Counting the cost of revenge
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1230720,00.html
Mary Midgley assesses Judith Butler's Precarious Life, a collection of
provocative post-9/11 essays
Saturday June 5, 2004
The Guardian
Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence
by Judith Butler
151pp, Verso, £16
This little book contains five fairly indignant essays by the
distinguished Californian feminist and literary critic Judith Butler,
written in protest against current American policies governing the
Iraq war, the treatment of Palestinians and the state of the
Guantánamo prisoners. Butler sharply rejects any idea that the
destruction of the World Trade Centre justifies these violent
measures. As she puts it: "That US boundaries were breached, that an
unbearable vulnerability was exposed, that a terrible toll on human
life was taken, were, and are, cause for fear and mourning; they were
also instigations for patient political reflection ... [We should ask]
whether the experiences of fear and loss have to lead straightaway to
military violence and retribution ... It would not be possible to
maintain that the US has greater security problems than some of the
more contested and vulnerable peoples of the world ... The dislocation
from first world privilege, however temporary, offers a chance to
start to imagine a world in which that violence might be minim-ised,
in which an inevitable interdependency becomes acknow- ledged as the
basis for global political community ... Final control is not, and
cannot be, an ultimate value."
Judith Butler
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