Judith Butler and the politics of grief as a path to non-violence

Judith Butler on living precariously

A feature common to all humans is our vulnerability to one another.  The self has boundaries, but these boundaries are permeable and allow us to form an understanding both of the world around us and of ourselves through the interaction of the two.  This means that we each have a fundamental dependency on others, making us susceptible to them both socially and physically.  Each of us is constituted in part by our vulnerability and social vulnerability is demonstrated in how we experience the loss of others as grief.  Our senses of self are manufactured by our interactions with others, and when we lose someone who once was a reference point for our own selves, so too do we lose a piece of our identity.  We mourn both.  

For Butler, when a life is lost and that loss is accompanied by grief, grieving functions as both an acknowledgement of death and recognition of a life lived.  On the other hand, the absence of grief and mourning implies the absence of a wider value afforded to the life of that person – a disregard not only of their death but also a negation of their life.  For this reason, grief and mourning represent a resistance to loss and therefore an important challenge to violence.  The absence of grief however implies a permissiveness toward future such losses and ultimately dehumanizes the individuals we place in the frame of the ungrievable.

Grievability and ungrievability make us less and more vulnerable to violence respectively on a sliding scale of the precariousness of our lives.  Such precariousness is not distributed equally, but rather is applied along the lines of race, class, gender, faith, or geography and thus, according to Butler, the conditions of life are distributed unequally.  This differentiated precarity is perpetuated by the frames we use to define and understand others relative to ourselves and these frames mould what we can see.  Our experiences constitute these frames just as we are constituted by them.

The importance Butler places on the role of grief as the manifestation of a life vested with meaning raises questions about our ability to extend our frame of the grievable and the possible advantages that it could confer.  She asks:

1. Is there something to be gained from grieving and not endeavouring to seek resolution through violence?
2.  Is there something to be gained in the political domain by maintaining grief as part of the framework within which we think about our international ties?
3. Is it destructive to stay with a sense of loss or are we instead returned to a sense of human vulnerability and our collective responsibility for the physical lives of one another?
4. From where might a principle emerge by which we vow to protect others from the kinds of violence we have suffered if not from a common human vulnerability?

9/11 and the War on Terror: How to Grieve, Who to Grieve

Butler offers her answer to the four questions above when she says, “To foreclose on vulnerability, to banish it, to make ourselves secure at the expense of every other human consideration is to eradicate one of the most important resources from which we must take our bearings and find our way.”  To this end, Butler criticises the Bush administration for rushing the processes of grief and mourning in the public sphere after 9/11, saying, “Mindfulness of this vulnerability can become the basis of claims for nonmilitary political solutions, just as denial of the vulnerability through a fantasy of mastery...can fuel the instruments of war.”

President Bush’s announcement September 21, 2001 of the end to the period of mourning and the start of the time for action dismissed the possibility of becoming better acquainted with the inequitable geopolitical distribution of the sort of corporeal vulnerability that America had just experienced.  Neither the President nor his administration considered the greater corporeal vulnerability of the citizens of the nations they were about to wage war on.  When we fail to grieve, when we fear it, we can instead turn it to rage and use it only to perpetuate a cycle of grieving.

In the course of the War on Terror, many lives had been lost, but Butler points out that public mourning is the key to understanding the limits of empathy and therefore the limits of action.  To demonstrate this, she highlights two examples.  The first is Daniel Pearl, an American who had worked for the Wall Street Journal and was murdered in 2002 by Pakistani extremists while on assignment. His murder was gruesome and rightly condemned in a public out-pouring of grief by private American citizens and colleagues of Pearl’s in the media.  In contrast, a Palestinian citizen of the US had submitted two obituaries to the San Francisco Chronicle.  They were both for Palestinian families killed by Israeli troops. This man was asked to make revisions and resubmit, but upon the resubmission they were ultimately rejected for fear of offending someone.

What makes Daniel Pearl more grievable than Palestinian families? What makes us strive to prevent more deaths like his, but fail to seek new protections for Palestinian families?  Butler says, “We have to consider how the norm governing who will be a grievable human is circumscribed and produced in these acts of permissible and celebrated grieving, how they sometimes operate in tandem with a prohibition on public grieving of others’ lives, and how this differential allocation of grief serves the de-realizing aims of military violence.”

 Homeland Precarity

Such ready acceptance of violence toward a population can be seen not only in the intersection of the familiar with the unfamiliar, but also within a single nation. The series of protests and civil disorder in Ferguson throughout 2014 in response to the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teen, Michael Brown, challenged American law-enforcement and its relationship with African-Americans.  Judith Butler describes the mass protest as “war zones of the mind that play out on the street” and emphasized that each time an officer or vigilante is exonerated for the killing of an unarmed black person, it normalizes violence toward black Americans, making their lives precarious.

Given the link that Butler draws between grievability and a life given meaning, the vigils and public mourning in Ferguson and by way of the Black Lives Matter movement become acts of protest.  They demonstrate the grievability of those lives that law enforcement and the judicial system had failed to protect and challenge the norms that make black people far more vulnerable than white in America.

 

Grieving and Non-Violence
 

Extending the bounds of our ability to mourn beyond the familiar or recommended can give us insight into the lives of others and our shared vulnerability.  Grief and grieving can mean reflecting on social narratives that make certain lives vulnerable while protecting others.  This is integral to the task of rewriting such narratives and most certainly a step toward a less violent future: it is much more difficult to harm someone you will mourn.  Through the radical equality of the grievable, we may begin to establish new concepts of self that are sufficiently unbounded so as to stay our hands when we may have otherwise done violence. Grief is therefore transformative, though the conclusion is unknowable at the outset.  That does not mean we shouldn’t follow its course.  As Butler says, “We’re undone by each other.  And if we’re not, we’re missing something”.


Emily