What World Is This?
A Pandemic Phenomenology
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
The pandemic compels us to ask fundamental questions about our place in the world: the many ways humans rely on one another, how we vitally and sometimes fatally breathe the same air, share the surfaces of the earth, and exist in proximity to other porous creatures in order to live in a social world. What we require to live can also imperil our lives. How do we think from, and about, this common bind?
Judith Butler shows how COVID-19 and all its consequences—political, social, ecological, economic—have challenged us to reconsider the sense of the world that such disasters bring about. Drawing on the work of Max Scheler, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and critical feminist phenomenology, Butler illuminates the conditions in which we seek to make sense of our disorientation, precarity, and social bonds. What World Is This? offers a new account of interdependency in which touching and breathing, capacities that amid a viral outbreak can threaten life itself, challenge the boundaries of the body and selfhood. Criticizing notions of unlimited personal liberty and the killing forces of racism, sexism, and classism, this book suggests that the pandemic illuminates the potential of shared vulnerabilities as well as the injustice of pervasive inequalities.
Exposing and opposing forms of injustice that deny the essential interrelationship of living creatures, Butler argues for a radical social equality and advocates modes of resistance that seek to establish new conditions of livability and a new sense of a shared world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This punchy philosophical treatise from UC Berkeley philosopher Butler (The Force of Nonviolence) considers what a more equitable post-pandemic world could look like. Drawing on such phenomenologists as Max Scheler and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Butler contends that because humans are politically, socially, ecologically, and economically interdependent, they have an obligation to "organize the world... on principles of radical equality." Covid-19 drew attention to the porous boundaries of bodies, communities, and nations, Butler posits, encouraging readers to see the pandemic as an opportunity to fashion a social fabric that recognizes this interconnectedness by offering guaranteed income and single-payer healthcare, as well as abolishing prisons. The author argues that such movements as Black Lives Matter in the U.S. and Not One Less in Argentina illustrate how recognizing shared dependencies enables activists to confront racism, sexism, and wealth inequality. 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.
