Precarious Life
by Judith Butler
Verso Books

Speaking at Washington's Woodrow Wilson Center in April, General Roméo Dallaire, the commander of UN forces in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide, told one of his now-trademark stories. He recalled an American official in Rwanda coming into his office asking for "all sorts of statistics." The official was trying to determine whether the United States should send forces into Rwanda, telling Dallaire that American public opinion would accept one American casualty for every 85,000 Rwandans killed. "Are all humans human?" Dallaire asked his audience, "or are some more human than others?" In her new book, "Precarious Life," Judith Butler asks the same question.

After Sept. 11, she notes, Americans granted the Bush administration vast powers to pursue a seemingly interminable "war on terror." We allowed the administration to erode civil rights, to detain human beings indefinitely without trial and to pursue military objectives speciously linked to the terrorist threat. With the complicity of the media, the administration also quashed dissent, arguing that any "relativistic" or "post-" arguments merely aided the enemy.

In this black-and-white world of "Either you're with us or you're with the terrorists," certain deaths became, in Butler's words, "ungrievable." The media refused to show images of wounded or dead Iraqis or Afghans, creating a "hierarchy of grief" in which countless casualties and victims of American operations are unacknowledged. Since they are the enemy (they are "against us"), they are never considered fully human. And if they are not fully human in life, their deaths too are not fully human deaths. Like the detainees at Guantánamo, they are unnamed and unmourned, effectively dehumanized.

Butler explores all of these issues, from the psychoanalysis of collective grief and mourning in the wake of Sept. 11 to the "indefinite detentions" at Guantánamo to the charge of anti-Semitism leveled against her and others who publicly oppose Israeli policies. Yet she is not the first to do so. Critics from Noam Chomsky to Arundhati Roy have been discussing them since late September 2001. What Butler offers is a role for postmodern theory in these debates.

Butler is not known for reaching out to wide audiences with a political message. A professor of comparative literature at Berkeley, she is best known for her work on queer theory and widely criticized for her obtuse language and academic stardom. In what is by far her most accessible book to date, however, Butler's message is clear: liberal criticism and theory must reemerge from their post-Sept. 11 hibernation.

Indeed, while the American public was rallying around the executive branch, intellectuals began affirming the "end of theory" and the death of postmodernism. Some notable postmodern and postcolonial thinkers began distancing themselves from the theories. Shortly after Sept. 11, the New York Times and Chicago Tribune ran articles equating postmodernism with moral relativism and calling such theories "ethically perverse" because they require "a form of guilty passivity" in the face of the attacks. Meanwhile, scholars like Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington enjoyed renewed popularity on college campuses with their arguments of ages-old struggles between civilizations and their reduction of the world to an "us"-versus-"them" face-off.

Butler suggests otherwise. Not only is postmodern theory still alive, it was made more imperative — not obsolete — by the attacks on Sept. 11. "It is not a vagary of moral relativism," she argues, "to try to understand what might have led to the attacks on the United States." Rather, such a quest for understanding is rooted in ethics, in a response to grief and the empathy one feels at the violence inflicted on fellow humans.

Butler sees Sept. 11 as a missed opportunity to redefine ourselves as part of a global, interconnected community. It was "a chance to start to imagine a world in which violence might be minimized," in which the shocking revelation of our own vulnerability might lead us to reflect on the vulnerability of others, particularly those others who have suffered at the hands of the US. That opportunity was not only passed up, but, for the near future, altogether foreclosed. Instead, post-Sept. 11 American society closed itself off by responding to violence with unbridled unilateralism.

Consider one striking anecdote Butler uses to show how closed American society has become: A Palestinian citizen of the United States submitted to the San Francisco Chronicle obituaries for two Palestinian families killed by Israeli gunfire. The Chronicle rejected them, however, explaining that the newspaper did not wish to offend anyone. "What might be 'offensive' about the public avowal of sorrow and loss," Butler asks, "such that memorials would function as offensive speech?" The "offense," Butler suggests, in admitting civilian deaths is that we would be humanizing them, recognizing their vulnerability. And in doing so, we would be empathizing, that is, equating "them" with "us" and positing that there is some minimal human vulnerability we indeed share.

This, Butler argues, is the imperative task of postmodern theory. In a recent interview for Salon.com, she explained that rather than a position of moral relativism or "permanent skepticism," postmodernism is "nothing more than a critical interrogation of beliefs we already carry with us." This type of cultural criticism, this public grieving for "ungrievable deaths," is absolutely necessary today.

With "Precarious Life," Butler hopes to "reinvigorate the intellectual projects of critique." More than ever, the imperative of critique must be "to return us to the human where we do not expect to find it." That is, not only in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, but also in Guantánamo, Fallujah and Ramallah.

Doing so is neither complicit with terrorism nor weakens the fight against it. Rather, it reasserts an American democracy in which dissent and critique combine to create a nuanced vision of the world, one that does not glibly respond to violence with more violence. To rephrase Bill Clinton's recent remarks at the Democratic National Convention, strength and dissent are not opposing values.

— Noam Lupu (noam at flakmag dot com)