Judith Butler's Precarious Life. The Powers of Mourning and Violence develops an ethics and politics to resist these tendencies.analysis of US discourses in response to the events of 9/11. She examines the indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay, censorship of public debates, the nation-building politics of mourning, and the demonisation of the Middle East in the media. The central theme of this book is how norms are established to define who counts as human and who is excluded from humanity.

In this review in Borderlands Susanne Buckley-Zistel says that:

Drawing on Emmanuel Levinas, Butler argues for a fundamental dependency between ourselves and an other, which reveals itself in the moment of loss and vulnerability as in the case of the US experience in 2001. Loss and vulnerability are ultimately linked to being socially constituted bodies since it is the attachment and therefore exposure to an other that puts us at risk of violence (p. 20). In her own words, "[i]f my fate is not originally or finally separable from yours, then the "we" is traversed by a relationality that we cannot easily argue against; or, rather, we can argue against, but we would be denying something fundamental about the social conditions of our very foundation" (p. 22). Consequently, the moment of grief might encourage us to challenge our understanding of ourselves as autonomous and sovereign entities. It is a moment when we are outside of ourselves and outside of our control.