Butler (excerpt)

So if the question, ‘How am I to lead a good life?’, is one of the elementary questions of morality, indeed perhaps its defining question, then it would seem that morality from its inception is bound up with biopolitics. By biopolitics, I mean those powers that organize life, even the powers that differentially dispose lives to precarity as part of a broader management of populations through governmental and non-governmental means, and that establish a set of measures for the differential valuation of life itself. 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 differential 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?

Of course, this question becomes most acute for someone, anyone, who already understands him or herself to be a dispensable sort of being, one who registers at an affective and corporeal level that his or her life is not worth safeguarding, protecting and valuing. This is someone who understands that she or he will not be grieved for if his or her life were lost, and so one for whom the conditional claim ‘I would not be grieved for’ is actively lived in the present moment. If it turns out that I have no certainty that I will have food or shelter, or that no social network or institution would catch me if I fall, then I come to belong to the ungrievable. 

Judith Butler