Judith Butler At Guernica

Michael Berger bio ↓  ·  April 8th, 2010  ·  filed under politics

“All I really have to say about life is that for it to be regarded as valuable, it has to first be regarded as grievable. A life that is in some sense socially dead or already ‘lost’ cannot be grieved when it is actually destroyed.

And I think we can see that entire populations are regarded as negligible life by warring powers, and so when they are destroyed, there is no great sense that a heinous act and egregious loss have taken place. My question is: how do we understand this nefarious distinction that gets set up between grievable and ungrievable lives?”

At Guernica, a lively and passionate interview with philosopher Judith Butler about her forthcoming book, Frames Of War: When Is Life Grievable?

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Michael Berger is a San Francisco-based writer, blogger and fiction editor for www.splintergeneration.com. A former civil rights law clerk, he now works at a bookstore, volunteers at Alemany Farm and is working on various unfinished novels about love and the apocalypse. More from this author →

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