To Imagine a World After This, Democracy Needs the Humanities

Abstract

This translated article is an edited transcript of the lecture Democracy and the Future of the Humanities that Judith Butler delivered on December 4, 2024, in Seoul, South Korea—coincidentally, one day after President Yoon Suk-yeol declared martial law. In the talk, Butler addresses the frames and forms of imagining and fearing the future, both of democracy and of the end of the world. Regarding the contours of the world as we know it, the role of the arts and humanities is fundamental in suggesting, through imaginative experiments, that the parameters of this world are not the limits of all possible worlds. Butler proposes a critical interrogation of the limits of the imaginable and of the limits naturalized as the democratic imaginary. She explores how those who imagine, fear, or are already living beyond the end of the world—as a threshold/point of reference/vanishing point—depend on the mediation that informs and forms such imagining or fearing. She also analyzes Kafka’s parable Zur Frage der Gesetze to delve deeper into the question of the law, and into when and who are “the people.”