or
Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering.
or
Amazon Prime free trial required. Sign up when you check out. Learn more
More Buying Choices
Have one to sell? Sell yours here
or
Get a £3.40 Amazon.co.uk Gift Card
Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?
 
See larger image
 
Tell the Publisher!
I’d like to read this book on Kindle

Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here, or download a FREE Kindle Reading App.

Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? [Hardcover]

Judith Butler
3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
RRP: £14.99
Price: £14.24 & this item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions
You Save: £0.75 (5%)
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
In stock.
Dispatched from and sold by Amazon.co.uk. Gift-wrap available.
Only 1 left in stock--order soon (more on the way).
Want guaranteed delivery by Monday, February 13? Choose Express delivery at checkout. See Details

Formats

Amazon Price New from Used from
Hardcover £14.24  
Paperback £9.49  
Trade In this Item for up to £3.40
Trade in Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £3.40, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.

Frequently Bought Together

Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? + Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence + On Violence (Harvest Book)
Price For All Three: £27.24

Show availability and delivery details

Buy the selected items together

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought


Product details

  • Hardcover: 192 pages
  • Publisher: Verso (18 May 2009)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1844673332
  • ISBN-13: 978-1844673339
  • Product Dimensions: 21.1 x 14.5 x 2.3 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 426,180 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Judith Butler
Discover books, learn about writers, and more.

Visit Amazon's Judith Butler Page

Product Description

Review

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

Product Description

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.

Suggested Tags from Similar Products

 (What's this?)
Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
 

Your tags: Add your first tag
 

Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store

If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store. Learn more

What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?


 

Customer Reviews

1 Review
5 star:    (0)
4 star:    (0)
3 star:
 (1)
2 star:    (0)
1 star:    (0)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
3.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review)
 
 
 
 
Share your thoughts with other customers:
Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting, but theoretically weak, 8 Jun 2009
By 
Ian M. Buchanan (Cardiff, Wales) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (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.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews 
Was this review helpful to you? Yes No

Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com: 4.0 out of 5 stars (3 customer reviews)

22 of 31 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
This review is from: Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (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.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Judith the Obscure, 19 Dec 2011
By S Zaidi "Peacemaker" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (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.

12 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars better than before, 19 May 2009
By critical "lefthegelian" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (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
 Go to Amazon.com to see all 3 reviews  4.0 out of 5 stars 
Were these reviews helpful?   Let us know
 
 
Only search this product's reviews



Customer Discussions

This product's forum
Discussion Replies Latest Post
No discussions yet

Ask questions, Share opinions, Gain insight
Start a new discussion
Topic:
First post:
Prompts for sign-in
 


Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
Search all Amazon discussions
   
Related forums


Listmania!


Look for similar items by category


Look for similar items by subject


Feedback


Amazon.co.uk Privacy Statement Amazon.co.uk Delivery Information Amazon.co.uk Returns & Exchanges