Precarious Life. Judith Butler

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СКАЧАТЬ of generation that precedes and exceeds a strictly causal frame. Both of them are pointing to conditions, not causes. A condition of terrorism can be necessary or sufficient. If it is necessary, it is a state of affairs without which terrorism cannot take hold, one that terrorism absolutely requires. If it is sufficient, its presence is enough for terrorism to take place. Conditions do not “act” in the way that individual agents do, but no agent acts without them. They are presupposed in what we do, but it would be a mistake to personify them as if they acted in the place of us. Thus, we can say, and ought to, that US imperialism is a necessary condition for the attacks on the United States, that these attacks would be impossible without the horizon of imperialism within which they occur. But to understand how US imperialism figures here, we have to understand not only how it is experienced by those who understand themselves as its victims, but how it enters into their own formation as acting and deliberating subjects.

      This is the beginning of another kind of account. And this seems to be, for instance, what Mary Kaldor in The Nation points to when she claims that “in many of the areas where war takes place and where extreme networks pick up new recruits, becoming a criminal or joining a paramilitary group is literally the only opportunity for unemployed young men lacking formal education.”² What effect did the killing of an estimated 200,000 Iraqi citizens, including tens of thousands of children, and the subsequent starvation of 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; СКАЧАТЬ