Lecture 15: "Who Counts as Human? Whose Lives Count as Lives?"

Lecture 15: “Who counts as human? Whose
lives count as lives?”*
English 165EW
Winter 2013
4 March 2013
“‘So I am afraid,’ Wilbourne said. ‘I wasn’t afraid then because I was in
eclipse but I am awake now and I can be afraid now, thank God. Because
this Anno Domini 1938 has no place in it for love. They used money against
me while I was asleep because I was vulnerable in money. Then I waked up
and rectified the money and I thought that I had beat Them until that night
when I found out They had used respectability on me and that it was harder
to beat than money. So I am vulnerable in neither money nor respectability
now and so They will have to find something else to force us to conform to
the pattern of human life which has now evolved to do without love—to
conform, or die. […] Of course we cant beat Them; we are doomed of
course, that’s why I am afraid.’”
— William Faulkner, The Wild Palms, ch. 5 * Butler, p. 20

Judith Butler (1956–)
● Professor of rhetoric,
comparative literature,
and philosophy at UC
Berkeley.
● Best known for her post-
structuralist work in
gender theory, including
Gender Trouble and
Bodies That Matter.
● Recent work focuses on
the relationship between
Jewish philosophy and
notions of state violence. Butler receiving the Theodor W.
Adorno Prize in 2012.

Mourning and Melancholia
● In psychoanalytic terms, mourning refers (broadly and
generally speaking) to a process in which the loss of
a beloved object is acknowledged and, gradually,
resolved.
– For Freud (at least in his earlier thought), this process
involves acknowledging the loss (by separating the ego
from the lost object) and re-investing the psychic energy
previously associated with it in a new object.
● Melancholia, on the other hand, is a state of
continuing (and possibly intermittent) sadness caused
by an inability to understand and acknowledge loss.
– Melancholia is thus mourning that is unresolved because
the lost object is incorporated into the ego, and the
necessary process of re-integration is blocked.

● … is, therefore, central to the resolution of loss.
● … necessarily involves a transformation of the
sense of self, even as it seeks to preserve the
construction of that understanding.
“Perhaps, rather, one mourns when one accepts that
by the loss one undergoes one will be changed,
possibly for ever. […] I do not think, for instance, that
one can invoke the Protestant ethic when it comes to
loss. One cannot say, ‘Oh, I’ll go through loss this
way, and that will be the result, and I’ll apply myself to
the task, and I’ll endeavor to achieve the resolution of
grief that is before me.’” (21)
The process of grieving

Relational identities
“It is not as if an ‘I’ exists independently over
here and then simply loses a ‘you’ over there,
especially if the attachment to ‘you’ is a part of
what composes who ‘I’ am.” (22)
“We’re undone by each other. […] This seems
so clearly the case with grief, but it can be so
only because it was already the case with
desire.” (23)
“As a mode of relation, neither gender nor sexuality
is precisely a possession, but, rather, is a mode of
being dispossessed, a way of being for another or by
virtue of another.” (24)

“Although we struggle for rights over our own bodies,
the very bodies for which we struggle are not quite
ever only our own. The body has its invariably public
dimension. Constituted as a social phenomenon in
the public sphere, my body is and is not mine. Given
over from the start to the world of others, it bears their
imprint, is formed within the crucible of social life; only
later, and with some uncertainty, do I lay claim to my
body as my own, if, in fact, I ever do.” (26)
“I may wish to reconstitute my ‘self’ as if it were there
all along, a tacit ego with acumen from the start; but
to do so would be to deny the various forms of
rapture and subjection that formed the condition of
my emergence as an individuated being.” (27)

Violence
“violence is, always, an exploitation of that primary tie,
that primary way in which we are, as bodies, outside
ourselves and for one another.” (27)
“Violence is surely a touch of the worst order, a way a
primary human vulnerability to other humans is exposed
in its most terrifying way, a way in which we are given
over, without control, to the will of another, a way in which
life itself can be expunged by the willful action of
another.” (28-29)
“Although I am insisting on referring to a common human
vulnerability, one that emerges with life itself, I also insist
that we cannot recover the source of this vulnerability: it
precedes the formation of ‘I.’” (31)

This leads to several questions …
● How do we designate certain acts of violence as
relevant, in various ways, to “us”?
– For instance, as “terrorist” or as an instantiation of
“righteous anger.”
● How do we grieve for these acts of “publicly directed
violence”?
– For whom do we grieve?
– How is the allowability of grief determined?
– What form does this grief take?
– What tasks does it accomplish?
– How does this intersect with our notion of what “human”
means?

“Nations are not the same as individual
psyches, but both can be described as
‘subjects,’ albeit of different orders. When the
United States acts, it establishes a conception
of what it means to act as an American,
establishes a norm by which that subject might
be known.” (Butler 41)
in part, because …
– “There is no ideology except by the subject and for
subjects.” (Althusser 1268)
– “Ideology has a material existence.” (Althusser
1265)

As Walter Benjamin has it …
“It is no accident that the portrait was the focal point of early
photography. The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent
or dead, offers a last refuge for the cult value of the picture.
For the last time the aura emanates from the early
photographs in the fleeting expression of a human face. This
is what constitutes their melancholy, their incomparable
beauty.” (“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction,” VII)
“By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden
details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus
under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the
one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities
which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure
us of an immense and unexpected field of action.” (“Work of
Art,” XIII)

Margaret Atwood (1939–)
● Best known for her novels,
including The Handmaid’s Tale
(1985), The Blind Assassin
(200), and Oryx and Crake
(2003).
● Oryx and Crake is the first book
of a trilogy, followed by The
Year of the Flood (2009) and
MaddAddam (August 2013).
● Atwood’s novels are often
concerned with post-
apocalyptic and feminist
themes; she (often) works
within a genre she identifies as
“speculative fiction.”

Post-post-modern entertainment
“So they’d roll a few joints and smoke them while
watching the executions and the porn – the body
parts moving around on the screen in slow motion,
an underwater ballet of flesh and blood under stress,
hard and soft joining and separating, groans and
screams, close-ups of clenched eyes and clenched
teeth, spurts of this or that. If you switched back and
forth fast, it all came to look like the same event.
Sometimes they’d have both things on at once, each
on a different screen.” (86; ch. 4)
“Jimmy felt burned by this look – eaten into, as if by
acid. She’d [Oryx had] been so contemptuous of him.
[…] But for the first time, he’d felt that what they’d
been doing was wrong.” (91; ch. 4)

What is real?
“She [Sharon] was like a real mother and he [Jimmy]
was like a real child.” (30; ch. 2)
“Why don’t we use a real set?” Jimmy asked
one day when they were doing some chess. “The
old kind. With plastic men.” […]
“Why?” said Crake. “Anyway, this is a real set.”
“No it’s not.”
“Okay, granted, but neither is plastic men.”
“What?”
“The real set is in your head.” (77; ch. 4)
“He [Snowman] feels the need to hear a human
voice – a fully human voice, like his own.” (10; ch. 1)

The distribution of vulnerability
“Jimmy’s mother said that didn’t change the
fact that she felt like a prisoner. Jimmy’s father
said she didn’t understand the reality of the
situation. Didn’t she want to be safe, didn’t she
want her son to be safe?” (53; ch. 4)
“Despite the sterile transport corridors and the
high-speed bullet trains, there was always a
risk when you went through the city. […]
Compound people didn’t go to the cities
unless they had to, and then never alone.
They called the cities the pleeblands.” (27; ch.
2)

Long ago, in the days of knights and
dragons, the kings and dukes had lived in
castles, with high walls and drawbridges and
slots on the ramparts so you could pour hot
pitch on your enemies, said Jimmy’s father, and
the Compounds were the same idea. Castles
were for keeping you and your buddies nice
and safe inside, and for keeping everybody
else outside.
“So are we the kings and dukes?” asked
Jimmy.
“Oh, absolutely,” said his father, laughing.
(28; ch. 2)

Who distributes? Who decides?
“Old enough, Snowman thinks as he scratches
himself […]. Such a dumb concept. Old enough for
what? To drink, to fuck, to know better? What
fathead was in charge of making those decisions?
For example, Snowman himself isn’t old enough
for this, this – what can it be called? This
situation.” (23; ch. 2)
“This would upset Jimmy; he was confused about
who should be allowed to eat what. He didn’t want
to eat a pigoon, because he thought of the pigoons
as creatures much like himself. Neither he nor
they had a lot of say in what was going on.” (24)

What “situation”?
“But everyone’s parents moaned on about stuff
like that. Remember when you could drive
anywhere? Remember when everyone lived in
the pleeblands? Remember when you could fly
anywhere in the world, without fear?
Remember hamburger chains, always real
beef, remember hot-dog stands? Remember
before New York was New New York?
Remember when voting mattered?” (63; ch. 4)
“Crake turned up at HelthWyzer High in
September or October, one of those months
that used to be called autumn.” (71)

“You want to know everything,” said Oryx. (92)
The last words of chapter 4

Media credits
The photo of Judith Butler (slide 2) and Margaret
Atwood (slide 11) have been released under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0
Unported license by their respective creators
(Wikipedia users Dontworry and Vanwaffle,
respectively). Original sources:
– http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons
/2/21/Margaret_Atwood_Eden_Mills_Writers_F
estival_2006.jpg
– http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons
/f/f9/Adorno-preis-2012-judith-butler-ffm-
303.jpg

Lecture 15: "Who Counts as Human? Whose Lives Count as Lives?"

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Lecture 15: "Who Counts as Human? Whose Lives Count as Lives?"