New Constellations: Judith Butler’s ‘Frame’ and Dave Eggers’ What Is the What

This chapter aims to critique Judith Butler’s recent use of the concept of the ‘frame’ in the context of the war on terror. While many of the questions that Butler raises about the ways in which violence is framed in the post-9/11 world are perspicacious, I argue that this conceptual reliance on framing actually stands in the way of her ability to answer them. Instead, it causes her to inadvertently exacerbate precisely the kind of framing process that she is ostensibly attempting to deconstruct. By making this argument, I do not mean to negate the ultimate goals of her project, nor the headway she makes towards them in other ways. Neither am I attempting to undercut her ideologically, by taking what some might interpret as a Badiouian position that rejects her as a proponent of a nihilistic ‘ethics of difference’.1 Rather, my aim is essentially to push her thinking further, holding her to account when she claims that her point is ‘not to paralyze judgement, but to insist that we must devise new constellations for thinking about normativity if we are to proceed in intellectually open and comprehensive ways to grasp and evaluate our world’.2 I suggest that Butler’s analysis of the frame does in fact involve a partial paralysis of judgement, which prevents these ‘new constellations for thinking about normativity’ from being as fully realised as they otherwise might be.