IAPL 2003 KEYNOTE SPEAKER

JUDITH BUTLER

Precarious Life

Emanuel Levinas writes that the face is that which one cannot kill. The face carries or communicates the prohibition against murder, but also that the face, according to Levinas, is not a human face. Indeed, the face is not a human face (it can be communicated through many other means), but it nevertheless serves as the condition of humanization itself. What the face communicates, which is different from what any face may speak, is the precariousness of life. In some of what he writes, the face is said to communicate the sound of agony, and though the face is a visual phenomenon, it works primarily through displacement, gaining its effectivity through the sound it conveys or through the sense of human frailty it bears. It follows, then, that not every face is a face, and many things that are not faces nevertheless serve as the face.

If we consider the use of the face within the media in the last year and a half, we see that the face of the enemy is produced time and again as one forecloses the apprehension of the precariousness of life. The figures that come to represent either the spoils of war or the targets of war are not quite human faces, but neither do they serve as the condition for humanization. They do not constitute a norm for human-ness, but they nevertheless produce a frame within which the human is negotiated. If the lives represented by the face of the enemy are not precarious lives, then they are not lives, and their deaths do not count as deaths. As a result, the differential by which the human and the inhuman are reproduced within the popular media becomes the means by which human lives are understood as more and less grievable. Indeed, the lives obliterated by the recent wars against Afghanistan and Iraq are not publically grievable lives within the dominant media at this time, and we can ask, in these circumstances, how it is that the face has come to erase the face in the Levinasian sense. The frame by which the human comes into forms of visual recognizability as human also works to dehumanize and render ungrievable certain kinds of lives. The critical question thus emerges: how does one tell the story of such lives to mark their grievability and, indeed, to grieve them. How does one produce an image, within available modes of representation, that convey what cannot, strictly speaking, be captured by any given image - the precariousness of life itself.