Why do we respond with empathy and compassion to some forms of human suffering and loss of human life, yet react with indifference or loathing to other forms of human suffering, and other losses of human life? This question, raised in Judith Butler's recent writings on violence, war and ethics, connects her work with two current developments in humanities and social science discourses: these are the so-called ‘affective turn’, and the turn towards ethics. In her work, Butler intimates that affect plays a central role in the differential structuring, or framing, of human experience, and in responses to the vulnerability and suffering of others. However, although her writings are peppered with references to affect and its impact on our responses to, and responsibility for the other, she has not given this feature of her work the kind of focus that I believe it deserves. And while Butler's ventures into the field of ethics have already received considerable critical attention, there has, as yet, been little discussion of her deployment of affect. Considering the enormous output of scholarship that her writings tend to generate, this oversight is remarkable, and it is one of my aims in this essay to review and evaluate Butler's deployment of affect in more detail.

My main objective, though, is to unravel the connection between affect and ethics, and to establish its import for understanding our responses to violence and war. It is my contention that the linkage between affect and ethics in Butler's writings is of significant explanatory and critical value: it contributes notably towards an understanding of the differentiated visceral reactions and responses to the suffering of others, specifically in the context of war. Her construal of ethics as enmeshed with affect (see Butler 2009: 34) is noteworthy for two further, and related, reasons: first, it conveys how ethical responsibility is not inherently at odds with the notion of the decentred subject. Rather, ethical responsibility is anchored in the subject's constitution as relational. Thus, at the heart of Butler's account lies her assertion of an affective relationality, or interdependency, out of which ethical obligations are said to arise: responsibility becomes grounded in relationality and in our vulnerability towards and dependence upon the actions of known and unknown others.