a historic, heterogeneous time, freighted with memory and

presentness.

403 397 9485

the false is the sign of itself and the correct

butler, Frames of War

The precarity of life imposes an obligation upon us p. 2

to be a body is to be exposed to social

crafting and form, and that is what makes the ontology of the
body a social ontology. In other words, the body is exposed to
socially and politically articulated forces as well as to claims of
sociality-including language, work, and desire-that make
possible the body's persisting and flourishing. 3

And
it is the differential allocation of precarity that, in my view,
forms the point of departure for both a rethinking of bodily
ontology and for progressive or left politics in ways that
continue to exceed and traverse the categories of identity. 3

it would be a mistake to understand the

operation of norms as deterministic. Normative schemes are
interrupted by one another, they emerge and fade depending
on broader operations of power, and very often come up
against spectral versions of what it is they claim to know:
thus, there are "subjects" who are not quite recognizable as
subjects, and there are "lives" that are not quite--or, indeed,
are never-recognized as lives. In what sense does life, then,
always exceed the normative conditions of its recognizability? 4

What we are able to apprehend is surely

facilitated by norms of recognition, but it would be a mistake
to say that we are utterly limited by existing norms of
recognition when we apprehend a life. We can apprehend,
for instance, that something is not recognized by recognition. 5

Production is partial and is, indeed, perpetually

haunted by its ontologically uncertain double. Indeed,
every normative instance is shadowed by its own failure,
and very often that failure assumes a figural form. 7

Precarious life

This means that each of us is constituted politically in

part by virtue of the social vulnerability of our bodies-as a site of
desire and physical vulnerability, as a site of a publicity at once
assertive and exposed. Loss and vulnerability seem to follow from
our being socially constituted bodies, attached to others, at risk of
losing those attachments, exposed to others, at risk of violence by
virtue of that exposure. 20

I think one is
hit by waves, and that one starts out the day with an aim, a project,
a plan, and finds oneself foiled. One finds oneself fallen. One is
exhausted but does not know why. Something is larger than one's
own deliberate plan, one's own project, one's own knowing and
choosing. 21

mourning
would be maintained by its enigmatic dimension, by the experience of
not knowing incited by losing what we cannot fully fathom. 21