More than Vulnerable Rethinking Community

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to disentangle some aspects of link established between community and mourning. It will be done in order to highlight in which sense community of mourners would be an impossible political community. In order to discuss approach of thinkers such as Judith Butler on possibility of setting a political community grounded on recognition of our common precarious life, paper will analyze challenges posed by film Hiroshima mon amour, directed by Alain Resnais with a screenplay by Marguerite Duras, under light of political theory of Hannah Arendt, especially from her articulation of connection between mortality, politics, memory and judgment. This analysis allows us also to reveal some prejudices inherited by theoretical proposal of Butler from androcentric Modern paradigm, which she tries to criticize through her emphasis on vulnerability.Community and Vulnerability2Thinking about community and commonality has led not a few philosophers to attempt to escape coordinates of debate between communitarians and liberals as formulated by Charles Taylor and Michael Walzer on one hand, and by John Rawls and Jtirgen Habermas on other hand.3 Among other thinkers of community, Georges Bataille, Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Blanchot, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito and Ernesto Laclau stand out. Employing various modes and styles, and departing from classical concepts of identity and sovereignty, they try to rethink community as openended and as a figure of difference. Judith Butler's approach to community adheres to this anti-essentialist turn, but, as we will see, her claim for a new community is so influenced by contemporary experiences of violence that marked beginning of twenty-first century (war, terrorism and torture), that her proposal may fall short in attempts to fruitfully address new challenges in thinking community.Due to terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 and consequent occupation of Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom), Judith Butler, throughout five articles comprising Precarious Life, fries to raise again some questions of which focus is on human nature and what makes for a grievable life? (20). In her reflections on relationship between violence, mourning and politics, Butler, without aiming to hold US responsible for everything, but with objective of fostering a critical approach toward US government's policies, attempts to elaborate a basis for a more fair and less violent global political community by appealing to most basic condition of human life: general vulnerability that makes us relational beings.According to Butler, experience of mourning for victims of attacks could have opened a space of awareness and representation of such interdependence which uncovers precarious existence of Self -which sometimes works as an individual subject and at other times as a collective subject-as constituted by Other at its base. The bond with Other is presented as a relationship of dispossession; Self only recognizes itself as constituted by Other and deconstituted by loss of that Other. From this perspective, mourning, an encounter with pain in order to cope with loss, reveals the unconscious imprint of my primary (28). Due to this radical sociality suffering is not only caused by loss of Other, but also by fact that absence of Other produces a transformation in Self with unpredictable consequences. With loss of Other, Self loses its own intelligibility. Thus, through loss of both Other and of this Self-made Otherness, we can access our more intimate political constitution in an experiential way.After only a ten day mourning period, President G.W. Bush declared beginning of crusade against terrorism; he declared conversion of American people's grief into angry resolution and restorative action. …