Precarious Politics

By the time this review is published, the 2004 elections in America will have already happened. Whatever their outcome, the (first?) war administration of George W Bush, with a relentless rehearsal of its depressing post-9/11 tune, will have had scarifying effects on the US and the world. Judith Butler’s new book deals with a number of the topics from which those effects will have arisen. In the five essays here, she complains about the exclusionary, media-led response to 9/11 and about America’s lack of a moral sense of the lives of others (notably Muslims). She addresses the outrage of Guantanamo Bay and the policy of “indefinite definition” that the Bush administration has tried to sustain there and elsewhere. And she objects to the unevenness of the discourse that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is accorded in US public life. The book’s final essay is a rather straightforward discussion of Lévinas, but framed in an argument about the role of cultural criticism in these troubled times.

Followers of Butler’s work will no doubt be happy to see her address so overtly some of the major issues of the last lethal years. But things have changed even in the few months since the book’s publication in April 2004. In July of this year the US Supreme Court ruled substantially against the Bush administration’s claim to be able to indefinitely detain “enemy combatants,” foreign and American, without interference from the law. From a body that was widely seen as being deeply in the tank for the Bush administration, the sharp constitutional lessons it delivered must have hurt. And those rulings came quickly on the heels of the Abu-Ghraib prison “scandal” that severely damaged the American government, denting its credibility at home and worsening its reputation even further abroad. At the same time, the much trumpeted handover of sovereignty to Iraqis (or what Naomi Klein has called the “underhand,” given the multiple ways the US constrained and compromised it) has done little to convince the world that the US is anything but a heavy-handed and corrupt occupying power, still embroiled in violent struggle with Iraqis.

And importantly, given the fact that Butler frequently stresses the poverty of media-led public discourse, the tide of American public discourse on all this has been turning too. For much of 2004 many parts of the media—led, perhaps, by TheNew York Times and CNN—have been visibly releasing themselves from the onus of their self-defined and unquestioned duty to reproduce the most impoverished of all possible American responses to 9/11 and its aftermath that the Bush administration manufactured. Those media are still “embedded” in all kinds of ways, to be sure; but from the position of being pig-headedly in the tank for the Bush administration, they have been slowly recovering the ability to critique the whole post-9/11 farrago, the misadventures in Iraq, and even the Mosaic leader himself.

In that light, the opening words of Precarious Life—where Butler points to “the rise of anti-intellectualism and a growing acceptance of censorship within the media”—are already somewhat outdated (1). Predictably, the pace of events has also affected many of the other positions Butler adopts in this book. As the post-9/11 wave of hysteria and narcissistic agitation has abated somewhat in America, and as the Iraqi war has come to seem even less justifiable than it was at the start, public discourse has admitted the critique of all aspects of the administration’s conduct since 9/11. You no longer have to be some maverick, unpatriotic leftie to be able to complain, for example, about Ashcroft’s assault on civil liberties, Rumsfeld’s barbaric policies in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, civilian casualties in Iraq, and the monstrous crimes of the current Israeli regime. These are positions that many on the political spectrum have now taken, continue to take, and presumably will have to keep on taking. During the last two years people...