Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence

Butler, Judith

ISBN 10: 1844670058 / ISBN 13: 9781844670055

Published by Verso, 2004

About this Item

First Edition. A heavily annotated and tabbed first-printing copy of Butler's influential post-9/11 meditation on vulnerability, violence, ethics, and political responsibility. This copy contains extensive reader engagement throughout the text, including pencil underlining, marginal markings, bracketed passages, circled references, and numerous page tabs distributed across the volume. An invitation from the United States Naval Academy Ethics Faculty Development Institute remains laid in, providing additional scholarly provenance. From the personal working library of philosopher Eduardo Mendieta, whose research intersects significantly with Butler's work on ethics, political theory, human rights, and violence. A notable research copy documenting an important philosopher's sustained engagement with one of Butler's most significant political works.

Seller Inventory # mon0000154177

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence
• Publisher: Verso
• Publication Date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1844670058
• ISBN 13: 9781844670055
• Binding: hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Includes dust jacket.

About this title

Synopsis

In this profound appraisal of post-September 11, 2001 America, Judith Butler considers the conditions of heightened vulnerability and aggression that followed from the attack on the US, and US retaliation. Judith Butler critiques the use of violence that has emerged as a response to loss, and argues that the dislocation of first-world privilege offers instead a chance to imagine a world in which that violence might be minimized and in which interdependency becomes acknowledged as the basis for a global political community.

Butler considers the means by which some lives become grief-worthy, while others are perceived as undeserving of grief or even incomprehensible as lives. She discusses the political implications of sovereignty in light of the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. She argues against the anti-intellectual current of contemporary US patriotism and the power of censorship during times of war. Finally, she takes on the question of when and why anti-semitism is leveled as a charge against those who voice criticisms of the Israeli state. She counters that we have a responsibility to speak out against both Israeli injustices and anti-semitism, and argues against the rhetorical use of the charge of anti-semitism to quell public debate.

In her most impassioned and personal book to date, Judith Butler responds to the current US policies to wage perpetual war, and calls for a deeper understanding of how mourning and violence might instead inspire solidarity and a quest form global justice.

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.