Holding Hands with Death

You live in a world saturated with images of suffering, appeals to compassion, and calls to care. But why do these moral encounters so often leave the structures of violence untouched? This book offers a critical philosophical account of contemporary regimes of care, showing how compassion, representation, and moral spectatorship can make suffering visible while blunting its political force. Bringing critical theory, phenomenology, and moral and political philosophy into dialogue with scholarship on aid, displacement, and global suffering, it reveals how humanitarianism manages vulnerability rather than confronting the conditions that produce it. For readers concerned with vulnerability, violence, and the demands of justice, this book challenges how you think about care, responsibility, and justice in a world where suffering is made visible even as its structural conditions remain untouched.