This profound appraisal of post-9/11 America considers the conditions of heightened vulnerability and aggression that followed from the attack on the US, and US retaliation. Judith Butler critiques the use of violence that has emerged as a response to loss, and argues that the dislocation of first-world privilege offers instead a chance to imagine a world in which that violence might be minimized and in which interdependency becomes acknowledged as the basis for a global political community. Butler considers the means by which some lives become grief-worthy, while others are perceived as undeserving of grief or even incomprehensible as lives. She discusses the political implications of sovereignty in light of the prisoners in Guantánamo Bay. She argues against the anti-intellectual current of contemporary US patriotism and the power of censorship during times of war. Finally, she takes on the question of when and why anti-semitism is leveled as a charge against those who voice criticisms of the Israeli state. She counters that we have a responsibility to speak out against both Israeli injustices and anti-semitism, and argues against the rhetorical use of the charge of anti-semitism to quell public debate.

硃迪斯·巴特勒，美國後結構主義學者，其研究領域有女性主義、酷兒理論、政治哲學以及倫理學。目前任教於加州大學伯剋利分校修辭學與比較文學係。巴特勒在1984年從耶魯大學獲得她的哲學博士學位，後開始從事後結構主義和西方女權主義理論的研究。