Butler Frames of War - When Is Life Greivable.pdf

(7136 KB) Pobierz
Frames of War
Frames of War
When Is Life Grievable?
JUDITH BUTLER
i'f;
~
.)1
i
/
VERSO
London • New York
Contents
First published by Verso 2009
©
Judith Butler 2009
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Precarious Life
J
Grievable Life
vii
1
Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F OEG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
www.versobooks.com
Verso is the imprint of New
Left
Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-333-9
1 Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect
2 Torture and the Ethics of Photography:
Thinking with Sontag
3 Sexual Politics, Torture, and Secular Time
4 Non-Thinking in the Name of the Normative
5 The Claim of Non-Violence
Index
33
63
101
137
165
185
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
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,
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
provided me with the support required to finish this text.
I thank Colleen Pearl and Jill Stauffer for their editorial
work on the manuscript (though all errors are emphatically
mine). I thank Tom Penn at Verso for encouraging and
editing the project. The text is dedicated to my students
who have moved and changed my thinking.
This manuscript was completed a month after the election
of Barack Obama to the US presidency, and we have yet
to see what concrete ameliorations of war may take place
under his administration. In a way, the occasions for these
essays emerged from the wars instigated by the Bush
administration, but I am clear that the reflections contained
herein are not limited to the vagaries of that regime. The
critique of war emerges from the occasions of war, but its
aim is to rethink the complex and fragile character of the
social bond and to consider what conditions might make
violence less possible, lives more equally grievable, and,
hence, more livable.
INTRODUCTION
Precarious Life, Grievable Life
This book consists of five essays written in response to
contemporary war, focusing on cultural modes of regulating
affective and ethical dispositions through a selective and
differential framing of violence. In some ways the book follows
on from
Precarious Life,
published by Verso in 2004, especially
its suggestion that specific lives cannot be apprehended as
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
conceivable as lives within certain epistemological frames,
then these lives are never lived nor lost in the full sense.
On the one hand, I am seeking to draw attention to the
epistemological problem raised by this issue of framing:
the frames through which we apprehend or, indeed, fail to
apprehend the lives of others as lost or injured (lose-able
or injurable) are politically saturated. They are themselves
operations of power. They do not unilaterally decide the
conditions of appearance but their aim is nevertheless to
delimit the sphere of appearance itself. On the other hand, the
problem is ontological, since the question at issue is:
What
is
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.

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika:

Zgłoś jeśli naruszono regulamin