Reading Precarious Life: A Dialogue on Grievability, Institutional Valuation, and the Grammar of Mourning

⸻ I. Butler’s Underlying Logic: From Levinas to Political Ontology The underlying logic of Precarious Life involves a double movement. Butler relocates Levinas’s “ethics of the face” from the terrain of metaphysics into that of political ontology. Levinas argues that the face addresses us with the injunction not to kill. Butler asks a prior question: whose face is permitted to appear as a face?…