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.At best, what Butler is pointing to here is a purely discursive orideological homology, and it turns out to be a very incomplete homol-ogy, even in its own terms.That is, there s something analytically wrongwhen Butler s highlighting of the  lives vanished from the World Trade120 precarious politicsCenter cannot include the laborers, janitors, food workers, homelesspeople, and undocumented immigrants who died or su,ered, and whosestruggles for recognition were not just about their access to  culturallyviable notions of humanity, but equally about their economic value.That is, in largely unpublicized struggles to gain compensation andbenects, the relatives of many of these people, as well as attack sur-vivors themselves, have confronted the simple fact that those lives weresimply not valued.The struggles of many of these people who fail to reachthe decnition of the subject of value continue, years after the attacks.These kinds of people don t appear in Butler s pantheon of vic-tims and her chosen victims themselves do not appear as labor, noras subjects whose identity is in any way constituted by their relationto capitalism (even though this might well be why they were attacked,as putative representatives of a predatory capitalist expansionism).Thiselision is more than simply symptomatic of Butler s approach an ap-proach that is essentially a plea for freedom and equality in a contextwhere, as I ve been suggesting in this book, freedom and equality areeach other s neutralizing masks).The elision is, rather, a reminder ofthe weakness of any consideration of subjective identity that cannotor will not entertain the historical and material conditions under whichsuch identities are formed.In the end, what divides and di,erentiates subjects is not some fac-titious, contingent, and unsatisfactory use or application of the categoryof the human.Rather, it is the continual and relentless depredations ofcapital.So it s not really conditions that Butler investigates in her work.She isn t asking about American imperialism, or media power, or anyof the material factors that inbect contemporary ideologies.And she iscertainly not talking about any material form of subjectivity.Rather, sheis simply pointing to some of the discursive structures and attitudinalhabits that are devolved symptoms of those conditions.Butler herself would no doubt be familiar with the criticism that sheis unable or unwilling to investigate material conditions or see subjectsas produced by them in any signiccant way.Similar issues are notably atstake in her well-known exchanges with cgures such as Nancy Fraserand Gayle Rubin in the past decade; they arise again in her conversationswith Laclau and Zizek in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (2000).Inprecarious politics 121my view, Butler comes across in these exchanges as more obstinate thancorrect when dealing with the challenge that politico-economic factorspose to her thinking.Indeed, in the last named text, when called toaccount for these lapses, she comes out with one of the most perverseformulations in all of her writing:  It s unclear that the subject is not,for instance, from the start structured by certain general features ofcapitalism, or that capitalism does not produce certain quandaries forthe unconscious and, indeed, for the psychic subject more generally(277).Such circumphrasis (a spectacular double negative and a vague-ness masquerading through the repeated word certain) can only concrmthe suspicion that if an examination of  conditions entails thinking interms of political economy, Butler doesn t want anything to do with it.The limitations of that reluctance are in full view all across PrecariousLife, but perhaps nowhere so overtly as in Butler s repeated insistencethat the media are to blame for the parlous state of  contemporary con-ditions of representation (16).While that may well be the case in somelimited sense, the assertion should surely mark the beginning of an in-vestigation, rather than establish the media as a kind of untranscend-able horizon; but this underlying assumption about the conditions ofrepresentation is never granted explication or elaboration.It seems tome that, even in Butler s own terms, little progress could be made in the revolution at the level of ontology without at the same time rethink-ing those conditions of representation and the role of the capitalistmedia in enforcing them.Indeed, to reformulate her own words: it is infact perfectly clear that the conditions of representation are from thestart structured by very specicc historical features of capitalism.Butler s way of circumnavigating the material emerges in manyother places in these essays.For example, in her chapter on the policyof indecnite detention, she spends several pages explaining Foucault sdistinction between governmentality and sovereignty (tapping into adebate that takes many forms and di,erent vocabularies in di,erentdisciplines and discourses though you wouldn t know that from heraccount).Essentially, she tries to establish a kind of dialectical descrip-tion of the Bush administration s actions: increases in the bureaucraticprocesses of governmentality give rise to gestures of authoritarian sover-eignty, and sovereignty thence gives itself back over to the mechanisms122 precarious politicsof governmentality to secure itself.There might be simpler ways todescribe the rise of authoritarianism in the post 9/11 administration,and certainly there are alternative ways to describe the same thing.ButButler s chosen mode sets the tone and intent, which is in the end todisembody the political processes involved.Its relation to subjectivity,to the civil being of the subject is absent.That is and even despiteher naming of names (Rumsfeld and Ashcroft in particular) those pro-cesses come to seem unmotivated, untouched by human hand, but alsoto have no relation to the subject.It s almost as if the administration ssovereign behavior can have no material explanation: it s simply what shappening and its monstrous agents are simply ciphers [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]