precarious life

just back from a talk given by Judith Butler at the FU ... an unbelievable experience on many levels and most stimulating on the academic one.
First the location was changed to the Henry Ford Building (the audi max) due to the incredible amount of people registering for the event. This building, while apparently the 1950s founding building of the university looks like one of its newest, it really is a piece of timeless and quite stunning and beautiful architecture. The lecture was opened by one of the vice-presidents of the university, a scholar I have known for years and I really admire and like a lot, but today she, quite frankly, blew it. Although she nicely welcomed the guest of honor and speaker, she then started to ramble on for about 15 minutes and not much of it was about Butler and what she said about her was rather embarrassing and banal in trying to summarize Butler's work in a few sentences and then she sounded like a PR brochure for the university, it's excellency (as acknowledged by the German administration) and the Dahlem Humanities Center. Then the rector of that center (or something like that) came up, acknowledging that the audience was here for Butler and thus he would keep it short - always be aware of the guy who introduces his introduction with promises of brevity ... because he after starting as PR continued to talk about Butler and we thought all is fine as he gave a nice short bio-sketch.... but then went on and on, basically telling her and us what her research was to interrupt his own narrative with stupidity and all that for about 30 minutes (and I mean real stupidity) to come to the point that only yesterday she had been in London and how bad the weather there was at the moment - which at least led to my Prof. remarking at my side 'oh good, he's at the weather report, which is usually at the end of a program, isn't it?' ... it wasn't ... not quite anyway because he still had to allude to the dangerous waves she had to overcome or rather cross beneath (referring to the Ärmelkanal) to come here - and from there made the link to announce the paper's title "Frames of War".

The great thing about it all - before I come to the content which was really interesting - was the atmosphere. First the whole lobby was filled to the brink and once they opened the doors to the Audi max at 6 it felt like a rock concert or huge football match as a wave and murmur rushed through these academic masses and at the same time it seemed as if the room opened had huge suction powers ... once we were seated - and it took about 5 minutes to have to room filled and then 55 minutes to fight off 'late-comers' (the talk only started at 7) and send them to the 4 adjoining huge lecture halls where a video-conference setup would transmit the event. This audi max was also the room where in 1968 students protested and demonstrated against the attack on Rudi Dutschke, leading to wide protests and later that year another huge student protest against the Prager Frühling was initiated here. So it was historic ground we were treading and it was also very present in the atmosphere, as the academically well informed audience (who was here for Butler and those being there before 6 - which were the only ones making it into the large room - were real fans and knew her work) were most annoyed (to put it mildly) by the introductions and PR statements given before so there was mild riot, buh-ing, whistling, laughter and shouting ... unfortunately to no avail, as both speakers did not budge from the podium although our discontent was well articulated...

Finally, Butler took the floor and gave a marvelous speech. I did not have much sleep last night and a long day - including some coffee but not much - but did not even feel tired during the more than one hour. She did not present totally new ideas as such and I am glad that we had discussed her approach in class before, so the basis of her argument or the approach was not unfamiliar - but the structure of the paper was great - not really surprising as she is a Prof. of Rhetoric in Berkeley. She started out with a discussion of the precariousness of life, distinguished between apprehension and recognition, came to her post-structuralist informed argument of resistance but then used all that to apply it to the question of humanity in general and the current political violent unrest in Gaza in particular. Emphasizing how to be able to apprehend life (which is not even meaning to recognize it) means to acknowledge the precariousness of life which is the root to distinguish what life is (here we briefly came to the discussion of normativity) and as this distinction between life and non-life and even death works along norms of society, life, too, needs to be recognized as such, thus needs the 'other', and thus can not be thought without grief, because to think what life is also means to conceptualize what it's loss is. conflicts not only result in the loss of life but usually are ideology bound and thus some lives are defined as more precarious than others - as more valuable and thus more valid to grief. If the loss of a life cannot or should not be grieved it thus is a non-life and thus the root of all conflict arises, as we are unable / unwilling to recognize this life and apprehend its precariousness. Butler, of course, had a lot more arguments along the line, very thought provoking insights a great presentation to go with it and a really stunning trail of thought, none of which I am able to do justice to.