Precious Life

Butler’s use of obtuse language almost hides the reasons for her writing about the atrocities that American military and media try to cover up regarding the September 11 attacks. Yet her points are well taken and can be used not only for a poor administration at that time, but an ongoing tragedy of visible censorship.
Butler wrote “Precious Life” at a time when the current American policies governing the war in Iraq, the treatment of Palestinians and the state of Guantanamo prisoners were being over militarized. She argues that the destruction of the World Trade Center did not justify these violent measures. As she puts it: "those US boundaries were breached, that an unbearable vulnerability was exposed, that a terrible toll on human life was taken, were, and are, cause for fear and mourning. Butler’s Precious Life is an attempt to create a sense oppositional voices that are not feared or degraded but valued. Butler mourns that America cried for war and gave up being a part of a global community by heightening nationalist discourse and extending surveillance mechanisms.
Butler explains the reasons why certain people’s voices cannot be heard, certain images cannot be shown and certain people’s lives cannot be grieved publicly in the post-911 in the U.S. is due to the operations of a form of racism that is directed at “they” cannot be counted as normal human beings like “us."
Butler discusses in this chapter the way in which human beings are tied together to one another even in the form of loss and vulnerability. She reminds us of the simple truth that we can be injured and that others can be injured as well. The human condition of interdependence and vulnerability should be the basis of reimagining instead of destroying the possibility of community.