Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?

By James J. Butler. 2009

2,193 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This is a 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.

Subfields: Gender Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6b3512871b06ac73a93c7a8503df6865209a2d42

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In Gender Studies

1. M. Fotaki
2. Anwar Ahmed
3. Michalinos Zembylas
4. J. Ribot

Citations in the corpus

• What Can Psychoanalysis Offer Organization Studies Today? Taking Stock of Current Developments and Thinking about Future Directions (2012, background): “In her recent work Butler (2004b, 2009) indicates that the post-9/11 world produces unlivable and unviable lives, and she thereby forces us to think about whether it is possible, given the conditions that govern us, to produce livable and viable lives (Loizidou, 2008).”
• Cause and response: vulnerability and climate in the Anthropocene (2014, background): “As Butler (2009, 25) states, ‘ … those whose lives are not ‘regarded’ as potentially grievable, and hence valuable, are made to bear the burden of starvation, underemployment, legal disenfranchisement, and differential exposure to violence and death’.”
• Theorizing “Difficult Knowledge” in the Aftermath of the “Affective Turn”: Implications for Curriculum and Pedagogy in Handling Traumatic Representations (2014, methodology): “Butler is particularly preoccupied with hierarchies of public mourning, the distinction between grievable and less grievable lives (see also Butler, 2009), and the repudiation of grief in the very discourse that seeks to redress it, thus exposing how we are all confronted with what we cannot…”
• Making sense of the complex entanglement between emotion and pedagogy: contributions of the affective turn (2016, background): “Judith Butler (2004a, 2004b, 2009) es una de esas académicas que nos incitan a reconsiderar el desafío que presentan los elementos psíquicos para lograr una posible transformación ética y política, y viceversa (véase Zembylas, 2009, 2014).”
• Why critical literacy should turn to ‘the affective turn’: making a case for critical affective literacy (2016, background): “Butler (2010) shows how our responsiveness to the suffering of others is conditioned by how their lives are presented to us.”