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4.0 

Frames of War

By Judith Butler
Frames of War by Judith Butler digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

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.

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26 Reviews

4.0
“Once I waded through the slightly convoluted language, there was so much to take away from this book. Grievability and the differential recognition of subjects as lives worth protecting are heavily pertinent in our current geopolitical context, and despite being written 15 years ago, the arguments here are perhaps even more relevant today than during the time of writing. Frames of War forces the reader to question why certain populations are more easily "lose-able" than others, why our responsibility to grieve others only applies when those "others" are like us, why victims of violence and war in seemingly faraway lands do not count as "lives," as living, as losses to us. This book burrows deep to grasp at the humanity that Butler reminds us is within each of us, most crucially in readers from the West, and wrenches it to the surface - tangible and inescapable.”

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