The unlivable is the most extreme point of human suffering and
injustice. But what is it exactly? How do we define the unlivable?
And what can we do to prevent and repair it? These are the
intriguing questions Judith Butler and Frédéric Worms discuss in
a captivating dialogue situated at the crossroads of contemporary
life and politics. Here, Judith Butler criticizes the norms that
make life precarious and unlivable, while Frédéric Worms appeals
to a “critical vitalism” as a way of allowing the hardship of
the unlivable to reveal what is vital for us. For both Butler and
Worms, the difference between the livable and the unlivable forms
the critical foundation for a contemporary practice of care. Care
and support, in all their aspects, make human life livable, that
is, “more than living.” To understand it, we must draw on the
concrete practices of humans who are confronted with the unlivable:
the refugees of today and the witnesses and survivors of past
violations and genocide. They teach us what is intolerable but also
undeniable about the unlivable, and what we can do to resist it.
Crafted with critical rigor, mutual respect, and lively humor, the
compelling dialogue transcribed and translated in this book took
place at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) on April 11, 2018, at
a time when close to two thousand migrants were living in nearby
makeshift camps in northern Paris. The Livable and the Unlivable
showcases this 2018 dialogue in the context of Butler’s and
Worms’s ongoing work and the evolution of their thought, as
presented by Laure Barillas and Arto Charpentier in their equally
engaging introduction. It concludes with a new afterword that
addresses the crises unfolding in our world and the ways a
philosophically rigorous account of life must confront them. While
this book will be of keen interest to readers of philosophy and
cultural criticism, and those interested in vitalism, new
materialism, and critical theory, it is a far from merely academic
text. In the conversation between Butler and Worms, we encounter
questions we all grapple with in confronting the distress and
precarity of our times, marked as it is by types of survival that
are unlivable, from concentration camps to prisons to environmental
toxicity, to forcible displacement, to the Covid pandemic. The
Livable and the Unlivable at once considers longstanding
philosophical questions around why and how we live, while working
to retrieve a philosophy of life for today’s Left.
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