In Frames of War, Judith Butler explores the medias 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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Judith Butler is the most creative and courageous social theorist writing today. 'Frames of War' is an intellectual masterpiece that weds a new understanding of being, immersed in history, to a novel Left politics that focuses on State violence, war and resistance. --Cornel West
War is 'framed' in the media so as to prevent us from recognising the people who are to be killed as living fully 'grievable' lives, like ours. That is the thesis pursued in this collection...[with] bracing close readings of the pope, Melanie Klein, Michael Walzer, Susan Sontag and poems written by Guantánamo prisoners. The best essay is the excellent 'Sexual Politics, Torture and Secular Time', in which, addressing the Abu Ghraib photos, Butler notes that 'The torture was also a way to coercively produce the Arab subject and the Arab mind', and advances the impressive gambit: 'I want to suggest that a civilisational war is at work in this context that casts the army as the more sexually progressive culture.' Elsewhere she excoriates lazy rhetoric about 'tolerance' and Islamic 'taboo', and deplores in a general way the 'inversions of discourse' in warlike rhetoric. --Guardian
Judith Butler is quite simply one of the most probing, challenging, and influential thinkers of our time. --J.M. Bernstein
War is 'framed' in the media so as to prevent us from recognising the people who are to be killed as living fully 'grievable' lives, like ours. That is the thesis pursued in this collection...[with] bracing close readings of the pope, Melanie Klein, Michael Walzer, Susan Sontag and poems written by Guantánamo prisoners. The best essay is the excellent 'Sexual Politics, Torture and Secular Time', in which, addressing the Abu Ghraib photos, Butler notes that 'The torture was also a way to coercively produce the Arab subject and the Arab mind', and advances the impressive gambit: 'I want to suggest that a civilisational war is at work in this context that casts the army as the more sexually progressive culture.' Elsewhere she excoriates lazy rhetoric about 'tolerance' and Islamic 'taboo', and deplores in a general way the 'inversions of discourse' in warlike rhetoric. --Guardian
Judith Butler is quite simply one of the most probing, challenging, and influential thinkers of our time. --J.M. Bernstein
About the Author
JUDITH BUTLER is Maxine Elliot Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of many books, including Giving an Account of Oneself, Precarious Life, and Gender Trouble.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
14 of 21 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This is not Butler's best book. It is,however, one of the more interesting books she's written. But theoretically it is kind of weak. She argues that we have a responsibility not to life as such (because people dying is a part of life); but rather our responsibility is to sustain the conditions which allow life to flourish. The problem is she doesn't define 'flourish', so all her talk about philosophy informing social policy is hollow. The other problem is she doesn't connect the dots: if our responsibility is to sustain the conditions which allow life to flourish, and we acknowledge that present conditions don't do that, then don't we also have a responsibility to change our conditions? She shies away from this issue. The other problem is her notion of 'frames' -- this is conceptually retrograde. D&G's concept of abstract machine + assemblage is a much more efficient concept.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
4.2 out of 5 stars
4 reviews
27 of 36 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting, but theoretically weak
8 Jun 2009
By Ian M. Buchanan
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Hardcover
This is not Butler's best book. It is,however, one of the more interesting books she's written. But theoretically it is kind of weak. She argues that we have a responsibility not to life as such (because people dying is a part of life); but rather our responsibility is to sustain the conditions which allow life to flourish. The problem is she doesn't define 'flourish', so all her talk about philosophy informing social policy is hollow. The other problem is she doesn't connect the dots: if our responsibility is to sustain the conditions which allow life to flourish, and we acknowledge that present conditions don't do that, then don't we also have a responsibility to change our conditions? She shies away from this issue. The other problem is her notion of 'frames' -- this is conceptually retrograde. D&G's concept of abstract machine + assemblage is a much more efficient concept.
8 of 12 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Judith the Obscure
19 Dec 2011
By S Zaidi
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Paperback
"If the violent act is, among other things, a way of relocating the capacity to be violated (always) elsewhere, it produces the appearance that the subject who enacts violence is impermeable to violence. The accomplishment of this appearance becomes one aim of violence; one locates injurability with the other by injuring the other and then taking the sign of injury as the truth of the other."
It was difficult to crack the code of a statement like this and the work is full of such intellectualist concatenations.One is reminded that it was not for nothing that Berkeley's celebrated rhetorician was awarded the prize honoring her proclivity to abstruse writing albeit her incandescence does speak through punctuative interstices a couple of times in each chapter, re-authorizing the impalement of a myasthenically obtuse syntax transpiring upon a neo-Hegelian consciousness. This writerly violence exploits the reader's hermeneutic injurability and permanently coagulates the possibility of transference of sense.
It was difficult to crack the code of a statement like this and the work is full of such intellectualist concatenations.One is reminded that it was not for nothing that Berkeley's celebrated rhetorician was awarded the prize honoring her proclivity to abstruse writing albeit her incandescence does speak through punctuative interstices a couple of times in each chapter, re-authorizing the impalement of a myasthenically obtuse syntax transpiring upon a neo-Hegelian consciousness. This writerly violence exploits the reader's hermeneutic injurability and permanently coagulates the possibility of transference of sense.
13 of 23 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
better than before
19 May 2009
By critical
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Hardcover
Butler continues her profound reflections in Precarious Life, offering insightful analyses of torture, photography, and the probem of mourning in the context of war. It is not just about media analysis of war, but about the question of recognition, survival, destructiveness, and non-violence
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4.2 out of 5 stars
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