Butlers Biopolitics:

Precarious Community
Janell Watson (bio)
Beginning with her earliest formulations of performativity and up through her more recent theory
of precarity, Judith Butler offers a sustained reflection on the constitution, production, and
reproduction of marginality. While the concern with marginality has remained constant, her
emphasis has shifted from exclusions based on normative gender and sexuality to exclusions
based on the norms of Western liberal democracy. Consequently, her critique expands from the
psycho-social scene of interpellation to the world stage of global geopolitics, as evidenced
especially in Precarious Life (2006) and Frames of War (2010). Butlers work on gender has always
compared the plight of sexual minorities to that of gender and racial minorities, but she has been
careful to avoid proposing a universal theory of oppression through marginalization and exclusion,
for fear of effacing the historical specificity of diverse social movements. Nonetheless, her recent
work does extend her philosophy of subjectivity to include many types of sociopolitical marginalization. Rather than relying on her theory of performativity to explain the ways in
which liberal norms establish poor, non-Western, or medicalized bodies as abject or less than
human, in her writing of the 2000s Butler develops her own theory of precarity. She defines
precarity and precariousness in terms of life and death, mentioning economic and labor precarity
only insofar as these are necessary to sustaining a viable life. 1 It is perhaps not surprising that
questions of life and death come to the forefront in Precarious Lives and Frames of War, both of
which develop the notion of the precarious in response to the US-led war on terror. Butler makes a
careful distinction between precariousnessthe corporeal vulnerability shared by all mortals
including the privileged, and precaritythe particular vulnerability imposed on the poor, the
disenfranchised, and those endangered by war or natural disaster. Corporeal fragility both equalizes
and differentiates: all bodies are menaced by suffering, injury, and death (precariousness), but
some bodies are more protected and others more exposed (precarity). Precariousness is shared by
all; precarity is distributed unequally (Butler 2010, xvii, xxv, 25). Butlers egalitarian remedy to the
social ills of unequally imposed precarity? Precariousness for all. Vulnerability will serve as the
basis for a new kind of community. Precariousness will save the world from precarity. These
are Butlers precarious propositions.
Rather than seeking to empower the weakthose who are living in precarityButler instead
insists on the vulnerability of those who deny their own precariousness. She reasons that since
precarity is imposed on others by those who refuse to acknowledge their own mortality,
precariousness must be avowed and recognized by slave and master alike. She claims that
avowing precariousness is a social act because precariousness is not simply an existential
condition of individuals, but rather a social condition from which certain clearpolitical demands and
principles emerge (2010, xxv). This raises the question of how a collective deals with its
vulnerability to violence (Butler 2004, 231). Disavowing vulnerability creates political inequalities
resulting in precarity because violence results when the national subject tries to immunize itself
against the thought of its own precariousness by asserting its own righteous destructiveness
(Butler2010, 48). Immunization takes the form of violence directed at the perceived threat. Facing
up to shared vulnerability will circumvent the violent immune response: Mindfulness of this
vulnerability can become the basis of claims for non-military political solutions, she claims.
Conversely, denial of this vulnerability through a fantasy of mastery can fuel the instruments of
war (Butler 2006, 29).
Butlers politics of shared vulnerability thus recalls Roberto Espositos theory of immunization, as
developed in his recently translated trilogyCommunitas, Immunitas, and Bos. Esposito describes
the shared vulnerability that Butler calls precariousness: What men have in common, what makes
them more like each other than anything else, is their generalized capacity to be killed: the fact that
anyone can be killed by anyone else (Esposito 2010a, 13). This provokes what he calls the
immunization response: Life is sacrificed to the preservation of life. In this convergence of the

preservation of life and its capacity to be sacrificed, modern immunization reaches the height of its
own destructive power (2010, 14). For Esposito, the immune paradigm underlies
modern political philosophy at least since Hobbes. Building on Foucault and Agamben, Esposito
takes Nazi biopolitics, especially its camps, to be paradigmatic of modern liberal regimes which
protect the life of the political body by expelling any internal threat. This strain of biopolitics thus
addresses the conundrum posed by modern liberalism: the preservation of life tends to take the
form of allowing, threatening, or imposing death (Dillon 2011). The immunitary paradigm turns
especially deadly when it takes the form of autoimmunity. For Esposito, preventive warsuch as
the US-led war on terrorconstitutes the most acute point of this autoimmunitary turn of
contemporary biopolitics (Esposito 2008, 147).2 Esposito calls for an affirmative biopolitics which
would overturn the immunitary paradigm in favor of a community that avows its fundamental
vulnerability. Rather than conceiving of itself in terms of discrete bodies which together form a social
body, such a community would conceive itself as part of the pre-individuated, de-personalized flesh
of the world. Espositos too is a political philosophy predicated on mortal vulnerability.
At least two prominent political theorists have questioned the political efficacy of Butlers call for
vulnerability. Julian Reid points out that liberal security statessuch as the USAlegitimize their
power by appealing to their populations vulnerability. Reid asks how this same vulnerability can
provide the basis for political resistance if it is already a tool of the surreptitiously oppressive
security apparatus (2011). Jodi Dean also worries that Butlers politics of vulnerability ultimately
contributes to the advance of neoliberalism. For her, Butlerexemplifies an American intellectual left
which has disempowered itself because it is uncomfortable with power, accepting of capitalism, and
unwilling to pronounce the we of political solidarity (2009, 10, 16). Left political conviction ends up
a casualty of friendly fire because of Butlers unwillingness to condemn and denounce, writes Dean
(2009, 123124). She argues that Butler relies on a constrained understanding of sovereignty such
that Butlers politics based on making sure that nobody is offended winds up targeting fantastic
returns of the master rather than exposing the complex intricacies of sovereignty today. These are
politically serious matters, and I share the concerns of Reid and Dean. I would add that, as will be
argued in this paper, Butlers politics of vulnerability is bound up with an aversion to the collective. I
find Espositos notion of communitas instructive in this regard. Both thinkers provide moving
accounts of vulnerability, but stop short of offering concrete remedies for unequally imposed
precarity. Tying their ambivalent portrayal of the collective to their dismantling of selves and bodies,
I demonstrate how, perhaps despite their good intentions, not only Butler but also Esposito remain
captured within the biopolitical limits of liberal discourse (Reid 2011, 776).
Butler contributes to the wider conversation on biopolitics from the perspective of suffering
subjects marginalized and excluded by the current world order. Interestingly, Butler herself
associates biopolitics with the life sciences, implying that she herself is not engaging in this field
(2010, 1618). However, her focus on life and death corresponds to the Foucauldian definition
of biopolitics: the emergence of life as the central concern of the modern political order.3 She is
sometimes cited by others commentators on Foucauldian biopolitics(Campbell 2008;Reid 2011).Her
title Precarious Life and subtitle When is Life Grievable? use the term life as defined by Foucault:
not only biological existence but also mankinds basic needs, concrete essence, and the
realization of human potential (1986, 266267); or according to Giorgio Agambens formulation:
both zo (bare life) and bios (socio-political life). Butler asks how and why this politics of life
differentiates among various populations, protecting some and threatening others, according to
complex distinctions not necessarily imposed by sovereign decree or juridical judgment, but more
often created and upheld by social norms and indirect rule through governmentality (2006, 6768).
Biopolitics is characterized by its contradictory functions of preservation and destruction.
Esposito defines a negative biopolitics of death and a positive biopolitics of life, observing that
Foucault himself hesitated between these two alternatives (2008, 3233). Similarly,
Foucauldian biopolitical critique can, observes Thomas Lemke, be divided into two tendencies: a
positive politics of life (e.g. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri) and a negative politics of death (e.g.
Agamben). For Hardt and Negri, exemplars of the positive view of biopolitics, the life of the

contemporary service-sector (or knowledge) worker provides the vitality for a new, post-subjective
revolutionary collective: the multitude. For Agamben, exemplar of the negative view, the prison
camp provides the matrix for modern biopolitics. Lemke finds Agambens analysis overly juridical
and legalistic, leaving out the important dimension of subjectivation deployed as political technology
(Lemke 2005, 4). Except for a passing reference, Lemke does not include Butler in his new
introduction to biopolitics, even though she remains one of the most prolific analysts of subjectivity
and its relationship to the politics of life and death (Lemke 2011). Her notion of precarious life offers
a more subtly detailed analysis of suffering subjects than does Agambens one-dimensional figure
of the homo sacer. She is much more wary of collectivities than Hardt and Negri, who are in turn
wary of the subject. However, she falls into neither of Lemkes camps, since her analysis
of biopolitics is neither positive nor negative, but double-edged like Espositos, recognizing both
a politics of death (immunization) and a politics of life (the community of shared
precariousness). Butler and Esposito both seek to reverse the immunitary self-defensive reaction to
shared vulnerability, resulting in what Esposito calls affirmative biopolitics. For both, an
affirmativebiopolitics would take the form of a kind of community yet to come, a community that (for
Esposito) affirms life in its fleshly multiplicity and (for Butler) promotes life because it mourns all
death. They argue that this positive form of community can only be grounded in a fundamental
vulnerability and lack. The suffering subjects of the affirmative community share nothing but their
own mortality and their inability to coincide with themselves or to cohere into an organic body politic.
Based on this ambivalence toward community, the two thinkers advance a critique of liberalism that
denounces individualism but which directs the bulk of its critical energies against negative forms of
the collective. Their proposed solutions pay little heed to the state, production, or the economy,
inadvertently leaving the backdoor open to laissez-faire liberalisms weakening of the state,
precaritizing of production, and financializing of economies.

Community Trouble
Butlers ambivalence toward the collective manifests itself in her confusing array of conceptual
registers and lexical choices. Prominent among her theoretical slippages is a tendency to revert to
the subjective register even when discussing the social in general. This might be attributed to what
many critics find to be her thin theory of the social (Lloyd 2008), but I suspect that these slippages
also signal her general mistrust of the collective. Her discussions of community often boil down to
accounts of subject trouble, sliding from collective to subjective entities. Subjective figures in her
work include subjects, selves, individuals, persons, bodies, lives, citizens, the stateless, nonsubjects, the living dead, the humanized, the dehumanized, and so forth. Such subjective figures
appear prominently in her book titles: Subjects of Desire,Bodies That Matter, Giving an Account of
Oneself, Precarious Life. Two of these titles feature nouns in the pluralsubjects, bodies
but Butler does not conceptualize these as collectivities; they remain pluralities. All of these
subjective figures are shown to be menaced by ominous collective entities and their
surreptitious dispositifs: communities, nations, states, sovereigns, governments, agencies, courts,
disciplines, institutions, laws, rights, treaties, the media, discourse, narratives, images, frames,
interpellation, recognition, interpretation, sovereignty, discipline, and governmentality.
Like any oppositional leftist political and cultural theorist, Butler calls into question dominant
powers, but for her the collective tends to appear as the oppressor, as the vehicle of powerful norms
and discourses which hierarchize and exclude. Her poststructuralist subjects are under constant
threat of interpellation from a whispering shadowy collective. She recommends resistance by way of
subversive discursive iteration, an oppositional strategy that does not feature the traditional leftist
figure of collective mass resistance. Although she does acknowledge and endorse social
movements which resist oppressive laws, policies, and exclusions (2010, 147), she hesitates to
promote any kind of mass resistance movement because to do so would risk subsuming disparate
social movements into a homogenizing collectivity. As a result of her emphasis on the subjective at
the expense of the collective, many leftist academics code her work as a-political identity politics or
mere culturalism (Butler 1997).

Butlers call for community in Precarious Life is therefore striking, given her general reticence
regarding collectivities. She proposes reimagining the possibility of community on the basis of
vulnerability and loss (2006, 20). Such a community would grieve the loss of any life, rather than
limiting mourning to members of a bounded group. She claims that grief furnishes a sense
of political community of a complex order (2006, 22). Vulnerability, loss, and mourning seem
compatible with Butlers ongoing concern for the marginalized and excluded, but in her larger body
of writing Butler treats the very concept of community with ambivalence. She denounces the
community of belonging based on nation, territory, language, or culture, demonstrating how such
communities maintain boundaries through the interplay of identity and recognition, upholding
exclusionary norms which in turn constitute the very recognizability by which members belong or do
not belong. Ones responsibility to this exclusionary community is predicated on membership, and
entails protecting the members even if this means exiling or harming non-members (Butler 2010,
36). In contrast, she shows sympathy to minority communities in the context of their oppression or
marginalization by the norm-imposing majority. However, she deliberately avoids evoking a
homosexual community. Instead, loose coalition is her preferred collective form of resistance, as in
her example of global networks which have coalesced to form political coalitions around such
problems as AIDS, the sans papiers, Muslim gays/lesbians, et cetera. These
transnational politicalcoalitions are bound together less by matters of identity or commonly
accepted terms of recognition than by forms of political opposition to certain state and other
regulatory policies that effect exclusions, abjections, partially or fully suspended citizenship,
subordination, debasement, and the like (Butler 2010, 147). These coalitions share common
injuries and common causes, not common qualities or attributes. They are not, however, as
inclusive as the community of vulnerability which Butler has recently set as her political goal.
Espositos work answers the call to imagine community on the basis of vulnerability and
validates Butlers rejection of the exclusionary community of belonging. The problem with
communities is that, as Esposito demonstrates at length in his trilogy, they so often appear in their
negative form. Communities in the negative protect themselves by excluding, threatening, or killing
others. They resort to violence in the name of protecting life. Esposito calls this negative pole
of biopolitics immunitas, the communitys tendency to protect itself by expelling or destroying what it
perceives to be a threat. Butler also exposes this dark side of the community of belonging
predicated on recognition: misrecognition leads to the abjection of that which is other. Abjection in
this context corresponds to Espositos immune response. Achieving the positive version of
community necessitates accepting the shared precariousness of all beings, lifes vulnerability to
finitude and death, and the mourning that results.
Paradoxically, for both Butler and Esposito an originary lacka negation, a voidlies at the
heart of the affirmative community. ForButler, the void is grievable loss. For Esposito, playing on the
etymology of communitas, the void is an obligation, a debt, a gift that will never be reciprocated
(2010a, 6). The common, for him, is not a set of attributes possessed by the members of
community. On the contrary, Common is only lack and not possession, property, or appropriation
(2010a, 139). Likewise for Butler the common experience of vulnerability and loss foregrounds the
relational ties that have implications for theorizing fundamental dependency and ethical
responsibility (2006, 22; see also 1949). This dependency can lead in the negative direction of the
immunitary community, or in the positive direction of the affirmative community which accepts its
fundamental dependency and takes on the ethical responsibility of the one-way giftthe
originary debt to the other. Affirmative biopolitics requires that both subjects and communities affirm
their fundamental ontological dependency on the other and therefore, claims Butler, We need to
think beyond or against groups and communities which function as unified subjects (2010, 145).
Esposito agrees, explaining that If the community always consists of others and never of itself,
then the community is constitutively inhabited by an absence of subjectivity, of identity, of property
(2010a, 138). No property because that which is ones own cannot be common. Common is the
opposite of possession. No possession. No identity. No subjects (Esposito 2008, 6369).

The problem of the collective thus quickly morphs into the poststructuralist problem of the
subject, a typically Butlerian slippage shared by Esposito. According to him the affirmative
community is incompatible with the individual autonomous subject. The subject of knowledge
belongs to the age of the very liberalism that goes hand in hand with modern biopolitics and its
perpetual violence carried out in the name of life (Evans 2011, 753). Liberalisms modern
individuals, who are by definition protected by a social contract, cannot partake in an affirmative
community because said contract exonerates them from their debt to the other. Modern individuals
truly become that, the perfectly individual, the absolute individual, bordered in such a way that they
are isolated and protected, but only if they are freed in advance from the debt that binds them one
to the other. The social contract shields modern individuals from the social contact that threatens
their identity, exposing them to possible conflict with their neighbor, exposing them to the contagion
of the relation with others (Esposito 2010a, 13). The modern immunitary paradigm constitutes the
other as contagion. Its subjects, bodies, and communities close in upon themselves for selfprotection. Self-identity relies on exclusionary immunitary boundaries.
Paradoxically, while the negative community offers protection, the affirmative community exposes
everyone to risk. Esposito makes it clear that communitasthe affirmative communitydoesnt
protect us. Unlike the self-protective immunity promised by the exclusionary proprietary community,
the community of affirmative biopolitics instead exposes its members to the most extreme of risks:
that of losing, along with our individuality, the borders that guarantee its inviolability with respect to
the other (2010a, 140). As a result, the affirmative communitys members are no longer identical
with themselves but are constitutively exposed to a propensity that forces them to open their own
individual boundaries in order to appear as what is outside themselves (2010a, 138). Community
is the relation that makes them no longer individual subjects because it closes them off from their
identity (2010a, 139).
Similarly, Butler locates an ethical violence in the demand for self-identity and complete
coherence, which is to say the demand that we manifest and maintain self-identity at all times and
require others to do the same (2005, 42). Self-identity is violent because it only becomes possible
with the destruction of that which exceeds the bounds of the subject, since for Butler a subject only
emerges through a process of abjection, jettisoning those dimensions of oneself that fail to conform
to the discrete figures yielded by the norm of the human subject (2010, 141). The excess which is
jettisoned exceeds the subject but remains in relation with it, making it impossible for the subject to
coincide with itself. Given that, as Butler points out, the subject can only exist in relation to others,
the subjects very being exceeds itself because it depends on a constitutive outside consisting not
only of its own detritus but also of its social ties to others.
Espositos call for a community predicated on an absence of individuated subjects would seem to
contradict Butlers campaign for equal access to subject-hood. However, although it may appear
that her solution to global inequalities would be to restructure the world such that everyone can be
recognized as a subject, her position is not that simple. The question of the subject is not, for Butler,
a problem of identity or even of the subject but is instead a question of how power forms the field
in which subjects become possible at all or, rather, how they become impossible (2010, 163). This
might suggest that by forming the field differently, subjectivity for all would become possible. This is
not the case either because the subject is always already impossible if by subject one understands
an entity that is autonomous and self-identical.
Both liberal norms and multiculturalism, notes Butler, rely on an ontology of discrete identity for
both subjects and communities. She opposes multiculturalism because multiculturalism tends to
presuppose already constituted communities, already established subjects. These already
constituted communities would be of the exclusionary, identitarian, negative, immunitary sort. Their
discrete identity is of course a fantasy, obscuring identitys need to jettison whatever exceeds the
boundaries that identity itself constructs then imposes. Multiculturalism is, according to this
argument, predicated on an exclusionary politics of discrete communities and can only account for
bounded, individualized, recognized entities. This paradigm of self-identity is especially ill-adapted

to the current global political situation: not everyone counts as a subject, and not everyone belongs
to a viable community. Multiculturalism and liberal subjectivity are not able to deal with
communities not quite recognized as such, subjects who are living, but not yet regarded as lives
(Butler 2010, 3132). What is to be done for these unrecognized communities, subjects, and
lives? Butlers strategy resembles Espositos: disable the fantasy of self-identity that enables the
immunitary response of abjection.
Completing the demolition of the identity-subject-property triad that upholds negative community,
Espositos affirmative community would abolish the social contract that protects property at the
expense of the common. As Butler concludes Giving an Account of Oneself, our willingness to
become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human. To be undone by
another is a primary necessity, an anguish to be sure, but also a chance to vacate the selfsufficient I as a kind of possession (2005, 136). The autonomous self is a possession to be
discarded. This dispossession, which results in a fundamental lack, lies at the heart of affirmative
community. To be human, thus enabling the affirmative community of constitutive vulnerability, is to
be a subject in pieces. For Butler, grieving and mourning for strangers make manifest the noncoincidence of the subject with itself, of a mode of dispossession that is fundamental to who I am
(Butler 2006, 28). To become affirmatively dispossessed is to dissolve a property relation. Selfpossession necessitates immunization. Letting go of possessions enables
affirmative biopolitical community that no longer needs immunization because there is no more
outside.
Instead of cohering into an identifiable body politic, the affirmative community is itself stripped of
subjective self-identity. It is equally problematic for a state to assume the form of a bounded
collective subject. Butler cites the example of the United States post-2001 which, she says,
constituted itself as
a sovereign and extra-legal subject, a violent and self-centered subject. . . . It shores itself up, seeks to
reconstitute its imagined wholeness, but only at the price of denying its own vulnerability, its dependency, its
exposure, where it exploits those very features in others, thereby making those features other to itself
(2006, 41).

This passage suggests that denying vulnerability leads to a blatant disregard for the lives of
others. Mourning the loss of its sense of entitlement to the world, argues Butler, is a necessary step
for the United States if there is to be hope for establishing a worldwide democratic political culture
(2006, 40). In other words, since the United States has denied its own vulnerability, it is condemned
not only to securitize itself, but also to magnify and exploit the others vulnerability. Precariousness
(disavowed by the USA) versus precarity (imposed on the others by the USA).
The impossibility of self-identity, for an individual or for a collective, makes immunity susceptible
to escalation into destructive auto-immunity. Esposito notes that medicine speaks of an
immunological self. Immunization works by separating out the non-self from the self. This leads to a
contradiction. If, as is generally believed, the fundamental task of the immune system is to reject
what is other than self, we must necessarily exclude the possibility that it can be aimed directly at
itself. From an immunological standpoint, the self is defined only negatively, based on what it is
not (Esposito 2011a, 175). However, adds Esposito, things are not so straightforward if one
examines the grammatical paradox of the third person reflexive pronoun. Adding the to self
nominalizes the term. The self is both pronoun and noun. Furthermore, the third person pronoun
functions very differently than the first- and second-person pronouns. I, me, we, us, and you
designate nothing outside of the act of utterance, outside of the presence of the interlocutors.
Conversely, the third person pronouns he, she, one, they, them, et cetera, by definition designate
someone who is absent. This makes the third-person pronoun impersonal (2011a, 176). We is the
most dangerous pronoun of all, claims Esposito. Its better that I become one (Campbell 2010,
149). One epitomizes the impersonal.

Butlers lexical choices play on the ambiguous status of the third person pronoun in a key
statement on collective violence, part of which Ive already cited. Halfway through the paragraph,
she shifts tellingly shift from the noun collective to the impersonal personal pronoun one.
Elaborating on the question of how a collective deals with its vulnerability to violence, she
suggests a few lines later that perhaps there is some other way to live in such a way that one is
neither fearing death, becoming socially dead from fear of being killed, or becoming violent, and
killing others, or subjecting them to live a life of social death predicated upon the fear of literal
death (2004, 231, my emphasis). In speaking of the relation to others, Butler could have used any
of a number of termsself, subject, human being, person, and so on. That she did not indicates the
inadequacy of any of these terms to denote all who are exposed to precariousnessan exposure
shared by all living beings. The impersonal, claims Esposito, serves the lexical purpose of indicating
a universal individuation which is neither subject nor self nor liberal individual. The impersonal
includes even those excluded by claims of human rights because they are not recognized as
human. One can belong to the affirmative community without being recognized as a person or as
a human. Butlers discussion of the nonhuman human, which preoccupies her
throughout Precarious Lives and Frames of War, resonates with Espositos theory that the notion of
the person operates as deadly dispositif.
One is not born a person, as Roman law made clear, notes Esposito. In more recent times, the
concept of the person has been promoted as a conceptual instrument of peace, he explains. He
recalls that the category of the person was adopted with enthusiasm after World War II, with the
hope that as opposed to the nationalistic concept of the citizen, a potentially universal notion such
as that of person would allow for the strengthening and expanding of the fundamental rights of
every human being. Given that the Nazis had wanted to crush human identity into mere biology, it
seemed that only the idea of a person could reconstitute the broken link between human being and
citizen, spirit and body, right and life. Unfortunately, bemoans Esposito, the category of the person
actually widens the gaping hole between rights and humanity. He traces the person dispositif back
to Aristotles definition of man as a rational animal (2010b 124, 128). He elaborates:
For some to be awarded the label of person, a difference needs to be identified from those that are no longer
persons, are not yet persons, or are not persons in any way. The dispositif of the person . . . superimposes and
juxtaposes humanity on human beings and animality on human beings; or that distinguishes the part of humanity that
is truly human from another that is bestial, that is enslaved to the first
(2010b, 128129; see also Esposito 2011b).

In this way, the category of the person divides and separates persons from nonpersons, humans
from the inhuman, zo from bios, the immune from the common (Campbell 2010, 149). In this
sense, the person dispositif separates life from itself. Given its ability to divide and separate life
from life, the dispositif of the person is also the conceptual instrument through which one can put
some part of the person to death (2010b, 128129). 4
Just as the category of the person implies nonpersons, the category of the human,
observes Butler, produces a host of unlivable lives whose legal and political status is suspended
(2006, xv). This suspension of life, its reduction to bare life or zo, works within the dispositif of the
person, functioning as the conceptual instrument through which some part of the human can be put
to death, to paraphrase Esposito (2010b, 129). Butler describes the exclusionary process which
consists in imposing the categorical distinction of human versus non-human according to the
normative conceptions of the human (Butler 2006, xv). This makes possible a process of
dehumanization which becomes the condition for the production of the human to the extent that a
Western civilization defines itself over and against a population understood as, by definition,
illegitimate, if not dubiously human (Butler 2006, 91). As evidenced by the term population in this
sentence, desubjectivation, dehumanization, and de-personalization operate not only at the level of
the subject, but in the modern period also at the level of the population.

In discussing dehumanization Butler slips back and forth between subjects and populations.
Population becomes the new subject of modern sovereigntys security apparatuses, claims Foucault
(Foucault 2007, 42, 79). Although the population may lack subjectivity and personhood, it is not
impersonal in Espositos sense because it was created as a unit by the security states forces of
governmentality. A population is no mere compilation of individual subjects, but rather an entity
created by modern governments, disciplines, or institutions. A collective does not become a
population until the emergence of modern techniques of aggregation: comprehensive measures,
statistical assessments, and interventions aimed at the entire social body or at groups taken as a
whole (Foucault 1986, 267). Population is a sort of Butlerian performative, creating the collective
entity that it names. Following Foucault, Butler defines governmentality as the management of
populations, and declares that the US government is managing a population when it constitutes
various collectives as humanly unrecognizable, as it has done repeatedly during the war on terror
(Butler 2006, 98). These collective entities can then be mobilized toward various ends. In targeting
populations, war seeks to manage and form populations, distinguishing those lives to be preserved
from those whose lives are dispensable (Butler 2010, xviiixix). Precarity is, according to Butler, a
form of governmentality, which is to say the maintenance and control of bodies and persons, the
production and regulation of persons and populations, and the circulation of goods insofar as they
maintain and restrict the life of the population (2006, 52). Subjects and populations suffer precarity
imposed by the menacing collective. As Foucault put it, The power to expose a whole population to
death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individuals continued existence (cited in Reid
2006, 28).
As Butler explains, in waging its war on terror, one of the ways in which the US government
manages populations is to constitute them as less than human and therefore as not entitled to
human rights (Butler 2006, 98). For her as for Agamben, those prisoners indefinitely detained by the
United States at Guantanamo prison were neither living nor dead, but existed in a state of bare life
(Butler 2006, 6768; Agamben 1998, 1; Agamben 2005, 4). The war on terror deploys ethnic, racial,
and cultural difference in order to produce a normative definition of the human which justifies its
differential treatment of those deemed less than human. Butler offers extreme examples: when a
persons body becomes an instrument of war, as in the case of suicide bombers or civilians acting
as human shields, that person does not count as a living being but is one of the undead, deprived of
life before being killed (2010, xviixxx). The discourse and imagery which frame the war on terror
have cast Muslims in general as inhuman (Butler 2010). Muslims have been reinvented by the US
security apparatus as a population to be contained.

Antigone as Political Zombie

Butlers slippages between subject and population become especially apparent in her choice of
Antigone as a figure for analyzing modern democracy. Antigones Claim (Butler 2000) presents the
figure of the living dead as a single subject of an ancient monarchial regime. Frames of
War (Butler 2010) recounts the trials and travails of modern populations rendered less than human.
At one point she compares ancient Antigone to modern oppressed populations, even though the
latter are manipulated in a different dimension, on a different scale, and using different logics.
Foucault clearly delineates between subject and population in relation to sovereign rule, explaining
that with the emergence of the security state, The multiplicity of individuals is no longer pertinent,
the population is (2007, 42). As Foucault convincingly demonstrates, The population as
a political subject, as a new collective subject absolutely foreign to the juridical and politicalthought
of earlier centuries is appearing here in its complexity, with its caesuras (2007, 42).
Antigone suffers from the kings imposition of exile and loss of citizenship. The kings sovereign
decree performatively transforms her into a political zombie: she is not immediately killed, but
condemned to a life which is not a life (Butler 2000, 23). Antigones brother had been killed in a
regicidal war against her uncle the king, who in revenge forbade his proper burial. The dead brother
was thus condemned to an undead status, and she joined him; the dead yet undead brother and the
corporeally living but socially dead sister. The kings decree makes Antigone a victim of

Espositos dispositif of the person: banishment renders her a non-person. Although she is killed as a
person, she retains her animal life at least for a while. Antigone allegorizes the fragile subject
downtrodden by a hegemonic collective, for even when non-subjects like her are not the victims of
genocide, neither are they being entered into the life of the legitimate community (Butler2000, 81).
The legitimate community here is a negative collective of the type that secures its self-coherence
through violent exclusion. The negative community legitimizes its immunitary expulsions based on
standards of recognition [that] permit for an attainment of humanness. Once again, Butler has
staged a collective playing the bad guy: the community in its negative form. Antigone dwells in the
sphere of the excluded, not negated, not dead, perhaps slowing dying, yes, surely dying from a lack
of recognition (2000, 81). Exiled Antigone is dying, socially and corporeally, from lack of recognition
by the others who have banded together as a negative community which expelled her as a threat to
its working order, just as the immune system deals with disease. 5
The living dead Antigone thus prefigures Butlers subsequent discussions of subjects who are not
subjects, who are neither alive nor dead, neither fully constituted as a subject nor fully
deconstituted in death (2006, 98). Several years after the publication of Antigones
Claim (2000)and in the midst of the US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, in an
interview Butler compares stateless and desubjectivated Antigone not only with war prisoners extralegally deprived of Geneva Convention protection, but also with many twenty-first-century
populations, including new immigrants, the sans-papiers, those who are without health insurance,
those who are differentially affected by the global economy, questions of poverty, of illiteracy,
religious minorities, and the physically challenged (in Antonello and Farnetti, 2009). Ancient
Antigones condition of socially dead non-person is certainly shared by members of these
downtrodden populations of the twenty-first century. There are, however, crucial differences.
Antigone is a single subject oppressed directly by a single sovereigns decree, whereas most of her
contemporary counterparts suffer primarily under the inequalities inflicted indirectly by tactics of
what Butler loosely calls governmentalitysocial norms, media coverage, economic globalization,
inadequate infrastructures, various policies which may be only indirectly imposed by states, and so
on.6
In the same interview, Butler recasts Antigone as a war critic who opposes the arbitrary and
violent force of sovereignty (in Antonello and Farnetti, 2009). However, in comparing Antigone to
the enemy combatant prisoners and civilian victims of a modern liberal state, Butlerjuxtaposes two
different figurations of the political subject: the subject of right in direct relation to a sovereign and
the population-as-subject governed by a modern security state (Foucault 2007, 79). Consequently
she also conflates various types of sovereignty. Jodi Dean has taken Butler to task for her limited
account of sovereignty (2009, 124136). To Deans examples, I would add Butlers comparison of
Antigone to contemporary suffering populations. In her fixation on their shared status
of political zombie, Butler ignores the very different forms that sovereignty takes across the
millennia. To be fair, it must be said that Butler deliberately slips registers, intentionally but
unconvincingly blurring the distinction between ancient sovereignty with modern governmentality.
She tries to move beyond Foucault in positing an interpenetration of sovereignty and
governmentality as the US has waged its war on terror. She argues that George W. Bush acted as a
sole sovereign when he suspended the law in order to impose invasive security measures on the
civilian population, to establish the Guantanamo Bay prison as an extra-judicial zone, and to declare
the Guantanamo Bay prisoners non-enemy combatants not protected by the Geneva Convention.
Summing up the Bush administrations tactics, Butler writes that sovereignty comes to operate on
the very field of governmentality: the management of populations (2006, 98). Conceding that even
for Foucault governmentality and sovereignty can coexist, she says that nonetheless Foucault could
not have imagined that sovereignty would, in its suspension of the rule of law in the name of the war
on terror, reemerge in the context of governmentality with the vengeance of an anachronism that
refuses to die (2006, 5354).
I agree with Dean that the U.S. president is in no way a sovereign, and underscore her point by
adding the example of Antigone (2009, 134). Even though Bush, Cheney, and Rove claimed

executive powers only available to them under a state of emergency, the executive branch of the
U.S. government is hardly comparable to ancient King Creon. Even as the U.S. president assumed
wartime powers, the administration had to operate in concert with a powerful legislature and legal
system. They also found it necessary to manipulate public opinion, as Butler herself argues
in Frames of War. In order to create and manipulate various populations, the Bush administration
relied on the governmentality tactics that Butler includes in her notion of the frame: images,
narratives, videos, memorials, and so on. Oddly, she claims that sovereignty deploys frames and
manipulates populations, stating that sovereignty functions differentially, targeting and managing
certain populations, denying the humanity of some subjects, differentiating populations on the basis
of ethnicity and race, extending its claims through the systematic management and derealization
of populations (Butler 2006, 68). King Creon did not need the public relations machinations of the
modern security state, nor did he need to create Foucauldian populations; he merely issued direct
decrees to his subjects. In contrast, the Bush administration had to use sophisticated frames to turn
Afghani and Iraqi civilians into faceless populations of political zombies.
The primary war function of frames, according to Butler, is to create a sort of negative community
of grief, a community that mourns only for its own and thereby relegates others to social death
(2006 (2010). Butler was perplexed that, given the understandable outpouring of grief for 9/11
victims and for American casualties from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, in contrast, few Americans
showed any remorse for the many innocent Afghani and Iraqi victims who died in even greater
numbers. She demonstrates at length that Washington DC deployed frames to foster this
nationalistic one-sided mourning on the part of Americans. It is in trying to explain this widespread
public indifference to the suffering of Muslim civilians that she calls for a community of mourning.
The death of someone who has been dehumanized cannot be mourned because they are always
already lost or, rather, never were, and they must be killed, since they seem to live on, stubbornly,
in this state of deadness (Butler 2006, 34). According to this Western liberal logic, social death
makes corporeal death ungrievable.
Whether or not one accepts Butlers theory of impossible grief as an explanation for unevenly
imposed precarity, this globally unequal imposition of precarity is certainly a political concern for
leftists, and Butler portrays it touchingly. However, she is less convincing when she promotes
vulnerability for all as an oppositional politics. For her, Antigone commits a political act of defiance
when she declares to King Creon that she will bury her brother. Butler opens Antigones Claim by
asking what happened to feminist defiance of the state, complaining that contemporary feminists
turn to the state to seek juridical redress for injuries inflicted by that same state (2000, 1). 7 Antigone
instead defiantly refuses to seek justice from the abusive state. She turns her back on the state
even though exile from it means certain death. Abandoning the leftist tradition of collective uprising
against the sovereign, Butler portrays a single woman who accepts banishment without actually
trying to change the way the sovereign oppressor wields power. This backing away from power is
why Dean quite rightly characterizes Butlers recent work as an ethics without a politics. Antigone
takes a moral stance, but does not try to intervene in the regime that victimized her.

Bad Bodies
While promoting his own problematic politics of vulnerability, Christopher Peterson points out yet
another conceptual slippage in Butler: a conflation of corporeal and social death. Butler uses the
terms spectral and spectrality to denote social death, the bare life lived by those upon whom
precarity has been imposed by a declaration of their inhumanity. In contrast, for Jacques Derrida
spectrality refers not to social death but to a process of originary mourning that animates corporeal
life (Peterson 2006, 155). Derridas spectrality thus corresponds to what Butler calls
precariousness. Peterson demonstrates that in Precarious Life Butler conflates social and corporeal
death, and appears to neglect the existential experience of finitudeDerridas spectrality. Peterson
finds Butler too corporeal because she ties social death directly to the threat of actual biological
death (AIDS, lynching, war, et cetera). The same could be said of Antigones Claim, which shows
social death directly leading toward corporeal death. When Butler talks about mourning, she tends

to talk about mourning corporeal death, unlike Derrida who is more interested in mourning mortal
finitude. However, Peterson writes before Frames of War, in which Butler introduced the distinction
between precariousness (finitude) and precarity (social death). Petersons conclusion remains
relevant, despite Butlers emendation of precariousness with precarity. He is right that Butler fixates
on corporeal threat (reversing the common criticism that Butler neglects the body). Peterson
proposes that, following Derridas version of spectrality, The abjection that sexual and racial
minorities endure is a mode ofredoubled ghostliness that displaces onto these same minorities
the spectrality [precariousness] inherent to all life (155156). Petersons point is that the social
death inflicted on the abjected minority reassures the majority by allowing the latter to overlook their
own finitudetheir shared precariousness. Socially dead minorities help the majority deny their own
vulnerability (Derridas spectrality, Butlers precariousness). Peterson argues that
queer politics would do well to shift its attention from social death to the shared but disavowed
condition of spectrality (precariousness). He recommends insisting on finitude, the precarious
condition shared by all mortals, in order to expose how the social death of racial and sexual others
is produced in and through the disavowal of the spectral (156). He concludes that the ultimate act
of queer politics would be to resist the racist and heterosexist disavowal of spectrality that
motivates the abjection of certain populations (173). In short, like Butler and Esposito, Peterson
proposes the avowal of shared finitude as a political strategy. Vulnerability for all.
Butlers conflation of social and corporeal death is, however, deliberate. The bodys vulnerability
is not merely physical. Bodies are socially vulnerable because from before its birth, the body is
dependent on and threatened by others; sociality is the bodys condition of survival and of its peril
(Butler 2006, 20; 2010, 54). Butler thereby redefines the body as socialityjust as in her earlier
work she redefined sex as gender. The bounded individual body dissolves into social dependency,
just as individual sexual organs disappear under the weight of socially normative gender. Slipping
from bodies to lives, she writes that we are, from the start and by virtue of being a bodily being,
already given over, beyond ourselves, implicated in lives that are not our own (Butler 2006, 28, my
emphasis). She insists that the subject (bios) and the body (zo) can never coincide, that our
bodies are not quite ever our own given the bodys invariably public dimension (2006, 26).
Biological vitality is not Butlers primary concern because, she argues, for humans there is no viable
biological life without social life insofar as life requires various social and economic conditions to be
met in order to be sustained as a life (2010, 14). Whether in the shared situation of precariousness
or the unevenly allocated situation of precarity, the body finds its survivability in social space and
time. Corporeal vulnerability amounts to this exposure or dispossession given that attachment is
crucial to survival (Butler 2010, 55; 2006, 45). In short, bodies are bound up with others through
material needs, through touch, through language, through a set of relations without which we
cannot survive (Butler 2010, 61). Butler thusly describes the bodys inherent sociality in order to
counter the liberal myth of the bodys bounded individuality.
Despite her concern with corporeal death, Butler always proceeds with caution when dealing with
the biological dimension of biopolitics. She rejects vitalism in stating that a postulated internal drive
to live will not sustain the socially dependent body (2010, 21), but she does note that the injured
body lives on, breathes, responds, formulates affect, and she adds that life is stubborn (2010, 61,
62). This is as far as she goes in acknowledging the vitality of life. This is where Butler and Esposito
begin to diverge. Esposito pushes the biological dimension much further. He observes that lifes
biological materiality had been almost entirely absent from the sphere of political philosophy prior to
Foucault. Butlers characteristic slippages from biology to sociality are perhaps as much a
symptoms of political philosophy as of her well-known aversion to the body. Despite their different
stances in regard to biology, both thinkers make the point that the old philosophy of the unified,
bounded, subjectified body presupposed individuation. Butler dissolves the body into sociality, in the
hopes that de-individualized vulnerability will enable the sharing of grief. Esposito dissolves the
body into the vulnerability of shared flesh.
Just as Esposito recommends abandoning the concept of the person, so he advocates
dispensing with the concept of the body. He argues in favor of a fleshly politics (2008, 150154).

The political philosophy of the subject of knowledge was predicated on the notion of the body but
had little or nothing to say about flesh (Esposito 2008, 166167). For example, Hobbess monstrous
but organistic body politic is devoid of flesh. 8 The discrete identities of liberalism are based on an
outdated organistic model which conceives the individual and the social bodies as bordered,
bounded, self-sufficient organisms. Organism is in fact an abstraction, an overly simplified theory
which ignores the bodys facticity by instead imposing a schematic grid of mechanistic systems
(respiratory, nervous, muscular, and et cetera). This organistic model assumes that every members
fully individuated body is in turn unified in a political body closed in on and coinciding with itself
(Esposito 2008, 158). The immunitary paradigm operates according to the organistic model, which
allows for the presumption that inferior bodies have to be expelled or destroyed lest they infect the
social body, the extreme manifestation of this model being the Nazis negative biopolitics. The
organistic, unified political body always produces an immunitary short-circuit (Esposito 2008, 158).
To overcome the political bodys deadly auto-immune responses, Esposito proposes a politics of the
flesh which, he claims, has been made possible by the eclipse of the organistic body
in political philosophy after its twentieth-century experiences with totalitarianism.
Esposito contrasts the organistic bodys presumed unity against the multiplicity of the flesh. He
writes that flesh is naturally plural, citing Merleau-Ponty (2008, 164). Life emerges out of
multiplicity; individuation is secondary, he explains, quoting Gilbert Simondon (Esposito 2008, 179
180). A new politics of the un-individuated flesh would overcome the immunitarian tendencies of the
old organistic body by recognizing that individuation is only one moment of life. Ashes to ashes,
dust to dust. New possibilities open up now that for the first time the politicization of life doesnt
pass necessarily through a semantics of the body (because it refers to a world material that is
antecedent to or that follows the constitution of the subject of law) (2008, 166). Instead of a
theological notion of the flesh, Esposito is talking about the flesh as such: a being that is both
singular and communal, generic and specific, and undifferentiated and different, not only devoid of
spirit, but a flesh that doesnt even have a body (2008, 167). The old liberal subject of the
Hobbesian body politic dissolves into the flesh of the world. Life is no longer conceived in terms of
individual bodies, but as a world flesh. All living things must be included in the unity of life.
Accordingly, no part can be destroyed in favor of another (2008: 194). If all the world were
apprehended as one flesh, there would be no foreign bodies. This would necessitate a new concept
of social health, since immunity would no longer make sense if there were only flesh and no bodies.

Conclusion: Liberal Logic?

As appealing as I find Espositos shared world flesh, I remain concerned that his analysis overlooks
the immense differentiations imposed by the unequal distribution of precarity, the uneven exposure
to the vicissitudes of the global economy. To state the obvious, some bodies suffer much more than
others. Will the recognition that all share the same world flesh actually help those who suffer? Will
those who routinely enjoy the pleasures of the flesh really care about others who endure chronic
fleshly pain? At least Butler theorizes the inequalities of vulnerability in its actually existing
manifestations. However, neither Butler nor Esposito address problems of production, distribution,
and governance. Both write movingly about the violence dissimulated by the liberal state, offering a
critique that is worthwhile and insightful. However, celebrating universal mortality hardly seems the
basis for a viable leftist politics, which I would task with finding ways to address precarity. It seems
to me necessary to imagine a different kind of state. Otherwise, instead of merely sharing
precariousness, well all share precarity as well. Without some sort of state, means of production,
and mechanism of distribution, there can only be precarity for all. That to me would not be an
improvement on the present untenable situation.
The neglect of the state and of the economy is perhaps less a problem that the disturbingly
laissez-faire quality to Butlers and Espositos politics of vulnerability haunted by the specter of
death. Even if it manages to launch a politics of life, the politics of precariousness risks falling into
the same systemic naturalism championed by neoliberalism. Liberalism organizes society so that it
appears to function on its ownmuch like Butlers shadowy figures of discourse-wielding power.

The situation comes to seem naturalizedas when Butler claims that the subject cannot destroy
the interpellating powers that brought it into being. Foucault explains that security tries to get the
components of reality to work in relation to each other (2007, 47). This is why neoliberalism can
advocate non-interference even while maintaining an effective security apparatus. The game of
liberalismnot interfering, allowing free movement, letting things follow their course; laisser-faire,
passer et allerbasically and fundamentally means acting so that reality develops, goes its way,
and follows its own course according to the laws, principles, and mechanisms of reality itself
(Foucault 2007, 48). Even as Butler shuns the state, as when championing Antigone in exile, she
advocates foregrounding the reality of social dependency and corporeal mortality rather than
attempting to modify the machinations of the state. She therefore falls into the security states own
strategy of turning her reality to itspolitical advantage.
The social sciences contribute to liberal naturalization, transforming the social sphere into so
many self-perpetuating systems that can be studied like the weather. For Reid, twenty-first-century
liberal regimes state of permanent mobilization against terror is rooted in the organization of society
according to the needs of war, and therefore its strategies for indirectly managing populations derive
from military science (2006, 1718). In contrast, for Butler the economic sciences provide the logic
of population management. She is still following Foucault in this regard, since governmentalitys
principal form of knowledge is political economy (Foucault cited in Dean 2008, 110).Butlers shift in
emphasis from disciplined subjects to managed populations is reflected in her economic vocabulary.
Although for her the economic is only one dimension of precarity, she relies on several economic
concepts in describing the worlds vulnerable populations. She writes that Lives are supported and
maintained differently, and there are radically different ways in which human physical vulnerability is
distributed across the globe (Butler 2006, 32). Distribution is an economic phenomenon related to
several others. For example, she writes that war is precisely an effort to minimize precariousness
for some and to maximize it for others (2010, 54). Minimizing and maximizing are economic
concepts. Lives that matter are lives with worth, with value, that countto cite some of the
other economic vocabulary scattered throughout Precarious Lives and Frames of War.
While Butlers primary concern may be with inequality and herpolitical aim a more radical and
effective form of egalitarianism (2010, xxii), her analysis relies on the economic notion of
distribution. Precariousness is distributed equally among all living beings, while Precarity is
distributed unequally or, at least, strategies to implement that unequal distribution are precisely what
is at work in war and in the differential treatment of catastrophes such as famine and earthquakes
(2010, xvii). Precariousness establishes a certain equality of exposure, but current
global political conditions deny this equality in favor of a differential distribution of precarity (2010,
xxv). Butler is describing a biopolitical economy of corporeally vulnerable lives. I am defining
economy broadly to include not only the exchange of goods, resources, or money, but also and
especially distribution and valuation in an economy which manages populations by regulating life
and death, withholding or conferring the biopolitical power to protect. Her economics of vulnerability
seems to operate as a perpetual motion machine watched over by an invisible hand. This makes it
hard to reimagine a more nurturing state and a more just economy. These were the dreams of
communism and socialism, and despite the failures of the communisms and socialisms that have
actually existed, I think that it would be politically fatal if the left gives up the quest for better means
of governing, producing, and distributing. Precarity is the problem, but precariousness is not the
solution.
Janell Watson
Janell Watson is Associate Professor of French at Virginia Tech and Editor of the minnesota review. She is the author
of Literature and Material Culture from Balzac to Proust and Guattaris Diagrammatic Thought: Writing between
Lacan and Deleuze. Her current research project explores the thought of Michel Serres in relation to biopolitics and
eco philosophy. Janell may be contacted at rjwatson@vt.edu

Notes

1. On precarity as political cause, see Neilson and Rossiter 2008. For an excellent elaboration on Butlers use of
precarity as well as on many other possible uses of precarity beyond economics narrowly defined, see Ettlinger 2007.
2. Julian Reid calls the contemporary war on terror a biopolitical war because it destroys life in the name of
protecting life (Reid 2006, 62). Brad Evans concedes that contemporary wars are not all alike, but like Reid he
identifies a twenty-first-century biopolitical warfare waged in the name of the liberal defense of peace, human rights,
and justice (Evans 2011). Modern liberal politics wages war in the name of peace.
3. There are of course numerous non-Foucauldian approaches to biopolitics. Of these, many directly involve the
biological sciences, focusing on issues such as eugenics, biotechnology, medical ethics, the environment, or animalhuman relations (for an overview see Lemke 2011).
I would add that Butler becomes biopolitical as she and other feminists move from the early Foucault of discipline to
the final Foucault of biopolitics and biopower (Taylor and Vintges, 2004).
4. Rather than making everyone a person, Esposito advocates altogether eradicating the regime of the person
(2010b, 122124). He would replace the person with the impersonal because the impersonal blocks the mechanism
of distinction and separation that creates the categories of those who are not yet persons, who are no longer
persons, or who have never been declared persons (2010b, 130131). Rights should be impersonal, he suggests,
because only the impersonal applies to everyone.
5. Nancy Fraser claims that the lack of recognition by the other corresponds to mere social recognition, although
according to Butler such recognition is as political as it is socio-cultural. This is because social norms of recognition
are intimately bound up with administrative, legal, governmental, and even economic practices. Moreover, lack of
recognition can lead to suffering and death, a point that Butler attempts to dramatize through Antigone. See their
debate in Butler 1997 and Fraser 1997. For a commentary on the debate see Smith 2008.
6. It seems to me that Butler superimposes governmentality onto ideological state apparatuses.
7. In the 1990s Wendy Brown expressed concern about the political consequences of Foucauldian feminism at that
time because, she argued, many of Foucaults disciples had neglected to study the bureaucratic state and the
organization of the social order by capital as the sites of power that they are (Brown 1995, 16). This, she says, led to
a neglect of the state and of political economy. She explains that, reacting against the dominant Marxian structuralism
of his time, Foucault had wanted to account for the decentering of the state and of political economy in the modern
constitution of power, and so he explicitly advocated that research turn away from state apparatuses and their
supporting ideologies. Although he developed the notion of governmentality in his late writing, for Brown
his political map remains inadequate because he still largely ignores the state and the economy (Brown 2006, 79
83). Paying attention to the state and to political economy is important because, again according to Brown, the
ideology of liberalism obscures their function. Butler has more to say about the state than about political economy
(although she sometimes alludes to economic precarity, she does not explicitly discuss economic issues).
8. Esposito presumes a body politic that looks very much like the one on the cover of Leviathan. Eugene Thacker
provides a more nuanced history of the notion that includes the possibility of monstrous, mystical, or multiplicitous
bodies (2011).

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