A man walks down a busy street in Manhattan while, unbeknownst to him, a hooded figure steps up behind him and aims a gun at his back. While the video is shocking, and although I have a moral aversion to acts of violence such as Brian Thompson’s killing, I still struggle to find footing in how I feel about the events that transpired in early December.
Other reactions have been similarly mixed. While news anchors and politicians have decisively condemned Thompson’s murder, netizens on the other hand have been so extreme as to mock his demise and raise Luigi Mangione, Thompson’s killer, to the status of a “folk hero”. While there exists a consensus that murder is wrong, Thompson’s role as the CEO of UnitedHealth, one of the United States’ largest health insurance companies, makes him complicit in the deaths of many more people. The words of one New Yorker encapsulate this tension: “It’s hard for me to feel sad that the CEO was killed […] I’m uncomfortable that violence was used. But also, it’s nice to finally have some pushback.”
Interpreted through the lens of philosopher Judith Butler’s conception of “grievability”, the friction between the unethicality of murder and a sense of justice is potentially illustrative of the ignition of a new wave of not only class consciousness, but of a collective will that has remarkably bridged political divides in an increasingly polarized political climate.
What makes life grievable?
It may be instinctive to associate death—the ending of a life—with grief. However, it is not true that all life is grieved equally. Conceptualizing grievability in the context of war, Butler highlights how grief as a public act is distributed unequally, raising the example of the pictures, names, and memorials for the victims of 9/11 in contrast to the relative anonymity of the war dead in Iraq.1 So what exactly makes some lives more grievable than others? The answer to this lies in the concept of human life’s precariousness.
Butler asserts that all life is precarious, meaning that it “requires various social and economic conditions to be met in order to be sustained as life”.2 To say that a life is precarious is “to say that a life can be lost, destroyed, or systematically neglected to the point of death”.3 While precariousness is a shared aspect of human life, precarity, on the other hand, is a lived experience—a politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death.4 Different levels of grievability are hence what reinforces the heightened precarity of marginalized individuals; not only do they face a greater degree of precarity in the maintenance of their lives through the oversight or intentional neglect of social systems and the state, this condition of precarity remains unrecognized—and as a result, unsolved—because their lives are ungrievable in the public eye.
One of the most important implications of Butler’s idea of precariousness and grievability is the importance of social connection. In short, the fact that all life is precariousness should spark the recognition—or at least the apprehension—that we are mutually responsible for one another in ensuring that the basic conditions for human life’s sustenance are met.5 Because our lives are precarious, we must rely on others to provide the conditions that allow us to continue living.
Precariousness, grievability, and the American healthcare system
The lack of public grieving for Brian Thompson’s death seems to conflict with Butler’s formulation for what makes life grievable. Thompson is almost America’s ‘everyman’: white and a family man with humble beginnings. Only two things set him apart: his wealth, and more importantly, his status as the CEO of one of the US’s largest health insurance companies.
Health insurance, or lack of access to it, has been a unifying force among most Americans. This cause’s claim to such a strong rally effect is because of the universal need for healthcare; healthcare (and health insurance by extension) directly addresses the issue of precariousness as a condition of human life. This contention is particularly accentuated in the United States. Despite the country spending significantly more on healthcare, life expectancy in the United States is a shocking three years lower than the OECD average. Moreover, while the marginalization of traditionally oppressed groups is attributable to a lack of access to healthcare, leading to the ungrievability of these lives, health insurance in the United States is so inaccessible that it frequently affects those outside these marginalized groups.
In other words, health insurance can be classified as an umbrella cause6—it reaches across social and economic classes, race, ethnicity, and regions. Because of the lack of access to quality healthcare, average Americans (no matter their particularities) face at least the same basic degree of precarity they can mutually recognize.
Unity in the face of political polarization?
In short, the reaction to Thompson’s death signifies a shift in the collective American conscience away from the grievability of one public life, but the recognition—or at least, in Butler’s terminology, the apprehension—of our shared precariousness and the differing degrees of precarity that render life difficult to grieve in the first place. Altogether, this aligns with Butler’s prescription for our approach to how we perceive the world—governed through politically constructed ‘frames’—as consisting of social connections that necessitate mutual attention, and in turn, responsibility. This momentous event and the responses it has generated has marked a development in our collective understanding of the social nature of precariousness and the value of human life—not of just one, but of all of those who have been swept away from public view.
Thus, the political implications of this shift are consequential, particularly taken in the context of America’s growing bipartisan divide. Most importantly, a unifying trend has been led from the bottom up, punctuated by statements emphasizing the shared concerns of “the American people” and the class divide over a partisan one. For tangible change—far-reaching and long-lasting—to occur, however, the question remains: how long can this coalescence of political interests and perspective be sustained? How many more lives must be lost until grief becomes reason enough for a serious apprehension of our shared precarity?
- Frames of War 38-9 ↩︎
- Ibid.,14 ↩︎
- Ibid ↩︎
- Ibid., 25 ↩︎
- Ibid., 33-4 ↩︎
- Or in the parlance of radical democratic theory, an ‘empty signifier’ ↩︎
Edited by Margaux Zani
The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and they do not reflect the position of the McGill Journal of Political Science or the Political Science Students’ Association.
Featured image by Freestock
References:
Butler, Judith. (2016). Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? Verso Books.