Judith Butler's latest book, Frames of War, argues that the U.S. media and government frame violence in a manner that facilitates the unequal distribution of our affective response to it. What is framed (or excluded from the frame) guides what and how we see and, in particular, whether or not we grieve when someone is killed. This visual culture is produced by norms that treat “certain subjects as ‘recognizable’ persons” (p. 6) while excluding others. Roughly, those norms are liberal individualism and humanism. Liberal individualism creates subjects that “shift suddenly from one principle (reverence for life) to another (legitimate destruction of life) without ever taking stock of the reasons” (p. 160), and humanism creates a standard by which those who are regarded as barbaric and less human can be dominated in the name of civilization and progress (p. 132).

By calling attention to the ways in which liberalism and humanism exclude or minimize the suffering of certain people, Butler hopes to foster a “sensate democracy” (p. 52) where we “react with the same horror to violence committed against all sorts of populations” (p. 50). Building on her claims in Precarious Life (2004) and taking some of her cues from Emmanuel Levinas, she argues that the precariousness of life elicits an ethical demand that we grieve equally for everyone. Implicitly, grievable life is more difficult to violate. Likewise, the claims of nonviolent action rely on “responsiveness” (i.e., the equitable grief she recommends) (p. 165). When loss of life has no affective purchase, or when the affect of grief is unequally distributed, it is a sure sign that the state and its attendant “regulatory powers” have manipulated affect in ways conducive to violence and war.

Butler covers a wide range of topics in making these arguments, most notably the poetry of prisoners in Guantanamo and a refreshing, subtle, and convincing critique of the use of progressive sexual politics to justify violence and discrimination against Muslims. However, the theme of “framing” comes to the fore most prominently in her analysis of the Abu Ghraib scandal. Faulting Susan Sontag's well-known skepticism about the role of photography in social criticism and politics, Butler argues that the political consciousness of the photographer is “embedded in the frame” of the photograph (p. 71). Photographs are not at the mercy of their interpreters; instead, there are “ways of framing that will bring the human into view in its frailty and precariousness [while other frames] foreclose [ethical and affective] responsiveness” (p. 77). The right kind of photograph “instates grievability” (p. 97).

Butler is correct that people grieve for some more than others and that states try to manage affect to produce particular political effects. However, it is an axiom of political realism, the just war tradition, tragic literature and poetry, and religious texts in various traditions that we can and ought to feel grief for those we nevertheless “must” kill or even, according to Augustine for instance, torture. Butler mentions tragedy briefly, and given her well-known interpretation of Antigone, it is not surprising that she agrees with Plato's position that “open and public mourning [disrupts] the order and hierarchy of political authority” (p. 39). But feeling grief, even for one's enemies, is often entirely consistent with war and violence, just as the catharsis of tragedy surely helped facilitate (as well as sometimes check) the Greeks' penchant for war. Public hangings, lynchings, and stonings were and are attended by feelings of sadness, anger, horror, pleasure, righteous satisfaction, and curiosity. Grief does not necessarily trump the other valences of affect, nor does it contradict them, because affect is (wonderfully) unreasonable. Grief is intimately related to violence and the politics of violence, but in a much more complicated way than Butler assumes.

Sontag's worry that photographs do not come packaged with their own interpretations or necessitate certain political responses is strongly confirmed by the Abu Ghraib photos. There is in fact no evidence that the photographs “turned public opinion against the war in Iraq” (p. 40), and George W. Bush was reelected seven months after they were made public. The photographers who took the photos may have understood the images as a way to worsen the punishment of the prisoners, as entertainment for those who were not present, as souvenirs, or as part of the pleasure they took in coercing sexual acts (see Susan Brison, “Torture or ‘Good Old American Pornography’?” Chronicle of Higher Education 50 [no. 39, 2004]: B10, and Allen Feldman, “On the Actuarial Gaze: From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib,” Cultural Studies 19 [March 2005]: 218–19). Perhaps the soldiers who took them look at them now and feel grief for those they tortured. However, would such feelings of grief give solace to the Iraqis who survived torture or the families of those who were killed? My guess is that most Iraqis would like us to take specific actions that may or may not be related to our feelings of grief, such as bringing the architects of the prisoner policy to account or releasing those still being held.

The last chapter of the book offers an important and compelling analysis of the connections between the psychology of nonviolence and its political effects and purposes. Butler argues that the nonviolent subject “is injured, rageful, disposed to violent retribution and nevertheless struggles against that action” (p. 171). Thus, “non-violence is not a peaceful state, but a social and political struggle to make rage articulate and effective—the carefully crafted ‘fuck you’” (p. 182).

Yet even as she disabuses the reader of some of the worst misconceptions about pacifism, Butler reinscribes others. Nonviolence not only expresses and elicits affective responses from witnesses but also involves the exercise of self-sufficient power through coordinated action. In addition, by looking for ethics in the precariousness and interdependence of bodies, she attempts to write a counternarrative that self-consciously begins with the same assumptions as Hobbes and Hegel (p. 31). Mahatma Gandhi argues that the problem with so-called Western civilization is that it makes “bodily welfare the object of life” (Hind Swaraj, 2009, p. 35). Even while Gandhi refuses to kill others, his theory and practice of satyagraha paradoxically challenges the idea that preserving biological life is the primary purpose of politics.

All of the contributors to Austin Sarat and Jennifer L. Culbert's edited volume States of Violence are troubled by the violence of governments, but what that means varies widely. Following an introductory chapter by the editors, the book is organized thematically around four topics: sovereignty (Chapters 2, 3 and 4), punishment (Chapters 5 and 6), indigenous peoples (Chapters 7 and 8), and the death penalty (Chapters 9 through 12). The claims of the essays dealing with sovereignty and punishment mostly fit together. The chapters dealing with indigenous peoples and the death penalty are placed in such a way that the claims of each are complicated or upended by a subsequent essay or essays.

Chapter 2 is a playful deconstruction of Max Weber's characterization of the relationship among the state, violence, and sovereignty through an analysis of the 9/11 report and the national security strategy documents that forwarded the Bush Doctrine. Robin Wagner-Pacifici provocatively suggests that Weber's claim that the state has a monopoly on the means of legitimate violence has the effect of suspending or corrupting our ability to judge proper ends. Thus, in the war on terror, the legitimate use of violence is no longer territorially circumscribed, and the goals of security and freedom come to imply and justify preemptive, extralegal force.

In Chapter 3, Jeremy Arnold provides an origin story for the idea that sovereignty corrupts itself. He deploys the Oedipus trilogy against Carl Schmidt and Thomas Hobbes to explain that just as Oedipus solved the riddle of the Sphinx only to bring about more suffering in Thebes, sovereignty is the source of the very problem it claims to solve. The reality of (at least) 80,000 dead Iraqis reveals that sovereignty simultaneously “saves and dooms” (p. 52).

In Chapter 4, Mateo Taussig-Rubbo shows how governments can subvert sovereignty purportedly grounded in the will of the people. By using private military contractors, treating the sacrifice of soldiers as a private family matter, and preventing the detainees at Guantanamo from committing suicide, the U.S. military has attempted to render sacrifice publicly meaningless.

Chapters 5 and 6 draw connections between current and historical modes of punishment in the United States and the Bush administration's treatment of detainees captured in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In Chapter 5, Colin Dayan uses Hannah Arendt's concept of civil death as a way of understanding the status of the nearly 30,000 detainees at secret CIA sites and in U.S. military prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay. She reveals stunning similarities between the court cases that allowed for the establishment of supermax prisons and the legal categories that justify indefinite detention, severe sensory deprivation, and enforced idleness in the current wars.

The most provocative part of Thomas Dumm's analysis, in Chapter 6, is the parallel he draws between the Terry Schiavo case and force-feedings in Guantanamo. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben and Carl Schmidt, he suggests that the modern state's primary task of regulating and managing life (which involves preventing death at all costs) urges certain kinds of torture and cruelty. Further, he connects this to the ambivalence and curiosity of fundamentalist Christians about Jesus' biological body and death.

Chapters 7 and 8 examine violence done to indigenous peoples by Australia and Canada and offer deeply contradictory diagnoses of the problem. In Chapter 7, Elizabeth A. Povinelli argues that there is both “strong” and “weak” state killing and that the withdrawal of basic medical services can be an example of the latter. She recounts Ursula Le Guin's fictional story of a society that knows it prospers on account of the suffering of a small child in a broom closet. Empathy for the child does not stop the community from doing what is necessary for the benefit of all. Likewise, because Australia's indigenous communities are so rife with disease and suffering, the government calculates that the cost of providing adequate medical services is not worth the future gains. Feeling empathy is inadequate since it is entirely consistent with a brand of neoliberal utilitarianism that recommends letting the destitute die.

In Chapter 8, Mark Antaki and Coel Kirkby argue that the formal recognition of indigenous peoples by the Canadian government is the death of “peoples as peoples” (p. 194). Tracing the history of how various laws and proclamations made native peoples legible to the state, they describe how such laws went hand in hand with prohibiting potlatch, destroying matrilineal lines, and sending children to residential schools. More recent laws freeze people in supposed “precontact” purity and encourage “reconciliation” that involves submission to the state.

The last four chapters recommend new ways to think about the death penalty. In Chapter 9, Peter Brooks analyzes Victor Hugo's Le Dernier jour d'un condamné and finds that the novel upsets the idea that death brings closure through the first-person narration of a victim of the guillotine. In Chapter 10, Ravit Pe'er-Lamo Reichman examines works by Albert Camus and Sylvia Plath, among others, and finds the literary imagination wanting. Drawing on Edmund Burke, she faults writers for eliciting the pleasure of the sublime in their fantastical execution narratives.

The last two chapters are the most ambitious. In Chapter 11, Adam Thurschwell argues that the death penalty is not a moral but a political problem: Western political and legal thought universally endorses the idea that sovereignty is defined by the right of the state to kill. Only a radical transformation of sovereignty would truly abolish the death penalty. In Chapter 12, Adam Sitze employs Cesare Beccaria to show that sovereignty is not only the power to kill but also the power to keep alive. By asking for clemency, death penalty abolitionists reinforce sovereignty. In sparing life, the state gains laborers and slaves. Clemency is not an antidote to the right to kill but yet another form of state violence.

As the book highlights various incompatible meanings of violence and offers worthwhile but contradictory insights about how best to disentangle it from the state, it takes on some of the characteristics of its subject. Like violence, the book is fascinating, disorienting, impressive, and frustrating. Paradoxically, this is in part due to too narrow a focus. Both the Sarat and Culbert volume and Butler's recent work focus on the violence of governments. In doing so, terms like “sovereignty” and “the state” are frequently reified and detached from the living and breathing people who practice and justify violence. States do have the greatest capacity for violence of any form of human organization. But the problem of people doing violence to one another preceded modern ideas of sovereignty and presently exceeds it in a wide variety of contexts (e.g., domestic violence and rape, personal vendettas, gang violence, and civil wars).

Yet both volumes are welcome because they reinvigorate certain lines of inquiry in political theory. Sarat and Culbert raise the possibility of changing “the essential relationship of the state to violence” (p. 22), and Butler argues that the problem of state violence “may well reorient the Left beyond the liberal antinomies on which it currently founders” (pp. 27–28). Though neither volume achieves these lofty aims, both are heartening appeals to those of us working to understand and mitigate violence.