Grievable Lives and the Western Gaze A Lacanian-Butlerian Critique of Moral Inconsistency in Gaza and Ukraine

Abstract This essay interrogates the stark asymmetry in Western responses to humanitarian crises in Ukraine and Gaza. Drawing on Judith Butler’s concept of “grievability” and Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory—particularly his notions of the Symbolic, the Real, and the gaze—the paper explores how some lives are publicly mourned while others are structurally excluded from recognition. Butler’s framework helps us understand how normative frames define which deaths are considered tragic and which are rendered invisible. Lacan, by contrast, illuminates the unconscious structures and fantasies that sustain this exclusion—not as a political failure, but as a psychic necessity. The essay argues that this selective moral visibility reflects the West’s ideological investments in its liberal self-image and its deep complicity in ongoing colonial violence. Gaza emerges as the West’s repressed Real—a traumatic kernel that threatens to unravel the fantasy of Western innocence. Ultimately, a meaningful ethical politics requires not only new policy but a reconfiguration of the unconscious architecture of recognition, grief, and symbolic inclusion.