Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (First Edition)

Butler, Judith

ISBN 10: 1844673332 / ISBN 13: 9781844673339

Published by Verso, London, New York, 2009

About this Item

London and New York: Verso, 2009. First edition. First printing, with full number line. Hardcover. Blue boards with white spine lettering. Fine in a fine dust jacket. Publisher's original price intact on jacket flap ($26.95). Comes with archival-quality mylar dust jacket protector. A tight clean copy. Octavo, 193 pages, with index. In this influential volume, Butler examines how state and media frameworks determine which lives are seen as grievable, mournable, or worthy of protection, particularly in the context of war, occupation, and global violence. The book engages with questions of precarity, vulnerability, and ethics, drawing on contemporary conflicts and advancing Butler s ongoing critique of power and norms. Recognized as a significant contribution to political philosophy, gender studies, and critical theory, "Frames of War" extends the arguments of Butler s earlier works such as "Precarious Life.".

Seller Inventory # F6100-Butler

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (First Edition)
• Publisher: Verso, London, New York
• Publication Date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1844673332
• ISBN 13: 9781844673339
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: As New
• Dust Jacket Condition: As New
• Seller catalogs:
  • Philosophy

About this title

Synopsis

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, outrage, guilt, loss and righteous indifference, both in the context of war and, increasingly, everyday life.

This book discerns the resistance to the frames of war in the context of the images from Abu Ghraib, the poetry from Guantanamo, recent European policy on immigration and Islam, and debates on normativity and non-violence. 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.

About the Author

Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. 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 Žižek and Ernesto Laclau, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality.