The Institute of Women's Studies would like to invite you to a lecture by Prof. Judith Butler:
Precarity, the Assault on Gaza, or Whose Lives are Grievable? Wednesday 10, 2010, 2:00-4:00 PM Venue: Hall 101, Institute of Women Studies Precarity, the Assault on Gaza, or Whose Lives are Grievable? This lecture considers the relationship between media and war-waging violence, and argues for the necessity to include forms of media and their frames in the material of war-waging. Two cases are examined in developing this argument: the photographs of torture in Iraq and their relevance to war-waging, and the Israeli assault and siege of Gaza. It is argued that the efforts of states to regulate the representation of their violence, through media, are themselves acts of violence. Two sorts of violence are operative in the work of media: the first suppresses the public comprehension of violence, and the second regulates it, and by so doing justifies its appearances. Both sets of practices are violent in that they construct the public understanding of what is war, and therefore enable its waging; they constitute a war on the senses and limit what is thinkable. The war on perception cannot be separated from the material reality of war. Together they result in maximizing the precariousness of targeted populations, as opposed to recognizing precariousness as a shared condition. Differentiated precarity marks a distinction between the ungrievable lives of targeted populations, and the inherently grievable lives of others. Ungrievable lives are those who cannot be lost, and cannot be destroyed, because they already inhabit a lost and destroyed zone. To destroy them actively might seem redundant or a way of simply ratifying a prior truth. One example of such deadening before killing is Israel’s insistence that Palestinian children operated as human shields for Hamas fighters during Israel’s assault on Gaza. Such insistence is meant to convince us that these children are not really alive, that they have already been turned to bits of armament, to metal, to steal. Ultimately, the body of the child appears as nothing more than a militarized metal, as no longer living, as already dead, and hence ungrievable. If conceptual and visual frames transform the life of the Palestinians into no life, whereby we must count the dead again and again, those same frames make Israeli lives as the only ones that count as life to be defended at all costs. And yet, the frames through which states wage wars on our senses circulate and exceed states’ control. That loss of control is one source of what can tentatively be called hope. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/greenyouth?hl=en-GB.
