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

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

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.

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.