mourning and justice
revisiting Judith Butler
Even if you’ve never taken a gender studies class in your life, you’re likely to have heard of Judith Butler. There’s a particular subset of Twitter users who consider them to be the devil; they have even been burned in effigy in recent years. If you listen to these voices, Butler has popularised a theory that has destroyed the world as we know it; they have poisoned The Children with the mind virus of woke. If you speak to anyone who has actually read their work, however, they’re just the philosopher who first wrote about gender performativity, underpinning what would become known as queer theory.
Butler has been everywhere recently promoting their new book Who’s Afraid of Gender, but they’re most well known for their 1990 book Gender Trouble, which, like many people, I studied in a university gender studies class. Gender Trouble sat alongside other course texts such as Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Marie Stopes’ Married Love, books which were revolutionary in their time and which examined, explored and often challenged our thoughts about femaleness and the institution of marriage respectively.
If you read or listen to interviews with Butler, it’s bewildering to think about how hated they are. They seem to be incredibly gentle with people, whether those people are interrogating or accusing them. They are self-deprecating and have a real sense of humour. They never take their own ideas as read; they seem to inherently question their own assumptions and theories, no matter how influential those ideas have been on contemporary culture. Everything, to Judith Butler, seems up for examination. This is a position I have great respect for.
The Butler book I’ve been reading recently, however, has nothing to do with gender theory. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Justice was published in 2004, and the essays that comprise it were all written in the wake of, and about, 9/11—specifically, about the US’s response to it. What I wasn’t expecting, when I started reading, was the uncanny experience of reading over-twenty-year-old essays that could have been written in the last six months, so perfectly did the things described by Butler mirror what has been happening in the media and popular discourse since October 7th. Nor did I expect that Butler would constantly draw specific reference to the Palestinian cause and the many crimes committed against them as a people. Over and over, in this book, Butler writes sentences that were basically unsayable in public discourse for the last two decades at least, in the US even moreso than the UK. And, more importantly, they discuss why these things were made so unsayable.
For the generation younger than me, it is probably difficult to understand what it was like, even from a remove, as 9/11 happened and in the years immediately after. It is probably difficult, even, to imagine that I heard about the attacks in a text from a friend on my way home from school, and had to wait until I got home and turned on the TV to see the footage of the plane hitting that first tower. Now, of course, we see everything in real time, responding in real time; all the footage we have seen from Gaza has been immediate, uncensored, horrifying, and shown in our hands. Back then, there was a prism of control that has mostly now dissolved. But what was similar to now was the dominant media dismissal of context immediately after the attacks. In the months, years following 9/11, it was forbidden for anyone to publicly bring up America’s foreign policy, or its movements in the Middle East, or indeed say anything other than a denunciation of terrorism. A terrorist act could only be self-contained, unconscionable, born of nothing but evil: a thing that happened without history, without context. All you could do was condemn.
This, of course, was exactly the dominant media response to the events of October 7th 2023. Condemn, condemn, condemn. Palestinian voices, finally invited onto mainstream news shows after decades of being completely silenced, were not allowed to speak about the thousands of Palestinians held without charge in Israeli prisons, or the Nakba, or the situation in Gaza which has for many years been described by human rights organisations as apartheid. They were invited on so they could be forced, by the hosts, to condemn Hamas. Condemn, condemn, condemn. There is no history. There can only be condemnation. All else forms a forced nothingness. As Butler puts it: “The public sphere is constituted in part by what cannot be said, and what cannot be shown.”
These are essays that draw on the linguistic and the political, but at the heart of the book, really, is the question of to whom we extend humanity. These essays are about loss, and life, and grief, and personhood. They are about now as much as they are about then.
Our words, Butler says, are controlled, politically, within the public space. We are not allowed to use “slaughter” to describe what the US has done to Iraqis (or, indeed, ‘genocide’ to describe what Israel does to Palestinians), and this is why: by the logic of the aggressors, the slaughtering of civilians justifies military self-defence. When an attack on US soil or on Israel occurs, and US or Israeli individuals are slaughtered, any level, any severity of military response is legitimised. The reason we are not allowed to use the same terminology for Iraqi or Palestinian deaths is that, by this logic, the same level of response would be justified. The grammar of this is unequal, because the power is unequal. One side is to be oppressed, and the other is to be the oppressor; we cannot allow linguistics to imply an equivalence, cannot let the value of lives be seen as identical. So: we hear constantly that Israel “has a right to defend itself”. We hear nothing of Palestine’s right to resist its decades-long occupation, or the constant slaughter of Palestinian lives, precisely because we cannot be allowed to think of them as lives:
Is a Muslim life as valuable as legibly ‘First World’ lives? Are the Palestinians yet accorded the status of “human” in US policy and press coverage? Will those hundreds of thousands of Muslim lives lost in the last decades of strife ever receive the equivalent to the paragraph-long obituaries in the New York Times that seek to humanize—often through nationalist and familial framing devices—those Americans who have been violently killed? Is our capacity to mourn in global dimensions foreclosed precisely by the failure to conceive of Muslim and Arab lives as lives?
Butler is so often accused of being impenetrable, of using academic language that is incomprehensible to a non academic reader. But these points are clearer and more morally attuned than much of the political writing we have read in the last six months. The power in this book is Butler’s insistence on centring, in simple language, the lives of Iraqis, the lives of Palestinians. In extending humanity to those who, in the years after 9/11 or in the months since October 7th, were and are, in the media and beyond, portrayed as functionally nonhuman.
When reading these essays, on the media and the unsayable, it is difficult to get away from the fact that Butler, in the first few days of the current conflict in Gaza, wrote and published a perhaps thoughtless op ed in the London Review of Books. It was published just twelve days after the attack, at the very start of what has proven to be a genocidal response. For the first time we were able to listen and watch Palestinians themselves describe their horrors. We should, more than anything, have been listening to them.
Ironically, in the preface to Precarious Life, Butler says this, about the days after 9/11:
These events led public intellectuals to waver in their public commitment to principles of justice and prompted journalists to take leave of the time-honored tradition of investigative journalism …. [these events] were, and are, cause for fear and for mourning; they are also instigations for patient political reflection.
It does not escape me that these are criticisms that could also be levelled at Butler for their immediate response to the events of October 7th. Perhaps the focus should have been on the immediate experiences of those affected, rather than a writing of three thousand-word essays by academics far removed. There is something to be said for being strategic in when you chose to speak, when you are in a position of great privilege. In re-reading an essay that I was very disappointed in at the time, I wonder if Butler’s real crime was in misjudging the moment. In the essay, their repeated capitulation to the dominant narrative—the constant condemning—feels incongruent with what they were writing about then and with what they had written twenty years before. They knew, on some level, that such capitulation was necessary then, in a way it hasn’t been in all the things they’ve said since. So why not wait, until your message might be better heard?
But, another contradiction: in a world where the currency is making public our private thoughts, it is often demanded that we speak before we have had time to consider, or to listen. Butler, despite their ability to understand our worst impulses, perhaps is no more able to resist them than the rest of us.
We could say that Precarious Life is about the claiming of a narrative, about the compulsion to insist upon what is sayable and what isn’t. To draw the lines around permitted discourse and police them as if we were being paid to do so. The narrative-claiming that Butler writes about hasn’t gone away in the twenty-three years since 9/11; what has changed, however, is who does it. Then, it was the big media players and our governments in tandem. Now, through the creation of the social media reaction machine, it is we who create dichotomies of the sayable and unsayable, all in response to our most immediate responses, which are often thoughtless and base. Through Twitter and the like we are encouraged simply to react, to put our most unadulterated responses and feelings, no matter how irrational or momentary or bad faith or unfair, out into the public sphere, where they become at least semi-fact, regardless of their relationship to the reality of the situation. We feel and say and tweet with immediacy, and tear down anyone who might not do the same. In our panic we pick a side and finger-point at anyone who does not. So quickly we make enemies of people who are actually comrades. As Butler gently pulls out over four essays, it is so easy—the easiest thing in the world—to let the powerful draw up lines of hatred in response to action. It is much, much more difficult to try and understand why things have happened, and honestly explore our complicities in systems much bigger than us, and resist our most base responses.
I come away from this book thinking that what Butler was talking about, really, was the problem is outsourcing our thinking to the people with the loudest voices and the clearest agendas. Instead of stopping, and considering, and listening to those under systems of oppression—letting them guide our actions—we find ourselves drawn to discourse, as a verb. On the fate of those whose deaths are unmarked, whose lives are not allowed to be noted as lives, Butler says this: ‘Such a death vanishes, not into explicit discourse, but in the ellipses by which public discourse proceeds.’
It is easy to speak, to react, to condemn. It is less easy to step back, consider the power structures and who labours under them, and resist the narrative that is most useful to the powerful—the narrative that turns us against each other instead of focusing our anger at the top. Finding where we can build together—while holding onto the facts of injustice, and insisting upon the humanity of those who our governments seek to dehumanise—is the necessary, but difficult, work.
As I was finalising this post, Abigail Thorn at Philosophy Tube published a brilliant video essay on Butler, which also mentions Precarious Life and Butler’s writing on the Palestinian cause (though briefly). Like all Abigail’s videos it is worth a watch.