Marginalizing the Victim and the Political Body of the People

The article examines Judith Butler’s performative approach to the concept of the people, which allows to not only outline the boundaries of a certain model of political theology, so important for conservative political thought, but to also see the significance born by the acts of entry by collective bodies into public space. In this context, the figure of the victim can have a consolidating function, being the potentially affectively condensed point of the collective body’s assembling. The marginalization of the victim’s body is analyzed through the concept of the politics of grief and that of ungrievable lives. The victim’s marginalization is shown to be a multidimensional phenomenon. Not only the victim, but also the criminal can be marginalized, as well as various circumstances of catastrophic events and acts of violence. Examples taken from the Russian news in recent years illustrate how important the independent media audience’s perception of victims are: whether they perceive the victims they are informed about as marginal or as pertinent to their own lives and identities, whether the audience is ready to shift the boundaries toward greater inclusivity and to reinstate