“Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Justice” by Judith Butler

It may surprise you, but I haven’t read much of Judith Butler’s work. And I wanted to change that, so I picked up this book. It’s from the early 2000s and mostly is in reaction to 9/11 and the Iraq War, but it is so stunningly prescient today. The work consists of a few essays by Butler. The first essay talks about how stories shape our politics and who is allowed to have a voice in those stories. The second starts off about mourning and from there discusses how mourning can impact politics and community. The third is a scathing indictment of Guantanamo Bay. The fourth talks about the charge of anti-Semitism when criticizing Israel, and the final essay is the most traditionally philosophical as it discusses Levinas and how that impacts personhood.

Now a lot of these are heavily based in a certain time for sure, but a few really moved me. The essay on mourning I thought was really beautifully written, in that it captured a lot of what I feel I went through with regards to grief and pain. And even the first one I think captured something essential about politics and how people think about global events. But I really wanted to focus on the anti-Semitism essay since that resonates so strongly with the current climate. Butler talks about how people are charged with “essentially” being anti-Semetic, meaning that they don’t intend to be anti-Semetic but the listener charges them with it anyways. And this is a dangerous thing to do as that means that there is no way to prevent the charge and therefore you can say that literally anything is anti-Semetic. And the result is that people are discouraged from criticizing Israel for starters, but also that it detracts from very real and very dangerous actual anti-Semitism going on. Through this, she calls for respect and self-determination for Palestinian people, and for free and open discussion around this topic so that people can contribute without the threat of being called anti-Semetic.

Now this is so important in this day and age as literally nothing has changed! Everything against Israel’s genocide of Palestinians gets labeled anti-Semetic or Hamas or whatever, and people are still terrified of taking a stand because they don’t want to offend Jewish people. Which is so frustrating and ridiculous as people are being bombed and killed. Going through this, it feels as though Butler is talking about 2023 and not 2003. And that is so so sad that nothing has changed in that amount of time.

I also didn’t love all of them, the essay on Guantanamo is good but it’s overly specific to that situation for me to talk about it now. And the final essay has a few too many ideas in it to make sense. But it is simply amazing how much of this was directly applicable to things we are still discussing and thinking about today. I picked this book at random, I didn’t research it or anything, but getting this one glimpse of Butler’s work really makes me want to read the rest of it. I bet they are just as insightful on any number of other topics.

This Is Beautiful: Solidarity

 Well not to dox myself, but the university I attend as a graduate student just ended all DEI programs before anyone asked them to. This is definitely an attempt to spin it as something the current administration is pressuring them into, but there's been talks about this since the fall and it's not fooling me. The administration just wants to consolidate more power in their end and do what they wanted to do all along.

In response, there's been a lot of heartening things taking place. More faculty are trying to learn from the graduate students who have been organizing for ages. And when faculty get fired up, that's when you know it's bad. So the solidarity and determination from everyone has been really encouraging and hopeful. I think this next year(s) is going to be rough, but we will have each others backs throughout it!