Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

In this urgent response to ever more dominant methods of coercion, violence and racism, Butler calls for a reconceptualization of the Left, one that brokers cultural difference and cultivates affective and effective resistance to the illegitimate and arbitrary effects of state violence and its vicissitudes. 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. 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 Cast as threats to human life as we know it, rather than as living populations, such populations become targeted for destruction in order to protect the lives of “the living”. Arguing that this process of differential grieving is enacted through media forms that have become part of the very waging of war, Butler shows how this situation has led to the first-world destruction and abandonment of populations who do not conform to the prevailing norm of the human.

In Frames of War (Verso, 2009), Judith Butler explores the way that recent US-led wars have enforced a distinction between those lives that are recognized as grievable, and those that are not. Judith Butler Maxine Elliot Professor, Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley “Frames of War”ħ25 West Roosevelt Road, University of Illinois at Chicago

Judith butler uchicago