Analysis Of Normative Frames Of War By Judith Butler

a) Normative Frames

As estated before, ghosts have a diachronic status of having been, or will be, and not being as present presents. Besides these phantasmagoric entities, we can also find a synchronic status of neither being nor not being at the same time. This status corresponds to ghostly identities, entities whose lives may not be recognized as lives due to the normativity imposed by the frames of ontology.

The idea of the normativity of frames is developed in Judith Butler's book Frames of War. There, she presents the idea of how the frames that permit us to recognize lives distribute the recognizability unequally. By this unequal distribution, other categories such as vulnerability and injurability are also unequally distributed.

As Butler affirms “ The epistemological capacity to apprehend a life is partially dependent on that life being produced according to norms that qualify it as a life or , indeed, as a part of life. In this way, the normative production of ontology thus produces the epistemological problem of apprehending a life, and this in turn gives rise to the ethical problem of what is to acknowledge” (Butler, 2009:3). Butler sees the framing as an epistemological problem that is related to power structures. “The frames through which we apprehend or, indeed, fail to apprehend the lives of others as lost or injured (lose-able or injurable) are politically saturated. They are themselves operations of power” (Butler 2009:1). But this issue of framing is, as she affirms, an ontological problem, since it presents the question of “What is a life” (Butler, 2009:1).

The unequal distribution of the vulnerability brought by injure or loss, takes us to “ask about the conditions under which it becomes possible to apprehend a life or set of lives as precarious, and those that make it less possible, or indeed impossible […] The epistemological capacity to apprehend a life is partially dependent on that life being produced according to norms that qualify it as a life or, indeed, as a part of life” (Butler, 2009:3). The issue of framing lives and the result of it is a “normative production of ontology”(Butler,

Is every life a precarious one? If not, how are these levels of precarity distributed? “To be a body is to be exposed to social crafting and form, and this is what makes the ontology of the body a social ontology. In other words, the body is exposed to socially and politically articulated forces as well as to claims of sociality.” (Butler, 2009:3) In Butler’s words, “one way of managing populations is to distribute vulnerability unequally in such a way that vulnerable populations are established within discourse and policy.” (Butler, 2013:171). This precariousness is therefore a category imposed and distributed unequally among populations. The effect of this unequal distribution leads us, as J. Butler affirms, to the situation in which “certain populations are effectively targeted as injurable (with impunity) or disposable (without grieving or reparation) (Butler, 2013:172). Precariousness can take individuals to the risk of oblivion. In my opinion, we can find that there are different levels of precariousness, being the highest level, the one in which an entity does not have an identity set within the frames of the imposed reality. The nonexistence of these categories takes the individuals that are uncategorized to an existential limbo that gives them the status of the ghost, the status of neither being nor