The Force of Nonviolence

Praise for Frames of War: A trenchant and brilliant book. -- Mike Rowe * Utne Reader * Praise for Frames of War: It's clear that its author is still interested in stirring up trouble-academic, political and otherwise. * Bookforum * Praise for Frames of War: Judith Butler is quite simply one of the most probing, challenging, and influential thinkers of our time. -- J. M. Bernstein Praise for Frames of War: Judith Butler is the most creative and courageous social theorist writing today. Frames of War is an intellectual masterpiece that weds a new understanding of being, immersed in history, to a novel Left politics that focuses on State violence, war and resistance. -- Cornel West Praise for Frames of War: An impressive and challenging book from one of the leading intellectuals of our time. * Diva * Praise for Precarious Life: A book that shines with the splendor of engaged thought. * Brooklyn Rail * Praise for Precarious Life: Here is a unique voice of courage and conceptual ambition that addresses public life from the perspective of psychic reality, encouraging us to acknowledge the solidarity and the suffering through which we emerge as subjects of freedom. -- Homi K. Bhabha Butler's philosophical inquiry argues that it is in fact a shrewd and even aggressive collective political tactic. * New York Times * Perhaps the most influential and widely travelled feminist in the Western academy...[Butler] carefully, with assertive toughness, combats the hatred, fear and rage of those who respond violently to her continuous commitment to confronting normative patterns of coercion with calls for concerted actions of resistance. -- Lynne Segal * Times Higher Education * Judith Butler lucidly enumerates the obstacles nonviolence faces in a time when it is sorely needed. Drawing on works from Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, and Sigmund Freud, she makes a fresh new case for what destructive obstacle our pervasive individualism is to nonviolent action - and the change possible with it. -- John Freeman * The Boston Globe * Featured in The New Yorker * The New Yorker * [The Force of Nonviolence] walks us through a route of emancipation that has not been approached previously, but which seems, once pursued, recognisable and familiar. * LSE Review of Books * Judith Butler has achieved a status that few other living academics have acquired: For each published work that she issues, reams of discussion and critique are produced in response, so much so that they have engendered microdisciplines in the many fields in which she is an expert: gender, politics, literary studies, and more. -- Francis Wade * The Nation * Drawing on thinkers from Sigmund Freud to Frantz Fanon, Butler untangles deep-seated misunderstandings about what constitutes violence and nonviolence, to suggest new paths forward. * Jewish Currents * Vital, and chillingly timely. -- Hettie Judah * i newspaper * [The Force of Nonviolence] avoids rehashing tired moral and strategic condemnations of violence. Butler reminds us that what is deemed violence or nonviolence is a matter of interpretation and that the state maintains a monopoly on deciding which forms of violence are legitimate, and which acts are understood to constitute violence at all. -- Natasha Lennard * Bookforum *