I return to these injunctions below. At this point, I simply want to emphasize Butler's account of the conditions of resignifcation as openings to a political future, openings that the return of the fantastic figure of a sovereign risks closing of.
Sovereignty and Resignifcation
In Precarious Life ( 2003), Butler confronts the resignifcations that followed the atacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September u, 2001. The unanticipated future instaled by the insurrectionary efects of t�s resignifcation has unfolded as one of preemptive war, indefinite detention, and ever increasing threats to civil liberties. In the name of freedom and democracy, the United States attac;ked a country that not only had not attacked it but presented no imnent danger. Given that resigrtifcation worked to advance militarism, what role does Butler assign it in this later work?
Assign is likely the wrong term here. Butler does not speak of resignification. She enacts it, though, as she reworks vulnerability and mourning into oppor�ties for connecting With others rather than occasions for securing violated borders. Yet the very sensitivity Butler brings to these moments of vulnerabilty and mournig exceeds a notion of resignification. After al, she is not saying mournig means that one has not undergone a loss. Rather she takes awareness of this loss to be an opportunity to appreciate the way we are given over to others. Feeling loss we are reminded of our deep interconnections. Vulnerabilty and loss, as she puts it, might thus provide new bases for "reimagining the possibility of community:'8 So it is rather inapt to read Butler's method in terms of resignification.
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