This book is the only monograph-length study of the work of Judith Butler to focus on the entire scope of her work, including the last decade of her writing. It presents a completely new interpretation of Butler's political thought, oriented by the idea of an insurrection at the level of the real. Instead of seeing Butler as a thinker of the subversive performance of cultural scripts, the book frames her work for the twenty-first century as an ambitious and coherent egalitarian alternative to liberal political philosophy. The chapters explore the potential of this conceptual framework in relation to questions of social inequality, violence and the experience of precarity. Designed for both researchers and students, the book provides a comprehensive way of accessing what is radically original about this crucial political theorist.