What World Is This?

Through a thorough philosophical accounting of the moral imperatives of living in a globalized society, Butler makes a rousing case for pushing progressive policies as a response to the disruptions of the pandemic. Thoughtful and profound, this hits the mark. * Publishers Weekly * By investigating the world's disunity, Butler provides an excellent text where readers can reflect on how the pandemic affected us all and what it revealed about the nature of our national and global realities. . . Butler challenges readers to think more deeply about how they share their physical and social space with other humans to assemble a more interconnected and livable world. * Philosophy in Review * 'Death and illness have been quite literally in the air,' writes Judith Butler in this stunningly poignant study. Phenomenology, they argue, speaks to moments when, every now and then, many, if not all of us, are reminded of the eventual end of the world, and, even more, worlds. That harbinger knocks at the door in 'this' world in which 'all' now at least attempt, despite and even because of tragedy, to live. Addressing the pan-demos, the people everywhere and our interconnectedness, permeability, and irreplaceability, Butler challenges the hubris of imagined protection from the 'external' and articulates the ebb, flow, fragility, and precarity of life beyond idolsbeyond, in their word, 'pretense'of self-sustained and hoarded power. In the spirit of repair, they ask us to embrace responsibility for conditions of radical equality and nonviolence on which livable lives depend, a common world of the symbiosis of breath and touch in the sociality of life. A beautiful and profound offering for our times and beyond. -- Lewis R. Gordon, author of <i>Fear of Black Consciousness</i> A thoughtful meditation on what it means to share a world with others in a time of global pandemic and climate change, from a philosopher who has already taught us so much about livable and grievable lives. This book offers a deeply human perspective on life at the edge of disaster. -- Lisa Guenther, author of <i>Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its Afterlives</i> In this remarkable meditation, Judith Butler draws together the key strands of their thoughtfrom bodies that matter to melancholia to grievability to nonviolenceand offers a manifesto for our time. Turning to phenomenology, they make the urgent case for a new form of global responsibility based on the deepest entwinement of everyone to each other, to the earth we live on, and to the air we breathe. Nobody else could have made it. What World Is This? offers hope in a cruel and endangered world. -- Jacqueline Rose, author of <i>On Violence and On Violence Against Women</i> In this timely and important book, Butler pays careful attention to the specifics of our contemporary situation with startling clarity, bringing their inimitable voice and philosophical resources to the questions of what it means for life to be livable, what it means for the earth to be inhabitable, what it means for an entity to be grievable, and the ways the COVID-19 pandemic has cast these questions into relief, at the same time marking how intimately entwined with each other they are. -- Amy Hollywood, author of <i>Acute Melancholia and Other Essays: Mysticism, History, and the Study of Religion</i>

Judith Butler is Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley. They are the author of several books, most recently The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind (2020). Butlers previous Columbia University Press books include Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2012), Antigones Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (2000), and Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (1987).

Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Senses of the World: Scheler and Merleau-Ponty 2. Powers in the Pandemic: Reflections on Restricted Life 3. Intertwining as Ethics and Politics 4. Grievability for the Living Postscript: Transformations Notes Index