540 Reviews

These two points indicate a general flaw in Long’s account of the proper relation
between faith and reason. Such seems to be the author’s fear of unaided reason, that
he would all but denounce any claim that it can function on its own. (See, for instance,
his misinterpretation of Cessario, p. 72). This denunciation is not just problematic in
itself. It is also not a very good starting point for demonstrating that faith and reason
are not antithetical. It would collapse reason into faith. And this would be a very bad
thing for both reason and faith. Revelation is very heady stuff.

Siobhan Nash-Marshall
Department of Philosophy
Manhattanville College
2900 Purchase St.
Purchase, NY 10577
USA
nashmarshalls@mville.edu

Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? by Judith Butler (London: Verso Books,
2009), + 192 pp.

In her latest book, Judith Butler continues to address questions that should be of
interest to theologians, and not just feminist theologians. As usual, her prose can be
difficult, but the essays that comprise Frames of War are quite readable—and worth
reading. The complex style that marked earlier works focused on the politics of
gender and sexuality—such as Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter—persists in this
collection of essays. Her reflections on war pursue the more recent agenda of Precari-
ous Life: she exposes ideological biases of the Left that presume the intractability of
violence. Her aim in so doing “is to rethink the complex and fragile character of the
social bond and to consider what conditions might make violence less possible, lives
more equally grievable, and, hence, more livable” (p. viii). Three themes tie the essays
together: the instability of the subject, the work of the frame in the justification for war,
and the reading of history that privileges a certain “modern” state. This last theme
remains mostly in the background, but plays a significant role nonetheless.
It is worth noting that the instability of the subject—one of the fundamental con-
cepts of Gender Trouble—not only knits the essays in the present volume together but
also plays a key role in threading together Butler’s work over the past two decades.
Already in Gender Trouble, Butler questioned the givenness of the subject “woman”
presupposed by identity politics in the 1980s. Although her argument that there is no
prediscursive subject is not uncontested, the concept of the linguistically-formed
subject plays widely and well with understandings about the way language works
that have now become commonplace. In Frames of War the instability of the subject
continues to operate, but on a different terrain. Butler observes that waging war
depends upon subjects’ ability to move back and forth between the modes of protect-
ing and destroying life, and wants to expose the justification for that movement, which
lies outside of the “frame” itself. What we see as the rationale for war, she suggests,
only warrants violence because it fits into a notion of what counts, for example, as
“modern.” Such a “frame” for the question whether a particular war is justified (or
justifiable) does not call into question the frame itself. (Is our understanding of what
counts as “modern” really coincident with what is human? she asks.) Echoing Roland
Barthes, Butler observes that “the frame never quite contained the scene it was meant
to limn, that something was already outside, which made the very sense of the inside
possible” (p. 9). Throughout the essays in this volume, Butler explores the contours of

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the frame, and what it excludes from the picture, in an effort to expose the norms that
produce (and reproduce) subjects capable of violence.
In “Torture and the Ethics of Photography,” for example, Butler turns her atten-
tion to the torture at Abu Ghraib prison. Her analysis makes two key points: first,
before addressing the torture directly, she suggests that embedded journalists’
reporting conceals as much as it reveals. Such reporters have access to information
only from a single perspective; that perspective, Butler argues, creates a frame for
the “news” that is both invisible to the consumer and anything but objective.
Second, she suggests that those who photographed the torture can be seen “not
only as reiterating and confirming a certain practice of decimating Islamic cultural
practice and norms, but as conforming to—and articulating—the widely shared
social norms of the war” (p. 83). Butler presses us to recognize that “to learn to see
the frame that blinds us to what we see is no easy matter. And if there is a critical
role for visual culture during times of war it is precisely to thematize the forcible
frame, the one that conducts the dehumanizing norm, that restricts what is perceiv-
able and, indeed, what can be” (p. 100).
If in “Sexual Politics, Torture, and Secular Time” the reader expects to encounter
concepts familiar from Butler’s earlier work, she will not be entirely disappointed. She
will find, however, that the fight for sexual freedom has to be waged again, on
different social territory. The essay is “a consideration of sexual politics now” which
necessarily involves “a critical consideration of the time of the now.” She claims “that
thinking through the problem of temporality and politics in this way may open up a
different approach to cultural difference, one that eludes the claims of pluralism and
intersectionality alike” (p. 103). Butler attempts to wrest that freedom from the grip of
the torturers and the ideology that supports them. She argues that homophobia and
misogyny have co-opted the freedom of women and of sexual expression and used
them to exclude minority subcultures from “modernity.” Heeding Walter Benjamin’s
warning about the seductive power of “homogenous, empty time,” she attempts to
distinguish the “now” of which she speaks from “modernity” and its narrative of
progress (p. 134).
The theme of subjectivity re-emerges in “Non-thinking in the Name of the Norma-
tive,” where Butler destabilizes not the gendered subject, but “a certain kind of liberal
subject” that can be regarded “as the ground of politics only if we agree not to think
well or carefully about the conditions of its formation, its moral responses, and its
evaluative claims” (p. 160). Drawing on Talal Asad’s work on suicide bombing, Butler
suggests that this subject itself cannot be singled out as a moral unity. Instead, what
characterizes the modern liberal subject is “the capacity to shift suddenly from one
principle (reverence for life) to another (legitimate destruction of life) without ever
taking stock of the reasons for such a shift and the implicit interpretations that
condition these distinct responses” (p. 160). Butler works to make explicit those
interpretations that allow violence a place in the moral imagination of the liberal
subject.
Butler concludes with “The Claim of Non-violence,” which centres on an interpre-
tation of pacifism that understands it as neither a position nor a set of principles
universally to be applied. Rather, non-violence recommends itself as a way forward
precisely at the point at which we are most threatened and/or injured. It seems, on
Butler’s reading, that non-violence makes the most powerful claim on us when it is
most difficult not to respond violently. Of course it is far more nuanced than that in her
discussion, and Levinas and Klein help to fill out the complexity of subjectivity and
the question of ethics in practice. In particular, in conversation with these two think-
ers, she draws out the necessity of mediation: the claim of every other is always
mediated in some way. “Ethics,” so Butler explains, “is less a calculation than some-
thing that follows from being addressed and addressable in sustainable ways, which

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means, at a global level, there can be no ethics without a sustained practice of

translation—between languages, but also between forms of media” (p. 181).
Any theologian who takes the time to work through Butler’s prose will find some
very familiar themes. She describes the predicament of human beings as being
wrought in and through violence and needing somehow to break that cycle; she
understands being a human subject as dependent on having been addressed; she
interprets the claim of non-violence as being both strongest and clearest when the
subject is injured or threatened. All this to me rings true, but probably not because
Butler has argued it persuasively. Not that she is not persuasive; Butler composes a
compelling argument. It is, rather, that the basic ideas that she presents as the grounds
for resisting the “frames” that allow war to be waged are already a part of what I
understand the claim of Christ to be. Christians are called to understand themselves
as born into sin as a post-lapsarian condition of our existence, and yet to resist that
origin and conditioning. We are taught to understand ourselves as being from God,
called into being by God, and dependent ultimately on God to address us and give us
a sense of who we are. In Butler’s terms, the “other” to which we belong is God.
Finally, Christians are likewise taught to practice non-violence at precisely the place
Butler suggests it is most difficult and most important: when struck on one cheek,
offer the other as well. The shift that Butler claims is the most fundamental shift that
the liberal subject makes—from protecting life to destroying it—is a shift that every
Christian is called to refuse. Butler seems to have discovered that we are all marked
by original sin: we are formed in and through violence and tend to reproduce those
structures that so form us. The difference between what Butler says about original sin
and what Christians say about it is that she believes we possess by nature the strength
somehow to resist it. Christians should know we need grace to do that.

Medi Ann Volpe

Department of Theology and Religion
Durham University
Abbey House
Palace Green
Durham, DH1 3RS
UK
m.a.volpe@durham.ac.uk

A History of Catholic Moral Theology in the Twentieth Century: From Confessing

Sins to Liberating Consciences, by James F. Keenan, SJ (New York, NY:
Continuum International Publishing Group, Ltd., 2010), viii + 248pp.

In this volume, Keenan has produced what will surely be a defining historical
resource and narrative for moral theology for decades to come. Drawing on an
extraordinarily encyclopedic knowledge, as well as personal connections and histo-
ries within the clerical ranks during this period—connections that are increasingly
inaccessible in a lay-dominated discipline—Keenan’s book proves more than infor-
mative; it is a vivid, often witty, and always engaging race through a very complex
story.
In his first three paragraphs, Keenan indicates the contours of his story. The century
begins with moral manuals, which then become subject to critique by “incorporating
an historical-critical method into a much clearer theological context animated by
biblical insights” (p. 1). This new tradition reaches its high-water mark in the synthe-
sizing work of Bernard Häring and Vatican II’s Gaudium et Spes, but then is “stymied”

© 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd