Philosophy
Picture Credits: Gemini AI
Judith Butler’s idea of “grievable” lives asks a brutal question: whose deaths are allowed to matter, and whose are quietly treated as expendable? From microaggressions and killjoys to collective mourning and Palestine, grief studies shows that pain is never just personal, it’s organised by power.
Pedagogy of Loss
Judith Butler’s work on grievability is crucial here. In “Precarious Life and Frames of War”, Butler asks: Whose deaths are mourned? Whose losses are recognised as losses? She shows how entire populations are rendered ungrievable, their deaths not counting as deaths worth public acknowledgement or collective mourning. This is not just about individual psychology but about political structures that determine whose pain matters. The question “whose pain counts?” has to haunt any philosophy of suffering. Scarry described pain’s structure brilliantly, but her examples, the tortured political prisoner, the person with medical pain, both assume a particular kind of sufferer. What about pain that is so ordinary that it is almost rendered invisible? What about pain deemed deserved, exaggerated or politically inconvenient?
This is where grief studies intersects with feminist theory, critical race theory, disability studies, queer theory, and all the theoretical traditions that ask how power determines whose suffering gets recognised. Patricia Williams writes about the pain of microaggressions, not acute torture but chronic erosion. Sara Ahmed describes the pain of being a “killjoy,” pointing out racism and sexism and being told you are too sensitive, making too much of nothing. This is pain that occurs precisely because it is not recognised as pain.
Grief studies also recognise something phenomenology struggled with: grief is not just an individual experience but a collective phenomenon. When a community loses a leader, when a people lose their land and when a generation loses its future, this is grief that exceeds individual consciousness. It requires rituals, collective practices of mourning that acknowledge what has been lost. The Thai-American poet Ocean Vuong writes:: Grief is a world as large as loss.” This is not a metaphor. Grief restructures our entire world, changes what is possible and impossible, and alters time itself. The morning after a loss, one wakes expecting everything to be different, and in one sense it also is, yet one also wakes expecting the person to still be there, and the collision of these two realities is how grief feels.
What grief studies offers philosophy is attentiveness to the social life of pain: how suffering is not just experienced but recognised or denied, how it circulates through communities, and how it is remembered or forced into forgetting. It insists that you cannot understand pain without understanding power.
Reflection: Ungrievable Lives in Palestine
Butler’s concept of grievability becomes painfully concrete when we look at Palestine. Whose deaths are mourned publicly? Whose losses make headlines? Whose names are remembered? The systematic rendering of Palestinian lives as ungrievable, the deaths dismissed as “collateral damage,” the children reduced to statistics, the destroyed homes and hospitals framed as military necessity, exemplifies exactly what Butler warns against. When tens of thousands of Palestinians are killed and the world debates whether their deaths matter, whether their pain is real or exaggerated, whether they brought it upon themselves, we witness the political machinery of ungrievability at work. Grief studies insist that this differential recognition of suffering is not natural but is produced through power structures that decide which lives count as lives and which deaths count as losses. The question “whose pain counts?” is not an abstract theory. It is answered daily through media coverage, political rhetoric and institutional responses that render some suffering visible and urgent while making other suffering invisible or inevitable. If grief studies teach us anything, it is that we must resist this differential allocation of grievability, must insist that all deaths diminish us, that all suffering demands recognition regardless of nationality, religion or political expedience.