Brian Hamilton-Vise

A politics of vulnerability

For a reading group on cultural studies, I spent the evening with Judith Butler’s book of post-9/11 essays, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. The first essay, insisting that it really is possible to propose an explanation for the 9/11 attacks that doesn’t amount to an exoneration of the attackers, was rather mediocre (though only because its points have, by now, been reduced to platitudes). But the second essay was much more enthralling, about how public grief and mourning can open onto new political possibilities. Here’s an excerpt:

bq. Many people think that grief is privatizing, that it returns us to a solitary situation and is, in that sense, depoliticizing. But I think it furnishes a sense of political community of a complex order, and it does this first of all by bringing to the fore the relational ties that have implications for theorizing fundamental dependency and ethical responsibility. … Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something. This seems so clearly the case with grief, but it can be so only because it was already the case with desire. (pp. 22–23)

24 September 2008 | Comments (0)
Tags: Judith Butler, Politics