"The reason that someone will not be grieved for, or have already been established as one who is not to be grieved for, is that there is no present structure of support that will sustain that life, which implies that it is devalued, not worth supporting and protecting as a life by dominant schemes of value. The very future of my life depends upon that condition of support, so if I am not supported, then my life is established as tenuous, precarious, and in that sense not worthy to be protected from injury or loss, and so not grievable. If only a grievable life can be valued, and valued through time, then only a grievable life will be eligible for social and economic support, housing, health care, employment, rights of political expression, forms of social recognition, and the conditions for political agency (Handlungsfähigkeit). One must, as it were, be grievable before one is lost, before any question of being neglected or abandoned, and one must be able to live a life knowing that the loss of this life that I am would be mourned and so every measure will be taken to forestall this loss.

From within a felt sense that one’s life is ungrievable or dispensable, how does the moral question get formulated, and how does the demand for public grieving take place? In other words, how do I endeavour to lead a good life if I do not have a life to speak of, or when the life that I seek to lead is considered dispensable, or is in fact already abandoned? When the life that I lead is unliveable, a rather searing paradox follows, for the question, how do I lead a good life?, presumes that there are lives to be led; that is, that there are lives recognized as living and that mine is among them. Indeed, the question presumes as well that there is an I who has the power to pose the question reflexively, and that I also appear to myself, which means that I can appear within the field of appearance that is available to me. For the question to be viable, the one who asks it must be able to pursue whatever answer emerges. For the question to clear a path that I can follow, the world must be structured in such a way that my reflection and action prove not only possible but efficacious. If I am to deliberate on how best to live, then I have to presume that the life I seek to pursue can be affirmed as a life, that I can affirm it, even if it is not affirmed more generally, or even under those conditions when it is not always easy to discern whether there is a social and economic affirmation of my life. After all, this life that is mine is reflected back to me from a world that is disposed to allocate the value of life differentially, a world in which my own life is valued more or less than others. In other words, this life that is mine reflects back to me a problem of equality and power and, more broadly, the justice or injustice of the allocation of value.

So if this sort of world – what we might be compelled to call ‘the bad life’ – fails to reflect back my value as a living being, then I must become critical of those categories and structures that produce that form of effacement and inequality. In other words, I cannot affirm my own life without critically evaluating those structures that differentially value life itself. This practice of critique is one in which my own life is bound up with the objects that I think about. My life is this life, lived here, in the spatio-temporal horizon established by my body, but it is also out there, implicated in other living processes of which I am but one. Further, it is implicated in the power differentials that decide whose life matters more, and whose life matters less, whose life becomes a paradigm for all living things, and whose life is a non-life within the contemporary terms that govern the value of living beings. Adorno remarks that

we need to hold fast to moral norms, to self-criticism, to the question of right and wrong, and at the same time to a sense of the fallibility of the authority that has the confidence to undertake such self-criticism.4

This ‘I’ may not be as knowing about itself as it claims, and it may well be true that the only terms by which this ‘I’ grasps itself are those that belong to a discourse that precedes and informs thought without any of us being able fully to grasp its working and its effect. And since values are defined and distributed through modes of power whose authority must be questioned, I am in a certain bind. Do I establish myself in the terms that would make my life valuable, or do I offer a critique of the reigning order of values?"

Butler