I think there is a way of living with vulnerability and grief that for most
Americans is not easy. It’s not easy to abide with grief and not to resolve
grief [through] action.
Grief marks something.
It marks loss.
I think
it was only September 21 when Bush said “We’ve finished grieving and now it’s
time to act.” And I thought, “Oh, that’s not bad. Ten days of grieving and
we’re done with it?” And then what? And then military action, striking back,
doing harm to others in the way they’ve done harm to us.
The quick move to action is a way of foreclosing
grief, refusing it, and even as it anaesthetizes one’s own pain and sense of
loss, it comes, in time, to anaesthetize us to the losses that we inflict upon
others.
In this way, the pain we inflict on our 'Others' enables us to hide the inevitability of loss from ourselves. It allows us to skip the process of mourning, and re-create the illusion that we are not vulnerable to loss.
An entirely different politics would emerge if a community
could learn to abide with its losses and its vulnerability.
could learn to abide with its losses and its vulnerability.
Judith Butler interview with Jill Stauffer (May - 2003) 72 hours after the start of the Iraq War
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