Grief, Protest, and the Value of Life

As of the 11th of April 2021, 127 thousand lives have been lost to Covid-19 in the UK. Reportedly the biggest drop in population since the Second World War,[i] it would be reasonable to describe this tragedy using chancellor Rishi Sunak’s favourite term: ‘unprecedented’. The loss of life on this scale has been largely unknown in the western world for several decades. Yet, there has been very little possibility of public mourning, beyond the melancholy-yet-lukewarm messages of a government who has consistently prioritised economic success over human lives.

The inability of public mourning leaves the deaths unmarked; in a sense we have not yet resolved their loss. As the philosopher Judith Butler reminds us, it is grief — the pain felt at the loss of a life — that marks the lost life as valuable.[ii] That a life is grievable expresses the meaning of a loss, that it is lived and felt by those who survive the deceased, whose continued life is marked by an absence caused by death. This grief is not a mere mood, but an affect — it is an emotion that is lived and experienced politically. Where it can be felt in public and where it is relegated to the private are not accidental divisions, but expressions of the organising forces that shape the spaces within which we move and appear. It is at once a banal and crucial observation to note how these forces treat different subjects unevenly — marking certain people more grievable than others.

Many people think that grief is privatising, that it returns us to a solitary situation and is, in that sense, depoliticising. But I think it furnishes a sense of political community of a complex order, and it does this first of all by bringing to the fore the relational ties that have implications for theorising fundamental dependency and ethical responsibility. If 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 it, but we would be denying something fundamental about the social conditions of our very formation.

Judith Butler, Precarious Life, pp. 22–23

This has been morbidly exemplified in the telling disparity with which two recent cases of public mourning have been treated. The first of these was the vigil for Sarah Everard on the 13th of March and the resulting police brutality. The second of these is the death of and state response to the death of Prince Philip on the 9th of April.

Everard’s kidnapping and murder have become another standard around which we have rallied to ignite discussions on the safety of women in public spaces. She was 33 years old. These conversations constitute another wave of feminist responses to patriarchal injustice, appearing alongside the previous wave of like responses. We know that this will not be the last time we need to have this conversation. A conversation many women are forced to re-enact, often performing for those who cannot or will not hear their concerns. It is a silence (or a silencing) that reproduces the possibility of further violence, further death.

These losses are felt, they are grieved — predominantly in private. On the 13th of March, however, they were lived collectively in public. Unsurprisingly, the response of the police was an unapologetic application of violent force.[iii] Despite the particularly active role played by the police in the very necessity of the vigil, predominantly male bodies acting for the state exerted dominating strength over those gathered — producing a series of emblematic photographs depicting women bound and forced to the ground. In a barely concealed display of the law existing only to replicate its own mechanisms of control — the police investigated themselves and found no evidence of wrongdoing.[iv] The excuse given? That the gathering breached the social distancing policies required to keep us safe — that the gathering could be harmful. So the police committed violent acts in order to prevent harm, justifying themselves with the claim that ‘it’s for your own good’.

Concurrently, the Police, Crime, Sentencing, and Courts Bill — a change to law that expands police powers to intervene against public protest — enters into the public conversation. The motivation for this bill is in places openly attesting to the limits of policing,[v] the numerous occasions at which public demonstration ‘threatens’ to overwhelm the ‘proper’ authority of the state. The appearance of a public in public now becomes dangerous not solely because of Covid-19, but because such a gathering — an appearance fundamental to the possibility of democracy — cannot be controlled. It is illegal not because of the risks such a gathering poses to human life — as is the important rationale behind ‘social distancing’ restrictions — but because such gatherings are themselves beyond control. Again, this is surreptitiously deployed as an argument for security and safety, from a perspective of ‘we need to be able to control the public for their own good’. The state unpicks the bedrock of democracy — our ability to appear together in public and the legal structures that secure this — supposedly in the name of our protection. Though the risks of Covid-19 are very serious and very real, the virus serves as a rhetorical weapon to justify suspending the lifeblood of democracy.

Through the suppression and forced disbandment of this vigil, the structures of the state have declared the effective ungrievability of Sarah Everard. Though Everard shall be privately mourned, as shall many other victims of patriarchal violence (many of which remain almost completely invisible), the mourning cannot take place in public. Though it can take place online, in the virtual publics of social media — and though this is an important element of public mourning in and of itself — the fact remains that the act of physically coming together to mourn has itself been turned into a locus of violence.

Precisely because a living being made I, it is necessary to care for that being so that it may live. Only under conditions in which the loss would matter does the value of the life appear. Thus, grievability is a presupposition for the life that matters

Judith Butler, Frames of War, p. 14

When life cannot be mourned, the loss of that life cannot truly be experienced as a loss. Within British public life, then, the state has made it clear that Sarah Everard’s murder shall not be marked as a loss — a gesture that itself calls into question whether she was truly recognised as alive to begin with. Of course, there are many far less visible than Everard, those who experience vectors of oppression that she did not — but the same logic is at work here: a logic that discriminates between the ‘real’ lives that count, and those that do not.

Violence against those who are already not quite living, that is, living in a state of suspension between life and death leaves a mark that is no mark. There will be no public act of grieving (said Creon in Antigone).

Judith Butler, Precarious Life, p. 36

Contrarily, the death of Prince Philip has activated the statist machinery of mourning. As a royal, the Prince’s life is permitted a symbolic status that becomes synonymous with a mythological British nationhood — his relationship with the Queen becoming an extension of the body of the nation. His death has been mourned, his loss has been grieved, and this grief has been permitted in public: no droves of police have come to harass these mourners, they have chosen not to ‘simply enforce the law’. Flowers left in memory of the deceased Prince are symbols of loving one’s country,[vi] lighting candles for a murdered woman is, however, an act of dissent that cannot be permitted. Though no more than a single individual, no more worthy or valuable if we are to take seriously the ethical implications of democracy, his death has been permitted to become a public affair — whereas the lives lost in the pandemic have been mourned almost exclusively in private.

Despite the current legal restrictions in the UK limiting funeral attendance to a maximum of 30 people,[vii] it is unclear whether or not exceptions shall be made for the life deemed exceptional.

Yes, Everard was also a single person. But her death was murder, a deliberate act of killing committed by another human being — an act that takes its place as ‘only’ the most recent such killing in a tapestry of misogynistic violence. Under patriarchy, the loss of her life will be just another statistic to many ‘detached’ spectators, but for others Everard has become a symbol of the ongoing need to struggle and resist the forms of patriarchal violence that have become normalised into the daily routines of so many. The ritual of memorial and mourning expressed this, and the actions of the police speak to the state’s disregard for what her murder, and the pain shared by those who go to remember her, means. When weighing the lives of the Prince and Everard, the state is not simply arbitrating between two individuals, but between two different kinds of death — each of which has acquired a distinct symbolic value.

The state forbids the public rituals that recognise one kind of loss and its symbolic quality, whilst simultaneously endorsing identical rituals for another case. One of these is allowed to matter more than the other. One life is allowed to matter more than the other. One life is allowed to matter more than 127,000. Prince Philip is one of history’s ‘great men’, some might say — the implication that therefore Everard does not matter is resoundingly clear. And perhaps she never did. The Prince is a wonderful public servant, Everard was probably asking for it. So turns the machinery of rhetoric.

Yes, it is important to appreciate that the pandemic has complexified our notion of solidarity. The unity implied by this term has often been embodied through proximity — through a physical standing side-by-side, or through gathering. What Covid-19 has necessitated is an inversion of this popular image of solidarity. Care for the other, so often conceptualised as closeness, as a hand reaching out to bolster or comfort, now finds its expression in distance, in withdrawal. The very act of collective gathering that underscores our political lives has become a threat. No longer a source of strength, physical unity had become deadly. The rituals of public mourning have too been disrupted; with the ways in which we routinely mark the loss of another’s life themselves becoming dangerous. Yet, to use Covid-19 as an argument against public protest is to ignore the causes that necessitate such gatherings.

When public congregation becomes a threat to the very public that congregates, then appearing together entails a risk that must be seriously considered. But appearing together always entails a risk, particularly when this appearance takes the form of protest. Of course, 2020 saw the necessity of widespread protests across the western world — particularly assemblies attesting that Black Lives Matter across the US — with echoing demonstrations — expressions of this solidarity — occurring all across the world. Many condemned the Black Lives Matter protests for the supposed threat they posed to public health, though many such critics clearly care little for combatting or opposing racial injustice in meaningful, structural ways.

Through using Covid-19 as a weapon against those protest legitimate injustices, one subordinates one type of responsibility to another: treating the responsibility to distance as more important than the responsibility to resist. But once this hierarchy is established, it is far easier to forget that one has temporarily suspended the responsibility to exist, to suspend that responsibility more permanently. This is a perspective that insists on responses to injustice occurring in a timely fashion, as if the violations of rights and the violence against which we are called to protest should be regulated for their convenience. For those who believe this, protest is always just a bit too disruptive. But protest is meant to disrupt, and that they are disrupted attests to a protest’s success.

So, yes, the right to protest, a right currently being eroded by the UK Parliament, is the right to appear in public, it is the right to be a public, the right to speak. But protest is more than a mere right — protest is a public expression of our taking seriously the responsibilities we owe to one another. Appearing in public to oppose racial oppression and racist violence, or to protest the murder of a women through the combined machinery of the state and patriarchy — these are both instances where the appearance in public is upholding our fundamental democratic duty to live together. These protests are embodied enactments of the democratic project. They express that we live together, and that this togetherness entails responsibility and care. Conversely, the numerous protests against the Covid-19 regulations defy this very spirit; sure enough, they oppose government policy, but not out of a sense of democratic duty, but out of a desire to cut the ties of responsibility to others. They are gatherings that do not declare any togetherness, but instead are public acts of standing alone, of saying ‘to hell with everyone else’ in a valorisation of a mythical sovereign individuality.

This different conditions of permissibility for public protest occasion stark reflections on the value of human life in the eyes of the state. The solemn sentiment of ‘we’re all in this together’ has been proven consistently false over the course of the pandemic. The rich have become richer,[viii] the marginalised and oppressed have made up most of the lives taken by the infection. It is therefore clear that, despite what many invoke to undermine Black Lives Matter, it is not the case that all lives matter — because not all lives are equally grievable. The ethics of democracy require that all be of equal value in public, and that though we may enjoy deep personal relationships in private — these relationships must not create disparities in our political lives, must not cause us to disregard the ethical value of other lives. And yet, should we attempt to attest to that equality through demonstrating our pain and rage at the machinery of patriarchal and state violence, we legitimise ourselves as targets in the government’s eyes. Again, a government that has wilfully prioritised an economy that works solely for the elite, over the lives of their citizens.

But of course, ‘Boris is doing his best’, right?

[i] Russel Lynch, ‘UK Population “in Biggest Fall since Second World War”’, The Telegraph, 14 January 2021 <https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2021/01/14/uk-population-biggest-fall-since-second-world-war/> [accessed 4 November 2021].

[ii] Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso Books, 2006).

[iii] BBC News, ‘Sarah Everard Vigil: Met “cannot Apologise” for Actions of Officers’, BBC News, 17 March 2021 <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-56414446> [accessed 4 November 2021].

[iv] Vikram Dodd and Jamie Grierson, ‘Sarah Everard Vigil Report Strongly Defends Police’s Use of Force’, The Guardian, 30 March 2021 <https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/mar/30/police-handling-of-sarah-everard-vigil-appropriate-says-watchdog> [accessed 4 November 2021].

[v] Dominic Casciani, ‘What Is the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill and How Will It Change Protests?’, BBC News, 22 March 2021 <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-56400751> [accessed 4 November 2021].

[vi] Sam Baker, ‘“You Were an Example to Us All”: Mourners Shed Tears for Prince Philip as They Place MORE Flowers Outside Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle despite Pleas to Pay Respects from Home’, The Daily Mail, 4 November 2021 <https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9458737/Mourners-shed-tears-Prince-Philip-place-flowers.html> [accessed 4 November 2021].

[vii] Department of Health and Social Care, ‘Https://Www.Gov.Uk/Government/Publications/Covid-19-Guidance-for-Managing-a-Funeral-during-the-Coronavirus-Pandemic/Covid-19-Guidance-for-Managing-a-Funeral-during-the-Coronavirus-Pandemic’, Gov.UK, 2021 <https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-guidance-for-managing-a-funeral-during-the-coronavirus-pandemic/covid-19-guidance-for-managing-a-funeral-during-the-coronavirus-pandemic> [accessed 4 November 2021].

[viii] Chase Peterson-Withorn, ‘The World’s Billionaires Have Gotten $1.9 Trillion Richer In 2020’, Forbes, 16 December 2020 <https://www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2020/12/16/the-worlds-billionaires-have-gotten-19-trillion-richer-in-2020/?sh=38e6e5487386> [accessed 4 December 2021].

Works Cited

Baker, Sam, ‘“You Were an Example to Us All”: Mourners Shed Tears for Prince Philip as They Place MORE Flowers Outside Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle despite Pleas to Pay Respects from Home’, The Daily Mail, 4 November 2021 <https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9458737/Mourners-shed-tears-Prince-Philip-place-flowers.html> [accessed 4 November 2021]

BBC News, ‘Sarah Everard Vigil: Met “cannot Apologise” for Actions of Officers’, BBC News, 17 March 2021 <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-56414446> [accessed 4 November 2021]

Butler, Judith, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (United Kingdom: Verso Books, 2016)

— — — , Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso Books, 2006)

Casciani, Dominic, ‘What Is the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill and How Will It Change Protests?’, BBC News, 22 March 2021 <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-56400751> [accessed 4 November 2021]

Department of Health and Social Care, ‘Https://Www.Gov.Uk/Government/Publications/Covid-19-Guidance-for-Managing-a-Funeral-during-the-Coronavirus-Pandemic/Covid-19-Guidance-for-Managing-a-Funeral-during-the-Coronavirus-Pandemic’, Gov.UK, 2021 <https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-guidance-for-managing-a-funeral-during-the-coronavirus-pandemic/covid-19-guidance-for-managing-a-funeral-during-the-coronavirus-pandemic> [accessed 4 November 2021]

Dodd, Vikram, and Jamie Grierson, ‘Sarah Everard Vigil Report Strongly Defends Police’s Use of Force’, The Guardian, 30 March 2021 <https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/mar/30/police-handling-of-sarah-everard-vigil-appropriate-says-watchdog> [accessed 4 November 2021]

Lynch, Russel, ‘UK Population “in Biggest Fall since Second World War”’, The Telegraph, 14 January 2021 <https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2021/01/14/uk-population-biggest-fall-since-second-world-war/> [accessed 4 November 2021]

Peterson-Withorn, Chase, ‘The World’s Billionaires Have Gotten $1.9 Trillion Richer In 2020’, Forbes, 16 December 2020 <https://www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2020/12/16/the-worlds-billionaires-have-gotten-19-trillion-richer-in-2020/?sh=38e6e5487386> [accessed 4 December 2021]