Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence

Useful framework for trying to make sense of the present moment.

This may be Butler's most accessible book. I would recommend it to generalist readers interested in contemporary political philosophy.

I had to read this for a college course, and I decided to keep it after I finished that project.

Great

I read this book yesterday and just ate it up. It's not the usual esoteric examination by Butler. (Not that anything is wrong with that and I've read her other work, as well).That said, the book is written for a lay audience and I think that this book needed to be published, since the responses of feminists to or after Sept 11th have been far and few. (Aftershock is a great book to read about Sept 11th from a feminist point of view).I can't pinpoint what my favourite section of the book was, however, I enjoyed it all. It was refreshing to see a political theorist write about something "real" that is taking place today that many are discussing or living through.This is a wonderful addition to her writing repertoire. I do hope to see her write more for a lay audience, since hopefully they will get their curiosity piqued and read more Butler.

Great read that shows the hypocrisy in how people value human life. Should make people challenge their notions about war and intervening around the world.

Book was bent to half and pressed on the side of another item inside the box. The book cover is damaged.

I have admired and enjoyed earlier works by Judith Butler, but this one came at, for her and this book, a most unpropitious moment in my personal historical experience. I had been on a six month journey to Israel attempting to rescue and offer refuge to four Palestinian queers--three men and one woman--who were in fear for their life for very good reason. Their pleas for justice and protection had been thoroughly ignored by the PLA, who basically told them they deserved whatever was coming to them. The only organization willing to give them material support was Keshet, an Israeli LGBT activist group in Tel Aviv. When I was reading Butler's passages about the potential opportunities for cooperation between queers and Muslims (etc.) I could not help but look back on my experiences in Israel and, before that, my experiences in Iraq, where I had gone with a relief organization to assist gay men who had been victims of torture. I thought the book committed the error of the three friends in The Book of Job, who care more about their abstractions of the theory of retribution and G-d's justice (universalism) than about the stark and stubborn actualities of real lives. This is a book that needed far more research and hands-on experience to achieve respect or credibility in my eyes. Geopolitical realities dictate that an alliance between queers and political Islam is an even more extreme pipe dream than an alliance between queers and the Christian Right. Arguing otherwise seemed, I believe, one of the aftereffects of this author's clear anti-Zionist ideology. This is fine, but it led her into inaccurate, inappropriate, and mistimed political day dreams.

An excellent text on a dictum of the value of human life and humanity that we take for granted - as lay persons and social scientists. Not everybody's life is 'grievable', not everybody's experience and memory is worth understanding or remembering.There is so much pretense about humanism in social science, so little self-reflection.

Reading Judith Butler is absolutely necessary for anyone who is interested in working with concepts like censorship, manipulation and control. In this book, she highlights a new dimension to the mourning policy after the 11th of sep.

excellent

I didn't realize that this title was directly related to 9-11 of which I am not interested in. I had thought it would bring more insight into the generalities of mourning and the violence that can come from unexpressed grief. So, it didn't meet my needs but was well written and I think, thoroughly researched.

Utter pseudo-academic drivel.