What world is this? On Judith Butler’s ethico-politics of breath and touch

Abstract

This review essay presents a detailed engagement with Judith Butler’s most recent monograph, What World Is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology. The essay situates this work within Butler’s recent work on ethics and its relation to politics, centering on notions such as precariousness, grievability and relationality. More specifically, this essay engages with Butler’s reflections on the pandemic, in which they dwell on touching and breathing as probes for thinking about ethical relationality and constitutive interdependency. In this regard, this essay elaborates the notion of an ethico-politics of breath and touch, as articulated within Butler’s most recent work. Through the notion of an ethico-politics of breath and touch that this essay identifies in What World is This?, this essay connects Butler’s account of subject-formation with their views on ethical relationality and their diagnoses of some of the most vexing political problems of contemporary times, namely economic inequalities, systemic racism and sexism, and climate catastrophe. Thus, this essay reflects on the intimate link between Butler’s investigation of ethics and socio-political reflection, concluding that the conception of ethics that animates Butler’s recent work has and is motivated by a strong political dimension which amounts to a commitment to the radical equality of lives.