Judith Butler's Death Cult Ethics

The obsession with death and mourning has become a political tool

The following is a text by Lukas Sarvari, originally published in German at Casablanca magazine in January 2024, updated and edited in April 2024. The original can be found here: https://textezurfalschenzeit.de/2024/01/14/ungleiche-tode/

Since the IDF’s military operation in the Gaza strip, following the worst single attack on Jewish and Israeli civilians since the Holocaust on October 7, 2023, Israel has been accused of “disproportionality”.  The call for recognition of the suffering on both sides has since become louder, usually followed by condemnation of only the Israeli side.

For decades, US philosopher Judith Butler has been responsible for the theoretical legitimization of this position, which presents itself as a model case of universal morality. In a text published less than two weeks after the Hamas massacre, she complains that “the prevailing framework” in reporting on the anti-Semitic mass murder “regards some lives as more grievable than others”, wonders “whether we can mourn without reservation both the lives lost in Israel and those lost in Gaza”, and wishes for an “ideal (of equality) that recognizes the equal grievability of lives”. Butler hints at the political consequences to be drawn from such a generalized and thus abstract mourning when she condemns the Hamas murders three times in formulaic terms, but without saying a word about what exactly Hamas has actually done - while she accuses Israel of a whole list of very specific and serious crimes: from "genocidal rhetoric" to “colonial racism” to “relentless bombing” and “apartheid”.

It was 9/11 and the subsequent “War on Terror” that prompted Butler to labor on an ethics of the political that calls for a world community united in an undifferentiated mourning of “the dead”, especially those of wars. Its moral imperative is based in convicting the USA and Israel of inhumanity. When jihadists flew planes into the towers of the World Trade Centre because they viewed them as the headquarters of international financial Jewry, this was merely an example for Butler of “our permeability to other people”, which we “have to accept”: “Grief equalizes us”, she said in the same interview. In Precarious Life (2004), she wished for an "identification with suffering itself". In this way, a "community on the basis of vulnerability and loss" could emerge, whose only problem would be " the radically inequitable ways that corporeal vulnerability is distributed globally.”

According to Butler, the USA and Israel were guilty in a general way of “dehumanization”, because they considered themselves invulnerable, and yet continually hurt others without mourning their losses. According to Butler, we must learn “that other lives are equally grievable and have an equal demand on us to be grieved”, because “only under conditions in which the loss would matter does the value of the life appear.  Without grievability, there is no life, or, rather, there is something living that is other than life.“ In this ethics of mourning, which is in fact an ethics of death, the living only appear as prospective corpses, as not-yet-dead, whose value of life is measured solely by the expected degree of mourning.

Butler's demand that “to live” means “to be mourned" appeals to morbid fantasies, in which everyone has already imagined their own, naturally tearful, funeral. Applied to others, this demand appeals to us to always anticipate the death of our fellow human beings and to enter a community of sufferers in a sort of “pre-felt grief” for everyone – except for the specific individual. However, the uplifting feeling of anticipatory grief does not have to be an authentic foretaste of a real experience of loss. Anyone who regularly gets misty-eyed at the thought of the future death of others, friends and, more often, relatives, is not demonstrating their respect for their lives, but must ask themselves why they keep falling for the fantasy of their death. The song line "Yours is the funeral I'd fly to from anywhere" by the US band Why? expresses just how close the painful fear of loss and the unacknowledged wish for death can be, oscillating between a declaration of love and a cool farewell, because it resonates with a commitment to the unconditional "grievability" of individual lives, as well as the suggestion of not wishing for a reunion during one's lifetime.

In no way, however, is Judith Butler's ethics about mourning as an individual way of dealing with a loss, in which all those contradictory moments characterizing the most loving relationships among the living come together. Nor does she speak of those social mourning rituals in which smaller or larger groups find their way back to life by mourning their loss together. Rather, Butler is concerned with mourning as a performance, as a collective political event. For her, the dead are relevant only insofar as they were victims of attacks, wars, or genocides, i.e. victims of political violence deemed inopportune. She is solely concerned with the political cult of the dead. In consequence, for Butler, an unequal calculation is made, for example, if the victims of 9/11 had been mourned more than the war dead in Afghanistan.

It is indeed a moral ideal of democratic and free societies that the lives of all human beings count equally. But Butler’s emphasis is not egalitarian with regard to life – it is egalitarian with regard to death. For Butler it is the “absolute identity of death” that should establish the equal value of all "lives". For her, grief is the currency in which every loss of human life must be settled and through whose global circulation a united world community is to be constituted. Like the perpetrators of the mass pogrom of 7 October in Israel, Butler does not value life, which she can merely regard as an addition of diverse "lives" without specific qualities, but rather death, which, as an omnipresent possibility, indiscriminately characterizes every individual life. In death, the egalitarian dream is finally realized.

And if only death equalizes every single life – does one not owe the more numerous victims of various wars as much, or even more mourning than the Jewish victims of anti-Semitic violence? This is the calculation presented by the so-called post-colonial discourse: What are the Jews murdered by Islamic terror versus the Palestinian dead? And what are the Jews murdered in the Holocaust against the victims of the transatlantic slave trade or the colonial wars?

Similarly, historical relativists on the right and left once insisted that more Soviet citizens, more Chinese or more Germans died in the Second World War than Jews in the Holocaust.

Such an accounting of the dead seems to make use of rational logic. But precisely because of it, it indulges in an almost passionate competition between victims, which attempts to erase the unprecedented nature of the extermination of the Jews in the Holocaust as a competitive advantage. It refuses to recognize the categorical and irrevocable break with any kind of rationality: that the Jews were killed “for nothing and because of nothing” (Eike Geisel), and that no military-strategic, economic, or political considerations could dissuade the Germans from their murderous work.

Historical and political judgement, which grasps the unprecedented character of the death of extermination, can neither be guided by mathematical calculation nor replaced by abstract mourning for indifferent deaths, but must, as historian Dan Diner writes, make an "ethically extremely difficult, yet necessary distinction, the distinction between death and death.” In the qualitative difference between victims of war and victims of the pogrom, between victims of an unleashed hatred of Jews aimed at the whole of humanity and victims of necessary acts of defense, the precedent for which is the Holocaust and the subsequent in the bombings of German cities during the Second World War, arithmetic reaches its limits.

Butler does not want to make this distinction, and this is the reason why she cannot even name, let alone conceptualize, the concrete bestial acts of murder committed by Hamas. She would have to speak of public executions that were frenetically applauded by the masses, of women raped to death, of the burnt corpses of children. Butler would have to admit that Hamas murdered indiscriminately, that the anti-Semitic violence of 7 October was aimed at total annihilation, which it executed on every single victim. It was a violence that said: this is what we will do to every one of you. Only the arbitrariness of the perpetrators and no comprehensible rule decided who was to be killed immediately and who was allowed to survive as a hostage for the time being.

In view of this total character of the mass pogrom, instead of calling for the universal grieve for all victims in a sentimental-abstract manner, it would be more appropriate to ask whether mourning, which is always individual and intimate and takes its starting point from the individual – the mourner as well as the one being mourned – does not reach its limits in such barbarism; whether mass murder did not also want to destroy the possibility of appropriate mourning along with the individuals in whom it always endeavored to liquidate the concept of humanity itself.

The fact that everyone within reach of the Palestinian attackers became a potential murder victim on 7 October must have been understood by all Israelis and Jews as an existential threat, which also touched on deeper layers of experience based on the survivors' accounts: the murderers surprised their victims in a state of extreme defencelessness (in bed, in pyjamas, brushing teeth, having breakfast) and inflicted the greatest possible humiliation on them.

Ze'ev Sternhell, the Israeli historian of fascism, recalled his years as a soldier in 2008 and confessed that when his comrades died in the Six-Day War, he thought: "At least they died like human beings. They weren't killed by being chased down the street" - as Sternhell had experienced in his childhood in the Przemyśl ghetto.

In this sense, the state of Israel was “not a political matter” for him, but “something much more fundamental, something much more elementary. It means a return to humanity. A return to a life as human beings.” On 7 October, this humanity, which allows for a “tangible” death and an appropriate mourning, was negated by the attackers from the Gaza Strip. Israel's self-image as a guarantor not only of the safety of all persecuted Jews, but also of the dignity of its citizens, was shaken.

By threatening to prosecute a “second, third and fourth October 7”, and declaring that he would be “proud” to “pay the price” and “sacrifice martyrs”, a Hamas spokesman made it unmistakably clear that Hamas is driven by the same desire for annihilation as the Nazis, even denying its own self-preservation. Not to defeat Hamas would be a death sentence for all Israeli Jews. But, according to polls, Hamas has the backing of seventy per cent of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank who have welcomed the massacre and publicly celebrated it with the distribution of sweets while still under the fresh impression of videos of mutilated and raped Israelis, as well as in Berlin, Tehran and the rest of the world, without Judith Butler having bothered them with the demand for universal mourning for the Jewish dead as well.

The Israeli military, which is taking action against Hamas and its allied groups in Gaza and at the same time has to defend itself against missile attacks from Iranian proxies in Lebanon, Yemen and Syria, and recently Iran itself, with vast areas in the North and North East of Israel being evacuated, is responding to the violence of 7 October by trying to neutralise the threat. It carries out targeted attacks on terrorists and their military infrastructure, which – as the IDF knows – is often hidden in hospitals, schools, and heavily populated areas. Because of this, the IDF has employed a complex warning system for civilians, which is now being studied by international military strategists in order to avoid high civilian casualty numbers. The fact that this response to terror is nevertheless regarded as “disproportionate”, despite all the differences in targeting and combat tactics, is only argued with reference to the increasing number of fatalities in Gaza. As of April 2023, over 32,000 Palestinians are said to have died, according to Hamas, though there have been reasonable doubts as to the Gaza Ministry of Health’s accounting of casualties, as well as the Hamas leadership recently correcting its numbers to a lower one. It is further unknown how high the proportion of terrorists (both in combat gear and in civilian clothing) is among the dead, and how many of the unarmed victims died because Hamas prevented them from fleeing. The very fact that such a war in Gaza became necessary in the first place is the responsibility of Hamas, which is sending its “nation of martyrs” to their deaths in the fight against the Israeli military, which is still superior.

If Hamas were to end this production of martyrs, i.e., release the hostages and surrender unconditionally, most Palestinian lives could be saved. Of course, such a humanitarian proposal will never be accepted by enemies of Israel like Judith Butler, if only because they would have to admit that Israel has no interest in massacring a population that would no longer pose any threat to themselves.

The judgement on the anti-Semitic violence of Hamas and the violence of the Israeli state cannot therefore be made solely on the basis of the deaths declared as the unit of measurement. If only the body count – and not even cause and effect –  is to be the valid criterion, what was done to the living moments before their murder is also ignored. Because Butler only speaks abstractly of the dead, the mourning she appeals to is therefore also abstract and pure ritual. She leaves aside the fact that Hamas not only murdered, but also tortured its victims before their murder, that it allowed family members to watch the murder of their relatives via livestreams or that it specifically tortured children held hostage by forcing them to watch the murder and torture of their own parents on video, damaging them for the rest of their lives.

Hamas knows that Israel – unlike the death-obsessed jihadists – wants to preserve the lives of its citizens at all costs. This is why it has taken hostages in the first place. Once upon a time, 1027 Palestinian terrorists, including the current ruler of the Gaza Strip, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, were set free in exchange for the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who was released after being held hostage for five years. Butler, who is not interested in the living, will remain silent about the fact that the Israeli military is not only trying to defeat Sinwar and his henchmen, but above all to bring home its kidnapped citizens. She will not admit that the “war in Gaza” is predominantly a hostage rescue operation. Spellbound by the logic of her death cult ethics, she can only speak of Israel's war as a “revenge military action” in which every dead Israeli is to be repaid.

The very fact that Israel neither kills blindly nor allows its citizens to be slaughtered, but protects its own population, is considered presumptuous by its enemies. Yet it is Israel's duty to do so if it wants to keep its promise to be a safe haven for all those threatened by anti-Semitic violence. And unlike immigration law, this is not even an exclusive Jewish right, but a protection requirement that applies to all citizens, regardless of origin and religion. Arab Israelis of Muslim faith are among the hostages freed from the clutches of Hamas in exchange for Palestinian terrorists. This general requirement of protection is essential to every civic theory of the state: in return for the partial renunciation of violence by individual citizens, they must be able to expect the sovereign to use the violence monopolized by it to protect their lives, property, and physical integrity against external attacks. This is why Israel not only has the right but also the duty of self-defence.

Whether it will be able to do so depends not least on the increasingly reluctant support of the USA, where Judith Butler and her ilk have long since gained sovereignty of interpretation, and not only at Ivy League schools. According to a recent study by Harvard University, 51 per cent of 18 to 24-year-old Americans are support the notion that Israel should “cease to exist” and the country being “handed over to Hamas and the Palestinians”. In the same age group, 67 per cent think that “Jews are a class of oppressors and should be treated like oppressors.” 

Israel’s struggle for survival is thankfully not decided at US Ivy League colleges. But an increasingly fringe-to-mainstream ideological pipeline, initiated by left-wing activists, under whose spell Butler increasingly seems to be, is making the struggle for its existence more difficult.

Cover photo: Debbie Harry from Blondie performing Heart of Glass (1979)