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About this book
Guardian & Observer reviews
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Trade review
A profound exploration of current wars, looking at violence, gender and different forms of resistance.
Synopsis
The media's portrayal of state violence has saturated our understanding of human life, and has led to the exploitation and abandonment of whole people, who are cast as existential threats rather than as living populations in need of protection. This title explores this portrayal, a process integral to the way in which the West wages modern war.
Book Details
Publisher:
VERSO
Publication Date:
01-Aug-2010
ISBN:
9781844676262
Guardian review
Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?
Steven Poole the guardian Fri 08 May 2009
War is "framed" in the media so as to prevent us from recognising the people who are to be killed as living fully "grievable" lives, like ours. That is the thesis pursued in this collection of reprinted talks and essays written since 2004. One must suffer through densely superficial jugglings of reified abstractions and tics of academic preening (Butler is fond of warning that what she is about to say might seem "paradoxical"), but at length she will arrive at a concrete subject, and there ensue bracing close readings of the pope, Melanie Klein, Michael Walzer, Susan Sontag and poems written by Guantánamo prisoners.
The best essay is the excellent "Sexual Politics, Torture and Time", in which, addressing the Abu Ghraib photos, Butler notes that "The torture was also a way to coercively produce the Arab subject and the Arab mind", and advances the impressive gambit: "I want to suggest that a civilisational war is at work in this context that casts the army as the more sexually progressive culture." Elsewhere she excoriates lazy rhetoric about "tolerance" and Islamic "taboo", and deplores in a general way the "inversions of discourse" in warlike rhetoric. This last strand of discussion consists, it seems, of promising, or wishing for, a book that never quite materialises. Perhaps someone else has already written it.