The cartoon complicates the je suis Charlie & free speech conversation with the question: Whose lives are grievable? or whose lives are already considered not lives, or only partially living, or already dead and gone, prior to any explicit destruction or abandonment? Im quoting Judith Butler whose earlier writings come to life in this 2012 speech that you can access at the link below: egs.edu/faculty/judith-butler/articles/can-one-lead-a-good-life-in-a-bad-life/ JB: ...In asking how to lead my life, I am already negotiating such forms of power. The most individual question of morality – how do I live this life that is mine? – is bound up with biopolitical questions distilled in forms such these: Whose lives matter? Whose lives do not matter as lives, are not recognizable as living, or count only ambiguously as alive? Such questions presume that that we cannot take for granted that all living humans bear the status of a subject who is worthy of rights and protections, with freedom and a sense of political belonging; on the contrary, such a status must be secured through political means, and where it is denied that deprivation must be made manifest. It has been my suggestion that to understand the dif- ferential way that such a status is allocated, we must ask: whose lives are grievable, and whose are not? The biopolitical management of the ungrievable proves crucial to approaching the question, how do I lead this life? And how do I live this life within the life, the conditions of living, that structure us now? At stake is the following sort of inquiry: whose lives are already considered not lives, or only partially living, or already dead and gone, prior to any explicit destruction or abandonment?...
Posted on: Sun, 18 Jan 2015 21:54:36 +0000
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