Precarious Life. Judith Butler
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Muslim populations, predicted by Concern, a hunger relief organization, to reach six million by the year’s end, have on Muslim views of the United States? 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?
Former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s response to Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal’s remarks on October 11 in New York raises this question of the acceptability of critical discourse emphatically. The prince came with a check for $10 million in hand for the World Trade Center relief effort and expressed at the same time horror and moral condemnation of the attacks on the World Trade Center, asking that “the United States take a more balanced stand toward the Palestinian cause.” Forbes.com reported Giuliani’s refusal of the check in this way: While in New York, Alwaleed said, “Our Palestinian brethren continue to be slaughtered at the hands of Israelis while the world turns the other cheek.” At a news conference, Giuliani said, “Not only are those statements wrong, they are part of the problem. There is no moral equivalent to this attack. There is no justification for it …. The people who did it lost any right to ask for justification for it when they slaughtered four or five thousand innocent people, and to suggest that there is any justification for it only invites this happening in the future.”3 The Saudi prince, the sixth richest man in the world, did say he condemned terrorism, and he expressed his condolences for the more than 3,000 people killed when hijacked jets slammed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
In a television report that same day, Giuliani announced that Alwaleed’s views were “absolutely wrong.” I would suggest that it was not possible to hear both of these views at the same time because the framework for hearing presumes that the one view nullifies the other, so either the claim of grief or the offer of help is considered disingenuous. Or, what is heard is that the failure of the United States to offer a balanced approach to the Palestinian cause provides a justification for the attacks. Alwaleed had been clear, and was subsequently clear in a New York Times editorial, that he did not think that the US policy failure, which he deems true, to honor the Palestinian cause, justifies the attacks. But he did think that long-term US–Arab relations would be improved were the United States to develop a more balanced approach. It makes sense to assume that bettering those relations might well lead to less conducive grounds for Islamic extremism. The Bush administration itself, in its own way, attests to this belief by pursuing the possibility of a Palestinian state. But here the two views could not be heard together, and it has to do with the utterability of the word “slaughter” in the context of saying that Israelis have slaughtered and do slaughter Palestinians, in large numbers.
Like “terrorist,” “slaughter” is a word that, within the hegemonic grammar, should be reserved for unjustified acts of violence against First World nations, if I understand the grammar correctly. Giuliani hears this as a discourse of justification, since he believes that slaughter justifies military self-defense. He calls the statements “absolutely untrue,” I presume, not because he disputes that there have been deaths on the Palestinian side, and that the Israelis are responsible for them, but because “slaughter” as the name for those deaths implies an equivalence with the deaths of the World Trade Center victims. It seems, though, that we are not supposed to say that both groups of people have been “slaughtered” since that implies a “moral equivalence,” meaning, I suppose, that the slaughtering of one group is as bad as the slaughtering of the next, and that both, according to his framework, would be entitled to self-defense as a result.
Although the prince subsequently undermined his credibility when he betrayed anti-Semitic beliefs, claiming that “Jewish pressure” was behind Giuliani’s refusal of the check, he nevertheless initiated an utterance and a formulation that had value on its own. Why is it that Israeli and Palestinian deaths are not viewed as equally horrible? To what extent has the very refusal to apprehend Palestinian deaths as “slaughter” produced an immeasurable rage on the part of Arabs who seek some legitimate recognition and resolution for this continuing state of violence? One does not need to enter into the dreary business of quantifying and comparing oppressions to understand what the prince meant to say, and subsequently said, namely, that the United States needs to think about how its own political investments and practices help to create a world of enormous rage and violence. This view does not imply that the acts of violence perpetrated on September 11 were the “fault” of the United States, nor does it does exonerate those who committed them. One way to read what the prince had to say was that the acts of terror were unequivocally wrong, and that the United States might also be able to intervene more productively in global politics to produce conditions in which this response to US imperialism becomes less likely. This is not the same as holding the United States exclusively responsible for the violence done within its borders, but it does ask the United States to assume a different kind of responsibility for producing more egalitarian global conditions for equality, sovereignty, and the egalitarian redistribution of resources.
Similarly, the New York Times describes Arundhati Roy’s critique of US imperialism as “anti-US,” implying that any position that seeks to critically reevaluate US foreign policy in light of September 11 and the ensuing war is anti-US or, indeed, complicitous with the presumed enemy.4 This is tantamount to the suppression of dissent, and the nationalist refusal to consider the merits of criticisms developed from other parts of the globe. The treatment is unfair. Roy’s condemnation of bin Laden is clear, but she is willing to ask how he was formed. To condemn the violence and to ask how it came about are surely two separate issues, but they need to be examined in tandem, held in juxtaposition, reconciled within a broader analysis. Under contemporary strictures on public discourse, however, this kind of dual thinking cannot be heard: it is dismissed as contradictory or disingenuous, and Roy herself is treated as a diva or a cult figure, rather than listened to as a political critic with a wide moral compass.
So, is there a way, in Roy’s terms, to understand bin Laden as “born” from the rib of US imperialism (allowing that he is born from several possible historical sources, one of which is, crucially, US imperialism), without claiming that US imperialism is solely responsible for his actions, or those of his ostensible network? To answer this question, we need to distinguish, provisionally, between individual and collective responsibility. But, then we need to situate individual responsibility in light of its collective conditions. Those who commit acts of violence are surely responsible for them; they are not dupes or mechanisms of an impersonal social force, but agents with responsibility. On the other hand, these individuals are formed, and we would be making a mistake if we reduced their actions to purely self-generated acts of will or symptoms of individual pathology or “evil.” Both the discourse of individualism and of moralism (understood as the moment in which morality exhausts itself in public acts of denunciation) assume that the individual is the first link in a causal chain that forms the meaning of accountability. But to take the self-generated acts of the individual as our point of departure in moral reasoning is precisely to foreclose the possibility of questioning what kind of world gives rise to such individuals. And what is this process of “giving rise”? What social conditions help to form the very ways that choice and deliberation proceed? Where and how can such subject formations be contravened? How is it that radical violence becomes an option, comes to appear as the only viable option for some, under some global conditions? Against what conditions of violation do they respond? And with what resources?
To ask these questions is not to say that the conditions are at fault rather than the individual. It is, rather, to rethink the relation between conditions and acts. Our acts are not self-generated, but conditioned. We are at once acted upon and acting, and our “responsibility” lies in the juncture between the two. What can I do with the conditions that form me? What do they constrain me to do? What can I do to transform them? Being acted upon is not fully continuous with acting, and in this way the forces that act upon us are not finally responsible for what we do. In a certain way,