Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence

“In a strong sense, the binarism that Bush proposes in which only two positions are possible—‘Either you’re with us or you’re with the terrorists’—makes it untenable to hold a position in which one opposes both and queries the terms in which the opposition is framed.”

Butler is concerned about the lack of critical perspective regarding both the 9/11 attacks on the United States and the United States’ response to these attacks. Many Americans accepted the frame that Bush presented for years after the attacks; opposition to the United States’ violence was tantamount to supporting the terrorists who attacked the United States. This framework refused any criticism, specifically, of the United States’ actions. Butler, however, insists that there can and should be criticism of both the attacks and the United States’ response to these attacks.

“The point I would like to underscore here is that a frame for understanding violence emerges in tandem with the experience, and that the frame works both to preclude certain kinds of questions, certain kinds of historical inquiries, and to function as a moral justification for retaliation.”

Butler is interested in the “frame” that people create for understanding violence, especially when this violence is experiential. The dominant frame in the United States for understanding violence has been one that precludes questions of the United States’ own terrorism, refuses an understanding of the context in which others attack the United States, and functions as justification—rather than ethical inquiry—regarding violent retaliation.

“In order to condemn these acts as inexcusable, absolutely wrong, in order to sustain the affective structure in which we are, on the one hand, victimized and, on the other, engaged in a righteous cause of rooting out terror, we have to begin the story with the experience of violence we suffered.”

Butler is interested not only in the broad frame in which society construct its understanding of experiential violence, and in particular the violence of 9/11, but the author is more specifically interested in the narrative structure that enables this structure for thinking.