Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence

Overview

Judith Butler gathers essays written largely in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, to develop a sustained meditation on vulnerability, mourning, and the political life of grief. The essays ask why some lives are publicly recognized as losses while others are rendered ungrievable, and how that differential recognition shapes which violences are condemned, excused, or invisible. Butler combines close readings of public discourse, legal theory, and ethical reflection to trace how media, state rhetoric, and social norms decide whose deaths count as lives lost.
Set against the rhetoric of the "war on terror, " the essays relocate mourning from a private sentiment to a public and political practice. Butler insists that acknowledging shared precariousness is not a sentimental move but a necessary ethical stance that challenges exclusionary frames and opens space for more just political responses to violence.

Precarity and Grievability

Butler reframes vulnerability through the term "precariousness" to capture both the bodily susceptibility of human life and the social conditions that intensify or mitigate that susceptibility. Precarity is both universal and uneven: all lives are vulnerable, but social and political structures render some lives more exposed and less protected. From that starting point emerges the notion of "grievability, " which refers to whether a loss is publicly mourned and recognized as a rightful injury.
Grievability depends on frames of intelligibility, national belonging, race, gender, and citizenship, that determine which deaths elicit mourning, outrage, or intervention. Butler shows how these frames not only shape public feeling but also legitimize or delegitimize state violence against particular populations.

Mourning, Responsibility, and Public Life

Mourning becomes for Butler an ethical-political practice that can reveal interdependence and the co-implication of lives. Public recognition of another's loss can disrupt narratives that justify retaliation or exceptional violence. Rather than isolating grief as private sorrow, Butler argues that a responsive mourning can generate sustained forms of responsibility and solidarity across borders and identities.
This receptive mode of mourning also challenges retributive logics. When grief is cultivated in a way that acknowledges shared vulnerability, it opens possibilities for nonviolent political action and for resisting frames that portray violence as the only appropriate state response to injury.

Critique of State Violence and Media Frames

A central strand is a forceful critique of how the U.S. state and popular discourse responded to 9/11, and later policies like the invasion of Iraq. Butler contends that political leaders and media selectively humanize victims while portraying others as threats or as lives that do not count. Such selective humanization enables exceptional measures, erosions of civil liberties, and military violence presented as necessary or unavoidable.
Butler extends the critique to global contexts where occupation, racialized violence, and colonial histories determine whose suffering commands attention. She interrogates how appeals to "security" and "sovereignty" often mask a moral calculus that permits harm to those deemed outside a protected community.

Political Implications and Ethics of Nonviolence

The essays conclude with a call to reorient political practice around the recognition of shared precariousness. Butler does not offer a programmatic blueprint but insists that ethical responsiveness and critical attention to frames of grievability are prerequisites for meaningful political change. Recognizing co-implication can motivate alliances across differences and challenge policies grounded in retaliation or exclusion.
Nonviolence is presented not as naive passivity but as a demanding practice requiring imagination and political will. Transforming public attitudes about whose lives matter becomes central to resisting structures that produce and normalize violence, and to building a political world more attentive to the precariousness that binds human lives.