Charlie Bertsch

• Precarious Life, by Judith Butler. Verso, 2004

• The Judith Butler Reader, edited by Sarah Salih. Continuum, 2004

Interrogating the presumption that there is “an equivalence between Jews and Israel” in Precarious Life, Judith Butler asks what the equation leaves out. “What are we to make of Jews who disidentify with Israel or, at least, with the Israeli state (which is not the same as every part of its culture)? Or Jews who identify with Israel (Israeli or not), but do not condone or identify with several of its practices?” Troubled by Harvard University President Lawrence Summers’s September 17, 2002 charge that, “serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent” when they express opposition to Israel, Butler demonstrates that Summers ends up duplicating the all-or-nothing thinking that underpins extremism at home and abroad.

The health of the Jews, she argues, depends not on forcing them into a fictive unity but on recognizing the differences that make them stronger. “The argument that all Jews have a heartfelt investment in the state of Israel is simply untrue. Some have a heartfelt investment in corned beef sandwiches or in certain Talmudic tales, memories of their grandmother, the taste of borscht, or the echoes of the Yiddish theater. Some care most about Hebrew songs or religious liturgy and rituals. Some have an investment in historical and cultural archives from Eastern Europe or from the Shoah, or in forms of labor activism that are thoroughly secular, although ‘Jewish’ in a substantively social sense.” After reciting this range of possibilities, Butler revises her question. “What do we make of Jews, including myself, who are emotionally invested in the state of Israel, critical of its current form, and call for a radical restructuring of its economic and juridical basis precisely because they are so invested?”

Because this is also a question that Tikkun readers find themselves asking these days, Precarious Life provides an ideal point of entry—especially when read alongside Sara Salih’s excellent The Judith Butler Reader—into the work of this difficult, influential Jewish thinker. A professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, Butler is best known for the controversy surrounding her 1990 book Gender Trouble, in which she forcefully argues that there is nothing “natural” about gender stereotypes, whether promulgated by sexist men or radical women. “Because there is neither an essence that gender expresses or externalizes nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires, and because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender create the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all.” Turning feminism inside out, Gender Trouble radically challenged its foundation. If sexual difference is “tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts,” rather than being an incontrovertible fact of nature, then the idea of “woman” that feminists have historically relied upon will necessarily place restrictions on many of the people they seek to free. “We regularly punish those who fail to do their gender right,” Butler notes, underscoring the irony in a supposedly liberatory political project relying on the bondage of its participants.

A decade and a half later, Butler has applied the same incisive logic to her analysis of the relationship between Jews and Israel. In taking Lawrence Summers to task, she makes it clear that we also regularly punish those who fail to do their Jewishness right. Although she never makes an explicit analogy between the category of “Jew” and the category of “woman,” the logic of her argument in Precarious Life implies that they function similarly. Just as, in her view, there is no common denominator that determines once and for all that one is or is not a “real” woman, there also isn’t one to determine once and for all that one is or is not a “true” Jew. It is crucial to note that this absence of a single unifying feature does not indicate, as Butler’s detractors tend to believe, that she regards the categories she critiques as empty or meaningless. Just because a collective identity cannot be reduced to a common denominator does not mean that the people who claim it have nothing in common. After all, Butler writes, “what do we make of Jews, including myself,” despite her reservations about the way in which the category of “Jew” functions in contemporary political discourse. She is willing to speak as a Jew, despite or perhaps because there is no indisputable essence to Jewishness. At one point in the chapter devoted to Summers’s charge, Butler describes speaking to a reporter from The New York Times. “I explained to her that I was, like many others who wrote in, a progressive Jew (handling the discourse of identity politics for the moment), and that I rejected the notion that to support Palestinian self-determination was in itself an anti-Semitic act.” The parenthesis is key. She knows the potential risks and rewards entailed in describing herself as a “progressive Jew.” So when Butler does, she does it not for all time but provisionally. Butler recognizes that there are times when it makes good personal and political sense to be counted as something specific. In the interview that closes The Judith Butler Reader, Butler tells a story. “I remember once walking on a street in Berkeley and some kid leaned out of a window and asked, ‘Are you a lesbian?’ Just like that. I replied, ‘Yes, I am a lesbian.’ I returned it in the affirmative. It was a completely impulsive moment.” Realizing that the questioner was really asking, “Are you the thing that I fear and loathe?” Butler concludes that, “to the extent that I was able very quickly to turn around and say, ‘Yes, I am a lesbian,’ the power of my interrogator was lost. My questioner was then left in a kind of shock, having heard somebody gamely, proudly take on the term—somebody who spends most of her life deconstructing the term in other contexts. It was a very powerful thing to do.”

This sense of timing—when it makes sense to speak as something specific, when it would be better to question the construction of that something—is what makes Butler’s thought particularly valuable to those of us on the Left. Regardless of what her critics may claim, she is no hidebound idealist, who declares, “Women do not exist!” over and over from her mountaintop hermitage. Butler knows why, how, and when to

descend from the heights of philosophical complexity to communicate the importance of her approach to a broader audience than the graduate seminar. She writes for Art Forum. She does interviews. She composes opinion pieces for The New York Times. The essay on the charge of anti-Semitism originally appeared in the London Review of Books. She acts, in short, as a public intellectual, despite the stress that role surely brings her.

What makes Precarious Life so compelling is that it manages to do double duty, fusing scholarly sophistication with the accessibility Butler has until now cultivated outside the academy. Begun in the wake of September 11, 2001, the book bears witness to the sense of urgency she felt as the American response to the attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. threatened to initiate a state of permanent war. This was no time to write only for scholars or only for mainstream progressive. This was a time to write for both groups at the same time, to bring them together on the page in the hope of inspiring greater collaboration off it.

Mind you, Precarious Life is not light reading. Butler’s sentences remain slow-going. But they require a lot less background reading to understand than their counterparts in earlier books like Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter. Instead of confining itself to intricate analyses of texts that are themselves intricate analyses, such as essays by Sigmund Freud or Michel Foucault, Precarious Life applies the same rigor to speeches, newspaper articles, and government documents. Particularly impressive in this regard, along with the critique of Lawrence Summers’s charge of anti-Semitism, is the chapter Butler devotes to the detention of the individuals being held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. “These prisoners,” she notes, “are not even called ‘prisoners’ by the Department of Defense or by representatives of the current U.S. administration. To call them by that name would suggest that internationally recognized rights pertaining to the treatment of prisoners of war ought to come into play. They are, rather, ‘detainees,’ those who are held in waiting, those for whom waiting may well be without end.” Here we see Butler’s long-standing preoccupation with names—the name of “woman,” the name of “Jew,” the name of “lesbian”—in full effect, but turned to a more specific political end. For the people held at Guantanamo, being classified as “detainees” instead of “prisoners” has had the effect of suspending every other identity—citizen, brother, father, Muslim—that they could otherwise claim. In a brutally concrete sense, these individuals are being punished for doing their humanity wrong. The Bush Administration’s rejection of due process for people captured in its “War on Terror” has transformed them into the ultimate “other”: the inhuman.

As Butler makes painfully clear, the sort of theoretical abstractions that postmodern thinkers have long been mocked for using—Jean-François Lyotard, for example, published a book titled The Inhuman—have, through an ironic reversal that rivals the best that Franz Kafka could dream up, become the bread and butter of American foreign policy. The Bush Administration engages, without apology, in the business of deciding who does and does not deserve to be treated as human. Whether the neoconservatives in D.C. think tanks have been reading the same abstruse theory as people like Judith Butler—one suspects that more than a few of them have—or have, rather, stumbled into inventing their own alternative, it is eerie how rapidly the gap between the so-called “real world” of Washington politics and the loftiest reaches of contemporary scholarship has closed.

Some progressives will argue that this fondness for abstraction on the contemporary Right serves as confirmation that all abstraction is dangerous, regardless of its perpetrator’s allegiance. Like other academic leftists, Butler has come under fire for being too removed from the realities of day-to-day life. Even when critics concede theoretical points to her—agreeing, say, that the category of “woman” is founded on a fiction—they usually make the counterargument that the practical value of those points is not worth the effort expended in absorbing them. “People still treat me as a woman, as a Jew, as a lesbian,” they argue, “whether I consent to their classification or not. I’m better off reshaping those categories from within than radically questioning them from without.”

What these critics have failed to see, however, is that there is a difference between the positions that Butler articulates in scholarly essays and the ones she stakes out by virtue of her actions. By saying, “Yes, I am a lesbian, woman, Jew, leftist,” when the situation calls for it, as she has repeatedly done—on the street, in bookstores, on petitions, and in the pages of establishment newspapers and magazines—Butler demonstrates a belief in the power of individuals to act responsibly for the public good that complicates the stereotype of her as an iconoclast bent on destroying the foundations of our civilization. Sure, she wants us to pry our minds free of the identity categories we are raised with in order to question them from the outside. But she also recognizes the need to keep working to reform those categories from within.

This aspect of Butler’s work may be the hardest to pin down, because it is expressed less in the content of her argument than in the form it takes. One of the biggest strengths of The Judith Butler Reader is that it highlights the role that the first-person singular plays in her thinking. “The prospect of being anything, even for pay, has always produced in me a certain anxiety, for ‘to be’ gay, or ‘to be’ lesbian seems to be more than a simple injunction to become who or what I already am,” begins the 1990 essay “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” included in the anthology. But this unease has not stopped her from making judicious use of autobiography. In the new preface she composed for Gender Trouble’s tenth anniversary edition, also excerpted in The Judith Butler Reader, Butler makes brave use of her past. “I grew up understanding something of the violence of gender norms: an uncle incarcerated for his anatomically anomalous body, deprived of family and friends, living out his days in an ‘institute’ in the Kansas prairies; gay cousins forced to leave their homes because of their sexuality, real and imagined; my own tempestuous coming out at the age of 16; and a subsequent adult landscape of lost jobs, lovers, and homes.”

Knowing Butler’s reluctance “to be” gives passages like this one more weight. If we identify with the person who recounts these experiences—not hard for anyone who has suffered the pain of being marginalized—the temptation to conflate her life and work will be strong. While there is a good side to the investment that identification brings about, the understanding it conjures tends to be shallow. The sense of knowing, to use a highly appropriate idiom, where a person “is coming from” should not provide a shortcut to meaning. Just because someone grows up in New York or spends time in the military does not mean that she thinks like a New Yorker or a soldier.

From this perspective, Butler’s greatest achievement may not be the dismantling of categories such as “woman” or “Jew” or “lesbian,” but rather her ability to write and speak in a first-person singular that invites people to identify her as a member of all three categories without letting them forget that identification always comes at a price. Identity provides a home, but one that too often turns into a prison. Without vigilance, the “I” we are required to speak will become the “I” we are forced to inhabit, an indefinite detention that will, in its own way, deprive us of our humanity. Precarious Life represents the culmination of an argument that Butler began making long before those jets crashed into the World Trade Center: the real war against terror begins not with the identification of suspects, but with the suspicion that identity is a problem with no final solution.

Charlie Bertsch (cbertsch@comcast.net) is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where he specializes in twentieth-century American prose, cultural studies, and the history of aesthetics. He also teaches film.