Frames of War

Judith Butler has penned many well read and influential publications. Frames of War (2010) is a collection of (revised) essays that were written between 2004 and 2008. The content covers some challenging territory, including details of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Not sure these books are well worth obtaining, but attracted me to a collection of Butler's work that I might not have otherwise read (so it serves a purpose). A few notes:

"In targeting populations, war seeks to manage and form populations, distinguishing those lives to be preserved from those whose lives are dispensable. War is in the business of producing and reproducing precarity, sustaining populations on the edge of death, sometimes killing its members, and sometimes not; either way, it produces precarity as the norm of everyday lives. Lives under such conditions of precarity do not have to be fully eviscerated to be subject to an effective and sustained operation of violence. My point is that such visual and conceptual frames are ways of building and destroying populations as objects of knowledge and targets of war, and that such frames are the means through which social norms are relayed and made effective... Ungrievable lives are those that cannot be lost, and cannot be destroyed, because they already inhabit a lost and destroyed zone; they are, ontologically, and from the start, already lost and destroyed, which means that when they are destroyed in war, nothing is destroyed. To destroy them actively might even seem like a kind of redundancy, or a way of simply ratifying a prior truth." (p. xviii-xix)

"Invariably, when an assault breaks out, such as the Israeli war on Gaza in December of 2008 and January of 2009 that took place under the name "Operation Cast Lead", we can start with the numbers, counting the injured and the dead as a way of taking stock of the losses. We can also tell and relay anecdotes that, along with numbers, start to develop an understanding of what has happened. At the same time, I am not sure that numbers or anecdotes, though modes of taking account, can alone answer the question of whose lives count, and whose lives do not. Even when it proves possible to know what the numbers are, the numbers may not matter at all. In other words, there are situations when counting clearly does not count." (p. xx)

"If the Islamic populations destroyed in recent and current wars are considered less than human, or 'outside' the cultural conditions for the emergence of the human, then they belong either to a time of cultural infancy or to a time that is outside time as we know it. In both cases, they are regarded as not yet having arrived at the idea of the rational human. It follows from such a viewpoint that the destruction of such populations, their infrastructures, their housing, and their religious and community institutions, constitutes the destruction of what threatens the human, but not of the human itself. It is also precisely this particular conceit of a progressive history that positions 'the West' as articulating the paradigmatic principles of the human—of the humans who are worth valuing, whose lives are worth safeguarding, whose lives are precarious, and, when lost, are worth public grieving." (p. 125)