Ungrievable and Grievable Lives: Socio-analysis in the Era of Biopower

The article tests an approach to the problem field of socioanalysis – the suffering from society – departing from a basic biopolitical distinction proposed by Judith Butler: between ungrievable and grievable lives. This distinction, into which the anticipation of death and dying is coded, is thematized in two aspects. In the context of the analyhtic of biopower, it is considered as heuristic with regard to a possible concept of biopower unconscious, as well as to outlining the category of ‘radical otherness’ in the field of biopolitics today. In the context of socioanalysis, the figure of (un)grievability, as proposed by Butler, is analyzed with an interest to the work of mourning and the related modalities of intersubjective time in death and suffering. The surviving and the impossible synchronization between lives in the meeting with death are conceived as a constitutive condition for the practices of caring-for (correspondingly, of therapeutic dispositives) permeated by strategies of giving – or taking – time. In conclusion, the diagnosis of the present time as ‘biopolitical management of the ungrievable’ and reduction of grief is related to the problem, raised by the late (‘anthropological’) Bourdieu, of the power to dispose of the time of the Others.