Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (Radical Thinkers)

She applies murky linguistic and aesthetic analyses to a hodgepodge of topics, including the notorious Abu Ghraib photographs, and claims that Islamic sexual puritanism poses a threat to gays and lesbians, a notion she contests at length. Butler's famously impenetrable, jargon-clotted style conveys no fresh thinking. From Publishers Weekly The dehumanizing rhetoric of war, especially the Iraq War, is examined but not illuminated in this turgid study. (June)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. government and media as less important—less grievable—than those of Americans, and develops an obscure theory of the precariousness of life as a rationale for opposing this bias, and state violence in general. The sludginess of Butler's prose and the banality of her ideas make the book virtu

Amazon Customer said Four Stars. Her writing style is dry but the topics are timely in this climate of uncertainty.. "read to overcome death by failure to avoid this kind of fighting" according to dropslaw witstomp. Warfare has become part of the fictive character designations that can be imposed like Plato's demography for a society that functions with rulers and those who are ruled, but Judith Butler prefers to think of all the people involved. Many have precarious lives whether we expect to defend them or consider them a population center filled with human shields that will die of weapons that match the strategic thinking of the rulers. I find it difficult to read the abstract nature of reasoning in this context. My life included some military train. "Interesting, but theoretically weak" according to Ian M. Buchanan. 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 whic

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. In this urgent response to ever more dominant methods of coercion, violence and racism, Butler calls for a re-conceptualization of the Left, one that brokers cultural difference and cultivates resistance to the illegitimate and arbitrary effects of state violence and its vicissitudes.. 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, Butl

She is the author of Frames of War, Precarious Life, The Psychic Life of Power, Excitable Speech, Bodies that Matter, Gender Trouble, and with Slavoj iek and Ernesto Laclau, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. . Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in