Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence

Butler opens the chapter with an anecdote about a meeting in which a university president indicated that no one reads the humanities anymore. Butler notes while they felt as though they were being addressed, it was difficult to establish intent and voice within the meeting or determine who felt what way about the humanities, mirroring the state of the modern discursive texts under discussion. Butler argues not for a return to “tethering” authors to discourse—noting that they participated in that particular undoing—but takes up the experience of being addressed by the other and “a consideration of the structure of address itself” (129).

Butler then relates the mode of response to an address by the other to ethics. Rather than thinking of ethics as grounded in a righteous, moral position and sticking with that position, Butler is interested in a moral demand coming from somewhere beyond the self, maybe even from a place that cannot be defined. In thinking about the moral experience of being addressed by the other, Butler works closely with philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’s theory of the “face,” through which the author finds what they believe to be a theory of Jewish nonviolence.

Levinas’s “face” is not necessarily a literal human face, and though it does not speak, the “face” is conveyed by the Biblical commandment, “Thou shalt not kill.” Levinas describes how the “face” may actually, for example, be the back or other body parts that are “said to cry and to sob and to scream” in their craning, tensions, and other ways of being (133), as if they have a mouth and a throat but are not able to vocalize in words.

To respond to the face, which is vulnerability, is “to be awake to what is precarious in another life or, rather, the precariousness of life itself” (134). This is not an awakeness that begins with the self and then expands out or opens to the other; instead, this awakeness begins with the other. The face calls from outside, takes the self outside itself, and thus “interrupts the narcissistic circuit” (138). Levinas also thinks that the face, in all its precariousness and vulnerability, calls to peace and simultaneously tempts to kill, embodying the commandment, “Thou shalt not kill.” The face of the other produces this ethical struggle between peace and murder and “establishes this struggle at the heart of ethics” (135). Since God says, “Thou shalt not kill” through Moses, the face “speaks” in a voice that is not its own, engendering murderous feelings at the same time that it prohibits murder.

Butler continues to consider Levinas’s theory and its Jewish grounding. Levinas examines Genesis Chapter 32, where Jacob learns that his brother Esau is returning, leading 400 men. In anticipation of this confrontation, Jacob experiences both fear of his own death and anxiety over the thought of potentially killing. Butler is drawn to the way that these two impulses are “at war” with one another precisely in order “not to be at war” more generally (137). For Levinas, nonviolence is not grounded in a peaceful locus but instead, in the constant tension between fear of one’s own death and the fear (or anxiety) of killing or hurting the other. The first impulse in apprehending the face, for Levinas, is the desire to kill, and Levinas believes this violent impulse is primary for humans.

There are two main reasons to look at Levinas in Butler’s current moment. The first is that Levinas allows people to think carefully about the relation between representation and humanization. In the current moment, and as Butler has discussed in previous chapters, representations of humanization and dehumanization are constantly reproducing themselves. The second way Levinas is helpful is in thinking through the implications of a Jewish ethic of nonviolence, which Butler sees as particularly important in the post-Zionist movement within Judaism.

In the case of representation, Butler is interested in both the “inhuman but humanizing face” (141) of Levinas and the dehumanization that can occur through the specifically human face. The face may be “defaced,” for example, in seemingly benign representations or even representations that believe themselves to be “capturing” human liberation from violence. One example Butler gives is of a photograph of young Afghan women without burkas baring their faces for the camera. Such an image presents war as entirely liberating and thus defaces the face, where there is no sense of the precariousness of life. Faces can also be shown within frames that refuse any precariousness in their presentation of the other as a target of war, such as the faces of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

For Levinas, the human is not “represented” in the “face.” Neither, however, is the human “identified with the unrepresentable” (144). It is impossible to “capture” the human in representation. An example of the attempt to “capture” in the face is the supposed representation of evil in literal faces where we “cannot hear the face through the face” (145). There can be an effacement “through occlusion” and also through representation itself.

Butler concludes by returning to the war against Iraq after 9/11 and, specifically, what was called the “shock and awe” campaign. The United States “advertised” its violence as visual spectacle, which in its spectacular nature, was sublime, and “the sublimity of destruction” (149) became “entrancing” for the media supposedly covering the war. The shock and awe campaign speaks to the need to wrestle with “murderous impulses” and to recognize these impulses as part of an ethical struggle that exists in relation to humans’ own overwhelming fears of violence. This is as important as apprehending the other’s suffering.