Butler, Judith. \u201cPrecarious Life and the Obligations of Cohabitation\u201d The Neale Wheeler Watson Lecture 2011 Nobel Museum Stockholm Sweden, May 24 2011.<\/p>\n
Finally, I want to say that sometimes these bonds are wretched ones, that one population is up against another in ways that feel unliveable, and the modes of interdependency are characterized as exploitative or colonizing. This is surely the case in Israel\/Palestine where the notions of a national home and homeland are inevitably implicated in relations of internal heterogeneity and adjacency which bring up the issue of unchosen co-habitation in yet a different way.<\/p>\n
Israel and Palestine are joined; they overlap, and through the settlements and the military presence, Israel invades and pervades Palestinian lands. Even if they sought a full-scale separation from each other, the two would still be bound to one another by the separation wall, by the border, by the military powers that control the border. The relationship would only be extended in its wretched form.<\/p>\n
There are settlements now in the West Bank populated with right wing Israelis who nevertheless depend on local Palestinians for conveying food or menial jobs. And we might point out as well that the soldiers at the checkpoint are in constant contact with Palestinians who are waiting there or passing through. These are forms of contact, adjacency, unwilled modes of co-habitation that are not only clearly inegalitarian, but where the military presence is hostile, threatening, and destructive.<\/p>\n
I would include among these the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions<\/strong> movement, which now has an Israeli version, which stipulates that co-existence requires equality and cannot take place under conditions where one party is subjected to colonial subjugation and disenfranchisement \u2013 an Arendtian view, to be sure. These are but a few of the many insistent and important ways of practicing and thinking about alliance, modes of working together, but sometimes working in separate venues against the illegal occupation and for Palestinian dignity and self-determination.<\/p>\n Over and against these instances of co-habitation, there are, as we know, antagonistic ties, wretched bonds, raging and mournful modes of connectedness. In those cases where living with others on adjacent lands or on contested or colonized lands produces aggression and hostility in the midst of that co-habitation.<\/p>\n Colonial subjugation and occupation is surely one way to live without choice next to and under a colonizing population. The mode of unchosen co-habitation that belongs to the colonized is surely not the same as the notion of a democratic plurality established on grounds of equality.<\/p>\n And this is why only those forms of alliance that struggle to overcome colonial subjugation carry the trace of any future possibility of co-habitation between the inhabitants of that piece of earth. Otherwise, Palestinians remain disproportionately exposed to precarity<\/span>, and Israelis act to shore up their territory and majority-rule through extending colonial control and heightening their modes of military aggression.<\/p>\n It seems to me that even in situations of antagonistic and unchosen modes of cohabitation, certain ethical obligations emerge.<\/p>\n Since we do not choose with whom to cohabit the earth, we have to honor those obligations to preserve the lives of those we may not love, we may never love, we do not know, and did not choose. <\/span><\/p>\n Second, these obligations emerge from the social conditions of political life, not from any agreement we have made, nor from any deliberate choice. And yet, these very social conditions of liveable life are precisely those that have to be achieved.<\/span> We cannot rely on them as presuppositions that will guarantee our good life together. On the contrary, they supply the ideals toward which we must struggle.<\/p>\n Because we are bound to realize these conditions, we are also bound to one another, in passionate and fearful alliance, often in spite of ourselves, but ultimately for ourselves, for a \u201cwe\u201d who is constantly in the making.<\/p>\n Thirdly, these conditions imply equality, as Arendt tells us, but also an exposure to precarity<\/span> (a point derived from Levinas) which leads us to understand as a<\/p>\n global obligation imposed upon us to find political and economic forms that to minimize precarity<\/span> and establish economic political equality. <\/span><\/p>\n Those forms of cohabitation characterized by equality and minimized precarity<\/span> become the goal to be achieved by any struggle against subjugation and exploitation, but also the goals that start to be achieved in the practices of alliance that assemble across distances to achieve those very goals.<\/p>\n We struggle in, from, and against precarity<\/span>. Thus, it is not from pervasive love for humanity or a pure desire for peace that we strive to live together.<\/p>\n We live together because we have no choice, and yet we must struggle to affirm the ultimate value of that unchosen social world, and that struggle makes itself known and felt precisely when we exercise freedom in a way that is necessarily committed to the equal value of lives. We can be alive or dead to the sufferings of others, – they can be dead or alive to us, depending on how they appear, and whether they appear at all;<\/p>\n but only when we understand that what happens there also happens here, and that \u201chere\u201d is already an elsewhere, and necessarily so, that we stand a chance of grasping the difficult and shifting global connections in which we live, which make our lives possible \u2013 and sometimes, too often, impossible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Butler, Judith. \u201cPrecarious Life and the Obligations of Cohabitation\u201d The Neale Wheeler Watson Lecture 2011 Nobel Museum Stockholm Sweden, May 24 2011. Finally, I want to say that sometimes these bonds are wretched ones, that one population is up against another in ways that feel unliveable, and the modes of interdependency are characterized as exploitative … Continue reading “precarity (7)”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78,138,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8098","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-butler","category-butlerethics","category-ethics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8098","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8098"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8098\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8101,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8098\/revisions\/8101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}