McRobbie, Angela. "Book of the Week: FRAMES OF WAR." TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION June 25, 2009.

Butler, Judith. Frames of Life: When is Life Grievable?. London: Verso, 2009. To propose that Judith Butler is one of the world's leading thinkers - a feminist philosopher whose writing has influenced a wide domain of disciplinary fields inside the academy as well as political culture in the outside world - is hardly contentious. We are, many of us, deeply indebted to a body of work that has illuminated issues at the very core of life, death, sexuality and existence. The tone of Butler's work conveys a modesty within urgency, a truly delightful need for precision, for caution as to how we proceed when intervening in matters upon which so much is at stake. In the case of her latest book, the issues explored are: lives that can be grieved and those deemed insufficiently alive to merit the privilege of memorialisation and grief in death; the Iraq War; the media and "embedded reporting"; photography and suffering; the instrumentalisation of feminist and sexual freedoms as a means of demonising Muslim culture; torture and the pornographic pictures from Abu Ghraib prison; and, finally, the possibilities of a new progressive Left coalitional politics of "precarity". While recent books by Butler - a trilogy of reflections that began with Precarious Life (2004) followed by Giving an Account of the Self (2007) and now Frames of War - may seem far removed from her earliest and still best-known books Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies That Matter (1993), there is nevertheless a clear thread of continuity. Her early work drew on Michel Foucault and the linguist J. L. Austin to argue that the seemingly indisputable fact of the sex with which we are born is instead a fictional coherence, a kind of ordering of organs into a duality of gender (male and female) for the sake of "normative heterosexuality". Rather, there is no fact of sex, no beginning with a sex that is then simply expressed as masculinity or femininity. Instead there is a compelled performance, and sanctions for those who do not or are unable to comply. Not being able to live within such dualities condemns vulnerable gay, lesbian or transgender people to threats to their lives, to their viability as subjects. Often their lives are considered not worth grieving, as was the case in the early days of Aids. Since then, Butler has also examined the way in which nation states such as France condemn to pariah status those gay and lesbian people who wish to have or adopt children. Eminent people across the media talk authoritatively of this desire as an imported American monstrosity against which French culture must be protected. Human vulnerability and the fragility of the lives of those condemned to such profound marginalisation compel Butler to reflect on the ways in which a politics able to "secure conditions for livable lives and do so on egalitarian grounds" could develop. In Frames of War Butler, cognisant of the power of grief and the political potential unleashed through rituals of remembrance, develops a theory of grievability. This concerns the lives of those whom we do not know, who are culturally different from or "other" to us, and for whom we often do not have the resources or the capacity to grieve when they endure losses because their suffering has no visibility, no public or legitimate face. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=407098.

Mills, Catherine. Review of Annika Thiem's UNBECOMING SUBJECTS. NDPR (December 2008).

Thiem, Annika. Unbecoming Subjects: Judith Butler, Moral Philosophy, and Critical Responsibility. New York: Fordham UP, 2008. Annika Thiem's exploration of Judith Butler's work in the context of moral philosophy provides an insightful interpretation along with a provocative argument for a rapprochement of sorts between post-structuralism and normative philosophy on the question of ethics. Rather than repeating their supposed opposition because of moral philosophy's emphasis on problems of normativity, and post-structuralism's oft-claimed failure to address such questions, Thiem wishes to maintain a focus on normative claims while taking on the revision of subjectivity offered by Butler. She argues that Butler's recent work presents a number of productive challenges to moral philosophy, challenges which Thiem extends and fleshes out through the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Jean Laplanche, both of whom Butler also draws upon. The key claim that she makes throughout this discussion is that ethical responsibility cannot simply be thought of as a matter of response to another, but must also entail the question of responding well. Thus, questions of value are inherent to ethics but, at the same time, ethics must be predicated on a primary demand for response. Ethics, then, emerges in the tensions between living and living well. She further argues that ethics necessarily entails critique, since the future-oriented question of how to live well requires attention to the productive constraints of subject formation, along with contestation of the presuppositions entailed in ideas of the good life and justice. The book is divided into three parts, the first dedicated to developing an interpretation of Butler's work on subject formation, the second extending her reflections on responsibility and the third articulating the role of a particular conception of critique in ethics. The engagement with Butler's work is sympathetic, perhaps overly so. The book is largely dedicated to drawing out the ways that Butler has attempted to re-theorise subjectivity and related concepts of agency, desire and will through highlighting the constitutive operations of social norms and the implications of this for ethics. While referencing much of Butler's work, Thiem engages most thoroughly with Butler's recent book, Giving an Account of Oneself, which is her most explicit theorisation of ethical responsibility to date. In this text, Butler mobilizes the work of Levinas and Laplanche (among others) to theorise responsibility as stemming from the recognition of a fundamental vulnerability in the condition of being a subject. Thiem also traces Butler's engagement with figures such as Nietzsche, Freud, Foucault and Lacan among others. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=14826.

Singh, A., and M. Singamsetty. "Review of Judith Butler's Gender Trouble." METAPSYCHOLOGY ONLINE REVIEWS October 23, 2007.

Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, simply put, traces the multivalent discourses around sex/gender and shows the trouble with them. First published back in 1990, the uniqueness, rigor, and finesse of Butler's analysis promptly served to propel the book and its author into the center of numerous academic debates: Was Butler a feminist or an anti-feminist? Does the text serve to privilege Gender Studies or undermined it? Whose side is she on, anyway -- or is she saying that there are no sides anymore? . . . Read the rest here: http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id=3882.

Kachra, Karen. "Review of Vicki Kirby's Judith Butler: Live Theory." NDPR October 3, 2007

Whatever their shortcomings, Butler's texts have proven powerfully evocative. Fecund enough to spawn whole sub-disciplines of theory, they have impelled scholars to scrutinize the politics inherent in their theoretical commitments and incited activists to grapple with obstruse French texts. Hers are words to come back to. It is a treat to have Kirby as a guide in this recent contribution to Continuum's Live Theory series. . . . The full review may be found here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=11243