Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence

Emmanuel Levinas (1905-1995) was a Jewish Lithuanian philosopher who relocated to France for his education. He became a naturalized citizen of France in 1939 and reported for French military duty as a translator of Russian and French and was later taken as prisoner of war, which ironically protected him from the concentration camps of the Holocaust. He was lifelong friends with Maurice Blanchot and studied under Edmund Husserl.

Levinas often grounds his exploration of ethics in the Jewish Talmud. His most famous text, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, was published in 1961 and explores “the other.” Levinas thinks that ethics is grounded within relationships and even within a confrontation with the other. Levinas is interested in the concrete and face-to-face encounter with the other, which potentially opens up to what he describes as “infinity.”

Butler is indebted to Levinas’s work in Chapter 5, where they explore his theory of the “face” in relation to the other as well as in relation to God, by way of Moses, in the handing down of the commandment not to kill. More specifically, Butler considers Levinas’s incorporation of violence into the struggle toward nonviolence. This is a struggle, which includes a constant tension between the impulse toward violence and killing and an anxiety over killing. Butler, by way of Levinas, does not posit a theory of nonviolence that somehow empties violence out of the world. Instead, Butler’s theory recognizes violence as an intrinsic response to vulnerability. Thus, the felt experience of violence is integral to the tension that potentially yields nonviolence.

Building off their criticism of the state of Israel, Butler is explicit about this theory of nonviolence being grounded in Jewish thinking. The theory is the culmination of the book in its elaboration on the ways in which violence may be accepted in order to then be resisted.

Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was a French philosopher and political activist who was interested in formations of power and the ways these different formations exert themselves in the world. He has had an enormous influence on the fields of literary criticism, political theory, philosophy, architecture, sociology, and history. He is particularly well known for his distinction between sovereign power, in which power is concentrated in the literal body of the king, and modern power, in which power is dispersed and thus not locatable to a specific body or place. This dispersal of power penetrates individuals through a “disciplining” in which they internalize power and thus do not require any kind of exterior punishment in order to think and behave as they are expected.

Foucault theorizes that “governmentality” is the way that state power is “vitalized.” This governmentality is different than earlier forms of power, such as sovereign power, that vitalized the state. Governmentality refers to the control of people and bodies as well as the distribution of goods required to support human populations. Governmentality operates through the functioning of many departments, such as bureaucratic, legal, and state. It operates, then, through functioning that is not the result of direct elections. Governmentality, for Foucault, is the only space where any real political contestation or critical debate can occur.

Butler is interested in the relation that Foucault theorizes between governmentality and sovereign power in their analysis of “the war prison” of Guantanamo Bay. Butler argues that sovereign power, in the hands of a few bureaucrats, has taken over the management of populations, a role that should be the purview of governmentality. While the notion of a monarchy in which power is concentrated in one individual may seem anachronistic, the power that is claimed (and to which the population largely concedes) in the state of emergency declared post-9/11 by the United States is a reanimation of sovereign power in which matters of life and death are decided by those who are not elected and have no oversight.

George W. Bush (born 1946) was the 43rd president of the United States (2001-2009). He is the oldest son of the 41st president of the United States, George H. W. Bush. He graduated from Harvard Business School in 1975 and worked in the oil industry, later becoming governor of Texas in 1994, before becoming president of the United States.

On September 20, 2001, Bush declared “our war on terror,” and in his January 2002 State of the Union Address, he proclaimed the United States’ right to wage a preemptive war. The insistence on this right became the basis for the “Bush Doctrine.” Under the Bush administration, millions of people were killed in the “war on terror,” people were detained and tortured at Guantanamo Bay, and the government surveilled US citizens using power granted through the Patriot Act.

Butler pays particular attention to Bush’s violent response to the violence the nation suffered, his public proclamation of an end to mourning, and his administration’s reanimation of sovereign power in its illegal detainment, imprisonment, torture, and killing at Guantanamo Bay. Butler’s larger argument is that Bush failed to respond ethically to the violence the United States suffered, even making war a spectacle as the United States subjected other nations to bombing described as “shock and awe.”

Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of the field of psychoanalysis. Freud graduated from the University of Vienna with an MD in 1881. He started his medical career as a neurologist at the Vienna General Hospital in 1882, where he spent time in various departments over the course of three years, including the psychiatric department. He also worked at a local asylum. He became increasingly interested in doing clinical work, and he resigned his position at Vienna General Hospital in 1886 to start a clinical practice focusing on what were then called nervous disorders.

This resignation was largely inspired by an 1885 fellowship that enabled Freud to go to Paris to learn about hypnosis. This turned him toward psychopathology and away from the neurology research that he had been doing. While he revised what he learned in Paris and used hypnosis for years, he found it inconsistent, and by 1896 he increasingly relied on what he called “free association” in treating patients, which encouraged them to talk about whatever came into their minds. He also became increasingly interested in the analysis of dreams, believing that they revealed layers of unconscious formations and also repressions that were at the root of various symptoms of psychopathology. By 1896, he referred to his work as psychoanalysis.

He published over 20 books and changed the way that Western culture thinks about human psychology, having a huge influence both on the profession of psychology and Western culture in general.

Butler is interested in Freud’s theory of mourning and melancholia. Freud theorized that mourning was “successful” when a loss could be “replaced” by someone or something new. Freud, however, also admitted to not being sure about what constitutes mourning as psychologically “successful.” Butler begins their discussion of what mourning “is” and what it might ethically generate with Freud’s thinking, disagreeing with him on replacement as important in mourning, as Butler does not think that “substitutability” is something that one should attempt to secure. Rather than securing substitutes in the experience of mourning, Butler is interested, instead, in the transformative power of mourning and what it would mean to “submit,” individually and politically, to this transformation.