Philosophy
What looks like shared human vulnerability is often something far more brutal: vulnerability politically assigned, managed, and made invisible.
The Distribution of Precarity
Judith Butler coined the word that names what we are describing: precarity. Not precariousness, which is that general existential condition of being a body in a world, but precarity: the politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer the failing of social and economic networks, and are differentially exposed to injury, violence and death. The distinction matters enormously. Precariousness is shared. Precarity is assigned. In Frames of War, Butler asks a question that is deceptively simple and genuinely devastating: whose life, when lost, produces grief? Not whose life is valuable in the abstract, most political systems will say, if pressed, that all lives are valuable, but whose life, when ended, appears in the news, generates mourning, demands accountability, and is held as a life that should not have been lost. And whose death is a statistic, a footnote, an acceptable cost. This is the frame: the set of norms, conventions, and media decisions that govern what we are permitted to see and feel. The frame does not merely report on reality; it constitutes the category of the recognisably human. To be outside the frame is not simply to be unrepresented. It is to be placed, systematically, in the zone where loss does not register as loss. Gaza is the test case that Butler herself has returned to with increasing urgency. What has become visible over years of coverage and especially in the period of catastrophic destruction from 2023 onwards is not merely violence but the active management of how that violence is permitted to be seen, named and mourned. The debate is not really about whether people are dying; it is about whether those deaths constitute an atrocity. The frame decides. And the frame, in this case, has been shaped by decades of geopolitical interest, selective empathy and the differential allocation of grievability.Franz Fanon, writing sixty years before Butler, had already mapped the mechanism. In The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon described what he called the zone of non-being: the space created by colonial and racial orders in which the colonised, the racialised, the dispossessed are positioned as less than fully human; not as a matter of rhetoric, but as a structural feature of how the order sustains itself. This is not hatred, exactly, though it may accompany hatred. It is something more systemic and therefore more durable. It is the organisation of society such that certain lives do not require the same protection, the same mourning, the same acknowledgement of humanity. Fanon helps us see that manufactured vulnerability is not a new failure of political will. It is not a lapse or an aberration. It is a design feature of certain orders, orders built on the premise that the full weight of human recognition does not need to be extended to everyone. Colonial history is one long ledger of this premise in action. What Butler adds is the recognition that the mechanism persists after formal decolonisation, that it operates now through subtler instruments, the media frame, the humanitarian exception, the grammar of who is permitted to resist and who is not. To understand precarity is to understand that the vulnerability (explored in Parts One and Two), the openness, the needfulness, the dependence are experienced against a political background that some people never have to think about, and others cannot escape. Our existential vulnerability is shaped by your political position, and the two cannot be cleanly separated.