Overview

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.

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Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature and Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley, and holds the Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School. She is the author of Gender Trouble, Precarious Life, Frames of War, and Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly. Wendy Tremont King, a classically trained actor and accomplished puppeteer, got her start in audiobook narration as a volunteer for The Lighthouse for the Blind and has narrated over 100 audiobooks in a variety of genres. She has performed in live and recorded multi-cast audio theater productions with Pocket Universe, The One Act Players, Misfits Audio, and Shoestring Radio. Her resonant voice, wit, and generous sense of humor is described as having an authentic emotional quality. Wendy lives in Buffalo, New York, and can be found throwing stones at the Buffalo Curling Club.

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