The war for affect

摘要

Sometimes when faced with photographs and videos of terrible war scenes, we are left feeling nothing. Although increasingly exposed to images depicting the horrors of conflict, we often remain immune, unable to really engage with the terror in the pictures we see. It is true that certain images and stories do manage to slip through the shield of numbness and affect people deeply, like the black and white image of a child burned by napalm that circulated through the US during the Vietnam war, or the tale of a Christmas truce between soldiers in the trenches during First World War. In these special, one-off instances, the inescapable humanity of the enemy, the 'other' of war, comes sharply into focus. Judith Butler's latest book is about how this can happen, and what it might lead to.