In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in Paris on 13/11, mounting criticism can be seen with regard to the outpouring of solidarity for Parisians and, at the same time, scarce expressions of empathy towards victims of other nations that have experienced similar events of terrorism.
By Carolina Yoko Furusho
In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in Paris on 13/11, mounting criticism can be seen with regard to the outpouring of solidarity for Parisians and, at the same time, scarce expressions of empathy towards victims of other nations that have experienced similar events of terrorism. In the Australian independent media outlet “New Matilda”, Chris Graham suggests that the outburst of indignation in response to the Paris attacks are indicative of a hypocritical international community which selectively mourns the assassination of French citizens whilst blatantly ignoring equally horrendous killings in other parts of the world.1 Graham illustrates the lack of outrage and scarce media coverage with respect to terrorist attacks by ISIS in Lebanon that took place just days prior to those perpetrated against France, leaving a death toll of 43 and approximately 200 people injured in Beirut. He continues on to give an even more striking example of what he denotes as “selective grief” when he compares the massacre of over 2,000 individuals by Boko Haram in Nigeria at the beginning of the year, which did not provoke any significant reactions in the international arena, and the massive political and social mobilization that occurred, just a few days later, in response to the Charlie Hebdo killings.
Currently living an hour away by train from
Paris and having family members who live there, I embarrassedly admit harboring
genuine feelings of solidarity and empathy for the mourning of Parisians which
are significantly more intense than my grief for other human tragedies around
the world. Perhaps geographical and cultural proximity combined with emotional
family ties are what makes my feelings and viewpoints biased and relatively
insensitive to human suffering elsewhere. However, the consistent imbalance of
media coverage and expressions of shock found in international news outlets,
statements by world leaders and social media by and large seem to point to a
more problematic issue than any narrative which focuses solely on personal
experience and individual bias could purport to explain. This scenario of
rising empathy and care for the vulnerability of Western French lives and the
concomitant neglect for equally vulnerable non-Western lives, whose deaths are
not equally regarded as worthy of mourning and grief, can be analyzed from what
Judith Butler identified as “precarity” (Butler 2010).2 Drawing on Butler’s
lessons on vulnerability, precariousness and precarity, I seek to ignite a
theoretically-informed debate aimed at a deeper understanding of our inability
to recognize all lives as equally vulnerable and our ensuing incapacity to care
and mourn equally for all violent killings arising from terrorist actions
across the globe. The overarching goal of this provocation is to start a
conversation about the extent to which our moral reasoning and emotional
development as a society allow us to coherently pursue our struggle for
upholding universal human rights and human dignity in the form of equal respect
and concern for each and every human being at a global level.
According to Butler (2010), vulnerable
subjects ought to be regarded as precarious lives insofar as life is imbued
with fragility and destined to ultimately face death, either due to willful
action, as instantiated by terrorist attacks, or fortuitous cause (Gilson
2014). In this vein, Butler’s notion of “precariousness” refers to the specific
human vulnerability relating to the frailty of life in light of its inescapable
ultimate destruction (Butler 2010: 13). She posits that precariousness may be
minimized or maximized according to normative and institutional settings in
which embodied existence unravels, in that social and political forces create
normative constructions of the subject which entail different degrees of
recognition as precarious lives (ibid: 23). In this sense, Butler’s point is
that individuals experience different degrees of precariousness by virtue of
discrepant levels of societal recognition, constituting what she coins as
“precarity”, that is, the politically-induced differential allocation of
precariousness.
Thus, in consonance with Butler’s theory,
recognizing vulnerable lives as precarious implies acknowledging their loss as
equally grievable and their sustaining as equally worthwhile. To clarify the
process through which some lives may be perceived as precarious and other not,
Butler sets forth the idea of “frame of recognition” as resonating with the
Foucauldian notion of “grid of intelligibility” (ibid: 25). Indeed, she posits
that frames of recognition depend upon apprehension and intelligibility
schemes, in that apprehension consists in the rustic mode of knowing that
precedes recognition, whereas intelligibility constitutes the historical scheme
that defines “domains of knowable”, that is, the boundaries that circumscribe
what may be captured by our cognition and transformed into knowledge.
Apprehension and intelligibility, as Butler elaborates, are conditions for
recognition, which ends up being the result of a Hegelian dialectical and
reciprocal interaction between these two conditions. Butler asserts that a life
has to be apprehended as intelligible, i.e., it must fit the pre-existing
conception of what constitutes a life, in order to be recognized. In this
sense, she argues that although schemes of intelligibility are ever-shifting,
the production of life at a moment in time is partial or incomplete, for there
are lives that are not produced according to the normative frame by which life
is recognizable; nevertheless, one can still apprehend the living status of
“being” outside the boundaries of the frame deriving from the norm. In the
particular case under analysis, the concomitant acknowledgment of the loss of
French lives as a reason for worldwide grief and the little concern or shock
demonstrated in light of the loss of Lebanese or Nigerian lives in similar
contexts of terrorist violence and brutality seem to instantiate how Western
lives might be more recognizable under extant frames of recognition as
precarious lives than non-Western ones, demonstrating the pernicious effects of
precarity.
But how do we begin to tackle precarity and
pave the way for recognizing all lives as precarious? Not only do frames of
recognition contain, circumscribe and define what we are able to see and regard
as precarious lives, but they also impose a condition of “reproducibility”, a
pre-requisite that allows for the perpetuation of such frames and therefore
entails a sense of continuity (ibid: 8). Yet, in light of changing contexts,
reproducibility also entails continually breaking out of previous contexts to
endow contents with definitive organization. Butler then suggests that when
those frames fall apart, apprehension of who is living but does not have his or
her life recognized as a life is made possible. She ascribes the characteristic
of collapsibility to the norms underlying frames, which therefore enables them
to break in order to install themselves, making the emergence of different
patterns and ways of apprehension possible.
On this note, there seems to exist hope for
an enlargement of frames of recognition towards a more inclusive and perhaps
all-encompassing gaze which transcends the narrow and thus exclusionary logic
to which our societies abide. Notwithstanding, it is vital to note the
hardships presented by this endeavor, since this exclusionary logic alarmingly
embeds even the processes through which we produce feelings and how we regulate
our emotional openness, thereby interfering with our core ability to feel
empathy for human suffering in distinct contexts. This is illustrated by the
expressions of outrage against the Paris attacks that outpoured in social media
which show, on the one hand, a selective (albeit unwittingly) perception of
Western French lives as precarious lives and on the other hand, a failure to
apprehend other lives who suffered similarly dire predicaments as intelligibly
precarious. In response to the statement made by President Obama in which he
categorized the 13/11 killings in Paris as “(…) an attack on all of humanity
and the universal values that we share”,3Professor Hamid Dabashi, in an article
for Al Jazeera, posed the following question:
Of course, the attack on the French is an
attack on humanity, but is an attack on a Lebanese, an Afghan, a Yazidi, a
Kurd, and Iraqi, a Somali, or a Palestinian any less an attack “on all of
humanity and the universal values that we share”? What is it exactly that a
North American and a French share that the rest of humanity are denied
sharing?4
These questions underscore the inadequacy of
extant frames of recognition and merit deeper reflection, calling for
transformative efforts towards an international scenario in which norms may
collapse and new frames can be drafted in consonance with universal notions of
shared vulnerability, precariousness and humanity. Notwithstanding, it is vital
to acknowledge that this equality-seeking undertaking is far from being a
straightforward task. Some of the problems that we may encounter in attempting
to mitigate precarity involve insidious, cross-cutting and deeply entrenched
forms of discrimination against which critical race and postcolonial theorists
struggle against. However, this does not mean that we should shy away from the
challenge. I will conclude by leaving a provocative quote by Butler, who
portrays the complex and multifaceted dimensions of challenging frames of
recognition in the particular context of human shielding, which may be
nonetheless applied to the issue of responses to terrorist attacks addressed
herein:
But as we can see, the instrumental value of
a life in human shielding (and here I would say in both its voluntary and
involuntary forms) depends on a prior differentiation among lives, those who
are more or less grievable and valuable, those who are more or less living,
those who exemplify the form of human life worth saving and those who in their
person and their cultural or racial status come to represent a living threat to
a form of human life worth saving. This last form of differentiation operates
in racism and in forms of colonial rule that depend upon, and reproduce,
differential value among living creatures of the human kind. Even that
definition seems to stumble on itself, since the definition and form of the
human are always at stake in a racist discourse: who is human, where does the
human and the inhuman come together or diverge, who decides these matters of
typology, and how does violence reside in every stipulation of this kind?
About The Author:
About The Author:
Carolina Yoko Furusho holds a Master of Laws Degree with Distinction from UCL, University of London. She is currently an Erasmus Mundus Fellow and a Joint Ph.D. Candidate at University of Kent and University of Hamburg.
This article was originally published at Critical Thinking under Creative Commons License.
References:
Butler, J., 1956– 2010, Frames of war : when
is life grievable? /Judith Butler, Paperback. ed. edn, London : Verso, London.
Butler, J., “Human Shields”, London Review of
International Law, Volume 0, Issue 0, 2015, 1 of 21, Oxford University Press,
, published 17 August 2015.
Gilson, E. 2014, The Ethics of Vulnerability:
A Feminist Analysis of Social Life and Practice, 1st edn, Routledge, New York.
Foot Notes:
- https://newmatilda.com/2015/11/14/paris-attacks-highlight-western-vulnerability-and-our-selective-grief-and-outrage/
- Butler, Judith (2010). Frames of War: when is life grievable?, Verso: London.
- https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2015/11/13/watch-president-obamas-statement-attacks-paris
- http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2015/11/je-suis-muslim-151114163033918.html
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