Whether and how we respond to the suffering of others, how we formulate moral criticisms, how we articulate political analyses, depends upon a certain field of perceptible reality having already been established. This field of perceptible reality is one in which the notion of the recognizable human is formed and maintained over and against what cannot be named or regarded as the human - a figure of the nonhuman that negatively determines and potentially unsettles the recognizably human.

(Judith Butler: Frames of War, Verso 2010, s. 64)