Profound exploration of the current wars, looking at violence, gender and different forms of resistance.

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, 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 quite simply one of the most probing, challenging, and influential thinkers of our time.” (J.M. Bernstein)
“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)

A szerzőről:
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.