Is what is happening so far from me that I can bear no responsibility for it?

In your post be sure to explain, in your own words, what you believe Butler is trying to express in the quote you chose; how it relates to the issue of ethics and vulnerability; how these ideas of ethical obligations and vulnerability relate to your own lived experience as a working American.1. Is what is happening so far from me that I can bear no responsibility for it?

. Sometimes, not always, the images that are imposed upon us operate as an ethical solicitation…

Is there a Levinasian* undercurrent in this moment of having to listen to the voice of someone we never chose to hear or to see an image that we never elected to see? (p. 136)*Emmanual Levinas was a French-Lithuanian philosopher who, during his years as a prisoner of war, developed an ethics based on the face of the Other with its “infinite moral demands.” See article for more details.

4.  evacuate my situation in an effort to secure the distance that allows me to entertain ethical feeling and even feel myself to be ethical. (p. 138)5. The set of ethical values by which one population is bound to another in no way depends on those two populations bearing similar marks of national, cultural, religious, racial belonging. (pp. 139-140)6. [F]rom unchosen cohabitation, Arendt* derives notions of universality and equality that commit us to institutions that seek to sustain human lives without regarding some part of the population as socially dead, as redundant, or as intrinsically unworthy of life and therefore ungrievable. (p. 145)*Hannah Arendt, a famous Jewish-American philosopher best known for her work in post-Holocaust ethics. See article for more details.7. If we try to understand in concrete terms what it means to commit ourselves to preserving the life of the other, we are invariably confronted with the bodily conditions of life and so, a commitment not only to the other’s corporeal persistence but to all those environmental conditions that make life livable. (p. 147)8.

We struggle in, from, and against precarity. Thus, it is not from pervasive love for humanity or a pure desire for peace that we strive to live together. We live together because we have no choice, and though we sometimes rail against that unchosen condition, we remain obligated to struggle to affirm the ultimate value of that unchosen social world, an affirmation that is not quite a choice, a struggle that makes itself known and felt precisely when we exercise freedom in a way that is necessarily committed to the equal value of lives. (p. 150)All quotes taken from this week’s article, “Precarious life, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Cohabitation” by Judith Butler

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