On Un/Certainty

Doubt has become the defining cliché of our political moment. In an era where politicians, CEOs, and pundits reflexively invoke "uncertain times" to explain everything from pandemic responses to climate inaction, journalist and philosopher Natasha Lennard offers a radical intervention: she exposes how our obsession with uncertainty masks the violent certainties that actually organize our world.

Lennard combines rigorous philosophical analysis with frontline reporting, personal reflection, and urgent political intervention. The book tackles contemporary flashpoints through this philosophical lens: What the crisis in our constant talk of 'crisis' actually means. How entrenched assumptions about gendered experience are weaponized to harass the most vulnerable. How the treatment of borders as a site of imagined security requiring violent maintenance threatens our collective flourishing. How narratives about our uncertain future risk holding the most harmful world-ordering structures firmly in place. Looking to the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, alongside other thinkers rarely put in conversation together, Lennard addresses the nature of certainty itself, identity and ideology, to show that much of this uncertainty is calculated and used to undermine our ability to act.

On Un/Certainty transforms philosophical insight into political action, offering readers not just analysis but hope-and the conceptual tools to make that hope concrete.

Praise for Being Numerous:

"An inoculation against apathy and nostalgia, this is an essential, provocative collection for our confounding times."-Astra Taylor

"Compassionate and merciless, Natasha Lennard's writing is proof that moral philosophy must not be left to the mealymouthed centrists." Andrea Long Chu, author of Females

"An enlightening and eminently readable guide to the radical politics of today." Times Literary Supplement

"One of the most brilliant and compelling thinkers of our time." Mychal Denzel Smith, author of Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching