Judith Butler: “Torture and the Ethics of Photography.”

Judith Butler: “Torture and the Ethics of Photography.” in: Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. Vol. 25, No. 6, pp. 951 - 966, April 19, 2007. (English)

“Photographs state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading toward their own destruction, and this link between photography and death haunts all photographs of people.”
Susan Sontag, On Photography

Toward the end of Precarious Life (2004), I consider the question of what it means to become ethically responsive, to consider and attend to the suffering of others, and, more generally, which frames permit the representability of the human and which do not. This seems important not only to answer the question of whether we might respond effectively to suffering at a distance, but also to formulate a set of precepts that might work to safeguard lives in their fragility and precariousness. I am not asking in this context about the subjective sources of this kind of responsiveness, although I do consider this question in Giving an Account of Oneself (2005a). Rather, here I propose to consider the way in which suffering is presented to us, and how that presentation affects our responsiveness. In particular, I want to understand how the frames that allocate the recognizability of certain figures of the human are themselves linked with broader norms that determine questions of humanization or dehumanization. My point, which is at this point hardly new, is to suggest that, whether and how we respond to the suffering of others, how we formulate moral criticisms, how we articu- late political analyses, depend upon a certain field of perceptible reality already being established. This field of perceptible reality is one in which the notion of the recogniz- able human is formed and maintained over and against what cannot be named or regarded as the human, a figure of the nonhuman that holds the place of