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What world is this? : a pandemic phenomenology / Judith Butler.

by Butler, Judith, 1956- author.

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New York : Columbia University Press, [2022]

Life -- History -- 21st century.

Civilization -- History -- 21st century.

COVID-19 Pandemic, 2020-

9780231208291 (trade paperback) ;

0231208294 (trade paperback)

134 pages ; 22 cm

"Whether we start from the pandemic, climate change, the inequality engendered by capitalism, the violence of racism and sexism, or any of a number of global crises, it is apparent that we are far from any idea of a common world, a world that is a site of belonging. Such a world would require a fundamental transformation of how we understand value--that everyone's life has value beyond market value and that the world is structured to facilitate everyone's flourishing. Such a world requires, too, the upending and reorientation of everyone's epistemic field, one's very sense of the limit and structure of the world, in order to apprehend the worlds of others and to find connection. Judith Butler draws, surprisingly, on Wittgenstein's sense that the world can be revealed as different than it was-precisely what the pandemic brought about. But what kind of world is it? Phenomenologist Max Scheler would say that it is a world that exhibits itself through its very breath as tragic. And how are we to live in this world? Critically, it must be inhabitable, and here is found the limit of personal freedom, which carried to its extreme makes the world unlivable both for others and for oneself. The world must also be tangible. As Merleau-Ponty describes it, touch is a characteristic of the world rather than a power that we have. We are bodies within a field of interrelated bodies--which has ethical and political consequences, moving beyond an ontology of individuals to an ontology of the world around us. We are asked to accept a vision of an interconnected world in which our breath is shared with others. Can we reimagine what we mean by social equality and inequality in the context of bodily interdependency? We have seen how the natural world begins to restore itself during the restrictions implemented during the pandemic; we have also seen the differential health results due to environmental racism. Together, they suggest that we have an obligation to reorder the world on principles of radical equality. Finally, an inhabitable world is a world where everyone desires to live. To want to live in such a world is to take up the struggle against the conditions that make it impossible for so many. "None of us can accept a world in which some people are protected while others are not," as WHO director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus puts it. Intersubjectivity enmeshes us in the power relations of race, gender, class, and sexuality as they are reproduced, naturalized, and contested in bodies within the complementary crises of pandemic, climate, and systemic racism and sexism. Ultimately, what movements like Black Lives Matter and Ni Una Menos stand for is that all lives are worthy of care and all lives are equally grievable"--

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