FRAMES OF WAR
WHEN IS LIFE GRIEVABLE?
Judith Butler
OUT NOW
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“Judith Butler is the most creative and courageous social theorist writing today. FRAMES OF WAR is an intellectual masterpiece.” Cornel West
“To propose that Judith Butler is one of the world’s leading thinkers, a feminist philosopher whose writing has impacted on a wide domain of disciplinary fields inside the academy, as well as on political culture in the outside world, is hardly contentious. We are, many of us, deeply indebted to this body of work which has illuminated issues that are at the very core of life, death, sexuality and existence.” Angela McRobbie, Times Higher Education Book of the Week
Read the full review here: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=407098
“Frames of War [is] an important contribution to what will no doubt be an ongoing philosophical and political discussion about the rights and wrongs of war.” Nina Power, The Philosopher’s Magazine
Read full review here: http://www.philosophypress.co.uk/?p=714
“Judith Butler’s focus in this collection of five essays written and revised between 2004 and 2008 is the USA under George W. Bush, with Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay looming in the background. The questions she addresses… have a clear bearing on the cultural politics of grief beyond the USA.” Mark Fisher, Frieze
Read the full review here: http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/frames_of_war_when_is_life_grievable
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The most celebrated feminist in the world – Gender Trouble started the Queer Theory movement and sold over 100,000 copies – returns with this powerful analysis of the role of the media in the ‘War on Terror’.
In FRAMES OF WAR, Judith Butler explores the media’s portrayal of state violence, a process integral to the way in which the West wages modern war. This portrayal has saturated our understanding of human life, and has led to the exploitation and abandonment of whole peoples, who are cast as existential threats rather than as living populations in need of protection. These people are framed as already lost, to imprisonment, unemployment and starvation, and can easily be dismissed. In the twisted logic that rationalizes their deaths, the loss of such populations is deemed necessary to protect the lives of “the living.”
This disparity, Butler argues, has profound implications for why and when we feel horror, guilt, loss and indifference, both in the context of war and, increasingly, everyday life. In this urgent response to increasingly dominant methods of coercion, violence and racism, Butler calls for a reconceptualization of the Left, one united in opposition and resistance to the illegitimate and arbitrary effects of state violence.
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Praise for JUDITH BUTLER:
“Judith Butler is quite simply one of the most probing, challenging, and influential thinkers of our time.” J.M. Bernstein
Praise for PRECARIOUS LIFE:
“It’s clear that its author is still interested in stirring up trouble—academic, political and otherwise.” –Bookforum
“Hers is a unique voice of courage and conceptual ambition that addresses public life from the perspective of psychic reality, encouraging us to acknowledge the solidarity and the suffering through which we emerge as subjects of freedom.” Homi K. Bhabha
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JUDITH BUTLER is Maxine Elliot Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of many highly influential books, including Giving an Account of Oneself, Precarious Life, and Gender Trouble.
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ISBN 9781844673339 £14.99 / $26.95 / Hardback / 200 pages
FRAMES OF WAR is available from all good bookshops and:
http://www.versobooks.com/books/ab/b-titles/butler_judith_frames_of_war.shtml
UK:
http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/book/9781844673339/Frames-of-War
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Frames-War-When-Life-Grievable/dp/1844673332
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