What World Is This?: A Pandemic Phenomenology

by Judith Butler

The pandemic compels us to ask fundamental questions about our place in the 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.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Politics, Theory, Audiobook, Disability

146 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 8, 2022

About the author

Judith Butler is an American post-structuralist and feminist philosopher who has contributed to the fields of feminism, queer theory, political philosophy and ethics. They are currently a professor in the Rhetoric and Comparative Literature departments at the University of California, Berkeley.

Butler received their Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University in 1984, for a dissertation subsequently published as Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France. In the late-1980s they held several teaching and research appointments, and were involved in "post-structuralist" efforts within Western feminist theory to question the "presuppositional terms" of feminism.

Their research ranges from literary theory, modern philosophical fiction, feminist and sexuality studies, to 19th- and 20th-century European literature and philosophy, Kafka and loss, and mourning and war. Their most recent work focuses on Jewish philosophy and exploring pre- and post-Zionist criticisms of state violence.

Reviews

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

As soon as I saw this book at the Edinburgh Radical Book Fair I obviously wanted to read Judith Butler's thoughts about the pandemic. What World Is This?: A Pandemic Phenomenology was published at the end of 2022 and written when omicron was taking hold in 2021. In it Butler seeks to articulate a phenomenology, or analysis of how the pandemic has been experienced. This draws upon work by a range of philosophers, some of whom were unfamiliar to me but inevitably included good old Foucault. The book is based on a series of lectures Butler gave online in late 2020 and I suspect the material was more punchy in that form. What World Is This?: A Pandemic Phenomenology is brief, only 109 pages plus notes. While I appreciated the clarity of Butler's insights and their thorough articulation, I was expecting more depth and novelty. Perhaps it was unrealistic to hope for a new and transformative way to think about COVID-19? Instead I found a tidy synthesis of quite familiar ideas, such as:

Perhaps we were wrong to think, even for a brief duration, that the pandemic could function as a great leveller, that it would be the occasion for imagining a more substantial equality and a more radical form of justice. We were not exactly wrong, but neither were we well prepared to bring about the world we imagined. One problem is that the aspiration animating the idea of remaking the world presumed it a tabula rasa, a new beginning, without asking whether the new brings a weighty history along with it, whether new beginnings are really breaks with the past, or even can be. Another problem, clearly deeper, is that the economy very quickly came to replace the world in the mainstream public discourse. The 'health of the economy' was understood to be more valuable and urgent than the 'health of the people'. Indeed, attributing health to the economy figured the economy as a human body, an organism, one whose life and growth must be supported at all costs, even if that entails the loss of human life. But the transposition of health onto the economy did not just transfer a human attribute to the markets; it literally drained health from living bodies to establish health for the economy. That has been the deadly form of displacement and inversion within the logic of capitalism that comes to the fore within pandemic times.

Prior to the pandemic Butler was already working on the concept of grievability, relating to what and who in society are deemed worthy of public acknowledgement. This of course proved highly relevant to the huge death toll of COVID-19 in the US and in general. Again the quotes below were not new ideas to me but are neatly articulated:

Under conditions of pandemic, it may be that we are all suffering from some version of melancholia. How does it become possible to mourn so many people? Do any of us know how to name what we have lost? What kind of public mark or monument would begin to address the need to mourn? Everywhere we sense the absence of the mark, the gap within the sensible world.
[...]
Too often the images of the dead and dying flit by as sensational clips. Sequestering enforces both a sense of ambient death and a shared practice of deflection: "let's not focus on the negative!" The task, though, is to convert that ambient sense of loss into mourning and demand. Learning to mourn mass death means marking the loss of someone whose name you do not know, whose language you may not speak, who lives at an unbridgeable distance from where you live, insisting on a global frame for our disorientation. One does not have to know the person lost to affirm that this was a life. One does not have to have all the details about a life to know that it existed. The right to belong to the world is anonymous but no less obligatory for that reason.

Butler's lucid prose did act as an excellent palate cleanser after the intense annoyance of Being Ecological. However my high expectations that What World Is This?: A Pandemic Phenomenology would make sense of the past three years were not quite realised. It feels like a work in progress rather than a complete philosophical analysis. That is a perfectly reasonable thing for it to be, especially as the pandemic is not over.

[Emily Morgan · Rating 4 out of 5]

""Liveability" is ultimately a modest requirement. One is not, for instance, asking what will make me happy? Nor is one asking what kind of world would most clearly satisfy my desires? One is looking, rather, to live in such a way that life itself remains bearable so that one can continue to live. In other words, one is looking for those requirements of a life that allow a life to be sustained and to persist. Another way of saying this would be what are the conditions of life that make possible the desire to live?"

"When the question how can I live like this? converts into a conviction — "I will not continue to live like this" — we are in the midst of an urgent question both philosophical and social: What are the conditions that permit life to be lived in a way that affirms the continuation of life itself?"

"The ethical quandary, or vector, that the pandemic produces begins with the insight that my life and the lives of others depend upon a recognition of how our lives depend in part upon how each of us acts. So my action holds your life, and your action holds mine, at least potentially."

"[Restrictions] would ask me to understand this life that I live as bound up with other lives and to regard this "being bound up" with one another as a fundamental feature of who I am. I am not fully sealed as a bounded creature but emit breath into a shared world where I take in air that has been circulating through the lungs of others."

"I am being stopped from contracting a virus that could take my life but also from communicating a virus that I may not know that I have and that could debilitate or take the lives of others. In other words, I am asked not to die and not to put others at risk of illness or death...To understand and accept both parts of that request, I must understand myself as capable of communicating the virus but also as someone who can be infected by the virus, so potentially both acting and acted upon. There is no escape from either end of that polarity, a risk that correlates with the twofold dimension of breathing itself: inhalation, exhalation. It seems as if I am bound up with others through the prospect of doing or suffering harm in relation to them."

[Teleseparatist · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been thinking a lot about how Butler's philosophy (grievable lives, precariousness) is a great way to approach the ethical issues associated with the pandemic reality and then they published their lectures on the pandemic. I wish it had been longer, but frankly, Butler today is so accessible and great to read.

Have a quote.

Learning to mourn mass death means marking the loss of someone whose name you do not know, whose language you may not speak, who lives at an unbridgeable distance from where you live, insisting on a global frame for our disorientation. One does not have to know the person lost to affirm that this was a life. One does not have to have all the details about a life to know that it existed. The right to belong to the world is anonymous but no less obligatory for that reason. In public discourse, it is the life cut short, the life that should have had a chance to live more, that captures our attention. The elderly are on their way to death (and the rest of us are not?). Whatever the age, the value of that person is now carried in the lives of others, a form of acknowledgment that becomes an incorporation, a living echo, an animated wound or trace that transforms those who live on. Just because someone else suffers in a way that I have not suffered does not mean that the other’s suffering is unthinkable to me.

[Mariana Ferreira · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you to Columbia University Press and Netgalley for this arc!

In this short book, Judith Butler tries and uses Philosophy - especially Phenomenology - to analyze what the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed about the world we live in. In her task, she divides her main question - What world is this in which something like this can happen? - into segments: is it possible to define the world from any point of view other than the subjective? What makes a world inhabitable? What is the value of a life - and why are some seen as 'expendable', just numbers on a graph, easily sacrificed if it means the return of economic activities? Is it possible to reflect on a global world, or have we failed by seeing it as a victory to turn a pandemic into an epidemic, contained to parts of the world that had no early access to vaccines, in a planet that is shared by all?
Butler uses all these questions, helping herself from multiple other authors, to look not only into the pandemic or its revelations about the world per se, but also to touch on multiple topics, such as racism, incarceration, feminism and the environmental collapse. She makes her thoughts clear and accessible even for readers who don't have a background in Philosophy, giving examples and recapping her previous points, making this not only a relevant work, but also a spark to start debate and reflection once the reading is done.

[Marea sdp · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 ⭐️Disclaimer: en ningún libro en el que salgan Butler y Merleau-Ponty pdoré llegar a ser objetiva reseñando.

Merleau-Ponty es mi padre filosófico. Y aquí se une a mi (m)adre para reflexionar acerca de nuestra interdependencia corporal, de la intersubjetividad y de nuestra vulnerabilidad compartida. Es un libro bellísimo porque la idea del quiasmo es bellísima.

También es muy bonito comprobar que la Butler fenomenológica es perfectamente comprensible. Si alguien teme leer a Butler porque se ha intentado leer El Género en Disputa y lo único que ha conseguido es llorar, este libro es una buena opción para comprobar el agua.

Sin embargo, y con respecto a lo anterior, es una obra un poco nicho. Por mucho que me duela (soy fan de la Butler merleau-pontiana), no es un libro muy representativo de su corpus filosófico. No considero que sea menos razón para recomendarlo!

[Micah Enns-Dyck · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very repetitive, especially if you've read any of Butler's other work on grievability and ethics. The chapter on Merleau-Ponty was the saving grace.

[Lissa Malloy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall, I enjoyed the book. Butler poses a lot of excellent questions and it was interesting to read about such a recent world-shifting event. As always, she delved into intersectionality and was unafraid to draw links that could have blowback (entitlement during the pandemic to white supremacy: hellloooo!). It did get a bit repetitive and she could have spent more time posing answers to questions.
More a critique of myself than the book: I have read some of her other work and thought my mostly sociological background would be sufficient, but this text contained quite a lot of references I was completely unfamiliar with, with little explanation. A few summarizing blurbs could go a long way for the less psychology-focused reader.

[Andy Pedersen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Utroligt interessant perspektiv på covid-19. Især det sidste kapitel og introduktionen af begrebet “grievability” om tabte liv som indikator for ulighed er voldsomt spændende. Analysen viser, at covid-19 forstærkede allerede tilstedeværende uligheder baseret på blandt andet race. Konklusionerne er en anelse vidtgående for mig enkelte steder, men alt i alt et spændende værk og perspektiv.

[Katie ratherbereadinggg · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[cab · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you NetGalley and Columbia U. P. for the ARC!

In What World Is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology, Judith Butler continues their political project of exploring precarious and ungrievable lives within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the climate crisis. What World is This? (as the title suggests), is all about asking questions, and exploring the implications of these questions, how they shift and clarify the boundaries of the world we know, in the process revealing new worlds unknown to those in the privileged first world pre-pandemic.

"The question what kind of world is this? is prompted by another question: how are we to live in this world? And then perhaps a further set of questions follow: Given this world, what makes for a liveable life? And what makes for an inhabitable world?" (What World is This? 29)

Butler reads the pandemic through several critical lenses, including affect, phenomenology (viewing the pandemic through the lens of Max Scheler's writing on the tragic, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's re-writing of intersubjectivity as intertwinement [entrelac]), Marxist critique (when making a living is also making a dying), re-working the classical liberal social contract, and Freudian readings (what happens when some lives are "ungrievable", beyond mourning, and can only be handled in a private melancholia).

I've always been drawn to Butler's political writing moreso than their writing on gender (arguably, their gender writing is also political, of course), and I am always surprised by Butler's intelligence and deep empathy. I suspect there may be more recent writing on intertwinement and intersubjectivity that Butler could have cited than Merleau-Ponty (Priscilla Wald comes to mind), but Butler makes the point rather poignantly that we cannot be exempt from intersubjectivity, that

"... I am asked not to die and not to put others at risk of illness or death. The same kind of actions bear the same sorts of risks. ... To understand and accept both parts of that request, I must understand myself as capable of communicating the virus but also as someone who can be infected by the virus, so potentially both acting and acted upon. There is no escape from either end of that polarity, a risk that correlates with the twofold dimension of breathing itself: inhalation, exhalation." (What World is This? 40)

There is an urgency and poetry to Butler's treatise on the pandemic. What World is This?, not a text without its difficulty, is nevertheless one suited for general readers, outside of an academic audience.

Edit 29 Nov 2022: updated Butler’s pronouns used in this review

[Amy ☁️ (tinycl0ud) · Rating 3 out of 5]

i have been thinking about how to summarise this book, and i guess simply put it is about how the pandemic has only exacerbated and made stark all the problems that have been plaguing (pun intended) capitalist society.

throughout the text the author consistently highlights how systemic racism and inequality is causing a disproportionate amount of deaths in marginalised communities, and she points out how entitled behaviour during the pandemic is directly linked to white supremacy. it is not a new sentiment but definitely a bold one to put out there, knowing the kind of backlash to expect. at the same time the text is a call to action. she asks for liveable wages that make healthcare affordable, and for govt bodies to stop reducing actual lives into numbers. a life is a life and a death is still a death; why are we celebrating when less people die? why do we need to choose the economy? why are some lives worth less? she’s right and i cannot help but think of the lorry situation in sg and how it is so ridiculous that this is still an issue.

i am also struck by the recency of the text. very soon a whole new academic branch of pandemic studies will probably spring up in universities and humanities departments, so of course people are going to want to quickly get published (in cantonese we call it 霸位) and say what they want to say before someone else says it. no shade!! i fully respect the hustle, and she did a great job saying very sensible things that already echo the general sentiments bouncing around the twitter and tumblrspheres (if u follow the right accounts). it is helpful to have an official academic citation for the discourse and this is a very citable book.

[Dresda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Qué es esto que nos ha pasado? Cómo es posible habitar un mundo así? La peste negra, viruela, cólera, malaria, gripe española, vih-sida, covid-19 no son solo hechos naturales y/o biológicos, sino que tienen una historia cultural y modalidades históricas de un capitalismo que organiza los mundos y las relaciones humanas-no humanas. Cómo podemos imaginar otros mundos?, quizá, como dice Judith Butler, podemos comenzar con entender la fenomenología del valor de la vida, entendiendo _valor_ como nuestro derecho a la respirabilidad compartida y al derecho de ser merecedorxs de duelo. Busquemos políticas de valor de vida que entrelacen condiciones de vida compartida y solidarias para reparar, curar y habitar el mundo, o mundos, desde lo común.

[Gray · Rating 2 out of 5]

Butler seems to have accepted criticisms about readability. This book is fairly accessible, while still challenging. I was surprised that it taught me a lot about some basics of phenomenology. There are also some sections that are quite poetic and beautiful.

My more critical side is suspicious that Butler is just redirecting everyone back into DNC-style progressive politics - which I think undermines their deeper points. Perhaps they're even doing so behind their own back. At some points they seem a bit naive - but that could just be because it was written in 2022, and even 2 years later we have seen and learned a lot.

[Nic · Rating 3 out of 5]

If I’m being super ungenerous: A series of provocative questions without any new answers; a trip with some phenomenologists that didn’t feel necessary and then just kinda fell off at the end; some assertions and political commitments I was on board with before I even bought the book. Some lovely prose and heartfelt writing. I would have preferred to just see some of the lectures online for free and wait a few more years for a more finished book.

[R.J. Gilmour · Rating 4 out of 5]

Butler uses the COVID pandemic to ask questions about how we relate to each & how these relations create disparity & inequality. At the same time she questions ideas about individuality & nationalism that came to the forefront as the world tried to deal with larger epidemiological issues. There is an opportunity for change, recognizing how we are all connected to each other and to the earth. The most fascinating issue she raises is the relationship between grievability (who can be grieved in a tiered society) and inequality.

"The pandemic upends our usual sense of the bounded self, casting us as relations, interactive, and refuting the egological and self-interested bases of ethics itself." 22

"...Heidegger claimed that "the world picture" is not a picture of the world but, rather, the world conceived and grasped as a picture. He raised questions about whether the world could or should be conceived that way and what it meant that pictures were coming to stand for the world." 16

"Under pandemic conditions, the very elements upon which we depend for life carry the potential to take life: we come to worry about touching someone, and breathing their air, unexpected proximity..."26

"When personal liberty permits the destruction of others and the earth, then personal liberty claims destruction as it derogative. I am certainly not against personal liberty, but the destructive form seems to me to be less about the person or the individual than about a nationalist sense of belonging and even a market sense of profit and gain that rationalizes the destruction of the earth and its climate. There is another form of freedom that is sidelined by this one, and it emerges amid social life, a life that seeks a common world, a life that is free to seek a common world. " 33

"The restrictions stop me from acting in certain ways, but they also lay out a vision of the interconnected world that I am asked to accept. If they were to speak, they would ask me to understand that this life that I live as bound up with other lives and to regard this "being bound up with one another" as a fundamental feature of who I am." 39

"The ethical quandary, or vector, that the pandemic produces begins with the insight that my life and the lives of others depend on a recognition of how our lives depend in part upon how each of us acts. So my action holds your life, and your action holds mine, at least potentially." 40

"Individuality is an imagined status and depends on specifically social forms of the imaginary." 41

"But the problem of radical inequality haunts every phase of pandemic time: whose lives are considered valuable as lives and whose are not?" 61

"...Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, formulated an ethical precept that took "the world" to be its measure, suggesting that such a concept may be central to ethical reflection going forward. "None of us can accept a world in which some people are protected while others are not." He was calling for an end to nationalism and to the market rationality that would calculate which lives are more worth safeguarding and saving than others by indexing borders and profits." 63

"The pandemic has illuminated and intensified racial and economic inequalities at the same time that it heightens the global sense of what our obligations are to one another and the earth." 65

"The intersubjective dimension of our lives...have to understood as an "interlacing," an "overlapping," or perhaps through the rhetorical figure of the chiasm. The chiasm is that shared domain occupied by two distinct entities that, in every other respect, are quite clearly separate from each other. What the body is, then, is to some extent its relations to other bodies, and that relationally is to be thought as an ontological status that cannot be rightly understood through considering the body as substance; rather, relationally establishes and undoes the individual subject in the same stroke." 75

"Merleau-Ponty's metaphors are pervasively erotic and harmonious. Even the "interlacing" does not seem like a bad deal. In my view, Merleau-Ponty underestimates the rage that can emerge from unstable forms of differentiation..." 78

"I have argued that it is not possible to understand social inequality without understanding how grieveability is inequality distributed. That unequal distribution is a key component of social inequality, one that generally has not been taken into account by social theorists. It follows that the designation, whether explicit or implicit, of a group or population as ungreiveable means that they can be targeted for violence or left to die without consequence." 93

"I would simply add that once we recognize the unequal distribution of the grievability of lives, our debates about equality and violence will be transformed, and the link between the two domains, more firmly understood." 107

"Vladimir Putin would surely agree that destruction is the ultimate sign of personal power, if not liberty. The rage is the voice of personal liberty as it abandons a common or shared life, the ideals of collective freedom, and the care for the earth and for living creatures, including human ones." 108

[Theo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Opinionated to the point of caricature. Strawman arguments. Philosophy sprinkled in.

[Chris Nagel · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Butler did it.

[J Earl · Rating 5 out of 5]

What World Is This?: A Pandemic Phenomenology by Judith Butler is a look at the interconnectedness of the world in which we live, using the pandemic as a way to rethink the things we took for granted or, more often, misunderstood.

I'll state upfront I have long enjoyed and been pushed to think more deeply about the world by Butler's books. To the extent one is a fan of an academic author, I am one. A professor gave me a copy of Bodies That Matter when it was first published (thank you Dr Michie) and from there I went back to read Gender Trouble and then kept up with Butler through her other work in areas like performativity and antisemitism. So yes, I am probably predisposed to finding this new book valuable.

And it did not disappoint. I'll talk first about the book as I think it is meant to be received by readers, which is a call for us to rethink what it means to live in a world, a habitable world, and livable lives. We are always already interconnected, the air one of us breathes we all breathe. We share the air and, because the COVID virus is airborne, we share responsibility not just for our own life but the lives of those around us, and in theory they for ours (though admittedly in the US a large portion of the population doesn't care about any life other than their own because, you know, freedom). Hopefully we can take this situation and rethink what it means to share a world. The inequity in the world, that which makes it uninhabitable for some and makes some lives unlivable, is something that we can and should work on. Universal healthcare, climate change, racism, heterosexism, and so many other factors that keep the basic elements of a just world unequally distributed, we need to reconsider in light of our new understanding of our interconnectedness.

On a more personal level, one of the things that always makes Butler's books such a joy for me is the way she inevitably introduces new texts and/or new ways of thinking about a text. In this case it is Scheler's essay "On the Tragic." At best I had a surface understanding and, more accurately, I had a secondhand reading of it as my understanding. Yet as Butler explores the ideas in relation to the tragic I was sent in a direction of my own. I won't get into it other than to say it involves depression as both an individual state and as a (one of many) constitutive state of the world that only presents itself at certain moments. I mention this because if you're the kind of reader that doesn't simply want to understand what a book's main thesis is but also wants to find ways to synthesize that information with other ideas of your own, this book may well offer you that opportunity.

I would recommend this to readers with or without a phenomenology background, the text is accessible and ideas are presented in fairly straightforward ways. This is valuable in helping us to rethink the world we will be inhabiting after (?) the pandemic as well as our roles in a world where we are all already intertwined.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.

[r. · Rating 4 out of 5]

it is that I am, as a body, part of the world I seek to know, already over there, seen, mobile, and mattering.The spatial limits of the perceived body belie its proper reach, for it is always both here and there, rooted and transported. The world that is usually assumed to be over there, or around me, is in fact already in and on me, and there is no easy way around that form of adherence, the way the world sticks to me and saturates me. My reflexivity, my very capacity to see or feel myself (if seeing is possible), oscillates between subject and object poles of experience. (p. 35)

*

For the fact is that we share the surfaces and objects of the world, and traces of others we do not know pass between us, sometimes unknowingly. What you touch thus touches me, although not always. If I touch a surface, am I also potentially touching another or being touched by them? It is unclear whether you are affecting me or I am affecting you, and perhaps neither one of us can know at the time whether that affecting/affected is also a form of infecting/ infected. When we think about the relationship of bodies to one another, we are not simply talking about discrete entities
that exist in isolation from one another. But neither are we talking about a simple reciprocity. There is earth and air and food that mediates our relationship, and we belong to those regions as much as we belong to one another. (p. 56)

*

Whatever the age, the value of that person is now carried in the lives of others, a form of acknowledgment that becomes an incorporation, a living echo, an animated wound or trace that transforms those who live on. Just because some one else suffers in a way that I have not suffered does not mean that the other’s suffering is unthinkable to me. Our bonds are forged from echoes, translation, and resonances, rhythms, and repetitions, as if the musicality of mourning makes its way past borders by virtue of its acoustic powers. The loss that the stranger endures echoes with the personal loss one feels, even as it is not the same. Because it is not the same, it echoes. An interval becomes a link. Strangers in grief nevertheless have formed a kind of collectivity. (p. 96)

[Matthew Giles · Rating 3 out of 5]

I live in Perth, Western Australia. Our state is one third of the island of Australia, one of the largest sub-national polities in the world, bordered by the rest of Australia to the east and the Indian and Southern oceans to the west. During the pandemic, these borders were shut for sustained periods with very little porosity. As a result, we lived more or less normal lives while the lives of the rest of the world and the rest of our country changed in fundamental ways. Outside of the state, this policy was considered tyrannical or contrary to human rights, but within the state, it was very popular, and resulted in an unprecedented landslide victory for the government that instituted the policy at its next election. I personally supported the policy because I wanted to be able to live life the way that I become accustomed to. I wanted to be able to go outside when I wanted, to meet and be around people, and to be out in the world. I wanted to act as though the pandemic wasn’t happening.

In this book, Judith Butler shows how this desire for a particular kind of life was based on an illusory power to disavow some of the conditions of that life. It argues that life occurs within a world that provides for the conditions of life, and the conditions of our lives are interdependent on each other and on that world. That interdependence is what enabled the pandemic to occur in the first place. For example, each stage in the chain of daily need for food requires people to be around each other to produce, distribute, and sell primary ingredients, then prepare, serve and eat dishes in a restaurant. There is no life without interdependence. There is only the question of how do we be interdependent in a way that recognizes the value of each life and produces the conditions of livability for those lives?

When I said before that I wanted to act as though the pandemic wasn’t happening, this book has made me realise that what I wanted was a life where I could continue to act as though life without interdependence was possible. That is what the policy was based on. It failed to seize the opportunity to redefine our relationship with life’s fundamental interdependency in favour of, in the end futilely, insisting on the possibility of independence.

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

“One does not have to know the person lost to affirm that this was a life. One does not have to have all the details about a life to know that it existed. The right to belong to the world is anonymous but no less obligatory for that reason. In public discourse, it is the life cut short, the life that should have had a chance to live more, that captures our attention. The elderly are on their way to death (and the rest of us are not?). Whatever the age, the value of that person is now carried in the lives of others, a form of acknowledgment that becomes an incorporation, a living echo, an animated wound or trace that transforms those who live on. Just because someone else suffers in a way that I have not suffered does not mean that the other's suffering is unthinkable to me. Our bonds are forged from echoes, translation, and resonances, rhythms, and repetitions, as if the musicality of mourning makes its way past borders by virtue of its acoustic powers.
The loss that the stranger endures echoes with the personal loss one feels, even as it is not the same. Because it is not the same, it echoes.

An interval becomes a link. Strangers in grief nevertheless have formed a kind of collectivity.
The modes of market calculation and speculation that have accepted death for many as the price to pay for supporting the "health" of the market are accepting the sacrifice of some lives as a reasonable price, a reasonable norm. And, yes, such a consequence has come to qualify as
"reasonable" within that particular rationality. Because market rationality does not exhaust rationality, because the calculating rationality founders on its own limit, we can even without a firm or single definition of life-assert the incalculable value of lives. The quandary is to construe a notion of social equality that incorporates rather than negates that incalculable value.”

[T. Tokunaga · Rating 4 out of 5]

【What World Is This? : A Pandemic Phenomenology / Judith Butler / 2022, U of Columbia Press】

--At the breast of history
I sucked and pissed
Thoughtless and heartless
Red and Blind ('I Am The Wife of Mao Tse-tung,' from Act 2, Scene 2 of "Nixon in China" by John Adams)

I quoted an lyric from an aria of an opera dealing with Nixon and Mao Zedong not to be pedantic. It's actually the central point which the most important passage from this book in Postscript.

--The rage is the voice of personal liberty as it abandons a common or shared life, the ideal of collective freedom, and the care for the earth and for living creatures, including human ones. (p. 108., Postscript)

This is sung by the wife of Mao Zedong who led the Cultural Revolutiono on behalf of Mao himself, and it's actually contrasted to this passage - but the 3 years after its publication seems to prove the very BLM movement might have been rage:

--...the Movement for Black Lives is at once a form of public mourning, a form of gathering and nongathering, embodied and virtual, that crosses borders and is not itself subject to any lockdown. We might call the movement a counter-contagion. (p. 102., Postscript)

This is exactly the point how this book feels it didn't age well - for Butler couldn't take the essential harm of capitalism in 2020s, monopoly, it was probably almost impossible to see that the extreme digital monopoly is not even about people's lives 'replaced by a number, percentage, and a graphic curve' (p. 53., Chapter 2) - it's actually more of Maoism which doesn't even care about graphic curve. The world is now entering the extreme concentration and monopoly, namely, Maoist regime with billionaires on behalf of Mr and Mrs Mao.

[Miriah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Note: I received this book as an ARC from Columbia University Press.

In this book, Judith Butler examines the role of the COVID-19 pandemic on illuminating systemic issues in modern capitalist society. Butler turns to phenomenology (popularized by Max Scheler) to describe how the pandemic “upends our usual sense of the bounded self, casting us as relational, interactive, and refuting the egological and self-interested bases of ethics itself.” The pandemic has made us reconsider the world, and Butler has taken up the task of laying out their findings thusly.

Butler’s main question is:
What kind of a world is this in which such a thing like this can happen?

This book is broken up into distinct sections:
1. Senses of the world
2. Powers of the Pandemic
3. Intertwining Ethics and Politics
4. Grievability for the Living
5. Transformations

Butler also looks at movements such as Black Lives Matter and Menos and their impact during the pandemic on creating a sense of community building and radical social change during a time when marginalized communities have been targeted as disposable.

“We live, that is, in relation to a world that sustains us, an earth and its habitants, including human ones, that depend on a politics that is committed to a world in which we can all breathe without fear of contagion, fear of pollution, or fear of the police chokehold, where our breath is intermingled with the world’s breath, where that exchange of breath, syncopated and free, becomes what is shared- our commons, as it were.”

Audience: This book would appeal to philosophers and people interested in pandemic studies, community advocates, or social justice.

[Miriah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Note: I received this book as an ARC from Columbia University Press.

In this book, Judith Butler examines the role of the COVID-19 pandemic on illuminating systemic issues in modern capitalist society. Butler turns to phenomenology (popularized by Max Scheler) to describe how the pandemic “upends our usual sense of the bounded self, casting us as relational, interactive, and refuting the egological and self-interested bases of ethics itself.” The pandemic has made us reconsider the world, and Butler has taken up the task of laying out their findings thusly.

Butler’s main question is:
What kind of a world is this in which such a thing like this can happen?

This book is broken up into distinct sections:
1. Senses of the world
2. Powers of the Pandemic
3. Intertwining Ethics and Politics
4. Grievability for the Living
5. Transformations

Butler also looks at movements such as Black Lives Matter and Menos and their impact during the pandemic on creating a sense of community building and radical social change during a time when marginalized communities have been targeted as disposable.

“We live, that is, in relation to a world that sustains us, an earth and its habitants, including human ones, that depend on a politics that is committed to a world in which we can all breathe without fear of contagion, fear of pollution, or fear of the police chokehold, where our breath is intermingled with the world’s breath, where that exchange of breath, syncopated and free, becomes what is shared- our commons, as it were.”

Audience: This book would appeal to philosophers and people interested in pandemic studies, community advocates, or social justice.

[Amanda books_ergo_sum · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love Judith Butler. And I love when philosophers reflect on Zeitgeist-y moments like the pandemic.

But this book was just okay.

It did something I expected: it applied my favourite part of Butler's philosophy, grievability, to the pandemic. That is, their ideas about how some people live a life with the knowledge that their death doesn't matter, that society won't grieve them. The way that the economy was prioritized over people's lives, the unequal access to medical care, Zoom funerals—Butler talked about it all.

But, I don't think greivability was explained as deeply in this book as in their other books, The Force of Nonviolence especially. And Butler seemed to agree (there was a lot of 'see The Force or Nonviolence for more info' going on). So, the book didn't add a ton to the way l'd already mentally applied grievability to the pandemic going into this.

And the book's main focus was a part of the pandemic mindset that... I don't think has persisted, unfortunately. That is, the concept of a post-pandemic radical permeability of the self and interconnectedness of society. Like, a concrete awareness that we all breathe the same air, for example.

And, I don't know. Has this stuck around? I feel like we've returned (since this book was published in
2022) to the fantasy of liberal individualism pretty hard, ngl.

[Rhys · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Humans, according to Arendt, lack any such right, and when they seek to obliterate a group of people from the earth, they are exercising a genocidal prerogative for which there is no justification. For Arendt, human creatures are born into a condition of common cohabitation, marked by a persistent heterogeneity or plurality, and this given plurality is the horizon within which we choose and act. But if we act against this given plurality, we commit a crime against the very condition of human life, understood as a social and political life" (p.98).

Grievable lives, livability, an inhabitable planet ... Judith Butler shares the way, and the way is in the breath we share.

[Alec Westgarth-Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Now with some distance on the heights of the pandemic in which this work was written, this book was an excellent philosophical reflection on the experience of the pandemic. As usual, Butler intertwines relevant strands of thought (phenomenology, social theory, psychoanalysis) in an engaging and fruitful way. I also found the writing itself quite beautiful, especially when compared to the dryness of some of Butler's earlier texts. My one criticism would be that it seems like some of the ideas are still being worked out, and lack perhaps some conceptual clarity (the references for instance to breath seemed to serve more of a poetic function than anything)

[David Guerrero · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not just a book about what happened during the pandemic. This is a philosophical, phenomenological, psychological, and social exploration of how we were able to discover our world, and how it changed, as of 2020.

It is a great opportunity to introduce debates about inequality, the importance of human lives outside statistics, racism, feminism, and how dehumanization has occurred when facing death on a global scale in our times. More than a great book, it is an extremely important one.

[Eran Sabaner · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel that the pandemic played a significant role in shaping my political consciousness today as it coincided with my graduation from my master’s course and the start of my full-time career.

Reading this book in 2024 feels profoundly depressing, given the state of the Earth. It seems as though we’ve learned little, if anything, from the crisis. Butler’s central question—‘What makes this world inhabitable?’—feels increasingly ignored, and the type of ethics proposed here seem less plausible than ever.

[Fiza Kuzhiyil · Rating 4 out of 5]

as unlucky as it feels for our lives to intersect with a pandemic of this size, how lucky are we to share the time with a philosopher as epochal as judith butler, who puts our shared consciousness and grief into sharp focus.

it can be hard to read about the pandemic when we crave escapism. living through it averts us from explorations like these, but, still, one day, when we've all suppressed the memories of the trauma, we will be grateful for the chronicling of these details by someone as precise and empathetic as butler.