UFPPC (www.ufppc.org) Digging Deeper XXXVIII: October 29, 2007, 7:00 p.m.

Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London & New York: Verso Books, 2004).

Acknowledgments. Guggenheim Foundation; Princeton University Center for Human Values; readers.

Preface [July 2003]. Post-9/11 essays (xi-xii). Their goal is to “begin the process” of “imagining” “interdependency” (xii-xiii). Comments on the five essays (xiii-xviii). Reflections on censorship and the “public sphere” (xviii-xxi).

Ch. 1: Explanation and Exoneration, or What We Can Hear. Argues that “[o]ur collective responsibility not merely as a nation, but as part of an international community based on a commitment to equality and non-violent cooperation, requires that we ask how these conditions [that produced acts of terror] came about, and endeavor to re-create social and political conditions on more sustaining ground” (17-18).

Ch. 2: Violence, Mourning, Politics. A philosophical meditation on how our understanding of our relation to the other is involved in what we consider a “grievable life”; because the self is constituted through its vulnerability to the other, the attempt to establish mastery everywhere destroys that which it hoped to preserve (19-49).

Ch. 3: Indefinite Detention. [Longest piece in the book.] Guantanamo and indefinite detention (50-51). Foucault on “governmentality,” i.e. the way power manages populations and goods, as the way the state “vitalizes” itself (51-56). Conceptualizing U.S. government actions in Guantanamo (56-58). Sovereignty’s relation to governmentality (58-66). “‘Indefinite detention’ is an illegitimate exercise of power” and signifies “the means by

which the exceptional becomes established as a naturalized norm” (67). The justification of indefinite detention is “not grounded in law, but in another form of judgment” (67; 67-71). Comparison to institutionalization of the mentally ill based on dangerousness (72-77). Degradation and the speech act of asserting “humane” treatment (78-82). Law seen to be an instrument of the state, not that to which the state is subject (83-86). Limits of the Geneva Convention and the delegitimation of certain forms of violence by the label “terrorist” lead to the question of whether we will be true to our conception of humanity at moments of outrage and incomprehension (87-91). Butler denounces “civilization” as a term “that has no place in an internationalism that takes the universality of rights seriously” (91). The present “singularity” consists in the indefinite extension of the “extra-legal operation of power” (92). Foucault on governmentality again (93-97). Argues that “the present circumstance” shows that governmentality has not separated itself from sovereignty, as Foucault claimed (97-98). Calls for “a new internationalism” that “strives for the rights of the stateless, and for forms of self-determination that do not resolve into capricious and cynical forms of state sovereignty” (99; 99-100).

Ch. 4: The Charge of Anti-Semitism: Jews, Israel, and the Risks of Public Critique. An essay refuting Larry Summers’s Sept. 2002 claim that anti-Israel positions are “anti-Semitic in their effect if not in their intent,” insisting instead that “Israel” and “Jews” are to be distinguished as objects of criticism (101-27).

Ch. 5: Precarious Life. Butler means to defend the humanities from charges of irrelevance, but without rehabilitating the author-subject per se” (129; 128-31). Levinas’s concept of the “face” as a source of moral demands (131-35). In his “Peace and Prosperity,” Levinas saw “Thou shalt not kill” as “what one should hear in the very meaning of European culture” (135-39). Doubts about Levinas’s authority (139-40). The face gives a sense of the “precariousness of life” (142; 140-44). “For Levinas, then, the human is not represented by the face. Rather, the human is indirectly affirmed in that very disjunction that makes representation impossible, and this disjunction is conveyed in the impossible representation. For representation to convey the human, then, representation must not only fail, but it must show its failure. There is something unrepresentable that we nevertheless seek to represent, and that paradox must be retained in the representation we give. In this sense, the human . . . is . . . that which limits the success of any representational practice” (144). The media evacuates

the human by presuming to appropriate the face for meaning (whether the evil face or the face of the hero) (145-50). The humanities’ vocation is “to return us to the human where we do not expect to find it, in its frailty and at the limits of its capacity to make sense” (151).

Notes. 9 pp.

Index. 6 pp.

[On the Author. Judith Butler, born Feb. 24, 1956, is professor of rhetoric and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Antigone’s Claim (2000), The Psychic Life of Power (1997), Excitable Speech (1997), Bodies That Matter (1993), and Gender Trouble (1990). She is best known for her argument that sex, gender, and sexuality are performative in nature, and are constructed culturally. Her style has been called obscurantist, and Martha Nussbaum has taken her to task for engaging in political action that is merely “verbal and symbolic.”.