Butler’s Biopolitics: Precarious Community

Beginning with her earliest formulations of performativity and up through her more recent theory of precarity, Judith Butler offers a sustained reflection on the constitution, production, and reproduction of marginality. While the concern with marginality has remained constant, her emphasis has shifted from exclusions based on normative gender and sexuality to exclusions based on the norms of Western liberal democracy. Consequently, her critique expands from the psycho-social scene of interpellation to the world stage of global geopolitics, as evidenced especially in Precarious Life (2006) and Frames of War (2010). Butler’s work on gender has always compared the plight of sexual minorities to that of gender and racial minorities, but she has been careful to avoid proposing a universal theory of oppression through marginalization and exclusion, for fear of effacing the historical specificity of diverse social movements. Nonetheless, her recent work does extend her philosophy of subjectivity to include many types of socio-political marginalization. Rather than relying on her theory of performativity to explain the ways in which liberal norms establish poor, non-Western, or medicalized bodies as abject or less than human, in her writing of the 2000s Butler develops her own theory of precarity. She defines precarity and precariousness in terms of life and death, mentioning economic and labor precarity only insofar as these are necessary to sustaining a viable life.¹ It is perhaps not surprising that questions of life and death come to the forefront in Precarious Lives and Frames of War, both of which develop the notion of the precarious in response to the US-led war on terror. Butler makes a careful distinction between “precariousness”—the corporeal vulnerability shared by all mortals including the privileged, and “precarity”—the particular vulnerability imposed on the poor, the disenfranchised, and those endangered by war or natural disaster. Corporeal fragility both equalizes and differentiates: all bodies are menaced by suffering, injury, and death (precariousness), but some bodies are more protected and others more exposed (precarity). Precariousness is shared by all; precarity is “distributed unequally” (Butler 2010, xvii, xxv, 25). Butler’s egalitarian remedy to the social ills of unequally imposed precarity? Precariousness for all. Vulnerability will serve as the basis for a new kind of community. Precariousness will save the world from precarity. These are Butler’s precarious propositions.

Rather than seeking to empower the weak—those who are living in precarity—Butler instead insists on the vulnerability of those who deny their own precariousness. She reasons that since precarity is imposed on others by those who refuse to acknowledge their own mortality, precariousness must be avowed and recognized by slave and master alike. She claims that avowing precariousness is a social act because precariousness is “not simply an existential condition of individuals, but rather a social condition from which certain clear political demands and principles emerge” (2010, xxv). This raises “the question of how a collective deals with its vulnerability to violence” (Butler 2004, 231). Disavowing vulnerability creates political inequalities resulting in precarity because violence results when the national subject tries to “immunize itself against the thought of its own precariousness” by asserting “its own righteous destructiveness” (Butler 2010, 48). Immunization takes the form of violence directed at the perceived threat. Facing up to shared vulnerability will circumvent the violent immune response: “Mindfulness of this vulnerability can become the basis of claims for non-military political solutions,” she claims. Conversely, “denial of this vulnerability through a fantasy of mastery… can fuel the instruments of war” (Butler 2006, 29).

Butler’s politics of shared vulnerability thus recalls Roberto Esposito’s theory of immunization, as developed in his recently translated trilogy Communitas, Immunitas, and Bíos. Esposito describes the shared vulnerability that Butler calls precariousness: “What men have in common, what makes them more like each other than anything else, is their generalized capacity to be killed: the fact that anyone can be killed by anyone else” (Esposito 2010a, 13). This provokes what he calls the immunization response: “Life is sacrificed to the preservation of life. In this convergence of the preservation of life and its capacity to be sacrificed, modern immunization reaches the height of its own destructive...