Framing question

Liberal antinomies

Written during the second term of George W. Bush, What makes a life has the backdrop of war, his images and his speeches. Are thus analyzed, coordinated and sometimes taken up from one chapter to another the question of terrorism, the photographs of Abu Ghraïb, the poems of Guantánamo, on -board journalism, but also discussions on homosexual parenting, on emancipation female, the tightening of migration policies, the supposed failures of multicultural societies or the assaults that the welfare state undergoes. Because Butler endeavors to show how foreign affairs, apparently “ exterior “, Determine the terms of the interior debates and thus place” the left »Faced with unpublished theoretical and practical difficulties ; The fights of his activists, for the rights of women, for those of homosexuals, are indeed in a few years the instrument of the legitimization of state violence, in the war both interior and external that it makes Islam.

From coercive policy of immigration to torture and destruction of civilian populations that characterize war strictly speaking, the permanence of legal or pseudo-Legal violence shows that certain invisible lives can be lost in indifference, while Others, on the contrary, are subject to mourning and therefore seem to be deserved to be defended. However, in this differential appreciation of the living by which “ Some humans take their humanity as acquired, while others fight to have access to it “(P. 77), it is the supposed anachronism of Islam which justifies the American civilizing mission and the violence it deploys, making an institution as misogynistic and homophobic as can be the American army The ironic spearhead of progressive modernity whose sexual freedoms would be the sign. The destroyed populations, considered “ Having not yet reached the idea of ​​rational humans (P. 123), do not be recognized as lives. Lack of recognition which is expressed, for example, in the refusal to grant the protection of the Geneva Convention to prisoners of war, and self -strokes by producing the pre -modern that it is supposed to overcome. In his analysis of the torture processes developed by the American army (chapter 3), Butler thus shows how sexual humiliation, conceived according to the taboos schematically lent to the “ Arab spirit “, Becomes a way to produce the fantasized subject, forcing tortured men to” embody cultural reduction (P. 125) in fact presupposed. The torture then exhibits the tortured as “ less than human “(P. 93) and therefore gives the right to be all the more violent as it is exercised against a living she does not recognize.

Liberal feminism is therefore summoned to choose between loyalty to its demands in matters of sexual policy, and the fight against racism and religious discrimination, which the dominant discourse manages to present as absolutely contradictory. This is the “ Liberal antinomy “To which the left is cornered, and of which Butler works to dismantle the false evidence. The discursive uses of the “ modernity “And” secularism “Ended up misguided these ideas which, in ways of emancipating and allowing, have become instruments of coercion and rejection of cultural difference. However, on the one hand, the rights of women and homosexuals in “ Euro-American »It often remains to be conquered (Butler thus examines in chapter 3 the Pacs French, which only consensus as long as it does not disturb the heterosexual order of the family). On the other hand, liberal antinomy is denied by the facts, since certain minorities that one would like to see as constitutively enemies associate, and that the staging of cultural conflicts freezes in rigid identities in defiance of “” the complexity and () dynamism of the new subjective configurations worldwide (P. 155). “” Anti-imperialist “, a “ feminist policy and queer (P. 130) would therefore lose its substance to accept the terms of the alternative that the official framing tries to impose it.

Managers: Learn to see what makes us blind

What makes a life Thus gives itself to highlight and widen the War Frames (Frames of waroriginal title of the work), that is to say “ The different ways, inherent in the conduct of war, selectively fragmented the experience (P. 30).

Starting from the framing of photography, images of violence whose representations are an integral part of the materiality of the war, Butler shows that these frameworks “ not only organize visual experience, but establish and generate specific ontologies of the subject (P. 9). It therefore extends the notion to the frameworks of the recognition of life, which divide the populations of true and simple living lives. Without life and death being said to be said purely and simply by speech, “ There is no life and death in relation to certain executives (P. 13). Hence the French title of the work: “ What makes a life “Does not refer to what constitutes it intrinsically, but to what it makes a living in our eyes, that is to say to the normative device, to the frame, which makes it subject to mourning.

To be framed it means both being framed (for an image), being supervised (for a table), and being surrounded, trapped, or a victim of a mounted stroke (p. 13-14). Butler exploits this polysemy beyond the simple play on words, since the interpretative dimension of photographic framing goes hand in hand with its authentic power (persuasion, accusation), which the authorities themselves recognize when they seek to regulate or Prohibit the circulation of certain images (chapter 2). Butler also speaks of rhetorical frameworks: framing the decision to go to war, “ immigration issues as a “ “Inner war” “, Or” framing of sexual and feminist policy in the service of the war effort (P. 30).

In all its meanings, the framework is this paradoxical “ “Do not see” at the heart of seeing, which is the condition of seeing »(P. 100): We only see only in delimiting, and the act of delimitation, of framing, is in principle invisible. He makes us blind as much as showy, and that’s what we need “ learn to see (P. 100). We are helped in this by the ambiguity specific to the framework which is “ invariably breaking with himself (P. 15) Because of, or thanks to, the circulation and reproducibility of images. By breaking with its production contexts, moving, the frame ends up indicating its delimitation function. Thus, the photographs of Abu Ghraïb can be variously framed: first elements of torture in that they constitute the trace of a humiliation which they prolong, instruments of excitement of the soldiers, they become controlling witnesses, evidence, and finally possible primers of recognition.

Precariousness and equality

The war is therefore made acceptable by normative executives responsible for saying who is “ like me », And which on the contrary cannot be perceived as resembling me. Here, updating the framework amounts to opposing the idea of ​​precariousness: all life, human or not, is in essence fragile, precarious ; But some lives see their precariousness produced or aggravated by the social, economic and political conditions which are made to them and which, exposing them to famine, poverty, unemployment, travel, or violence, make them “ unlivable ». To say that life is precarious, that this precariousness is general, involves refusing a distribution between precarious lives and lives subject to mourning, and obliges to take charge of the needs of all, that is to say to minimize the precariousness of egalitarian way.

The lies inherent in war is to deny this interdependence, shared vulnerability and the common need for protection that results from it: by war, the United States seeks to occur as definitively protected, “ waterproof »(P. 51) – What Butler links to the concerns aroused by the supposed permeability of borders. Destructivity is therefore horrified denial of its own destructibility, and only recognition of the generalized condition of precariousness will make it possible to think of real responsibility worldwide. Butler’s reflection therefore presents itself as an inventory which would like to contribute to the development of new executives for the left, in which new coalitions or alliances could then appear that, despite certain divergences, have in common to oppose the violence of states that produce and distribute precariousness.

What makes a life ends with a “ call for non-violence (Chapter 5), which envisages the practical modalities of this political response to violence. The non-violence that Butler advocates is not the opposite of aggressiveness, since, by his own admission, this one “ is part of life and therefore also politics (P. 52 and 160 sq.). Non-violence, whether it distinguishes from passivity or even false virtues of the beautiful soul, remains a form of combat. But a fight in which the aggressiveness, anger and the rage of an injured subject manage to make themselves other ways than that of violence, because he seeks to “ Limit injury (P. 165) that he knows he can cause, because he therefore tries to hear the universal precariousness of life and to assert, beyond the aggressiveness, the existence of a social bond threat.

We can certainly question the effectiveness of this way of not responding, of this “ “”Fuck You“carefully developed “(P. 175 – The sexual insult can, under the pen of butler, to perplex), whose author hopes, with a certain optimism, that he allows” expose the unilateral brutality of the state (P. 171). But although the question appears here only in the filigree, it also seems that she is thinking of Israel and seeks by this call for non-violence to return back to away “ The sovereign subject (which) denies its injuries ” And “ The persecuted subject Who, because he defines himself as a victim by his past injuries, comes to “ deny his own violent acts (P. 172), the injuries he in turn inflicted.