To grieve, and to make grief itself into a resource of politics, is not to be resigned to inaction, but it may be understood as the slow process by which we develop a point of identification with suffering itself […] Then we might critically evaluate and oppose the conditions under which certain human lives are more grievable than others. From where might a principle emerge by which we vow to protect others from the kinds of violence we have suffered, if not from an apprehension of a common human vulnerability?
Judith Butler, Precarious Life, 2004 # 33
Politicize grief
Invitations to contemplate these words and play with your thoughts
Collections that include this source
Keep exploring
- According to myths, Europa was named after an Asian princess. Europa was abducted by Zeus, who had transformed himself into a bull, while she was picking flowers with her friends on the beaches of Tyre, a city in modern-day Lebanon. The animal carried her from Asia across the sea to Crete, where it …
Where does Europe begin where does Europe end
Who are we actually capable of grieving?
Grief has traditionally been associated with proximity. We grieve those who are close to us: family, friends, neighbours, people whose lives have somehow entered our own. But in a mediated world, proximity has become much more complicated. We can grieve for people thousands of kilometres away on our screens; we can know their face, hear their voice, follow their story — and yet remain unable to grieve for others who might be quite close.
The distribution of grief is not accidental. It follows existing political and social hierarchies. Some deaths immediately become European tragedies; others remain statistics. Some victims are named, photographed, mourned and commemorated, while others disappear into numbers, borders and categories.
And this is where Europe becomes interesting: Europe's borders do not only determine who may enter Europe. They also, in a sense, determine whose suffering enters European political and emotional space. The people who die while trying to reach Europe are not necessarily geographically distant from us — they die at Europe's borders. Yet their deaths can remain outside the circle of European grief.
So perhaps we need to think about a politics of grievance as a politics that asks whose suffering becomes a matter of collective concern in the first place.
What would it mean to politicise grief itself? To make visible the unequal distribution of grievability? To refuse the idea that proximity — and therefore our capacity to grieve — should be determined by passports, borders, race, wealth or political belonging?
Perhaps this is one way of reading Butler: not simply asking us to grieve more, but to ask how our capacity to grieve is organised.
What if we put grief on the agenda of the European Parliament?
Meike Gleim, 2026of our Imagination
