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On Un/Certainty:The Uses of Doubt in Dangerous Times
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Ebook
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We live in uncertain times. But what does uncertainty mean for our ability to act?
While politicians, CEOs, and pundits reflexively invoke “uncertain times” to explain everything from pandemic responses to climate inaction, journalist and theorist Natasha Lennard offers a radical intervention. Lennard demonstrates how our obsession with uncertainty masks the violent certainties that dominate our fracturing world.
On Un/Certainty applies philosophical insight to political practice, offering readers not just analysis but hope—and conceptual tools with which to act. The book tackles contemporary flashpoints through an original philosophical lens, demystifying our constant talk of crisis, polycrisis, and omnicrisis. Lennard examines the way entrenched conceptions of gendered experience are weaponized to harass the most vulnerable. Dissecting the discourse around borders, she reveals their enforcement to be a site of paranoid vigilance and violent property logics, which threaten millions of lives. On Un/Certainty addresses head-on the limits to traditional forms of political persuasion and demands that we think anew about how to build more liberatory forms of life.
Drawing on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and placing his work alongside thinkers rarely put into conversation, Lennard contends with the nature of certainty, identity, and ideology as we struggle into the future.
Reviews
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An inoculation against apathy and nostalgia, this is an essential, provocative collection for our confounding times.
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One of the most brilliant and compelling thinkers of our time.
, author of Invisible Man -
Compassionate and merciless, Natasha Lennard’s writing is proof that moral philosophy must not be left to the mealymouthed centrists.
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We are snowed under by known unknowns. Thank heavens for Natasha Lennard then, here to talk us through the expectations we place on words and walk us out of the numbness induced by their mindless repetition.
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Fascism attempts to destroy the capacity to think. Natasha Lennard restores it here with lyric philosophy.
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Sometimes an essay arrives that sends a gust of fresh air into the stuffy present from an unexpected angle. What does it mean when people say they feel assailed by uncertainty and insecurity? A sign hovering over a conjuncture of seemingly ubiquitous instability, this trope has never been investigated – until now. Making surprising use of Wittgenstein, Natasha Lennard here enjoins us to think anew, and closer, about the meanings of uncertainty on the fronts – racism, transphobia, genocide – that define our age. Hers is a vital contribution to the hard work of making any sense of what’s going on.
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Amidst inflationary talk of uncertainty and crisis, Lennard makes a bracing case, instead, for the critique of pernicious certainties. A brilliant provocation to further thought. A hinge book.
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An invitation to rethink what we know, and how we know it. Lennard challenges conventional understandings of crisis, borders and gender, revealing how deeply entrenched certainties shape our perceptions of the world.'
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For penetrating and revolutionary insights, not only into “the news” per se but also into our hell-world’s basic epistemic workings and (especially) their impermanency, I always look to Natasha Lennard. At the same time as demonstrating almost every day—for well over a decade now—what a precious thing journalism can still be, Lennard has become this century’s most illuminating political reader of Wittgenstein and our most invigorating public philosopher of antifascism.
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On Un/Certainty seeks to name and so unseat 'pernicious certainty in action,' and call for a different paradigm around the truths we take for granted–specifically as they pertain to what pundits are calling the polycrisis...Lennard’s got a knack for making the heady feel approachable, even to a layperson. This promises to be a most topical intervention for the thinking human. (Bonus: it’s slim enough to take on the subway.)
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