What World Is This?

Jacqueline Rose, author of On Violence and On Violence Against Women:
In this remarkable meditation, Judith Butler draws together the key strands of their thought—from bodies that matter to melancholia to grievability to nonviolence—and 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.

Lisa Guenther, author of Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its Afterlives:
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.

Lewis R. Gordon, author of Fear of Black Consciousness:
'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 idols—beyond, 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.