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Frames of War Frames of War Frames of War Frames of War When Is Life Grievable? JUDITH BUTLER i'f; .)1 ~ / i VERSO London • New York Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Precarious LifeJ Grievable Life 1 First published by Verso 2009 © Judith Butler 2009 All rights reserved 1 Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect 33 2 Torture and the Ethics of Photography: The moral rights of the author have been asserted Thinking with Sontag 63 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 3 Sexual Politics, Torture, and Secular Time 101 Verso 4 Non-Thinking in the Name of the Normative 137 UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F OEG 5 The Claim of Non-Violence 165 US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 www.versobooks.com Index 185 Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-333-9 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh Printed in the US by Maple Vail Acknowledgments These essays were written and revised between 2004 and 2008. Although some of them have appeared in earlier forms, they have been substantially revised for the purposes of this book. An earlier version of Chapter 1, "Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect," was published by the Centre de Cultura Contempodmia de Barcelona in English and Catalan in 2008. "Torture and the Ethics of Photography" appeared in an earlier version in Society and Space, the journal of the Royal Geographical Society, and in Bilderpolitik in Zeiten von Krieg und Terror: Medien, Macht und Geschlechterverhaltnisse, ed. Linda Hentschel, Berlin: b_books, 2008. Chapter 2 also draws on my essay "Photography, War, Outrage," published in the PMLA in December 2005. "Sexual Politics, Torture, and Secular Time" appeared first in the British Journal of Sociology (59: 1) in March 2008. "Non-Thinking in the Name of the Normative" draws upon a reply I wrote to several responses to "Sexual Politics" in the British Journal of Sociology (59: 2). "The Claim of Non-Violence" draws upon "Violence and Non-Violence of Norms: Reply to Mills and Jenkins," in differences (18: 2) in fall 2007. The argument of the text was elaborated in a series of seminars I gave in viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Paris for the Ecole Normale Superieure and the Ecole INTRODUCTION des hautes etudes in the spring of 2008. I am grateful for discussions I have had with several interlocutors over these last years which informed and changed my thinking: Frances Bartkowski, Etienne Balibar, Precarious Life, Grievable Life Jay Bernstein, Wendy Brown, Yoon Sook Cha, Alexandra Chasin, Tom Dumm, Samera Esmeir, Michel Feher, Eric Fassin, Faye Ginsburg, Jody Greene, Amy Huber, Nacira Guenif-Souilamas, Shannon Jackson, Fiona Jenkins, Linda Hentschel, Saba Mahmood, Paola Marrati, Mandy Merck, Catherine Mills, Ramona Naddaff, Denise Riley, Leticia Sabsay, Gayle Salamon, Kim Sang Ong-Van-Cung, Joan W. Scott, Kaja Silverman, and Linda Williams. I am grateful for the Humanities Research Fellowship at the University of California at Berkeley and Dean Janet Broughton who This book consists of five essays written in response to provided me with the support required to finish this text. contemporary war, focusing on cultural modes of regulating I thank Colleen Pearl and Jill Stauffer for their editorial affective and ethical dispositions through a selective and work on the manuscript (though all errors are emphatically differential framing ofviolence. In some ways the book follows mine). I thank Tom Penn at Verso for encouraging and on from Precarious Life, published by Verso in 2004, especially editing the project. The text is dedicated to my students its suggestion that specific lives cannot be apprehended as who have moved and changed my thinking. injured or lost if they are not first apprehended as living. If certain lives do not qualify as lives or are, from the start, not This manuscript was completed a month after the election conceivable as lives within certain epistemological frames, of Barack Obama to the US presidency, and we have yet then these lives are never lived nor lost in the full sense. to see what concrete ameliorations of war may take place On the one hand, I am seeking to draw attention to the under his administration. In a way, the occasions for these epistemological problem raised by this issue of framing: essays emerged from the wars instigated by the Bush the frames through which we apprehend or, indeed, fail to administration, but I am clear that the reflections contained apprehend the lives of others as lost or injured (lose-able herein are not limited to the vagaries of that regime. The or injurable) are politically saturated. They are themselves critique of war emerges from the occasions of war, but its operations of power. They do not unilaterally decide the aim is to rethink the complex and fragile character of the conditions of appearance but their aim is nevertheless to social bond and to consider what conditions might make delimit the sphere of appearance itself. On the other hand, the violence less possible, lives more equally grievable, and, problem is ontological, since the question at issue is: What is hence, more livable. a life? The "being" oflife is itself constituted through selective means; as a result, we cannot refer to this "being" outside of the operations of power, and we must make more precise the specific mechanisms of power through which life is produced. 2 FRAMES OF WAR PRECARIOUS LIFE, GRIEVABLE LIFE 3 Obviously, this insight has consequences for thinking about precariousness for some and minimize precariousness for "life" in cellular biology and the neurosciences, since certain others. It is not possible first to define the ontology of the ways of framing life inform those scientific practices as well body and then to refer to the social significations the body as debates about the beginning and end of life in discussions assumes. Rather, to be a body is to be exposed to social of reproductive freedom and euthanasia. Although what I crafting and form, and that is what makes the ontology of the have to say may have some implications for those debates, body a social ontology. In other words, the body is exposed to my focus here will be on war---on why and how it becomes socially and politically articulated forces as well as to claims of easier, or more difficult, to wage. sociality-including language, work, and desire-that make possible the body's persisting and flourishing. The more or To Apprehend a Life less existential conception of "precariousness" is thus linked with a more specifically political notion of "precarity." And The precarity of life imposes an obligation upon us. We it is the differential allocation of precarity that, in my view, have to ask about the conditions under which it becomes forms the point of departure for both a rethinking of bodily possible to apprehend a life or set of lives as precarious, and ontology and for progressive or left politics in ways that those that make it less possible, or indeed impossible. Of continue to exceed and traverse the categories of identity. 1 course, it does not follow that if one apprehends a life as The epistemological capacity to apprehend a life is partially precarious one will resolve to protect that life or secure the dependent on that life being produced according to norms conditions for its persistence and flourishing. It could be, as that qualify it as a life or, indeed, as part of life. In this way, both Hegel and Klein point out in their different ways, that the normative production of ontology thus produces the the apprehension of precariousness leads to a heightening epistemological problem ofapprehending a life, and this in turn of violence, an insight into the physical vulnerability of gives rise to the ethical problem of what it is to acknowledge some set of others that incites the desire to destroy them. or, indeed, to guard against injury and violence. Of course, And yet, I want to argue that if we are to make broader we are talking about different modalities of "violence" at each social and political claims about rights of protection and level of this analysis, but that does not mean that they are all entitlements to persistence and flourishing, we will first have equivalent or that no distinctions between them need to be to be supported by a new bodily ontology, one that implies made. The "frames" that work to differentiate the lives we the rethinking of precariousness, vulnerability, injurability, can apprehend from those we cannot (or that produce lives interdependency, exposure, bodily persistence, desire, work across a continuum oflife) not only organize visual experience and the claims of language and social belonging. but also generate specific ontologies of the subject. Subjects To refer to "ontology" in this regard is not to lay claim are constituted through norms which, in their reiteration, to a description of fundamental structures of being that are produce and shift the terms through which subjects are distinct from any and all social and political organization. On the contrary, none of these terms exist outside of their I For related views, see Robert Castel, Les metamorphoses de la question political organization and interpretation. The "being" of the sociale, une chronique du salariat, Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1999, translated body to which this ontology refers is one that is always given by Richard Boyd as From Manual Workers to Wage Labourers: Transformation of the Social Question, Edison, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2005. See also Serge over to others, to norms, to social and political organizations Paugam, Le salarie de la precarite, Paris: PDF, 2000; Nancy Ettlinger, "Precarity that have developed historically in order to maximize Unbound," Alternatives 32 (2007),319-40.
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