After 9/11 the problem of “ungrievable lives” has taken a central place in Judith Butler’s philosophical work. However, in her latest works, she tries to imagine a new kind of political mobilization not only capable of breaking into the hegemonic cultural framework, which is responsible for the exclusion of some lives from the human domain, but also capable of putting at centre-stage the bodily dimension of all human beings with their needs and demands. In the first part of this article I give a brief overview of the processes of disavowal and derealisation, focusing especially on the media representation of contemporary wars that influence our cognitive schemes by applying a different human value to other populations and social groups. In the second part of the article I discuss the bodily mobilizations of those very subjects whose lives are made unworthy and unliveable by virtue of current “frameworks of intelligibility”.
