Judith Butler - 'Vulnerability, Survivability:The Affective Politics of War'

Birkbeck Institute for Social Research

Judith Butler - 'Vulnerability, Survivability:The Affective Politics of War'Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

This lecture considers the claim that we feel horror and moral repulsion about the destruction of certain lives and righteous justification about the destruction of other lives. It considers Talal Asad's thesis that under contemporary liberal conditions, state-sponsored violence is more likely to be approved than the violence of counter-insurgency. The affects of horror and righteousness are formed in part through implicit modes of interpreting and imposing differential categories for human lives, producing an unreasoned schism at the heart of moral responsiveness. Through a consideration of Klein that takes her insights firmly outside the domain of ego psychology, we can develop an account of human destructiveness and guilt that ocates survivability in interdependent forms of sociality. Finally, the poems that have recently emerged from the Guantanamo Bay prison suggest that survivability depends upon maintaining a distinction between vulnerability and injurability, and forming affective responses through lyric appeal that politically contest the dominant affective politics of war.
Wednesday 27th February 2008 3pm Room B33 Birkbeck Main Building, Malet St.

Free – all welcome