Butler and Mbembe on Death, Mourning, and Self-(Dis)Possession

Butler: Well, this is a cheery topic! I first shared my thoughts about death, grief, and, specifically, the role of obituaries in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (over 20 years ago now!) and I think we’re still dealing with a lot of these same issues of dehumanization and otherness that prompted my writing this, especially now with the constant media attention to war and the onslaught of violence that seems so far removed from us and the psychological toll that takes on people. Among other things, I explored the idea of the relational self, the dispossessed self, and the effects of loss on our very idea of what a “self” is. I brought in the idea of obituaries as a concrete example of how grieving brings us closer to the deceased, and what it means when certain people are excluded from the “grievable” class. Thinking about death in connection to my research in other areas, and our role in all of this, I’ve found that some of your ideas fit in really well with what I was doing all those years ago. I read Necropolitics when it first came out in 2019 and it left me with a lot to think about—to be honest, I found it so deeply troubling that I had to put it down a few times. The connections you make just hit too close to home. I have to wonder what you would think about my commentary about obituaries now when we’ve been thrust with this new kind of post-post-modern setting where there's an absolute excess of death, and honestly, excess of everything, but I know you write more about large-scale political and societal patterns maybe than the psychological effects on the individual and individual relationships.

Mbembe: Thank you, Judith. Necropolitics was certainly not easy to write, and the current geopolitical situation is not easy to live with, so I think it did what it was supposed to do in gnawing at you the way it did. You’re absolutely right that I focused more on the environment of violence and larger ideas about sovereignty evolving in modernity, but one thing I do want to note is that I don’t think we can restrict our analysis to the present day—something I argued for in Necropolitics is a sort of counter to Agamben and the idea that death camps acted as this pinnacle of patterned, enacted death and not just a more visible form of what has always been a factor of political life, but one we are perhaps increasingly exposed to.

Butler: I remember that was one of the most disturbing aspects of your book, your expanding on Foucault’s biopower with the idea that death camps are not just a horrifying product of Nazism but of the human condition that’s somehow always been with us. What are some reasons we might not see that?

Mbembe: Yes, I believe death camp-like institutions have always been with us, but what we’re seeing now is that political entities, state agents, are losing their grip on death, losing their monopoly over death. We’re increasingly surrounded by, you could say desensitized to, death such that its presence is simply part of life to varying degrees, of course, based on the political circumstances of your homeland and whether or not your community has been thrust into war. But there is always the exterminating of unwanted life. 

Butler: You’re suggesting a big shift in who enacts “legitimate” violence. Can you say more about that change?

Mbembe: Absolutely. I’m suggesting that death is distributed through society in a way it has never been before, by what I term the “war machine.” When we talk about terrorism, the “war on terrorism,” these are not state actors waging war—these are private conglomerates working to perpetuate war and violence, actually optimize death. I think one of the most powerful examples in Necropolitics for the optimization of death is the idea of suicide bombers. I work with suicide bombers and the concept of “freedom” in self-destruction, but I won’t go into that now. What I mean to say is that when we’re at war all the time, but no state actor can actually be held responsible, we find ourselves in an environment of pure excess. 

Butler: “Pure excess.” That’s exactly what it is. And the suicide bomber is such a horrifying metaphor. Something I couldn’t have predicted when I was writing back in 2004, but I’m sure informed your research when you were working on Necropolitics, is how media attention sort of implicates us all in this environment of necropolitics. We see piles of bodies in Gaza, for example, the Russian-Ukraine war, mass shootings even, in ways we haven’t ever before. But bringing it back to the human impact—isn’t that ironic?—the human impact of loss on survivors, I wonder if we could turn to the role of the imagination in all this. You actually don’t mention grief at all in Necropolitics, which I found interesting, because surely there is loss here. As someone who studies mourning, the sheer volume of death absolutely calls into question the kinds of grieving patterns we allow ourselves to engage with (although I certainly don’t mean to suggest that grief is a voluntary process). You talked a little bit about the psychological dimension of necropolitics, “the status of the living dead”. How can one grieve under these circumstances, if we grieve at all?

Mbembe: The angle from which you approached the concept of the obituary in Precarious Life was very telling. You spoke of obituaries as the evidence of who is considered “grievable” and who is not, and the personal transformation—a “transformation without knowing the end result,” I’m paraphrasing. So there are certain losses that affect us, that push us along this path as you describe it, and certain losses do not. And that is for a variety of reasons.

Butler: Do you think we can say that we mourn people who we want to “be like”—that’s probably not the best way of putting it—and distance ourselves from people we don’t? We grieve the lives we were or wanted to be part of, and we don’t want to be “implicated” in the end of lives we didn’t want to be part of?

Mbembe: That’s an interesting way of putting it. I think we could also say that we mourn people whose life and death look drastically different. Someone reduced to “bare life,” to borrow from Agamben, their life and their death are basically the same.

Butler: So there’s this positive relationship between grievability and perceived difference from one’s life and one’s death.

Mbembe: I believe so. 

Butler: I want to talk more about the “variety of reasons” you mentioned earlier as to why certain losses affect us more than others. I believe it has something to do with how much of ourselves we're willing to suspend in that process. I devoted a lot of attention to the idea of vulnerability in Precarious Life, sort of questioning the idea of the autonomous self that is always in control of its reactions, its circumstances. Building on some earlier ideas, I proposed that our idea of “self” is in fact so deeply caught up in our relationships with other people that when someone close to us dies, we lose a very real part of ourselves that only existed in relation to that other person.

Mbembe: I remember reading that and not fully understanding what that part of ourselves was.

Butler: I think what I was trying to say is that certain aspects of ourselves are actually created by interactions with others (that’s a mutual process). By interacting with you, I have an object to apply aspects of myself towards. So when I lose someone I had that kind of interaction with, I lose that outlet and no longer have possession (if we can call it that) of that part of my identity. So it was as much yours as it was mine.

Mbembe: That is fascinating. So loss is what actually reveals those aspects of ourselves that are hidden from us.

Butler: Exactly. And someone with dementia, for example, will start losing these ties even before they die. 

Mbembe: I think that idea works well with my critique of the idealized view of reason and independent thought that so much of Western political theory and democratic theory rests on. What you’re suggesting is that the self is not static, going against the Cartesian self and the idea of self-possession.

Butler: Absolutely. It’s almost Hegelian in a sense where we’re talking about a kind of recognition. His philosophy was something like “I need you to know me”, but the “I” I’m talking about is different. “I” am not a static entity; “I” change in relation to you. And that’s the fundamental vulnerability of humans as social beings.

Mbembe: You write something like “We are implicated in lives that are not our own.” How can we bring this back to the idea of obituaries and the role of imagination in loss?

Butler: Well, obituaries are a key aspect of how we relate to ourselves, and actually death itself. We are who we grieve. We see the kinds of people who are afforded obituaries and those who are not, and a society’s collected obituaries are a perfect reflection of what that society values and whose lives are considered worth living. And with my research, we can see that those hierarchical and social preferences for “grievable” death can cause harm in life.

Mbembe: And obituaries actually perpetuate these harms.

Butler: Sometimes, yes. Refusing to engage with certain people’s deaths at all, not even saying “It is good that this person died,” is actually the most dehumanizing thing we can do. “The silence of the newspaper,” as I wrote—that preferential coverage towards people whose lives look like ours—renders the “other”’s suffering, and our complicity in it, completely invisible. It is as though their lives were not lives at all.

Mbembe: What do you hope will come of your writing about topics like this, that people might not otherwise be watching for?

Butler: What I hope will come of a different understanding of the self and how that self is constituted through its relationship to death is that we collectively start moving away from a politics of aggression and towards one that accommodates the self as it truly is: deeply, inextricably linked to the identities of others. The problem with conceiving of ourselves as such distinct entities with no ties to anyone else is that politics inevitably becomes a me-against-you situation, and we know from experience that that attitude is what leads to oppression.

Mbembe: And the obituaries?

Butler: That continues to be a tricky issue. On one hand, we can take a giant step back and say “The practice of writing obituaries for certain people and not for others is deeply exclusionary.” But on the other hand, an obituary is such a personal thing. Certainly, we grieve the loss of a parent, friend, relative, neighbor. It’s a lot to ask someone to grieve someone they have never met in the same way. That’s just not how humans operate. But there is something to be said for not actively suppressing those losses for political gain, because they are still losses. I cited the example of the San Francisco Chronicle—there are certainly more recent cases—where the newspaper first refused to run obituaries, and then refused to run memorials, for two Palestinian families killed by Israeli troops because the editors “did not wish to offend anyone.” That’s what I hope to raise awareness of, the politicization of grief and the unspeakability of certain deaths. How can grief be offensive? That’s always bothered me.

Mbembe: I think we can trace everything back to your idea of natural human vulnerability occurring in my unnatural environment of necropolitics—the more distance we can put between ourselves and human loss, the more protection we can afford ourselves against being implicated in their deaths. Because if we constitute the self—whether that be the individual, the community, or the state—in terms of the independent, the isolated, and the self-possessed, “they” must die in order for “us” to survive. It’s the worst possible combination.

Butler: I think that’s what it all comes down to. Self-preservation and people trying their darndest not to admit guilt. Well, this has been a very enlightening conversation. I know I will be working with these ideas for a long time to come, and I will be looking out for more of your work and, hopefully, another conversation. 

Mbembe: Thank you.