The Sensate Critique of Violence: Butler on Affect and Potentiality

Fiona Jenkins (Australian National University)

In Judith Butler’s recent works of social criticism we find an emphasis on grief and “grievability”, a precarious life and a vulnerability that mark the terms of an ethics she holds to be irreducibly entwined with politics. Yet this so-called “ethical turn” has given rise to the charge of sentimentalism, and of an evasion of genuinely political tasks. In this paper I provide an account of how the critique of violence Butler practices is bound up with a commitment to projects of social transformation in ways that extend her earlier reflections on bodies that matter. I particularly focus on how her attention to media images in these works brings into play a sensate critique that takes place at the level of affectivity. My argument will be that she thereby develops an activist approach to challenging “closed” political identities that has crucial aesthetic dimensions. Her ethics, on this account, is important primarily in generating the temporal horizons of radical politics, by exploding the constraints of fields of vision and, linked to this, the terms of social existence, that are imposed by “frames of war”.

Fiona Jenkins is convenor of the ANU Gender Institute and a senior lecturer in the School of Philosophy, Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. Her work examines power, injustice and violence, and explores new directions in ethical thinking apt to challenge entrenched social hierarchies. Her co-edited book “Women in Philosophy: What Needs to Change?” is published by OUP, and another, “Allegiance and Identity in a Globalising World” is forthcoming. Her work on topics in social and political philosophy as well as on Judith Butler, on Nietzsche, and on film, have appeared in many books and journals. She is presently completing a book manuscript titled, “Sensate Democracy: How Bodies Matter in a Common World”.