Characteristically, Butler has been one of the most nuanced thinkers on the Israel-Hamas war, writing an essay for the London Review of Books that looks not just at the conflict but at how it is communicated. They write, ‘political morality takes time, a patient and courageous way of learning and naming’, a slowness lost in the media churn of outrage and easy condemnation. Considerations such as these come naturally to the Gender Trouble (1990) author and comparative literature professor at UC Berkeley, who remains a champion of queer and gender theory, and who published The Livable and the Unlivable this year (coauthored with Frédéric Worms), a treatise on intersectional care in the face of identity-based and ecological violence. It was these subjects and more that they picked up with a series of speakers – among them philosophers Paul B. Preciado, Elsa Dorlin, Hourya Bentouhami and psychoanalyst Monique David-Ménard – in the first of their events organised as part of being the 2023–24 intellectual-in-residence at the Pompidou in Paris.