International audienceAs pointed out by military historian Joanna Bourke, ‘the characteristic act of men at war is not dying, it is killing’. This simple observation has led to some important literature on how soldiers relate to the suffering and deaths they cause. This literature has shown that military consent for killing does not have its origins in a pre-discursive biological nature. Rather, it is mediated by powerful meaning structures – such as nationalist narratives or demonized representations of the enemy – that state which lives should be recognized as livable, and which lives should remain excluded from this economy of compassion. This article investigates how military consent for killing is constructed in the context of contemporary Western wars. It does so by focusing on a particular case study: those French soldiers who participated in the war in Libya in 2011. The analysis – based on 40 semi-structured interviews with military leaders and fighter aircraft pilots – reveals a framing of war where enemies are neither framed as an object of hatred nor of ritual sacrifice nor as anything else. They are ‘ungrievable lives’ as expressed by Judith Butler: ‘they are, ontologically, and from the start, already lost and destroyed, which means that when they are destroyed in war, nothing is destroyed’. The article reviews the ideas and materialities that lead to this spectacular case of misrecognition
Emotions are often said to be a hard case for empirical analysis because of their 'intimate' nature. This paper argues that this view stems from a misleading view of the real nature of emotions. As Butler recently put it, emotions are inseparable from the social 'frames' which constitute them. Hence, it is possible to by-pass the epistemological problem of the study of emotions by studying these frames. I make this point by elaborating on an inquiry into the 'frames' which mediate French airmen's emotional relation to violence. I analyse their emotional approach to violence in three steps: (1) data collection, (2) an analysis of the language that they use when talking about their victims; (3) an investigation of the routinized procedures which precede their lethal actions.
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