ELL/ENG Judith Butler – Precarious Life (Ch. 5) Comprehensive Study Notes

Butler recalls a university‐press meeting where a university president claims “no one is reading humanities books anymore.”
- Uncertainty over who owns this claim; voices blur, signaling the current “humanities quandary.”
Core issue: Have the humanities lost moral authority through their own relativism/critique or through attacks on them?
Butler refuses a simple return to “author” or “authority”; instead she foregrounds:
- The “structure of address”—the way speech positions speaker, listener, obligation.
- Moral urgency arises not from authorship but from being addressed and compelled to answer.

Moral authority is introduced through the impingement of another’s address.
- We “come to exist” in the moment we are addressed; if address fails our existence is shaken.
Obligation precedes the will:
- “Binding” demands emerge unbidden, often ruining our plans.
- Being addressed deprives us of pure autonomy.
Contemporary crisis: breakdown of authoritative address (e.g., presidential speech that calls Iraq a threat but labels North Korea “regional”).

Butler develops a Jewish ethic of non-violence via Emmanuel Levinas.
Key quotations:
- “The approach to the face is the most basic mode of responsibility.”
- The face says: “Thou shalt not kill.”
Features of the face:
- Not merely visual; transcends mouth/language.
- Can appear in non-facial forms (e.g., backs of waiting relatives at Moscow’s Lubyanka prison).
- Operates as catachresis: face → back → cry → pure vocalization beyond words.
The face = exposure of precarious life; encountering it awakens us to vulnerability.

Face simultaneously:
- Reveals another’s defenselessness (temptation to kill).
- Commands peace (“You shall not kill”).
Internal ethical struggle: murderous impulse vs. divine interdiction.
Voice of the face is indirectly God’s voice; the human face carries a non-human utterance.

Levinas cites Jacob’s fear when Esau approaches with $400$ men (Genesis 32).
- Two affects: fright (for his own life) vs. anxiety (he might have to kill).
Europe’s “vocation” for Levinas = hearing “Thou shalt not kill” as civilizational essence—yet Islam becomes unspeakable in this formulation.

Levinas: Self-preservation never justifies murder—an extreme, possibly “absolute,” pacifism.
Butler notes counter-arguments: utilitarian, deontological, Spinozist, Nietzschean, Freudian appeals to life drives.
Psychoanalytic turn:
- Desire to kill is primary; ethics redirects aggression outward/inward, risking super-egoic cruelty.
- The face interrupts narcissistic circuits, relocating concern outside the self.

“Face and discourse are tied”: language begins with the face’s command.
- We can speak only after being spoken to.
- Obliteration of the Other annihilates language itself.
Being addressed = a form of violence; we are “held hostage” by alterity.
Political sphere complicates the dyad: multiple Others create competing obligations; Derrida warns of “radical irresponsibility.”

Ordinary belief: representation humanizes; lack of it dehumanizes.
Paradox:
- For Levinas, the face that humanizes is not necessarily a literal human face.
- Media “faces” (bin Laden, Arafat, Hussein) can enact dehumanization through personification.
- Colin Powell framed before Picasso’s Guernica; Afghan girls unveiling for U.S. cameras—faces mobilized to justify war or proclaim triumph.
Loss & suffering are masked; the Levinasian cry is inaudible in triumphalist images.

Levinasian Failure
- Representation must show its failure; human is affirmed in what escapes depiction.
Media Capture
- The face is equated with evil/human norm; dehumanization achieved by “capturing” the image.

Identification/Disidentification:
- Viewers are positioned as unrepresented observers urged to annihilate the represented evil.

Power regulates what counts as a “livable life” or “grievable death.”
- Some lives = hyper-visible threats; others = effaced.
Two operations:
1. Produce the inhuman face (visible yet disqualified).
2. Radical effacement (no image, no story, no death).

U.S. campaign designed as overwhelming visual spectacle; likened to the sublime that stuns thought.
Media collusion (CNN, Fox, NY Times) with romantic sunset ordnance shots.
Aerial views substitute for ground-level carnage; dead U.S. soldiers or Iraqi children withheld, while Hussein-era victims foregrounded to justify occupation.

Vietnam napalm photos—illicit images that shifted U.S. public opinion.
Current prohibition on graphic suffering thwarts ethical outrage, curtails mourning, installs national melancholia.

Humanities must:
- Return us “to the human where we do not expect to find it” (frailty, sensate limits).
- Question frames, foster cultural translation, sustain critique.
- Create a public sphere valuing dissent, hearing the cry beyond language.
Moral, philosophical, and representational obligation: expose precarious life, contest frames that deface or erase.

Address: The act of being hailed; foundational to subjectivity & moral demand.
Face (Levinas): Figure for precarious life; issues the command “Thou shalt not kill.”
Precariousness: Shared vulnerability; ethical starting point.
Grievability: Capacity of a life to be publicly mourned.
Shock & Awe: U.S. strategy merging military destruction with visual spectacle.
Identification/Disidentification: Psychoanalytic dynamics in reception of images (Jacqueline Rose).
Radical Effacement: Total exclusion from representability; life erased from public sphere.

Understand Levinas’s “face” and how Butler leverages it to critique violence and representation.
Be able to explain the tension between temptation to kill and command not to kill.
Discuss how media images can both humanize and dehumanize, using Butler’s contemporary examples.
Grasp the concept of grievability and its political manipulation.
Articulate the role Butler assigns to the humanities in restoring ethical sensibility and public critique.