In this essay I return to certain questions raised in my 2010 article ‘Preparing for Politics: Judith Butler's Ethical Dispositions’. I examine Butler's continued articulation of a politics and ethics of precariousness, particularly in her most recent book Frames of War, and specifically the role of the concept of ‘affect’ in that text. Affect did not play an explicit part in Butler's analysis throughout Giving an Account of Oneself or Precarious Life. Indeed, as I explain below, though the word appears in those texts occasionally (and in Undoing Gender, to the extent that it overlaps with Precarious Life), I interpreted the ethics Butler articulates there as inhering specifically between people who did not necessarily know each other, recognise and identify with each other, or have any particular feelings for each other. Absence of affinity was obviated as an obstacle to ethical bonds to others. In Frames of War, however, Butler makes frequent recourse to the term affect, and though the precise substance and implications of the term remain underdeveloped, this shift suggests some change in her thought regarding the role of what I shall call for the moment ‘feelings’. This essay seeks to gain some purchase, then, on what, whether and how feelings matter for the ethical appeal that Butler is mounting across her recent body of work.

Butler before ‘affect’

In ‘Preparing for Politics’ I argued that in order to fully comprehend the political implications of Butler's work it was necessary to grasp the relationship and distinction between four vectors of her thinking: her diagnosis of the human condition as fundamentally exposed and vulnerable, or precarious; her expression of normative aspirations for liveable life and a more inclusive conception of ‘the human’; her defence of a particular ethical comportment that grew out of, not despite, our basic aggression when confronted by the Other; and her theory of a new kind of political engagement defined by responsiveness to the claim of non-violence. While acknowledging that the four vectors of her thought were in fact not neatly separable, and that the order of priority among them was complex, and not linear or progressive, I nonetheless maintained that these dimensions of her thought were not reducible to each other. Such reductions, I argued, are what have led numerous critics of Butler to misread her as anti-normative, apolitical and ethically silent.