A Sensate Critique

A Sensate Critique:Vulnerability and the Image in Judith Butler’s Frames of War Fiona Jenkins (bio) That man’s not more alive whom you confrontAnd shake by the hand, see hale, hear speak loud,Than any of these celluloid smiles are,Nor prehistoric or fabulous beast more dead;No thought so vivid as their smoking blood:To regard such a photograph might well dement,Such contradictory permanent horrors hereSmile from the single exposure and shoulder outOne’s own body from its instant and heat. —Ted Hughes, from “Six Young Men” Traversing the Impossible In an important recent essay, “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy,” Cora Diamond elaborates the salience for philosophy of experiences such as those that Ted Hughes renders in the above-cited verse. The poem responds to a photograph taken in 1914 of six young men, friends of the poet’s father, all of whom within a few months would have been killed in the Great War. It articulates a sense of vulnerability and of the horror that arises upon encountering one kind of image of war. The phrase Diamond uses in her own response—“the difficulty of reality”—evokes something constitutively enigmatic in experience1: “experiences in which we take something in reality to be resistant to our thinking it, or possibly to be painful in its inexplicability, difficult in that way, or perhaps awesome and astonishing in its inexplicability” (45-46). Such an experience might be one of horror, as in this poem’s response to a photograph of war’s victims, but also potentially one of a sense of beauty, wonder or overwhelming goodness (60), evoking what “cannot be,” yet is. In each of these responses we apprehend a reality that defies our capacity to “think” it or to make it the object of understanding. As Diamond stresses, this may not be a response to an event or experience that is necessarily shared, being rather “taken up” in a certain, uncommon way (46); yet it cannot be called “merely subjective.” The articulation of such a response, she argues, defies standard frames of philosophical [End Page 105] thought, and particularly those of moral philosophy; indeed, the vulnerability the poem marks could be said to be a constitutive difficulty for philosophy—one that its very practice depends upon occluding. Here I propose to adopt elements of Diamond’s discussion as offering a series of clues for reading Judith Butler’s recent work on vulnerability and “frames of war.” These frames, I suggest, share aspects of the occlusion of the “difficulty of reality” identified by Diamond. Diamond’s way of approaching this topic allows me to foreground aspects of the practice of framing that flow not only from the disavowal of vulnerability (which Drichel, in her introduction to this volume, rightly highlights as being key to Butler’s thought), but bound to that, a disavowal of the “impossible” that potentially disturbs us in such images as the one in Hughes’s poem. I would contend that it is this “impossible,” that is most ethically and politically salient in Butler’s thinking on vulnerability; and especially so because the “impossible”—which emerges in relation to a rule or law of experience—is also the zone of a space and time that is excised from the autonomous powers of reason. This is a zone that might be considered that of “sensate” life—exposed, affected and affecting. The practice of “sensate critique” I seek to elaborate here will involve the affective-critical work of rendering the force of exposure as occurring (thus not “impossible”) at a level of experience that is at odds with an ideal of autonomy. Just as Diamond speaks of the “difficulty of reality” as the paradoxical experience of the occurrence of the impossible, so too I want to track in Butler’s work the specific inflection of an affective critique that involves traversing the impossible. More specifically again, I want to track how this traversal takes place by way of relating with images—images that are simultaneously laying claim to us. The sensate cast as “impossible” indicates a zone in which we find our lives and ways of being in

Aesthetics · Art · Idiot · Literature · Narrative · Poetry · Psychoanalysis · Salience (neuroscience) · Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy · History · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Political Theology and Sovereignty · Psychology

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