Bodies That Still Matter 1

Judith Butler

Abstract
The question of how best to name those who are most vulnerable to
precarity and exploitation is both a conceptual and political one. It has
been tempting in recent years to consider vulnerability as the foundation
for a new politics, but that is an error. Vulnerability cannot be isolated as
a new ground for politics. It is always contextual since it belongs to the
organization of embodied and social relations. Vulnerability can neither
be isolated from the constellation of rage, persistence, and resistance that
emerges under specific historical conditions, nor can it be the basis for a
new humanism. Rather, the differential exposure of bodies to abandon-
ment, illness, and death, belong to a sphere of power that regulates the
grievability of human lives, linked to the climate crisis and the demand
for a new political vocabulary that moves beyond anthropocentrism.
The differential scheme that governs the grievability of lives is a central
component of social inequality at the same time that it belongs to forms
of institutional violence that target communities and establish their
precarity, if not their dispensability. If and when a population is (or is
treated as) grievable, they can be acknowledged as a living population
whose deaths would be grieved if their lives were lost. To assert the griev-
ability of human life under conditions in which those lives have already
been abandoned is to make a political claim against abandonment, for
sustainable infrastructure, and for both the grievability and value of those
lives. Mourning is thus linked with public protest, Vulnerability is the
possibility of injury, but also of responsive and radical politics, one that
asserts continued bodily existence as a form of persistence.

Keywords: vulnerability, embodiment, grievability, life, inequality,

violence, protest

1 Some parts of this essay have appeared in Judith Butler, The Force of Nonviolence (Verso, 2020).

Halsema, Annemie, Katja Kwastek, and Roel van den Oever (eds), Bodies That Still Matter:
Resonances of the Work of Judith Butler. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2021
doi: 10.5117/9789463722940_butler
178 JUDITH BUTLER

We are living in a time of numerous atrocities and senseless death, and so

the enormous ethical and political question becomes: what are the modes
of political representation available to us? I want to caution against too
quickly developing a politics of vulnerability or a politics of care as an
immediate pathway for feminism or for the Left, although I am quite clear
that we need to reconsider both notions, and that many people do suffer
from disproportionate forms of vulnerability. It matters how we go about
addressing this issue. Some would say that we have to identify vulnerable
groups and offer them protection. I am never sure who “we” are in that
formulation, even though I am not always opposed to that procedure. Neither
vulnerability nor care can be the basis of a politics, in the sense of an ongoing
and unconflicted human disposition or condition that can and should give
rise, logically or temporally, to a political framework for feminism.
It would perhaps be understandably easy and efficient if we could es-
tablish vulnerability as the foundation for a new politics, but it can neither
be isolated from other terms, nor can it be the kind of phenomenon to
serve as a foundation. If we think about the connection between vulner-
ability and resistance, we can see the limits of those accounts that either
use vulnerability as a sociological adjective to describe certain groups or
isolate it as a condition that gives rise to a specific version of the human
creature. The task is not to rally as vulnerable creatures or to create a class
of persons who identify primarily with vulnerability. In the context of
human rights work and humanitarianism, we are given to understand that
vulnerability sometimes applies to populations; sociologically considered,
there are vulnerable populations and they are understood to be in need
of protection and even care. Of course, we speak that way especially in
light of those who are without basic human requirements, a mass number
of refugees being abandoned by so many nation-states and transnational
state formations, including the European Union. We also speak that way
about the victims of feminicidio (or femicidio) in Latin America (especially
Honduras, Guatemala, Brazil, Argentina, and El Salvador), which includes
everyone who is brutalized or killed by virtue of being feminized, and that
includes large numbers of trans women as well.
Often these deaths are reported or sensationalist stories appear in news-
papers, after which there is a momentary shock. There is horror, to be sure,
but not always linked with an analysis that helps to mobilize against such
widespread crimes. Sometimes the men who commit such crimes are said
to be pathological, or the situation is considered to be tragic, or the story
is treated as yet another periodic instance of the aberrant. Consider the
description of feminists, however, who are trying to theorize the situation
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in order to know the terms by which it should be framed and understood.

Montserrat Sagot, for instance, has argued that femicide expresses in dra-
matic form the inequality of the relations between feminine and masculine,
and demonstrates an extreme manifestation of domination, terror, social
vulnerability, and extermination with impunity.2 In her view, it will not
do to explain assassinations such as these through recourse to individual
characteristics, pathology, or even masculine aggression. Rather, these acts
of killing have to be understood in terms of the reproduction of a social
structure. She claims that this has to be described as an extreme form of
sexist terrorism (Monárrez Fragoso 2002).
For her, killing is the most extreme form of domination, and other forms,
including discrimination, harassment, and battery, have to be understood as
on a continuum with femicide. This mode of reasoning, however, leads us to
a paradox, since if extermination is the goal, then the perpetrators no longer
dominate, for the one who dominates requires one who can be subordinated,
and whose subordination reflects back to them their dominance. Without the
continued life of the subordinated person or class, the dominator becomes
the norm, and a relation of imposed inequality gives way to genocide. No
one dominates the dead.
But let us note that femicide does not involve the killing of all women,
although it establishes a climate in which any woman, including trans
women, can be killed. So the living endure within that atmosphere of
potential harm. The population of women who live on are terrorized by the
prevalence of this killing practice, induced to subordinate to avoid that fate.
The subordination is already linked to their status as “killable.” Subordinate
or die becomes the imperative delivered to women under these conditions.
It is this power to terrorize that is backed up, supported, and strengthened
by the police who refuses to prosecute, or who inflicts violence on women
who dare to make a legal complaint when they suffer or see violence.
We call the killing “violence,” of course, but shall we also call the repro-
duction of institutionalized terror “violence”? If we call the latter violence,
then we shift from one conception of physical violence to another that is
institutional, although the two are, in fact, linked, bound to one another
in a strengthening dialectic of terror. Here is where there is so much theo-
retical work to do: How do we understand the specificity of sexual terror?
How does it relate to domination, and to extermination? Is there a general

2 “El femicidio expresa de forma dramática la desigualdad de relaciones entre lo femenino y

lo masculino y muestra una manifestación extrema de dominio, terror, vulnerabilidad social,
de exterminio e incluso de impunidad” (Sagot 2007).
180 JUDITH BUTLER

theory of sexuality and violence within which this phenomenon can be

understood? All these questions help us to understand how there might be
an intervention, global in scale, to demand a reconceptualization of these
forms of murder, so that we can understand the forms of social power that
are enacted in these circumstances. Only then will we know how to counter
the stories that blame women for their own violent deaths, or that make the
men into pathological characters, or provide a sympathetic account of their
rage. As individual and awful as any of these losses may be, they belong to
a social structure that has deemed women ungrievable. The categories that
fail to grasp the operation of social power in such cases thus obstruct the
effective political opposition to this condition.
Of course, there are many questions that remain: the uses of human rights
discourse, the recourse to legal regimes which often reproduce inequality,
the necessity of understanding the possibilities of resistance that women
have under such terrorizing conditions. And the necessity to create a global
picture of this reality may well involve understanding the way such killings
work, for instance, in US prisons and US streets, especially targeting women
of color and trans women, the most vulnerable, but also those whose forms
of political resistance may well prove to be among the most powerful. The
growing feminist scholarship and legal jurisprudence in this area that is
becoming more well-known and more accessible, has changed the legal and
political landscape. I do not know what kind of revolution it would take to
become more powerful than this form of terror. But it is an ideal that must
stay alive as a thought, no matter how difficult that may seem.

How to Name Those Who Are Vulnerable?

Is there then a way to name and counter forms of necropolitical targeting

without producing a class of victims that denies women, including trans
women, their networks, their theory and analysis, their solidarities, and their
opposition (Mbembe 2003)? When we speak about vulnerable populations,
we may be thinking that we make no ontological claim about this group,
but only offer a provisional sociological or legal terminology for the purpose
of description. The reasonable view seems to go something like this: A
population is designated or demarcated that has become vulnerable under
certain historical conditions, but that population can also be delivered from
vulnerability if they are given proper infrastructural support, including
safe refuge and legal rights. If and when that happens, that group loses its
status as vulnerable, though other populations remain vulnerable because of
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their historical conditions. The task is to relieve them of their vulnerability,

and that task is presumably undertaken by someone who is tasked with
providing that relief. Do those called vulnerable still maintain and exercise
their own power, or is it rather the power of paternalistic care that is now
obligated to intervene?
When we ascribe vulnerability to persons in that way, we abstract and
isolate vulnerability as a defining feature of human lives under specific
contingent historical conditions and, in so doing, we occlude the constel-
lation of vulnerability, rage, persistence, and resistance that emerges under
these same historical conditions. In other words, we all know that to receive
aid or to declare a humanitarian crisis, vulnerable populations have to be
named by those who wield the institutional and discursive authority to
prompt aid, to engage legal structures, to facilitate media attention. At the
same time, however, when a population is described in such a way, efforts at
action, forms of solidarity, networks of support, and means of resistance are
at risk of being effaced. So, under those conditions, the language by which
these persons are represented risks misrepresenting them, locating power
external to their own action. Thus, named as vulnerable, they are deprived
of their power. And this is a bind, since we call them vulnerable because
they have been deprived of power. How do we get around this conundrum?
A similar situation affects the refugee populations detained in Europe
or those abandoned to the Mediterranean. Whether we are speaking about
people trapped in camps along the border of Syria, or launching into the
sea where there is no guarantee of rescue, we are referring to populations
that risk death and often die, and whose deaths are a calculable feature of
what Mbembe has called a necropolitics. I will not elaborate on that notion
here, but would like to call attention first to the organized character of
deprivation and death that has taken place along the extended borders of
Europe. More than three thousand people have died trying to cross the
Mediterranean in the last few years, and these include the large numbers
of Kurdish people seeking to migrate over the sea. The number of civilian
deaths in Syria is enormous. Human Rights Watch reports the following:
“The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a monitoring group
based in the UK, estimated the death toll since the start of the war to be as
high as 511,000 as of March 2018. Years of relentless fighting left 6.6 million
displaced internally and 5.6 million around the world, according to the
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).” There are
many examples on which I could draw to raise the question of how we
come to name and understand the organization of populations primed
for dispossession and death, and they would include the last decades in
182 JUDITH BUTLER

Colombia, the mass slaughter of the Rohingya, and the brutal treatment of
Syrians and Kurds amassed on the border of Turkey or refused by European
countries. The latter form of lethal abandonment by European states reflects
the differential ways that anti-Muslim racism works in Europe and its
convergence with anti-black racism that creates the notion of a disposable
people, those who are considered on the cusp of death or already dead or
never really considered as part of human life at all. We can decide to set up
different categories for those who died in war and refugee deaths, but the
refugee is tied to the war, is a war casualty – there is arguably no Syrian
refugee without war – and the refugee is living out a condition produced
by war – the precarious flight from war.
Those who are killed are victims, to be sure, and those who somehow
survive in the shadow regions of displacement and destitution live on in
some way. What, then, are the conditions for that living on, and how do we
understand that vulnerability in a condition of precarious survival? After
all, it does happen that those who have lost their homes and countries or
who are, as a consequence of military or economic destruction, without
adequate infrastructural support, have nevertheless developed networks.
Refugee activism involves a range of activities: communicating timetables,
translation, learning legal and regulatory policies, international maritime
and asylum laws in the Mediterranean to their advantage in order to move
across borders, to plot a route and to connect with communities who can
provide support of one kind or another. Arrival can mean confinement to
detention centers or getting through only to squat in vacated hotels with
accommodating anarchists or to become the new homeless.
The names we use to describe such conditions of life matter. Those
amassed along the borders of Europe are not precisely bare life – we do
not recognize their suffering by further depriving them of all capacity. They
are, for the most part, in a terrible situation, improvising forms of sociality,
using cell phones, plotting and taking action when it is possible, drawing
maps, learning languages, though in so many instances those activities
are not always possible. Even as agency is blocked at every turn, there still
remain ways of resisting that very situation, ways of making a political
demand, though not in every instance. When they do make the demand
for papers, for movement, for entry, they are not precisely overcoming
their vulnerability – they are demonstrating it. They do not miraculously
transform vulnerability into strength, but articulate the demand that life
has to be supported in order to persist. Sometimes the demand is made
with the body, showing up, refusing to move. The cell phone image that
makes the virtual case for the embodied life. In other words, vulnerability
BODIES THAT STILL MAT TER 183

is incorporated and manifest in the making of a political demand, in the

action of resistance. The mistake that is sometimes made is to think that if
there is action, vulnerability has been overcome. The vulnerable do not act;
to act is strong. But perhaps we have to rethink the act of demonstrating,
and the logic of demonstration itself, in order to re-evaluate these kinds of
assumptions.
Consider, for example, the German newspaper Daily Resistance, published
in Farsi, Arabic, Turkish, German, French, and English, which contains
articles by refugees who have formulated a set of political demands, including
the abolition of all refugee camps, and the end of the German policy of
Residenzpflicht (which limits the freedom of movement of refugees within
narrow boundaries) to stop all deportations and to allow refugees to work
and study. In 2012, several refugees in the city of Würzburg stitched their
mouths shut, protesting against the fact that the government had refused
to respond to them. That gesture has been repeated in several sites, most
recently by Iranian migrants in Calais in March 2019 before the destruction
and evacuation of their camp. Their view, widely shared, is that without a
political response, the refugees remain voiceless, since a voice that is not
heard, is not registered, and so is not a political voice. Of course, they did
not put their claim in the propositional form that I just offered, but they
made the point through a readable and visible gesture that muted the voice
as the sign and substance of their demand. The image of the stitched lips
shows that the demand cannot be voiced and so makes its own voiceless
demand. It displays its voiceless-ness in a visual image to make a point
about the political limits imposed on audibility. In some ways, we see again
a form of theatrical politics that asserts the power of these people and the
limits imposed on power at the same time.
Consider an example from Turkey, the “standing man” in Taksim Square
in June of 2013, who was part of the protest movements against the Erdogan
government’s policies of privatization and its authoritarianism. The standing
man was a performance artist, Erdem Gündüz, who obeyed the state’s edict
delivered immediately after the mass protests not to assemble and not to
speak with others in assembly. This edict by Erdogan sought to undermine
the most basic premises of democracy: freedom of movement, of assembly,
and of speech. One man stood, and stood at the mandated distance from
another person, who in turn stood at the mandated distance from another.
Legally, they did not constitute an assembly, and no one was speaking or
moving. What they did was to perform compliance perfectly, hundreds
of them, filling the square at the proper distance from one another. They
effectively demonstrated the ban under which they were living, submitting
184 JUDITH BUTLER

to it at the same time that they displayed it for the cameras that could not
be fully banned.
Demonstration in this case had at least two meanings: the ban is shown,
incorporated, enacted bodily – the ban becomes a script – but the ban is also
opposed, demonstrated against. That demonstration was elaborated in and
by the visual field opened up by cell phone cameras, the forms of technology
that eluded the interdiction on speech and movement. The performance
thus both submitted to, and defied, the interdiction in and through the
same action. Fighting the censor, embodying its term, this could be called a
subject knotted with legal powers, to be sure, but also manifesting defiance.
Lives seeking to live on the margin of life seek to assert their existence.
Sometimes the slogan is simply “we exist.” That public assertion of existence
is meant to break through the denial that these are lives, that they deserve
recognition, support, and legal status, and that they can be lost.

The Biopolitics of Grievability

What then does it mean to say that a life, or lives, can be lost? On the one
hand, this would seem to be a defining feature of all finite life, the very
meaning of finitude. On the other hand, under conditions in which life is not
sustainable, lives are more likely to be lost than not. Foucault distinguished
in Society Must Be Defended ([1976] 2003) against two forms of death-dealing:
one is sovereign and death follows upon a command or a sentence, the other
is biopolitical and death is the consequence of a policy – or a set of policies
– of abandonment and destitution. To assert the grievability of human life
under conditions in which those lives have already been abandoned is to
make a political claim against abandonment, for sustainable infrastructure,
and for both the grievability and value of those lives.
It is an awkward phrase: grievability. What does it mean to say that one
population appears within a particular configuration of power to be more
or less grievable? Obviously, we are speaking not generalizing about an
existential condition nor are we referring to inherent attributes. Rather, we
are referring to a way that populations are represented and treated within
dominant schemes of power. For a population targeted in war, systematically
detained, or abandoned or left to die, their lives do not count as lives worth
sustaining or preserving. There is no social or public policy aimed at securing
a livable life for them, and yet they live with the felt knowledge that their
lives are, in the eyes of dominant power, disposable. Is there a clear way to
distinguish on demographic grounds the grievable from the ungrievable?
BODIES THAT STILL MAT TER 185

From within the terms of racism, those designations are made all the
time. From within the framework of anti-racism, those distinctions are
exposed and challenged all the time. Racist power can draw the line between
grievable and ungrievable lives in several ways. Sometimes ungrievable lives
are not even considered lives or living; they belong to the shadow regions of
life, those who are already socially dead, or dying. Other times they are lives,
but their value is considered less than other lives. These are two distinct
forms of inequality. The one distinguishes between those who are more and
less alive, the other distinguishes between those who exemplify the value
of the human life more and less fully. Either way, some are more grievable
than others. Put differently, some lives are regarded as if the prospective
loss of that life would be a serious loss; they are the grievable. Others are
regarded as if their loss would be no loss, or not much of a loss; they are in
the category of the ungrievable. But those determinations are always made
within frameworks of radical inequality, whether racist or misogynist or
transphobic, that seek to preserve the fully human and valuable life, or the
life fully alive, as a white and masculine prerogative.
Of course, to speak of grievability is an awkward way to speak. It usually
involves thinking about those who are already lost or dead: Will there be
a gravesite, a monument, a public acknowledgement of some kind? But
what if grievability characterizes the living? We are also used to asking
whether subjects are capable of grieving, but we are less adept at asking
whether people are eligible to be grieved. If the sense of being grievable is
an experience that the living carry, that is, that they would be mourned
if their lives were lost, then so too is the sense of being ungrievable, of not
knowing whether the loss of one’s life would be marked or mourned. When
we talk about the capacity to grieve, we are usually referring to individuals
who have had to face a loss and now have to accept that hard fact. But we
can talk about societies that way, and whole cultural worlds. The question
of whether a people are capable of grieving was poignantly posed by the
study published in Germany called The Inability to Mourn ([1967] 1975) by
Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich. That text, building upon Freud’s work
on melancholia, asked whether in postwar Germany there was a failure to
mourn the massive losses inflicted by the Nazi regime, but also the losses
borne by German civilians. It showed that melancholia might not only
characterize an individual psyche, but a collective or shared condition or,
more precisely, a national one, as well. Whereas mourning is characterized
by the acknowledgement of loss – what Freud called the “verdict of reality”
– melancholia refuses to hear or accept the verdict, refuses to acknowledge
a loss that at some level is both registered and refused.
186 JUDITH BUTLER

When off icial EU boats turn back refugees in precarious vessels, do

they regard the lives on that boat as grievable or ungrievable? How do
their governments regard them? Does “national security” as a principle
in such instances encode implicitly a refusal to grieve, to acknowledge
the grievability of those persons? Grievability is relative to treatment, and
treatment is relative to larger policies and schemes of social and racial
inequality. If and when a population is (or is treated as) grievable, they can
be acknowledged as a living population whose deaths would be grieved if
their lives were lost. Those losses would be unacceptable, and even wrong,
an occasion of shock and outrage, moral judgment, and political opposition.
Grievability is a characteristic attributed to a group of people, perhaps a
population, by some group or community, or within the terms of a discourse,
epistemic framework, policy, or institution. That attribution is rarely a
punctual event. Not one person with power explicitly proclaims that a
population is not worth grieving, that their lives are not worth living. And
yet such judgments are implied by immigration and health policies that
regularly abandon populations, by military campaigns that target, abandon,
or persecute populations or force them to flee without recourse to basic
goods or entitlements. This can also happen through many different media
and with variable force – it can also fail to happen, or happen only intermit-
tently and inconsistently, depending on the context, or how the context
shifts. But my point is that people can be grieved or bear the attribute of
grievability to the extent that the wrongfulness of their lives becoming lost
can be acknowledged and embodied in policies that seek to secure their
living on; the fear of that loss, the effort to prevent that loss can only happen
if the grievability of those lives can be acknowledged while they are alive.
And that can happen only when the conditions of acknowledgement are
established and maintained within an intersubjective field of some kind,
whether a community, a network, a set of relations, a regional or religious
set of institutions or, indeed, a state or international authority.
However, seeking to acknowledge a loss when there are no established
conditions for its acknowledgment, or where those established conditions
have been destroyed or dispersed, is a practice of performative defiance. As
such, it seeks to break through the melancholic norm to assert the existing
and living characters of those who are deemed disposable and ungriev-
able. Such forms of social and existential solidarity activate a performative
dimension of public grieving that seeks to expose and oppose the limits of
the grievable and to establish new terms of acknowledgement that imply a
commitment to infrastructural sustenance. This would be a form of militant
existential declaration – “we exist!” or “we still exist!” – but also of producing
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public acts of grieving for those who are lost, the kind that breaks into public
space and time, defying its melancholic prohibitions against mourning,
inaugurating a new constellation of space and time of the grievable.
We might prefer to avoid all this complexity and simply say that every life
is grievable, and militate for an understanding of that basic equality. That
is a good humanist solution, and it has its merits. But it cannot describe the
radical form of inequality that must be challenged. We may want to insist
that “every life is grievable” is a descriptive claim, that all existing life is
equally grievable, but if we let that be the full extent of our description, we
badly misrepresent present reality. “Every life is grievable” makes sense
politically only if that is a call, a demand, and an explicit aspiration in a
world in which structures of radical inequality are rampant. So, we should
perhaps go frankly normative, without shame or hesitation, and say that
every life ought to be grievable, thus positing a utopic horizon within which
theory and description is obliged to work. If we want to argue that every life
is inherently grievable and claim a natural or a priori value to this descriptive
claim, then we ask the descriptive claim to carry a normative implication:
every life should be grievable. That conflation, however, misses the chance
to address the incommensurability between descriptive and normative
claims and gives rise to a persistent question: Why do we ask the descriptive
claim to do that normative work? After all, we have to point out the radical
discrepancy between what is and what ought to be in order to demand
that the world come to embody the normative aspirations we outline. So,
it is better to keep them distinct, at least for these kinds of debates. After
all, while theorizing within the terms of the present, it is radically untrue
to make a descriptive claim that all lives are equally grievable. They are
not. So let us move from what is to what ought to be, or at least start that
movement, which posits a utopic horizon for our work.3
Of course, when one speaks about lives that are not equally grievable,
one posits an ideal or measure of equal grievability. What notion of equality
operates in such an assertion? There are at least two implications of this
formulation that pose some critical problems. The first is that we have to ask
whether there is a way to measure or calculate how much anyone is really
grieved. How does one establish that one population is more grievable and
that another is less? Given that grievability is always relative to a framework
of social inequality, we would have to determine grievability in relation to
the differentiating mechanism of that form of social power. Perhaps within
a given framework, we could discern different degrees of grievability, but

3 My thanks to Drucilla Cornell for teaching me this point.

188 JUDITH BUTLER

any such determination would be historical, variable, and contingent, since

even racist regimes have a way of coming to an end.
Surely, it would be quite disturbing, if not fully counter-productive, to
establish a calculus that could provide answers of this sort. That would be
impossible, since it would abstract the attribute from the framework of power
in which it operates. So the only way to understand the claim that some lives
are more grievable than others, that some are, within certain frames and
under certain circumstances, safeguarded against danger, destitution, and
death more tenaciously than others, is to say precisely – with Derrida – that
the incalculable value of a life is acknowledged in one setting and not in
another, or that within the same setting (if we can set the setting) some
are acknowledged as bearing incalculable value and others are subject
to a calculation. Indeed, calculation is one of the mechanisms by which
the grievable are distinguished from the ungrievable, so we cannot use a
calculus to decide this distinction without deepening and strengthening
the distinction itself. To be subject to any such calculation is already to have
entered the grey zone of the ungrievable.
A second implication of the formulation that not all lives are treated as
equally grievable is that we have to revise our ideas of equality in order to
take into account grievability as a social attribute that ought to be subject to
egalitarian standards. In other words, we are not yet speaking about equality
if we have not yet spoken about equal grievability, or the equal attribution
of grievability. Grievability is a necessary condition for equality. It is also
a dimension of inequality that is not acknowledged by those calculations
that seek to establish social and economic inequality, although it belongs
to both spheres.
If we consider unequal grievability as a part of social and economic inequal-
ity, and if unequal grievability prepares, targets or abandons populations
for dying and death, for life-extinguishing violence, then it follows that the
struggle for equality is linked to the struggle against violence. It also implies
a commitment to a new biopolitics, to a generalizable infrastructure of suste-
nance geared toward the sustaining of lives otherwise regarded as unworthy
of living or unsustainable. When a population is regarded as ungrievable, it is
first deprived of its status as a living population. Only the living can die, and
if there is no marking of death, including potential death, then there is no
life – or so it appears within frameworks governed by logics of this kind. If a
population is (that is, is regarded as) in some sense socially dead, or if it has
been subjected within and by a necropolitical episteme and practice, it can
hardly be grieved under such conditions. Only that which has been regarded
as living can be grieved, can be considered as a lost life. A life that is already
BODIES THAT STILL MAT TER 189

lost, or that was lost from the start, cannot be lost in any meaningful way, and
so cannot be grieved. Melancholic denial of the possibility of loss thus sets
the stage for a living being whose life cannot be lost because it will never have
truly lived. And yet, as we know, the life that is considered lost from the start
can be grieved precisely because it was, quite without knowing it, lost before it
had a chance to live, and lived out all its potentials as a form of perpetual loss.
Hence, when we say that a life is ungrievable, we are not speaking only
about a life that is already over. No, to live in the world as a grievable life
is to know that one’s death would be mourned, could be mourned, and to
have a sense of living in a world in which one’s life matters. But also, it is
to know that this life will be safeguarded because of its value, that it will
have the infrastructural ground that is required to live in a world with an
open-ended future. This way of evaluating the unequal grievability of lives
is part of biopolitics, and that means that we cannot always trace this form
of inequality to a sovereign decision-making process. As mentioned above,
Foucault’s 1976 lecture course, Society Must Be Defended, elaborates on the
emergence of the biopolitical field in the nineteenth century. There we
find that the biopolitical describes the operation of power over humans
as living beings. Distinct from sovereign power, biopolitics or biopower
appears to be a distinctively European formation. It operates through
various technologies and methods for managing life, but also death. For
Foucault, this is a particular kind of power, inasmuch as it is exercised over
humans by virtue of their status as living beings. Sometimes he calls that
living status a biological status, though he does not tell us which version
of biological science he has in mind. Foucault describes the biopolitical
as a power to “make live” or to “let die,” distinguished from the sovereign
power to “take life” (or “made to die”) or “let live.” As in many instances in
Foucault’s work, power acts, but not from a sovereign center. Rather, there
are multiple agencies of power operating in a post-sovereign context to
manage populations as living creatures, to manage their lives, to make
them live or let them die. This form of biopower regulates, among other
things, the very livability of life, determining the relative life potential of
populations. This sort of power is documented in mortality and natality
rates that indicate forms of racism that belong to biopolitics. 4 It emerges as
well in forms of pronatalism and “prolife” positions that regularly privilege
some sorts of life, or living tissue, over others, giving priority to the life of
embryonic tissue over the lives of teenage or adult women.

4 “Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of

group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” (Gilmore 2007, 247).
190 JUDITH BUTLER

The radical inequality that governs the grievability of persons is part of

the biopolitical, or one point where the biopolitical turns necropolitical.
Those who are lost or violently effaced from life ought to be openly grieved,
since that would accord those lives value, even if posthumously. As for the
living, only by becoming grievable do they stand a chance of appearing as
alive. To say that they are grievable is to say that they should not be lost,
that this loss should not happen, should not have happened, and that the
world needs to be organized in such a way to mark and forestall such a loss.
Whereas the recognition of lost lives makes them grievable, establishing the
possibility of mourning, the radical assertion of grievability among and by
the living gives rise to performative defiance. This is a form of resistance to
hyper-precarious life, to protracted modes of living death, to the differential
susceptibility to sudden and violent injury, detention, death. This is a kind
of resistance that is undertaken not simply in the name of life, or the right
to live, but against the political conditions that arrange for mass deaths and
cover them over as an implication of policies that may or may not operate
according to sovereign forms of death-dealing. Such resistance takes form
sometimes as railing against the censoring of lives by those whose voice,
whose image, and whose theatricality seeks to break through the scheme
of representation that leaves them unrepresentable.
The bodies that resist the presumption of their ungrievability appear
as such within the public as a political scandal. Their exposure to police
and military force in the context of such demonstrations delineates the
risk of death or deportation with which they live – it brings it to the fore. It
makes the wager and the demand with its own performative and embodied
persistence.

A Relational Body

As we think about the future of resistance movements, the opening of the

future that some of us call feminism, we might have to return to the body
to understand better these forms of persistence and resistance. Perhaps
going forward, our slogan can no longer be “my body, my self” since the
body is not exactly property, its boundaries are not fixed, and the task is
not just to defend individual liberty. For if we accept that part of what a
body is (and this is for the moment an ontological claim), is its dependency
on other bodies, on living processes of which it is a part, on networks of
support to which it also contributes and from which it draws, then it is not
altogether right to conceive of individual bodies as completely distinct
BODIES THAT STILL MAT TER 191

from one another. Without conceptualizing the political meaning of the

human body in the context of those institutions, practices, and relations
in which it lives and thrives, we fail to make the best possible case for why
murder is unacceptable, abandonment has to be opposed, and precarity
alleviated. I am suggesting not just that this or that body is bound up in a
network of relations, but that the boundary both contains and relates: the
body, perhaps precisely by virtue of its boundaries, is differentiated from
and exposed to a material and social world that makes its own life and
action possible. When the infrastructural conditions of life are imperiled,
so too is life precisely because life cannot be separated from the conditions
that make it possible. I take this to be a materialist point we can deny only
at our own peril.
What difference does it then make if we understand the body in these
terms? I want to suggest that if we understand bodies as defined by their
interdependency, it follows that the body cannot really exist without another
body. No one body is self-subsisting. The border, the boundary, is the site of
its exposure to possible danger, but also a vector of relationality, including
the possibility of contact, excitation, passion, the possibility of leaning,
holding, even the wild sense that one might be caught in the middle of a
fall. That “I” requires a “you” in order to survive and to flourish. These are
social relations that ground the broader global obligations we bear toward
one another. I cannot live without living together with some set of people,
even though the form of that co-habitation varies. The fact that we are
given over to one another without always choosing to be in that situation,
that we do not choose our parents or our world, means that our lives are
bound up with an unchosen vulnerability and an unchosen dependency.
We catch a virus from someone we do not know; we extend compassion for
those whose names we will never know. This sphere of the unchosen bond
should not be lamented. Rather, it is a chance to dwell on the far side of
contract. If we wish to see all of our relations as determined by our individual
freedom, we will surely rail against this fact of unchosen interdependency,
and act and argue as if we should all be in full control, engaging only with
those with whom we have a consensual contract. That, however, is a liberal
conceit that denies the conditions of embodiment itself. Vulnerability is
not a simply subjective state or disposition, but is always related to an
object, a prospect, an impinging world (and for that, “intentional” in the
phenomenological sense). Vulnerability might take the form of excitability,
susceptibility, longing, delight, fear, anxiety, or dread, but whatever form it
takes, it is already and from the start a relational predicament. This body is
already dependent on a body prior to any sense of its choice, and both are
192 JUDITH BUTLER

dependent on an infrastructure of sustenance; if one fails to be sustained,

the other can fail as well, which means that our “equality” is bound up with
our interdependency on each other as well as a sustaining organization of
the world.
Individualism fails to capture the condition of vulnerability, exposure,
even dependency, that is presupposed by any claim to an individual “right”
to life, and which corresponds, I would suggest, to a body whose boundaries
are themselves fraught and excitable social relations. It is our social life that
is indicated by our embodied existence outside of political and economic
organizations of life. Whether a body that falters and falls is caught by
networks of support or whether a moving body has its way paved without
obstruction depends on whether a world has been built for both its gravity
and mobility – and whether that world can stay built. The skin is from the
start a way of being exposed to the elements, but what is done about that
exposure is already a social and political relation: a relation to shelter, to
adequate clothing, to health services. So if we seek to find what is most
essential about the body by reducing it to its bare elements, we find that
right there at the level of its most basic requirements, the social world is
structuring the scene, impinging on psychic life at the level of fear and
desire. Thus, the basic questions of mobility, expression, warmth, and health
implicate that body in a social world where pathways are differentially
paved, open or closed, modes of clothing and types of shelter that are more
or less available, affordable, or provisional. It is from this uncertainty, this
encroachment of death that the question emerges, am I a life? Does the loss
of this life matter? Whose bodies matter, and why?

Works Cited

Foucault, Michel. 2003. Society Must Be Defended. Lectures at the Collège de France,
1975-76. Translated by David Macey, edited by Mauro Bertani and Alessandro
Fontana. London and New York: Picador. First published 1976.
Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. 2007. Golden Gulag. Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition
in Globalizing California. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Mbembe, Achille. 2003. “Necropolitics.” Translated by Libby Meintjes. Public Culture
15, no. 1: 11-40.
Mitscherlich, Alexander and Margarete. 1975. The Inability to Mourn. Principles of
Collective Behaviour. New York: Grove Press. First published 1967.
Monárrez Fragoso, Julia Estela. 2002. “Feminicidio Sexual Serial en Ciudad Juárez:
1993-2001.” Debate Feminista 25: 279-308.
BODIES THAT STILL MAT TER 193

Sagot, Montserrat. 2007. Femicidio ( feminicidio). Diccionario de estudios de género

e feminismos. Edited by Susana B. Gamba, Dora Barrancos, Eva Gilberti and
Diana Mafía. Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos.
—. 2017. “Un Mundo Sin Femicidios? Las Propuestas del Feminismo Para Erradicar
la Violencia Contra las Mujeres.” In Feminismos, Pensamiento Crítico y Propuestas
Alternativas en América Latina, edited by Montserrat Sagot Rodríguez, 61-78.
Buenos Aires: CLACSO.

About the Author

Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative

Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California,
Berkeley. She is the author of numerous books, such as Gender Trouble:
Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Bodies That Matter: On
the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of
Subjection (1997), Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning (2004);
Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009). Her most recent books include:
Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2012), Notes Toward a
Performative Theory of Assembly (2015), and The Force of Nonviolence (2020).
She is active in gender and sexual politics and human rights, anti-war politics.
She received the Adorno Prize from the City of Frankfurt (2012) in honor
of her contributions to feminist and moral philosophy, the Brudner Prize
from Yale University for lifetime achievement in gay and lesbian studies, and
was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and The British
Academy, as corresponding Fellow. She has received honorary degrees from
11 universities and her works are translated into 27 languages.
 About the Contributors

Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Compara-

tive Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of
California, Berkeley. She is the author of numerous books, such as Gender
Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Bodies That Matter:
On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories
of Subjection (1997), Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning
(2004); Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009). Her most recent
books include: Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2012),
Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015), and The Force of
Nonviolence (2020). She is active in gender and sexual politics and human
rights, anti-war politics. She received the Adorno Prize from the City
of Frankfurt (2012) in honor of her contributions to feminist and moral
philosophy, the Brudner Prize from Yale University for lifetime achievement
in gay and lesbian studies, and was elected to the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences and The British Academy, as corresponding Fellow.
She has received honorary degrees from 11 universities and her works are
translated into 27 languages.

Adriana Cavarero is honorary professor at the University of Verona, Italy,

and held numerous visiting appointments, including at New York University
and Berkeley. She is widely recognized for her writings on feminist theory,
ancient philosophy, Hannah Arendt, theories of narration and vocality, and
on a wide range of issues in political philosophy and literature. Among her
books, in English translation, are: In Spite of Plato (1995); Relating Narratives:
Storytelling and Selfhood (2000); Stately Bodies: Literature, Philosophy and the
Question of Gender (2002); For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of
Vocal Expression (2005); Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence (2008);
Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude (2016); Surging Democracy. Notes on
Hannah Arendt’s Political Thought (2021).

Eyo Ewara is assistant professor in the department of Philosophy at

Loyola University Chicago. His research explores the intersections be-
tween twentieth-century continental philosophy, critical philosophies
of race, and LGBTQ thought and queer theory. His work has appeared in
Critical Philosophy of Race, philoSOPHIA, and Black Women’s Liberatory
Pedagogies.