Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence

Judith Butler has written about the exclusions that mark certain lives as “grievable” and exclude others from the community of concern. “Each of us,” she writes, “is constituted politically in part by virtue of the social vulnerability of our bodies.” Those not recognized as belonging to the community have no social vulnerability. They are not recognized as vulnerable insofar as they are not recognized as belonging to the community of those whose lives matter and thus who are understood as being fully alive. They, who “cannot be mourned because they are always already lost, or, rather, never ‘were.’” They possess only what Agamben terms “bare life,” a life included within the boundaries of a meaningful life or death only in its complete vulnerability, which is, simultaneously, not a vulnerability, since these unmournable lives cannot be recognized as being wounded, since no one feels any outrage or sense of shared suffering for what they suffer. Thus, “if violence is done against those who are unreal...from the perspective of violence, it fails [from the perspective of the dominant community:] to injure or negate those lives since those lives are already negated.” This exclusion of some—most—lives from the community of sympathy helps constitute the human, for, as Butler writes, “I am as much constituted by those I do grieve for as by those whose deaths I disavow.” Butler emphasizes that therefore obituaries should be understood as acts of community formation; as Chloë Taylor insisted in a recent reading of Butler, the obituary should also be understood as an act by which animals lives become forgotten. After all, no casualty list ever records massacres of beasts; they have no memorial.