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drbjjcarpenter's review against another edition
5.0
Butler provides some deep insights into the nature of grief within the public sphere before then proceeding to analyse the relationship between executive (governmental) and judicial power with regards to Guantanamo bay. Both of these sections discuss the nature of the human, who we can consider human and who is excluded from this, and what kinds of lives can be grieved or considered worthy of such a response. This is picked up in the final section, in which she discusses Levinas' concept of the face and the precarious nature of the lives of others, something which, through our coming to know, we come to realise our own precarity. The four section is a wonderfully concise yet apt division of "Jewish" and "Israeli" through which she expresses her dislike for the concept of any critique of Israeli policy to be in some sense anti-semitic. Butler continues to be a shrewd and precise critic and rhetorician.
franceswilde95's review against another edition
5.0
Chose to do my literature review on this and was completely blown away by Butler's case against the desensitisation used by the media, and case for moral relativism to be married with basic ethical practice of seeing the face of the Other for what it is- a face.
themorsecode's review
4.0
More accessible than I was anticipating, particularly strong on dehumanisation post-9/11 America and the horrific treatment of "detainees" in Guantanamo Bay.
ebazilereads's review against another edition
3.0
I received this kindle edition of Judith Butler's Precarious Life as part of my Verso book club subscription. In a series of essays, Butler responds to the ways in which the United States reacted to the 9/11 terrorist attacks and outlines the ways in which we determine who is human, and therefore who is grievable. A complex, thoughtful collection, although a little dense.
raluca_p's review against another edition
4.0
Is a Muslim life as valuable as legibly First World lives? Are the Palestinians yet accorded the status of "human" in US policy and press coverage? Will those hundreds of thousands of Muslim lives lost in the last decades of strife ever receive the equivalent to the paragraph-long obituaries in the that seek to New York Times humanize -- often through nationalist and familial framing devices -- those Americans who have been violently killed? Is our capacity to mourn in global dimensions foreclosed precisely by the failure to conceive of Muslim and Arab lives as lives ?
madeleine_with_tea's review against another edition
3.0
The language was too abstract for me to understand her arguments.