JUDITH BUTLER is Maxine Elliot Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of many books, including Giving an Account of Oneself, Precarious Life, and Gender Trouble. Frames of War When Is Life Grievable? JUDITH BUTLER‘This paperback edition first published by Verso 2010 First published by Verso 2008 ‘© Judith Butler 2010 All rights reserved ‘The moral rights of the author have been asserted 13579108642 Yerso UK: 6 Meard Street, London WIF 0EG- US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201, ‘wwrw-versobocks.com ‘Verso isthe imprint of New Left Books ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-626-2 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data ‘A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Libary Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data ‘A catalog record for this book is avalabe from the Library of Congress ‘Typeset by Hewer Text UK Led, Edinburgh Printed in the US by Mapie Vail Contents Acknowledgments Introduction to the Paperback Introduction: Precarious Life, Grievable Life 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vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Paris for the cole Normale Supérieure and the Ecole des hautes études in the spring of 2008. Tam grateful for discussions I have had with several imterlocutors over these last years which informed and changed my thinking: Frances Bartkowski, Etienne Balibas, Jay Bernstein, Wendy Brown, Yoon Sook Cha, Alexandra Chasin, Tom Dumm, Samera Esmeit, Michel Feher, Eric Fassin, Faye Ginsburg, Jody Greene, Amy Huber, Nacira Guénif-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. 1am gratefal 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. T 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 essays emerged from the wars instigated by the ration, but am clear that the reflections contained 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 character of the social bond and to consider what conditions might make violence less possible, lives more equally grievable, and, hence, more livabl Introduction to the Paperback Edition ‘This volume gathers a set of essays that return in different ‘ways to common themes. There is no single argument here, but rather a ‘ways in which vis recruitment and descriptive, but critical and oppositional. After all, there are conditions under which war is waged, and we have to know them if we are to oppose war. Indeed, the opposition part, through remaking the and probability. Similarly, if have to understand how popular ted and maintained, in other words, ‘acts upon the senses so that war is thought to be an inevitability, something good, or even a source of ‘moral satisfaction. ‘Any effort to understand must consider how wars are waged and the technology of war, but to understand the operation of technology we have to consider how it works on the field of the senses. What is formed and framed through the technological grasp and circulation of the ‘visual and discursive dimensions of war? This grasping and circulation is already an interpretive maneuver, a way of giving an account of whose life isa life, and whose life