Ethics of interdependence is depoliticizing—it re-individualizes the self and reinforces Eurocentric paternalism. Individuation isn’t inherently violent.

Basing an ethics on our capacity to identify with the suffering of others rather than, say, on a priori principles of human rights, carries some risks, the first of which is that the failings of identification are so endemic that such an ethics might end up being unacceptably erratic. Though I wholeheartedly agree with Butler’s contention that global power imbalances make it hard for Westerners to acknowledge the equal humanity of non-Westerners, I do not think that the matter is quite this simple, for if Americans have a hard time mourning the Iraqis and Afghans killed by the United States military, Iraqis and Afghans might also have a hard time mourning those who are far away from them, including each other. Butler suggests that we identify with the suffering of some people more than others because their names and faces are familiar to us in the sense of being culturally and ethnically similar to us, and undoubtedly this is true. But there are other ways that alliances based on familiarity are forged, ways that cut across cultural and ethnic differences. For instance, that my friend is black, my colleague is Chinese and my downstairs neighbour is Muslim does not change the fact that if this friend, colleague or neighbour is harmed or killed, I – a white atheist woman – will mourn more intensely than I would mourn another white atheist woman harmed or killed somewhere in Sweden. In other words, there seems to be an important link between familiarity (and thus our ability to mourn), on the one hand, and intimacy, proximity and shared history, on the other, that is not necessarily in any way based on similarity of culture or ethnicity. From this perspective, the ability to mourn the other may be too haphazard, too random a basis for ethics.

The second risk that accompanies an ethics based on our ability to identify with the suffering of others is that it can replace political action with paralysing grief. Grief can be privatising, and thus potentially depoliticising, because it tends to result in a retreat from the social world. This retreat may, in part at least, be a defence against our own vulnerability, for grief reminds us of the immensity of our dependence on others: the fact that we can be undone by the loss of others highlights the flimsiness of our fantasies of sovereignty. Indeed, besides acute bodily suffering, there are few things in life that ‘interrupt’ the coherence of our being more than the anguish we feel when we have lost someone who feels irreplaceable to us. If desire, intimacy and sexuality already challenge our aspirations of autonomy, grief often results – at least momentarily – in the utter dissolution of the self. As Butler correctly remarks, we ‘cannot invoke the Protestant ethic when it comes to loss’ (Precarious Life 21); we cannot decide how the task of grieving is to be performed or when it is going to come to an end. Rather, we are forced to ride waves of sadness that mock our attempts at self-mastery, that call us back to prior experiences of dispossession. Some of these experiences relate to losses we can name, but, ultimately, what grief touches is the unnameable core of melancholia that connects us to our constitutive inability to attain closure (to disavow our dependence on others). Butler describes such melancholia as a kind of timeless enigma that ‘hides’ in each loss we mourn, as an indelible trace of a primary vulnerability that we can no longer access directly but that our losses touch indirectly. In a more Lacanian vein, one could say that every loss reanimates the primary loss – the loss of das Ding (the primordial non-object of desire) – that constitutes the melancholy core of our being. That is, when we lose another person, we not only mourn that loss but we also mourn, with renewed energy, our own incompleteness, our own helplessness, even if we are not aware that this is what we are doing.

Butler asserts: ‘On one level, I think I have lost “you” only to discover that “I” have gone missing as well’ (22). This can be understood to mean that when I lose you, I no longer know who I am because who I am is so intimately tied to you that losing you makes me unintelligible to myself. But it can also be understood to mean that in losing you I have come up against melancholy realms of my being that I usually keep at bay through my efforts to lead a self-sufficient and reasonably organised existence. Butler implies that there are ethical lessons to be learned from such an encounter with the melancholy foundations of my being in the sense that my heightened sensitivity to my own precariousness leads (or should lead) to my heightened sensitivity to the precariousness of others. As she posits: ‘Despite our differences in location and history, my guess is that it is possible to appeal to a “we,” for all of us have some notion of what it is to have lost somebody. Loss has made a tenuous “we” of us all’ (20).

Unquestionably, this is a poignant way to characterise the solidarity of suffering. But would it not be equally possible to argue that melancholia might lead to the kind of preoccupation with the self – the kind of solipsistic turning inwards that excludes all others from the self ’s sacred crypt of sadness – that represents the very antithesis of ethical accountability? Melancholia, even more than mourning, fends off others; it sacrifices present and future objects for the sake of the one that has been lost. As Sigmund Freud already argued, the melancholic copes with his or her loss by incorporating the lost object into his or her psyche, thereby translating a loss in the external world into an internal possession, with the result that this psyche, for the time being, becomes closed to other objects. The memory of the lost object, as it were, crowds out the possibility of new affective ties, which is why, for instance, we find it hard to cathect to a new love object when we are still mourning a lost one. In this sense, while grief may well function as an ethical resource in the way that Butler suggests, the melancholia that grief awakens may pull us in the opposite direction, away from others, from alterity, from the stimulation of new bonds. In addition, melancholia is difficult to translate into the vocabulary of ethical intervention because it arrests action; it is hard to get a depressed person out of bed, let alone into a political rally.

IV Though grief may be a potent source of indignation, as an ethical resource it may also be somewhat unreliable precisely in so far as it conjures up the melancholy ghosts of our constitutive despair. Moreover, it would be relatively easy to stage a critique of Butler’s ethics of mourning akin to the one that Wendy Brown stages in relation to Western notions of tolerance, namely that mourning – like tolerance – can function as a distraction from political and economic solutions to global problems. In the same way that discourses of tolerance make us feel that we are accomplishing something when in fact nothing has changed in concrete terms, the ethics of mourning can obscure the fact that mourning by itself does not transform things. If anything, as long as we get to focus on our grief, we do not actually need to do anything; we can feel good about ourselves because we experience ourselves as benevolent Western subjects who feel the appropriate remorse about the suffering and death of those far away from us. One could even propose that Brown’s argument about tolerance being what the powerful extend to the disempowered – about how tolerance merely debases the tolerated even further – applies to grief as well in the sense that the objects of our grief may become all the more disempowered (pitiable, pathetic) by that grief.

Along similar lines, there might be an argument to be made about the potentially patronising implications of Butler’s insistence that Western subjects are somehow uniquely responsible for grieving those who are less fortunate. Though she does not state the matter in these terms exactly, the implication of much of her discussion of shared precarity is that it is the Western subject in particular who must develop the capacity to mourn the violated other. The non-Western subject is, in this model, invariably the one who is the more violated, the more victimised and therefore in need of ‘our’ grief, while we, the Westerners, do not deserve the grief of non-Westerners but should, first and foremost, feel our guilt. There are of course excellent historical reasons for this line of reasoning. Obviously, the West should feel guilty about the colonial past and about the ways in which its ongoing aspirations of empire-building contribute directly to the suffering of non-Westerners. Yet there is also something questionable about the branding of the Western subject as one who is supposed to be racked by grief while it is the lot of the non-Westerner to be the suffering object of this grief. One could even say that, within this model, grief becomes the way in which Western subjects suffer. Does that mean that other forms of suffering have, once again, been relegated to the rest of the world (so that, say, they have their poverty while we have our grief)?

Yet Butler is also right in insisting that, under certain circumstances, grief can furnish a sense of political community, and that it can furthermore do so on a basis that is both more fundamental and more complex than mere identitarian identifications. If our goal is to transcend identity politics without thereby discarding our understanding of the reasons why various individuals and populations have sought shelter under identitarian labels (black, Muslim, queer and so on), then shared grief is a potentially powerful place to start. If I can get to the point where the other’s grief becomes my grief, then the other’s outrage about her oppression also becomes my outrage, with the consequence that I may be willing to overlook the differences between self and other to act on behalf of this other. There are alternative ways to arrive at the same place, and these include my rational assessment that the other has been unjustly treated, but Butler is correct in suggesting that there is something viscerally powerful about the grief we feel when the other’s vulnerability, particularly the other’s bodily vulnerability, has been exploited. Accounts of genocide, torture and rape, for instance, tend to move us even when we have no personal connection to the victims, which is precisely why Butler’s call for a rethinking of grievability as a foundation for alleviating the power imbalances of the global order strikes a chord, why her ethics of precarity makes such intuitive sense, why it is hard to deny her basic insight that ‘there can be no equal treatment without a prior understanding that all lives have an equal right to be protected from violence and destruction’ (Parting Ways 21).

This is precisely why public acts of grieving are so important, why it is essential to see the pictures, to apprehend the names and faces of those who have been wounded even when these names and faces are not immediately familiar to us. Butler is right that the prohibition against mourning is the flipside of the derealisation of loss, of the indifference we are asked to display with respect to the other’s suffering or even death. Furthermore, even when it comes to losses that are avowed, that ‘count’, we are encouraged to mourn as expediently as we can, so as to leave no debilitating residue of sadness that might impede the nation’s general robustness, let alone interfere with capitalism’s demand for efficiency; we are urged to grieve quickly, to get back on our feet, to brush ourselves off, to get back on track, to get ‘back to business’. After a catastrophe, such as 9/11, there is a haste to return the world to its previous order, whether by sending people back to work, by resorting to nationalist slogans of renewed prowess, or by staging flamboyant architectural competitions to prove technological (and, by implication, military) invincibility. In the Western world, money, the Protestant work ethic and extravagant displays of power are used to bandage the wounds of violence, to reestablish the fantasy of being inviolable, beyond the reach of dangerous, ‘irrational’ others. This is one reason Butler maintains that there might be ‘something to be gained from grieving, from tarrying with grief, from remaining exposed to its unbearability and not endeavoring to seek a resolution for grief through violence’ (Precarious Life 30).

V I appreciate Butler’s claim that overcoming grief too quickly might eradicate one of our most important ethical resources. But I also want to note the masochistic tendencies of her ethics of precarity because these, in my view, complicate the task of theorising (not to mention attaining) social justice. Butler has always been quick to equate subjectivity with subjection (disempowerment), but the masochistic strain of her outlook has become acutely pronounced with her turn to Levinas, who famously quotes Fyodor Dostoyevsky: ‘We are all guilty for everything and everyone, and I more than all the others’ (105). The obvious problem with this formulation is that it implies that I am responsible for the other regardless of what the other has done – that is, regardless of any normative considerations. This, indeed, is the crux of the Levinasian ethical attitude. However, Levinas does not stop here. He draws a clear distinction between ethics (where normative considerations have no place) and justice (which arbitrates between different ‘faces’ on the basis of a priori norms of right and wrong). Levinas, in short, recognises that justice places limits on our ethical accountability. Butler, in contrast, ignores for the most part the distinction between ethics and justice, attempting, as it were, to apply Levinasian ethics to questions of global justice. Moreover, undoubtedly in part because of her anti-Enlightenment poststructuralist predilections, she resists the ideal of a priori principles of justice, with the result that she sometimes speaks as if normative judgements had no place in her theory.

Levinas argues that our ethical responsibility for the other is unconditional and inescapable, that the other is inviolable and that, unfortunately for us, even the executioner, even the Nazi guard, has a face. We may feel tempted to attack such a face, but ethics demands that we resist this temptation. This seems reasonable: I do not take issue with the idea that I should not counter murder with murder, particularly given that, as I just stressed, Levinas maintains that it is the task of justice – as opposed to ethics – to mediate between different faces. The trouble begins when Butler translates this Levinasian (ethical) injunction into a general theoretical stance, which means that assigning responsibility – in the sense that normative justice strives to do – becomes virtually impossible. In this manner, Butler arguably – though no doubt unintentionally – shifts the burden of responsibility from the victimiser to the victim; after all, in the absence of normative judgements regarding the behaviour of the victimiser, what matters is not the content of this behaviour but rather the response (and responsibility) of the victim. As Butler, chillingly enough, writes in Precarious Life, ‘our responsibility is heightened once we have been subjected to the violence of others’ (16).

Consider also the following statement from Parting Ways: ‘The responsibility that I must take for the Other proceeds directly from being persecuted and outraged by that Other. Thus there is violence in the relation from the start: I am claimed by the other against my will, and my responsibility for the Other emerges from this subjection’ (59, emphasis added). The basic idea here is that because the other ‘interrupts’ the coherence of my being, impeding my self-closure, I am, in a sense, always ‘persecuted’ and ‘outraged’ by the other; yet because the other is always already an ingredient of my self, I cannot denounce my responsibility for this other. In this model, responsibility is the flipside of being impinged upon by the other in ways that sometimes feel persecuting and outrageous. As Butler reminds us, according to Levinas ‘precisely the Other who persecutes me has a face’ (Giving an Account 90). Consequently, ‘I cannot disavow my relation to the Other, regardless of what the Other does, regardless of what I might will’. Responsibility, in this sense, is ‘not a matter of cultivating a will, but of making use of an unwilled susceptibility as a resource for becoming responsive to the Other’: ‘Whatever the Other has done, the Other still makes an ethical demand upon me, has a “face” to which I am obliged to respond’ (91).

I understand why Butler’s appropriation of Levinasian ethics represents an effective critique of Enlightenment rationality, particularly of the individualistic pretensions of the autonomous subject, who – to borrow from Adriana Cavarero – is ‘too preoccupied with praising the rights of the I ’ (in Giving an Account 32). This critique, for good reasons, is longstanding in posthumanist theory. But does Butler’s version of it not swing too far to the other extreme, making a virtue out of masochism? Is there not, say, from a feminist perspective, something quite uncomfortable about the idea that I am responsible for others who violate me ‘against my will’? Along related lines, Butler’s critique of ‘the rights of the I’ tends to backfire whenever it comes up against accounts of extreme oppression, such as Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, which voice the need of a traumatised collectivity to re-establish its autonomy and self-determination in the face of subordination. Likewise, individual trauma narratives – such as Holocaust memoirs or chronicles of rape – often emphasise that being able to recover a degree of agency is an essential part of surviving trauma. In other words, they reveal that the quest for sovereignty is not invariably a synonym for arrogant individualism. And they also illustrate the problematic nature of an ethics that operates wholly without norms, that asks us to sustain others indiscriminately, irrespective of how appallingly they might behave.

VI More generally speaking, the problem with Butlerian theory is that it consistently sets up a rigid dichotomy between bad autonomy and good relationality. Indeed, one could say that this is an instance where a vehemently anti-essentialist thinker falls into the kind of poststructuralist essentialism where some possibilities – such as the idea that autonomy might sometimes be an important component of human life – become unthinkable. Butler often talks as if the fact that we are not fully autonomous creatures means that we have no capacity for autonomy whatsoever. Yet in the same way that having an unconscious does not erase the conscious mind but merely complicates its functioning, our lack of seamless autonomy does not render us completely devoid of it. Moreover, as Jessica Benjamin, among others, has illustrated, autonomy is not necessarily always the repugnant antithesis of relationality, so that Butler’s depiction of autonomy as intrinsically violent comes off as overly simplistic. Butler asserts that there is ‘no recentering of the subject without unleashing unacceptable sadism and cruelty’: ‘To remain decentered, interestingly, means to remain implicated in the death of the other and so at a distance from the unbridled cruelty … in which the self seeks to separate from its constitutive sociality and annihilate the other’ (Giving an Account 77).