Judith Butler, Frames of War. New York: Verso, 2009.
If the terms of multiculturalism and the politics of recognition require either the reduction of the subject to a single, defining attribute, or the construction of a multiply determined subject, then I am not sure we have yet faced the challenge to cultural metaphysics posed by new global networks that traverse and animate several dynamic determinations at once. 147
When such networks from the basis of political coalitions, they are bound together less by matters of “identity” or commonly accepted terms of recognition than by forms of political opposition to certain state and other regulatory politics that effect exclusions, abjections, partially or fully suspended citizenship, subordination, debasement, and the like. In this sense, “coalitions” are not necessarily based on subject positions; indeed, they can be based on provisionally overlapping aims and there can be — perhaps must be — active antagonisms over what these aims should be and how best to reach them. 147
They are animated fields of differences, in the sense that “to be effected by another” and “to effect another” are part of the very social ontology of the subject, at which point “the subject” is less a discrete substance than an active and transitive set of interrelations. 147
So when we speak about “frameworks” in this respect, we are not simply talking about theoretical perspectives that we bring to the analysis of politics, but about modes of intelligibility that further the workings of the state and, as such, are themselves exercises of power even as they exceed the specific domain of state power. 149