or even pathological. But the question is: politically, what do we do with this? I would say that every campaign in favour of homosexual marriage ought also to be in favour of alternative families, the alternative systems of kinship and personal association. We need a movement that does not win rights for some people at the expense of others. And imagining this movement is not easy.
The demand for recognition by the state should go hand in hand with a critical questioning: what do we need the state for? Although there are times that we need it for some kinds of protection (immigration, property, or children), should we allow it to define our relationships? There are forms of relation that we value and that cannot be recognised by the state, where the recognition of civil society or the community is enough. We need a movement that remains critical, that formulates these questions and keeps them open.
F.B.: I would like to bring up a thinker I have been working on in the last few years, Hannah Arendt. I believe there are aspects of her thought that interest you. Where would you situate Arendt’s distinction between liberation and liberty in your work? Similarly, how does the concept of responsibility fit into your reflections about the importance of performativity and resignification as political practices?
J.B.: It is true that, in general, I do not think of freedom in terms of liberation. I continue to be very strongly influenced by Foucault’s History of Sexuality, in which he warns us against imagining a complete liberation from power. There can never be a total liberation from power, especially in relation to the politics of sexuality. Foucault says two things at the same time: we can never totally liberate ourselves from power (there is no space from which to say “no” to power) and, on the other hand, we are never completely determined by power. Thus, despite the impossibility of transcending power, a space of liberty opens up, and both determinism and radical voluntarism are refuted. What is this space of freedom that opens up once we have understood this? Here freedom is a kind of practice, a struggle, a continuous process with neither a beginning nor an end. When this practice is systematically attacked we cannot function as political subjects, our political capacities have been undermined.
When referring to freedom, I am not alluding to the idea of an individual subject, alone, since a subject is free to the extent that s/he is conditioned by conventions, norms and cultural possibilities that make freedom possible, though they do not determine it. They are the conditions of possibility of freedom. Who we are as subjects of freedom depends on non-voluntary forms of connection with others; I was not only born within a series of rules or conventions that form me, but also within a series of relationships on which I depend for my survival and which constitute me as an interdependent creature in this world. The questions of responsibility emerge in the context of this sociality, this interdependence.
On the matter of responsibility I am interested in the productive formulations made by Levinas. For Levinas, I am not responsible for my actions — though in fact I also am — but rather responsible for the Other, for the demands of the Other. And any demand made by the Other is prior to any possibility of social contract: whatever the demand the Other puts before me, it affects me, it involves me in a relation of responsibility.
Legal contracts cannot adequately describe this situation of primary responsibility. That means that I am responsible even for those who are not in any form of contractual relationship with me, or who do not form part of my community, or my nation, or who are not covered by the same legal framework as me. This helps to understand, for example, how I can be responsible for those who live at a distance from me, who are under a different form of political organisation, or those who are stateless. In Levinas’ framework, even those we never meet, those whose names and faces we do not know, present us with a demand. It is, then, a question of accepting our global interdependence and even our obligation to protect the lives of those we do not know. For Levinas, this primary obligation is expressed through what we commonly call commandments, “Thou shall not kill”: a requirement to preserve life. This does not mean that I can or should preserve the life of every individual (of course I cannot do so, and to imagine I could would be unhealthy, it would imply some sort of narcissism, a certain messianism), but rather that I should think about what kind of political structures we need to sustain life and minimise those forms of violence that extinguish it. This does not mean I am capable of making these structures come into existence — responsibility is not the same as efficacy — but rather that I can fight for a world that maximises the possibility of preserving and sustaining life and minimises the possibility of those forms of violence that, illegitimately, take life, or at least reduce the conditions that make it possible for this to happen. This is part of what I am thinking about at the moment. And I have to say that it is not easy to situate Arendt in this context.
Despite the fact that Levinas himself was not a pacifist, I believe that, taking his ideas as a starting point, it is possible to develop a philosophy of non-violence and even a conception of a trans-national political community that holds these values to be fundamental. We have to take Levinas’ framework and develop a kind of trans-national ethics based on non-violence, and thus it is necessary to disagree with him with respect to the difference between ethics and politics, to his stand on pacifism, and on Israel.
F.B.: Certainly, we are not only responsible for what we have done; responsibility points towards the interplay of autonomy and limit. To the extent that we always live and survive through some sort of consent that can hardly be considered voluntary, political responsibility also has to do with the idea that we are aware of, that we hope will continue, that we want to innovate or conserve. In this sense, unless our attitude towards the world is one of indifference, we can talk about a kind of political responsibility in the maintenance of structures and habits or values that, in many spheres, impede the possibility of feminine freedom.
J.B.: Let me start with a criticism Derrida made of Levinas: if it is necessary to respond to all demands, that means an infinite number of demands, and how should we decide which group of demands to respond to? Perhaps responsibility is only made possible by circumscribing a group of demands, that is, by becoming irresponsible in relation to all other demands. In a way that is characteristic of him, Derrida affirms that responsibility, in Levinas’ sense, leads to a necessary irresponsibility. Yet this is to continue to misunderstand the singularity of the demands made on us. It’s not enough to deal with them case by case. Let’s think, for example, about violence against women: it is true that we can consider a rapist or an aggressor to be responsible before the law; in a legal framework, he will have to pay for his acts, will have to be punished, once evidence of his guilt has been provided. No doubt we need a punitive legal institution, but the question is whether, once legal responsibility has been assumed, this means that full responsibility has now been apportioned. Legal responsibility is not an adequate model for conceptualising the whole range of responsibilities we have, because there remains a fundamental question to resolve: rape and domestic violence continue. Why do these social practices reproduce themselves time and again in a culture? A broader kind of intervention seems to me to be necessary, a kind of outcry about violence against women, and against sexual minorities; I believe it is very important to relate them: violence against transsexuals, for example, against sex workers, against illegal immigrants who can have no recourse to law, and violence against many groups who have been dispossessed of all their rights. I consider that we need a strong policy that connects all these forms of violence, and also demands the production, through the mass media, of an education, an ethos, that would act as a counterweight to these forms of violence. If you examining all this, case by case, you lose sight of the horizon: these forms of violence form part of a social practice — are even socially acceptable amongst certain types of men — of a social model. But how can we intervene at the level of social practices? By using the law, certainly, but not only in this way, given that we have a responsibility to remake the world, and to institute certain standards of non-violence on a more general level. Political responsibility must go hand in hand with legal responsibility.
F.B.: In your latest books you deal with the issue of the place occupied by passions and emotions, like pain and vulnerability in politics. Similarly, you point to the urgency of asking ourselves: “what does it mean to be human?” Isn’t it a little surprising that all this should be written by an author who appears to form part of the anti-humanist tradition, part of the tradition that is known in the USA as French Theory?
J.B.: It is necessary to be careful when we talk about ‘humanism’. We only have to look at the various legacies of humanism to see that there is not just one kind of humanism: the forms that emerge in Italy are very distinct from those that emerge in France. There is also a humanism based in classical liberal political philosophy that can not be assimilated into literary humanism. In any case, if we agree that philosophical anthropology is a form of humanism that supposes that there is just one single idea of what it is to be human, and that it is possible to attribute defining traits to this human subject, then we are taking that which is human as something given, something that already exists.
What I want to suggest is the following: for humanness to become possible — in specific times and places — depends on certain types of social norms that are involved in the exercise of producing and ‘de-producing’ humanness. In other words, for that which is human to be human, it must be in relationship with that which is inhuman or non-human, and this is a differential operation of power. Humanness is produced and sustained in one form and is ‘de-produced’ and not sustained in other forms: the human being is a differentiating effect of power.
In the USA, for example, at present there is a very powerful discourse that sets out to define humanness as being a product of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Similarly, we have some morphological policies that define humanness in terms of certain ideas about what a human body should be like. And this produces a population with disabilities, or of disabled individuals whose bodies do not match the morphological idea. Remember that any regulatory ideal of humanness always produces exclusions, ‘outsiders’, and creates a problem: how should we refer to these beings that appear human but are not? We only have to think of the history of slavery, something which survives in the USA, where it remains unclear if all the black men who are imprisoned are human or not.
Humanness is not something given, it is a differentiating effect of power, but we need the term because without it we cannot understand what is happening. I am worried by those positions that say: “that which is human belongs to humanism, so we can never talk any more about humanness”; “choice belongs to voluntarism, we have to stop talking about choice”; “the Enlightenment belongs to that which we have dismantled, so we can no longer speak of Enlightenment”. But they don’t ask themselves what the Enlightenment was. Why go back to that which was? Why go back to humanness? Well, because these concepts, these really important ideals, have not left us, they continue to form us. And there is a new way of understanding them that starts with the idea that they do not have a single form and that, in fact, their regulation operates politically to produce exclusions that we must challenge. For someone to say that a person who is considered non-human is, in fact, human means a resignification of humanness and emphasises that humanness can work in another form. On occasions it is important to use the term precisely in the way that the Human Rights discourse sometimes does: taking someone to whom the defining characteristics of humanness are not attributed and affirming that person is human is a performative act that redefines humanness in terms of liberation, as emancipation. It is not a question of searching for what was already there, but of making it happen.
F.B.: In your recent reflections, when you talk about ‘that which is human’ you connect it with the question of which lives deserve to be recognised as being worthy of being protected or helped. When you speak about ‘life’, are you taking as your starting point the distinction between bios and zoe?
J.B.: The question of life is difficult; I have my doubts about the way in which the distinction that Arendt establishes in The Human Condition has been popularised by Giorgio Agamben. Despite the fact that bios and zoe are analytically distinguishable, each is always implied in the other. I have problems when Arendt affirms that the point of life cannot be life itself. For her it is a terrible idea, since she only understands life as something that is bound up with very important principles and values. Arendt wanted to distinguish between life that was not worth living and life itself, and in this she was following Socrates: an unexamined life was not worth living. That is why, for her, thinking, judging and responsibility were so important, because she understood that these human activities make life worth living, and if these are not possible, then neither is life. But this does not help us to understand why it is necessary to preserve the life of sensate beings, including human beings.
Arendt distinguishes between the public and private spheres. The public domain is where we think, judge act; the private domain means that someone looks after the home, the food, the reproduction of the material conditions of life. It seems to me to be worth remembering that there is a politics of this sphere, a politics of the domestic, there is a politics of private life. Who does the work of cleaning the house, of keeping it all together? The questions about relationships, about the family, about work, are political questions.
I would like to go back and ask about the conditions of survival: what do we need to survive? We depend on our surroundings and on food; the food should be well distributed and eating habits healthy. We depend on justice and the distribution of economic resources. I believe there could be a politics of this sphere that looked on life as simply that, life, bare life; a politics that allowed us to see that life is never just naked life, that it is always politically saturated. Hence my disagreement with Agamben’s characterisation of ‘naked life’, for example when he refers to the Palestinians in Gaza, stripped of their rights, exposed to brutality without any defence, reduced to mere life; it is not a question of ‘mere life’, these lives are politically saturated: there is a battle taking place to cross the border, to find food, to rebuild the house destroyed by bombs, or to get medicine. All these actions are struggles, even, I would say, practices of freedom. The practices of survival are extremely important; if we say they are simple mere organic life, we cannot recognise them as political struggles.
F.B.: In your latest books you deal with the idea of thinking the community in terms of relatability. This perspective seems to me very interesting, since it allows us to establish a nexus between the misnamed ‘domestic’ violence and the violence of war. Do you believe that this would allow us to rethink global international politics?
J.B.: When the USA was attacked in September 2001, the government set out to quickly construct an idea of the country as sovereign, impermeable, invulnerable, because it was unacceptable that its frontiers had been breached. The system involved creating very powerful images, normally of men: men of the government, men fighting to save people inside the World Trade Center. There was a kind of resurgence of the idea of a strong, efficacious, militarised man, a man whose body will never be destroyed nor affected by anyone, who will be pure action and pure aggression. A certain idea of the subject was produced: who is the American subject? Who is America? A very aggressive affirmation was made about masculine sovereignty, a certain idea of what the body is — of the masculine body, a certain idea of masculine subjectivity, which also amounts to a national self-comprehension — and then naturally they annihilated the sovereignty of Iraq, of Afghanistan, they resorted to Guantanamo because it is not under Cuban sovereignty and is also outside the borders of US sovereignty, in such a way that they could do what they wanted. They play with sovereignty; they take a certain kind of sovereignty as a prerogative, but do not respect sovereignty as a principle.
Another possibility would have been to say: we have been attacked, we accept the fact that we live in a global community, our frontiers are porous, people can cross them, we have to decide how we want to live this. Instead of defending ourselves, what we need are new international agreements and also to show the USA as being committed to international law, because we should remember that since 2001, and even before, Bush has refused to sign almost any international treaties: the anti-missile treaty, that establishing the International Court; anything to do with international cooperation, including the UN. He exercised his sovereignty over them and against them.
Perhaps because international cooperation is an ethos: we are dependent on a global world, we are all vulnerable, there can be accusations and agreements. How do we live together? What kind of agreements do we accept? But it is the nation-states that establish agreements between themselves and the real question is that of the stateless peoples: insurgent populations, people who live within political organisations that are not permitted to participate in international agreements. What kind of connection can be established here? This implies another kind of politics, a global politics, one that does not restrict itself to the nation-states. I am referring to other ways of thinking our vulnerability as nations, our limits as nations, and that include the conception of the subject as being fundamentally dependent or fundamentally social, as well as the forms of political organisation that seek to structure global politics in such a way as to gain recognition of our interdependence.
F.B.: To round off our conversation, I would like to formulate some of the questions that ideas of sexual difference have raised: how do you explain, from your conception of gender, the historical asymmetry between the sexes? How do you explain that lack of recognition of our first origins, of having been given birth to by a woman?
J.B.: I am always surprised that, in Europe, these great divisions are made between Irigaray and the philosophers of sexual difference, on one side, and Butler, on the other, because in the USA we work in both lines. For me, this supposed contrast does not exist; in my classes I teach Irigaray. In my opinion, when we study the significances that have been conferred on sexual reproduction and how it has been organised, we find important convergences between Irigaray’s work and mine, because the question is: how does the scene of reproduction come to be the defining moment of sexual difference? And what do we do with this? And, in this respect, we find various points of view: that of psychoanalysis, which underlines masculine dependence on the mother and at the same time its rejection; that which emphasises the importance of the maternal as a feminine value, as the basis for the feminist critique; and we can also find another perspective that raises questions like: why has sexuality been thought of in a restrictive form within the framework of sexual reproduction? What does it mean to think of non-reproductive sexuality in relation to this burdensome symbolic scene of reproduction? Every nation-state, every national religious unit, wants to control reproduction, everybody is very uneasy about reproduction: the Spanish conservatives want to control reproduction, they say “no” to abortion. Why? Because it is through the control of women’s bodies that reproduction of the population is achieved and it becomes possible to reproduce the nation, the race, masculinity.
We are all trying to change these values and work on them, trying to find other spaces and possibilities for femininity, for masculinity, for that which is neither feminine nor masculine. We have distinct conceptions about how to think this difference, but, for sure, we are all interested in exploring this difference. Given that we cannot assume a hard and fast division between these positions, I think there could be a dialogue between them: none of us want to accept the conception of sexual reproduction that transforms woman into a non-being that makes possible the being of man. We all start here, though we all have different strategies about how to move on.
Lloyd cultural intelligibility
Cultural intelligibility: refers to the production of a normative framework that conditions who can be recognized as a legitimate subject. Butler uses it in her earlier writings as a way of think about how normative ideas of sex and gender circumscribe who can be conceived of as subject. She also draws on it in her later texts (particularly Undoing Gender and Precarious Life), to demonstrate how the human is normatively produced within particular racial and cultural frames. On both occasions, Butler ties the idea of cultural intelligibility to the possibility of a liveable life (that is, a life that is recognized as having value and legitimacy). Before any individual can live a ‘liveable’ life, she argues, they have first to be recognized as a viable subject. If they cannot be recognized in this way (because they deviate somehow from the norms determining viable subjectivity), then their lives will be ‘”impossible”, illegible, unreal, and illegitimate’ (GT: viii). They simply will not matter. Any regime of cultural intelligibility thus hinges on what she calls in the 1999 preface ‘normative violence’ (GT:xx): that is, the violence that is done by certain norms in the generation of liveable lives and in the constitution of subjectivity. It is this interest in how normative violence relates to cultural intelligibility and how both relate to liveable lives that drives her politics (33).
Heterosexual matrix: generates a series of ideal relations between sex, gender and desire such that gender is said to follow naturally from sex and where desire (or sexuality) is said to follow naturally from gender. ‘Sex’ in this sense can be thought of as a natural substance that is given expression in both femininity and masculinity, AND in specific ‘modalities of desire and pleasure’ (‘GB’:259). Consistent with the grid, maleness entails masculinity, and masculinity is expressed in sexual desire for a woman, whereas femaleness entails femininity and is expressed in sexual desire for a man. Gender and desire are thus seen as aspects of sex. As such, “intelligible” genders are those which in some sense institute and maintain relations of coherence and continuity among sex, gender, sexual practice, and desire’ (GT:23). These relations of coherence and continuity are not natural; they are the effect of the constitutive and violent work of certain gender norms. A coherent —and culturally intelligible— subject, therefore, is one in whom sex, gender and desire flow in the way just described. Where however, sex, gender and desire line up in a different way … the individual in question is regarded as culturally unintelligible and, as such, as not a viable subject. In terms of the matrix, he might be thought of, that is, as ‘unnatural’ or as not a ‘proper’ man. If therefore, according to the terms of heteronormativity, to be human is to be heterosexual, then consequently anyone who is not heterosexual (be they gay, lesbian or bisexual, for instance) is not (fully) human. As non-human or less-than-human, they lack social, legal and political validity. Exposing the regulatory and fictive nature of compulsory heterosexuality is thus central to a gender politics, such as Butler’s, that seeks legitimation for non-normative sexual minorities (34-35).
precarious ch. 3 new power
This new configuration of power requires a new theoretical framework, or, at least, a revision of the models for thinking power that we already have at our disposal. The fact of extra-legal power is not new, but the mechanism by which it achieves its goals under present circumstances is singular. Indeed, it may be that this singularity consists in the way the “present circumstance” is transformed in a reality indefinitely extended into the future, controlling not only the lives of prisoners and the fate of constitutional and international law, but also the very ways in which the future may or may not be thought (92).
How then finally are we to understand this extra-legal operation of power? (92)
What we have before us now is the deployment of sovereignty as a tactic, a tactic that produces its own effectivity as its aim. Sovereignty becomes that instrument of power by which law is either used tactically or suspended, populations are monitored, detained, regulated, inspected, interrogated, rendered uniform in their actions, fully ritualized and exposed to control and regulation in their daily lives. The prison presents the managerial tactics of governmentality in an extreme mode. And whereas we expect the prison to be tied to law—to trial, to punishment, to the rights of prisoners— we see presently an effort to produce a secondary judicial system and a sphere of non-legal detention that effectively produces the prison itself as an extra-legal sphere (97).
Finally it seems important to recognize the one way of “managing” a population is to constitute them as the less than human without entitlement to rights, as the humanly unrecognizable. This is different from producing a subject who is compliant with the law; and it is different from the production of the subject who takes the norm of humanness to be its constitutive principle.
The subject who is no subject is neither alive nor dead, neither fully constituted as a subject nor fully deconstituted in death. “Managing” a population is thus not only a process through which regulatory power produces a set of subjects. It is also the process of their de-subjectivation, one with enormous political and legal consequences (98).
… I am [interested] in the place of law in the articulation of an international conception of rights and oblligations that limit and condition claims of state sovereignty … I am further interested in elaborating an account of power that will produce effective sites of intervention in the dehumanizing effects of the new war prison…. I think that a new internationalism must nevertheless strive for the rights of the stateless, and for forms of self-determination that do not resolve into capricious and cynical forms of state sovereignty. There are advantages to coneiving power in such a way that it is not centred in the nation-state, but conceived, rather, to oeprate as well through non-state institutions and discourses, since the points of intervention have proliferated, and the aim of politics is not only or merely the overthrow of the state. A broader set of tactics are opened up by the field of governmentality, including those discourses that shape and deform what we mean by “the human.”
I am in favor of self-determination as long as we understand that no “self,” including no national subject, exists apart from an international socius. A mode of self-determination for any given people, regardless of current state status, is not the same as the extra-legal exercise of sovereignty for the purposes of suspending rights at random. As a result, there can be no legitimate exercise of self-determination that is not conditioned and limited by an international conception of human rights that provides the obligatory framework for state action. I am, for instance, in favor of Palestinian self-determination, and even Palestinian statehood, but that process would have to take place supported by, and limited by, international human rights (Precarious: 98-99).
… Even the US’s call for an international coalition after those events [Sept 11] was one that presumed that the US would set the terms, lead the way, determine the criterion for membership, and lead its allies. This is a form of sovereignty that seeks to absorb and instrumentalize an international coalition, rather than submit to a self-limiting practice by virtue of its international obligations. Similarly, Palestinian self-determination will be secured as a right only if there is an international consensus that there are rights to be enforced in the face of a bloated and violent exercise of sovereign prerogative on the part of Israel. My fear is that the indefinite detainment of prisoners on Guantanamo, for whom no rights of appeal will be possible within federal courts, will become a model for the branding and management of so-called terrorists in various global sites where no rights of appeal to international rights and to international courts will be presumed. If this extension of lawless and illegitimate power takes place, we will see the resurgence of a violent and self-aggrandizing state sovereignty at the expense of any commitment to global co-operation that might suport and radically redistribute rights of recognition governing who may be treated according to standards that ought to govern the treatment of humans. We have yet to become human, it seems, and now that prospect seems even more radically imperiled, if not, for the time being, indefinitely foreclosed (100).
precarious life ch. 3 to be human
When the very human status of those who are imprisoned is called into question, it is a sign that we have made use of a certain parochial frame for understanding the human, and failed to expand our conception of human rights to include those whose values may well test the limits of our own …
If we assume that everyone who is human goes to war like us, and that this is part of what makes them recognizably human, or that the violence we commit is violence that falls within the realm of the recognizably human, but the violence that others commit is unrecognizable as human activity, then we make use of a limited and limiting cultural frame to understand what it is to be human. This is no reason to dismiss the term “human,” but only a reason to ask how it works, what it forecloses, and what it sometimes opens up. To be human implies many things, one of which is that we are the kinds of beings who must live in a world where clashes of value do and will occur, and that these clashes are a sign of what a human community is. How we handle those conflicts will also be a sign of our humanness, one that is importantly, in the making. Whether or not we continue to enforce a universal conception of human rights at moments of outrage and incomprehension, precisely when we think that others have taken themselves ot of the human community as we know it, is a test of our very humanity.
We make a mistake, therefore, if we take a single definition of the human, or a single model of rationality, to be the defining feature of the human, and then extrapolate from that established understanding of the human to all of its various cultural forms.
That direction will lead us to wonder whether some humans who do not exemplify reason and violence in the way defined by our definition are still human, or whether they are unique (Hastert), or really bad people (Cheney) presenting us with a limit case of the human, one in relation to which we have so far failed.
To come up against what functions, for some, as a limit case of the human is a challenge to rethink the human. And the task to rethink the human is part of the democratic trajectory of an evolving human rights jurisprudence.
It should not be surprising to find that there are racial and ethnic frames by which the recognizably human is currently constituted. One critical operation of any democratic culture is to contest these frames, to allow a set of dissonant and overlapping frames to come into view, to take up the challenges of cultural translation, especially those that emerge when we find ourselves living in proximity with those whose beliefs and values challenge our own at very fundamental levels. More crucially, it is not that “we” have a common idea of what is human, for Americans are constituted by many traditions, including Islam in various forms, so any radically democratic self-understanding will have to come to terms with the heterogeneity of human values. This is not a relativism that undermines universal claims; it is the condition by which a concrete and expansive conception of the human will be articulated, the way in which parochial and implicitly racially and religiously bound conceptions of human will be made to yield to a wider conception of how we consider who we are as a global community.
We do not yet understand all these ways, and in this sense human rights law has yet to understand the full meaning of the human. It is, we might say, an ongoing task of human rights to reconceive the human when it finds that its putative universality does not have universal reach (Precarious: 89-91).
The question of who will be treated humanely presupposes that we have first settled the question of who does and does not count as a human. And this is where the debate about Western civilization and Islam is not merely or only an academic debate, a misbegotten pursuit of Orientalism by the likes of Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington who regularly produce monolithic accounts of the East, contrasting the values of Islam with the values of Western civilization. In this sense, civilization is a term that works against an expansive conception of the human, one that has no place in a internationalism that takes the universality of rights seriously. The term and the practice of civilization work to produce the human differentially by offering a culturally limited norm for what the human is supposed to be.
It is not just that some humans are treated as humans, and others are dehumanized; it is rather that dehumanization becomes the condition for the production of the human to the extent that a “Western” civilization defines itself over and against a population understood as, by definition, illegitimate, if not dubiously human (91).
A spurious notion of civilization proves the measure by which the human is defined at the same time that field of would-be humans, the spectrally human, the deconstituted, are maintained and detained, made to live and die within the extra-human and extra-juridical sphere of life.
precarious life ch. 3 indefinite detention
In the name of a security alert and national emergency, the law is effectively suspended in both its national and international forms. And with the suspension of law comes a new exercise of state sovereignty, one that not only takes place outside the law, but through an elaboration of administrative bureaucracies in which officials now not only decide who will be tried, and who will be detained, but also have ultimate say over whether someone may be detained indefinitely or not. With the publication of the new regulations, the US gov’t holds that a number of detainees at Guantanamo will not be given trials at all, but detained indefinitely. What sort of legal innovation is the notion of indefinite detention? (51)
- And what does it say about the contemporary formation and extension of state power?
Indefinite detention not only carries implications for when and where law will be suspended but for determining the limit and scope of legal jurisdiction itself. Both of these, in turn, carry implications for the extension and self-justificatory procedures of state-sovereignty (Precarious 51).
I would like to suggest that the current configuration of state power, in relation both to the management of populations (the hallmark of governmentality) and the exercise of sovereignty in the acts that suspend and limit the jurisdiction of law itself, are reconfigured in terms of the new war prison (53).
I hope to show how procedures of governmentality, which are irreducible to law, are invoked to extend and fortify forms of sovereignty that are equally irreducible to law. Neither is necessarily grounded in law, and neither deploys legal tactics exclusively in the the field of their respective operations. The suspension of the rule of law allows for the convergence of governmentality and sovereignty; sovereignty is exercised in the act of suspension, but also in the self-allocation of legal prerogative; governmentality denotes an operation of administration power that is extra-legal, even as it can and does return to law as a field of tactical operations. The state is neither identified with the acts of sovereignty nor with the field of governmentality, and yet both act in the name of the state. Law itself is either suspended, or regarded as an instrument that the state may use in the service of constraining and monitoring a given population; the state is not subject to the rule of law, but law can be suspended or deployed tactically and partially to suit the requirements of a state that seeks more and more to allocate sovereign power to its executive and administrative powers. The law is suspended in the name of the “sovereignty” of the nation, where “sovereignty” denotes the task of any state to preserve and protect its own territoriality. By this act of suspending the law, the state is further disarticulated into a set of administrative powers that are, to some extent, outside the apparatus of the state itself; and the forms of sovereignty resurrected in its midst markthe persistence of forms of sovereign political power for the executive that precede the emergence of the state in its modern form (Precarious, 55-56).
It is of course, tempting to say that something called the “state”, imagined as a powerful unity, makes use of the field of governmentality to reintroduce and reinstate its own forms of sovereignty. This description doubtless misdescribes the situation, however, since governmentality designates a field of political power in which tactics and aims have become diffuse, and in which political power fails to take on a unitary and causal form. But my point is that precisely because our historical situation is marked by governmentality, and this implies, to a certain degree, a loss of sovereignty, that loss is compensated though the resurgence of sovereignty within the field of governmentality. Petty sovereigns abound, reigning in the midst of bureaucratic army institutions mobilized by aims and tactics of power they do not inaugurate or fully control. And yet such figures are delegated with the power to render unilateral decisions, accountable to no law and without any legitimate authority. The resurrected sovereignty is thus not the sovereignty of unified power under the conditions of legitimacy, the form of power that guarantees the representative status of political institutions. It is, rather, a lawless a prerogatory power, a “rogue” power par excellence (Precarious, 56).
The state in this sense, then, augments its own power in at least two ways. In the context of military tribunals … The executive branch in tandem with its military administration not only decides whether or not a detainee wills tand trial, but appoints the tribunal, reviews teh process, and maintains final say over matters of guilt, innocence, and punishment, i ncluding the death penalty. .. The decision to detain someone indefinitely is not made by executive review, but by a set of administrators who are given broad policy guidelines within which to act. Neither the decision to detain nor the decision to activate the military tribunal is grounded in law (58).
The one who makes this decision assumes a lawless and yet fully effective form of power with the consequence not only of depriving an incarcerated human being of the possibility of a trial, in clear defiance of international law, but of investing the governmental bureaucrat with an extraordinary power over life and death. Those who decide on whether someone will be detained, and continue to be detained, are government officials, not elected ones, and not members of the judiciary. They are, rather, part of the apparatus of governmentality; their decision, the power they wield to “deem” someone dangerous and constitute them effectively as such, is a sovereign power, a ghostly and forceful resurgence of sovereignty in the midst of governmentality (59).
My own view is that a contemporary version of sovereignty, animated by an aggressive nostaligia that seeks to do away with the separation of powers, is produced at the moment of this withdrawal, and we have to consider the act of suspending the law as a performative one which brings a contemporary configuration of sovereignty into being, or, more precisely, reanimates a spectral sovereignty within the field of governmentality. The states produces, through the act of withdrawal, a law that is no law, a court that is no court, a process that is no process (62).
Sovereignty consists now in the variable application, contortion, and suspension of the law; it is, in its current form, a relation to law: exploitative, instrumental, disdainful, preemptory, arbitrary (83).
One might conclude with a strong argument that gov’t policy ought to follow established law. And in a way, that is part of what I am calling for. But there is also a problem with the law, since it leaves open the possibility of its own retraction,and, in the case of the Geneva Convention, extends “universal” rights only to those imprisoned combatants who belong to “recognizable” nation-states, but not to all people. Recognizable nation-states are those that are already signatories to the convention itself. This means that stateless peoples or those who belong to states that are emergent or “rogue” or generally unrecognized lack all protections. The Geneva Convention is, in part, a civilizational discourse, and it nowhere asserts an entitlement to protection against degradation and violence and rights to a fair trial as universal rights. Other international covenants surely do, and many human rights organizations have argued that the GC can and ought to be read to apply universally. The notion of “universality” embeddd in that document (GC) is restrictive in its reach: it counts as subjects worthy of protection only those who belong already to nation-states recognizable within its terms. … By clearly privileging those prisoners from wars between recognizable states, it leaves the stateless unprotected, and it leaves those from non-recognized polities without recourse to its entitlements (87).
Precarious pt 2.
Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? And finally, What makes for a grievable life? Despite our differences in location and history, my guess is that it is possible to appeal to a “we,” for all of us have some notion of what it is to have lost somebody. Loss has made a tenuous “we” of us all.
To be ec-static; means, literally, to be outside oneself, and thus can have several meanings: to be transported beyond oneself by a passion, but also to be beside oneself with rage or grief. I think that if I can still address a “we,” or include myself within its terms, I am speaking to those of us who are living in certain ways beside ourselves, whether in sexual passion, or emotional grief, or political rage (Precarious: 24).
I am arguing, if I am “arguing” at all, that we have an interesting political predicament; most of the time when we hear about “rights,” we understand them as pertaining to individuals. When we argue for protection against discrimination, we argue as a group or a class. And in that language and in that context, we have to present ourselves as bounded beings — distinct, recognizable, delineated, subjects before the law, a community defined by some shared features. Indeed, we must be able to use that language to secure legal protections and entitlements. But perhaps we make a mistake if we take the definitions of who we are, legally, to be adequate descriptions of what we are about. Although this language may well establish our legitimacy within a legal framework ensconced in liberal versions of human ontology, it does not do justice to passion and grief and rage, all of which tear us from ourselves, bind us to others, transport us, undo us, implicate us in lives that are not are [sic] own, irreversibly, if not fatally (Precarious: 24-25).
Precarious Life pt 1
Our fear of understanding a point of view belies a deeper fear that we shall be taken up by it, find it is contagious, become infected in a morally perilous way by the thinking of the presumed enemy.
Thus we can say, and ought to, that US imperialism is a necessary condition for the attacks on the United States, that these attacks would be impossible without the horizon of imperialism within which they occur. But to understand how US imperialism figures here, we have to understand not only how it is experienced by those who understand themselves as its victims, but how it enters into their own formation as acting and deliberating subjects (Butler, Precarious 2004: 11).
What effect did the killing of an estimated 200,000 Iraqi citizens, including tens of thousands of children, and the subsequent starvation of Muslim populations, predicted by Concern, a hunger relief organization, to reach six million by the year’s end, have on Muslim views of the United States? Is a Muslim life as valuable as legibly First World lives? Are the Palestinians yet accorded the status of “human” in US policy and press coverage? Will those hundreds of thousands of Muslim lives lost in the last decades of strife ever receive the equivalent to the paragraph-long obituaries in the New York Times that seek to humanize — often through nationalist and familial framing devices — those Americans who have been violently killed? Is our capacity to mourn in global dimensions foreclosed precisely by the failure to conceive of Muslim and Arab lives as lives (12).
Those who commit acts of violence are surely responsible for them; they are not dupes or mechanisms of an impersonal social force, but agents with responsibility. On the other hand, these individuals are formed, and we would be making a mistake if we reduced their actions to purely self-generated acts of will or symptoms of individual pathology or “evil.” Both the discourse of individualism and of moralism (understood as the moment in which morality exhausts itself in public acts of denunciation) assume that the individual is the first link in a causal chain that forms the meaning of accountability. But to take the self-generated acts of the individual as our point of departure in moral reasoning is precisely to foreclose the possibility of questioning what kind of world gives rise to such individuals. And what is this process of “giving rise”? What social conditions help to form the very ways that choice and deliberation proceed? Where and how can such subject formations be contravened? How is it that radical violence becomes an option, comes to appear as the only viable option for some, under some global conditions? Against what conditions of violation do they respond? And with what resources?
To ask these questions is not to say that the conditions are at fault rather than the individual. It is, rather, to rethink the relation between conditions and acts. Our acts are not self-generated, but conditioned. We are at once acted upon and acting, and our “responsibility” lies in the juncture between the two. What can I do with the conditions that form me? What do they constrain me to do? What can I do to transform them? Being acted up on is not fully continuous with acting, and in this way the forces that act upon us are not finally responsible for what we do. In a certain way, and paradoxically, our responsibility is heightened once we have been subjected to the violence of others. We are acted upon, violently, and it appears that our capacity to set our own course at such instances is fully undermined. Only once we have suffered that violence are we compelled ethically, to ask how we will respond to violent injury. What role will we assume in the historical relay of violence, who will we become in the response, and will we be furthering or impeding violence by virtue of the response that we make? To respond to violence with violence may well seem “justified,” but is it finally a responsible solution? Similarly, moralistic denunciation provides immediate gratification, and even has the effect of temporarily cleansing the speaker of all proximity to guilt through the act of self-righteous denunciation itself. But is this the same as responsibility, understood as taking stock of our world, and participating in its social transformation in such a way that non-violent, cooperative, egalitarian international relations remain the guiding ideal (Precarious: 16-17).