This work seeks to examine the differential values placed on human life as emerged in the post-9/11 political discourse. We lost 2,983 American lives on 9/11/2001, and in the past decade, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have claimed 911,931 Iraqi and Afghani lives. Judith Butler calls these as “ungrievable” lives, for to grieve them is to declare oneself unpatriotic to the US nation, and sympathetic to the “enemy”. It seems that the 9/11 victims are the gold standard of a grievable life. This work seeks to apprehend the value of one American life in terms of non-American lives. How does the scale tilt in terms of grievable and ungrievable lives?
With this work, I seek to perform the unpatriotic act of mourning and remembering the humanity of the ungrievable 911,931 civilians that lost their lives in the decade after 9/11.
