Judith Butler’s Lecture Now Available for Streaming

The PACT Division of the EGS is delighted to announce that Judith Butler’s lecture “Losing Touch: Fragments on the Inhabitable World” can be rented here.

Judith Butler – Losing Touch: Fragments on the Inhabitable World from The European Graduate School

This lecture revisits two questions: what makes a life livable and what makes for an Inhabitable world? The argument is that the two questions are linked and suggests a critical phenomenological reconsideration of the life-world.  The conditions of pandemic establish bodies as ethical vectors, capable of doing and suffering illness, illuminated in an intertwined mortality.  Considering again Merleau-Ponty’s posthumous writing on “the invisible and the visible” in pandemic times, we can ask, what sense of world and livable life emerges when the prohibition on touch is one way of safeguarding another’s life as well as one’s own.  And what sense do we make of care when healthcare workers safeguard the lives of those who are ill by taking on a potentially lethal viral load?  To what extent is touching/being touched breathing each other’s air part of the embodied and social life-world that now inverts in the name of a politics of life?

We are charging for this recorded lecture in order to generate resources for our public events.  While we would prefer simply to ask for contributions on such an occasion, this has not proven to be technically feasible.  We thank Judith Butler warmly for donating her lecture for this purpose, and we appreciate your financial support.  We will continue to strive to bring as much public programming as possible with proceeds from events like this one.