Precarious Life

Precarious Life PDF Author: Judith Butler
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1839763035
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
In her most impassioned and personal book to date, Judith Butler responds in this profound appraisal of post-9/11 America to the current US policies to wage perpetual war, and calls for a deeper understanding of how mourning and violence might instead inspire solidarity and a quest for global justice.

Precarious Life

Precarious Life PDF Author: Judith Butler
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1839763035
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
In her most impassioned and personal book to date, Judith Butler responds in this profound appraisal of post-9/11 America to the current US policies to wage perpetual war, and calls for a deeper understanding of how mourning and violence might instead inspire solidarity and a quest for global justice.

Precarious Life

Precarious Life PDF Author: Judith Butler
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1789602424
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
In this profound appraisal of post-September 11, 2001 America, Judith Butler considers the conditions of heightened vulnerability and aggression that followed from the attack on the US, and US retaliation. Judith Butler critiques the use of violence that has emerged as a response to loss, and argues that the dislocation of first-world privilege offers instead a chance to imagine a world in which that violence might be minimized and in which interdependency becomes acknowledged as the basis for a global political community. Butler considers the means by which some lives become grief-worthy, while others are perceived as undeserving of grief or even incomprehensible as lives. She discusses the political implications of sovereignty in light of the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. She argues against the anti-intellectual current of contemporary US patriotism and the power of censorship during times of war. Finally, she takes on the question of when and why anti-semitism is leveled as a charge against those who voice criticisms of the Israeli state. She counters that we have a responsibility to speak out against both Israeli injustices and anti-semitism, and argues against the rhetorical use of the charge of anti-semitism to quell public debate. In her most impassioned and personal book to date, Judith Butler responds to the current US policies to wage perpetual war, and calls for a deeper understanding of how mourning and violence might instead inspire solidarity and a quest form global justice.

Precarious Life

Precarious Life PDF Author: Judith Butler
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9781844675449
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
"A book that shines with the splendor of engaged thought."-- The Brooklyn Rail

Precarious Life

Precarious Life PDF Author: Judith Butler
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9781844670055
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
In this profound appraisal of post-September 11, 2001 America, Judith Butler considers the conditions of heightened vulnerability and aggression that followed from the attack on the US, and US retaliation. Judith Butler critiques the use of violence that has emerged as a response to loss, and argues that the dislocation of first-world privilege offers instead a chance to imagine a world in which that violence might be minimized and in which interdependency becomes acknowledged as the basis for a global political community. Butler considers the means by which some lives become grief-worthy, while others are perceived as undeserving of grief or even incomprehensible as lives. She discusses the political implications of sovereignty in light of the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. She argues against the anti-intellectual current of contemporary US patriotism and the power of censorship during times of war. Finally, she takes on the question of when and why anti-semitism is leveled as a charge against those who voice criticisms of the Israeli state. She counters that we have a responsibility to speak out against both Israeli injustices and anti-semitism, and argues against the rhetorical use of the charge of anti-semitism to quell public debate. In her most impassioned and personal book to date, Judith Butler responds to the current US policies to wage perpetual war, and calls for a deeper understanding of how mourning and violence might instead inspire solidarity and a quest form global justice.

Frames of War

Frames of War PDF Author: Judith Butler
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1784782491
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book 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.

State of Insecurity

State of Insecurity PDF Author: Isabell Lorey
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1781685975
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 118

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Book Description
Years of remodelling the welfare state, the rise of technology, and the growing power of neoliberal government apparatuses have established a society of the precarious. In this new reality, productivity is no longer just a matter of labour, but affects the formation of the self, blurring the division between personal and professional lives. Encouraged to believe ourselves flexible and autonomous, we experience a creeping isolation that has both social and political impacts, and serves the purposes of capital accumulation and social control. In State of Insecurity, Isabell Lorey explores the possibilities for organization and resistance under the contemporary status quo, and anticipates the emergence of a new and disobedient self-government of the precarious.

Precarious Lives

Precarious Lives PDF Author: Shahram Khosravi
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812248872
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Drawing on extensive ethnographic engagement with youth in Tehran and Isfahan as well as with migrant workers in rural areas, Shahram Khosravi weaves a tapestry from individual stories, government reports, statistics, and cultural analysis to depict how Iranians react to the experience of precarity and the possibility of hope.

The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Precarious State

The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Precarious State PDF Author: Declan Walsh
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393249921
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
Winner of the 2021 Overseas Press Club of America Cornelius Ryan Award The former New York Times Pakistan bureau chief paints an arresting, up-close portrait of a fractured country. Declan Walsh is one of the New York Times’s most distinguished international correspondents. His electrifying portrait of Pakistan over a tumultuous decade captures the sweep of this strange, wondrous, and benighted country through the dramatic lives of nine fascinating individuals. On assignment as the country careened between crises, Walsh traveled from the raucous port of Karachi to the salons of Lahore, and from Baluchistan to the mountains of Waziristan. He met a diverse cast of extraordinary Pakistanis—a chieftain readying for war at his desert fort, a retired spy skulking through the borderlands, and a crusading lawyer risking death for her beliefs, among others. Through these “nine lives” he describes a country on the brink—a place of creeping extremism and political chaos, but also personal bravery and dogged idealism that defy easy stereotypes. Unbeknownst to Walsh, however, an intelligence agent was tracking him. Written in the aftermath of Walsh’s abrupt deportation, The Nine Lives of Pakistan concludes with an astonishing encounter with that agent, and his revelations about Pakistan’s powerful security state. Intimate and complex, attuned to the centrifugal forces of history, identity, and faith, The Nine Lives of Pakistan offers an unflinching account of life in a precarious, vital country.

Precarious Worlds

Precarious Worlds PDF Author: Katie Meehan
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820348805
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
This edited collection contributes to the theoretical literature on social reproduction—defined by Marx as the necessary labor to arrive the next day at the factory gate—and extended by feminist geographers and others into complex understandings of the relationship between paid labor and the unpaid work of daily life. The volume explores new terrain in social reproduction with a focus on the challenges posed by evolving theories of embodiment and identity, nonhuman materialities, and diverse economies. Reflecting and expanding on ongoing debates within feminist geography, with additional cross-disciplinary contributions from sociologists and political scientists, Precarious Worlds explores the productive possibilities of social reproduction as an ontology, a theoretical lens, and an analytical framework for what Geraldine Pratt has called “a vigorous, materialist transnational feminism.”

Giving an Account of Oneself

Giving an Account of Oneself PDF Author: Judith Butler
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823225054
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
What does it mean to lead a moral life? In her first extended study of moral philosophy, Judith Butler offers a provocative outline for a new ethical practice—one responsive to the need for critical autonomy and grounded in a new sense of the human subject. Butler takes as her starting point one’s ability to answer the questions “What have I done?” and “What ought I to do?” She shows that these question can be answered only by asking a prior question, “Who is this ‘I’ who is under an obligation to give an account of itself and to act in certain ways?” Because I find that I cannot give an account of myself without accounting for the social conditions under which I emerge, ethical reflection requires a turn to social theory. In three powerfully crafted and lucidly written chapters, Butler demonstrates how difficult it is to give an account of oneself, and how this lack of self-transparency and narratibility is crucial to an ethical understanding of the human. In brilliant dialogue with Adorno, Levinas, Foucault, and other thinkers, she eloquently argues the limits, possibilities, and dangers of contemporary ethical thought. Butler offers a critique of the moral self, arguing that the transparent, rational, and continuous ethical subject is an impossible construct that seeks to deny the specificity of what it is to be human. We can know ourselves only incompletely, and only in relation to a broader social world that has always preceded us and already shaped us in ways we cannot grasp. If inevitably we are partially opaque to ourselves, how can giving an account of ourselves define the ethical act? And doesn’t an ethical system that holds us impossibly accountable for full self-knowledge and self-consistency inflict a kind of psychic violence, leading to a culture of self-beratement and cruelty? How does the turn to social theory offer us a chance to understand the specifically social character of our own unknowingness about ourselves? In this invaluable book, by recasting ethics as a project in which being ethical means becoming critical of norms under which we are asked to act, but which we can never fully choose, Butler illuminates what it means for us as “fallible creatures” to create and share an ethics of vulnerability, humility, and ethical responsiveness.