Despite the continual displacement of nearly every established conception of the human, the figure of the human remains a powerful idea for political and ethical theorising. In the era of human rights, the language of dehumanisation has become a dominant frame for accounting for and criticising a wide range of abuses and social harms: from the crimes of slavery to indefinite detention to the torture of ‘enemy combatants’ to the indiscriminate use of drone attacks. Likewise, the human has come to mark a status that promises protection from the ‘dehumanising’ effects of violence, discrimination and other modes of injustice. Judith Butler's recent work on the concepts of precarity and grievability have contributed to this discussion by providing an important analysis of the conditions that we call human and by pointing towards an ethical grounding for politics. As such, Butler's ethical turn towards the precariousness, vulnerability and grievability of life has been simultaneously praised for its perspicacity as an analysis of current state practices and condemned for depoliticising these conflicts in favour of the assertion of a ground for ethics (see Dean 2008; Honig 2010 and 2013).

Instead of retreading the depoliticising perils of this ethical turn, this essay argues that Butler - both before and after her ‘ethical turn’ - presents two distinct images of the human that track competing drives for subversion and survival that mark all of her work. These conceptions of the human - and of subversion and survival - carry with them very different political effects. First, in her recent focus on ‘grievability’ and the precariousness of human life, Butler offers a view of the human as a subject position necessary for one's life to matter and bear political agency. With this image, Butler participates in the now-familiar discourse that presents the victims of violence, oppression or the denial of human rights as inhabiting a space in which they are rendered inhuman, invisible, spectral or derealised. This figure of the human, I suggest, tends to obscure as much as it reveals and to exclude as much as it promises to include. It risks overstating the power of the ‘human’ to protect us from state and social violence, and it tends to overlook, and thus undervalue, the agency and worth of lives that fall outside the dominant norms of the ‘human’.