/// Judith Butler (* 24. Februar 1956 in Cleveland) ///

Here are my notes from: Judith Butler lecture "Frames of War" at the Dahlem Humanities Center der Freien Universität Berlin.....



- What obligations, if any, do we have to preserve life?
-What are the conditions that put us under this? What lives do we consider should be preserved?
-Apprehension / heightening of violence
- Bodily Ontology - bodily persistence / desire / language etc
- Fundamental structures of being. None exist outside political and social interpretation.
- Social significances the body assumes. The body = a social ontology.
-Existential notion = departure for rethinking progressive + leftist politics // New ways of administrating precariousness.
- Ethical problem of preserving lives
- Normative productions of producing bodies, H/E Normative schemes = disrupted // power structures etc.
- Does life exceed these norms?
Construction of lives - need time... therefore job never done??
- Exercising crafting power.
- Hegel = social ontology of the body - phenomenology of spirit, an "other" appears.
- Me + I --> question of comprehension
- Localising the body - relation to space - not a fully bounded being
-Capacity to be somewhere else but this becomes a certain sense of loss - not quite bounded in space as once assumed.
- Limit of what you can call "yourself" - tension between me + I.
- Life also refers to non-persistence... trajectories // time before + after I exist - other people existing outside of our own --> as a shape. "I" am not bound to others.
- The questions that come - help us to live...
- Who is this "I" who is also substitutable?
- Non-substitutable idea = idea of conceiving existentialism // society etc. Society = trajectory of idea of maintaining and bonding of society... also = apprehension etc.
- Recognition of life only through social norms or in relation to the not normal.
- Whose lives are grievable?
- Apprehending + recognising a life
- Utterly limited in recognising through existing norms of recognition.
- What new norms are possible? Egalitarianism - democratic results?
- Shifting schemes of intelligibility, i.e. debates of abortion - what constitutes life or death? (i.e. death of heart / brain etc) or death of animals - how are they negotiated? B/C of debates = discursive models, therefore "norms" are recognised.
- Failure assumes a figurative form.
- Living figure outside the "norms" of life = the problem is that ontology cannot be secured - neither living nor dead (N.B. - like Žižek's extension of Freud's Todestrieb complex??)


- Frames feature as an editorial - frames guide the interpretation i.e. if criminal framed then their life becomes the object inside the frame. H/E the frame ignores // does not determine what was in it - within its intended context. i.e. War photography departs from its context, but takes on a new context.
- What gets out of hand is what breaks the context - frames breaking from itself. --> media phenomena.
- Conditions of reproductability in order to succeed --> Frame therefore subject to a temporal logic - therefore need to understand the frames ethically. Shifting temporal conditions.
- Movement of the image outside its confinements.
i.e. War photography - outside the context & framed - proposes worldwide horror // i.e. facilitating widespread outrage photos from Guantanamo
- Exploiting the frissure in ontological fields - frames breaking from themselves - therefore becomes possible to fuel apprehension for something that is neither living nor dead.
- The norm exists in being able to undo its being
i.e. Thinking of the recent Gaza / Israeli war - what do the numerical doings evoke? Numerical frame - what does it provide for our ethical practice (& political)?
- normal therefore based on apprehension & precariousness

-Life needs social & economic situations to be repeatedly met in order to be "normal".
- Birth of an infant = an institutional social norm and therefore the value of life will matter.
-Life exists as a condition that is grievable
-Conditions are our political & ethnical responsibility

Israel vs Palestine
- one thought - survival depends on I must attack in order to survive
- H/E politics on the left - freedom
- Precarity as a shared distribution strong notions of equality - seeks to address basic needs in order to survive.
- Frames of war produce the materiality of war
- Media representations are military operations - frames of perceptions.
- Therefore... war = ontology = bound + constrained in frames of power
- "The Enemy" = losable B/C already considered lost.
- Shields of War
- The task is to live with people that we have never known.