Judith Butler Quotes About War

Quotes about: War

• Visual renditions of war not only establish what can be seen, and the audio-track established what can be heard, but the photographs also "train" us in ways of focusing on targets, ways of regarding suffering and loss.

  Judith Butler

  War, Loss, Track

  Interview with Cihan Aksan and Jon Bailes, www.counterpunch.org. October 11, 2013.

• Because Al-Qaeda has been a non-state centered organisation, many of these scenarios do not exactly apply. These are not wars between states. And yet, it seems to me that we make a mistake if we accept the view that states are fighting terrorism, since we have abundant evidence for accepting the idea of state terrorism, and what is most urgent is to track and expose how state terrorism operates under the rubric of "democracy."

  Judith Butler

  Mistake, War, Fighting

• Photographs can be forms of recruitment, ways of bringing the viewer into the military, as it were. In this way, they prepare us for war, even enlist us in war, at the level of the senses, establishing a sensate regime of war.

  Judith Butler

  Military, War, Levels

  Interview with Cihan Aksan and Jon Bailes, www.counterpunch.org. October 11, 2013.

• I certainly don't mean to suggest that all investigative journalism prior to 9/11 in the US was praiseworthy. But there were more examples to which one could point, and there were at last some activist photographers who understood that getting information into the public sphere in spite of military censorship was a right and obligation within democracy. That strain in war journalism did nearly vanish during that time.

  Judith Butler

  Military, War, Mean

  Interview with Cihan Aksan and Jon Bailes, www.counterpunch.org. October 11, 2013.

• I am not sure that I know enough about the pre-history of 9/11 to agree or disagree. But I did think at the time that the [George W.] Bush administration took a number of cues from the Israeli government, not only by drawing on and intensifying anti-Arab racism, but by insisting that the attack on US government and financial buildings was an attack on "democracy" and by invoking "security at all costs" to wage war without a clear focus (why the Taliban?), and by suspending both constitutional rights and the regular protocol for congressional approval for declaring war.

  Judith Butler

  War, Thinking, Rights

  Interview with Cihan Aksan and Jon Bailes, www.counterpunch.org. October 11, 2013.

• Peace is a certain resistance to the terrible satisfactions of war. It’s a commitment to living with a certain kind of vulnerability to others and susceptibility to being wounded that actually gives our individual lives meaning.

  Judith Butler

  War, Commitment, Giving

  Interview with Jill Stauffer, www.believermag.com. May, 2003.

• The Gulf War was a clear precedent as well, and it let us begin to understand how the US government would go to war to secure strategic oil reserves and potential markets.

  Judith Butler

  War, Government, Oil

  Interview With Cihan Aksan, Jon Bailes, www.counterpunch.org. October 11, 2013.

• Peace is a certain resistance to the terrible satisfactions of war.

  Judith Butler

  Peace, War, Satisfaction

  Interview with Jill Stauffer, www.believermag.com. May 2003.

• I think maybe the destructive pleasure got turned into the destructive pleasure of war (something we see still in the images of US soldiers urinating on the dead bodies of Taliban soldiers). Something of the pleasure in destruction gets unleashed, and then becomes part of war effort rationalised first as revenge (or justice defined as revenge). But then it takes new forms, as we see now.

  Judith Butler

  Revenge, War, Thinking

  Interview With Cihan Aksan, Jon Bailes, www.counterpunch.org. October 11, 2013.

• War begets war. It produces outraged and humiliated and furious people. That is almost invariably the case.

  Judith Butler

  War, People, Produce

  Interview with Jill Stauffer, www.believermag.com. May, 2003.

• The pleasurable part of public mourning can also lead to a sense of self-sanctification that justifies in advance any war effort, whether or not the target and destruction are in any way related to the initial event.

  Judith Butler

  War, Self, Mourning

  Interview with Cihan Aksan, Jon Bailes, www.counterpunch.org. October 11, 2013.

• I don't think there's any way that war can have a place in peace. I think that peace is the active and difficult resistance to the temptation of war; it is the prerogative and the obligation of the injured. Peace is something that has to be vigilantly maintained; it is a vigilance, and it involves temptation, and it does not mean we as human beings are not aggressive. This is a mistaken way of understanding non-violence.

  Judith Butler

  War, Mean, Thinking

  Interview with Jill Stauffer, www.believermag.com. May, 2003.

• I think that many of the mobilizations against the wars waged by the US and its allies since 2001 have been non-violent and massive. We have seen them throughout European capitals and in the US, and in many other parts of the world as well. So it is not only imaginable, but already actual.

  Judith Butler

  War, Thinking, Allies

  Interview with Cihan Aksan and Jon Bailes, www.counterpunch.org. October 11, 2013.

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