Planetary Politics: Arendt, Anarchy and the Climate Crisis 1399544942, 9781399544948

Table of contents :
Cover
Frontmatter
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INTRODUCTION LOCATING THE CLIMATE CRISIS – THE INTER ESSE PLACE OF POLITICS
1 DWELLING IN PLACE WITH HEIDEGGER THE ORIGIN OF THE ARTWORK AND THE FOURFOLD
2 BENJAMIN’S POLITICAL THEOLOGY A MESSIANIC PROJECT IN EARTHLY LIFE
3 CONFRONTING ARENDTIAN (AN)ARCHISM NATALITY DESPITE THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
4 THE ANTHROPOCENE OR HISTORY VIOLENCE, MYTHS AND BEGINNINGS
5 OVERCOMING PREDICTABILITY RETHINKING FUTURE FATES
CONCLUSION AMOR MUNDI INOF CRISIS
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Index

Citation preview

PLANETARY POLITICS

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For my parents, who else?

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Planetary Politics ARENDT, ANARCHY AND THE CLIMATE CRISIS

Lucy Benjamin

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Lucy Benjamin, 2025, under a Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial 4.0 International licence Cover image: Alicia Frankovich, AQI2020, 2020. Live performance, acrylic and steel box, inflatable boat, hazer, chairs, chilly bins, blankets and assorted items. Performers: Raven Fa’asu Afoa-Purcell, Christina Houghton, Xin Ji, Rana Hamida, Kristian Larsen, Yin-Chi Lee, Olivia McGregor, Janaína Moraes, Adam Naughton, Sophie Sutherland, Briar Wilson. Assistant Choreographer: Zahra Killeen-Chance. Sound composition by Igor Kłaczyński. Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, purchased 2020. Copyright credit: © Alicia Frankovich / Photo ©David St George. Cover design: www.richardbudddesign.co.uk Edinburgh University Press Ltd 13 Infirmary Street Edinburgh EH1 1LT Typeset in 10/12.5 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 3995 4494 8 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 3995 4495 5 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 3995 4496 2 (epub) The right of Lucy Benjamin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

This book is printed using paper from well-managed forests, recycling and other controlled sources

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

vi

Introduction: Locating the Climate Crisis – The inter esse place of politics

1

1 Dwelling in Place with Heidegger: The Origin of the Artwork and the Fourfold

22

2 Benjamin’s Political Theology: A Messianic Project in Earthly Life

48

3 Confronting Arendtian (An)archism: Natality despite the American Revolution

73

4 The Anthropocene or History: Violence, Myths and Beginnings

101

5 Overcoming Predictability: Rethinking Future Fates

130

Conclusion: Amor Mundi in/of Crisis

155

Notes

162

Bibliography

189

Index

208

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

From the blank page to the finished form, a book is a product of help and love. As I crept closer to finishing this manuscript, the names of who to thank became, in comparison to the challenge of actually writing a book, a task of seemingly equal magnitude. This book evolved slowly, from my doctoral work, and then all at once, written in flurries amid fires and pandemics. It was rewritten after I read James Martel’s Anarchist Prophets and rewritten again after I received extensive and generous commentary from my readers at Edinburgh University Press. It grew out of dialogues with my friends at the Hannah Arendt Circle and it continued to foment and stew in the conversations overheard at any number of universities that I had the privilege to study and work at while it developed, first and foremost Royal Holloway and the University of Melbourne. After my first encounter with Arendt’s writing as a graduate student, my project turned to confront the planetary upon meeting Larry Alan Busk at the 2018 meeting of the Hannah Arendt Circle. These concerns continued to develop throughout my PhD as I worked with my fellow candidate, Dr Josephine Taylor, on all questions environmental. My supervisors Dr Danielle Sands and Prof. Colin Davis were instrumental to the development of these ideas, and I thank them for asking the hard-hitting questions that helped me to define my project. Teaching sections of this work at the Free University of Brighton in 2020 and for all the students since, I want to think everyone I met who shared in my excitement for this project and in turn I want to celebrate the next generation of Arendtians. vi

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acknowledgements

The project in its current form was written after I returned to Australia and out of the ecological crisis that was the Black Summer Bushfires of 2019/2020. This also means that the majority of this book was written on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Eastern Kulin Nation and I acknowledge their elders past and present as the owners of the land on which I worked and lived. This book has been supported by funding from the Faculty of Architecture, Building, and Planning at the University of Melbourne and the Australian Academy of the Humanities. I want to thank the Melbourne Political, Legal and Social Theory Network who awarded me the Early Career Researcher Manuscript award in 2022 and pushed me to get this book written, and am also thankful for the generous commentary I received as part of the award from Peter Christoff, Liane Hartnett, Terry MacDonald, Paul Muldoon and Steven Slaughter. I particularly want to thank Paul Muldoon for his continued support and commitment to sustaining an Arendtian project. It should also be clear that this book wouldn’t exist without James Martel’s thinking, but his generosity and enthusiasm have helped carry it through. Ersev Ersoy, Sam Johnson and Beatriz Lopez at Edinburgh University Press, as well as my anonymous reviewers, made this project possible and provided support throughout. I have been fortunate enough to attend six meetings of the Hannah Arendt Circle in my life and these are the life-giving oases that have helped sustain my commitment to this otherwise precarious and complex way of living. The conversations I have had with J. Barry, Katherine Brichacek, Jennifer Gaffney, Anne O’Byrne and Yasemin Sari underpin this project. Returning to Australia, I have been welcomed and supported by a host of wonderful and argumentative people. I want to thank Dimitris Vardoulakis, without whom I doubt I would have been able to shape these ideas into a coherent form; Justin Clemens, for his ability to make thinking elastic and shared; Joe Hughes, for walking laps and discussing theoretical binds; Miguel Vatter, for first asking me to think about anarchism; and for the entire team of people at the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy, who help keep ideas alive. The kind of life that allows for a book to be written is at once wildly lonely and fiercely collaborative. I want to acknowledge the commitment of other young scholars who inspire me: Jessica Marian, Christopher O’Neill, Sean McMorrow, Marilyn Stendera, Elliot Patsoura, Renee Miller-Yeaman, Sabina Andron and Andrew Dean. I particularly want to thank Alicia Frankovich, who powerfully translated the experience of the Black Summer Bushfires into art, David St George for capturing that work in photography, and Auckland Art Gallery for providing the cover image for this book. My friends who have lit up life and given me wings: Megan Bardsley, Selina Blair-Holt, Maurita Dumbill and Eleanor Grace. Ben Davis, for the enthusiasm vii

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always. My long-lost pal Al for sharing the magic of words with me (all of the words). Craig McCormack for smashing goals and sharing dreams. And my family, as always, who are behind everything I do. To the political commitment of my grandmothers, who each defied expectation to assume a political life, this is me becoming a nurse, becoming a protestor. To my parents, who said ‘of course’ when I outlined my project and asked ‘yes but’ every moment since. To my brother, who I imagine addressing each point I’ve made; you helped me understand what a good argument is. On an almost daily basis, the world seems to become a scarier place. In this moment, I fear that the violence of the climate crisis is normalised and forgotten. I do not want, as our political adversaries proclaim, to maintain the rage. I want to echo Elvis Costello, who unknowingly echoes Arendt, who is describing Benjamin, that ‘we could be diving for pearls’. Like Costello and those before him, I do not want to dive for dear life, and I maintain that we oughtn’t need to. For all the confusion that human emotions produce, the possibility for action, for recovery and for repair persists. That’s the ship we should be building. Here is a draft.

viii

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INTRODUCTION: LOCATING THE CLIMATE CRISIS – THE INTER ESSE PLACE OF POLITICS

We sat on the back deck and watched thick bolts of lightning strike the ground. The flashes were some distance away, but the air was already thick with static and smoke. It was sublime. I turned to my friends, who had just built the house we were sitting behind, and asked about their fire plan. No plan yet, they replied. That fire’s some way off, they said, nodding to what seemed an encroaching horizon. They’d set up next year. For now, there was the small dam down the track back towards the barn. You could drive there in a minute or two. Run if you wanted. There was no hose though. Next year, it would be sorted. I excused myself. The sublime exposed its terrible face. Quite how terrible the Black Summer of 2019–2020 was for southeast Australia would become apparent by the end of the year, as families stood on beaches and waited for emergency evacuation.1 If I was going to burn that night, I didn’t want to see it coming. Then again, that remark assumes something we can’t yet say with certainty – not simply that ‘it’ is coming but that this ‘it’ is seen, known and recognised in advance. It assumes a legibility and a literacy of which we have not yet proven ourselves capable. We would be better to say, we all see something coming, something slowly creeping: the waking presence of the climate crisis. This is not a book about Australia or its experience of climate crisis, though that is the reality from which I write, and it intrudes throughout this project. Where it resists legibility, I seek it out, pushing to realise my own climate literacy of a planetary reality marked by instability and change. And whether that reality is understood as a battle that has long been fought or one that has 1

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recently come into existence, whether it is the creeping fog of misinformation or the total breakdown of what it means to live a human life, the need to seek light in this darkness and understand that what is coming is both here and not yet here, that it has both passed us by and is still arriving, is not only an invitation to think in the twenty-first century but contemporary thought’s organising imperative. While we can and indeed ought to pause in our despair and allow the truth of burning fires and rising seas to colour experience of this unearthly place that is our changing, changed, and changeable planet, we cannot stay with that despair for long. Despair leeches potential from life, and even when the conditions of that life are worthy of despair, part of the moral imperative of living in an unearthly place is to prioritise a discourse of repair and an economy of care. Only this kind of care will make the planet liveable for the coming onslaught of new generations.2 Against the unearthly places of modern life, this book suggests a path towards those other places that lie like islands of certainty amid a raging sea. In these places we will cultivate a planetary politics.3 These places are not forthcoming. They do not lie waiting to be found with ‘cartographic exactitude’. Such places, Jorge Luis Borges has already told us, do not know how to home the ‘animals and beggars’ who dwell on their earthly surface and whose tread gives meaning and texture to the world.4 The earthly places that are needed in this unearthly time, places that might return meaning to a political system that has chosen to prioritise profit over life, must be sought out.5 They must be, to anticipate a vocabulary that will be central to this project, unconcealed. Against the claims of worldly ideologies that seek to displace and dispel, that make planetary claims without learning what it means to live a planetary life, places are needed that will signal repair in a planet marked by despairing disrepair. Only in such places, places that are both earthly and worldly, but neither one more than the other, where custodianship is meaningful and strives to realise the depth of those original principles of human and more-than-human life – dignity, rights and justice – can politics be made possible again. While despair may conjure motivation, it cannot bring forth the new.6 Bent on the conservation of an ideal that was once liveable, despair has no place in political life. Planetary Politics In what follows, I outline a reading of planetary life drawn from the writings of Hannah Arendt. Arendt was not a theorist of the planet and yet the planetary was central to her writing. In her life Arendt contended with an ideology that sought to determine the conditions for planetary existence. She confronted the earth-denying utopianism of extra-planetary travel. She investigated the planetary reality of political life, and she persistently understood human life as grounded by its planetary origin. Though these remarks suggest a preoccupation with those questions that are now central to the emergent field of the 2

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environmental humanities and climate-conscious political scholarship, Arendt is not a common point of reference in these discussions. Her work remains largely peripheral to theories of planetary life and where it is invoked it is applied, meaning that her writings serve as a belated contribution rather than an original point of departure.7 This is the narrative that I aim to counter throughout this book, suggesting instead that Arendt developed a complex account of planetary politics, one that underpinned her contributions to political theory. This reorientation has meaningful implications. Not only does it reposition a prominent political theorist of the twentieth century, one whose writings are continuing to gain traction well into this century, as an ‘environmental humanist’ or ‘planetary theorist’; it troubles existing conceptions of political theory which claim to ‘do politics’ without at the same time considering the ground on which their political ‘doing’ takes place.8 In other words, it begins to point out that political theory, if it claims to be ‘political’, must also be planetary theory.9 From Arendt’s writings I take three methodological aims: 1) To think what we are doing; 2) To confront the elementary problems of human livingtogether; 3) To recover the lost spirit of revolution.10 In the context of this moment, at the outset of the twenty-first century, this threefold imperative becomes the need to think about the climate crisis and the conditions for collective, revolutionary action at a planetary scale. Arendt alone cannot stage the path to such action. A plurality of voices must inform our way. James Martel’s work is particularly helpful here. Indeed, it is Martel’s discussion of ‘archism’ that names the form of violence against which an Arendtianinformed revolutionary politics of the planet must be organised. In his clearest articulation of the term, Martel defines archism as ‘a form of politics based on rule and hierarchy, on phantasmal authority structures’.11 For Martel, archism is a corrosive structure that supersedes the political power of the collective and conceals reality from the otherwise robust potential of grassroots, communityled action. For anyone familiar with Arendt’s writings, archism presents a direct attack on the communion of plurality and the recognitive construction of natality. More acutely still, archism imposes modes of envisioning the world and the lives we make within it as determined by a singular truth, an arche that ‘comes from the top versus truths that are determined from within the larger community’.12 At its core, archism vacates the political sphere of its combative political actors, imposing a structure of prediction and predictability where formerly there was spontaneous deliberation and experiences grounded in reciprocal appearance. In the age of unearthly places, as extreme weather is naturalised against those now deemed superfluous to and hence expendable before its violence, archism assumes a planetary guise. The form it takes is overheard in words spoken in 2015 by Australia’s then immigration minister, Peter Dutton, who remarked on the late arrival of ministers from the Pacific that ‘time doesn’t 3

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mean anything when you’re, you know, about to have water lapping at your door’.13 It is heard six years later when Australia’s then Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, refused to bear witness to those same leaders in their demands for a bigger 2030 emissions reduction target, telling journalists at COP26 that ‘in every discussion I’ve ever had with Pacific Island leaders, that is something they’ve always encouraged us to do’ while signalling no substantial action that would register their pleas.14 In these two instances of silencing the political speech of Pacific Islanders, a system of planetary archism that creates, maintains and justifies a right to planetary domination is seen. It is against the naturalisation of such events that this book is organised. Arendt anticipates both Martel and our own archic time, attributing a similar function of ‘truth’ to the narrative of the ‘One World’, the fictional space produced by the political regimes she bore witness to in the era of European Totalitarianism. More acutely still, she describes the ‘One World’ as producing a notion of ‘humanity’ that might, at any moment, choose to liquidate parts of itself no longer considered conducive to the conditions of that ‘oneness’.15 Whether such a setting has now become the ineliminable backdrop of the planetary reality that is known to be the consequence of driving cars, eating burgers, and burning fuel exposes the opaque moral condition of our present world. Though this image gestures towards a picture of planetary archism with a sinister face, part of the duplicity of archism is the innocent guise of its appearance. Indeed, Martel highlights the degree to which archism operates by seduction. Incorporating a language of temptation, he shows how archism is able to ‘project particular wishes as if they were universal, [promising] offers of privilege to some few elite and of comforting – but false-compensations for the rest.’16 Archism’s allure, he tells us, lies in its ability to present an account of reality that comprehends everything, that claims inclusivity despite the limited routes of access that it actually offers. At its core, archism insists on the ability of everything to be enfolded within the singularity of its form. The resolute graphs depicting possible planetary futures that differ on scale of apocalyptic terror alone recuperate this condition, yet now they are produced with the apparent aim of bolstering action. The paradox of archism appears in the call to arms of the ‘Climate Clock’ launched in 2015 in New York City to ‘count down the critical time window remaining for humanity to act to save itself’, a clock which is at the same time a reduction of possibility to the dominance of calculability.17 What the clock shows us is the complex reality of desiring the recuperative power of structures that claim total legibility while at the same time seeking out an emergent politics of collective action. Staying with the force of epistemology to determine the conditions for action, Martel connects archism to the Derridean ‘arkheion’. The latter serves as the fount of knowledge and, more pressingly, of power.18 It is in this space that politicians (and others) find a depository of planetary domination from which they can draw. 4

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Archism, as I deploy the term, exists in the callous words of politicians that silence the existential threats faced by others. But it also exists in the naturalisation of a carbon logic that creates conditions of complicity or what others call a ‘murderous consent’ in modes of living that are, at their core, inextricable from the destruction of planetary ecosystems – which I would emphasise include the political ecosystems of ‘our’ human worlds.19 The seductive quality of this planetary archism exists in the belief that nothing need change for the planet to change. Or, that if things must change, they can be reintegrated into a system of gain, extraction and growth, systems that preclude the possibility of responsibility and the world-repairing labour of moral development. More destructively, archism exists in the colonisation of political action by the logic of neo-liberalism, which disrupts the potential of the collective by recentring the individual.20 A neo-liberal planetary archism exists in the blurring of individual and corporate responsibilities. When governments deny responsibility on the grounds that ‘this’ – and again, we would be wise to ask what ‘this’ is that has attained legibility – is a global phenomenon and hence not their responsibility, they reaffirm the pollution of politics with archism. When fossil fuel giants create and disseminate the language of individual carbon footprints, an impasse is created and archism intrudes. At the same time that the possibility for action is suspended, archism stages the planetary intervention of geoengineering and mass reconfigurations of the conditions that make human (and more-than-human) life on earth possible, further denying responsibility in order to herald the ‘earth-power’ of a new superman.21 The account of planetary archism that I develop throughout this project exists, in part, in the conflicting narratives of responsibility that govern responses to the climate crisis. This encounter plays out on a stage between the ‘guilty us’ and the ‘innocent them’, without recognising the complex and nuanced realities that produce these actors. And so, it is these realities, the historical conditions that determine the categorical ‘them’ and ‘us’ that structure my response to the archist planet of climate crisis. Before I look back to the planetary conception of politics that is latent to Arendt’s writings, I suggest that we understand the question of political archism through the varying lenses of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s historical ‘entanglement’, Elisa Iturbe’s analysis of ‘carbon logic’, the colonial ‘Orbis Point’ of Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin’s account of the Anthropocene, Achille Mbembe’s ‘planetarisation of the world’, the planetary violence of Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright’s ‘Climate Leviathan’, and the ‘slow violence’ of Rob Nixon’s ‘environmentalism of the poor’.22 In other words, what I bring to Martel’s understanding of the archic is a specifically planetary dimension. Archism becomes planetary archism, one that is outlined in the above examples and more as the naturalisation of a particular mode of living that is organised around a view of the planet as territorialised rather than common, of resources as capital rather than custodial and of the 5

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earth as subordinate to all, but especially to the whims of the world. Indeed, it is this final hierarchisation that captures the essential function of planetary archism at work in this book. Planetary archism, despite its name, is the supposed superiority of worldly life, which claims to emancipate the world from its earthly condition, relegating the latter to the ‘merely’ biological ground of departure, a site to be overcome rather than treasured. Like Martel, I counter the totalising claim of planetary life imposed by this archism through the collective power of anarchism. Yet where for Martel anarchism exists in the power of collective sight, which dis-appoints the sovereign claim of the archic truth/ leader/history/One World narrative, I locate the anarchic in the earth itself. In effect, I turn from who we the collective are to where we are. Arendt, Anarchism, Natality The radical and anarchic character that I attribute to the earth stages the return to Hannah Arendt, both to her planetary writings and to that anarchic political condition of hers ‘natality’.23 Read together, the argument throughout this book turns on the claim that what links Arendt’s understanding of the planetary condition of political life on the one hand, and the unpredictable disruption of natality on the other, is their common origin in the earth. More emphatically still, it is this earth that is the an-arche of political life.24 This indeed is the central argument of this book. The condition of anarchic politics is, of course, not alien to Arendt’s writing. Unlike the planetary which has thus far resisted common view, Peg Birmingham’s intervention in the study of natality, which redefines the opacity of natality’s ‘beginning’ as ‘anarchic’ has been influential in determining how the radicality – and hence, the anarchy – of Arendtian politics is understood. What Birmingham demonstrates in relation to Arendt’s writing is the irreducibility of beginning to one archic moment. Meaning that almost a century after Arendt introduced the idea of natality and fifteen years after Birmingham’s essay, Martel is able to write in his study of an-archism that it is Arendt’s work that serves as ‘the context and basis for anarchist life as such’.25 For Birmingham, the fulcrum on which such a reading of Arendt turns can be found in Arendt’s reflections in On Revolution, where she writes that ‘what saves the act of beginning from its own arbitrariness is that it carries its own principle within itself, or, to be more precise, that beginning and principle, principium and principle, are not only related to each other, but are coeval’.26 Birmingham rephrases this for us in the language of anarchism, explaining that ‘the event of natality is an arche in the double etymological sense of origin and rule. Further, it is the unpredictable, anarchic origin that carries its rule or principle within it.’27 Natality, in other words, is the arche of an-arche, a beginning that is set within an ocean of beginnings. Or, to mix aquatic metaphors and anticipate another figure central to this work, natality reimagines Walter Benjamin’s definition of the origin as emerging from ‘eddies in the stream of 6

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becoming’.28 Natality begins without inscribing beginnings towards ends, it suspends a death drive mentality and opens beginning up to precisely that form of becoming that foregrounds a language of anarchic principles of unpredictability. Framed in this way, natality becomes Arendt’s organising motif around which to develop a politics of disruption and unpredictability. When she first introduces the idea of natality in her doctoral thesis (1929), without yet naming it as such, Arendt stages a correspondence between beginning in action and the status of humans as themselves beginners. What is thus clear at the outset is a blurring of natality itself – it is both the faculty of action and a condition of being human. By the time she writes The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, this double account of beginning as anarchic faculty and condition has assumed greater prominence. Here she writes that ‘beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identical with man’s freedom’.29 The coincidence of the faculty of beginning, what Arendt understands as natality’s equivalence in political action, and the quality or condition of natality that is inscribed in each human who is born as a beginner in themselves, underscores her politics of anarchic disruption. In other words, it is Arendt’s preoccupation with the disruptive potential of politics, with the inauguration of the new, with her reading of humans as themselves beginners, and with her insistence that politics be unpredictable and spontaneous, that distinguishes her as a thinker of the anarchic. This point is important. Anarchism for Arendt is not simply a matter of political theory, it is entangled with the phenomenology and ontology of human life. Arendt’s theoretical conceptualisation of the anarchic is interwoven throughout her political theory, meaning that at each turn in her writings the realisation of natality is latently articulated as both a condition of politics and an anarchic condition. The importance of this point, however, lies in the fact that Arendt was not always an anarchist herself. Anarchism occupies a fraught position in her writings. Where she was able to develop a rigorous theoretical account of an-archism, that melds together a complex web of an-arches, she was not always able to realise this in either her own politics or, as it often turned out, in her response to political events. More to the point perhaps, she was, at times, actively hostile to the political tradition of anarchism. This point ought not deter us. Indeed, as I show throughout this project, the politics of anarchism and the theory of anarchic beginning are not, and should not be viewed as, coextensive. Disentangling anarchism – as tradition and as theory – must remain at the forefront of our minds as we proceed. Arendt’s critique of anarchism can be structured broadly into two categories. On the one hand, she disputed the temporality of anarchism which was unable to realise the kind of institutional an-arche that a political system structured on the permanent revolution inscribed in something like natality required. On the other, she understood anarchism to be a form of activism realised by 7

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isolated figures, meaning that it could not be understood within the same collective framework of plurality that she considered central to political action. In the latter instance, her critique of anarchism returns to her discussion in The Human Condition of the distinction between action as a beginning (archein) and action as the achievement or finishing of something (prattein). For Arendt, it is the courage of beginning that distinguishes action and not the superstitious belief of the so-called ‘strong man’ who believes themselves capable of foretelling action’s end and realising it. Indeed, in the action of the strong man, time itself is overcome and action cannot begin, it can only inscribe ends, meaning that the revolutionary potential of action is lost. In essence then, it was the anarchist tradition’s inability to recuperate either the force of natality (action as beginning) or plurality (action as collective) that made Arendt view anarchism as antithetical to what she considered genuine politics. The relative simplicity of this critique, while somewhat exaggerated here into two categorical forms, goes someway in establishing the ground that actually lay in common between Arendt and the anarchist tradition. Indeed, as Birmingham and Martel’s anarchist readings of Arendt begin to suggest, there was much overlap at a theoretical level between the two. Nevertheless, Arendt’s biography diverged at several key moments from the activist core at the centre of the anarchist movement as it is generally understood. Arendt’s own politics frequently verged towards conservatism. Her dismissal of civil rights movements in the US is a particular source of consternation for those who look to Arendt not only for a theory of radical politics, but a living example.30 Conscious of these moments in Arendt’s writings, what I aim to advance in this book is a commitment to Arendt’s ideals without subscribing to or perpetuating Arendt as ideology. It is true that Arendt systematically rejected many appeals for anarchist politics as ‘antipolitical’ or ‘interests-based’. Where she did embody an affinity with certain anarchist groupings, her approach was often mired by an underlying elitism. To an interview question regarding her political leanings, Arendt replied ‘I don’t know . . . You know the left think I am conservative, and the conservatives sometimes think I am left, or I am a maverick or God knows what. And I must say I couldn’t care less.’31 Arendt then, despite her inherent anarchism, was not an anarchist. The editor of her estate, Jerome Kohn, describes Arendt as being hailed as both ‘a liberal wanting change and a conservative desiring stability’, leading to that paradoxical accusation of Arendt as ‘harbouring an unrealistic yearning for the past [and] for being a utopian revolutionary’.32 Part of her ambivalent status in view of questions of conservatism lies in her embrace of seemingly conservative ideals and their redeployment through the radical political foundation of natality. In her essay ‘What is Authority?’ she effectively reorients the conservatism of authority, writing that ‘what authority or those in authority constantly augment is the foundation’, namely, the principle of beginning or natality itself. To this end, in that essay, 8

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she is able to write, contra the conservative logic of the ‘strong man’ and their delusory claim to be able to ‘make things happen’, that the ‘source of authority transcends power and those who are in power.’33 And so, despite Arendt’s equivocation on her own politics and the, at times, counterintuitive invocation of political vocabularies in her writings, it is to Arendt that so many writing on the anarchic have turned. As already noted, Martel describes Arendt’s notion of natality as ‘the context and basis for anarchist life as such’.34 Shmuel Lederman looks to Arendt for a framework through which to realise the aspirations of contemporary anarchist movements.35 In turn, Brian Smith suggests that Arendt actually held much in common with the anarchist traditions she criticised.36 Yet rather than persist with the institutional form of anarchism and build on Smith’s interrogation or even Lederman’s interwoven reading, my intention is to give teeth to Martel’s anarchism. Bringing Martel’s writing into productive proximity with Arendt’s reflections on the coextensive nature of natality and the earth, I suggest that her account of politics is organised around a notion of ‘planetary anarchism’. Planetary Anarchism Bringing together natality, the event of human birth, and the earth or what I am referring to as the ‘planetary’ is, undeniably, evocative of dangerous political foundations that have been used in the service of racial supremacy, eugenics and exclusion. The hierarchisation of humanity based, if not on race, then on territorialised accounts of nationality, ethnicity or religion, often seem to appear in the intersection of birth and earth. Framed in this way, the coincidence of birth and earth assumes the kind of archist form that is antithetical to the project at hand. Indeed, the very claim that I have hinted at, that the earth is itself anarchic, seems counterintuitive. The earth is, after all, a constant fact in human life. Though revolutions come and go, the endurance of the earth would seem to confirm its status as a liminal condition and hence as an original arche. Indeed, viewed as a site of archism, unchanging and to be overcome by politics that seek to attain new ground, an arche of the earth might be seen to encourage new forms of emancipation that liberate revolutionaries from their earthly needs to breathe, eat, drink and sleep. And yet, insofar as a human life does more than merely survive, and that an emancipated life is not determined by a greater selection of food or drink, a position begins to emerge that sees the earth not as liminal but as, to invoke a word used at the outset, concealing. By this I mean merely to say that the earth continually withdraws from those attempts to locate within it one truth that determines one narrative of one liberated humanity. Here the argument should be read as gesturing towards that position of the earth as anarchic. Against claims of archic enlightenment, which position the earth within an ideological narrative of this place for these people, of your entry but not theirs, your admissibility and their superfluity, 9

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it becomes clear that to supersede the original earthliness of all human life by determining it within one possessive logic is to forgo something specific about the conditions of earthly life itself. More to the point, perhaps, while no one people can be granted exclusive ownership of the earth, if such an ownership were claimed, the very integrity of such a claim would be denied by virtue of that move. A human life is not a matter of mere survival nor of creating conditions of survival according to the archist iteration of one good life. It is instead about relating to and living with the condition of being earthly. What I thus take from Arendt’s description of beginning in On Revolution as carrying ‘a principle within itself’ is something that can be prescribed to the planetary as well. The earth carries the principle of an-arche within it, sustaining the conditions of political life by continually disrupting and reimposing the question of what it means to dwell in this place, at this time, with these people.37 The main focus of this book is to recognise that Arendt was making this claim throughout her life. Indeed, what is perhaps the more emphatic claim is that each of Arendt’s political contributions is organised around her recognition of an original interplay between earth and world. With this argument, I join a path in political thinking of the earth that is, outside the parameters of Western thought, well established. Accounts of the earth-world intersection and the earthly dimension of political worlds are central to many indigenous theorists who proclaim the earth as a site of worldly custodianship.38 Viewed in light of this company, and my own reality of writing as a settler-Australian from a land of ‘white possessions’ where the question of dwelling has yet to assume meaningful engagement, this book is not original in its planetary claims.39 However, these positions are not evident in Arendt scholarship. Arendt’s writing remains at a distance from a politics of the earth. And yet, Arendt was a theorist of anarche and the planet, producing an entire oeuvre that can be read as a planetary account of political life. She wrote extensively – if not always in a way that has been clear to her readers – on the intersection of politics and planet. It is time that the canons into which she is placed are reread in light of this. Recent engagements with Arendt have positioned her as ‘a critical theorist, a phenomenologist, an anti-feminist, a feminist ally, a democratic theorist, a republican theorist, a Heideggerian and a nostalgic Hellenophile’.40 If it is not already time that ‘environmental humanist’ is added to this list, it is at the very least time to see if it could be. Despite the force of my conviction, I do not mean to say that Arendt’s writings on the planetary are straightforward. Indeed, part of their being overlooked should be understood in terms of their limitations. Nevertheless, what I do suggest is that if we are to read Arendt in any context, but especially this context of living in the climate crisis, we need to recognise the actual condition of her politics: the fact that humans are born on earth in order to begin. Arendt made almost exactly this point in the concluding pages to her report on Adolf Eichmann, that against the holes of oblivion and estrangement 10

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that violence seeks to open, hope in politics persists in the fact that collective action is capable of maintaining ‘this planet . . . a place fit for human habitation’.41 The current work continues this project. One of the central formulations around which Arendt develops her politics of natality and plurality is the Roman equivalence between ‘inter homines esse’ and ‘esse’. The former, to be among men, and the latter, to be, disclose for Arendt the original relationality of being. In The Human Condition she writes that while all aspects of the human condition are somehow related to politics, this plurality is specifically the condition – not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam – of all political life. Thus the language of the Romans, perhaps the most political people we have known, used the words ‘to live’ and ‘to be among men’ (inter homines esse) or ‘to die’ and ‘to cease to be among men’ (inter homines esse desinere) as synonyms.42 This staging enables Arendt to conceptualise the condition of plurality, or original difference, and natality, or original beginning, as occurring in situ with others. While to be and to be with others emerge here for Arendt (and the Romans) as identical, this pairing also means that Arendt is provided the resources to pave the way towards a consideration of the original relationality of ‘to begin’ and ‘to appear’, two notions central to her account of political action. For Arendt action can only be performed in concert, witnessed and given meaning by a recognitive plurality. Moreover, it is from this formulation of the inter homines esse that critical interpretations of Arendtian politics, from the feminist contributions of Adriana Cavarero and Fanny Söderbäck, to the collective rights-based readings of Seyla Benhabib and Peg Birmingham, to the democratic interpretations of Bonnie Honig and Linda Zerilli in the context of judgment and action, have been able to draw on in order to enrich and extend notions of political life.43 And yet, against the productive backdrop of these contributions which prioritise the recognitive structure of plurality in considerations of natality, and the anarchic dimension of collective politics which resist ‘one-man’ rule in favour of Arendt’s politics produced in the gathering of ‘men’ [sic], they also betray a general failure to conceptualise the place of politics.44 In other words, though the anarchic of a collective – albeit one that omits a gender plurality – is taken from Arendt’s writing into the context of maternal ethics, collective responsibility, and communal repair, this is done without reflection on the placed condition of these practices.45 What is then lost in each of these clarifications of Arendtian politics is the earthliness of politics, its planetary origin and its implications in relation to place. In other words, what these readings forget is precisely that final appeal from Arendt’s report in Eichmann 11

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in Jerusalem to maintain the planet as a place fit for human habitation. Part of the critical reading that I develop throughout this book of these responses is therefore staged in order to recover them through an original consideration of the planetary.46 A general overview of Arendt’s foremost political texts will highlight the priority she gives to the earth. The preface to The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) appeals for a new understanding of ‘human dignity on earth’; the extended essay ‘Introduction into Politics’ (1954) opens with the claim that ‘politics is based on the fact that humans are an earthly product’; The Human Condition (1958) begins with a reflection on space travel and ends with a discussion of earth alienation; the second essay of Between Past and Future (1961) starts with a discussion on ‘History and Nature’ and concludes with an inquiry into human status in the space age; in her account of Adolf Eichmann’s trial in 1963 she describes the Nazi party as having deemed itself ‘ordained to reorder the conditions for earthly appearance’; and, finally, in The Life of the Mind (1978) she directly invokes the earth as harbouring ‘the law of plurality’.47 Indeed, it is Arendt’s continual return to the origin of natality and plurality in the earth that, more than her thematic concerns with space and the extraplanetary, demonstrates an original planetary ontology in her politics. What is stark about each of these invocations is the way in which they hint at an interplay between the earth and those most human of faculties: politics, dignity and rights. As I progress in this reading of the earthliness of plurality then, I suggest that beyond the original equivalence between inter homines esse and esse, there is a corresponding ‘between place’ or inter-esse place that exists in the coming together of earth and world as the conditions for politics. Arendt suggests the existence of such a place in her references to the intersection of earth and world, not least in her account of the earth as the ‘quintessence of the human condition’ and as providing the artificiality of the human world with the conditions that sustain life for human beings, but in her continual return to the earth as the locus in relation to which the plurality of humans appear. The equivalence that Arendt stages between plurality and the earth is sustained throughout her writing. It appears in the prologue to The Human Condition in the definition of plurality as ‘the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world’.48 As noted, it reappears in the first line of the essay ‘Introduction into Politics’ in the claim that ‘politics is based on the fact that humans are an earthly product’; as well as in the determination of men as ‘earthbound creatures’ in her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy; in the essay ‘What is Freedom?’ the earth appears in the context of plurality’s setting of the conditions for freedom, and in The Life of the Mind her position becomes even more acute, with the claim, already noted, that plurality is the ‘law of the earth’.49 It is worth pausing here to quote in full her invocation of the planetary in the preface to The Origins of Totalitarianism. It is here, after 12

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all, in a text written in the wake of totalitarianism that she makes explicit what has occurred in the forsaking of humanity’s planetary condition and what humanity must now be tasked in recovering. She writes: Antisemitism (not merely the hatred of Jews), imperialism (not merely conquest), totalitarianism (not merely dictatorship) – one after the other, one more brutally than the other, have demonstrated that human dignity needs a new guarantee which can be found only in a new political principle, in a new law on earth, whose validity this time must comprehend the whole of humanity while its power must remain strictly limited, rooted in and controlled by newly defined territorial entities.50 What the earth is shown to be in each instance both here and above is coeval with the fragile spontaneity of plurality. On these terms, it is precisely not the liminal setting of mere biological survival that the earth represents in her writings, rather it is coincident with the agonistic and unpredictable meaning that is produced in the gathering and disclosing of a plurality. The earth becomes anarchic in these moments, its principle inscribed within it. As much as a plurality is disclosed and becomes meaningful in its gathering, and not before, the earth becomes meaningful as a political locus as it is encountered in forms of planetary politics. In other words, rather than rhetorical flourish or passing intellectual interest, Arendt’s investment in the earth signals an organising preoccupation with the earth as providing the ontological basis for political life as such. Based on this reading, the earth is not merely a source of metaphorical abstraction but an organising point of departure for the conceptualisation of those principles, which, insofar as they are unanswerable by the top-down One World totality of archism, depend upon the earth as their anarchic origin. A clear example of Arendt’s direct engagement with the an-arche of the earth is seen in her confrontation with what she saw as the planetary archism of totalitarianism. Against a regime that she described as considering itself ‘ordained to reorder the conditions for earthly appearance’, she viewed totalitarianism in terms that coincide with what I am calling planetary archism; the attempt to impose conditions for planetary life thereby superseding the original relationality, or inter-esse, of earth and world.51 When Arendt imagined herself confronting Adolf Eichmann at the end of her report on his trial, she wrote that it was Eichmann’s support for a regime that sought to determine ‘who could and could not inhabit the earth’ that meant that no one could be expected to want to share the earth with him.52 This critique of Eichmann reappears in her account that what transpired under Nazism was an attack on humanity: that anarchic and earthly constituency. Moreover, these words were written during the Cold War, in recent living memory of the atomic bomb and the ongoing threat of nuclear destruction. That Arendt chose to formulate her response to 13

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Eichmann in these starkly planetary terms when a far more immediately environmental threat had been both enacted and lay as potential underscores how centrally she saw the planetary to accounts of political life. That need that she describes in The Origins of Totalitarianism to found a ‘new law on earth’, an entreaty written in the summer of 1950, and a decade before the environmental agitation of the 1960s, reinforces the ontological depth of what it means to conceptualise the planetary condition of political life. Her account that what had occurred under totalitarianism was the production of unearthly places on earth, a point that appears acutely in her description of the concentration camp as a place denied of ‘earthly purpose’, makes this claim even bolder.53 Judith Butler builds on Arendt’s critique of planetary totalitarianism, writing that what Eichmann failed to realise was that ‘no one has the prerogative to choose with whom to cohabit the earth’.54 Implicit to this interpretation of the crimes against humanity committed by the Nazi party is their transgression of the ‘unchosen character of earthly cohabitation’ – a cohabitation that I understand to be the anarchic condition of planetary politics. Indeed, it this earthly place, one that exists by virtue of the anarchic investment of communities to remain with what Donna Haraway describes as ‘the trouble’ of not having an archic solution to planetary life, that confronts the unearthly places produced by the climate crisis.55 Such unearthly places, which assume pronounced expression in sites of incarceration that impose mere survival onto their inhabitants, are the places against which this book is written. It is against the creeping normalisation of these archic sites, which do not only exist in the inhumanity of prisons that create lives ‘condemned’ as Achille Mbembe says, ‘to live’, but increasingly in the mundane sites that depend upon air conditioning to be liveable or uninsurability to be ‘affordable’.56 In other words, what I am suggesting after Arendt’s original diagnosis of lives denied their earthly purpose is the necessity to think how certain archic constructions of ‘good living’ and solutions to planetary an-archism or unknowable unpredictability are now implicated in reifying what she later called the ‘desert’ conditions of unearthly, unpolitical life. More to the point, in fact it is the invisibility of the unearthliness and unpolitical dimension of these lives, which claim normality despite, for instance, their lack of drinkable water or their dependence on infrastructures that destroy the very conditions for their existence (we need only think of the three C’s – cars, carbon, concrete), that reveals their archic dimension. The ‘desert’ creating effect of archism is described in different terms by James Martel. He writes of the way that archism ‘transfers the tangibility of human life to itself’ such that ‘our actual life begins to seem empty and shapeless’. The effective internalisation or even embodiment of the desert leads Martel to claim that ‘we begin to project onto that life the very ephemeral nature of archism that now appears to us to be firm and utterly real, effectively 14

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swapping our life and agency for its deathliness and nihilism’.57 What he is describing here coincides with the point made at the outset to this introduction regarding the logic of personal responsibility imposed by the archism of climate narratives, which insist upon individualised responses rather than collective action. More precisely however, it is the suspension of any political possibility other than that prescribed by the logic of particular arches – this will resolve the climate crisis – that his point anticipates. This brings, of course, the irreversible and ineliminable quality of the crisis into view. For as much as the archism of carbon logic and extractive regimes can be suspended, the consequences of climate crisis already exist. In popular terms, Naomi Klein has already made clear that ‘everything has changed’.58 More pointedly, to the otherwise Marxist and anarchist call for action – ‘workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains. You have a world to win’ – members of critical publishing house the Salvage Collective reply: ‘what if the world is already lost?’59 The question speaks to the planetary ‘tipping points’ identified by climate scientists, to the infrastructural design of precarity and to the already ‘baked in’ effects of capitalist production and resource extraction. These realities cannot be denied and must be recognised as a condition of a planetary an-arche. Irreversibility does not mean that political life is no longer possible. Anarche remains anarchic! Though irreversible changes certainly demand their being reckoned with, they do not foreclose possibility – if they did there would be no discernability of change because they would be no critical consciousness capable of saying this is difference and difference is possible. Arendt encountered such a scenario of the figurative ‘lost world’ after totalitarianism. Surveying the conditions of her own recent history and the irreversibility of the violence it had wrought, Arendt launched herself at the world. She spoke from the ‘vantage point of [her] newest experiences and [her] most recent fears’.60 Rather than flee the world, she sought precisely to reckon with historical reality. Only in so doing was she able to realise the possibility of politics anew. And so, Arendt returned to the an-arche of the earth, seeking out a new law of human dignity, aware that her thinking could not be guided by tradition or convention. In other words, what she recognised was the imperative to establish anarchic conditions in political life. Today that planetary an-arche is discerned in Achille Mbembe’s appeal for a ‘planetary consciousness’, a ‘radical decentring that forces us to be born together again’.61 It exists in Donna Haraway’s project of ‘making kin’ and in the opaque hope of Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright’s future of ‘Climate X’.62 In these conjectures towards the unknown planetary future, the earthliness of natality and the necessary an-arche of that beginning as beginning-in-place are found. When Arendt describes the absence of tradition to guide the categories of judgement and thinking, she deploys the metaphor of ‘thinking without a banister’.63 The image appears in various instances throughout her work. One of 15

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the clearest examples is her encounter with the post-totalitarian world and the need to make sense of an event that defied sense. What Arendt describes as the unending process of reckoning with the world and understanding is part of her attempt to reconstruct the conditions for thinking. We know, however, from her earlier reflections on the earthly condition of human life in her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, that thinking, though it may be performed in private, in withdrawal from the world, depends upon the world. To quote from elsewhere in the lectures, she writes that humans need ‘each other’s company even for thinking’.64 Elsewhere she describes the effect that this public company has of ‘throwing light’ onto the private and disclosing the conditions of private thinking.65 Even in her description of thinking she anticipates the validation provided by plurality and the public performance of thinking in the form of the private ‘two-in-one’, the dialogue that is sustained as I think alone with myself.66 When contemporary scholars like Mbembe thus express the need to articulate the conditions for a ‘planetary consciousness’, we can understand them as wanting to return to the plural condition of Arendtian thinking. Indeed, what Mbembe conceptualises in terms of the consciousness that follows from a radical decentring of the subject, such that it is ‘premised on the capacity to know together, to generate knowledge together’ appears in Arendt’s position regarding the requisite companionship for collective thinking.67 The role that the planetary or collective consciousness plays in Arendt’s reflections on the anarchic dimension of politics, in both the unpredictability of natality and the fragile spontaneity of plurality, appears in her discussion on authority. Authority, popularly understood, is perhaps more associated with the politics of archism than the aims of anarchism towards which this project has otherwise been moving. For Arendt, of course, it is not this simple. I have already gestured towards the fact that for Arendt, authority is related to the legitimacy of foundational acts, meaning that the notion of authority is invested with and determined by its collective potential. Much like the relationally or reciprocally constructed idea of ‘power’, which appears in her writing as an attribute of the plurality, authority is developed in association with the an-arche of natality. Indeed, rather than express authoritarianism, authority holds off the invasion of archism. To this end, ‘authority’ is better associated with a collective sense of public thinking and with the modes of consciousness that Mbembe seeks out in his reflections on planetary life today. In the essay ‘What is Authority?’ Arendt writes that ‘if authority is to be defined at all, then, it must be in contradistinction to both coercion by force and persuasion through arguments’, foregrounding the claim that authority can only exist in the spirit of free and collective thinking.68 Here a productive paradox emerges in the context of authority’s independence, something that recalls the supposed singularity of natality as performed by an actor, when it is in fact contingent on the recognitive structure of plurality. 16

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To think independently, Arendt will show throughout her writing, is to think free from coercion and the straitjacket of archisms like totalitarianism; it is thus to think in dialogue with rather than in rote repetition of the other. She notes in a 1973 interview, just two years before her death, that ‘every thought actually undermines whatever there is of rigid rules, general convictions etc.’.69 The archetypal figure who was incapable of this thinking was, of course, Eichmann, whose reproduction of clichés during his trial proved, for Arendt, his inability to think independently. Moreover, for Arendt, this absence of public thinking coincides with the loss of authority as a governing structure that could safeguard thinking in concert. To say then that archism flourishes in societies that lack authority is to centre the role of public thinking that holds open the space of cultivating the shared frame of legibility on which natality and plurality draw. Indeed, the gathering of a plurality who see within themselves the legitimacy of their own action, relying neither on an arche that is imposed as a benevolent good nor on the guarantee provided by existing systems that operate without their contribution, is coextensive with the production of public political authority. To rephrase an earlier formulation then, the authority of plurality exists within plurality, action within public action, and the an-arche of beginning in beginning. The ‘authority’ of the archic structure of authoritarianism relies on the singularity of One Truth conceived in relation to what Arendt calls the archic structure of ‘One World’, an entity that might be seen to adapt and change but is in truth merely growing and consuming. Where the One Truth then operates in alienation from the plurality it presumes to coordinate, authority exists in a plurality.70 Indeed, the self-generating authority that emerges from within a plurality, is necessarily anarchic, counter to the fixed origin of one beginning for one community. The functions of these two claims to authority – one archic and imposed even where it claims benevolence, the other anarchic and alive within a plurality of relations – are necessarily oppositional. One threatens to capture the other, to conjure its progressive form for its own end. This is not to say that the anarchic exists in defensive retreat, staving off incorporation and co-option – though this indeed it does. Rather, it is to highlight the source of plurality’s public authority as demanding continual renewal, continual investment, and continual acts of care that will sustain the integrity of plurality’s worldly legitimacy. What Mbembe contributes to this account of the anarchic dimension of public authority is the explicit need to locate authority in what we might call its planetary relation to self and place, hence what he calls a ‘planetary consciousness’. The corrosive effect of relinquishing public thinking for the temptations offered by archism led Arendt to the conclusion that the lost spirit of revolution or the principle of revolutionary beginnings must be recovered. At the close of the essay on authority, she writes that ‘to live in a political realm with 17

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neither authority’ in the sense of a public and planetary consciousness, ‘nor the concomitant awareness that the source of authority transcends power and those who are in power means to be confronted anew . . . by the elementary problems of human living-together’.71 As she reaches this final line, she can be read as providing the central problematic that organises this book: to recover the elementary problem of living-together as the basis for revolutionary, anarchic action. Arendt does not describe the form of this problem with any great clarity. And yet, her work is organised throughout by a direct engagement with the world and can be read as pursuing its articulation. In the prologue to The Human Condition, she describes her task as ‘to think what we are doing’. In the pages that follow, she develops the threefold division of human activity that has become canonical of her work – labour, work and action – highlighting at each turn the role that natality and plurality have as organising conditions that determine the meaning of labour (to sustain their possibility), of work (to record their appearance) and action (to compel their expression). Throughout the book are references to the earth and the planetary project of human livingtogether as the elementary problem of political life. Whether these appear in her confrontation with the unearthly ideals of extra-earthly travel, a moment that she records as ‘second in importance to no other’ or in those more subtle claims regarding the earthly quintessence of the human condition and the grounding of plurality in the earthliness of human life, what is clear is that they appear throughout.72 And yet, at best, these moments have generated fleeting attention, leading to an underdeveloped account not only of the planetary in her work but of all those conditions that find their anarchic origin in the earthly planet – not least natality and plurality – but the conditions coeval with them: thinking, dignity, rights and politics. Where Arendt’s work is taken up within the context of planetary thinking, these dialogues are principally sustained by the imperative imposed by the planetary dimension of the climate crisis – that engagement with theory must change. Though these contributions offer much in terms of the applicability of Arendt’s political thinking to the archist violence of the climate crisis, which appears both in the ongoing logic of carbon extraction and in the forced incorporation of planetary violence as a condition of life for some, they often miss the original preoccupation with the planetary in her writing. In other words, these works turn to Arendt as a diagnostic aid rather than a planetary thinker in her own right. Following Arendt’s division of the human condition into its three constitutive parts – labour, work and action – many pursuing Arendtian readings of the environment have built on precisely this framework.73 Kerry Whiteside’s argument regarding the failure to judge the world in ecological terms is connected to a preceding failure to engage the ‘rise of the social’, a political trend that Arendt identified in the crossover of labour and work.74 Ari-Elmeri Hyvönen presents a similar reading, introducing the hybrid notion 18

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of labour-as-action, a locus of activity that unleashes the unpredictability of action into the biological web of life traditionally correspondent to the activity of labour.75 Like Whiteside, Hyvönen’s reading cannot be separated from a discussion on labour and consumption, yet his argument is distinguished for its critique of the agent of labour. His claim, then, that the collectively organised labour process ‘has taken the shape of action minus plurality’ is countered with an appeal to restructure collective existence and recover the diversity of human plurality.76 Scott Hamilton and Anne Chapman share these concerns for action, both claiming that the unpredictable force of Arendtian political action is diminished by something like the calculative and capitalistic framework of resource extraction.77 This distortion of value as an attribute of nature, namely, of applying a profit-engineered framework to the environment, reappears in Paul Ott’s discussion of the insufficient attention paid to human-nature relationships.78 The destructive consequences of this form of largely unconstrained consumption is read through an Arendtian lens by Paul Voice, who turns towards Arendt’s account of the self and deliberative justice as a potential remedy.79 Jill Hargis develops a similar appeal, countering growing sentiments of world alienation with a return to Arendtian plurality where deliberative and democratic judgement might reposition individuals as responsible for the world.80 What is effectively hinted at throughout these contributions as the archic dimension of planetary life that erodes the capacity for collective action or thinking and being in concert assumes centre field in this discussion. While there is thus much to draw on in this field, much more remains to be said. Layout of the Book At its core, this is a book about the planetary politics of Hannah Arendt. Yet, it is also a book that responds to the planetary conditions of life in the twentyfirst century. In the chapters that follow I develop an account of the planetary that foregrounds the anarchic. Countering the archism of planetary life that sustains the climate crisis, which is now the undeniable, ineliminable and irreversible condition of planetary life, is perhaps the organising salvo of this project. The book is nominally divided into three sections; the first two chapters explore the anarchic writings that inform Arendt’s, the third provides a necessary complication of an-archism in Arendt’s writings, and the final two chapters confront the varying archic forces that attempt to eliminate the anarchic dimension of planetary life. Chapter 1 details the anarchic dimensions of Martin Heidegger’s writings on place. This is, of course, a complicated place to start. Heidegger’s work does not advance the revolutionary politics that are at work in Arendt’s. Indeed, invocations of the planetary in the context of Heidegger can be rightly argued to bear greater affinity to the ‘blood and soil’ of Nazism than the an-arche of place that I am advancing. And yet, as Arendt’s teacher and one of the twentieth 19

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century’s key theorists of place, Heidegger’s work in relation to this project cannot be overlooked. Indeed, in many ways, his work in this area foregrounds the planetary schematic that Arendt goes on to develop. In this chapter, I look to two moments in Heidegger’s writings – the pre-war essay ‘On the Origin of the Work of Art’ and his post-war formulation ‘the fourfold’ (das Geviert) – to unpack the way in which he imagines the intersection of an-arche and planetary place. This reading of Heidegger, while pivotal to understanding how Arendt developed an account of the planetary, is then essential without being essentialising. Arendt’s writing bears the trace of Heidegger’s teaching – and for this reason it must be engaged – but she does not ventriloquise his argument nor does she naively incorporate his planetary logics. Chapter 2 turns to another of Arendt’s interlocutors: Walter Benjamin. Explicitly aligned with the political aims of anarchism, here I read Benjamin’s account of history as anarchic. Melding together the planetary conditions of both place and time, this chapter demonstrates how history unfolds, following Benjamin, in relation to the planet. Benjamin’s methodological framework of political theology emerges as a central device here in understanding how the planetary assumes an an-arche that gives shape to the principles of worldly being. Chapter 3 returns directly to Arendt’s writing, exploring her own ambivalent relationship with an-archism. While Arendt develops a productive theoretical account of anarchism, one that emerges both in relation to her political conditions of natality and plurality and to the anarchic ground of the earth, her project falters in its worldly application. Arendt’s account of the American Revolution as the most prominent example of an-arche fails to recognise the colonial dispossession and institution of slavery on which the Revolution was founded. While the theoretical gravity of natality is thus robust, its historicization demands interrogation. Reckoning with this conflict in Arendt’s writing in order to move forward in thinking natality in dialogue with the colonial origins of the climate crisis is the central problematic of this chapter. Chapter 4 looks at the archic dimension of historiography in accounting for the present crisis of planetary climate change. Here I return to the writings of Walter Benjamin, connecting his reading of violence with the archism of history’s partiality and the anarchic and revolutionary potential of historical impartiality. Confronting the ineliminable colonial origins of the present climate crisis and how this history assumes an archic hold over the present is the problematic of this chapter. Recuperating the anarchic force of natality, the chapter grapples with how to think through the conflicting narratives that assume prominence in climate crisis literature and history. Chapter 5 mirrors the structural concerns of the preceding chapter; however here the focus shifts from history as past to history as future. Confronting the various iterations of mathematised futurity, in the prophetic foreclosure of 20

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introduction: locating the climate crisis

the future as a space of potential or in the persistence of planetary modelling to foretell the future, as well as the archic claim that politics must be instrumentalised if the planet is to be saved, this chapter engages with the complex imperatives of political life in an age of crisis. Accepting the irreversible reality of this planetary condition, here I aim to carve out a space between the necessity for immense planetary action that is archist in form and the paradoxical necessity for anarchic political structures if politics is to persist. This interstitial space recalls the original inter esse place of Arendt’s politics as occurring between earth and world. It is one that I ultimately navigate in dialogue with Arendt’s worldly condition of amor mundi, or love of the world. The conclusion to this book thus explores the possibility that a robust conception of love might offer a moment of insight into the darkness of the climate crisis. Recuperating the revolutionary aims of a planetary anarchism, this closing discussion of love stays with the dangers of living with the seductive appeal of archist imaginaries by insisting that another posterity is always possible. By introducing planetary love or amor mundi in the conclusion to this project, I effectively return to the beginning of Arendt’s career. Arendt’s first major study was her doctoral dissertation entitled Love and Saint Augustine, written in 1929 when she was twenty-three years old. Before she endured a life marked by the violence of genocide, exile and statelessness, Arendt was writing about the need to love. She continued to do so after the war, describing The Human Condition, her study into the human subject who finds their quintessence in the fact of their being earthly as written out of love and gratitude for the world. In the context of this project, as violence reappears as a threat internal to that quintessential condition, I look to Arendtian love as a resource that might orient politics towards a new regime of dignity, rights and political meaning. With this conclusion I aim to begin a new discussion around Arendtian theories of love, one that holds open a space for reimagining what the planet might look like in the future. Rather than present a hollow account of planetary love that romanticises ideals of care as though affect alone could right the centuries-old wrongs of planetary destruction, disrepair and intentional neglect, I present love as a complex and fraught challenge, one that invites us to rethink the responsibility of care as an ongoing form of labour, vigilance and critical thinking. Love, in other words, is not merely an affectation that lets the world be and celebrates the beauty of decay as a cyclical process that demonstrates the power of nature and indulges in the forced recognition of human humility. Love demands without coercing; it orients without imposing. Love provides the oasis from which thinking, feeling and acting can occur. When Arendt tells us that love is the force that brings forth responsibility, she can be read as anticipating this moment of planetary fragility. To this end, this is a book of planetary love, an unpredictable venture towards the anarchy of caring for an impossible planet. 21

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1

DWELLING IN PLACE WITH HEIDEGGER: THE ORIGIN OF THE ARTWORK AND THE FOURFOLD

Themes of the anarchic, understood in terms of an original unpredictability and indeterminate telos, pervade Hannah Arendt’s work. This is perhaps most clear in the primacy Arendt affords to the notion of human natality, the capacity for action that coincides with the act of beginning. This point is made more emphatic still with the equivalence Arendt stages between natality and humans – namely, that the latter are themselves instances of beginning. The argument, in turn, cuts across her writing. Indeed, Arendt’s contribution to twentieth century thought is often marked by the conceptual break that the disruptive origin of natality poses – regardless of whether it is framed in relation to action or as ontologically equivalent with the being of being human. Against a logic of absolute origins and narratives of finitude, natality is a distinguishing moment. That is not to say, however, that the anarchic does not already exist in the tradition that Arendt otherwise sought to, or perhaps unintentionally did, disrupt. One of the clearest examples of anarchic thinking at this time is the work of Walter Benjamin, whose material historiography challenged the arche of historical linearity and the notional ends inscribed in certain iterations of beginnings. Benjamin’s disruptive politics, that sought to avenge the dead and rewrite the future, was uninterested in the dream of the strong man idealist. Anarchic and revolutionary politics were, at their core, unpredictable and premised on a logic of vigilance to change. This same reorientation reappears in Arendt’s suspension of ‘the end’ as the totality of the articulated goal, salvo or finale in politics. In Arendt’s work the unending beginning of natal an-arche 22

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Dwelling in Place with Heidegger

is recentred as a political concern – a point of origin that we will come to see in her writing as synonymous with acts of worldly understanding, confrontations that serve as sites of beginning through renewed comprehension. The influence of Benjamin in this context is not only important, it is clear. His writings on history, that Arendt carried over to the United States as she fled European totalitarianism, are particularly influential to the development of this line of thinking in her work (and this will be a core concern to the argumentative development of several later chapters). Indeed, Benjamin’s blurring of anarchic methods and anarchic principles in his reflections on the role of historiography in forming (and reforming) the present assume a particular presence in Arendt’s work as the organisation of planetary life’s essential an-arche. And yet, it is not with the figure of Benjamin that this project begins in earnest. Rather it is to Martin Heidegger that I turn in these opening pages, a figure in relation to whom Benjamin claimed ‘sparks would fly’ if he were ever to write about him. My intention in beginning with Heidegger is not to fulfil Benjamin’s conjecture – I do not want sparks to fly but I do want to honestly situate Arendt’s thinking. To that end, however, it is equally not my intention to prosecute Arendt’s position that Benjamin, ‘without realizing it’, had a lot in common with Heidegger.1 Much like the various essays collected in the aptly titled Sparks will Fly collection on Heidegger and Benjamin’s affinities and divergences, the aim of this chapter is to note that there are many similar points of convergence between Heidegger and Arendt. However, as the introduction to that collection notes (in relation to Arendt’s two interlocutors) these affinities ‘not only do not obliterate their differences, but rather they highlight the points where their thought diverges’.2 In beginning with Heidegger then, I set Arendt at a productive remove from his writings, showing their influence in order to better understand how Arendt grappled with the unearthly politics – and political thinking – of her times. What makes this task complex is, of course, the status of Heidegger’s writings in contemporary thought. Not only did Heidegger’s politics clearly fail, his ideas risk being sanitized in their recovery through the study of scholars like Arendt. To take greater responsibility still, the writings aren’t passively sanitized; as a writer, I am implicated in this process. And yet, to advance an argument in relation to Arendt’s planetary politics without recognising the various ways in which she is indebted to Heidegger’s thinking would be intellectually and historically naïve. And so, where this chapter is not easily written, the corresponding expectation is that it is not easily read. Arendt’s writing is not a Heideggerian palimpsest, but it is also not alien to his ideas. These claims are, of course, made more complex by the thematic through which I encounter Heidegger: the politics of anarchy. While not anarchist in the political manner of Walter Benjamin, Heidegger’s writings are intercut with an anarchist dimension. It is quite clear that Heidegger was not an anarchist in the sense of maintaining a political allegiance 23

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Planetary Politics

with anarchism, and yet anarchist tropes appear throughout his work. To this end only and insofar as Heidegger’s influence on Arendt’s writing appear in her discussion of the political temporality of an-arche and the antiteleological dimension of political life, parts of his works can be positioned as ‘anarchist writings’. This is an anarchism, quite distinct to its political realisation, that inscribes a mode of thinking that insists on the suspension of finitude. It is in this sense that Reiner Schürmann describes the an-arche of Heidegger’s writing through the language of ‘ignorance’. Distinct to thoughtlessness or refusals to think, Schürmann’s reading of Heidegger’s ignorance is explicitly anarchist – ignorance is the conscious suspension of thought’s conformity. Indeed, insofar as Schürmann describes ignorance as a modality of refusing the prestige of dominant knowledge and its inevitable exhaustion, it assumes a revolutionary character. Schürmann is the first to read an anarchist essence in Heidegger’s writings, yet later contributions that explore the authenticity of Heideggerian temporality as determined by an original response to Being can be read as building on this interpretation. Indeed, what Schürmann sees as productive of a form of anarchism in Heidegger’s writings is the doubled elimination of a grounding ground, once in relation to the action of Dasein, his central existential analytic, and again in the question of what enables action of any sort to be articulated. Read together as a dialogue of modest progression towards the unconcealment of Being, Schürmann shows Heidegger to be inviting the reader into a mode of thinking that he describes in terms of an original curiosity. Read in the context of the twenty-first century, in the wake of critical theory’s ‘reparative turn’, this kind of critical hermeneutics appears in thinking that operates against the ‘knowing, anxious paranoid determination’ of suspicion in favour of cautious bids towards alternative posterities.3 The stance that Arendt assumes in taking up such a bid, working her way through her relationship with Heidegger in order to rearticulate the anarchic dimension of the planetary, is effectively the arc of this chapter. Asking precisely those questions of Heidegger’s work that show how Arendt is able to rethink the politics of planetary anarchism towards a properly political end, my aim throughout this chapter is to demonstrate how scholars like Schürmann work through Heidegger’s writing before Arendt begins her own anarchic project. To this end, when Bernard P. Dauenhauer critiques Schürmann’s position as failing to provide a satisfactory answer to the question of political action’s anarchic orientation, he nevertheless articulates the ‘set of questions of capital importance’ that Schürmann does raise in relation to Heidegger and that I continue to bear witness to here. Those questions are: What are the implications for political philosophy of Heidegger’s thought of Being? Does Heidegger’s thought of Being entail some specific political philosophy? Or are there many possible political philosophies which 24

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Dwelling in Place with Heidegger

can be in agreement with it? Or does it rule out rather than rule in one or more specific types of political philosophy? Or, finally, is it equally compatible and incompatible with, and hence irrelevant to, all political philosophies?4 While answering these questions is not the primary aim of this chapter, insofar as this project is committed to understanding the legacy of Heidegger within a broader context of planetary politics and the conditions for an anarchist revolution therein, they remain instructive. In other words, these are the questions that remain pertinent to the revolutionary politics of Arendt as they are developed after Heidegger. While this chapter inevitably resists certain criticisms of Heidegger’s politics, perhaps first and foremost Emmanuel Faye’s condemnation of Heidegger’s writings as ‘impregnated with Hitlerism’, the legitimacy of that accusation is not denied.5 Instead, what I seek to explore in Heidegger’s writings in this chapter is a genealogy of planetary anarchism that challenges the conditions of political ontology in order to suspend the very rigidity of form that ultimately came to determine Heidegger’s personal thinking and politics. What I thus offer in reading through Heidegger and towards Arendt is an honest engagement with the history of Arendt’s thinking. Such, I would argue, is the responsibility of any Arendtian. I look beyond Heidegger’s key text, Being and Time, in this chapter, to the shorter essays ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ (1936) and ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ (1954). It is across these two texts that I argue a more complex ontology of Heidegger’s an-arche of place (and the place of Dasein’s ‘placedness’) is articulated – as well as one that maintains a closer claim to Arendt’s later position. More to the point, perhaps, it is from these texts that we are invited into a consideration of the fraught historical condition of living in an historical place – and hence to the question of whether or not Heidegger’s writing bears on the historical condition of something like the Anthropocene. From these two essays then, it is possible to rethink the question of dwelling, that activity of being-in-place that emerges as a critical motif for Heidegger, in the modern context of the climate crisis. To this end, this chapter begins to realise the methodological aims of this book: to think with and through the planetary thinking of the twentieth century and towards another posterity. An-Arche in Heidegger? In Schürmann’s earliest reading of Heidegger’s relationship to anarchism, the 1978 essay ‘Questioning the Foundation of Practical Philosophy’, he looks to Heidegger’s 1956 lecture series later published as The Principle of Ground, as evidence of Heidegger’s anarchist vocabulary. He writes that here we see that ‘[Heidegger’s] project is to think, not a ground, Grund, but an abyss, Abgrun; not to begründen, found, but to ergründen, to fathom.’6 Abandoning 25

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Planetary Politics

the ground, or what Schürmann calls ‘the deliberate and enduring project of destroying the representation of a grounding ground’ has direct bearing on the project of Dasein, who is now shown to respond to the (groundless) condition of being and to this as the more precise condition of political life.7 By the end of the paper, Schürmann has arrived at the position that ‘anarchy is the essence of what is “doable”’.8 At the same time then Schürmann refracts the anarchic condition of groundlessness through a temporal lens, recentring the importance of authenticity as a predicate for anarchic life. Indeed, Joeri Schrijvers describes him as ‘temporalizing ontological difference, turning it into a temporal and therefore anarchic difference’.9 Highlighting this temporal dimension in Heidegger’s anarchic writings, Schrijvers encourages a reading that draws closer to notions of historicity and the condition of ‘thrownness’ that is so central to the development of Dasein in Being and Time in locating Heidegger’s anarchist thematic. Pushing at the responsibility to realise an authentic response to the fact that each life is ‘thrown’ into its historical context, Schrijvers extends what Schürmann has already articulated as the fact that responsibility is determined by ‘the epochal field in which we always stand’.10 Responding to and living with the world is, for Schrijvres and Schürmann alike, the only way that an authentic life can be achieved. Such a life can, at the same time, only be anarchic. The condition of always already being ‘thrown’ into a historical context demarcates the responsibilities of Dasein to respond to and realise the conditions of living in that time and place. To locate oneself in time and place by way of a response to this condition will come to figure in Heidegger’s writings as a distinctly human capacity. More to the point however, it indicates a choice: the decision of whether to pick oneself up in the world or not. To respond to the ‘thrown condition’ of being, Dasein can either answer or not. It is this choice that permits the entry of archism or inauthenticity which answers for us, offering itself as a seductive remedy to the labour of learning to live in and with the world. To heed the call of being thrown into time and place is, by contrast, to take charge of the thrown condition and realise the timed and placed condition of this life lived here and now. It is in this sense, of an original response to place, that Heidegger incorporates themes of an-arche into his writings. Yet it is the language of authenticity rather than anarchism that appears in his writing. For Heidegger the authentic life of Dasein is lived in the context of place, which assumes a paradoxically singular and plural form, a condition recuperated in Being’s predicate of mitsein. Authenticity pertains then to an insistence on the possibility of articulating an original, yet originally relational, response to Being. In this move away from the rigidity of form, the authentic life is tenuous, it is continually called into Being, yet it is this continuous discontinuity, of continual re-beginning that draws us towards the anarchic in Heidegger’s writings. A life lived in response to its thrown condition, continually seeking out 26

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meaning in the time and place of its appearance, is unstable, its path forward wayward. Meaning in such a life is produced in moments of clarity, lit by fissures that open into the dark unknowing of a world otherwise shielded by the gloom of inauthenticity. And so, while the ‘thereness’ of Being – the Da of Dasein – corresponds to the locus of authentic potential in life, continual reflection on the temporality of this place must be made. To be, in the precise sense of Dasein’s being, is a matter of being in time and place. Making sensible the ‘there’ of Dasein, Kelly Oliver describes ‘there-being’ – literally Dasein – as being ‘there in the world’.11 What Oliver stresses for us is the affective response of Dasein, who inserts themselves into the world that is both already there and that comes into being as they appear there. ‘There’ is not merely a geographical coordinate but one that is infused with an excessive temporality. Historicity expands in the placedness of Dasein, who responds to a temporal existence that surpasses the singularity of any one moment. What it provokes is an interrogation of the world, of that place at that time within a broader schematic of time and place as the locus of being. This primordial complexity, of a ‘there’ that is both there as world and as a world that was or is still coming into being, anticipates the anarche of place that Arendt goes on to develop in the fragile communion of the polis, which is sustained in the gathering of a plurality in common.12 The same temporal and fragile structure is latent to Heidegger’s writings on the anarchic relationality of the polis, which he describes in An Introduction to Metaphysics as ‘the site, the there, wherein and as which historical Da-sein is. The πόλις is the historical site (Geschichtsstitte), the there in which, out of which, and for which history happens.’13 This complex form, the interwoven ‘in which, out of which, and for which’ should be read in anticipation of the ‘world’ that Arendt will foreground with even more conviction as the realm that is paradoxically sustained by politics while, at the same time, making political life possible. Inevitably, this point hangs on the fact that it is not straightforwardly politics as an institutional setting or activity that is at play here. Instead, what Heidegger invokes with the notion of πόλις is an original insistence in his writings to understand the worldliness of Being, including the activity of politics, in terms of the ontology of its being. What thus emerges here is a melding of those conditions that inform the groundless ground of worldly action. And yet, despite this image it is to the muddy ground of the earth that we must turn if the groundless ground of anarchic being is to come into view. The Earth and the Artwork It with the earth that all iterations of being begin. There is a paradoxical simplicity that challenges efforts to bring the earth into such a hermeneutic inquiry as this. At once the literal ground of being, the earth equally resists being made reducible to this fact. The ontological persists beyond the ontic. For insofar as 27

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Planetary Politics

a meaningful life is understood to be more than mere biological existence, what the earth is cannot simply be determined in relation to the conditions it sets for survival. In other words, a ‘worldly’ life cannot – and does not – result from the satisfaction of those conditions. If it did, the lives of those who live in states just above extinction would be ontologically sufficient to constitute ‘humane’ lives.14 We know that lives lived just above the threshold of survival – lives that meet the demands of the body but do not go beyond them – might well be ‘earthly’ in the sense of unfolding on earth, but they are not yet meaningfully experienced as living or flourishing lives. Achille Mbembe describes what I simply call the planetary as the ‘biosphere’, an entity that he writes ‘is not only a physical, organic, geological, vegetal, or atmospheric reality’ but one that is ‘interwoven with noumenal realities that lie at the source of existential meaning’.15 Yet even here he writes that there are some that ‘will come up against this experience of limits before others do’.16 While the planetary is a shared condition, it is not a uniformly experienced one. The worldly juts through and redetermines who dwells and how they do so. To turn back again on the question of a meaningful life, a purely ‘worldly’ life, lived in alienation from or denial of the earth, as in the fanciful ideology of determining and ordaining what the conditions for life should be – the fact of having ‘this’ colour skin being perhaps the most pervasive – are in no greater sense humane. Jeff Malpas describes Heidegger’s concern with the being of being human as inherently ethical, noting that ‘to be “inhuman” or “inhumane” is not to fail to be a certain species of hominid, but rather to fail to exhibit a certain mode of ethical being or ethical comportment’. He then goes on to make the precise point that ‘to take the “human” to refer just to a certain species, or species-character, would be to treat the human merely biologically’, and it is this account of the human that Malpas sees as being antithetical to a Heideggerian conception of being. Such a figure, despite their conspicuous biological humanity, is made inhumane at the level of fulfilling a human life, that is, of being.17 To Malpas’ argument that the purely biological foregoes what is proper to the human potential of human life, I make the further argument that a (human) life lived at the behest of a narrative, an arche that consumes, determines and defines the possibility of life produces a different violence to the one determined by survival. Nevertheless, both share a common inhumanity. The purely biological and the purely ideological forsake the possibility of living in a space between knowing and unknowing, earth and world, condition and potential. What is relinquished in the meaning that exists as the meaning of life becomes a task for interrogation, where meaning is sought in and through conditions of relationality. Heidegger calls this space of relationality the ‘Open’. Here the earth becomes host to productive rather than liminal thresholds, between the reductive and the imaginable, the known and unknown, the now and the not yet. It is on this earth that new events unfold, that new happenings occur, 28

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Dwelling in Place with Heidegger

that love is experienced and that life is mourned. Here the earth changes and yet remains the same, it ages and is weathered and yet it persists as new and unknown, not only for the cycles of generations who year upon year arrive upon its surface, but for all of those who continually dwell upon it. As the place that precedes any understanding of placedness, that is presupposed in each consideration of place, and is present in each instance of assuming place, the earth is both a provocation and a source of certainty. In these ways and more, it becomes a site of an-arche. It is this problematic primordiality, or what I understand as the original an-arche, of the earth that Heidegger takes up in his essay, ‘On the Origin of the Work of Art’. Framing his entry into this relationship between the unknowability of the earth, which resists extraction by totalising meaning, and the world that nevertheless persists in wresting meaning from it, Heidegger begins the essay by turning to an analogous inquiry into the origin of art. And so, we turn from the earth to art, anticipating a return that will locate us within the written word of Heidegger. He opens the essay as follows: The question concerning the origin of the work of art asks about the source of its nature. On the usual view, the work arises out of and by means of the activity of the artists. But by what and whence is the artist what he is? By the work; for to say that the work does credit to the master means that it is the work that first lets the artist emerge as a master of his art. The artist is the origin of the work. The work is the origin of the artist. Neither is without the other. Nevertheless, neither is the sole support of the other. In themselves and in their interrelations artist and work are each of them by virtue of a third thing which is prior to both, namely that which also gives artist and work of art their names – art.18 While Heidegger’s remarks might at first read as setting up nothing more than a complex and esoteric account of a necessarily unlocatable origin, what he in fact outlines is a critical reworking of the ontological tension of human experience. In other words, what Heidegger is inviting here is an engagement with the organising origin of life itself. Here we see what Schürmann accounts for in Heidegger’s writings as the fact that there is not one origin, ‘there is place only for a thought of the origin as multifarious emergence’.19 And again the doubling of anarchism in his writings appears as the writing itself assumes a multifarious form of words that double and invite speculation. Heidegger writes that ‘we are compelled to follow the circle’ that has arisen in his text.20 Adding further encouragement to his reader, he writes that ‘to enter upon this path is the strength of thought, to continue on it is the feast of thought’.21 In a step towards indulgence then, we follow in his footsteps, looking not for an absolute exposition of the earth but the opening an-arche of earthly becoming. 29

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Planetary Politics

At its most simplistic, Heidegger’s argument in this opening section of the Artwork essay hangs on the fact that art both precedes and yet cannot precede that which assumes the status of either ‘artwork’ or ‘artist’. However, his argument is not sustained by mere semantics alone. What he points to is a complex epistemology of anarchic becoming. In the essay, the ‘artwork’ is encountered prior to knowing that more expansive category ‘art’. It is this disruption of appearance, of order as always ‘in order’ by virtue of being out-of-order, that becomes central to the essay’s later move from the domain of art to that of the earth and hence to our own discussion of the planetary. More precisely, the disrupted order that appears in the essay in the discontinuous appearance of art, artist, artwork recuperates earlier elements of Heidegger’s thrown condition – insofar as what they demarcate are the conditions of place and history that exist prior to my appearance and yet only become meaningful by virtue of my appearance. Understanding this meaning is made possible by returning to the art-artist-artwork configuration. Heidegger proceeds in the essay by asking ‘but can art be an origin at all?’, effectively leading his reader directly into the field of an-arche. Drawing closer still to the anarchic, his answer to this question hinges on what he describes as ‘refusing disclosure’ in art.22 Setting up a tension here between the work that opens up a world by drawing the earth out of concealment and into a form of worldly disclosure and the simultaneous refusal of the earth to be disclosed, his answer gestures to the an-arche of relation. This moment of intersection reappears in Arendt’s writings through the language of inter-esse. The movement between concealing, withdrawing, disclosing and opening points to the tenuous relationship between earth and world which is neither static nor finite. Instead, the ontic and the ontological merge in the production of an ethical relation. In other words, as Heidegger draws away from the object specificity of the artwork and towards that broader world in which art is situated and the earthly relation it indexes, he leads his reader towards a broader understanding of the movement between earth and world. This becomes the locus of response and hence the register of authentic life. No longer bound by the artwork, what is at play in the essay is a shift in orientation from the tension inscribed by the artwork as the meeting of earth and world or art and artist towards the ontological an-arche of that tension. In the context of the essay, this appears as the movement between the opening of a world through the artwork and the ongoing openness or opening of that world. For Heidegger then, the worldliness of art is not bound to the limited object of the artwork alone but exists in the world around the artwork, in its opening of the world. In other words, Heidegger wants to say that once the art object comes into existence, the world is changed, it is opened up and made more expansive in its opening. And yet, it doesn’t follow from this claim that the artistic potential of the earth to be made worldly is depleted. It is precisely against this argument 30

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that Heidegger shows the opening of the earth to resist. In other words, as the essential ground of being, the earth is the groundless ground that can only be made meaningful through those inquiries that neither expose by extractive means nor romanticise through unthinking form the question of what it is to dwell on the earth.23 In this precise sense, art has both an analogous relationship to the concealed meaning of the planetary and an ontological equivalence with how meaning is developed. The tenuous status of what becomes known in relation to this antagonistic relation as the ‘Open’ provokes yet more disclosure. In the end, Heidegger’s account of the Open exists by virtue of that ongoing movement between the worldliness of art and the refusal of the earth to become worldly through art. In essence, what Heidegger is asserting here is the capacity for the artwork to illuminate world and earth alike, bringing Dasein into that inter-esse place that Arendt will foreground explicitly as the interweaving of earth and world in the gathering of plurality. The original provocation regarding the origin of the art, which refuses to be made reducible to the object quality of the artwork or to the practice of the artist, coincides with the refusal of the earth to be ‘broken into’ and exposed.24 What Heidegger thus outlines in his discussion on the material form of art and the meaning that is disclosed in art as something akin to its ‘function’, is the irreducibility of the artwork to its origins. This is the argument that brings us towards the an-arche of the planetary earth. Staying within the parameters of the essay, he writes that an artwork ‘as work sets up a world. The work holds open the Open of the world.’25 With this allusion to the opening of the world, Heidegger calls into consideration the ongoing tension through which the world is sustained as whole and which, by virtue of this same tension or agonism, is unable to ever be in a complete, totalised and immobile sense. The world is thus ‘whole’ rather than ‘a whole’. It endures as a space of action. What emerges here is an effective relationship between the world that worlds and the earth that is, by virtue of this worldling, brought into its earthliness. In other words, Heidegger stages a reciprocal scene of worlds that world as the earth earths. Heidegger clarifies the meaning of this antagonism between the world opened by artworks and the resistant earth by turning to the specific materiality of the work. Here he writes that ‘the sculptor uses stone just as the mason uses it, in his own way. But he does not use it up . . . To be sure, the painter also uses pigment, but in such a way that colour is not used up but rather only now comes to shine forth. To be sure, the poet also uses the word – not, however, like ordinary speakers and writers who have to use them up, but rather in such a way that the word only now becomes and remains truly a word.’26 In each of these instances Heidegger highlights the tension inscribed in the ‘completeness’ of the artwork. The movement between the paint pigment that ‘shines forth’ and yet is not ‘used up’ points to the openness that exists between world 31

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and earth, which come closer together as they move apart. Against an arche of finality, the artwork highlights the an-arche of earth-world relations. A world comes into being on the earth in the precise sense of a continual being, but it does not finish this act of appearance. Rather than suggest something that has become, Heidegger instead stages a scene of becoming. As he moves through this condition of becoming as a mode of appearing on earth, his argument resists being reduced to mere materiality, as though the exemplary paint pigment corresponds to an extractive resource. For Heidegger the paint invokes the interstitial form of acting within a relation to place. In this sense, the paint coincides with the unknowable depth of all that is earthly in origin yet earthworldly in meaning. In other words, the disclosure of the earth in the setting up of the world, here in the colour of the artwork, allows the fullness of that earthworld or inter-esse relation to come into being. At the same time, it reveals the limit of claims to total (or totalising) earth-world knowledge. Acknowledging the tension of the relationship, one that is whole only insofar as it is fraught, he goes on to write in the essay that ‘only what is in motion can rest’.27 What appears in this moment of creating a work is the disclosure of something that simultaneously recalls the earth, is in the most literal sense of the earth and yet presents something new in itself. In this moment of creation, or what Heidegger calls the setting up of a world, and which we can understand here as the work of an-arche, the earth as earth is brought into view. No longer a mere space in which humans appear but a site of meaning from which experience – as in the experience of artistic creation – can be gleaned, Heidegger describes the construction of human worlds as that which ‘does not cause [earthly] material to disappear, but rather causes it to come forth for the very first time . . . The work lets the earth be an earth.’28 More than anything, Heidegger’s claim, which first emerges here in the tension inscribed in the artartist-artwork configuration, becomes an interrogation of earth’s disclosure via the construction of the world. Ineliminable, then, is the status of the artist, who rather than existing merely as a conduit, brings earth and world into their disclosive co-being or anarchic becoming. This drawing of the earth out into the fullness of its being, reducible neither to mere materiality nor biological ground, shows Heidegger’s writing as offering a new understanding of what it means to encounter the earth as human: namely, via an encounter that is premised upon anarchic discovery rather than archic utility, sensibility rather than immanence. Kelly Oliver offers further clarity here, suggesting that ‘in terms of the work of art, earth resists and refuses ever being used up in any one representation or interpretation’.29 Invoking a methodology reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s constellational thought, in the precise sense of working between a plurality of ontological conditions, she continues by noting that ‘Heidegger’s introduction of the notion of earth performs or enacts that operation [of interpretation] as 32

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well as announcing it.’30 Resisting any sense of a totalised universal or fixed truth, Oliver reveals the earth as the self-secluding ground that is unknowable except through acts of poetic interpretation in the world. The same sort of reading is undertaken by Schürmann, who locates the concept of ‘presencing’ in Heidegger – a formulation that coincides with the notion of ‘becoming’ at play here – with the annihilation in Heidegger’s work of ‘the quest for a complete possession of self by self’, and hence with the essence of an-arche.31 This kind of thinking reappears in Arendt’s work as the notion of thinking without a banister and of surrendering teleological conceptions of thought to the unpredictable yet authority-generating conception of common sense or public thought. What Oliver and Schürmann identify in Heidegger as the rejection of a manifest absolute foregrounds the productive anarchism of earthly presencing in the world that is later infused into Arendt’s thinking as the rejection of thought’s prejudicial scaffolding and return to the earth as the quintessence of being. Returning to the Artwork essay, Heidegger explains the tension between what is revealed through artwork and what resists revelation as the groundwork for appearance. More broadly, what he presents as an encounter with the essence of a thing – whether that thing is understood as an artwork, object, world or even the earth itself – is made possible because in the moment of opening into ‘the Open’ a withdrawal is made towards concealment. Staged in far more philosophical terms than Arendt, what Heidegger is pointing towards here is something that Arendt will later understand in terms of the boundedness of human freedom and understanding to the earthly condition of the world.32 In other words, what Heidegger demonstrates is a resistance at the moment of encounter away from the logic of something like ‘pure knowledge’. Framed in the language of authenticity, Heidegger suggests that if something like this purely immanent knowledge were to exist. it would be purely meaningless because it would lack the relational constitution that is its ontological status. The resonance of Schürmann’s account of Heidegger’s writing as ‘ignorant’ should be heard here. Not only would the immanently interpersonal ‘with’ of mitsein be lost, so too would that locative condition of being there in time and place. Anticipating the forceful co-being that holds together Arendt’s account of the earth as both the literal origin of being and the anarchic opening in which natality and plurality appear, Heidegger clarifies the antagonism that binds his iteration of earth and world together. Resisting simplification, he writes that ‘the world is not simply the Open that corresponds to clearing, and the earth is not simply the Closed that corresponds to concealment. Rather, the world is the clearing of paths of the essential guiding directions with which all decision complies.’33 Refusing the binary depiction of earth and world as closed and open, Heidegger develops an image of the agonistic co-being or inter esse in which the withdrawal or concealment of the earth forms part of the Open. In other words, what Heidegger suggests is that the discovery of knowledge or 33

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the ontology of things does not force them into a state of archist permanence. Rather he insists on that discontinuous continuity of a ‘clearing’ in which ‘being’, each determined by their present continuance, operates. Refusing the absolute, Heidegger sets up a hermeneutic configuration that draws away from immanence, which renders knowledge possessable towards an an-arche of living in the interstitial gathering that is ‘place’. For Arendt this instability prefigures the vulnerability of plurality, which exists only as long as it is recognised. Open and Closed The disavowal of totality in Heidegger’s writings, firstly in relation to the artartwork-artist conjunction and then to earth-world co-being, determines the parameters through which the question of being emerges as an existential problematic for Dasein. In other words, it is here that the tension between the materiality of being and its ontology meaningfully enter into dialogue. In the context of the Artwork essay, this dialogue appears in the conflicting terms of ‘Open’ and ‘Closed’. It is in relation to these categories that Heidegger describes the an-archism of the earth that ‘rises up as self-closing’, becoming, in this moment, a force or place of ‘unknowing’ in the context of the ‘world’.34 Commenting on this unknown space, or what we might understand once again as the necessity of ignorance, Bruce V Foltz suggests that by framing the earth as ‘not only the “ground” in the literal sense of “soil” but also that which in every instance gives rise to what emerges’, a project can be traced in Heidegger’s writing demonstrating that to essentialise the earth is to impose a threshold on the project of being itself.35 It is here that Heidegger’s language of concealment-unconcealment becomes particularly forceful and its disavowal of archist temptation most acute. If the artwork consists of the perpetual refraction of the irreducible origin ‘art’, Heidegger maintains a similar refractive function in the earth that is drawn into the ‘Open’ of historical experience.36 Beyond a mere space of understanding, the Open signals an historical intrusion into the earth, in which the meaning of worlding is wrought from the concealing earth. Jeff Malpas extends this point, suggesting that the Open be seen as an event, which we might otherwise understand as the holding open of experience and the beginning of an an-arche in the inter esse between earth and world. Malpas clarifies that ‘to be is to be in place, and to be a phenomenon, in appearing, is similarly to be placed, or, as one might say, to take place.’37 To exist within the Open, then, is to act in such a way that responds to the concealing earth which draws away from the move towards total unconcealment and towards the world which demands perpetual renewal. Read back into the context of the artwork, this response echoes the move towards the world as a way of venturing paradoxically closer to and further from the material conditions of earthly existence. And yet it would be a mistake to think that the withdrawal of the earth is the only source of antagonism in the production of works, for 34

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so too does the world demand renewal through the work that continually confronts the world and finds meaning within it. Meaning is neither absolute nor self-evident. What is sustained in this agonistic space of making and seeking and then re-making and re-seeking meaning is the integrity of an-arche. These continual acts wrest an-arche from the absolute annihilation of archist domination, which lays claim to the actionless realm of the lost and alienated world, a world we might now understand as a ‘world without earth’. To follow Malpas, the event of acting is met by an equal event of refusal to be drawn into the Open. Rather than assign the earth a form of agency, this event of refusal recuperates Heidegger’s claim that the earth cannot be unconcealed or known as a totality. In other words, acting corresponds to the fundamentally anarchic and even anti-archic structure of the earth. More than simply a passive openness, existence in the Open is traversed by the agonism of earthly concealment and worldly disclosure, meaning that authentic becoming can only ever be anarchic. Oliver illuminates this once again, showing that ‘world and earth do not exist apart from each other, but only in their conflict, the essential conflict between opening and closing, revealing and concealing, Sagen and Versagen.’38 Existence within what Heidegger calls the strife of the earth-world opening appears at this point as a historical task. Moreover, it is precisely this strife that anticipates the inter-esse form of Arendt’s notion of a politics in and of planetary place. Oliver returns us to the tension in Heidegger’s writings as a way of pointing towards the historical dimension of being, writing that ‘between the history of humans and their destiny through essential decisions is the strife between earth and world’.39 What she sets out in relation to the an-arche of Heideggerian place at this moment is the responsibility to wrest new beginning – to be historically anarchic – as the only mode of ‘authentic’ being in the Open. Returning to the force of art towards the Artwork essay’s close, Heidegger makes this point explicitly: When art happens – that is, whenever there is a beginning – a thrust enters history, history either begins or starts over again. History means here not a sequence in time of events of whatever sort, however important. History is the transporting of a people into its appointed task as entrance into that people’s endowment.40 Staging this equivalence between art and beginning in such clear terms, Heidegger’s claim regarding the realisation of history in art as the construction of earth and world anticipates acutely the force of historical appearance that Arendt will go on to attribute to natality. Indeed, where Arendt describes natality both in relation to the planetary origin of its appearance and as creating the conditions for history, she effectively extends the an-arche of Heidegger’s earlier 35

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account of the artwork into the realm of planetary history. Not only does Heidegger’s conclusion point towards this fact, it also explicitly acknowledges the fact that what is ‘history’ cannot be described as the merely sequential.41 History is broken into, it begins and starts again, bringing back into consideration that gerundive construction of the continuance of Dasein’s ‘presencing’ in the world or ‘holding open’ of the earth-world relation. This, for Malpas, is the ‘taking place’ event of Being. Entering into this space, Heidegger sets out an understanding of history, in quite clear terms now, as a site of anarchic becoming. At the same time, such an event or space is also fragile. History depends on the opening of that Open in which historical events (art!) can be made. The centrality of this structural an-archism is, of course, part of its own original condition. The an-arche of place that is already attributed to the spatial Open becomes the an-arche history. While this creates a clear sense of historical vulnerability and stages the conditions through which the annihilating narrative of archism will enter, it also, and this is where Arendt will ultimately go in her own writings, creates a space for revolution. Heidegger meanwhile remedies and reinforces this anarchic vulnerability in his later writings, with the introduction of the ‘fourfold’ (das Geviert). Indeed, this formulation of Heidegger’s post-war years recasts the interplay of earth and world seen in the artist’s move between art and artwork and brings us closer to a more explicit conception of the anarchic in Heidegger’s writings. Understanding how this later account of the anarchic functions will allow greater access to the development of anarchy in Arendt’s own writings, particularly as a placed or relational condition. The Gathering of the Fourfold In the introduction to his book, The Fourfold: Reading the Late Heidegger, Andrew Mitchell asserts that ‘the fourfold is nothing less than the inauguration of Heidegger’s late thinking’.42 The exact force of this point in relation to the project at hand becomes clearer still with Stuart Elden’s qualification of Heidegger’s ‘late thinking’ as centred on ‘issues of earth, nature, space and time’.43 As Elden goes on to write, it was these determinants that formed the very substance of Heidegger’s thinking after what is known as the post-war Kehre or turn in his writings, a moment that Elden classifies as ‘immanently spatial’.44 While I would want to add the further qualification here that Heidegger’s later writing, particularly in the context of the fourfold, is marked by an underlying concern for the an-arche of experience, it is the presentation of ideas within a spatial format that is most prominent in these later writings. Moving away from and developing the abstract ‘thereness’ of Dasein, which was otherwise central to Heidegger’s writings up to this point, and from the language of agonism or strife in the Artwork essay, the fourfold articulates with greater emphasis the ontological conditions of being in place. In other words, the fourfold foregrounds the necessity of engaging with the spatial conditions 36

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of relational being. Recuperating once again the notion of a multifarious origin, the construction of the fourfold within the agitative scene of ‘gathering’ recentres the essence of an-arche in Heidegger’s writings. In general terms, the concept of the fourfold captures Heidegger’s project in the relational phenomenology of existence. Not only are humans born ‘there’, thrown into the historical condition of their being, able to realise the anarchic potential inscribed in each moment within the strife of earth and world, they are born into a complex web of planetary relations: the fourfold. The ‘fourfold’ is comprised of earth, sky, mortals, and divinities. Borrowed, in fact, from the poet Hölderlin, the fourfold recovers aspects of agonism from the Artwork essay in terms of the moves between concealing and unconcealing, disclosing and refusing, and begins to depict a notion of the earth-world within the dialectical exchange of the four. The earth as a manifest ‘whole’ that is articulated in dialogue with the ‘world’ is thus subsumed into its relational exchange of the four. By contrast, the world is displaced from its earlier representation as the earth’s opposing pole. In place, an account of the world as the space of relations produced in the anarchic co-being of the fourfold comes into view. To follow Kelly Oliver’s reading, which moves from a consideration of the Artwork essay to the fourfold, in the latter ‘world is no longer one element amongst others in the fold of the four, but rather what results from their gathering’.45 The world thus becomes a site of meaning generated through the relational act of ‘dwelling in the fourfold’. Indeed, Heidegger writes in the ‘Question Concerning Technology’ that to dwell is to ‘belong within the fourfold of sky and earth, mortals and divinities’.46 Moving away from the specificity of the artwork and the boundedness of Heidegger’s earlier interpretation of place to the fourfold enfolds within it the acute ethical task that organises the project of living within the fourfold. More emphatically still, this task is anticipatory – Being becomes custodial. Heidegger relies on the object of a bridge to develop the notion of the fourfold, writing in ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ that the earth is gathered around the bridge as a landscape.47 Articulating an image of the bridge in relation to what I am calling the planetary an-arche of the fourfold, the bridge for Heidegger ‘does not just connect banks that are already there. The banks emerge as banks only as the bridge crosses the stream.’48 In this way, the bridge discloses a set of relations that exist in the experience of becoming in place and in the becoming of place.49 Hence, ‘the bridge gathers the earth as landscape around the stream’.50 As the bridge endures in space, realising the an-arche of a particular place’s relational ontology, it equally resists ‘the sky’s weather and its fickle nature’. More than simply providing a climactic or atmospheric definition of ‘sky’, what Heidegger invokes here is a notion of temporality. In addition to a purely spatial landscape, he begins to introduce the temporal endurance of the bridge, which ‘weathers the storm’ of history. More than simply spatial, the bridge is historical, an element of the fourfold that comes more clearly 37

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into view via the introduction of mortals. Once again invoking a constancy of movement, Heidegger describes the bridge as it appears to mortals, writing that ‘always and ever differently the bridge escorts the lingering and hastening ways of men to and fro, so that they may get to the other banks and in the end, as mortals, to the other side’.51 At each moment reaffirming the gathering of relational components – place, history, plurality – Heidegger sketches an account of the bridge as something that can almost be understood as the an-arche of infrastructure, its capacity to be sustained by virtue of its becoming within a broader social narrative. The bearing that this has on someone like Arendt’s writing is already that much more pronounced. Indeed, what this means is that sixty years later, when Bonnie Honig turns to the infrastructural role of bridges in the context of her reflections on democratic disrepair, traces of Heidegger can be found in her discussion. Though she doesn’t cite Heidegger’s bridge, her reflection of the way in which bridges appear as public things that ‘press us into relations with others’, that act as ‘sites of attachment and meaning that occasion the inaugurations, conflicts, and contestations that underwrite everyday citizenships and democratic sovereignties’ effectively echoes the social an-arche of the bridge as Heidegger first understands it.52 Persisting in time and space as a locus of meaning and meeting, the bridge gathers together and discloses a plurality of mortals. Static and seemingly devoid of internal evolution, the materiality of the bridge is interwoven with the social ontology of passing generations who encounter the bridge and become in and through the world that is staged by the bridge. If the three – earth, sky and mortals – already seem to have announced the space of human experience, the appearance of the divinities seems an unnecessary addition. Indeed, at one extreme, they threaten to impose a theological archism over the custodial gathering hitherto articulated. Julian Young goes so far as to note that while the fourfold as a whole is marked by ‘the almost total absence of any attempt by Heidegger scholars to explain what it is’, the appearance of the divinities is particularly striking in light of the apparent simplicity of their meaning.53 That is to say, in ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ the essay in which the fourfold is developed in most depth, Heidegger seems to locate the divinities in terms of a straightforward differentiation between theistic praise or atheism – and hence between two modes of thought that invite archic form. Read through the language of the anarchic however, the role of the divinities is far more complex and introduces an ethics of beginning; one that, to the extent that it bears closest relation to Arendt’s reflections on the ethics of natality, is worthy of exploration. Divine Divinities Subdued to the immanent form of physical representation, the divinities risk appearing in Heidegger’s text in terms linked to archist narratives of seduction or absolute truth. In the essay he writes: 38

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The bridge gathers, as a passage that crosses, before the divinities – whether we explicitly think of, and visibly give thanks for, their presence, as in the figure of the saint of the bridge, or whether that divine presence is obstructed or even pushed wholly aside.54 Though the passage invokes a simple duality between theism and atheism, to locate divinities in such isolated terms is to forgo what struck Heidegger as intrinsic to their being. Namely, their comprehensibility as discernible only within the manifold unity of the fourfold, a gathering that, because it cannot be disentangled from an originally relational form, is always already resistant to the logic of the absolutist and isolated reading. Legibility of the one is always already legibility of the four and the world of meaning that is the expression of this gathering. In this sense, the gathering of the bridge is the becoming of a landscape for a plurality whose appearance renews as with the passing of seasons. Constancy in meaning resists the singularity of any one narrative and moves towards the reinvention of narrative form, as in the an-arche of a gathering of people in place. To sever the divinities from this constellation, such that they can be viewed in exclusively external terms as either theistic or atheistic, is equivalent not only to fracturing the ontological depth of the divinities themselves but the broader relational an-arche of the fourfold as a whole. Noting the absence of engagement with the Divinities, Julian Young is also one of the few to confront their status within the fourfold. And yet, while his solution is productive, it is marked by a key limitation, namely that his account of the divinities is advanced according to a reading of the fourfold as structured by two halves. This hinging between, as he reads it, an earth-world and mortaldivinities dichotomy, while carefully articulated, undermines Heidegger’s own account of the fourfold as irreducible. In his own discussion of the fourfold, Heidegger reiterates throughout that ‘“on the earth” already means “under the sky.” Both of these also mean remaining before the divinities” and include a “belong to men’s being with one another.” By a primal oneness of the four – earth and sky, divinities and mortal – belong together in one.’55 Young overlooks this primal ontology, choosing instead to introduce a binary reading of the fourfold that ultimately threatens to undermine the original precision of his reading. What this means is that his argument cannot be endorsed in its entirety. Despite what I consider the serious limitations of Young’s reading, which is offered at the expense of Heidegger’s insistence throughout the essay that the fourfold belongs ‘together in one’, Markus Wielder describes the ‘ingenuity’ of Young’s approach as one of the most ‘thorough and perspicacious’ accounts of the fourfold. ‘For one thing’, Wielder writes, ‘he [Young] couches the fourfold in a twofold. That is to say, for Young, the four dimensions on Heidegger’s list are grounded in a more basic duality, namely, the dynamic interplay between nature and culture.’56 Though he presents them as intersecting axes, what Young’s 39

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couching of the fourfold into two assumes is that the ontology of the four is in fact the result of an additive, rather than relational, gathering of two couplets. The supposed clarity that Young and Wielder locate in this moment of breakage is a troubling insinuation of archist typologies that reinforce nature-culture dualisms. Recalling Heidegger’s project of an original ethics in his ‘Letter on Humanism’, which becomes ‘godly’ as it transcends the appearance of singular generations, Young evokes this question of an intergenerational historical meaning by transforming ‘divinities’ into ‘divine destinings’.57 He writes: The element of the fourfold that is most difficult to understand is ‘the gods,’ die Gottlichen, literally ‘the godly ones.’ Heidegger says of Greek tragedy that it ‘brought the presence of the gods, [i.e.,] brought the dialogue of divine and human destinings to radiance’ (QCT 34). In some sense, therefore, the gods are the ‘divine destinings.’ What are these? The divine destinings, ‘laws’ (HE 312) or ‘edicts’ (I 116), are the fundamental ethos of a community.58 For Young, divine destinings constitute the intangible ethos of a community, the grounds of appeal for moral claims and hence a form of tradition that acts as the basis for moral integrity within a community. In effect, the divine destinings align with something that Arendt imagines in terms of the sensus communis of public thinking and authority.59 In other words, the ethical paradigm that Young draws out of the fourfold can remain perfectly intact within the logic of the four. Indeed, Schürman relies on a similar language in his discussion of the fourfold, noting what he calls the fourfold’s ‘destinal history’. Forgoing Young’s couching of the four in two, Schürmann describes the way in which an articulation of the fourfold as man against earth (what Young effects in the earth and mortal binary) produces a setting in which ‘man responds to the destinal injunctions by ordaining entities to be answerable to him’.60 What emerges in violently generative terms in Schürmann’s reading is however lost in Young’s project, which persists in alienating the ethical project of living within the fourfold. Given the relative contemporaneity of Schürmann’s argument to Young’s work and Heidegger’s own insistence on the oneness of the four, the rationale for Young’s motivation is unclear. And yet, rather than dismiss his contribution outright, I suggest returning it to the ‘oneness’ of the four. In so doing, the an-arche of planetary becoming becomes more apparent and the ethical imperative of this mode of dwelling comes into view. This effectively brings us back to Schürmann’s own alternative to an alienated ethos of the fourfold, one that he articulates in the melding together of ‘thinking’ and ‘thanking’ before the threshold of the four. Against the domination of man, Schürmann’s project aims at preserving the ‘guardianship’ of ‘presencing’ before the fourfold

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in ways that begin to anticipate but do not yet resemble Arendt’s account of plurality as the law of the earth.61 And yet, what is shown here is that Heidegger’s fourfold creates space for an an-arche of place that has ethical force, one that gestures towards the project of pursuing the an-arche of dwelling in the interstitial places of being as coincident with the affirmation of an ethically rigorous life. Precisely because this ethics can neither be relinquished to historical certainty nor isolated outside the agonistic place of gathering, it creates a setting in which notions of authentic dwelling are only possible through a practice of ethical response. Recuperating the moral condition of the thrown life, dwelling within the fourfold is now coextensive with the ethical demands of that dwelling. Building on his positioning of the divinities in the context of a divine ethos, Young goes on to locate what is now referred to collectively as ‘the divinities’ in the form of a hero. In his account, the hero comes to stand for ‘more or less mythologized figures preserved in the collective memory of a culture, who embody, collectively, what it is to live properly as an Athenian, a German, a New Zealander, or whatever’.62 While the turn towards the nation here stages an unhelpful affinity between what is determined as ‘ethically proper’ and the nationalist ideologue, Young’s argument in relation to the historical endurance of ethical meaning is insightful. Indeed, I suggest that the missing variable here is the coming of future generations on earth, whose not-yet-present presence gives meaning to the present – this is the absent account of plurality that Arendt will offer. For Heidegger, an initial outline appears in reference to the ‘coming and going’ of generations, and the need to not only think of mortality as an individual condition but as a predicate of the reality that is intergenerational-being. As Nicholas Dungey notes, to engage ethics properly according to Heidegger, ‘we must raise the question of who we are, and the way we find ourselves in this world’.63 Going on to quote from Heidegger’s lecture series, ‘What is Called Thinking?’ that ‘ethics as a mere doctrine and imperative is helpless unless man first comes to have a different fundamental relation to Being’, Dungey anticipates the fact that ethics can only be ethical as related to a temporal plurality.64 I would even go so far as to suggest that the way we find ourselves in the world as ethical subjects is made possible because of the individual mortality that is redeemed through the relational transcendence of the fourfold. Meaning that to respond to the relation of dwelling within this construct is to live anarchically in its presence, seeking meaning anew from within the context of relational being. Heidegger’s writing on the relational futurity of dwelling within the fourfold is expressed with greater precision by Arendt, who adopts Heidegger’s language of ‘gathering’ to make a more pronounced point regarding the obligation of living within and through plurality. It is her idea of a potential earthly

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immortality that I suggest best reflects the project of Heidegger’s divinities. She writes in The Human Condition: Only the existence of a public realm and the world’s subsequent transformation into a community of things which gathers men together and relates them to each other depends entirely on permanence. If the world is to contain a public space, it cannot be erected for one generation and planned for the living only; it must transcend the life-span of mortal men. Without this transcendence into a potential earthly immortality, no politics, strictly speaking, no common world and no public realm, is possible. For unlike the common good as Christianity understood it – the salvation of one’s soul as a concern common to all – the common world is what we enter when we are born and what we leave behind when we die. It transcends our lifespan into past and future alike; it was there before we came and will outlast our brief sojourn in it. It is what we have in common not only with those who live with us, but also with those who were here before and with those who will come after us.65 Read back into the context of the fourfold, a common affinity can be gleaned between Arendt’s move towards earthly immortality and Heidegger’s divinities: each determines the present in terms of its historical potential, realised and preserved by virtue of an enduring ethos or orientation towards the not-yetpresent presence of future planetary generations who will ‘sojourn’ here also. The dynamism between the divinities and the ‘wholeness of the fourfold’ is thus embedded within the historical development of the world as a space of mortal dwelling that always already exists for the sake of earthly posterity. It is Arendt however, after Heidegger, who brings the political force of this argument to life. Dwelling in the Fourfold As Heidegger’s writing on the an-arche of place develops and the earlier abstract ‘thereness’ of Dasein moves from the agonism of the earth-world strife to the relational plurality of the fourfold in his later work, he reorients his writings around the act of dwelling. Indeed, while the notion of dwelling has been invoked throughout this chapter as a motif that runs throughout Heidegger’s writings, it attains a central prominence in relation to the fourfold. By this stage of his writings then, the notion of dwelling cannot be separated from the ethical – and anarchic – attribute of Being. To this end, and in anticipation of this chapter’s conclusion, it demands closer scrutiny. While dwelling assumes primacy as the ontological predicate of acting in the world in Heidegger’s later writings, particularly in relation to the fourfold, notions of Dasein remain nevertheless central. At least part of the meaning of dwelling must then be theorised in relation to Dasein. Heidegger accounts for the development 42

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of bauen, the German word for dwell, into its modern formulation, bin, ‘I am’, as a way of foregrounding the productive affinity between the two experiences. In the post-war essay ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ he writes that ‘the way in which you are and I am, the manner in which we humans are on the earth, is bauen, dwelling’.66 David Krell writes that in dwelling ‘man’s Being rests in his capacity to cultivate and safeguard the earth, to protect it from thoughtless exploitation and to defend it against the calumnies of the metaphysical tradition.’67 Carrying over the language of unconcealment from the Artwork essay, dwelling draws the earth out of concealment, creating a world in which the earth ‘juts through’. Here dwelling becomes a practice of anarchic care for the planetary. More precisely, it is dwelling that brings earth and world into a state of co-becoming. Refusing historical or ontological totalisation, in dwelling the earth resists worldly disclosure while the world is sustained in its renewal. In essence then, with every act of dwelling that draws the earth into unconcealment a move is made into concealment, recuperating tensions described in the Artwork essay that simultaneously justified and problematized acts of worlding. In contrast to the meaning wrested in the artwork object, the activity of dwelling centres the futurity of being. Though this is not unique to the late Heidegger – he had already written in Being and Time that ‘Dasein can be authentically having-been only because it is futural. In a certain sense, having-been arises from the future’, the emphasis on the intergenerational constitution of the fourfold which is sustained in the ‘coming and going’ of mortal men, prioritises practices of inheritance and in this way anticipate a framework of planetary care that Arendt develops more explicitly in her writings.68 From Heidegger we learn that to dwell on the earth is to give meaning to the experience of being through a connection to and cultivation of place. A precondition to dwelling is thus a claim to space, hence Tim Ingold notes that ‘to build or to cultivate, [Heidegger] reasoned, one must already be, and to be one must stay or abide in a place’.69 And yet, in much the same way that to sketch a line in the sand does not disclose a world and bring the earth out of concealment, to merely build is not to dwell. Dwelling attains through the disclosure of what it means to cultivate a human life, prompting Heidegger to assert that ‘not every building is a dwelling’.70 And while the earth informs the dwelling place of humans, as Stuart Elden notes, ‘dwelling is not to be understood as the possession of accommodation and housing. Whilst such things are indeed dwelling, they do not fulfil or ground its essence’.71 Nor indeed, then, is dwelling synonymous with worlding. Recalling the language of the ‘Artwork’ essay, to dwell is to enact the constellation of the earth-world as co-becoming in history. This ambivalence plays on the always possible slippage between anarchism and archism that James Martel explores and that was discussed in the Introduction. It anticipates the ways in which the planetary is concealed by logics that negate action that would otherwise seek to understand and respond to the reality of dwelling amidst the climate crisis. 43

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Poetic Dwelling Paying attention to the nuanced development of the planetary place of dwelling in Heidegger’s writings is critical to understanding the intricacies of the fourfold, which can otherwise risk appearing simply as a reiteration of the original an-arche of the earth-world ontology in his earlier work. Central to the move from a twofold relation to a fourfold is an appeal to the unknowability of Being’s relationality. This develops in dwelling as a way to encounter the mystery of the yet to be disclosed nature of a relational phenomenon. It is perhaps for this reason that Heidegger adopts Hölderlin’s position that ‘poetically man dwells’ on earth as an ethos for dwelling within the fourfold. It is through poetic language that Dasein can now be understood as perpetually encountering a plurality of anarchic or concealed existential horizons within the fourfold. Staying with Hölderlin, Elden describes the irreducibility of Heidegger’s account of dwelling as emerging out of his reading of Hölderlin’s poetry. Speaking directly to Hölderlin’s work then, Elden contends that the two river hymns, ‘The Rhine’ and ‘The Ister’, helped Heidegger in his ‘attempt to provide a non-metaphysical understanding of time-space’.72 Without overcoming metaphysics, Elden describes Heidegger as seeing in poetry a mode of dwelling in which ‘time is not understood in terms of calendrical dates, it is understood as the passage, as the journeying of becoming homely. Space is not understood in terms of Cartesian co-ordinates, extension or, indeed, space, but in terms of locale or place.’73 Elden’s description here echoes the centrality of Schürmann’s account of Heideggerian presencing and recuperates the anarchic image of the earth earthing as the world worlds. Moreover, what this emphasis on the gerundive form of the present continuous resists is the annihilation of meaning through the conventional seduction of archism. Poetry dissolves the certainty affixed to any one account of existential meaning, becoming as it does the anarchic practice of refusing archism. This is precisely not to say that poetic language, or poetic dwelling, erodes existential traditions, a destruction which effectively paralyses development, but rather that poetry transfigures what it means to be in any one instance and thus sows the seeds for a reimagining of being. Heidegger writes in the second lecture of the series, ‘What Is Called Thinking?’, that the poet’s word attests to what is enigmatically beautiful, namely the potential concealed within that which is yet to be fully disclosed. In a seemingly explicit invocation of the anarchic, he writes in the essay that ‘the beautiful is not what pleases, but what falls within that fateful gift of truth which comes to be when that which is eternally non-apparent and therefore invisible attains its most radiantly apparent appearance.’74 Echoing this sense of a non-apparent meaning and the radiance of meaning’s becoming in the world, William Lovitt writes that Heidegger had a ‘poet’s ear for language’ that often appeared in his own writing as well. More than rhetorical flourish, poetic language becomes a methodological device in 44

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his work as form and content intrude on one another and produce something proper to the written word itself. Recuperating what was first described following Schürmann as the integration of an anarchic mode of expression into Heidegger’s writings, Lovitt goes on to write that ‘for [Heidegger] the proper function of words is not to stand for, to signify. Rather, words point to something beyond themselves. They are translucent bearers of meaning. To name a thing is to summon it, to call it toward one. Heidegger’s words are rich in connotation.’75 What Lovitt shows as operative in Heidegger’s mode of writing is the investment Heidegger makes in the written word to assume an anarchic function akin to the placed event of dwelling. Moreover, it captures the ‘shining forth’ of language that Heidegger first described in his essay on the Artwork in relation to the paint pigment that expressed the depth of possible meaning in the earth. This same argument reappears with even more force when Heidegger writes in the ‘Letter on Humanism’ that language is the house of being, effectively capturing this argument that draws both on the ethical dimension of dwelling and the poetic potential of language.76 Grounding the poetic once again within the constellation of the fourfold, ‘dwelling’ is envisaged not as the product of pure anthropocentric archism, or as a narrative of total human sovereignty, but as that which corresponds to the unfolding of earth, sky, mortals and divinities, hence as the anarchic. Or, as Kelly Oliver writes, the fourfold marks the dispossession that is definitive of mortals.77 In other words, it is precisely not mortals who exclusively govern the conditions of being on and of the earth; it is rather the force of relations manifest in the fourfold that provide the anarchic groundwork for mortal being on earth. I would argue that Arendt posits a similar claim when she writes in The Human Condition that ‘man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity’.78 Where Arendt foregrounds the relational condition of freedom and the contingent renouncing of sovereignty as the groundwork of freedom, and insofar as this freedom is guaranteed by the plurality, the ethics of freedom, Heidegger offers the image of the fourfold.79 A large part of this project in Heidegger is only made possible by virtue of the freedom from humanist metaphysics that Heidegger sees in Hölderlin’s poetry. Veronique Fóti’s work is suggestive here, arguing that what draws Heidegger to Hölderlin is his production of poetry that ‘problematizes its own essential being (Wesen). . . .’ For Heidegger, this means that Hölderlin’s poetry can be read as questioning ‘its own destinal and onto-historical mandate’.80 Echoing the anarchic relations within the fourfold to the ethos of the divinities, Heidegger sees a similar reflexive questioning of archist ontology in Hölderlin. Pursuing this line of inquiry and assessing the ‘disclosedness’ of the fourfold within the ontohistorical mandate of Hölderlin’s poetry, invites a conception of the fourfold that remains wedded to an irreducible and anarchic ontological horizon. This is the horizon that reappears as the groundwork of freedom in Arendt’s writings. 45

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The persistence of the fourfold as a site of original relationality exposes the contingency of all acts of dwelling to receive the four; to world in a way that allows the unfolding of earth, sky, mortals, and divinities to assume presence. In light of the originality of this intersecting moment or even what we might now call the anarchic origin of dwelling, Mitch Rose proposes considering all acts of dwelling as the asserting of ‘claims’. For Rose, this language of ‘claiming’ captures the perpetual movement of dwelling as caught between concealment and unconcealment, such that the act of dwelling remains a mere claim to permanence, established within a broader context of an-archism’s discontinuous continuity. Building further still on this paradoxical form of continuity, Rose notes insofar as ‘the fourfold is the totality of changing shifting relations that variously allow the world to unfold as a world, that is, as a specific site marked out in and through material things’, any attempt to alter the status of the fourfold through archist permanence stages its own annihilation.81 By contrast, the risk of encountering redundancy must persist as the condition of anarchic rebeginning. What this language of assertion and claiming does not undermine then is the integrity of anarchic beginning within the fourfold. Indeed, to undermine the force of any one of the four would by necessity undermine the simple oneness of the four and with it the very viability of thinking the relational an-arche of planetary dwelling (this again is the danger of Young’s twofold account). Fracturing the capacity for mortal presence within the fourfold equally fractures the relational appearance of earth, sky and divinities. Without Heidegger’s example of the mortal force constructing the bridge, the fourfold cannot be gathered together; the two sides of a river remain alien to one another. Yet equally, without the river, the bridge cannot be built. Negotiating the development of the earth from its earlier presentation alongside the world in the ‘Artwork’ essay to its iteration within the fourfold, one need only think of Heidegger’s desire to emphasise the interconnectedness of different locales for thinking the an-arche of planetary experience. The fourfold builds upon the tension of the earth-world to show that implicit in the disclosure of the earth are acts of truthful unconcealment, which aspire towards transcendent historical meaning. The fourfold thus figures as Heidegger’s way of attaching an intimately historical dimension to the earthworld, one that invokes a culture of care for the sake of continual anarchic beginnings. Attempts to separate the fourfold into axes that resemble the earlier earth-world framing such as those by Young, or Graham Harman, who views it along concealing/unconcealing poles, fall short of understanding what Heidegger is attempting to expose through the introduction of the fourfold.82 Against these accounts, it is through the fourfold that Heidegger shows the porous quality of what will later appear in Arendt’s writing as the earthly place in which (political) worlds world. When Young attempts to advance his bifurcation of the fourfold into a nature/culture divide, by arguing that present 46

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within each world is an iteration of the fourfold unto itself, he actually obscures what Heidegger is seeking to show. More dangerously, he risks imposing an archic form over the fourfold and denying the ontological possibility of a meaningful planetary life. When he writes ‘the primary object of my guardianship is not the universe or the planet, but rather the particular fourfold to which I belong’, he encapsulates a mode of human experience that is utterly at odds with the manifold unity of the fourfold and one that appears today in the worldly archisms that impose a hierarchical view over the planet.83 What Young then takes forward from his reading of the fourfold as a locus of particularity is precisely what Heidegger sought to avoid in his movement from the earth-world to the fourfold. Where the former invites the possibility of total archic unconcealment, the plural relationality of the fourfold continually returns the logic of the anarchic. Where this leads us is to a reconsideration of that ‘place’ – temporal as much as territorial – in which life assumes meaning, futures become imaginable and pasts recoverable. Perhaps more than these readings of earth and world, what Heidegger’s account of dwelling – read into the modern context of planetary life – allows for is a recognition of the original, primordial intersection of all those elements that in their anarchic meeting disclose the ethics of planetary life. As the four parts of the fourfold reappear in the modern history of the climate crisis, as the denial of an ethically robust relation to place, what is brought to the fore is the need to reimagine dwelling, to disclose a new an-arche for planetary life. Ultimately, it is Arendt, who, in departing from Heidegger, realises this. Yet it is Benjamin who makes this move possible, creating the conditions out of which Arendt will prise open the fissures in earthly life and create space for the onslaught of the new. Indeed, it is Benjamin’s seeking out of cracks in the surface of history, cracks that hint at the possible cessation of history and the anarchic rupture of a messianic present, through which Arendt will offer an account of earthly life that is capable of arresting the archist tropes of the climate crisis. While Heidegger’s thinking may afford certain moments of clarity that gesture towards the kinds of anarchic politics necessary to fulfilling an authentic life, it is quite clear that Heidegger himself is incapable of this. Where it is important to understand the genealogy of thinking from which Arendt departs (and to be certain it is a departure that she undertakes), what I have sought to highlight in this chapter are the moments of possibility ultimately unrealised in Heidegger’s politics. In the following chapter, however, I sketch out the historical conditions that Benjamin outlines for the project of history’s an-arche, setting the scene to develop a more complex account of those archisms that see themselves ordained to govern the conditions for planetary life.

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2

BENJAMIN’S POLITICAL THEOLOGY: A MESSIANIC PROJECT IN EARTHLY LIFE

If Martin Heidegger initially appeared as a peculiar figure in the context of conceptualising an an-arche of the planet, Walter Benjamin enters this dialogue with apparent ease. Benjamin’s anarchist politics permeate his writings. Moreover, when they appear in the context of material historiography in the theses On the Concept of History, they do so in relation to ‘our coming on earth’. Planet and history converge in political anarchism. And yet, as much as Benjamin’s writings incorporate an explicitly anarchist politics, even one that suggests itself in direct relation to the earth, it is the theorisation of anarche that coordinates the reading of Benjamin that follows. The distinction between a politics and a theory of an-arche is subtle; after all, the two overlap and converge at many points. Nevertheless, there is something specific about the development of an-archism in Benjamin’s writings as a theoretical device within the context of a broader methodological paradigm that I want to explore in this chapter. Rather than look to Benjamin’s politics as a site somehow separated from his theoretical approach to the world, it is worth pausing to consider the way in which Benjamin’s modes of thinking – material historiography, political theology, constellational thought – each presuppose an original an-arche as their constitutive and guiding element. The argument here is precise. My intention is not to read Benjamin as providing an analytic precedent, such that his critique of political archism in the context of capitalism might, for instance, be reread into the contemporary context of planetary archism. Instead, I look at the particular methodology of political theology as 48

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a practice in anarchic planetary thinking. Material historiography and constellational thinking appear in due course. In essence, the aim in this chapter is to bring the planetary an-arche of Martin Heidegger explored in the previous chapter into dialogue with Benjamin’s writings. More precisely, my aim is to turn from the specific notion of anarchic dwelling in the fourfold to the historical conditions of Benjamin’s anarchic project of political theology. What this makes possible is a move away from the central preoccupation of planetary an-archism with dwelling, which is associated with (though not reducible to) spatial acts of being towards a more historically informed account of planetary life. While it is clear that such a concern is evident in Heidegger’s writings, whether in terms of Dasein’s futurity or the historical condition of the thrown life, there is a clearer sense in Benjamin’s writings of how to think history as a locus of revolution and hence of how to see within dwelling’s an-archism a revolutionary dimension. Read together, dwelling and historical revolution foreground a mode of planetary life that is central to Arendt’s politics. To this end they inform a constellation in thinking that will be instrumental in understanding how to reckon with those planetary archisms in operation today. Ultimately, it is Benjamin’s writings on political theology that create the specific setting in which to develop one of the questions central to understanding Arendt’s politics: ‘What does it mean to be born on earth?’. This question, however, can only be asked once we have gained an understanding of how Arendt’s thinking on the planetary is informed by Heidegger’s. While Heidegger does not succeed in developing and actualising a properly planetary account of anarchism, his writings are nevertheless central to understanding how Arendt develops an account of planetary politics. That she is able to write in the summer of 1950 that a new account of earthly dignity is required, whereas Heidegger is still grappling with the ethical dimension of the fourfold in 1954, is one clear instance of the way in which her writing on the revolutionary dimension of planetary life radically diverges from and in this instance predates his own. This divergence is brought into clarity through a reading of Benjamin, for even though he doesn’t rely on the same vocabulary of natality as Arendt in order to develop a form of planetary anarchism, his discussion of weak messianism as a faculty of original beginning offers a clear parallel. The movement and correlation between messianism and natality assume a pivotal function in this chapter as a guiding arc in relation to which the an-arche of political theology as linked to the planetary is developed in Benjamin’s writings. What this then means is that what is gained in looking to Benjamin’s political theology is a methodological paradigm through which to read natality and hence an Arendtian politics of planetary an-archism. At the same time, what underpins this methodology is its own organising an-archism, insofar as what is explored is a practice in thinking that assumes form only in its being practised and hence as always 49

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already rewriting the conditions of its being practised. Rather than evince a theocratic logic then, I see political theology in Benjamin’s work as providing a way of thinking that operates outside the limits of existing doctrine. Moreover, Benjamin’s emphasis on the collective condition of political theology, which persists in relation to ‘our’ earthly appearance, and the messianic power with which ‘we’, like every generation before ‘us’, have been endowed, orients us towards a notion of Arendtian plurality.1 Recentring the politically theological frame of Benjamin’s discussion, the emphasis here on an ‘earthly’ human collective is reinforced by Benjamin’s rejection of a mediative theological figure through which to advance his claim. For Benjamin then, a notion of ‘plurality’ is recuperated via the suspension of theology’s divine figure, one who – for Benjamin – coincides with the absolute instantiation of archism. By contrast, in what we might call ‘theological archism’, the divine appears as the imposition of a binding law from the divine sovereign (and whether this figure is benevolent or not is really beside the point for Benjamin). What Benjamin actually foregrounds in his understanding of political theology is the need to think divine emancipation from within a collective. The influence on James Martel’s anarchic politics here is clear, as is the anticipation of Arendt’s miraculous and collectively produced account of natal action. Where Martel defines archism as ‘a form of politics based on rule and hierarchy, on phantasmal authority structures’ and an-archism as relating to ‘truths that are determined from within the larger community’, he presents a clear distillation of what Benjamin imagines in terms of theological archism’s cultic form as opposed to political theology proper.2 This difference will be spelled out in greater detail in due course, such that between Benjamin and Martel, it will be made clear that Arendt’s insistence of staging the miracle of birth as the fundamental basis of (planetary) action serves as a connecting and anarchic force. Despite the claim that Benjamin’s political theology operates via an anarchic conception of plurality, I am compelled to begin this chapter with a confrontation with Carl Schmitt. Schmitt’s engagement with political theology diverges sharply from Benjamin’s. And yet, their projects advance a similar vocabulary. Indeed, Benjamin’s melding of the planetary or earthly in relation to political theology can be heard as echoing Schmitt’s problematic articulation of political theology and the territorialisation or nomos of the earth. Establishing a clear distance between Schmitt and Benjamin thus allows for a clearer sense of how the an-arche of political theology emerges in Benjamin’s writing and how it comes to correspond to the revolutionary politics that are required in an age of climate crisis. Against the ‘archisms’ of planetary life, which appear today in the constant extraction of natural resources and the ongoing depletion of the conditions requisite for planetary life, this chapter unpacks the organising project of Benjamin’s politics of an-arche. This precedes a more substantive inquiry 50

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in Chapter 3 into the an-arche of Arendt’s politics, principally in relation to her political faculty of human natality, a form that I invoke throughout this chapter as a parallel to Benjamin’s project of weak messianism. The intention then is to present an account of Benjamin’s an-arche that responds to the question presented by the Salvage Collective in the introduction to this project: how to ‘imagine emancipation on an at best partially habitable planet?’ The question serves as an underlying imperative to this chapter, which seeks emancipation in the form of a Benjaminian political theology. Such emancipation, which brings together the being and the fact of history in one, becomes my own methodological manifesto, one that is ultimately brought into operation in the closing two chapters of this book. Carl Schmitt – The Other Political Theology Benjamin’s politics clearly diverge from Carl Schmitt’s. And yet, their entanglement persists. Not because Benjamin condoned the politics that Schmitt would ultimately come to support – the two writers pursued political theology to diametrically opposed ends, this much is clear. Nor, moreover, does the ground of this entanglement rest on the near infamous or, as Agamben has it, the ‘scandalous’ letter that Benjamin wrote to Schmitt in 1930 crediting Schmitt’s exploration of sovereignty in Political Theology as formative of his own thinking.3 The letter, which accompanied a copy of Benjamin’s book The Origin of German Tragic Drama, read: You will very quickly recognize how much my book is indebted to you for its presentation of the doctrine of sovereignty in the seventeenth century. Perhaps I may say, in addition, that I have also derived from your later works, especially Die Diktatur, a confirmation of my modes of research in the philosophy of art from yours in the philosophy of the state. If the reading of my book allows this feeling to emerge in an intelligible fashion, then the purpose of my sending it to you will be achieved. (qtd. in Weber 1992, 5). Part of the infamy of the letter no doubt lies, at least in part, in its exclusion from Benjamin’s first published Correspondences in 1966.4 Adding to the complicated status of the letter, Marc de Wilde has noted that while Theodor Adorno and Gershom Scholem, the editors of Benjamin’s Correspondences, saw the letter as an unwelcome reminder of a possible connection between their friend and a man who would be described as the ‘legal theorist of the Nazis’, Schmitt was forthcoming about the existence of the letter. Indeed, it seems that the latter hoped its existence would absolve him of his former allegiance to the Nazi Third Reich. Describing his encounter with Schmitt’s biographer, Joseph Bendersky, de Wilde writes that Bendersky ‘told [him] that Schmitt kept Benjamin’s letter in a 51

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special file, which also contained letters from Ernst Jünger and Rudolf Smend. His impression was that Schmitt kept the file with the specific purpose of showing it to visitors.’5 Schmitt’s manipulation of the letter in this way obscures the initial intention of the letter, complicating the conditions of its engagement close to a century later. Whether the letter is actually meaningful in terms of proving an ongoing relationship, at least at the level of methodological practice between Schmitt and Benjamin, is not my concern. Indeed, it is clear that when the politics of each are actually considered on their own bases, no such affinity can possibly exist. Countering any such possible interpretation of a common project, Judith Butler allows tone to intrude on their reading of the letter, writing of it: ‘that formal expression of thanks is hardly the basis for inferring that Benjamin condones Schmitt’s book in part or in whole’.6 The possibility of drawing Schmitt and Benjamin together in common allegiance has already been attempted in Ellen Kennedy’s controversial 1987 article on the affinities between Schmitt, Benjamin and other members of the Frankfurt School, a project that has been duly rebutted by Martin Jay and Ulrich Preuss.7 And it is worth reiterating that my project is not intended to reignite this debate. Nevertheless, there is a sense, even in Benjamin’s clear use of political theology within, not only a secular context like Schmitt’s, but a politically radical and anarchist context, that theological language itself contains within it the archist potential that someone like Schmitt came to hold. What must be confronted then is less the possibility of any affinity between Benjamin and Schmitt but the archist dimension of political theology itself. In part, the argument against the necessary sublimation of political theology into such an arche of domination must be oriented by the recognition that precisely this possibility must always remain, for such is the possibility of all politics. At the same time, however, I do want to pause and outline for the reader how Benjamin and Schmitt each contend with the arche of political theology. To this end (and this end only) there is something to be gained in following momentarily Schmitt’s path. At the outset, both Schmitt and Benjamin understood political theology to incorporate more than the mere translation of theological terms into the political. This is important. For both thinkers, political theology is not merely the sense in which the ‘ever-changing relationships between community and religious order, in short between power and salvation’ are described.8 As de Wilde writes, for Schmitt and Benjamin, ‘the concept [of political theology] acquires a somewhat different meaning: for them, political theology covers more than politics and less than theology. Political theology does not refer to what is usually called politics, that is, those issues that concern politicians but to “the political.”’9 This latter realm is no longer confined to traditional political arenas but is omnipresent – it infiltrates and exists in all domains of public life from culture to economics.10 As a more-than-political-politics, 52

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political theology turned, for Schmitt and Benjamin alike, on the role and formation of political life. Inevitably, differences emerge in their understanding of this process. For Schmitt, the politics of political life interpreted theologically appeared in view of the sovereign who can, he writes in Political Theology, ‘decide on the exception’. This moment of suspension, brought into being via the state of exception, will be critical to Benjamin’s writings as well. Indeed, the exception marks the excess of the political, as leaching out of the contained space of politics, and hence informs de Wilde’s reading of ‘more than political’ political theology. In this moment of exceptional suspension, the possibility of anarchic revolution and sovereign archism coexist. In both accounts, Benjamin’s anarchic revolution or Schmitt’s archist sovereignty, the exception exists as a moment outside the law. In each instance, distinct though they are, the law is suspended. Political theology assumes a structural dimension: it operates both within the context of the law’s suspension and marks a moment of theological power over that suspension. This is the structure of absolute beginning. The forms of this inaugurating power are, however, distinct. Indeed, it is by virtue of this moment that the distinction between the two underlying conceptions of the theological – Schmitt and Benjamin’s – is revealed. While both interpret a theological intrusion in terms of a miraculous intervention, for Schmitt suspension of the law reaffirms the omnipotent power of the sovereign, the one figure who suspends the law and then (re)creates it. ‘Revolution’ is not a rebeginning but the reaffirmation of the same. For Benjamin, however, suspension is generated collectively, the divine law that takes its place neither benevolent nor complete. The formation of the law for Benjamin must be collective. Indeed, it can only exist within the context of a plurality. At its core the suspension of the law cannot conform to what he calls the mythic structure that otherwise organises Schmitt’s account. Suspension of the law coincides with an unknown beginning; it marks the an-arche of a different reality. This bid for another posterity anticipates Benjamin’s focus on the language of messianism in the context of revolutionary politics. A productive parallel can be seen here in David Hume’s definition of the miracle as a ‘transgression of a law of nature by a particular volitional act of the Deity’.11 The miracle of transgression is the miracle of beginning. To transgress is to create a moment of anarchist intervention. Paul Kahn adds that to ‘absent the volition act – that is, the decision – the exception would appear not as miraculous but as arbitrary and chaotic.’12 And yet, for Benjamin, the volitional act of decision is also collective. The authority of the sovereign is the mark of an original impotence, which alone determines the arbitrariness of decisive action. Decisions, in the precise sense of a willed and substantive decision, remain possible only in view of a collective encounter with the conditions of a political plurality. The ‘decision’ to suspend and stage a state of exception is thus inscribed within the ‘collective’ of past, present and future pluralities. 53

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The distinction at play here is subtle but revealing. After all, the notional decision plays a central role in both accounts. Yet where for Schmitt the sovereign decides the state of exception, Benjamin would seem to intervene and ask, but who is the sovereign to make this decision? Moreover, what is the form of their decision? The exact need to answer these questions is less pressing in Benjamin’s writings because the very possibility of the exception is without a normative form, it depends on the an-arche of a collective to be realised. In other words, the conditions of suspension resist immanence. For Schmitt, the same elasticity cannot be applied. Schmitt wants one sovereign and so confines himself to a set of relations that are necessarily binary, the one in power who decides and the one or more upon whom the decision is imposed. The structural forms of political theology break away from one another. The opening that the law’s transgression realises is in effect only an opening for Benjamin, who sees this moment as the groundwork for anarchic revolution; the beginning, that is, of another history. By contrast, for Schmitt transgression creates an opening that reaffirms the centrality of the law – one that is now determined by the will of the deciding sovereign. Suspension reaffirms. Though he doesn’t read the sovereign within the anarchic structure at play here, Kahn develops his interpretation of Schmittian political sovereignty by claiming that ‘sovereignty is not the alternative to law, but the point at which law and exception intersect – at stake in both is the free act.’13 Here we need to pause and recognise that what is true for Schmitt is also the case for Benjamin as well. Yet the actor of freedom is different, for Schmitt the sovereign is absolute and singular, evocative of Hobbes’ Leviathan, while for Benjamin, freedom is generated from within a plurality of actors.14 For Arendt, this distinction plays out in terms of the need to renounce the individualism of sovereignty in order to realise freedom, a faculty that can only be held in concert and that assumes legitimacy through the recognitive power of the reciprocal other.15 In effect, this is how the collective appears for Benjamin as well. Action is inherently relational. More to the point, the miraculous politics towards which political theology moves depends upon the witnessing of others. And so, when Benjamin describes the messianic power in the theses On the Concept of History, he foregrounds the centrality of the plural pronoun. What emerges in the context of the ‘air we have breathed’ and ‘among people we could have talked to’ [ . . .gibt es nur in der Luft, die wir geatmet haben, mit Menschen, zu denen wir hätten reden] and the expectation of ‘our coming on earth’ [Dann sind wir auf der Erde erwatet worden] is the pivotal function played by the ‘we’.16 Indeed, the earthly coming that Benjamin describes here anticipates what Arendt centres throughout her writings as the earthly condition of politics. As we return to Kahn, the force of this distinction comes into play more clearly. Against the framework of the collective’s move towards the unknown beginning of acting in concert, he continues: ‘the historical and theological 54

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connection is also evident as a matter of logic: there can be no exception without reference to a norm. Without that reference, the exception becomes mere anarchy: not the miraculous intervention, but law’s failure. The miracle must affirm the norm, at the same time that it violates the norm.’17 The language of anarchism intrudes and offers a point of entry into the an-arche of political sovereignty. For Schmitt, transgression is archic; it requires the coordinates of archism and the phantasmal structure of legal security. For Benjamin, transgression inscribes a law of an-arche. The contrast is straightforward. In one instance, transgression of the law informs the structure of archism. Rather than suspend the law in order to inaugurate a new beginning, in which the decision to suspend becomes an historical opening, the decision becomes the basis of archism. The suspension of the law is precisely not emancipatory; instead it registers the moment of the law’s transformation into a naturalised condition. As Kahn continues, ‘the sovereign must affirm the norm in a world in which he can will the exception’.18 Rather than resist or create, the sovereign suspends the law, creating a state of exception, in which to will what is now the naturalised return of the norm. Drawing the notion of the law into the planetary realm, Achille Mbembe describes the way in which the oppressive force of the law intersects with regimes of extraction. As a planetary condition, he writes that ‘the law – as the state of exception becomes the norm and the state of emergency, permanent – is being maximally used to multiply states of lawlessness and to dismantle all forms of resistance’.19 The law, operating as the negation of resistance, ossifies the political and cultivates conditions of exhaustion as natural. This moment of potential revolutionary suspension – the moment before exhaustion is made the normative condition of the law – registers the point of departure for Benjamin’s anarchic writings. Located within this suspension is the theological miracle of beginning, which inaugurates something precisely other than Kahn’s suggestion of ‘mere anarchy’ and instead verges closer towards the ‘pure an-arche!’ of revolutionary beginning. Ironically, we can turn to Schmitt’s writing here for further clarification. In reference to the norm that the sovereign reaffirms, Schmitt writes: ‘the norm requires a homogenous medium . . . There exists no norm that is applicable to chaos’ (13). The point is not that Benjamin’s take on political theology’s capacity to suspend the norm of law privileges chaos, but that he negates the very possibility of the norm within the context of the political. Indeed, it is worth emphasizing Herbert Read’s clarification of anarchism that ‘what is “without ruler” . . . is not necessarily “without order”’.20 Being against the sovereign does not equate to being against the conditions of common sense that organise political order. What Benjamin wants to say then, is that there is no way of imagining the potential of politics – which he locates in terms of a revolutionary anarchism – at the same time as the norms of the world are sustained. The force of distinction here rests 55

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in the opposition of Benjamin’s view to that of Schmitt, namely, that the law’s failure is indeed miraculous. What this failure makes possible is the opening of the political structure to its own emancipatory revolution. In opposition to what becomes, in Martel’s terms, Schmitt’s focalisation on ‘phantasmal authority structures’, Benjamin remains invested in the vulnerability of an opening of the law, a becoming of the collective and a rewriting of history. In other words, he is committed to the existence of no norm or an-arche. The emphasis on the ongoing force of the miracle of an-arche, of an event that is decided by a collective to recognise their potential – to seize, in Marx’s terms, the world that is waiting for them – is the revolutionary core of Benjamin’s political theology. This leads to the position that de Wilde defines as Benjamin’s approach to the state of exception, as departing from a ‘messianic perspective that regards the legal-political order as destined to wither away’.21 Against Schmitt’s advocation for a theologically divine figure who exerts a normative and even omnipotent claim to power, Benjamin, as de Wilde writes, ‘sides with the revolutionaries in whose anarchist violence’ he recognises a different divine power, one vested in the opening of the political to the collective.22 And so, while a connection exists between Benjamin and Schmitt in the relatively general sense outlined by de Wilde that ‘in spite of secularisation, political phenomena are to be understood primarily in light of certain theological concepts and images’, and in the more precise sense of the centrality of the law’s suspension as a moment that invites the intervention of a miraculous decision, this does not lead to the realisation of a common project.23 The miracle is either archic or anarchic, singular or collective, fixed or becoming. While it is clear in both instances that the decision is consciously realised, the form of that miraculous entry into the political cannot be viewed in equal terms. Nevertheless, vigilance remains imperative. Despite Martel’s reminder that ‘anarchism lives and breathes amid archism’, even in those archic configurations like Schmitt’s sovereign political theology, this cohabitation is not one-sided.24 The parasitic presence of archism rests equally alongside an-archism. On this reading then, the project of Benjamin’s political theology remains not only unfinished in that wonderfully liberatory and collective sense of an-archism’s staging of an ongoing story, but in need of sustained interrogation. The spectre of archism in the guise of a sovereign theology can be vanquished but not annihilated. The need to reckon with the vulnerability of ideas to be colonized or for thinking to be co-opted endures. This is not, of course, a mark of defeat. The place-based anarchism to which I argue Benjamin’s political theology gives rise, inviting a messianic disruption of the territorialisation that Schmitt’s project otherwise goes on to prioritise, is a reminder of what remains possible and what remains to be done in the realm of political life. This begins with a return to the anarche of political theology and the disruptive power to begin that is held within the moment of the law’s suspension. 56

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Benjamin’s Jewish Theology Holding on to the distinction between the archism of Schmitt in the affirmation of the norm as natural and the intrusion of Benjamin’s an-arche, the revolutionary force of Benjamin’s political theology comes into view. Where Schmitt sees in political theology a framework through which to reinstate the necessity of legal orders, namely as the omnipotence of God reinscribed in juridical form, Benjamin sees a framework into which he might interpolate a Marxist appeal for revolution.25 Rather than preserve the law, Benjamin’s intention is to break it. More to the point perhaps, the aim is for the law to remain broken. That being said, to reduce Benjamin’s relationship to political theology to the service of fracturing normative legality would miss much of the nuance of Benjamin’s position. The law, in other words, is not only ‘legal’ in the traditional sense. The law as a normative device possesses a far greater and more nebulous function. It is the neutralisation of the status quo, the naturalisation of what might be called prosaically the ‘they say’ of public chatter and the subsumption of judgement to prejudice. While the suspension of the law’s normativity signals the moment for the possibility of a miraculous intervention, a possibility that is at all times determined by its fleeting form, or what Benjamin describes elsewhere in terms of a ‘flash of recognition’, the groundwork for realising the anarche of divine or theological politics is limited.26 Knowing how to recognise this flash, how to coordinate a collective that might realise the divine power of beginning, and how to understand what it is to begin, are all complex tasks. Benjamin is not forthcoming in answering these questions. Despite this ongoing reluctance in his writings to immanent structural formations, the notion of the ‘origin’, a moment that diverges from the proscriptive arche of normativity’s naturalisation and coincides instead with the beginning of the an-arche, assumes an important position in Benjamin’s work. Against Schmitt’s invocation of the sovereign as the instigator of law’s arche, and hence the straightforward transition from a divine omnipotence to a hierarchical omnipotence, Benjamin’s move from a traditional theology to the political turns on the dislocation of divinity. In place, what assumes an organising function is the faculty of ‘weak messianism’, that power gestured towards above and central to his transgressive departure from the law. Indeed, weak messianism names the potential inscribed in the moment of the law’s suspension. Yet what precedes weak messianism as a productive concept in political theology is an original investment in the Jewish dimensions of Benjamin’s theological paradigm. This investment, in dialogue with Benjamin’s resistance to a vocabulary of immanently usable terms, is worth exploring in some detail. The Jewish inflection of Benjamin’s writings on theology are intimately linked to their anarchic dimension. Gerhard Richter even describes the self-conscious refusal of Benjamin’s Jewish writings to provide stable concepts as a mode of resistance, one that corresponds to the ‘no norm’ basis of his revolutionary 57

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political theology. Richter shows the relationship between theory and method to be reciprocal, in the sense that method informs and forms theory. He describes Benjamin’s corpus as ‘a variegated and heterogenous reservoir of discourse and reflection’, noting that political theology is no exception.27 While Miguel Vatter’s recent work on twentieth-century political theologians has shown the common development of a democratic theory of divine power and anarchist principles, the singularity of Benjamin’s approach, distinguished not only from Schmitt, is distinct.28 And so, when Benjamin writes in convolute ‘N [Re the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress]’ of The Arcades Project that ‘my thinking is related to theology as blotting paper is related to ink. It is saturated with it. Were one to go by the blotter, however, nothing of what is written would remain’, it is perhaps unsurprising that, even noting the departure from Schmitt, the reader is left with rather more perplexity than clarity regarding the exact status of the theological in Benjamin’s writing.29 Part of the particularity of Benjamin’s status as a political theologian stems from a tension implicit in the very idea of ‘Jewish theology’. Unlike Schmitt’s basis in Catholicism and the givenness of Christ as a mediative figure who Schmitt is later able to interpolate into systems of state politics in which the sovereign assumes an organising, legalistic position (or as Martel would encourage us to think, the figure of archism), Benjamin’s relationship to a theological figure is premised on an im-mediacy. Meaning that where the trespassing of theological concepts into the political inhered for Schmitt ‘the centrality of sovereign power to decide’, for Benjamin the equation of theology with the organising omnipotence of a sovereign overlooks the anarchic project of theology as a praxis of critique.30 In other words, the theological is not coterminous with dogma – an equation which, for Benjamin, is to be found in the institution of religion. Instead, theology opens up rather than closes down the meaning of politics. Beyond an original opposition to Schmitt, the nuance of this claim pivots on a distinction at work in Benjamin’s writing between the religious and the theological. Moreover, this distinction allows for a move from the operative force of political theology as the secularization of theology in political society to political theology in service of revolutionary critique and hence as instrumental to the development of an-arche in a planetary context. Hans Jonas captures the difficulty of locating the (sovereign) figure of theological law in his reflection on Jewish theology in the essay, ‘The Concept of God after Auschwitz’. The central claim he develops in that text pertains to the im-mediacy of the Jewish theological figure. Of the world itself as godly or divine, Jonas writes that ‘to the Jew who sees in “this” world the locus of divine creation, justice, and redemption, God is eminently the Lord of history.’31 On this reading, the world has to be contended with as intrinsically theological if it is to be engaged at all. This reading brings us back to the an-arche that is glimpsed in the moment of the law’s suspension. In this moment, the possibility 58

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of continuing the divine project of history is realised – history returns as a locus of miraculous becoming. In effect, this point already answers what it means to think action in messianic terms. If history is divine, then action that is authentically historical is already divine. Remaining in the presence of the truly theological, the central point that Jonas is making is that divinity cannot be thought through the mediative presence of God, who exists only in the ‘other world’ of divine redemption. For Jonas, divinity is history. Moreover, on his terms, this mode of thinking can only be Jewish. This point is made by others. Gillian Rose contends in bold words that ‘there is no Judaic theology – no logos of God’, a position that seems to emphasise that if divinity is to exist, it can only exist in the structure of something that is incomplete and human, namely history itself.32 Importantly, this history is not the product of logos, as for Jonas it is organised by a ‘becoming’ or what Benjamin sees as the ongoing precision of divinity’s ‘no norm’. In other words, if there is, as Rose suggests, no logos of God, the divine structure of history must be anarchic. History is not natural and linear but intercut with different forces. History, we might be compelled to think, is not only anarchic, but anachronistic, formed by the resurgence of the past and the making present of the future. In all senses of the word, history is ‘becoming’. If we return then to the revolutionary history inscribed in Benjamin’s political theology, we come close to the Salvage Collective’s response to the climate crisis, namely that they ‘yearn for the commencement of human history, after an irrevocable decision against barbarism’.33 Here such a commencement is the decision that follows the transgressive break of the law. History is the affirmation and realisation of revolutionary an-arche. More can be gained by remaining in dialogue with the Jewish dimension of Benjamin’s theology, in particular his relationship with Gershom Scholem. Indeed, much of what transpires in Benjamin and Scholem’s shared concern for the politics of religious divinity and the transgressive function of theology as intrinsically messianic underpins the revolutionary politics of entities like the Salvage Collective. Both Benjamin and Scholem share an investment in the historical role of the messianic in Jewish traditions, and it is the messianic that Benjamin will privilege in his discussion of political theology’s revolutionary dimension.34 (It is this language of messianism in Benjamin’s writings on history that ultimately sits behind the patently Benjaminian notion of the Salvage Collective’s ‘materialist theology’, a portmanteau of Benjamin’s materialist historiography and political theology). Unlike the anarchist orientation of Benjamin’s political theology and its inherently political dimension, Scholem remains committed to theology as religiously Jewish. Nevertheless, even for Scholem, the religious appears within the political, meaning that Jewish theology is seen by him to enable the sort of critical political engagement that Scholem considered necessary within his social milieu of exiled German Jewish intellectuals. 59

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In other words, for Scholem the politics of theology is inextricable from the Jewish core of that same theology. Religion and politics blur in the project of Scholem’s theological life. This confluence is heard in his memorial speech for Franz Rosenzweig in 1930, in which he located theology in the service of ‘concrete questions’: As for theology, the discipline . . . that deals with man’s innermost and darkest needs, that seeks to bare the riddle of his concrete existence and show him the deed he must do in order to uncover the path leading from creature to Creator theology is not a science of the essence of the divinity beyond creation but consists rather of the eternal questions of love and will, wisdom and ability, judgment and mercy, justice and death, creation and redemption.35 The force of this project, while clearly aligned to the question of God and a religious life, nonetheless reveals Scholem’s recognition of an anarchic potential in political theology (one that Benjamin will realise in the context of weak messianism).36 The theological, as Scholem describes it, stages the ground for a return to the world as a world of human becoming. Again, the overtly anarchist politics of the Salvage Collective’s yearning for the ‘commencement of human history’ rings through here as the secular form of what is, for Scholem, a Jewish politics.37 Though Scholem’s world remains theologically religious it exists in the immediacy of this world. Theology is, at this moment, secular. Yet in precisely this sense, it possesses a theologically messianic potential – another world might emerge. Secularism becomes, as a revolutionary construct, divine. The practice of political theology thus serves as a space of creation and anarchic beginning, not as the fulfilment of a preordained arche from God, but as divinely self-creating. In the latter stages of this chapter, I will show the way in which this divine creation becomes the an-arche of a specifically planetary life. For now it is clear that while certain Jewish intellectuals like Scholem and Jonas maintained a productive overlap between the religious and the political in their accounts of political theology, Benjamin was reluctant to incorporate their religiosity. Gerhard Richter responds to this antinomy to religious thinking in Benjamin’s work by returning us to the etymological distinction at work between theology and religion. This antinomy is worth mentioning precisely insofar as what Arendt takes from Benjamin is the secularity of messianic politics without the contingent need to locate those politics within a broader frame of religiosity. In other words, the messianic is the revolutionary aspect of secular politics. When Richter thus plays on the imperatives harboured in theology and religion as part of his exposition of theologies’ onto-political stakes, he does so on the basis of Benjamin’s critique of modernity, showing religion to betray – for Benjamin – a dimension of archist finality. In Richter’s account 60

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theology is derived from the Greek theologia, itself comprised of théos (God) and logos (study, sense, speech); it is the study of God or Gods and the scholarly engagement with the sources, scriptural or otherwise, undergirding belief. Religion, by contrast, derives from the Latin religio. According to Cicero, religio derives from relegere, meaning to regarter, to reconsider, to reread; but according to Lactantius’ later account, religio derives from religare, meaning to re-bind, and, by extension, to re-bind oneself, through faith, to the Divine.38 Although Richter concedes that both elements are at play for Benjamin, namely, scholarly engagement and a rebinding of the self, it is the object of study that he shows to shift. His suggestion turns on the claim that rather than the figure of the divine as the object of religious rebinding, Benjamin turns to study itself. In this sense, the act of rebinding returns to the conditions that underpin the labour of studying. This is effectively what Arendt is describing when she speaks about the progression of thought and the reweaving of worldly understanding as an unending task. It relates even more closely to her belief that action can only be achieved in concert and that plurality is the condition for political life. In relation to Benjamin’s formative influence over Arendt, what Richter is demonstrating here is the degree to which a theological hermeneutics or constellational thinking sustains the object of study as it studies. Again, what is prefigured within this conception of theological work is the ‘no norm’ condition of its being. Study assumes an anarchic or, more emphatically, a mode of being that, in order to be self-realising, is, at the same time, self-defeating. When Schmitt thus attests to the fact that theology demands a homogenous setting in which to be realised, equating sovereign power with the maintenance of the status quo or naturalisation of the norm, Richter encourages a mode of thinking theology in dialogue with the anarchic conditions of something like Benjamin’s state of exception. And so, what appears as the object to which faith is reaffirmed is the pursuit of scholarly study itself, which beyond its Judaic setting in an original plurality – the Jewish study group or chavruta requires at least two participants – is reinscribed as a belief in the potential for the becoming or the coming-into-being of a worldly plurality. Bringing this reading of Benjamin’s theology back into the suspension of the arche’s claim to normative naturalisation, Benjamin reorients theological life towards the collective structure of an-arche. Anticipating what Arendt understands in terms of the plural conditions of natality’s beginning, Benjamin imagines a collective moment of action achieved in concert. Importantly, the salvo of this collective is not determined in advance, rather it assumes form in its being sought, hence its constellational structure. Richter effectively captures this in his account of theology as ‘that which generates writing, belief and presentation, while thinking . . . is there to cancel, to erase, 61

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to undo, to extinguish’.39 Much like the necessary and ineliminable co-presence of an-archism and archism, the origin that the an-arche introduces into the world is founded on the ongoing appearance of a collective plurality (itself a form of co-presence), an appearance that can never be guaranteed or known in advance despite its structural centrality to the possibility of political theology’s miracle of revolutionary politics. Becoming Theological – Messianic Origins The language of plurality that has appeared throughout this chapter is drawn from Arendt, who takes the figurative ‘we’ of Benjamin’s writings and turns it into a theoretically rich political concept. Indeed, it is Arendt, writing after Benjamin, who is able to see plurality and the authority of acting in concert as the lost spirit of revolution that Benjamin seems to be searching for in his account of political theology’s transgression of the law. Like Benjamin, Arendt develops a politics of revolution – in the context of the twofold political conditions of natality and plurality – through the language of theology. For Arendt, it is the miracle of birth that coincides with the state of exception, effecting a similar transgression or moment of historical rupture theorised by Benjamin. While initially developed in the biblical setting of Christ’s birth, an event that Arendt reads historically as a moment of disruption, Arendt develops her reading of birth into the miraculous (and secular) faculty of ‘natality’. This connection establishes a setting in which to imagine the miracle of action, which Arendt shows to correspond originally to birth and later to the ‘second birth’ of human natality. In this move from miracle to action, Arendt effectively recasts Benjamin’s language of exception, messianism and revolution into an even more secular and historical context. To be more precise, it is Benjamin’s account of ‘our coming . . . on earth’ as a predicate of messianic action that reappears in Arendt’s writing as the construct ‘plurality is the law of the earth’, a law that remains the contingent ground of an-arche rather than archist permanence. Benjamin’s discussion of the ‘origin’ offers perhaps the clearest account of how his writing informs Arendt’s. In his 1928 text The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin outlines the historical dimension of beginning in terms that move beyond the vocabulary of theology, highlighting the revolutionary overlap between the more secular ‘historical origin’ such as the one that commonly appears in commentary of Arendtian natality and the theological an-arche. Origin, although an entirely historical category has, nevertheless, nothing to do with genesis [Entstehung]. The term origin is not intended to describe the process by which the existent came into being, but rather to describe that which emerges from the process of becoming and disappearance. Origin is an eddy in the stream of becoming.40 62

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Staying with the language of becoming, Benjamin actually anticipates a related concern with the origin disclosed by Arendt’s plurality. In The Human Condition she describes ‘the storybook of mankind’ in similar terms. Here she writes that while ‘we can at best isolate the agent who set the whole process [of a historical event or story] into motion . . . we never can point unequivocally to him as the author of its eventual outcome’.41 Much like Richter’s insistence that Benjamin’s theology betrays a scholarly engagement and rebinding of the self to the object of inquiry such that the very status of the ‘origin’ is always caught in a process of ‘originating’ or ‘becoming’, Arendt is invested in the same sort of suspended beginning. Rather than forgo beginning as a meaningless event that can never ‘become’ in the sense of a static permanence or eschatological completion, both Arendt and Benjamin see history as a locus of alive becoming, sustained in the collective authoring of those events that draw meaning out of that fixity that is the structure of the law. It is this drawing out, something that recovers Heidegger’s language of unconcealment, that Arendt will go on to describe in terms of the unending task of worldly understanding or ‘reckoning’ with the consequences of that stream that is history’s becoming.42 Moreover, it is this reckoning that in Arendt and Benjamin’s writings is described as having a divine or messianic potential. Greater clarity regarding the messianic depth of Benjamin’s notion of the origin, and of Arendt’s to follow, can be found by way of a return to Jonas’ account of theology.43 Rejecting the sovereignty of an ordained and preeminent God whose existence can be framed in terms of an arche of absolute divine permanence, Jonas describes a theological project organised around a ‘becoming God’. The anarchic dimension of this figure should be clear almost at once. Yet Jonas clarifies his position by locating the becoming God in the context of history, moving further still from the structural primordiality of an omnipotent God to a human collective that assumes a divine role through the realisation of revolutionary politics. In Jonas’ account, the status of God is so affected by the act of creation that God can now only be understood in terms of a continual relation to the object of creation, which itself persists as an entity of perpetual change, reset with the coming and going of generations. Ceding self-containment, Jonas’ ‘becoming God’ serves as an object of theological meditation only insofar as such engagement recalls the immediacy of the world as determined by change, or better yet, by becoming. A clear echo of Schmitt’s conjecture that ‘there exists no norm that is applicable to chaos’ can be heard here. And yet, it is precisely ‘no norm’ that Jonas’ becomingGod reflects, encouraging a theological relation as a relation to becoming, and hence to the an-arche of dwelling before the divine. A further parallel between Arendt, Jonas, and Benjamin’s approach to the event of living in relation to such an an-arche or moment of divine becoming can be found in Arendt’s account of thinking.44 63

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Playing on the image of Penelope’s web, Arendt describes the movement of thought as that which ‘undoes every morning what it has finished the night before’ suggesting that ‘the need to think can never be stilled by allegedly definite insights of “wise men”; it can be satisfied only through thinking, and the thoughts I had yesterday will satisfy this need today only to the extent that I want and am able to think them anew’.45 Locked into a temporality of relationality, the becoming-God and the thought-object persist as provocations, unknowable in advance and locatable only in practice. From Benjamin’s theology we thus learn, in Richter’s terms that the ‘unyielding vigilance of thinking . . . must take account of the very conditions that first make thinking possible’.46 Mirroring the fragility of Heidegger’s account of earthly meaning, which is sustained by virtue of the coming and going of generations who interpolate meaning anew, theology progresses on the presumption of a foundational precarity. And yet, rather than undermine the project of theology tout court, precarity or vulnerability create the conditions for the plurality that Arendt embeds in the earthly mud of worldly life. Here the inter-articulation of theological thought and change, namely, its perpetual claim to renewal, reorients theology away from dogmatism to the anarchic ground of the origin. And so, though my invocation just above of an ‘earthly mud’ suggests a preoccupation with the materiality of earthly life, it in fact speaks to the broader antagonistic intersection of human bodies that find their essential being in terms drawn from the earth, without at the same ever essentialising that condition. What is, of course, at play here is a distinction between the merely human life of survival and the properly authentic life of human dwelling. The former sustained by an arche of survival, the latter sought out in the an-arche of history’s earthly commencement. Such a commencement is the act of messianic intervention. Messianic Revolution Once again forgoing a mode of thinking determined by religious study of a mediative godlike figure, Benjamin incorporates a weak messianism into political theology, moving from an understanding of the Messiah as the completer of history (and of sovereign law) to an idea of messianism as a human faculty realised through history’s coming into being.47 Martel makes this same point in his discussion of anarchy when he cautions that ‘we cannot think of some kind of finish line that anarchism can cross and say to itself, “Finally, we are free once and for all”’.48 Indeed, the entire point regarding the form of messianic anarchism that Benjamin develops is its staging in terms of a perpetual fragility that recuperates themes of an original vulnerability. What is continually called for in the ‘weakness’ of Benjamin’s messianism is ongoing recognition of messianism’s original incompleteness. Indeed, the need not only to recognise the onslaught of the new as messianic figures in their own right, but to make space for their appearance, means that messianism can never be ‘finished’. It 64

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must always set the scene for another messianic intervention. In other words, the messianic confers on a collective the need to affirm (and reaffirm) the conditions of openness that hold open a space of arrival. The rupture to the linear progression of history that messianism poses in Benjamin’s project is thus only possible so long as the storybook of history remains in flux, its pages a palimpsest of historical remembrance and becoming. Responding to the claim of the past, Benjamin’s messianism coincides with historical materialism to disrupt the movement of past into present. This rupture in the linearity of history exposes the belated claim of the past over the present, thus effecting Benjamin’s ‘dialectics at a standstill’ and reintegrating past, present and future in the manifestation of divinity or divine becoming.49 It is this rupture that hints at the potential of Benjamin to be read within the context of the climate crisis. Not only does the past exert an organising force over the present, in terms of the violent structures that maintain the crisis, they are confronted by appeals that rearticulate the overlooked ecological violence of that past. Naming violence as ecological violence thus becomes a mode of reshaping the trajectory of history, giving new life to the meaning of what is past. Moreover, because of the problematic nature of time in the context of the climate crisis – of consequences that shift, expand and intensify in time – action that responds to the present reality of the crisis must take an anachronistic response to the present by explicitly recuperating past and future as sites that inform the present. In Chapters 4 and 5, these appeals from past and future assume a central position as I encounter the ‘after-lives’ of living in both the wake and waking of planetary archism’s climate crisis.50 With weak messianism – and here the emphasis is both on the politically theological context of messianism and its qualifying weakness – Benjamin establishes himself at a critical distance from accounts of messianism that operate in the service of God and are thereby defined in terms of religious salvation. In place, messianism is put to work as the anarchic – and secular – beginning that will break away from the historical atrophy preserved in the violence of history’s ongoing normativity. Rather than contend with the religious domain of The Messiah, a figure whose claim to immanent and absolute disruption locates them once again within the limits of the sovereign and hence the logos of the arche, Benjamin’s discussion of the messianic is tempered by the qualification of messianic weakness. Once again emphasising the latent worldliness of his argument, one which hinges on the potential fulfilment of a (Marxist) revolution, Benjamin’s weak messianism serves as a motif for the enduring potential for history to become a site of emancipation. Indeed, in the collected theses of ‘On the Concept of History’, Benjamin describes messianism in terms of the oppressed. He notes that its task is to ‘wrest tradition away from conformism’.51 It is here that the anarchic potential for political theology to take up concrete questions of lived reality finds its clearest expression. Moreover, it 65

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is here that another point of divergence can be seen from Schmitt, who necessarily recentres the linearity of history at the moment of its suspension. This emphasis on the ‘wresting’ of history from conformism leads Raluca Eddon to position Benjamin’s messianic redemption as his ‘revolutionary idea par excellence’.52 Elsewhere, David Kaufman describes Benjamin’s weak messianism in terms of a suspension of ‘the horrific train of “progress” by redeeming (and therefore fulfilling) the hopes of the past. Thus, the hopes and desires of the downtrodden serve as incomplete figures of redemption’, their emancipation entwined with the openness and holding open of the present.53 However, insofar as the messianic in Benjamin’s writing lends itself to secular interpretation as a mode of ‘rebeginning’, in which messianism becomes synonymous with the disruption of historical continuity, this move glosses over some of the more particular elements of Benjaminian messianism. Taking note of the conditions that Benjamin stipulates in regard to messianism then, not simply its ‘weakness’, but its appearance in the coming and going of each generation on earth, I want to move slowly through its development in his writing, connecting the original force of his politically theological methodology with the precise earthliness of its anarchic logic. Only then will it be possible to enjoin Benjamin’s writings in the project of suspending contemporary planetary arches of ‘cheap nature’, unlimited growth and unearthly destruction.54 Planetary Messianism While the critical distinction at play in Benjamin’s writing between theology and religion has already been outlined, it is worth unpacking this differentiation as it pertains to messianism. This will allow the planetary dimension of messianism to come through with greater clarity and highlight the intersection of history and planet as loci of divine power. Although Benjamin’s writing was pivotal to the extension of theological thought beyond the parameters set up by Schmitt, as Eric Jacobson highlights, by the sixteenth century a radical transformation had already taken place in regard to the theological exceptionalism of the messianic figure.55 Jacobson situates his reflections on messianism in his study of the intellectual friendship of Benjamin and Scholem, bringing back into consideration the overlap these two figures represent between Jewish theology and Jewish religion.56 He points out that three centuries prior to Benjamin’s writing, the human figure had already assumed a very active and central role in its own redemption.57 Appropriating the messianic further still, Jacobson situates Benjamin in a historical trend displacing the figure of the singular messianic subject in favour of the dispersal of messianic potential. What amounts to an effective redistribution of messianic power across a generational plurality becomes for Benjamin the condition of messianic realisation. Appealing to a form of collective action that anticipates Arendt’s account of acting in concert or, more recently, Martel’s attribution of a 66

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messianic potential in the anarchic force of what he calls ‘collective vision’, Benjamin’s transference of messianism onto the people coincides with a politics of collective emancipatory action.58 Building on this collective construction of the messianic, Michael Löwy describes Benjamin’s discussion not as a ‘question of waiting for the Messiah or calculating the day of his arrival . . . but of acting collectively’.59 Benjamin himself makes this point in the second thesis of ‘On the Concept of History’ where he writes, ‘our coming on earth was expected. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim.’60 Even before the earthly condition of this appearance is brought into consideration, the explicit reference he makes to an intergenerational obligation of messianism infers a necessary preservation of sensus communis or common sense, that condition that frames political discourse and repels the corrosive effects of political crisis. And so, we see that insofar as messianism disrupts the law’s suspension by reaffirming an open space, messianism in fact brings us back to Schmitt. Weak messianism is the anti-sovereign act that Schmitt understands as effecting ‘no norm’. Weakness thus becomes a central condition of messianism, one that reinforces the potential of a political an-arche and hence of revolution. And yet, conceptualised in this way, the messianic is always at risk of being overlooked, of being cast as ‘too weak’ or simply not visible. To receive the messianic is, then, not to be exposed to some notion of absolute truth by virtue of an immanent, blinding messianic light but to cautiously realise a messianic receival of that which might (or might not!) confer a messianic beginning. The weakness of messianism is coextensive with a politics of response. To not respond or, in Benjamin’s terms, to deny the claim of the past to a messianic future and hence to an anarchic anachronism of rebeginning, is however already to infringe upon the condition for revolution. Non-response coincides with the Schmittian preservation of the law. We are compelled, despite our weakness, to respond. This is the relational groundwork of Arendt’s inter esse, a condition that becomes inherently spatial or indeed planetary, once the ‘earthly’ dimension of Benjamin’s account is recovered. Advancing the secular pluralism of Benjamin’s weak messianism, a similar qualification is at play regarding the object of messianic redemption. Responding to the provocation that is the past’s claim on the present, Benjamin locates the ‘spark’ which flames messianism’s realisation in relation to a narrative of the oppressed. What thus emerges as a central point of consideration is the capacity for the messianic to disrupt forms of historical violence. Rather than confront the violence of history as contained to the figure of the historical sovereign whose reign over history determines the life of the oppressed, Benjamin turns to the structure of historical hegemony itself. It is here that the violence of history is found, constructing a frontier that excludes or perhaps sustains the oppressed as oppressed. This is the arche that the state of exception 67

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suspends. Yet it is also the arche that is reaffirmed by the sovereign – hence the position that establishes an equivalence between violent intervention and a violence by non-intervention or passive preservation of the norm. Recognising the oppressed and reorienting the givenness of the present, messianism offers up unimagined possibilities in an era described by Jayne Svenungsson as ‘permeated by philosophical pessimism about the possibility of radical political change’.61 In other words, the intervention of messianism within a moment of historical suspension to remember the past is the revolutionary act of beginning history anew. Anticipating the messianic project of Chapter 4, this ‘radical change’ will reappear in the critical historiographies of Christina Sharpe and Kathryn Yusoff, both of whom read climate history against the conditions of racialised exclusion.62 The radicality of these positions is not however foreseen. Archism exists within anarchism as much as the sovereign exists within the chaos of anarchic revolution. Suspending the law can, as Benjamin and Schmitt’s divergent political theologies demonstrate, have a plurality of consequences. This is true for Arendt also – her politics as theory and as personal belief occupy a fragile position as revolutionary ideals. Staying with the trouble posed by archism’s claim on anarchic life, Benjamin grapples with this danger of instrumentalising the narratives of those dispossessed by historical conformism. Rather than rewrite history within a teleological framework coordinated around an ethos ‘for the sake’ of history’s oppressed, the messianic force of Benjamin’s historical materialist is oriented in terms of an anarchic ground. Inevitably then, it remains weak in its project.63 Challenging the idea of a Hegelian dialectic of historical progression, Benjamin counters the very premise of progress, writing in The Arcades Project that one of his methodological objectives is ‘to demonstrate a historical materialism which has annihilated within itself the idea of progress’.64 He goes on to explain that this is precisely because the ‘founding concept [of historical materialism] is not progress but actualization’.65 Historical materialism thus ‘aspires to neither a homogeneous nor a continuous exposition of history’.66 In the context of the messianic rupture, what is brought into being is history as an open space of creation, or as an-arche itself. And so, anticipating once again the move that Arendt makes in describing those actions that attest to natality as creating ‘the conditions for remembrance, that is, for history’, a direct link to Benjamin’s inauguration of history in acts of weak messianism is revealed.67 History’s ends Foregrounding this link to Arendt’s writing and to natality’s messianic potential to arrest history in order to open it up to the onslaught of the new, I want to unpack Benjamin’s emphasis on the plurality of messianism and its occurrence across multiple generations. As already noted, this transferral of messianic potential onto a plurality coincides with Benjamin’s rejection of Schmitt’s sovereign 68

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omnipotence. This is important because it signals the ongoing project of history, both in a sense that diverges from eschatological or utopian narratives of history as ‘completable’ while simultaneously holding onto a sense of historical movement in the perpetual renewal of meaning. What appears as the fallibility of a messianic project here is in fact part of its repudiation of the archist violence of history as sovereign – because that too is exposed as fallible! In other words, neither the messianic intervention nor the exclusive bounds of history are finite; neither is wholly determinant or capable of condemning history to a singular ‘forever after’. What appears as the ‘weakness’ of messianism is in fact part of the messianic resistance to the sovereign’s archist tendencies to sublimate all difference. If messianism did prevail as an outright messianic rebeginning, it would simply collapse back into the same force of the sovereign, realigning with the politics of a singular telos. Messianism must then, if it is to be truly messianic, always be weak. It is, after all, with weak messianism that Benjamin replaces the historically totalising figure of the Messiah, who ‘completes all history’.68 Dispersed across humankind, messianism not only displaces the singularity of the messianic and its appearance from without; it can now be read in the context of a divine human history. Benjamin’s aversion to a narrative of theological redemption is implicit in his claim that the ‘storm of progress’ that sweeps the present back into the future blows from Paradise.69 His resistance to this biblical tempest forms part of his broader resistance to theological narratives of historical salvation that displace themselves from the present in order to be consumed by an imaginary, not-yet future. This resistance to the future is not motivated by a blind faith or investment in the present, a space blithely condemned by the Salvage Collective as a site of ‘now-hilism’. Instead, Benjamin’s hope for the present is cautious; it turns on the capacity to be lit by flashes of the past, for it is there that the messianic potential of history is found. Hence, Martel writes after Benjamin of those historicists who claim to ‘keep step’ with their own time, who ‘insist they know exactly what their time is about and who try to foist that temporal certainty onto other periods of time as well’, as reducing the present to the conceit of immanent knowability within the broader lie of historical archism.70 By contrast, the historian that Benjamin describes confers a prophetic potential onto the present as in-the-making or as one that is still emerging out of and into history as a site of becoming or commencing. Such a historian might have turned their back on the future but only so far as they are invested in the present as future; after all it is this space that is still becoming, still entering history, and so still suspended in a state of openness. Against the force of the tempest of progress, in The Arcades Project Benjamin deploys the notion of an ‘afterlife’ as a motif for disrupting historical linearity. Rather than attempt to pacify the storm of progress, Benjamin challenges the necessary unfolding of time as futural progression. Returning to the 69

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past as an entity alive with messianic potential, Benjamin develops a project of historiography that does not seek to complete the past, a move which submits it to the arche of history, but instead opens it as a space of agonistic or anarchic interpretation. Rather than simply pacify the storm then, Benjamin accounts for a mode of interpreting the past through acts of coming to understand (in which past and present are situated as ‘becoming’ intelligible and hence as ‘becoming history’). Anticipating a definition of understanding that Arendt will adopt in her own writings, he writes that ‘historical “understanding” is to be grasped, in principle, as an afterlife of that which is understood; and what has been recognized in the analysis of the “afterlife of works,” in the analysis of “fame,” is therefore to be considered the foundation of history itself’.71 The ideas that Benjamin introduces here will emerge centrally in Chapter 4 where I take up the implications of historical understanding more closely, particularly as they resonate with Saidiya Hartman’s own use of afterlives as a historical theme.72 I point to it here, however, to stress the way in which understanding and methods of comprehension, namely historical understanding as historical methodology, inform what it means for history to ‘appear’. Charging the past with the force of now-time [Jetztzeit], Benjamin articulates how the past, having been ‘blasted out of the continuum of history’, comes to assume new meaning in the present – a move that necessarily changes what is configured as ‘present’ and sustains the messianic suspension of history’s linear arche.73 Arendt recreates the force of this image in her account of action as occurring in the collision of past and future.74 Part of the image she is drawing on when she does so is seen already in Benjamin’s revival of the ‘past’ in messianic action that reorients the direction of history. Fundamental to both Arendt and Benjamin’s account of historical unfolding here is the occurrence of that history on earth within the planetary realm that sustains human and more-than-human life. Embedded within and defined (though not curtailed) by this set of planetary conditions, Benjamin’s project can be distinguished from attempts ‘to construct visions of a better world of transcendence’, and aligned instead as Timothy Beasley-Murray shows to ‘reveal the broken nature of the world of history . . . in anticipation of the voice of revolution that will come as destruction’.75 Acting ‘into’ planetary history in this way, Benjamin’s appeal for a new image of history is revolutionary in the precise sense that it disrupts the conformist Schmittian continuum in the linear march from past, to present and on to future. Where Schmitt’s nomos of the earth collapsed the plurality of experience that prefigured European expansion, advancing a claim to Eurocentric historical unilinearity, Benjamin’s ignites the moment of beginning as the historical arrest out of which history will reappear as history.76 Rather than signal the collapse of history, this cessation of what is coincides with the rupture that prefigures the new beginning of the anarchic messianic moment. To this end, Benjamin writes in ‘On the Concept of History’ that 70

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materialist historiography is a ‘Messianic arrest of happening’.77 In the context of the climate crisis, this arrest, which I will explore in the following chapters, coincides with the historiographical break away from the archist narrative that organises the logic of mainstream political response. What this looks like more exactly is a necessary confrontation with neo-colonial structures that organise that climate crisis’ systems of extraction, dispossession and survival. Implicit throughout this reading on the afterlife of history is its underlying contingency: the claim that history – understood as the onward progression of time – could be otherwise. Bringing this contingency into consideration, without denying the violence of its past nor the ramifications of its effects, adds to the nuance of Benjamin’s claim that it is not the Messiah who is sought but the incompleteness and fragility (or weakness) of the messianic. It is only the latter that legitimizes the experience of the oppressed in their oppression and actualises the coincidence of messianism and justice. Willem Styfals clarifies this point, recalling that Benjamin ‘was not interested in his [the Messiah’s] actual coming but in the eternal possibility of his coming, and in this way this possibility influenced our perception of time and present’.78 The emphasis here is important, it reveals the organising premise of an-arche as the condition for history and revolution. It is to neither the Messianic nor the explicit messianism of beginning that Benjamin attends. It is instead the messianic: the constant potential for the world to be otherwise. When Benjamin writes in a point only just cited that materialist historiography is a ‘Messianic arrest of happening’, his argument remains at the moment of rupture, a moment which though pregnant with possibility has not yet realised the fulfilment of the Messiah. There is much to gained in emphasising the displacement of messianic actuality – which necessarily implies a form of finitude in historical archism – in favour of a possible messianism. Indeed, Benjamin’s emphasis on the messianic effectively anticipates the turn I will make in later chapters to locate messianism’s anarche in the context of planetary an-arche. In contrast to both the Messiah and ‘place’, which both evoke a sense of exactitude, the messianic and what we might call the ‘placedness’ of anarchic experience withdraw from totalisation. In so doing, the an-arche recalls Heidegger’s language of concealment as the perpetual challenge to the unconcealing predicate of worldly action. In the following chapter, these two notions of an-arche, Heidegger’s an-arche of place and Benjamin’s an-arche of history, come together in Arendt’s writings. This project in Arendtian beginning hinges on the prior configuration of Benjamin’s messianic arrest of those unearthly archisms that seek to sublimate the conditions of political life by denying the knowledge that each generation is expected on earth and who thus command the conditions of weak messianism. In other words, the next chapter operates in that moment of suspension or messianic arrest. And yet, as we know, the conditions of this moment are fragile; messianism is weak. The task requires that, to quote again from the Salvage 71

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Collective, an ‘irrevocable decision against barbarism’ be made such that ‘the commencement of human history’ and a messianic feat of planetary proportion can be realised. Such a decision is not easily made, and revolutionary hope, well-intentioned though it is, can succumb to the comprehensive force of planetary archism. Indeed, as members of the Salvage Collective go on to write, ‘it does not take much for provocation to become swagger to become mannerism, and thence a new kind of rote thinking’.79 Reckoning with the double reality of archism and an-archism, alongside the now irreversible conditions of planetary archism, is the reality of revolution today. Though Arendt was not forced to encounter the exact contours of this reality, she contended with her own iteration of the ‘lost world’ produced by the arche of the Third Reich’s ‘One World’ logic. Out of this world she sought the recommencement of history. She was not always successful. In the following chapter, I look to internal complexities of Arendt’s writings on an-arche, seeking out those conditions that might facilitate a return to the world.

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3

CONFRONTING ARENDTIAN (AN)ARCHISM: NATALITY DESPITE THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

The context in which this book is written is one marked by the planetary archism that has produced the climate crisis. Its production follows logics of extraction that are fuelled by imperial structures that authorise dispossession and determine what Judith Butler describes poignantly as the ‘grievability’ of certain lives and not others.1 These structures are its archist core. Framed in these terms, the crisis is revealed as a form of violence. Indeed, the logic of domination that sits within these particular archic structures demands that it must be violent. Violence, in this instance, though it will be explored in much greater detail in the following chapter, is the structural degradation of those conditions that make life possible. It is what Achille Mbembe calls the production of lives ‘condemned to live’.2 It is what the Salvage Collective describes as the forced complicity of the worker in destroying the (planetary) conditions that sustain the possibility of their liberation.3 And so, though violence may be a physical blow, it can also exist as the slow poisoning of air, the rising tide, the drying land.4 More recently, Butler has written of the need to understand structural and systemic violence by moving beyond frameworks that rely on two figures, ‘one striking and the other struck’.5 The expression of violence needs to be viewed in light of the political conditions that determine its necessity, impunity and naturalisation. Against these factors, each of which lies within the organising project of archism, the previous two chapters have highlighted the contours of Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin’s writings that went on to influence the development of Arendt’s anarchist and planetary account of political life. It 73

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is now to Arendt herself that I turn, fleshing out the detail of that influence and how she grappled with – and sometimes failed to – adhere to the responsibility of staying vigilant to the threat of archism. Arendt, who set the stage of planetary politics in the introductory chapter to this book, re-enters our thinking here as the dialogical counterpart with whom to realise a planetary anarchism. In part, this decision is the mere consequence of chronology; Arendt wrote after Heidegger and Benjamin and so was able to incorporate into her writings those themes of planetary anarchy that had already emerged in theirs. Yet more precisely, it is Arendt’s insistence on reckoning with the reality of political events and her already present concern with what is earthly in human life that informs this decision. It is Arendt who, as I indicated in the Introduction, gives us the threefold methodological imperative that must coordinate political thought in the age of climate crisis: 1) to think what we are doing; 2) to confront the elementary problems of human living-together; 3) to recover the lost spirit of revolution.6 However, this and chronology alone do not distinguish Arendt as an ideal interlocutor. As James Martel warned us early on, archism pervades anarchism and Arendt’s anarchist project was fallible. This fallibility unfolds in a complex way. First and foremost, it is necessary to clarify that what Arendt understood as the tradition of anarchism and the an-arche that I associate with her writings here are not the same. While Arendt rejected in rather sweeping terms the political tradition of anarchism as ‘singularly unequipped to deal’ with the project of revolutions to found something new (rather than simply end with the abolition of the state), she nevertheless maintained an allegiance – in theory at least – with the emancipatory and participatory politics of anarchism as it has been presented throughout this book.7 Indeed, Martel suggests we think of her as a ‘stealth anarchist’ and situates Arendt’s writings as the point of departure in his own account of anarchism.8 Reading Arendt with a critical attention to the political work achieved by concepts like natality and plurality rather than taking at face value her casual dismissals of anarchist traditions, a paradoxical and double account of the anarchic emerges. What she clearly rejects as apolitical in the anarchist tradition is, in the first instance, the anarchist as a lone figure, a political hermit who is incapable of the collective action that she considers the fabric of politics; while in the second, rejection coincides with her conflation of Marxism and anarchism.9 In the end, the ability, as has already been shown by many others, to recover an anarchism in her work reveals an ambiguity as to what exactly she rejects in anarchism and creates a point of entry from which to productively develop an account of Arendtian anarchism.10 Arendt’s critiques of anarchist politics as politically impotent are generally made in the form of off-hand remarks and in relation to particular nineteenthcentury anarchist traditions that she viewed with disdain. Assigning these remarks with what I would consider to be an undue gravity, as evidence of a 74

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deeper commitment to anti-anarchism for instance, relies on a conception of anarchist politics that belies the traditions of collective organisation, embrace of unpredictability and investment in cultivating ongoing change that Arendt otherwise radically endorses. The account of anarchism that I take from Arendt thus needs to be held in view of her definition of beginning from On Revolution. When Arendt writes that ‘what saves the act of beginning from its own arbitrariness is that it carries its own principle within itself, or, to be more precise, that beginning and principle, principium and principle, are not only related to each other, but are coeval’, she sets up a direct opposition with the conceit of anarchism as holding within it the authorising end of politics.11 The arbitrariness that Arendt describes here is thus distinct from the kind of arbitrariness that she associates with the discretionary powers of the anarchist who locates themselves as the source of the law’s beginning and hence as unbound by the law of beginning – which exists as the demand to stay vigilant to the capacity for beginning to constantly begin. And so, while she writes in that same text a seemingly more conservative or ‘archic’ chapter on liberal constitutionalism, what undoes that conservatism is her conviction that politics is bound up not with the naturalisation of law but with the paradoxical conservation of underdetermined – and undeterminable – potential. What is then at stake in Arendt’s disagreement with the figure of the anarchist and their politics is a particularly limited and esoteric account of anarchism. As Brian Smith writes, Arendt in fact held in common with the anarchist tradition ‘a belief in the revolutionary nature of the council system’. Where she was critical of the account given by nineteenth-century anarchists of the ‘temporal or transitional’ characterisation of this [revolutionary] movement’, these criticisms, as Smith goes on to write, are largely misdirected and contingent on a conflation of Marxism and anarchism.12 Returning to her view of the anarchist as antithetical to the plurality of political action and hence as necessarily oppositional to her political condition of plurality, Arendt in fact navigates a form of anarchism into plurality. We see this infusion of anarchism into political plurality when she writes that plurality ‘corresponds to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world’13 Describing plurality as without an original origin, Arendt in fact establishes it as always already in anarchic relation. Indeed, she writes in the essay ‘What Is Existential Philosophy?’ that if it does not belong to the concept of man that he inhabits the earth together with others of his kind, then all that remains for him is a mechanical reconciliation by which the atomised Selves are provided with a common ground that is essentially alien to their nature.14 Such an alien landscape is the landscape of the anarchist, whose absolute yet isolated origin of ‘no ruler’ – yet also no other – is fundamentally disconnected 75

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from what it means to be a political actor. What Arendt alleges as the anarchist’s antipolitical and alienated characterisation, she positively reimagines as the unpredictability, or literal an-arche, of acting in concert within an earthly plurality. More precisely, the latter anarchism emerges in the an-arche of promises, what she describes in The Human Condition as ‘a remedy for unpredictability’. Promises then, unlike the enclosure of sovereign laws, function as an-arches for a plurality.15 The affinity that emerges in her writing between anarche as a politics and as a collective concept is then staged in contrast to both the sovereign law imposed from an elite and the possibility of the externalised anarchist violence perpetrated by the individual. The necessary antagonism between Arendt’s view of anarchists and anarchism thus begins to disintegrate even before we look to her explicitly anarchic concept of human natality, the faculty of unpredictable and spontaneous beginning. And while a discussion of Arendtian anarchism will inevitably lead to an engagement with natality, at the moment, we must remain in dialogue with the source of her anarchist fallibility, namely, that her theorisation of anarchism as an attribute of a political collective does not remain vigilant to the seductive power of archism. What this means for the reader of Arendtian anarchism is a necessary engagement with the historical reality in relation to which she develops the theory of anarchic beginning. And so, we must look to another area of her writings – her reflections on the American Revolution – for it is here that the limits of her anarchist politics are most explicit. The Anarchist Politics of Revolution Arendt, insistent on the fact that her thinking remain bound to the incidents of reality ‘as the circle remains bound to its focus’, looked to the historical conditions of the American Revolution to develop her theory of revolutionary beginning.16 In essence, it allowed Arendt to empirically illustrate the revolutionary dimension of natality, not as an ontological predicate of political being but as a historical device, capable of creating or commencing human history. And so, while the precise condition of natality is, of course, not reducible to this event, Arendt’s broader discussion of the anarchic spirit of revolution is articulated through a discussion of this event. And while she doesn’t explicitly use the word ‘anarchism’ in describing the Revolution, what she describes in relation to the federalist system of collective and spontaneous governance that underpinned the revolution is the politics of an-arche. In other words, what Arendt understands as revolutionary in the Revolution was the an-arche of the Revolution’s bottom-up council system. This mode of political organisation was, for Arendt, evidence of the ‘lost revolutionary spirit’, and the form of collective, spontaneous and importantly non-hierarchical politics that it took is what we can take from her as an organising instance of political anarchy. Without the benevolence of a sovereign ruler, the federalist system gave Arendt 76

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a basis through which to think the resurgence of direct democracy and a mode of doing politics that resembled the agora of the Athenian polis. It is thus important to emphasise that it was this form of politics, not the violence of the Revolution, that Arendt saw as anarchic and revolutionary. What this means, of course, is that in Arendt’s mind, the subsequent ‘failure’ of the American Revolution was its establishment of a representative government rather than the creation of citizen-controlled public spaces for debate, and not at any point its implication in slavery or colonial displacement.17 Indeed, in one of the clearest readings of Arendt as an anarchist, Shmuel Lederman turns to Arendt’s model of council republicanism as providing the systematic framework through which to realise the aspirations of contemporary anarchist movements. His argument turns on the claim that outside the socialist or anarchist tradition, it is Arendt who offers the only ‘re-examination of the council system as an alternative to the party system’.18 This, however, is not what Arendt saw in the subsequent construction of representative governance. Nevertheless, the substance of her engagement with the council system as a political reality informs the breadth of contemporary engagements with Arendt’s writings: from the ideological anarchism of anti-capitalist and post-GFC protests to decolonial movements.19 Against the benevolent sovereign, councils demonstrated the potential of anarchy as a political mode of organisation.20 Here we can turn to the same invocation of anarchist theorist Herbert Read as Lederman does in his reflections on Arendt, the councils and anarchism, to remind ourselves that in contrast to the ‘common image of anarchism, it is perhaps still worth emphasizing that “what is ‘without ruler’ . . . is not necessarily ‘without order,’ the meaning often loosely ascribed to it”’.21 This point must be held in mind when we go on to think about the practice of Arendtian anarchism more broadly. It is clear that Arendt saw in the Revolution a revitalisation of a mode of governance that she associated with the Athenian polis. While she would criticise the Revolution for failing to institutionalise the council system and so inscribe an anarchic quality within political life, in its emergent moment, she saw something that looked like the public appearance of the revolutionary spirit. Indeed, Lisa Disch describes Arendt as ‘composing an elegy to the American Revolution’. Quick to the mark however, Disch goes on to write that it is a composition marked by Arendt’s ‘mischaracterising’ of the founders’ political strategy, to the point of ‘warping’ our democratic imaginations, a condemnation that is reinforced by Disch’s attention by Arendt’s numerous historical mistakes.22 On these terms, it is not an elegy that we would want to blindly repeat. Like Disch, however, who responds to Jason Frank’s reading of On Revolution, as a ‘landmark of historically situated political theory’, by recognising the importance of attending to the text’s internal conflicts, I too see a need to grapple with the mix of theory and history in Arendt’s writing 77

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on anarchic revolution.23 This need underpins the necessity of recognising precisely what Arendt is ‘elegising’ in the American Revolution, namely a mode of participatory governance. As indicated, this is what informs the contemporary readings of Arendt’s revolutionary politics of anarchism. Yet as Disch and Frank note, the council systems – and so Arendt’s reading of them – were not ahistorical. They took place in a history of colonial dispossession that was still – and is still – unfolding. The exclusion of this reality from Arendt’s theorisation of the council system becomes the mark of our theorisation today. The question thus emerges as to whether Arendt’s theory of anarchic natality can be read productively without attending to this question of colonial history as current framings of Arendt the anarchist suggest? And if not, then how should it be read? My answer to these questions has to come in two stages. Firstly, by noting that Arendt’s theory of revolution was not a history of revolution. As Disch notes, Arendt did not always subscribe to factual fidelity. And while historicising a theory can indeed offer great clarification – to history and theory alike – this is not what I want to offer. Instead, the answer to how we read On Revolution as a theoretical treatise on beginning has to hang on what effect the omission of colonial archism’s presence has on the theoretical rigour of beginning, an-arche and natality. This question can be explained in clearer terms. The revolutionary and hence the anarchist dimension of the Revolution that Arendt celebrated was the emergence of a council system and public town hall spaces in which the people could appear as political actors. And yet – and as Arendt failed to properly consider – the construction of these spaces coincided with the reaffirmation of the colonial logic that preceded the federalists’ presence – and their councils – in the United States. That is to say, there was an already present archism at work in the anarchic meetings of the new and revolutionary state. Given this reality, the question then emerges as to whether we can – or should – advance with Arendt’s an-arche of revolutionary and collective beginning. The answer to this question is not straightforward and it needs to be determined in clear terms that remain coordinated in view of an Arendtian theory of an-arche. This is not easily done. Before we proceed, it must be noted that while the councils serve as the systematic form of an-arche, they themselves are not the revolutionary spirit. They remain its systematic expression. What inspires them is natality, the ontological basis of political action capable of sustaining the revolutionary spirit of beginning even when the allures of predictability threaten to resolve (and so destroy) its tenuous and anarchic constitution. In other words, given that it is natality that sustains the councils and, insofar as what follows is not a study of anarchic institutions, but of an-arche itself, it is natality that will serve as the organising point of departure for a discussion of Arendtian an-arche in this chapter. What this means is that answering the question of whether we can or should advance with Arendt’s theory of anarchy, and hence 78

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of natality, must consider her failure to substantively reflect on the colonial conditions that made the institutional form of natality’s expression possible. This is necessary even in light of Arendt’s critique on colonialism elsewhere, in part because what transpired in the US context was not colonialism but settlercolonialism and hence the naturalisation of colonial presence. Ayça Çubukçu outlines clearly the issues at stake here, noting that ‘not only were African Americans and Native Americans excluded from the original consensus universalis [of the United States], arguably, their enslavement, slaughter, and dispossession through violent acts of settler colonialism were constitutive of the revolutionary republic that Arendt so praised’.24 Building on this reading, David Myer Temin goes on to offer one of the starkest expositions of Arendt’s relation to settler-colonialism. Like Çubukçu he begins by reading Arendt historically, describing her account of Madison’s emphasis on colonisation via federations as a ‘constant enlargement whose principle was neither expansion nor conquest but the further combination of powers’ as giving a ‘federalist twist’ to the settler-colonial fiction of terra nullius.25 He goes on to write that this fiction that was central to the settler projects the world over, including parts of North America and the entirety of Australia, requires the imagination of the ‘colony as empty in order to justify the formation of European civil society in a putative state of nature’.26 In more general terms then, this ‘twist’ serves as the trace of Arendt’s naturalisation of colonialism as it goes on to appear in the form of settler-colonialism. In a particularly forceful article, Patricia Owens writes unequivocally that ‘Arendt consistently refused to extend her powerful boomerang thesis to contemporary racial conflict in the United States’, arguing that ‘this refusal was rooted in the unique role of the American republic in her vision for a new post-totalitarian politics, which necessitated excluding the United States from the kind of decentred, transnational analysis of racism found in The Origins of Totalitarianism.’27 And so, though as Owens notes, Arendt was a keen critic of the ‘boomerang effect’ of colonialism that was the corrupting influence of the authoritarian outpost on the colonial metropole, as colonialism transitions into settler-colonialism and the invasion becomes a structural event ‘come to stay’, Arendt largely forewent interrogation of the absorption of colonial violence into the settler-state.28 More to the point, Temin points out that Arendt’s anti-imperialism on the ground of things like the ‘boomerang effect’ was largely determined by the consequences of imperial practice ‘for the metropole and expanding outward to the rest of humanity caught up in intra-imperial rivalries’.29 In other words, hierarchy reigns even here. This is perhaps the first glimpse of the fact that archism has successfully infiltrated anarchism. This has direct historical implications for Arendt’s reading of the American Revolution because it challenges the integrity of the council system and the legitimacy of its status. In theoretical terms, it brings us back to consider the co-presence of an-archism in the form of collective, revolutionary beginning and the sovereign 79

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violence of archism. Whether this undermines the very legitimacy of an-arche as an operable theoretical tool of Arendt’s or whether it points to a necessary and ineliminable paradox at its centre is what I take to be the problematic of Arendtian an-archism. Taking note of this paradox, in what follows, the political and politics, theory and practice, converge as the setting in which to think the contemporary struggle between an-arches of planetary revolution and those arches of planetary domination that otherwise sublimate political hope and its productive unpredictability. While I will withhold inquiry into the specific conditions of planetary archism’s violence until Chapters 4 and 5, here my thinking is oriented, as noted, by the possibility of determining Arendt’s planetary an-arche as sufficient to contend with them. This question cannot be cast aside. Arendt’s politics must be held to account and the strength of her political concepts tested. The climate crisis has already imposed a fog of dissonance onto the political and too much is at stake to not interrogate those resources to which we turn in seeking to bring about a revolutionary future. In other words, we cannot risk recreating a political theory of anarchy that unconsciously reproduces conditions of archic destruction.30 The imperative to interrogate underpins the decision to bring Arendt herself into critical dialogue with contemporary Arendt scholars, with those who read Arendt against herself and challenge the coordinates of her position. Notable in this arena is the investment of feminist Arendt scholars who extract from Arendt’s writings an ethics of emancipatory, feminist action. As will become apparent, such emancipatory politics also speak to the ungendered revolutionary anarchism of Walter Benjamin and disclose a point of convergence between the revolutions that will be required to subvert the patriarchal forms of planetary archisms that currently sustain the climate crisis.31 Throughout this chapter I run Arendt’s natality and Benjamin’s politics of weak messianism together, staging an elective affinity between them that becomes productive as a way of thinking natality’s earthly condition in revolutionary or messianic terms. After an initial outline of natality in the context of Arendt’s writings, it is drawing on Adriana Cavarero’s work on the ethics of natality that I begin this chapter in earnest. Rather than locate the institutional form of the lost spirit of revolution in the council system, Cavarero offers a narrative of natality as told through the practical realisation of political vulnerability. It is this, not the council system, that then becomes natality’s revolutionary force. Developed within a geometrical imagination that reads natality as a ‘postural ethics’, Cavarero highlights the affective politics that coordinate something like the council system, yet instead she foregrounds vulnerability as their organising condition. At the same time, insofar as what underpins this discussion is Arendt’s theorisation of an-arche, what necessarily endures throughout as a central problematic is the ineliminable reality of colonisation, for it was this archist theory of political 80

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dwelling that Arendt allowed to infiltrate her theorisation of anarchic beginning and that now sits as the necessary point of confrontation for any theorist of Arendt, let alone Arendtian anarchism. Where and Why An-arche? If the complex opposition gestured towards at the centre of Arendt’s politics of an-arche, namely her theory of an-arche contrasted with her naturalisation of colonial archism in the form of settler-colonialism, strikes us as threatening to upend the very possibility of reading Arendt anarchically, it is worth reiterating the complexity of the planetary setting into which this discussion leads. At the outset, it is something of a relief that it is no longer radical to think of climate change as a form of violence and hence as linked (or linkable) to violence’s organising entity, namely, archism itself. However, in as much as retreats into clichés such as the claim that ‘the weather has always been volatile’ become less and less common, and the violence of this weather comes into view, such recognition does not mean that its perpetrator is found guilty. Increasingly, they are not ‘found’ at all. Indeed, the very condition of violence resists legibility, meaning that even before battles over climate reparations and the injustice of archism’s planetary violence are fought, reality has become illegible.32 As climate denialists lay claim, for instance, to Dorothea Mackellar’s 1908 Australian poem, ‘My Country’, co-opting the line ‘of droughts and flooding rains’ as a way of dispelling the anthropogenic violence of these droughts and floods, they demonstrate the way in which the conditions that organise the legibility of climate crisis violence – and hence, accountability – are eroding.33 On the one hand, this is seen in the historical fact that it is precisely not Mackellar’s ‘sunburnt country’ that climate denial pundits experience; that with climate crisis the country has changed.34 Yet this position is too simple. A continuity of weather must be conceded. The same sun still rises. The mistake lies in the thought that the weather is somehow distinct to the planetary condition of world politics. What denialists miss, in other words, is the fact that ‘weather’ does not exist outside the fourfold space of Heidegger’s gathering, the earth of Benjamin’s messianic generations, or Arendt’s inter esse place of politics. Weather, before we understand it as anthropogenic or extreme, is a condition of reality and hence of political life. Before climate change is anthropogenic, there is no ‘weather’ that is not already human, in the precise sense that there is no human who is not already living in and conditioned by their relation to the weather. The weather, in other words, is not a fixed reality. It is meaningful and ‘real’ by virtue of its being a condition of life. And so, before its progenitor is accounted for, what must be conceded is that the weather is now more extreme. Droughts and floods are not as they once were. One hundred-year floods become recurrent realities. This is undeniable. What is, of course, now distinct is the genesis of this weather and hence the moral imperative that must 81

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accompany political response. But to live as though the weather were static and not already gathered together in one with the earth, ethics, and the intergenerational dimension of worldly life is to deny the conditions of life itself. Accountability must be determined and demanded. Yet what also needs to be conceded is the new reality of extreme weather. Unlike the flood of redemption that was offered to Noah, in this century, floods leave in their wake uninsurable homes. Fires, once central to the generative cycle of pyrophytic flora, now ravage landscapes. In the story of the Australian Black Summer bushfires that staged the opening of this book, more than a billion animals were either killed or displaced.35 This is not as it ‘has always been’. Fires at this scale have prompted earth scientist Stephen J Pyne to suggest we now live in a ‘pyrocene’, an age marked by an insatiable and uncontrollable relation to fire.36 Colonisation of the planet via the organisation of domestic livestock has led to soil erosion and desertification, conditions that exacerbate drought, and so, when they come, fire and floods also. Despite the growing regularity and extremity of these moments of planetary violence, and the seemingly more explicit intersection between oil and gas extraction and that most traditional exercise of violence – war – these events are yet to be brought into meaningful relation.37 Benjamin’s moment of revolutionary suspension is yet to keep pace with the normative domination of extraction. The coherency of the fourfold slips from view and the conditions of political life become a force of alienation, meaning that the reality of climate change, despite its immanent and ineliminable presence, is not comprehended for what it is. There is, in this realm of ‘incomprehension’, no change, there is simply a land ‘of droughts and flooding rains’. This claim precedes and reinforces the view that planetary responsibility is an obligation for ‘them’, ‘over there’, ‘at that point in time’.38 This is the twofold effect of the phantasmal archism that sustains the crisis; it turns on the logic of ‘cheap nature’ and the ‘unconditional imperative to accumulate’.39 It exists in the cultic structure of capitalist growth; it reappears as the insidious invisibility of what Rob Nixon calls ‘slow violence’ and it insists upon a particularly callous notion of survival of the fittest.40 Naturalised conditions cannot contend with change and so, when they must, the responsibility to confront, to reckon with reality, is assigned the responsibility of someone else, somewhere else. It is with this that a planetary an-archism must contend. To reiterate the project of this chapter then, by beginning with Arendt on natality before reconsidering her project in light of Adriana Cavarero’s feminist project, I move towards precisely such a confrontation with the stronghold of archism, not only as insidious to Arendt’s work but as a present reality. Ultimately, I remain committed to Arendtian thinking without subscribing to Arendt as ideology. To this end, my encounter with Arendt, across this book as a whole, but first and foremost in this chapter, is staged as a response to Patricia Owens’ question regarding ‘how many [of Arendt’s] signature contributions rest on 82

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racist and ethnocentric presmises, and whether anything is left of the work if these premises can be severed and fully reworked’. Like Owens, I agree that ‘there is no easy way to find out except through such a reworking and there is no one-size-fits-all checklist that can be applied across canonical thinkers’, this inquiry into Arendt is thus distinct to my approach to Heidegger and Schmitt and couched instead in those terms, frameworks and ideals to which Arendt committed herself.41 Arendt on Anarchic Natality And so, we return to Arendt and the problem with her politics of anarchic encounters in practice. The limits of this an-arche emerge in her reading of colonialism within the settler-state, and the apparent ease with which she accepts facts such as the ‘short periods of cruel liquidation because of the natives’ numerical weakness’ in the colonisation of the United States and Australia.42 That Arendt both glosses over genocide in this instance and equates weakness with what is a clearly questionable understanding of population density, is one basis in articulating this problem. It threatens the spirit of revolutionary anarche that is natality and undermines the conditions of the council system that appears as the institutional format of that revolution. While Arendt relies on the stretch of years between the violence of invasion and those later events like the American Revolution to justify the retreat of the former into the sanitized structure of history, the fact that she describes the revolution as ‘founding a completely new body politic without violence and with the help of a constitution’ cannot be viewed in these sanitised terms.43 This examination must come before a celebration of natality, that supreme condition of Arendtian beginning, which otherwise threatens to become a site of mere beginning, irrelevant to the historical conditions of its appearance and hence as naturalising one theory within another. Evidence of the growing literature on Arendt and decolonial responsibility begins with recognition made by one Arendtian that it is no longer ‘a radical claim to say that the sovereignty of the United States was founded on and expanded through the conquest of Indigenous peoples’.44 Points like this register the fact that despite the rich affordances of Arendt’s work and the critical insight that she offers, her sublimation of indigenous experience in the settler state and her acceptance of the neo-colonial practices that sustains the settler state has not been ignored.45 Yet where others reckon with the historical reality of Arendt’s writings in the context of historical revolution, land rights and human rights, few interrogate the organising spirit of revolution itself. Natality remains, in Arendt’s writings and those of her commentators, opaque. On the question of natality, Fanny Söderbäck accuses Arendt of saying ‘notoriously little of the concept,’ while John Kiess refers to it as her ‘most important, if least understood, contribution to political theory’.46 Miguel Vatter asks the direct question of natality 83

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and anticipates the focus of Cavarero’s project: ‘if Arendt’s political thought is so “anti-biological,” then why does she root human freedom in birth?’47 Feminist scholarship responds to this question, establishing a line of inquiry that Julian Honkasalo describes as using Arendt’s writings as ‘stepping-stones’ to articulate robust ethical projects.48 Indeed, it is this field that realises Arendt’s methodological imperative that speaks to the project of anarchism: to act from ‘the vantage point of our newest experiences and our most recent fears’.49 It is well worth contemplating that this is the only position from which responsible scholarship can be produced today. Arendt’s preoccupation with birth first emerges in her reading of St Augustine, on whom she wrote her doctoral dissertation in 1929 and in relation to whom she continued to write throughout her life, including her final work, the unfinished and posthumously published The Life of the Mind. From Augustine, Arendt takes the claim that humans are born in order to begin and hence are beginners in themselves. This position anticipates the Kantian position that humans are ends in themselves and so cannot rightly be treated as a means to something else. Though the two points are similar in terms of the moral claims they make about the human status and the immorality of treating another as a use-object, the reorientation from ends to beginnings, and Arendt’s return to Augustinian beginning in order to do so, are important. These points will be unpacked in due course. At the outset, Arendt’s dissertation on Augustine and so, in many respects, the first point of reference in establishing the affinity between Arendtian natality and Augustinian beginning, is dense and somewhat awkward to read. Though Arendt revised it for publication in the 1960s and clarified those sections that invoke Augustinian beginning, it remains a peripheral rather than central basis for considerations of natality.50 More to the point, the revisions of the 1960s came after natality’s fuller development in The Human Condition, giving further cause to look to those interim texts of the 1950s if what we are looking for is a clear idea of natality – and revolutionary anarchism. The first clear encounter we have with the theoretical form of natality is in The Origins of Totalitarianism, where Arendt presents the notion of birth – not natality – as a secular or human faculty of divine beginning. Against the archist domination of the Nazi Third Reich, she writes in the conclusion to The Origins that ‘with each new birth, a new beginning is born into the world, a new world has potentially come into being’.51 It would not be a stretch to hear in these words the theological language of Benjamin’s weak messianism and the world-making potential of revolutionary thinking.52 Despite the clear anticipation of what will be determined in relation to the political condition of natality just seven years later in The Human Condition, a moment that will also mark a turn to the theological language of miracles, the word ‘natality’ does not appear in The Origins. Nevertheless, what she is doing in the text is setting up the groundwork for its later articulation. In particular, in the 1951 84

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text she is developing its political function, and in a seemingly direct dialogue with Benjamin, a sense of its historic potential to realise a ‘new world’. The convergence anticipated here with her accounts of a revolutionary new world in the American Revolution, written in On Revolution in 1963, are clear. As I’ve gestured to above, to the extent that Arendt invokes Augustine in the conceptual development of natality as coincident with birth, and the status of humans and their role in history, the presence of a Benjaminian politics builds in tandem. And so, while it is Augustine to whom she continually turns, I want to suggest that what she is doing when she describes the creative capacity of natality is, in fact, coextensive with what Benjamin understands in terms of weak messianism. She quotes Augustine early on in The Origins, writing that ‘beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically it is identical with man’s freedom. Initium ut esset homo creatus est – “that a beginning be made man was created,” said Augustine. This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man’, yet what comes after bears closer relation to Benjamin.53 Meaning that as the link between creation and birth gains momentum in her ideas, such that in The Human Condition she writes that natality is the ‘miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, “natural” ruin’, what is heard here is not Augustine but Benjamin. The slip between the normal and natural ruin of the world in particular speaks back to Benjamin’s critique of the norm, the naturalisation of which leads to the catastrophe of history.54 Yet rather than the ruination imposed by the natural world, there is a clear sense in which the natural ruination of the world that Arendt references here occurs when history itself is not renewed. Rather than speak to the natural ruin of weeds and decay, Arendt’s account of ruination and its suspension by way of a ‘miracle’ relate to the absence and presence of natality, that revolutionary spirit that she describes as creating the conditions for historical remembrance and hence for history itself.55 In other words, natality is already described as a practice in historical suspension, holding within it that doubled Benjaminian quality of disrupting the norm and staging of the miracle of beginning through cessation and renewal. Bringing herself into further alignment with Benjamin, she goes on to write in The Human Condition that it is in natality that ‘the faculty of action is ontologically rooted. It is, in other words, the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born.’56 The echoes of Benjamin’s messianic expectation of earthly generations, in whom the messianic potential to wrest new beginnings from the past lies, are precise.57 When read in this way, natality brings us quite clearly back to the miracle of Benjamin’s political theology and the historical event of messianic intervention to open up the continuum of history to a space of becoming. After all, this same sense of openness is read in Arendt’s account of natality as coinciding with ‘the becoming of a new world’. Yet the language of birth must remain with us. 85

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Arendt is insistent that the event of birth is central to the political function of natality. Against the disembodied language of historicity and the redemption of what remain an abstract oppressed class, natality speaks to the bodily experience of politics and the fleshy reality of political encounters. Clarifying the political consequences of birth, Arendt positions action in the form of birth, namely, as the ‘second birth’ in which ‘with word and deed we insert ourselves into the human world . . . in which we confirm and take upon ourselves the naked fact of our original physical appearance’.58 Here the world and earth come together in an invocation of the inter esse place of political life. By ‘taking upon ourselves’ the task of bringing the earthly condition of mere appearance into the realm of the human world, Arendt gestures towards a position outlined earlier in The Human Condition that ‘the earth is the quintessence of the human condition’ and spelled out in greater detail still in The Life of the Mind as the fact that plurality (the recognitive condition of natality) is ‘the law of the earth’.59 As she brings together this setting of earth-world or, what I am calling inter esse conditions for political life, she begins to formulate the conditions for a political, planetary an-arche. This claim becomes clearer when she writes in On Revolution that ‘what saves the act of beginning from its own arbitrariness is that it carries its own principle within itself or, to be more precise, that beginning and principle, principium and principle, are not only related to each other, but are coeval’.60 Peg Birmingham rephrases this for us in a language that pertains to this text, explaining that ‘the event of natality is an arche in the double etymological sense of origin and rule. Further, it is the unpredictable, anarchic origin that carries its rule or principle within it’.61 In other words, the beginning of either birth or natality is never absolute in the sense of teleological beginning, as inclined towards an end; rather it is always open, its end unpredictable. On this reading, natality shares Benjamin’s staging of an-archism as the commencing of human history. Indeed, while Arendt describes natality as a historical event, she does so in relation to a history that is contingent on what we might call an original historical corporeality, on memory in the first instance and, in the second, on the earth as its material condition.62 More to the point, precisely because the mere satisfaction of those earthly conditions that organise human life does not create ‘history’ in any meaningful sense but simply coincides with the continuance of the natural and hence aligns with the ruination that is history’s naturalisation, human history or historical natality is always at once on earth and world, operating in that planetary space of inter esse’s anarchic becoming. This point is made clearer still by Arendt, who bases politics, which is simply to say, the content of history, on the fact that humans are an ‘earthly product’.63 And so, even before we look further back to the connection between natality and the role of place or planetary dwelling in Heidegger’s anarchic conception 86

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of the Open, the quality of gathering in place is already seen in the form that natality takes. This, I want to argue, is the planetary an-arche of natality. The force of this reading comes into view as it is brought into dialogue with Adriana Cavarero’s feminist reading of the role of birth in the political expression of natality.64 And what I want to suggest here is that we look to Cavarero’s feminist ethics of natality, one that she describes as an ‘ethics of inclination’, as paralleling the an-arche of natality. What this double reading of natality, once as feminist and once as planetary an-arche, offers, is a mode of thinking the integrity of natality anew. Framed as an original reading of natality, we come closer to realising the much-repeated imperative now incumbent on political theory of the climate crisis, namely, to see after Naomi Klein that ‘everything has changed’ and so too must theory.65 Cavarero’s An-arche of Inclination Adriana Cavarero’s project continues a now well-established resistance to interpretations of natality that position the literal event of birth as a basis for metaphorical abstraction only.66 Lisa Guenther captures the resistance that both she and Cavarero realise, describing the ontological weakness of metaphorical readings as often ‘implicitly or explicitly coded as masculine’.67 Against these tropes Cavarero’s interpretation of natality confronts their subversion of the material (and maternal) conditions of birth, which she argues render the corporeality of political life (and its origins) invisible. For Cavarero this confrontation hinges on a displacement of the child in accounts of natality, in favour of the mother, a reorientation that she describes as a direct rejection of the masculine ego of Kant’s moral subject, who, in her telling, comes to stand in for a broader tradition of masculine thinking (such as the one Guenther gestures towards).68 It would be a mistake, however, to think that Cavarero’s substitution of mother for child is straightforward. The basis of her reading is not onefor-one, the child cast aside in order to make way for the mother. Instead, it turns on the relation between mother and child, recalling the logic of Arendt’s inter esse. Indeed, the ethics of natality that Cavarero develops as a critique of what she calls masculinity’s ‘moral rectitude’ turns on the literal position of bodily inclination between parent and child. In this sense, she evokes a far more Levinassian account of ethical relationality in the form of the gazing face that looks down or up, inclining the body – parent or child’s – towards that of the other. What is thus at stake is more than a simple ethics of maternal care. Enfolding a critique of sovereign rectitude within her account of natality’s inclination, her argument also rebuts Schmittian claims to centralised power and the staged benevolence of archism’s will. Suspending narratives of singularity – mother, child or sovereign’s – Cavarero situates natality in the context of parental relation. For her this becomes the setting for relationality and the original inscription of relationality as the condition 87

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for political action, which, after Arendt, arises from natality and the event of birth. Moreover, this scene of relational encounter, of suspended meeting between parent and child, caregiver and dependent, becomes the setting of an-arche’s ethics also. What we see in this move is thus an attempt to locate the theory of natality in the conditions of its first appearance. Moreover, we can read it as a countermove to the historical entanglement of natality’s revolutionary form in the historical conditions of the American Revolution. This point returns at the end of this chapter. Cavarero’s focus on natality as the groundwork for an ethics of relationality distinguishes her project. Already at the outset, it gives depth to a topic – natality – that is largely underdeveloped by Arendt and those writing after her who chose to see it alternately as a readily available, if abstract, notion of individual beginning or, more commonly, as independent of its origin in birth.69 It is the latter that Cavarero confronts, such that the fallibility of the former, the conceit that ethics exist within the individual, can be exposed.70 Ruminating on the original ambiguity in Arendt’s writings referenced above, Cavarero reminds us that Arendt’s use of natality ‘at least has the advantage of putting a somewhat unusual theme at our disposal’.71 Indeed, she sees it as an open invitation for fabulation in Arendt’s politics and hence as a point for thinking anarchically. Moreover, Cavarero’s work serves as a reminder that if a political concept is to be deployed, it must first be interrogated. For Cavarero, this begins by bringing Arendt into dialogue with another text on natality, one that she finds in Leonardo’s painting The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne (1503–19). The painting, which adorns the cover of the book in which Cavarero develops these ideas, Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude, serves as a pictographic index of natality. In it, Mary inclines over her baby, who looks up and around to his mother. Behind them is Saint Anne, whose body in turn inclines over her family, her look cast down and away from the viewer. In this moment of distracted care, as Anne protects her family from injury, Cavarero invites her reader to consider the way in which she exposes herself to injury, effecting the dangerous ethics of living in states of mutual inclination. This is the ethics of natality; from here we can work our way back through to the archism of Arendt’s first articulation of natality in practice. Cavarero uses the painting as a point of departure from which to imagine the various lines of encounter that are present not only at birth as mother and child incline towards one another in acts of mutual love and care, but in the meeting of bodies generally.72 The reciprocity of inclination, a word that she understands both literally and conceptually as the condition of vulnerability in acts that ‘incline’ the body into the world and seek meaning in the receiving hands, eyes, mouth and ears of the other, forms the basis of Cavarero’s ‘postural ethics’. It is this posture of unknowing invitation that anticipates the an-arche of meeting – and acting – in concert. Through inclination, Cavarero 88

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describes a product of relations without a clear origin; instead, she encourages a consideration of action that exists in the unfolding origin of meeting. Implicit here is Benjamin’s account of the origin in ‘the stream of becoming’ and the impossibility, in Arendt’s work, of finding a sole author of history’s political action.73 In a clear evocation of her earlier work on the relationality of the voice which always speaks to the ear, and hence suspends the singularity of that sovereign speaking voice, Cavarero’s postural ethics of inclination turn from the heroic appearance of the natal subject to the body that supports them, the hand that guides them, the voice that propels them.74 No longer an appearance ‘from nothingness’ as others have suggested, Cavarero shows natality to go beyond an encounter of bodies in the Arendtian condition of plurality.75 As the ontological basis for action itself, Cavarero shows natality to inscribe conditions of care and dependence into the being of action. On this account, Cavarero wants to say, to act is to incline. Moreover, to act in this way is to be exposed as vulnerable, such that this vulnerability becomes the ethical condition of acting. It is in this sense that action subverts the arche of sovereign authorship or the status of the spectacular disruptive natal child, demanding instead recognition and support in vulnerability. As she goes on to write, the project of emphasising vulnerability as the groundwork for action is to foreground relationality as original and constitutive of being, at the same time as exposing the unbalanced ways in which we are consigned to one another in acts of being.76 This consignment becomes clear in Cavarero’s claim that natality is the ends and the means of political life, highlighting the coextensive form of ethics and action. Locating these acts in history, she deploys her own Benjaminian language, and defines them as the ongoing intersection of multiple discontinuous beginnings. Importantly these beginnings are neither from nothing nor inaugurated in relation to nothing. Beginnings occur in place, they interrupt the movement of history, they reorient a trajectory, suspending mere linearity in favour of a disruptive, discontinuous, human temporality. Hence, Cavarero describes natality as occurring ‘among us here’, inviting a simultaneous encounter with the plurality and the place of natality.77 For Arendt, natality always already arrives into a world that exists, implicating a plurality of existing actors with the task of maintaining the world for the onslaught of the new.78 Against the unworldliness of alienated history, Arendt begins The Human Condition by cautioning against the ‘universal time’ of an extra-earthly life in her critique of Sputnik, insisting on the earthliness of natality’s condition and giving teeth to that claim that the ‘earth is the quintessence of the human condition’.79 Yet it is Arendt’s description of natality as coincident with the ‘earthly plurality’ of men and as ‘[creating] the conditions for remembrance, that is, for history’ that puts into relief the earthly an-arche of natality.80 Recognition of this earthly preoccupation is fleeting in Arendt scholarship. It appears in subtle forms in Judith Butler’s ethics of earthly cohabitation and is hinted at in Peg 89

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Birmingham’s interrogation of crimes against natality that ‘attempt to eradicate plurality from the face of the earth’.81 However, even when Cavarero writes that natality occurs ‘among us here’, she remains caught by the force of that ‘us’, forgoing substantive interrogation of the place of natality ‘here’. Indeed, despite the depth of Cavarero’s project in recovering the bodily forms of natality, something is lacking. In its current form, inclination relates to bodies alone. But insofar as Arendt’s worldly plurality precisely does not exist from nothingness – as Cavarero rightly notes – it cannot be figured in solely interpersonal or bodily terms. Natality must be – because it always already is – placed. Nevertheless, what we can take from Cavarero is far from negligible. The ethics that she develops, one that she describes in relation to the ‘geometrical plane’ of natality – the inclined bodies in Leonardo’s painting of the Madonna are our clearest source here – she inscribes into natality as the condition of politics. An ethics of vulnerable relation thus becomes the basis of political action. Indeed, on Cavarero’s account, politics cannot proceed without this form of original dependence, meaning that politics is always a space of vulnerability, marked by the interdependence of its actors, who, as in the moment of parental encounter, lean on one another. Diane Perpich reiterates this point from Cavarero in stark terms when she writes that ‘to say that subjects are inherently relational is to say that they exist within a field of differences. That is, the subject is not an isolated existent who has relationships as external associations or bonds that it can take on or give up as a matter of will; the subject is its relations in the sense of being constituted by them in ways that, while malleable, are not wholly up to it to control, either as a matter of fact or with respect to their personal and social significance.’82 The force of this reading lies in its positioning of ethical relationality as an original condition of being. In effect, this brings us back to the inauthentic life described by Heidegger as the one that fails to respond to the condition of living within the gathering of the fourfold. Where for Perpich, writing after Cavarero, the denial of that original relational condition undoes the being of the person, for Heidegger it is the denial of that historical, placed and interpersonal condition that undoes the meaning of being. And yet, what Cavarero offers is an example in thinking that takes the convergence of being and ethics, expressed in the form of inclinational action, forward to unpack the concrete situations that form the political reality of feminism. If the vulnerability of inclination provides Cavarero with the tools to confront this reality, the question we can take from her project is what would it mean to act vulnerably in relation to the planetary condition of natality? Answering this question will offer a path back towards the latent colonial archism of Arendt’s project. An-arche in Place: After Cavarero and Benjamin The original form of this question arises from the need to place the body, to locate it in its ‘placedness’, and to see the anarchic function of natality as a 90

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function of place. That Arendt’s plurality is worldly is well-known, yet what is too often overlooked is the contingent earthliness of that plurality, which she describes in her final work as ‘the law of the earth’.83 Indeed, it is by forgetting the earth that we find ourselves in the contemporary ‘lost world’ of the Salvage Collective, a world that resembles the arid desert of Arendt’s apolitical realm of alienation described at the end of The Human Condition.84 Though Cavarero enriches the ethics of natality, showing us how to think the plurality of natality in terms of an original an-arche of relation, she remains at a distance from the place of natality, from its earthly condition, and ultimately, from the planetary an-arche that is needed in unearthly times. If natality is to be conceptualised within a political framework that is conditioned by the ineliminable climate crisis and a recovered version of Arendt’s revolutionary spirit, it must be done so in view of occurring in this earthly place of planetary life. Returning to consider Cavarero’s relational subjects in the presence of Benjamin’s earthly generations, those whose ‘coming on the earth was always expected’, a clear sense of the way in which natality relates to something like the gathering of intergenerational, planetary communities comes into view.85 Indeed, when Arendt attributes a custodial responsibility to earthly plurality in her essay ‘Crisis in Education’, she effectively echoes the position outlined in Benjamin’s writings on the responsibility of each earthly generation to respond to the claims of the past. Unlike Benjamin, for Arendt, this claim is described as originating in the future, in the decision that is taken not to expel future generations from the world by destroying the conditions for historymaking but by ‘[preparing] them in advance for the task of renewing a common world’.86 Part of this preparation includes the preservation of the earth against the ruin beset by history’s naturalisation and the desertification of public life. As discussed in the previous chapter, for Benjamin the stage of this historical encounter appears in ‘the air we might have breathed’ and people we ‘could have talked to’, namely in the contingency that determines the possibility of all encounters. The similarly abstract and unformed ‘future’, the not-yet of history, organises Arendt’s ‘historical claim’. This reorientation from past to future is consistent with the emphasis on natality as the beginning of history. Yet it does not forgo the past, which Arendt recognises as vulnerable to forgetting and distortion. The point, instead, is to hold them both together: past and future as the conditions for the present. Looking elsewhere in Cavarero’s writing, to the corporeal accounts of natality and action, the present acts as the ‘ear’ that hears and gives meaning to the calls from past and future, inclining into time and responding to that which lies just outside the bounds of memory. Picking up on her own language of inclination, Arendt describes the historical function of action as a ‘parallelogram of forces’, in which action sets off in a ‘diagonal,’ in a new act of indeterminable origin.87 Not knowing what the future will bring nor what the recovery of the past’s oppressed 91

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will change, reading inclination into the historical conditions inaugurated by natality echoes the messianic project of Benjamin. Giving further basis to this elective affinity between Benjamin, Arendt and Cavarero, Benjamin’s turn to the collective – which was shown in the previous chapter to anticipate the expectation that falls on Arendt’s polis – also anticipates the relational ethics of Cavarero. Indeed, both Benjamin and Arendt want to expect more from their respective communities, Benjamin insisting that the claims of the past will not be settled ‘cheaply’ while Arendt dismantles political hubris and determines worldly responsibility an ‘unending’ task.88 And yet, whether the human polis is capable of being better can never be guaranteed. Alongside the ongoing labour of inclining into the world in unending acts of understanding and beginning, the temptations of archism must also be resisted. In Cavarero’s writings, the spectacle of birth threatens to overwhelm the conditions of action, leading to the empty celebration of the new rather than the care that is required to recognise what is disruptive or emancipatory in natality. Read in this light, Cavarero’s emphasis on the vulnerability of birth is staged in opposition to the phantasmal allure of archism, which appears in the fully formed figure of moral rectitude, independent of inclination’s attendant care.89 Both Arendt and Benjamin were well aware of the threats archism posed in the form of phantasmal ideology and the way it could infiltrate politics and erase the conditions of political appearance. The ease of not thinking, of falling in with the masses, of realising that banal unthinking act of evil, is ever present in an an-archist world. Martel describes the way that archism ‘can project particular wishes as if they were universal, the promises it offers of privilege to some few elite and of comforting – but false – compensations for the rest, the harmony and peace it suggests [make] archism a permanent feature of the political possible’.90 This feature persists as we take from Arendt the abstract condition of natality: unbirthed, unplaced and unhistoricised. In as much as natality needs to be read back into the material conditions that inform its appearance, it equally needs to be read in light of its own theoretical emergence. At last, then, we return to the politics of archism in the revolutionary history of the American Revolution. Arendt and Archism, terra nullis and Beginning It is unsurprising that Arendt looked to history to develop the theory of natality. Her positioning at the outset of The Human Condition, that she writes from ‘the vantage point of our newest experiences and our most recent fears’, reinforces this mode of scholarship.91 Yet importantly these discussions are also determined by place. As was discussed in the Introduction, she framed natality in relation to the archism of the Nazi Third Reich; a politics of archism that saw itself ‘ordained to reorder the conditions for earthly appearance’ and against which natality would bring a new world into being.92 Reading natality 92

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and place together, she describes the Nazi death camp as a place in which life was ‘denied earthly purpose’ and where extermination occurred as the ‘extermination of men as men [meaning] the extermination of their spontaneity’, a term synonymous with their (earthly) natality.93 As the death camp marked out a space of pure archism, it became a site of unearthly unfreedom, the killing of earthly plurality coextensive with the killing of natality. Bringing into clearer focus still the intersection between worldly politics and earthly place, Arendt describes the function of totalitarian archism as emerging from the naturalisation of the belief that we live in ‘One World’, a site that evokes the planetary claims of archism.94 Holding on to this sense of place in conceptions of the politics of beginning, Arendt describes herself in the Kierkegaardian position of standing before the world in ‘fear and trembling’ in order to confront the history of Nazism.95 She assumes this position as she surveys the ‘lost world’ conditions of worldly alienation at the end of The Human Condition, as she looks fearfully for the lost spirit of revolution in On Revolution and as she sees the political failure in ‘What is Authority?’ of not confronting ‘the elementary problems of human living-together’.96 These are the moments that I described at the beginning of this chapter as the methodological imperatives set out in Arendt’s writings in relation to politics, place and history. And yet, for all her historicization and reckoning with reality as creating unearthly conditions, she failed to sufficiently interrogate the origin conditions of that nation state that she viewed as having the most robust political revolution and hence as the one that came closest to realising the project of natality as revolutionary. This failure is in contrast to Arendt’s substantive critique of the nation state as the locus of rights and as coordinating the conditions for political thought. Biographically speaking, we know that Arendt was not straightforwardly ‘progressive’ in the radical or anarchist sense. In the introduction to this text, I quoted the editor of Arendt’s estate, Jerome Kohn, describing Arendt as ‘a liberal wanting change and a conservative desiring stability’, leading to that paradoxical accusation of Arendt as ‘harbouring an unrealistic yearning for the past [and] for being a utopian revolutionary’.97 This antagonism reappears in her response to the question as to whether she was a liberal or a conservative: ‘I don’t know . . . You know the left think I am conservative, and the conservatives sometimes think I am left, or I am a maverick or God knows what. And I must say I couldn’t care less.’98 Though Arendt is critical of the nation state throughout her writings, particularly in the context the state played in relation to securing rights – she thought that state rights undermined the integrity of the more primordial ‘right to have rights’ – she nevertheless fails to adequately critique the colonial origins of the supposedly revolutionary state. Indeed, she seems to circumvent the necessity of engaging the question of the origin by casting the land in question terra nullius, a manoeuvre that simultaneously extinguishes the role of the human from the equation and establishes land as 93

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meaningless until it is incorporated into the system of colonial order. In other words, Arendt’s acceptance of terra nullius aligns her with the particularly corrosive arche of colonial ideology. In a recent discussion referenced at the outset of this chapter on Arendt’s reproduction of settler-colonial mentalities, David Myer Temin notes the way in which Arendt sees colonisation as an ‘improvement’ of the empty space that is terra nullius. He describes her as ‘[casting] colonisation as an origin, not a continuous practice of native elimination and dispossession’. Drawing our attention to a point in The Origins of Totalitarianism where she uses the story of terra nullius to justify colonial presence, he quotes her as saying that ‘where an untouched, overwhelmingly hostile nature that nobody had ever taken the trouble to change into human landscape seemed to wait in sublime patience “for the passing away of the fantastic invasion” of man’.99 The force of this point is important. When she does reflect on the original violence of indigenous genocide, as in the admission that US colonialism turned on ‘the extermination of native peoples’, she seems to neutralise this violence by highlighting the effect of colonial rule.100 Temin notes this distinction in relation to Arendt’s critique of the racism that pervaded South Africa. He writes that she does not identify the same race-based politics in North America or Australia because ‘they had already massacred all the Indigenous peoples (or settled on vacant land); therefore, there was no need to invent the permanent second-class citizenship for an indigenous population that Arendt condemns as a proto-fascist project [in South Africa]’.101 But it is precisely not the case that either genocidal massacre can recede out of history in order to establish legitimate grounds for colonial presence nor that a similarly insidious division of populations did not occur in contexts where such violence did take place. Understanding how to reckon with the fact of this violence, Arendt’s general indifference towards it, at the same time as seeing within her writings a politics of natality that can retain the productive vulnerability of Cavarero and ultimately offer a path towards a planetary an-arche is a complex endeavour. When Arendt describes the planetary archism of the Nazi regime as operating in relation to a ‘One World’ logic, its capitalised form indicative of its absolute structure, part of its singularity as ‘One’ history, is depicted by her as its own original weakness. In other words, in its claim to absolute law, she sees a fissure of revolutionary hope. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, where these ideas are first explored, she describes the ‘humanity’ of the ‘One World’ as an instance of mechanisation. Forgoing the antagonistic wresting of meaning from the anarchic origin of humanity in the earth, its legibility only made belatedly possible within the recognitive structure of an equally anarchic plurality, the ‘humanity’ of the ‘One World’ becomes a function of archism. She writes in The Origins that ‘one fine day a highly organised and mechanised humanity will conclude quite democratically – namely by majority decision – that for 94

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humanity as a whole it would be better to liquidate certain parts thereof’.102 The fragility of humanity, which may become precisely such an expression of archic violence, does not, however, cause Arendt to forsake it. Part of humanity, indeed part of politics, is the necessary confrontation with the archic forms that permeate below the surface of anarchic life. For Arendt, the reality of anything is denied, its integrity eroded when it does not exist in the harsh light of the public sphere, sustained in the dialogical forms of speech. Of humanity, she writes that even this ‘loses its vitality to the extent that man abstains from thinking and puts his confidence into old verities or even new truths, throwing them down as if there were coins with which to balance all experiences’.103 There is, that is to say, always the possibility that humanity will forsake itself when it forgets itself. She goes on to write in The Origins that it is humanity that will have to serve as guarantee for the right ‘to belong to humanity’, despite the very real fact that ‘it is by no means certain whether this is possible’.104 At this moment in her writing, she effects the ethical condition Cavarero has gleaned from the event of birth; she demonstrates the vulnerability of politics, which stands not only in need of plurality’s recognising gaze; she actively recuperates the heroism of an-archism despite its unknown, uncertain ground. Establishing such a foundation not only in political life, but in the ethical conditions that support that life – rights, recognition, dignity – Arendt challenges the projection of certainty and the prophets of political archism, which she describes as the ‘strong men’ of the masses. In other words, she does this in the name of something wholly unpredictable. We first learn of the source of this unpredictable an-arche in the preface to The Origins of Totalitarianism. Here she describes human dignity’s need for ‘a new guarantee which can be found only in a new political principle, in a new law on earth, whose validity must this time comprehend the whole of humanity’.105 Like the fragile guarantee of humanity, the earth resists emancipatory immanence for Arendt. Its anarchic potential requires work. And yet, unlike humanity, the earth persists even when it is not considered, precisely because it retreats from the yoke of archic domination and blurs the distinction that archisms insist upon between nature-culture, earth-world, past-future binaries, flashing up in moments of Benjaminian recognition and marking the present possibility for an anarchic earthly break. This again is the point that she makes at the end of her report in Eichmann in Jerusalem when she writes in relation to the redemptive imperfection of humanity that ‘under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lessons of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that “it could happen” in most places but it did not happen everywhere. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.’106 95

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An-arche on Earth We have already seen in the Introduction that Arendt locates the basis of political life in the earth. In so doing, she provided an exemplary form of the anarchic. As the site of human dwelling, which can be understood in the Heideggerian sense as coeval with human being, the earth continually resists immanent meaning and organises the ongoing care outlined in Cavarero’s inclinational ethics – i.e., the project of earth-being is ongoing, custodial, inclinational. Connecting anarchic life to the earth brings into suspension the logic of extraction, which, by positioning the earth within the arche of carbon logic, denies the earth its status as an unknowable, retreating entity. Recognising, however, that there is no arche of earthly life – i.e., humans don’t simply eat, drink and sleep to survive and so the meaning of life cannot be answered tout court – but that worlds are developed that unconceal the earth as humanely habitable, as well as the fact that an exclusively worldly life can only ever be archic in the sense of determining these people fit for this earth, the earth offers the primordial agonistic example of anarchic politics. Or rather, the earth as made meaningfully habitable in the construction of worlds, offers the primordial agonistic example of anarchic politics. On this claim, Robert Pogue Harrison suggests that ‘what distinguishes us in our humanity’ is the fact that we inhabit worlds that are intentionally constructed in our bid to bind ‘generations together in a human continuum’.107 A human earth is, in other words, historical, it is moved from concealment into the place of human dwelling. Viewing this place between the earth and world as an ‘inter esse place’, as neither the result of an earth-arche or world-arche, the former wholly Animal and latter wholly Man, but the anarchic beginning of earth-world life, Arendt marks the point of entry from which to consider the revolutionary potential of political life. It is worth recovering this ground in some detail and returning to the inter esse place that is the condition of planetary anarchism. Arendt discusses the notion of the inter homines esse in relation to the fragility of the polis in The Human Condition. Recovering the notion of the inter esse from the language of the Romans, where ‘to live’ and ‘to live among men’ were coextensive, the inter esse appears in Arendt’s writing as part of the vocabulary through which she develops the relational ontology of plurality. From here Arendt connects the inter esse or ‘between being’ to the plurality of the polis, that place that is sustained not only by virtue of the relationality of humans but by the almost literal space that is maintained between them such that the One World does not intrude and collapse the diversity of opinion into the arche of The Political, a moment that would destroy political life as such. In her own words, Arendt writes that the polis ‘properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organisation of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose’.108 The structural form that an-archism assumes here in the informal 96

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emergence of a polis, which is neither built nor enforced, but created, unpredictable and plural, develops a conceptual form in the hinging together of earth and world, hence the anarchic earth-world, as the figurative inter esse place that has meaning in the act of being. It reappears in the vulnerable inclination of Cavarero’s geometrical plane as inclined bodies that lean on one another in the expectation and hope of care. And yet, this an-arche of the planet and the need to ground an account of human dignity on earth, to see plurality as the law of the earth, to resist the territorialising archism of worldly life which lays claim to the an-arche of the earth, is not consistent in Arendt’s writings. How then do we chart a return to the problematic instances of anarchic beginning in Arendt’s writings? Arendt, who insisted on the inter esse place of politics and the recognitive structure of natality and plurality to begin as emerging from the earth, yet who nevertheless lauded the American Revolution as the anarchic event par excellence. For Arendt, this event that was ‘violence-free’ served as the clearest instance of anarchic revolution in history. And yet, this is not true. Colonisation into the Americas resulted in the death of over 40 million indigenous peoples.109 Its naturalisation into the ‘neutral’ history of linear progression has implications today relating to the provision of healthcare, education, housing and justice. The political break that is signalled in the Revolution and its grounding of a revolutionary format in the spontaneous emergence of a council system does not change this fact and the entrenchment of dispossession in the founding of a ‘new’ and independent land does not transfer the act of archic displacement onto the British and liberate the founders as an-archists. Instead, the arche of colonisation is naturalised in this moment – it is neutralised into the historical violence of settler-colonialism. This cannot be overlooked. Arendt’s emphasis on remaining bound to the events of her time, and on a politics that does not seek out the transcendental subject ‘man’ but looks to the plurality of historical humans, risks disintegrating in the face of this internal contradiction, or at worst succumbing to the preservation of archism.110 Benjamin P Davis grapples with this question in illuminating ways, looking at the intersection of Arendt’s writings on rights and place, in order to realise the kind of anarchist politics of her writings in the context of a decolonial state without reinscribing the territorialised arche of dispossession to which she ultimately subscribes.111 Departing from her anarchic conception of the right to have rights, a right that is grounded in an anarchic principle of natality, Davis returns to the land-based condition of politics.112 Following the work of indigenous rights theorists, Davis qualifies land as custodial rather than proprietary, signalling a shift from Locke and things like the ‘white possessive’ identified by Aileen Moreton-Robinson.113 What is made implicit here is a shared project of political anarchism in the context of Davis’ ‘land’ and Arendt’s ‘earth’. Working with an anarchic conception of land/earth, Davis realises the responsibility 97

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intrinsic to a framework of rights that wrests meaning from the place – and placedness – of politics. Against the territorialised origin of the American Revolution then, which is always already working against the anarchic foundation of politics in the earth, even in those moments of anarchic gathering in the council system, Davis concludes his discussion of Arendtian land rights by writing that this renewed conception of rights amounts to situating ‘ourselves not only as actors among, actors making demands and re-claiming public life among other actors [here an understanding of plurality is at work], but also as actors within, actors within the land, responsive to and responsible to land’.114 This latter point brings in the placedness of natality and the earthly condition of Arendtian politics. Echoing the linguistic precision of Arendt’s account of the anarchic, which similarly carries its own principle within itself, Davis’ invocation of responsibility as operating within land reorganises the meaning of politics by returning to the anarchic origin of place that sustains politics. In other words, what he offers in the context of contemporary US rights is a return to the earthly conditions of politics that were overlooked in Arendt’s original analysis of the revolutionary project of the US. As he makes this move, Arendt’s writing slips from view. Davis ventures forward from her writing to a conclusion that, within the context of his project, is unpredictable – it is anarchic. He ends with a complex invocation of ‘us’ and ‘our’ work as beginning ‘anew and again’ on the land that is the contemporary US. And yet, the argument pertains not only to the US but to the unterritorialisable ‘earth’ that is the planetary place of Arendtian politics. The argument could stumble at this point, its potential hanging on the responsivity of the reader who either hears these words or doesn’t. And yet, that ambivalence has to remain. Responsibility rebounds onto the reader to begin the work of thinking place, land and the ‘why’ that must accompany any action into and within place. Humanity expects more and so too do theorists of anarchism. This ‘why’ is not a matter of doubling down on extractive relations to land and politics, it is a demand of the reader, the dweller of land, the political actor as much as the politician. It does not impose archic metrics on the practice of anarchic politics, it rather invites precisely that reflexive interrogative relation to politics that realises what Donna Haraway calls the ‘response-ability’ of doing politics and what Cavarero imagines in the inclined body that cares for the other.115 Speaking to these questions in the context of institutional decolonisation, Gomeroi scholar Nikki Moodie points out that we need to ask ‘why we’re doing anything’.116 In part a response to institutional ‘moves to settler innocence’, a trend identified in Eve Tuck and K Wayne Yang’s seminal essay, ‘Decolonisation Is Not a Metaphor’, as the failure to engage an indigenous futurity, Moodie’s point highlights the naïvety of thinking that metrics solve politics or that political concepts can ever retain reality when they aren’t also subject to reflection.117 Here a seemingly clear echo of Arendt’s suspicion of political blueprints can be 98

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heard. Moodie goes on to write that in the educational context (but also more broadly), targets are good but statistics ‘can only ever measure the health of a system’, they can’t explain it or make the organising meaning of action palpable.118 The revolutionary aims of an-archism, which is inherently disruptive, must, in other words, remain. Rosa Luxembourg, a central figure for Arendt, makes this point with even more force, when she condemns with absolute contempt the position that seeks revolution by way of reform.119 Luxembourg, writing in an entirely other context to the indigenising project of Moodie, Tuck and Yang, nevertheless forms part of one voice that speaks to a discontinuous project of ongoing revolutionary beginnings. Indeed, each becomes part of the interrogative project that grows out of Arendt to think the an-arche of politics as operating in the inter esse place of earth and world. Davis’ project fits into this reflexive inquiry, turning back on Arendt in order to take a different path, reorienting the anarchic ground of her politics in terms of its own potential. And yet, it would be naïve to think that Davis’ project or even Cavarero’s feminist ethics of inclination redeem Arendt’s project. The failings of her attempt to realise an-archism in her historical account of the Americas has direct implications for how she responded to contemporary US politics, a point that is acutely evident in her reaction to race politics and civil rights movements of the 1960s.120 Though Arendt laid the groundwork for feminist intervention, she continually dismissed the pursuit of these questions herself. And so, we can dismiss her if we want, or like Arendt we can grapple with the world, with the necessary shadow that archism casts on the fragile structures of an-archist politics. However we choose to proceed, there is a responsibility that historians of ideas have to intervene in the organisation of theory in the present by recognising the complexity of its legacy, to salvage in the name of salvation. Such is the condition of anarchic life. In the end, we come back to James Martel’s recognition that despite the ineliminable temptations of archism, we are not ‘doomed to an endless archist past, present, and future’. He even cautions against any kind of ‘once-and-for-all victories’, drawing on Walter Benjamin to argue that though ‘we may be able to defeat archism, we can never be assured it won’t come back. Hence the need for ongoing vigilance, a way of life and a state of being that is inherently, and continually, anti-mythic.’121 Substituting vigilance for another word that we read in Cavarero’s work – care – we return to Davis’ open conclusion, which incorporates the reader in the ‘we’ of ‘our’ task to begin anew and again, of remaining vigilant to the archism that overrides the open spaces of care for which vulnerability allows. From the readings of Arendt that Cavarero and Davis offer us we are not given a solution to Arendt’s acceptance of the ideological terra nullius archism, nor are we shown how to resolve the antagonistic incorporation of that arche into her anarchism of natality. Nevertheless, the interrogative force of each of their projects highlights the complexity of anarchism and the struggle with 99

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which any theorist must grapple if they are to ‘do’ politics responsibly. Arendt thought continually about the need for reality and thinking to remain in concert. She cautioned extensively about the failure to remember and considered thoughtlessness itself the fertile, if febrile, ground for evil. Accepting Arendt’s natality as a concept of beginning, or even the groundwork for ethics and rights, without seeing it as emerging from within and alongside a theory of archism, threatens the condition of politics. In the following two chapters I put the revolutionary an-arche of natality to the test, bringing its planetary force into direct dialogue with the planetary arches that sustain the climate crisis and realise the violence of living within a system of archist domination.

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4

THE ANTHROPOCENE OR HISTORY: VIOLENCE, MYTHS AND BEGINNINGS

This book set out to locate the meaning of political action in the age of climate crisis. Taking Hannah Arendt as its guide, it began with two chapters on her contemporaries: Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin. It was here of all places that an account of the anarchic earth was developed: one that began but ultimately failed realisation in Heidegger’s account of earthly concealment before assuming the messianic and historical depth of Benjamin’s earthly generations. It was in Benjamin’s writings that ideas of earthly tension developed into the ontologically grounded project of living a political and planetary life. This agonistic dance between concealment and unconcealment became, with Benjamin, an intimately historical project. It was, after all, thanks to Benjamin that the language of expectation and the arrival of earthly generations came into view, thus taking the historicity of Heidegger’s Dasein into the realm of disruptive and revolutionary politics. In Benjamin’s writings then, the call of Heidegger’s earth and the authenticity of Dasein’s response became the revolutionary task of transforming the earth into a place in which history occurs out of time and where anarchy can suspend the phantasm of earthly unconcealment. And yet, for neither Heidegger nor Benjamin can a response to this call be guaranteed. Anarchy remains a potential. Inauthentic life reigns as a possibility, as does the catastrophe of naturalising the status quo. Anarchy prefigures within it the conditions for what Donna Haraway terms response-ability, a mode of being that is always conditioned by the possibility of not responding.1 To respond or not, to be responsible or not, is the necessary 101

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dualism of earthly – and anarchist – life. Arendt captured this duality in her reflection on the need ‘to think what we are doing’ and recognise the unending task of worldly understanding. At the same time, the analysis of Arendt thus far has highlighted the difficulty of this task. The argument in the previous chapter was that she failed to reflect the full history of the event that she saw as revolutionary par excellence: the American Revolution. While she articulated the lost spirit of revolution, and hence the revolutionary form of natality, in relation to this event, she did not view it with impartiality. By extension, she did not settle the claim of Benjamin’s oppressed. If victims of colonial archism called out, Arendt did not respond.2 She committed herself to the naturalisation of settler-colonialism and, in so doing, produced a limited account of an-arche’s institutional appearance. This does not mean, however, that her theory of anarche, the political condition of natality, is without force or value. Wresting Arendt’s politics of an-arche from the historical context of her archism staged the setting of the previous chapter. To this end, that chapter followed Patricia Owens’ thesis that ‘to refuse the work may be to miss what Arendt got right, to miss certain things that nobody else but she had fathomed’.3 Taking Owens’ suggestion that to read Arendt might allow us to imagine what she was unable to is, in many ways then, the test of this chapter. In what follows, I advance the politics of Arendt’s an-arche into the planetary realm of climate crisis archism in order to see if she might yet have something to say. Though many aspects of the planetary violence that defines the climate crisis have been noted in passing throughout this project, they have remained, thus far, at a remove. Violence has been seen in the norm that Benjamin’s political theology sought to suspend; and it was against the more general violence of historical ruin that Arendt posited the miraculous faculty of natality. More acutely in terms of the climate crisis, violence has been witnessed in reference to the planetary disrepair of the Salvage Collective’s so-called ‘lost world’ and in the fires of the Australian Black Summer bushfires. The specific coordinates and the contours of this violence now demand direct interrogation. This chapter approaches this task via a return to Benjamin, in so doing, it brings the miraculous force of Arendt’s earthly natality into dialogue with the account of violence outlined in Benjamin’s essay ‘Critique of Violence’ (1921). This essay provides, in the conclusion, a partial scaffold around which to imagine the anarchic retelling of planetary histories of the climate crisis. What is instead methodologically central to this chapter is the articulation of a planetary violence in its own terms. Where violence has thus been present in this project in fleeting instances it now assumes centre stage. Moreover, it is at this juncture that theorists of the Anthropocene enter our dialogue, bringing the planetary an-arche woven throughout Heidegger, Benjamin and Arendt’s writings into the territory reality of this planetary present. Drawing on writings

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of these contemporary theorists that give texture to the materiality of violence at work within and, in part, defining the climate crisis, I seek to give specificity to those who appear today as Benjamin’s ‘tradition of the oppressed’. Indeed, the respective methods of engaging with the ‘after-life’ of the past, thinking in ‘the wake’, and challenging the forgotten ‘pre-history’ of the present enliven the task of responding to the call of history and redeeming the claims of the past.4 Equally in the margins of this project is the idea of ‘history’, which has appeared in the form of both Dasein’s historicity and more prominently as the locus of Benjamin and Arendt’s revolutionary action. Through historical presence life becomes meaningful as such. In revolution it is the status quo of history that is suspended. It was this suspension that Arendt saw within the spontaneous collectives of the revolutionary council system. For Benjamin, the suspension of what is past opens up the possibility for a reorientation of the political, creating a bid for posterity that is also revolutionary in kind. At the risk of oversimplifying how violence and history intersect, it should however already be clear that the construction of history can operate as a locus of archist realisation. This is seen in Arendt’s imaginary ‘One World’, which foretells the future through the continuation of its own organising conditions and in the catastrophic ‘status quo’ of Benjamin’s linear historical continuum.5 To conceive of the past as determined at the behest of the sovereign is to incorporate archism into accounts of the past, producing a fallible and limited ‘history’ that lays siege to the future also. Against this narrative, weak messianism suspends the naturalisation of what is past, disrupting its linear claim in the name of its renewed and revolutionary commencement – the beginning of human history. What is then clear is the presence of two modes of conceptualising the movement of time: one archist and one anarchist. Holding on to that original and ineliminable proximity between archism and anarchism that James Martel first outlined as ‘archism’s [living] and [breathing] amid anarchism’, here I suggest that they be thought temporally as History and history.6 Distinguishable only in their written form, as the capitalised and dominating History of planetary archism and its weak yet revolutionary counterpart, history, we move away from the supposed neutrality of ‘history’. Instead, History and history bring conceptual form into theoretic argumentation. History and history become thinkable through the violence and revolution of Benjamin’s historical project. Recovering the violence of sovereign law that Benjamin sought to suspend, History corresponds to domination while history indexes, in a moment of suspension, the possibility of messianic beginning. Paying attention to the subtle ways in which History attempts to co-opt the revolutionary project of history, this chapter is aimed at teasing out their distinction formations, working against the narrative of History in the planetary age of the Anthropocene and moving towards the productive opacity of history.7

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History and history In Arendtian terms, History is the historical record produced by the fabricators of what she called the ‘One World’, the inhabitants of an alienated place of their own making.8 History, in the context of climate crisis, names the archist law forged in the logic of colonialism, the governance structure of the plantation and the phantasmal ideology of terra nullius. It speaks to Nick Estes’ description of protests at Standing Rock as ‘a struggle over ancestral lands wrongly stolen through violence and guile’.9 It reappears in the challenge mounted by the Tiny House Warriors of the Secwépemc nation, who protest the Trans Canadian Pipeline by reasserting their right to dwell along the path of the pipeline’s construction, exposing that space as the frontier encounter between settler-extractive regimes and Indigenous life.10 These are protests against the archism of History and the archist forms that precede and sustain the extractive regimes that are one of the bases of the climate crisis. These regimes, produced in the wake of ecological imperialism, as archic narratives of how to live, what seeds to sow and when to irrigate, disfigure the earthly land that is the condition for political life and action.11 To this end, History is the archism of planetary territorialisation that sees itself ordained to overwrite the law of unpredictable and unknowable earthly plurality. What distinguishes History is its claim to neutrality, while operating at the same time as the structural and systemic violence that Judith Butler describes as irreducible to the encounter of two figures ‘one striking and the other struck’.12 In Arendtian terms, this violence exists as the diminished and oppressive site of what could otherwise be her impartial and incomplete ‘storybook of mankind’.13 Moreover, insofar as the structural condition for ‘history’ is natality, the structural exclusivity of History, as a story that admits them but not you, is itself an attack on natality. This point will assume greater prominence throughout this chapter. In general terms, the operation of History is omnipotent. It exists in that literal exclusion of voices from history books, as well as in the phantasmal colonial narrative of terra nullius, a fiction that extinguishes indigenous presence from both what is construed as past and what has the potential to become future.14 History operates where truths are denied because they feature the wrong protagonists. It is built into memorial structures, and it determines who is in power and who is not. Yet History is not only a narrative. As a structural form, History is seen in the degree to which vulnerability is designed into infrastructural systems, such that violence functions as the slow degradation of life over time, as communities are denied the roads that would link them to health services or fed water through pipes that slowly poison them.15 Here violence functions according to the material temporality of Rob Nixon’s ‘slow violence’ as a violence that resists legibility until it has become the generalised condition for some lives in some places. This violence, he writes, ‘occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and 104

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space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all’.16 Victims of this violence are ‘condemned’ in the words of Achille Mbembe ‘to live’.17 Their existence creates a setting which Nixon describes as resulting in the need to engage ‘a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales’.18 This is what History seeks to achieve. Denied visibility, those who are victimised by the narrative structures of History are forced to occupy positions of testimonial injustice, where this voice but not that is deemed worthy of being heard.19 Denied legitimacy in the present by virtue of the continued practice of exclusion or dismissal, History can wash over the events of the past and in so doing paralyse and fragment the conditions of natality (the basis of ‘history’) today. The capacity for an account of the past to be understood in terms of History’s singularity and thus to be used as a weapon is evident not only in the refusal to remember the dead and the oppressed but in the silencing of those voices that seek to recover their narratives today in order to resurrect the past in the move towards reorienting the future. Indeed, it is to this end that the violence of History is futural in form. In this context, the exclusive conditions of what is remembered as ‘history’ as though it were a site of neutrality are exposed. This is the phantasmatic form that archist History can take, written with a pen that blots out and highlights at the whim of the sovereign Historian. This intersection between History as a form taken by violence and the dominating logic of archism is central to the naturalisation of complicity in structures of planetary destruction. When the Salvage Collective describe the tragedy of the worker as their forced participation in the degradation of the planetary conditions that would otherwise home their liberation, they are describing the naturalisation and the planetary reach of a mode of living that is intrinsically violent.20 How we proceed with a diagnosis like this is not straightforward. In the context of the climate crisis, the degree to which accounts of the past, archism and violence intersect, resists, like most things in this crisis, legibility. This is precisely part of the seductive allure of History, which compels and in so doing paralyses the conditions for anarchic revolution. The History of the climate crisis operates in terms that Jason Moore calls a ‘comforting story with uncomfortable facts’.21 Against this archist telling, Moore encourages us to see that what is needed is an uncomfortable story with uncomfortable facts. What he asks for is the messianic suspension of History. Uncomfortable stories remind us that before the Industrial Revolution, that popular image of technological development in climate discourse that gives rise to a corresponding techno-solutionism, lands were invaded, people enslaved and ecosystems destroyed.22 Anarchist stories confront History and remind us that these conditions were necessary for cotton to grow and machines to run. Uncomfortable stories remind us that technological leaps often follow inhumanity. To suspend 105

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History is to make this violence legible and thus open up the possibility for thinking another reality determined by different epistemologies. Against History’s claim to neutrality, the victims of History occupy peripheral positions, waiting for their voices to be heard and for their accounts of the past to be recorded. Rather than contend with these claims, History attempts to calcify the an-arche of earthly life, fixing world and past in a set relation to this mode of earthly life – one that in late modernity is premised on an extractive regime.23 Overwhelming the present as a space of original creation, History overrides these claims to place and the an-arches that sustain relations to the earth as the place of dwelling. History, then, is the story of the climate crisis present, otherwise known as the ‘Anthropocene’, that forgets the reality of colonialism and slavery that is the bedrock of its foundation. History not only emanates from domination, insofar as it is normalised; it maintains a state of domination.24 Evident in the refusal to tell the past with impartiality and pay heed to the plurality of actors that populate its form, the violence of History exists in the refusal to admit its own implication in the reality of colonialism.25 Oppressed by the force of History, history endeavours to articulate Moore’s uncomfortable story with uncomfortable facts.26 Recuperating the weakness of messianism, history coincides with the moment of redemptive potential and the arrest of what is in the name of what might yet be – it is an act that simultaneously avenges the past and dreams the future. Moving through History as a correlate to Benjamin’s discussion of violence as alternately law-making or law-preserving towards this revolutionary suspension, history becomes the name of Benjamin’s law-destroying violence. This tripled account of the historical forms that violence can take underpins this chapter and stages the possible conditions for a planetary intervention that recapitulates the possibility of an anarchic beginning. Understanding the Anthropocene as History Understanding the archist function of History in the context of the climate crisis has to begin with understanding the way in which the crisis is an historical event. This understanding turns on the legibility of the Anthropocene, the geological classification that attempts to capture the impact of humans on the earth and the capacity they have to change the ‘most basic physical processes of the earth’.27 It is a diagnosis that Ari-Elmeri Hyvönen rightly points out ‘ought to be shocking’.28 How it manages to sublimate shock or inspire technocratic ‘green growth’ will, in due course, be shown to be part of its phantasmatic and archist structure.29 First identified by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer in 2000, the ‘Anthropocene’ signals the historic singularity of life in an age of climate crisis. Tracing the way in which human activity during the Holocene grew to constitute a ‘significant geological, morphological force’, they make the assertion that it now seems ‘more than appropriate to emphasise the central role 106

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of mankind in geology and ecology by proposing to use the “anthropocene” for the current geological epoch’.30 Though they conject that to assign a specific date to the onset of this Anthropocene hypothesis seems ‘somewhat arbitrary’, they nevertheless propose a start date connected to latter part of the eighteenth century, the height of the Industrial Revolution.31 As others note, it was this moment of technological advancement ‘when methane and CO2 brewed by the gargantuan machines of the Industrial Revolution began to influence the earth’s climate’.32 However, it is not yet clear that these effects alone equate to the violence of History. They relate rather to a generalised condition of planetary degradation and its negative consequences rather than the organising predation of archism. Setting the path for their equivalence will emerge in due course. In the quarter of a century since Crutzen and Stoermer’s conjecture, a host of counter and contributing narratives to their ‘arbitrary’ historicisation have emerged. Rather than persist with just one ‘cene’, the Anthropocene is now situated as one epochal title among many others, each of which speak to a different historical setting.33 Today we encounter, to name only a few, the agnotocene, capitalocene, chthulucene, plantationocene, phagocene, thanatocene and thermocene. Stephen Mentz’s index of what he wryly calls the ‘neologismcene’ accounts for twenty-four different ‘cenes’. Though his text is playfully written, it points to the very real need to understand the rapidly multiplying forms of violence that are seen to organise planetary life in the twenty-first century. Indeed, Mentz concludes with the imperative that ‘crafting adequate responses to the vast plurality of the ’cene salad comprises the quixotic task of this moment in the environmental humanities’.34 In part, it could be said that this chapter is a move towards this quixotic task. More precisely however, what I aim to do here is suspend the division of ‘cenes’ and return to the historical origins of that first ‘cene’ – the Anthropocene. I suggest it is this encounter that will expose the phantasmatic veil of the Anthropocene as neutral ‘history’ while also incorporating the specificity of violent structures outlined in Mentz’s ‘cene salad’. This means that rather than persist with the historical offerings of Crutzen and Stoermer, who coordinate an Anthropocene narrative that overlooks the planetary implications of war (thanatocene), the planet-degrading forces of capital (capitalocene) or the seductive but destructive effects of denial (agnotocene), I follow the stratigraphic readings and historical project of another conjecture that rereads the Anthropocene without introducing another neologism into an already inflated vocabulary.35 Here I suggest that we suspend the narrative of technology, that History of progress, from which Crutzen and Stoermer’s Anthropocene departs and follow instead the ‘Orbis theory’ of Mark Maslin and Simon Lewis. Indeed, it is this latter telling of the Anthropocene’s origin that succeeds in incorporating the differentials of planetary violence alluded to above (war, capital, denial) and in so doing anticipates the revolutionary project of history. 107

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The History of Planetary Colonialism Maslin and Lewis’ stratigraphic readings locate the Anthropocene in the hulls of transatlantic ships and settler-colonialism, moving back in time from Crutzen and Stoermer’s eighteenth-century intervention by a stretch of over 300 years to the arrival of Columbus into the Americas in 1492.36 Suspending the forward progression of climate narratives linked to technological development and recentring the planeterising effects of colonialism, Maslin and Lewis effectively open up a space of climate history from which to realise a new planetary beginning. This, I want to suggest, is the Benjaminian moment of normative suspension that a revolutionary an-arche of the planet requires. Maslin and Lewis describe the methodological process of their work in the following way: Defining the beginning of the Anthropocene as a formal geologic unit of time requires the location of a global marker of an event in stratigraphic material, such as rock, sediment, or glacier ice, known as a Global Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP), plus other auxiliary stratigraphic markers indicating changes to the Earth system. Alternatively, after a survey of the stratigraphic evidence, a date can be agreed by committee, known as a Global Standard Stratigraphic Age (GSSA). GSSPs, known as ‘golden spikes’, are the preferred boundary markers.37 The boundary marker that they set out has immediate political ramifications, ones from which Maslin and Lewis do not shy away. Renamed the ‘Orbis point’ in reference to the Latin word for world and the inauguration of a new world-system coordinated by global interconnection, their narrative ‘implies that colonialism, global trade and coal brought about the Anthropocene’.38 As if responding to Arendt’s recognition that the questions raised by science cannot be answered by scientists alone, Maslin and Lewis acknowledge their hypothesis as ‘an act with consequences beyond geology’.39 It is here again that the prescience of Benjamin’s critical historiography reveals itself. Benjamin did not discuss the historical resonance of colonialism, nor did he concern himself with the systemic problems it inaugurated. Yet there is a clear affinity between Benjamin’s critique of oppressive politics, his hostility towards systems of accumulation, the imperative he felt to disrupt the linearity of History’s naturalisation and the project of critical decolonialism at work in the Orbis Hypothesis. Indeed, as the extractive regimes of accumulation coincide with the causes of the climate crisis, a further imperative can be discerned from Benjamin as the need to understand them within the logic of the status quo as catastrophic.40 Benjamin attributes this mode of comprehension to what he identifies after Paul Klee as ‘the angel of history’. The angel appears in his collected theses ‘On the Concept of History’, as though swept back by the phantasmatic storm of progress – something that we might understand as the naturalisation of 108

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accumulation. Here he writes that the ‘where we perceive a chain of events, he [the angel of history] sees one single catastrophe’.41 This one catastrophe is captured by Maslin and Lewis’ Orbis Hypothesis, which suspends the division of violence into capital/planetary, war/planetary and disease/planetary, and exposes their inextricable form as the catastrophe of the ‘New World Anthropocene’. In what can thus be read as a response to Benjamin’s appeal to hear the call of the oppressed, Maslin and Lewis put into stark relief the lived specificity of the planetary violence produced by the emergence of the Anthropocene: Besides permanently and dramatically altering the diet of almost all of humanity, the arrival of Europeans in the Americas also led to a large decline in human numbers. Regional population estimates sum to a total of 54 million people in the Americas in 1492, with recent population modelling estimates of 61 million people. Numbers rapidly declined to a minimum of about 6 million people by 1650 via exposure to diseases carried by Europeans, plus war, enslavement and famine.42 The moment of invasion sits at the centre of this narrative and, when read as the origin of the climate crisis of the Anthropocene, demonstrates how invasion has assumed a global effect. The globality of its effect, or what Achille Mbembe describes as its ‘planetarization’, corresponds to the phantasmal violence of archism’s History.43 Beyond the economic ‘entanglement’ of Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean and Europe at this time, and here I rely on Chakrabarty’s use of the term entanglement as invoking a predicament which demands a response from within a plurality, what is equally underway is a momentous shift in the transfer of flora and fauna.44 As Maslin and Lewis explain what is commonly known as the Colombian Exchange, ‘the cross-continental movement of dozens of . . . food species . . . domesticated animals . . . and human commensals (the black rat, to the Americas) plus accidental transfers . . . contributed to a swift, ongoing, radical reorganization of life on earth without geological precedent’.45 Indeed it is these two paradigm shifts together, the reshaping of ecosystems and the death of so many indigenous lives, that appear posthumously in stratigraphic record as a dip in carbon production. It is to this dip that Maslin and Lewis respond, locating it as the stratigraphic point of departure for their Anthropocene history. Rather than begin with the false optimism of technological innovation, in the chimneys of the Industrial Revolution that climb into the skies in pursuit of a worldly heaven, Maslin and Lewis return us to the empirical reality on which such towers were built. This return stages the revolutionary moment of suspension from which history will emerge. While there is a clear distinction between the material reorganisation of the earth in the movement of flora, fauna and people and the imposed unfolding 109

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(benevolent or not) of a planetary archism, what they have in common is a refusal of the earth as the anarchic ground of both a planetary and a political life. In other words, though the violence of archism is clear in the immediate violence of invasion (and its aftermath as the invasion ‘come to stay’), another sinister performance of violence is exhibited when the forces of that technological present have, in Mbembe’s words, ‘overtaken the interrogation of meaning’ in relation to the earth.46 This is what is achieved through extractive regimes and ecological imperialism. Recovering Arendt’s sense of the One World as a structure of violent domination, Mbembe’s reference to the erosion of interrogation here speaks to a broader concern regarding something like the total ‘unconcealment’ of planetary life. In a recent interview, Mbembe expresses these ideas as the view that archist structures of the market and technology emerging from fossil capital have set ‘the rules and procedures according to which we are obliged to live together as a connective body within new planetary limits’.47 What he is identifying here as ‘new planetary limits’ is the structural form of mechanised thinking that reconditions the planetary condition of political life, shadowing the anarchic project of being with the principles of archist form. The language of ‘rules and procedures’ echoes an account of violence already present in Benjamin’s writings on the procedural form of ‘mythic violence’ to which I will turn momentarily. At the outset, however, it is this procedural violence that conforms to the archist structure of domination. For Benjamin, such a violence is staged in opposition to the revolutionary potential of what he calls divine violence, a force that plays out in the revolutionary counter-History of history.48 As an act of original violence, Benjamin’s formulation ‘mythic violence’ works by way of ‘setting boundaries’ manifest in the form of threats and literal acts of bodily (‘bloody’) violence.49 In this sense, mythic violence corresponds to Mbembe’s account of the planetarising consequences of colonialism, which he sees as reorganising planetary life and imposing normative modes of relating to place. Importantly, the norms that Mbembe outlines often pivot on the archist fictions of terra nullius, a lie that both denies the worldly place of indigenous peoples and naturalises History as a neutral ‘history’. This original act of denial, which sets up the nothingness around which archism will be organised, is then set in constant relation to the ongoing construction of the nothing, the mute origin of colonial invasion and dispossession. Moreover, it is this empty core that corresponds to what Benjamin describes in the essay on violence as the ‘rotten core’ of the law.50 This rotten origin and its naturalisation as given is the violence of the Anthropocene as told in relation to a seemingly ahistorical Industrial Revolution. Moreover, this rotten centre forms the basis of mythic violence and hence is the opposing pole to the revolutionary and anarchic potential of history. The conflict it stages is captured by David Lloyd, who describes the status of the colonial subject as contingent upon the 110

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ongoing practice of that original, constitutive violence. The point he makes in relation to the vigilance of the settler-Historian captures the fundamentally fragile archist construction of the rotten law as the law that requires its continual resurrection as law. He writes: the settler remains perpetually on guard, poised for real and imaginary resistance behind an ‘iron wall’ whose institutionalisation preserves the attitude of an initial colonising minority within the very structures of the state. Rather than gaining confidence and therefore openness to the potential for change and accommodation as it gains power and security, the settler society undergoes a gradual hardening of its defensive psychic and institutional structures over time. Rather than expanding democratic freedoms and inclusivity, the more it appropriates in the name of security and development, the more deeply it becomes militarised, and the more it shapes draconian laws and restrictions on the rights of the colonised.51 When we recall that this militarised state is the same as the one that sits at the origin of the Anthropocene and so at the origin of the climate crisis, it becomes apparent that what is needed is a revolutionary suspension of the myth that is the colonial state itself. We get there in part by reinterrogating the conditions of anarchism that emerge in opposition to colonial History, as in the project of Chapter 3 to recuperate natality’s anarchism from the trajectory of settler-colonial naturalisation. Yet the force of revolutionary suspension has to turn on more than an appeal to the democratisation of history. In order for a revolutionary history to emerge it will need to engage with the new conception of human dignity that Arendt sought out after Nazi totalitarianism, one that would organise itself in relation to the fact that humans are an earthly product, and that plurality is the ‘law of the earth’.52 Archist Topographies Speaking to the imagery of Maslin and Lewis’ account of the Anthropocene, Christina Sharpe describes the organising violence of the slave ship as leaving a ‘wake’ in the water of historical time. This wake, which ripples outwards, rewrites the topography of water and implicates others beyond its original scene of violence. With this image in hand, Sharpe draws us back to the language of earthly dwelling and the complex ‘oneness’ of the ontological pluralities that disclose the earth as earthly. In so doing, she points to a notion of the earth that echoes Arendt’s understanding of plurality as the fact that ‘we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live’.53 Against this plurality, Sharpe shows the way in which the rippling wake of slavery has sought to incorporate and flatten 111

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narratives of resistance. Where archism then seeks to extinguish anarchist gatherings, Sharpe brings its acute violence into view. What this means, she writes, is that ‘as we go about wake work, we must think through containment, regulation, punishment, capture, and captivity and the ways the manifold representations of blackness become the symbol, par excellence, for the less-thanhuman being condemned to death’.54 The language of control against which Sharpe shows the specificity of one of History’s oppressed to exist reinscribes the plurality of experience that discloses political reality. Yet this violence maintains a structuring effect, one that, through the seduction of archism, lays claim to the politics of resistance that would otherwise dismantle it. In the case of climate violence then, rather than recognise that the integrity of a carbon-based lifestyle is coextensive with the production of planetary precarity for those who live too close to sites of extraction and their accompanying air, water and soil pollution, or else too close to sites of disposal and their accompaniment by these same forms of pollution, the seduction of archism conceals the liberatory alternative. Once again, a politics of force manifests that there is no alternative, reinscribing the possibility of alternative (a change in cultural norms or expectation) within the logic of extractive archism (technologically determined green growth). Max Liboiron makes precisely this point in the argument that pollution is colonialism. The negation of the right to dwell is shown by Liboiron as coextensive with the intrusion of imperial waste that simultaneously determines the periphery as essential but disavowed. The archist construction of this ground is not, of course, contained only to the specificity of those lives organised by the spectre of absolute planetary precarity. Violence leaches outwards, assuming its own polluting runoff. Andrew Benjamin writes into this space, noting that ‘violence is not just an individual act. It is worldly in part because while sanctioned by the world that world is configured to deny its victim a place within it. Taken together this is the event of violence.’55 This shift in the event of violence to the planetary is made possible in the case of climate crisis by virtue of archism’s already realised exclusion of those lives from the framework that organises comprehension of the planetary crisis that is the climate crisis. In other words, what archism achieves by naturalising a History where the weather has always been, as the previous chapter showed, endured by a land ‘of droughts and flooding rains’ and hence as always experienced in this way, is a suspension of the link between the reality of the climate crisis and the ideological choices that organise it: accumulation, racialised capitalism, settler-colonialism and carbon. Following in Sharpe’s wake, for Kathryn Yusoff, the rewriting of global cartography after the ‘discovery’ of the New World and the commencement not of ‘human history’ but of climate crisis History, coincides with the construction of ‘[b]lackness as a historically constituted and intentionally enacted deformation in the formation of subjectivity, a deformation that presses an 112

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inhuman categorization and the inhuman earth into intimacy’.56 The event of the climate crisis thus cannot be extricated from the event of racialisation and colonial imperialism. These modes of production are not simply coincidental, they are coextensive, sustained according to the same logics of planetary extraction, human disavowal and a generalised condition of superfluity imposed over human and non-human life, flora and fauna and a broader framework of planetary potential. There are no limits according to the systems of production generated in this moment of imperial beginning, there is simply more – life, planet, resource – to be taken. What thus emerges in the wake of this event is the naturalisation of a planeterised History. This History serves as the index of a violence that grounds the ongoing logic of dispossession at the centre of the colonial-extractive regime. In other words, caught alongside the violence that is the denial of indigenous claims to presence is the simultaneous construction and latter treatment of certain bodies as instrumental to these processes of extraction. As these plural forces of violence coalesce, they reveal environmental destruction and minority oppression as two sides of the same coin.57 Ghassan Hage puts it bluntly when he writes that the ‘practice of racial and ecological domination have the same roots’.58 Inés Valdez describes these moments of recognition that draw the ecological and the human together from their imposed alienation in what can now be seen as History’s insistence on an earth-world, nature-culture binary as disruptive precisely because what they achieve is a confrontation with ‘historical accounts of progress that obfuscate knowledge’.59 It is not the disruption that presages revolutionary anarchic beginning but the one out of which sovereign reaffirmation arises. And so, it is not merely because of the coincidence of inhumanity and the pursuit of global order that colonialism emerges. It is the incorporation of inhumanity into the name of something like ‘human progress’ that binds together the inhumane and the colonial, even, or perhaps especially, where the inhumane assumes its most innocuous face. The capacity of the ideal of ‘progress’ to decide how, when and whom to liquidate as part of its realisation is the archist narrative of Arendt’s One World. In the context of the planetary event of the Anthropocene, this progress conceals the differential destruction of planetary conditions and its victims. Rather than orient a question of ‘progress’ towards some redemptive end then, the question to be asked is what happens when we recognise that continued extractive processes coincide with the destruction of key sites of indigenous heritage? Or perhaps more acutely still, what happens when we understand the seemingly value-free ideal of ‘progress’ as now contingent upon the trespassing of indigenous lands? What happens when we understand that the framework of ‘good living’ and the structuring of normative values around that – land and car ownership, energy security, travel – as requiring the normalisation and naturalisation of differing forms of indigenous displacement? What emerges here is 113

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a demanding articulation of the body that is described in largely abstract terms by Benjamin as the ‘oppressed’. This is the reality of planetary archism in the age of the Anthropocene. Walter D Mignolo articulates resistance to this planetary archism as bound to the resurgent ‘knowledges that emerge from forms of life who do not build themselves on the ideological principle of “change” and “progress”’. Naming the archist construct that coordinates this principle – the ‘progress’ of Western Civilisation as the logic of the ‘New World’ – he reinforces the point that ‘if you “control” change and progress you control the destiny of a civilisation, and you hide and repress the fact that “change” always happens whether you want it to or not’.60 Read in light of Arendt’s One World logic of ideology, an ideology that consistently consumes the narrative of change and absorbs the moments of potential historical arrest and becoming, Mignolo’s account of the functioning of progress is almost indistinguishable. For Arendt, of course, the principle of resistance lies within the unpredictable force of natality. And yet, even here, as the previous chapter sought to show, the vulnerability of natality – and hence of resistance – is marked. While Arendt insists that natality cannot exist outside the realm of plurality, a dependence that Cavarero qualifies is determined by conditions of care, vulnerability and exposure, and that I would argue is equally determined by the question of earthly place, the allure of the new as an isolated reality persists. Indeed, the original function of archism to ground a new mode of being and to promise a form of redemption that exists exclusively within the realm of desires also claims to operate by way of ‘natality’. That human beings are born to begin and that beginning is the condition sine qua non of politics does not enshrine beginning as a guaranteed sanctity. Natality, because it is anarchic, is held in suspension. It exists as potential. Arendt makes exactly this point when she describes the fragility of the polis, that political realm that ‘rises directly out of acting together’ and that ‘without such stability protection could not endure’.61 This space, which cannot ‘survive the moment of action and speech itself’, is where Arendt invests the potential of political revolution.62 This alone, the magnanimity of the responsibility that Arendt attributes not to the political arena but to the political actors who are themselves coextensive with the grandeur of the city hall, should be enough to compel vigilance to preserve political life. Of course, however, it is not. Vigilance remains, after Haraway, a site of response-ability, and hence of contingency. Archism’s Victims – Planetary Slaves Yusoff’s reading of the colonial origin of the Anthropocene turns on the production of a set of Historical conditions that also sustain it. In part, we have already seen the centrality of the fiction of terra nullius, which washes over the original an-arche of the earth as central to this process. Yet Yusoff builds on these dispossessing forces, noting that 114

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The human and its subcategory, the inhuman, are historically relational to a discourse of settler-colonial rights and the material practices of extraction, which is to say that the categorization of matter is a spatial execution, of place, land, and person cut from relation through geographic displacement (and relocation through forced settlement and transatlantic slavery).63 As an instance of displacement read back through the ‘wake work’ of Sharpe, an account of this displacement beyond the realm of spatiality and into a more temporal frame of reference comes into view. Where Arendt gives an account of natality as creating ‘the condition for remembrance, that is, for history’, what these depictions of the past make clear is the attempt to erase natality as an historical faculty.64 Against the archist force of violence that forecloses time and seeks to trap it within the archism of History, another beginning will endure through natality as the mark of the as-yet. And yet, this disruptive beginning remains – at least as it currently stands – not only potential but seemingly immaterial. For what remains to be reckoned with are the irreversible consequences of the archist places that we currently inhabit and, because of the empirical reality of History’s planetary consequences, are forced to inhabit. In other words, there is a need to address History in its materiality. We will turn to this in due course. What the fracturing of place as the worldly realisation of earthly law through processes of colonialism demonstrates is the ontological and material consequences of violence. Which is simply to say it isn’t ‘place’, some abstract construction of the earth that is degraded through violence, nor is it some alienated group of people that are impacted by its form. It is rather the integrity of plurality, which is always already an earthly condition, that is impacted by the violence of colonialism’s History. Violence to place, when that place is part of the human condition, is violence to the human condition, an assault on the very possibility and integrity – i.e., the reality – of being human. This point is articulated by Arendt in a number of instances. It is present, for instance, in the metaphor of worldly desertification, an environmental analogy that draws on the earthliness of plurality to demonstrate the conditions for the being of being human. The same point reappears in her claim that human life is conditioned life, lived in the gathering of those things – artificial, material, organic, temporal – that are woven together as the place of action. Drawing these conditions together, in terms that invoke the function played by the bridge in Heidegger’s discussion of the gathering of place, she writes in The Human Condition that ‘the physical, worldly in-between’, a space I have construed thus far as the inter-esse realm of political life, ‘is overlaid and, as it were, overgrown with an altogether different in-between which consists of deeds and words and owes its origin exclusively to men’s acting and speaking directly to one another.’65 115

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The force of this position appears in Arendt’s claim that a life without speech is literally dead to the world. Continuing this blurring between the biological and the ontological, Arendt clarifies the position of the silenced and unearthly life as akin to that of the slave. It is this figure, denied earthly politics, who serves as the antithesis of natality and plurality.66 When Arendt describes the status of the slave as ‘aneu logon, deprived, of course, not of the faculty of speech, but of a way of life in which speech and only speech made sense’, she gestures towards the original violence that is the construction of a life marked by its inability to be heard.67 Such inaudibility is central to the life of the slave. Elsewhere, I have described this condition of slavery as distinct to the corporeal figure – the slave – and instead as a condition that is attached to the political realm itself.68 Suspending notions of slavery that are predicated upon the individual, without denying either the historical or contemporary reality of slavery as a lived condition, I take Arendt’s description of slavery to pertain to the ontological and institutional realm of the political ‘in-between’. Reflecting on Arendt’s staged equivalence between speechlessness and slavery, and noting her ongoing insistence that speech is the political faculty par excellence, my argument has been that ‘Arendt does not consider slavery exclusively as exploitation or the curtailment of desire to the realm of necessity. Rather [slavery] is the violence that is the refusal to be admitted to the human community of politics . . . Unable to speak, the slave is unable to appear.’69 This refusal to be admitted is at the same time a refusal of the human community, a negation not only of the individual but of the individual as a reciprocal condition of the polis itself. Pushing at the extent to which Arendt reflects on plurality as the mediating condition of political life, namely, the condition of appearance that engenders political life as such, the negation of the slave’s speech forecloses the potential of politics tout court. While something akin to the desert like reality of an a- or even antipolitical gathering can persist, the political depth of such a community is inconceivable. Where I have written about this elsewhere, I have argued that ‘insofar as slavery is a condition of silencing, denying the speech of the slave and, in so doing, denying their right to appearance, slavery dehumanises the realm of politics.’70 Despite this ongoing speechlessness however, both the slave and the polis remain in anticipation of liberation. A dormant if denied politics exists. This potential marks the fissure through which the an-arche of natality’s revolution might emerge. When Mignolo describes what I am considering the messianic arrest of overcoming or breaking free of the economic expropriation of such conditions, he describes the ‘long process’ of removing the veil of colonial arrogance. Rather than advance an account of revolutionary resistance as a moment of deliverance that arises from a supposed historical tabula rasa, uncontaminated by that legacy, he describes the revolution of ‘re-emergence’. These re-emerging ‘knowledges and sensibilities’ and modes of ‘knowing and seeing’ are not however the 116

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re-emergence of a promise to a pre-colonial paradise. Revolution is instead the work of dealing with the ruins of that archist law that ‘attempted to subject, supersede, and destroy’.71 Where that law failed – because it couldn’t succeed – what Mignolo calls ‘planetary diversity’ (re)emerges as a resurgent an-archism. In similar terms, Mbembe describes the latent potential of the slave, as maintaining a subjectivity that resurges as its own revolutionary marker.72 With this turn to the subjectivity of the slave, Mbembe invokes the recognitive plurality that witnesses action, that provides and sustains its meaning. It is here then, that Mbembe – like Mignolo – implicates the other, turning attention from the condemnation to the condemner. In the context of planetary violence, Mbembe’s argument reframes the life that is made expendable before the History of the climate crisis through the presence of the passive subject who, with impunity, permits that move to take place. Moreover, however, this implication extends beyond the intersubjective. It recalls the law of earthly plurality that is denied in precisely this condemnation ‘to live’ and yet that persists as redeemable. In some of his most recent reflections on this multiplying implication, Mbembe writes that as ‘it is more and more understood that humans are part of a very deep history that is older than the existence of the human race’, the category of human subjectivity is radically expanded. What it then means ‘to be a subject is no longer to act autonomously but to share agency with other subjects that have also lost their autonomy’.73 The implicit demand for vigilance as constructed through an enlarged mentality that incorporates both the other and the more-than-human other necessarily inheres a mode of relating to place. Or, as Mbembe writes elsewhere, of seeing that politics, that product of enlarged thought’s vigilance to the gathering of beings, ‘consists in the interminable effort to imagine and to create a common world and future’.74 As a praxis of vigilance, the willed and collective resistance to colonial normativity is countered by the ‘perpetually on guard’ reality of the settler-colonial, which, as already noted by David Lloyd, is over time hardened by archism’s ‘defensive psychic and institutional structures’.75 The necessity of this violence, which operates as the construction of an account of the past that simultaneously demarcates what is excluded from that past, equally marks the fissure of hope that will destroy it. In other words, it is the violence of this exclusion, the insistence that the oppressed be relegated to the constitutive peripheral of ‘History’ that points to ‘something rotten’ – yet destroyable – ‘in the law’ of History.76 Positioned both inside and outside the structural normativity of society, the enslaved and the colonised emerge as the historically – and racially – specific condition of Agamben’s exposed homo sacer.77 And, of course, it is this name – the homo sacer – that I have been resisting throughout this project. Agamben’s homo sacer, the figure ‘who may be killed and yet not sacrificed’, has been present in absence throughout this chapter.78 They have appeared in figurative terms as the 117

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naturalised murder of the enslaved, the dispossessed and the racialised subject. Yet where the homo sacer brings back into view an account of Schmitt’s politics of sovereignty, and the site of violence that the law’s suspension reaffirms, I want to insist that it also blurs the name of Historical violence. Countering this concealing force of History by naming its conditions, I am simultaneously moving towards history and redemption of who the homo sacer is. What this means is that insofar as we theorise the homo sacer’s body in the historical conditions of its construction – not as an abstract theoretical construct but as those present at the outset of the Anthropocene – a mode of resistance is enacted against the violence that would otherwise render it mute and external to the law of earthly plurality. In other words, today it is insufficient to merely theorise the homo sacer. They must instead be named, as origin stories like the Orbis hypothesis encourage us to do so. To be general through abstract theorisation is to claim impartiality, while to do history is to demand specificity. Against the motif of the homo sacer, I have been wanting to think in terms of the specificity and retention of historical potential in the same manner described in Stuart Hall’s index of the ‘out of place’ figure: ‘the insider/outside perspective of Georg Simmel’s “stranger,”’ the terrain of Homi Bhabha’s “in-between,” the controlled doubling of Ashis Nandy’s “intimate enemies,” W. E. B. DuBois’s “double consciousness” and Edward Said’s “out of place.”’79 Here we return to the function of History, which insists on the ambiguity of non-specificity, co-opting the open condition of plurality into its own archist regime. Against this naturalisation of plurality as a conformist singularity, Yusoff exposes the methodological frame of Anthropocene studies as archist. What she calls ‘white geology’, or the racialised practices of scientific reasoning, is an account for the loss of history’s impartiality and the sublimation of anarchic thinking (which might lead dangerously towards humanity!) to the arche of calculative rationalism.80 Within this practice, what appears as ‘white geology’ is the simultaneous construction of an unearthly place and the transgression of the human law of plurality. Together, this is the ground of History. But how does this domination endure? What is it in the unearthly place of archism that enables it to continue to exact that structural claim beyond the moment of original violence and to silence planetary politics? To this Benjamin offers the diagnosis of law-preserving violence. This is the groundwork of violence’s naturalisation and it captures the phantasmatic force of archism. In the Wake of History In the previous chapter, I drew attention to Arendt’s failure to complicate the revolutionary councils that she saw as the institutional form of natality’s revolutionary spirit. Her inability to consider the plurality of actors and to realise the law that she had declared as in need of such critical recovery after the events of

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totalitarianism, when she herself was forced into an unearthly place – first from Germany, her exilic homeland, then again in an internment camp in France – make her account of the American Revolution that much harder to comprehend. Her implication in the arche of settler-colonialism is even more acute when we recall that she was aware of the divisive violence on which that country was founded. Indeed, when she writes: ‘the reason [Tocqueville] could predict the future of Negroes and Indians for more than a century ahead lay in the simple and frightening fact that these people had never been included in the original consensus universalis of the American republic’, a singularly uncomfortable truth about her is revealed.81 Arendt actively persisted in misrepresenting history in the United States. Seemingly unable to grasp the meaning of settlercolonialism in this context – even when she recognised its existence and engaged with it elsewhere – Arendt was incapable of seeing the violence that would serve as the ground of the nation she esteemed so highly. Ayça Çubukçu presses at this point in Arendt’s writing: reminding us that ‘not only were African Americans and Native Americans excluded from the original consensus universalis, arguably, their enslavement, slaughter, and dispossession through violent acts of settler colonialism were constitutive of the revolutionary republic that Arendt so praised’.82 Arendt’s failures to critically engage, and to assume her own injunction to think, point us towards the phantasm of archism and the creeping naturalisation of History.83 Where Arendt implicates herself in violence, she effectively undermines her own project of historiography. What she describes as a necessary historical impartiality is missing from her attempt to locate in institutional form the lost spirit of revolution. Against this orientation, a properly Arendtian historicisation of the American Revolution, one that faces up to and trembles before the violence of History, is found instead in Martin Luther King Jr’s words. In them we find the historical project that Arendt might have produced, on the condition that she practiced the impartiality that she otherwise so vigorously defended. On the origin of the US, King writes: Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shores, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society. From the sixteenth century forward, blood flowed in battles of racial supremacy. We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or to feel remorse for this shameful episode. Our literature, our films, our drama, our folklore all exalt it.84

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The immanent connection between violence and place, as the destruction of communities coincides with the desecration of land, recalls the implication of colonialism with the wholeness of the earth, and hence with the transgression of the earthly law of plurality, the ground of humanity and that space that enduringly expects more of us. The subsequent (though not inevitable) force of racist doctrines such as settler-colonialism that go on to assume normative presence, not only as they render the topography of the environment anew, forces out the relational worldliness of indigenous people and the historicity of those who might otherwise have lived a life in this earthly place. The violence experienced by the victim of History is singular. But the conditions of archism that History brings into the world are extensive. They insinuate themselves throughout planetary life, in relation to oppressor and victim alike. Indeed, as the naturalisation of History accelerates, the status of oppressor and victim blurs, such that all are implicated – consciously or not – in the continuation of an archist violence that diminishes the conditions of planetary liberation. This is the archist negation of the polis as unpredictable. In the Anthropocene, this scene of violence incorporates both oppressor and oppressed, the unearthly no longer a quality of personhood – dispossessed, enslaved, exiled, outcast – but a condition of life itself. This is the reality of life on an alienated planet – one that Mbembe describes as having been formed as ‘the Atlantic gradually became the epicentre of a new concatenation of worlds, the locus of a new planetary consciousness’.85 It is against this that a new mode of planetary thinking is required. Absent Presence of Hope Such resistance recalls the fissures of hope engrained into the conditions of History. Where previously I borrowed Lloyd’s description of the hardening of ‘defensive psychic and institutional structures’ as sustaining the Anthropocene and so the climate crisis as well, I noted alongside this hardening the existence of hope.86 As the institution hardens, it becomes brittle, its organisation marked by a swelling of revolutionary potential. James Baldwin makes this point in illuminating terms, when he writes that ‘all of the Western nations have been caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism; this means that their history has no moral justification, and that the West has no moral authority’.87 Forgoing the fullness of history that Baldwin is alluding to here, what is rendered immoral is the pretence of History’s claim to universal humanism. Not only does humanity expect more from us than the positing of archist finality, ‘history’ itself expects more than the practice of blind hagiography. If ‘history’ is to have a moral basis, it must be recuperated, the victorious moments alongside the dark. An origin story structured according to the logic of solutionism, as in the latent technoutopian teleology of the Industrial Revolution – a problem born and resolved in the pursuit of planetary domination – must now be retold and reinserted into the 120

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confluence of history. What the archist structure of Historical silencing realises is the undoing of that gathering together in which being might come into place and place into being. What the production of unearthly places or anti-planetary politics undermines, in other words, is the gathering of that fourfold place in which being dwells. Disfigured by force and recast as an iteration of fixed ontological specificity – as this earth for these people – the continuation of place becomes bound to the perpetual violence inflicted upon those deemed unearthly by this ‘earthly’ place. And so, what continues in name as the ‘earth’ is in fact the violent consecration of that which is precisely unearthly, the planet of archist History. Kyle Whyte of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation describes the campaigns of settler-colonialism as erasing ‘what makes a place ecologically unique in terms of human and nonhuman relations, the ecological history of a place, and the sharing of the environment by different human societies’.88 Writing after Whyte, Heather Davis and Zoe Todd describe his project as exposing ‘the deliberate enactment of colonial processes that refuse to acknowledge specific and locational relations between humans, the land, and our other kin’.89 Robbed of specificity and radically undermined as a locus of original relationality, the space that Whyte describes diverges from the matrix of irreducible forces that coalesce as the meaningfulness of earthly dwelling, the gathering oneness of that anarchic place that is the earthly. What transpires instead is the calcification of space and the normalisation of something like a lack in relation to the original claim to be-in-place – this is the trace of an original violence. The insidious erasure of that gathering that informs the ontological meaning behind being-in-place operates as a construction of ‘present absence’, a formulation which is central to Lloyd’s account of settler-colonialism as well. On his terms, the present absence of History’s oppressed are denied the legibility that would allow them to enter the frame of historical revolution. He describes it as this peculiar condition of being absent even when all too present, or of presence manifest in absence, of being outside even when all too much inside, however metaphysical it may appear, is one that both follows the spatial logic of ethnic cleansing and occupation as material phenomena and conforms to the logical space of the exception, that space where the constitutive force of law or state is manifested in its suspension.90 The spatial logic of this violence translates Benjamin’s account of violence as an omnipotent and threatening presence into a planetary format. Lloyd’s phrasing of a ‘presence manifest in absence’ corresponds to Benjamin’s description of a violence that ‘juts manifestly and fearsomely into existence’.91 Read together they point towards the reconfiguration of planetary life according to the archist conditions of appearance set by the original violence of a dispossessing possession of land. That this possessive violence turns on its capacity to dispossess is, however, 121

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that basis upon which, following Mbembe, the possibility for resistance in the name of anarchic humanity is founded. Archism and anarchism coexist. In the ‘Critique on Violence’ essay Benjamin develops the organising force of original violence, showing how it cleaves to reality, adopting a threatening and fluid form. In Martel’s reading of the essay, the fluidity of this threat reappears as the phantasmal allure of archism. Benjamin writes, And its threat is not intended as the deterrent that uninformed liberal theorists interpret it to be. A deterrent in the exact sense would require a certainty that contradicts the nature of a threat and is not attained by any law, since there is always hope of eluding its arm. This makes it all the more threatening, like fate, which determines whether the criminal is apprehended.92 As the threat assumes a normative status in the structural formation of society it exercises a claim over the capacity of certain individuals to incorporate themselves within a plurality. This is the rewriting of plurality’s status as the law of the earth. Read through Benjamin, we instead have the law of the territory. Suspended outside of the social framework of the earth as the locus of both dwelling and action, the territorial spaces of archism erode the valence of place as the ground that precedes action. In straightforward terms, what we are left with in this instance is the empty space of a diminished fourfold or a land alienated from weather. These forms of place appear in Arendt’s writings as the condition of alienation, while for Heidegger they determine the experience of homelessness.93 And yet, a remedy by way of a return to place is possible. We have seen this already in Arendt’s doubled reading of politics both as the product of earthly humans and in the fact that humans can form a polis or political community wherever they go.94 For insofar as the political is not preordained, its capacity for resurgence is its being. The gathering of the polis is the simultaneous means and ends of the political. That this gathering is inherently earthly, that it is made possible via the planetary conditions of life, simply reasserts the fact that insofar as being in place precedes political being, the possibility of rejecting the territorial and colonial structures of History’s archism coexists in the formation of what we might call a ‘planetary polis’. In the next chapter, we will see how Mbembe develops precisely such an entity through the logic of a ‘planetary consciousness’. While the ‘law’ in Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ is not reducible to the realm of positive law – indeed it exists above the legal measure as the ‘jutting’ through of an organising violent condition – its preservation is perhaps most clearly attested to in the structures of state-sanctioned violence. This does not only need to be the police, that ‘spectral mixture’ of institutional violence that

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Benjamin points to in this essay. It can exist in the state-sanctioned investment and building of those sites of violence that crystallise the colonial-extractive regime of the Anthropocene. The law is the catastrophe of a murderous status quo. Alongside the material violence of the extraction site, Sharpe explores the endurance of this violence within the context of systemic racism. She writes: the condition in the post–Civil War United States of the formerly enslaved and their descendants; still on the plantation, still surrounded by those who claimed ownership over them and who fought, and fight still, to extend that state of capture and subjection in as many legal and extralegal ways as possible, into the present. The means and modes of Black subjection may have changed, but the fact and structure of that subjection remain.95 In another section of the same text, Sharpe describes the ‘gratuitous violence that occurs at the level of a structure that constitutes the Black as the constitutive outside’.96 This constitutive outside reappears in Nixon’s project of ‘slow violence’ as the ecological devastation wrought disproportionately upon the already vulnerable, evolving today into resistance to reparative justice regimes that would begin to remedy, and so expose, the conditions of this violence.97 Competing to occupy a place upon the earth, the victim of this violence is erased from presence. This erasure assumes a critical poignancy in the climate crisis in the example of small island nations, whose claim to the right to live in response to the call of the earth is literally denied by rising sea-levels.98 Having named the law that is preserved as the violence of the climate crisis, namely the History of settler-colonialism, I want to conclude by exploring the conditions for Benjamin’s destruction of the law in divine violence. In so doing, a return is made to Arendt and to that reality now determined by this violence. Suspending History Ari-Elmeri Hyvönen’s insightful essay on the Arendtian politics of climate crisis concludes with a reference to Benjamin’s angel of history, that figure who has become archetypal to discussions of apocalypse. Though Hyvönen’s essay proceeds with the claim that there is ‘little sense in speaking of a singular Anthropocene that has one definition and one origin,’ his conclusion seems to invite precisely that.99 In relation to the angel then, he writes that ‘although we are forced to witness the piling up of debris . . . we have not lost the capacity to change the world’.100 This final invocation of the collective ‘we’ is a pivotal claim in the paper, which earlier on suggests that what is needed in the age of crisis is a ‘restructure [of] collective existence’, a claim that Hyvönen develops in the context of an Arendtian plurality.101 I want to cite Hyvönen’s paper here

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and the way it moves in and out of agreement with my own argument, which foregrounds the need for both a revolutionary recovery of the ‘we’ that dwells on the earth and a historical origin both because there is much to be learnt from readings like Hyvönen’s but also to highlight how – and where – we diverge. Indeed, unlike him, I want to persist with the claim that to allow History to elude legibility by passing over the need to suspend its form and pay attention to who has been excluded from that ‘we’ in the first place is to allow archism to infiltrate our politics. As in the previous chapter, it is not enough to simply reclaim the politics of the collective, the ‘we’ of Hyvönen’s plurality or even the inclined relation of Cavarero’s subjects. ‘We’, the collective, must organise ourselves in relation to a temporal place, the gathering in which and from which our appearance assumes its present meaning. What this means for the suspension of planetary archism’s History is a need to move beyond the view that a democratisation of what is ‘past’ is coextensive with the revolutionary aims of history. It is no longer sufficient to simply diversify the range of actors who appear within the storybook of humankind. Which is simply to say that history, the site of historical revolution, needs to return to its material conditions. In other words, we cannot advance a conception of the past that is organised either in opposition to or alienation from place – even if we do so with a supposed claim to experiential and testimonial plurality. This misses the point, as the law of plurality is not simply difference but difference on earth, natality is the condition of remembrance not of worldly dreams but of inter-esse realities.102 An account of the ‘historical’ has to recognise the materiality of place; at the same time that the materiality of place has to recognise its own inscription within what is conceived of as ‘history’. Federico Luisetti thus describes the radicality of decolonialism as a historical project that qualifies ‘pluriversal imagination[s] as a situated geopolitics of knowledge’.103 Reconstituting what he calls the ‘antagonistic epistemic communities’ of resistance and community is the realisation of those messianic generations, whose revolutionary appearance on earth was, as Benjamin tells us, ‘always expected’.104 Maslin and Lewis move towards the realisation of such a historical responsibility in their account of the Anthropocene, realising the form of material history that Benjamin describes throughout his writings as sustaining the conditions for resistance against the violence of archism. In turn, what we are also able to rely on at this moment is a meaningfully revived conception of natality, as the spirit of revolution that disrupts History and realises the earthly law of plurality. Indeed, it is natality, given its unfinished status and its inscription on the earthly surface of the planet, that reappears as the lost spirit of planetary revolution. The difficulty of realising the an-arche of natality in the wake of History’s violence can be resolved by returning to Benjamin, whose reflections on divine violence draw together the suspension of archist History with the opening that is the history of earthly life. 124

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Divine Violence: Or the Beginning of history The function of violence thus far in this project has been determined in relation to the oppressive structures of normativity and the catastrophe that is the status quo, meaning that the move towards Benjamin’s divine violence – particularly given Arendt’s own rejection of violence as antipolitical – can be difficult.105 Nevertheless, it is ‘divine violence’ that Benjamin offers as the way of bringing revolutionary anarchism into being and it is this ‘violence’ that anticipates the kind of History destroying function of Arendt’s natality. Nevertheless, even within Benjamin’s discussion of divine violence as a revolutionary and hence a non-violent act, paradoxes emerge. Luiz Guzmán articulates the difficult form of Benjamin’s violence, claiming that ‘if one believes that violence is necessary to overcome certain situations of oppression and injustice on Earth, and yet that it is never justifiable (since as a means to an end its justification is dependent on a specific end that cannot avoid, to preserve itself, reproducing the conditions that were to be eliminated), then one finds oneself in a paradox’.106 Read today, this paradox exists in the recreation of an oppressed political class condemned to planetary instrumentality in order to recover the conditions of earthly life. It exists in the condemnation, that is, of submitting to the benevolent violence that is doing politics exclusively ‘for the sake of’. This cannot be the final point in the revolutionary politics of history or natality. The exclusivity of its determination – ‘for the sake of’ – is already the index of its archist core, creating the setting for the One World of self-liquidation. If redemption from the oppression of History is to be achieved, it cannot be attained via the appropriation of History’s oppressed as handmaiden. As Guzmán writes, the main trait of divine violence ‘is that it is not a means to an end; it is not exercised “to”’.107 What this means in relation to the Anthropocene is a complication of what it is to decolonise a normativity that operates not only at the narrative level of Historical violence but now determines the material reality of planetary life. The singular need for divine intervention in this context thus departs from the need to break the hold of settler-colonial law whilst also recognising that this law has an irreversible claim over the earth: we cannot not live in the time of the Anthropocene as an extractive, polluting and dispossessing paradigm. The question then is, are we condemned to live unearthly lives in unearthly places? The force of this question lies in the fact that even as we endeavour to suspend the move towards the ‘tipping points’ of climate apocalypse, the normative violence of the Anthropocene is already ineliminable and irreversible. This is the condition for life today. The Anthropocene may be decolonised, critical histories retold against the force of History, but the empirical fact of its presence will persist. The important point here is that decolonising the Anthropocene will not destroy the climate crisis, nor will it reverse it. And yet, that does not mean that the need to decolonise the Anthropocene disappears. It remains incumbent upon the historical present to reorient its relationship with the past 125

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and assume an understanding of living in the present that takes the fact of the Anthropocene as its necessary point of departure while simultaneously refusing to advance the logic that once organised its appearance. This point has been made before. Out of Standing Rock, Nick Estes tells us that ‘there is no separation between past and present, meaning that an alternative future is also determined by our understanding of the past. Our history is the future.’108 This gathering of past, present and future points towards the project of divine, historical history. Davis and Todd provide their own vision of what decolonising the Anthropocene would look like: We hope to have shown that by dating the Anthropocene to colonialism we can at least begin to address the root of the problem, which is the severing of relations through the brutality of colonialism coupled with an imperial, universal logic. Through this, we might then begin to address not only the immediate problems associated with massive reliance upon fossil fuel and the nuclear industry, but the deeper questions of the need to acknowledge our embedded and embodied relations with our other than-human kin and the land itself. This necessarily means re-evaluating not just our energy use, but our modes of governance, ongoing racial injustice, and our understandings of ourselves as human.109 Though there is a clear revolutionary project at work here and it is one that speaks to the disruptive aims of history, vigilance is the condition of anarchist politics. What this means is the continual need to ask of our political projects, is this divine violence? Only by asking such questions can material reality be recognised alongside the original contingency of that reality. It is unclear whether these questions can be answered. Indeed, vigilance presupposes a critical awareness that suspends the paranoia of suspicion that answering generates, recuperating instead those factors of productive opacity and anarchist unpredictability that determine the project of politics at the outset.110 Clarifying these factors is made possible via a return to Guzmán. Guzmán: Four Aspects of Divine Violence Guzmán denotes four qualities of divine violence: ‘the possibility of its occurrence, the impossibility of its recognition as such by humankind, the lack of urgency for said recognition, and the invisibility of its expiatory power.’111 Drawn from three dense sentences in the last paragraph of the ‘Critique of Violence’, Guzmán dedicates the bulk of his exegesis to working through the meaning of these qualities. Benjamin’s original text reads: But if the existence of violence outside the law, as pure immediate violence, is assured, this furnishes the proof that revolutionary violence, 126

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the highest manifestation of unalloyed violence by man, is possible, and shows by what means. Less possible and also less urgent for humankind, however, is to decide when unalloyed violence has been realised in particular cases. For only mythic violence, not divine, will be recognisable as such with certainty, unless it be in incomparable effects, because the expiatory power of violence is invisible to men.112 The first of these qualities, the innate potentiality of divine violence, appears in Massimiliano Tomba’s temporal reading of divine violence; namely, that it occurs in a moment of suspension, as a rupture from a given temporal order.113 This rupture is the anarchic break from Historical linearity into history, it is the moment of sovereign disruption through which a collective emerges. Where Tomba sees this suspension as ‘a matter of ethics’, Guzmán clarifies that what is at stake is the contingency of ethical justice.114 In relation to this contingency, he writes: Why can’t it be fulfilled or actualised? Because it would cease being justice or divine violence. It would fall into the field of instrumentality, into an economy of means-end, sucked into the cycle of mythical violence. A violence that destroys law to found a new law on its ruins falls into the orbit of the cycle of mythical violence. It would need to justify itself, thereby exemplifying once again the ‘problematic nature of law.’115 In other words, divine violence resists being caught in the snares of fulfilment, which would amount to the perversion of its precarious inclination towards justice. Here we retreat into a politics ‘for the sake of’. In the context of the climate crisis, divine violence must resist such forms of instrumentalization and the subsumption of experience into a means-end paradigm. Which is merely to say that something like climate justice must continually defy fulfilment insofar as it remains a question of agonistic renewal. Decolonisation of History is unending, a continual task of rewriting what had been through the reimagining of what could have been and what now might be. Justice then is the seeking of justice and not the execution of punishment. The climate does not exist in a state of permanence, as the constitutive condition of political life, it is held within the ‘oneness’ of conditions that is life itself and hence it is anarchic, concealed from view. Continually seeking justice is thus the first condition of writing history. This leads to Guzmán’s second quality: ‘the impossibility of divine violence’s recognition as such by humankind’. Rather than obfuscate what it means to act in terms of divine violence, this quality reinforces the temporal ‘not-yet’ of divine violence’s relation to judgement. In so doing, Guzmán maintains the anarchic form of divine violence and resists the totalising effect of archism’s 127

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claim to immanence. The further specification that it is humankind who remain incapable of recognising divine violence when it occurs reinforces humanity’s inscription within the agonistic places of earthly dwelling. Put otherwise, this might be better understood in terms of the plural forces that coalesce in the appearance of worldly reality. Simply because divine violence and the destruction of the law are not recognisable by humankind, it does not follow that they have not occurred. Humanity expects more of us in the precise sense that the conditions for the recognition of justice resist exposure. Justice, because it retreats, must be sought. Guzmán extrapolates this further in the account he provides of divine violence’s third dimension: the lack of urgency for said recognition. Echoing the perpetual possibility of the law’s destruction, Guzmán explains the lack of urgency in terms that parallel the temporal delay of divine violence. Mirroring Arendt’s own description of natality as only assuming its status as spontaneous belatedly, divine violence lacks the transparent urgency that would make it immediately comprehensible.116 It requires the work of generations, to recognise and realise the revolutionary project that begins at one moment in time but can never rightly be said to be finished. Reality, retreating from concealment, resists legibility. Indeed, to insist upon a revolutionary immediacy would fall back into the means-ends orientation of instrumental or law-preserving violence. Anarchic beginnings such as those attested to by natality, messianism and divine violence defy presence, they persist retrospectively or conversely as something to be anticipated. In both instances, what is clear is that divine violence suspends the unfolding march of time, it subverts the course of History and enjoins historical presence. The final of the four qualities, the invisibility of divine violence’s expiatory powers, reaffirms the intersection of the preceding three. Yet here this invisibility in relation to the expiatory force of divine violence reaffirms the expansive and anarchic project of divine violence in relation to judgement. Namely, that while divine violence is motivated by the pursuit of justice, it does not impose a liminal threshold on what this should constitute. Guzmán’s account of this is particularly moving and clarifies the problematic of responding to the climate crisis: We can catch a glimpse of divine violence: it is fulfilled, in its appearance as mere possibility, say, at the beginning of a revolution. It is actualised as ideal, as possibility, lying like a shadow just beyond our reach. Its value lies in how it feeds the desire and impulse for transforming the current world-historical conditions of existence into a more just and equal society. It takes place not in the bloody, physical manifestation of mythical violence exercised at particular historical junctures, but in the purity of the thirst for justice that leads humans to attempt to change their conditions.117 128

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Played out in the context of the climate crisis, each affirmation of land rights or indigenous sovereignty, each piece of ‘wake work’ or altered thinking of the past, reveals itself as the beginning of divine violence’s anarchist suspension of History. Against the normativity of Historical linearity, these projects realise the humility of Martel’s anarchist project: to ‘struggle with and confront what [we] encounter’.118 This struggle is heard in the ‘thirst for justice’ that is realised in the small acts of resistance that challenge the conditions of political life without knowing what will come next but knowing that change is possible. In spite of the ‘weak’ status of divine violence as ideal and as possibility, plurality, the recognitive condition of politics and the framework of Haraway’s ‘responseability’ becomes the condition of action and remembrance. It is this formation and the political hope that lies within the plurality that motivates and sustains the small acts of revolutionary suspension. Speaking to her responsibility as an ‘historian of the multitude’, Saidiya Hartman describes the way in which she is ‘forced to grapple with the power and authority of the archive and the limits it sets on what can be known, whose perspective matters, and who is endowed with the gravity and authority of historical actor’.119 Although Arendt displays her own form of violence regarding the archive as she reads the history of the United States not in terms of the archism of settler-colonialism and its normalisation as the arche of History, but as the ‘spirit of the laws’ of the revolutionary councils, what this chapter has shown is that the anarchic function of natality to sustain history persists. Enriched by this dialogue or, perhaps more simply, to follow Hartman, ‘forced to grapple with the power of the archive’, natality assumes new weight as initium. With this, Arendt’s politics and the texture of reality to which that politics attest become more complex. In a sense proper to this project, the earthliness of the earth is brought once again into a state of Heideggerian ‘unconcealment’. At the same time, however, naming the violence of History as not simply a physical threat to land and place but a threat to the anarchic ground of politics also exposes the History of climate crisis that is the phantasm of planetary archism. Against the naturalisation of this narrative, by drawing out the voids of History, recognising the existence of the oppressed, living in the wake and the afterlife of this violence, we begin to suspend its presence. In the following chapter, as I turn to confront the archism that reaches into the present in the form of a foretold planetary future, I move to realise James Martel’s project of anarchist risk-taking and stage the grounds for a planetary revolution.

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5

OVERCOMING PREDICTABILITY: RETHINKING FUTURE FATES

The previous chapter has presented the question of what is generally understood as ‘history’ through the binary constructs History and history. There, History was presented as the violence of colonialism that organises the appearance of the Anthropocene, the geological epoch of which the climate crisis is now symptomatic. The phantasmal promise offered by this colonial archism turns on the claim that critical reflection on the origin of the crisis is not required for climate revolution. It reappears in the imposed dissonance between the climate crisis and extractive regimes. The coercive hold of this archism appears in what Harriet Johnson describes as ‘the complacent assumption that markets will correct for environmental risk’ where ‘mechanism regulating social desires are camouflaged as natural laws’ and finally where what is awaited is not a planetary revolution but that ‘unproven technologies (such as carbon capture and clean coal) will yet intervene’.1 The arche of History that sits behind these narratives was countered in the previous chapter through a revolutionary narrative of critical history. This attempt to suspend History and stage the commencement of planetary life anew must contend however with the fact that the future has, in certain instances, already been produced by the force of this archist History. Effects have been ‘baked in’. Conditions of planetary degradation have begun and in some cases are irreversible. It can now be said that though the future is always a space of becoming, in some places it has ‘become’ ahead of its time. What this means for climate action that proclaims to realise a revolutionary planetary ethics is that it is now insufficient to reckon with the past alone – even when the formation 130

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of a critical history claims its own future orientation. Past and future must be engaged alike. And so, having set the scene for a critical history, in this chapter I move to the critical space of a corresponding future. In the age of climate crisis, the very status of the ‘future’ is under question. Where history is overwhelmed by the domination of History, so too is the future confronted by an archist Future. Yet the form this archist Future takes is distinct. It is both not-yet and already here. In the age of climate crisis, the future is marked by finitude – glacier retreat and mass extinction, coastline erosion and desert encroachment. More disconcertingly still, for all the unknowns that exist in the world, the future is increasingly presented as a place of immanent ‘knowability’. It is charted in graphs, it is projected in climate futures, it is made present in the language of political responsibility that knows today how much carbon will be emitted tomorrow. It was seen in the image of the Climate Clock that appeared in the Introduction: ‘[T]he stark, orange-tinted letters [counting] down the critical time window remaining for humanity to act to save itself.’2 This double reality – the baked-in effects and the prophetic nature of climate communication – subdues political unpredictability, effectively destroying the very core of Arendtian politics.3 At the same time, however, these effects and prophecy set the ineliminable conditions with which any emancipatory project seeking hope for change and efficient action must engage. In other words, revolution will need climate prophesy in order to orient itself in relation to a degraded planet. Safeguarding the conditions for spontaneous beginning requires the empirical data of prediction. In the form of a prophetic future then, we encounter the straitjacket of the Future, the sovereign corelate to History and the conditions for a messianic future. In the move from History to Future, the lingering and structural event of planetary violence is brought to the fore. What is marked in this transition is the collapse of the present as a space of disruptive beginnings that determines the meeting of past and future. Against the linear march from one to the other, the present retreats as a space from which the historian might realise Benjamin’s project of ‘blasting open the continuum of history’.4 As the archist construct that is History-Future tightens its grip on the conditions for political appearance and imposes its planeterising view of what it means to live a worldly life, the very setting in which to realise Arendt’s twofold political conditions of natality and plurality is lost. Locating within this violence something that operates in Benjamin’s terms as the ‘rottenness of the law’, in the previous chapter I sought to counter History through Benjamin’s divine violence, recast in this instance as the becoming potential of history.5 Holding on to that slipperiness between the archist violence of History and the anarchic opening of history, what I demonstrated in that chapter was the essential vulnerability of those attempts to disrupt the normative force that imposes itself over planetary life. Described in messianic terms as the anarchic destruction of the law, the 131

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divine violence of history seeks out a revolutionary change. Yet this change exists only ever ‘as ideal, as possibility’.6 This resistance to absolute form and the necessary fragility of messianic intervention sustains the inquisitive compulsion to remain vigilant to the seduction of archism. Claims, in other words, are made on the revolutionary project of the one who seeks to disrupt and suspend the linearity of what is called ‘history’. The fragility of their project also distinguishes divine violence from the totalising hegemony of History, which always insists on the possibility of a total and pure form. Indeed, it is this resistance of pure immanence that creates the space in which to think an open future. The identification of the Future significantly broadens the implications identified in History. Where the latter marked the conditions that emanate from the violent structures of settler-colonialism that are central to the commencement of the climate crisis and continue to organise its appearance, the Future represents a fluid interplay of three distinct forms of violence. Disentangling the way in which the Future imposes a form of planetary archism over the present, in this chapter I turn to the depiction of fate in Greek mythology. Here the future is presented through the Moirai, three sisters who correspond to the intersecting lines of worldly fate. Known as Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos, the Moirai clarify the futural reality of a planet under archist conditions. Reading the future in this way not only responds to the material or earthly implications of the climate crisis but also to the way in which they reduce politics in the present to a realm of instrumentality. Operating in this way, this reading recuperates the intersection of earth and world in the inter esse scene of Arendtian politics. More to the point perhaps, it stages a setting in which a revolutionary future can contend both with the ineliminable and baked-in effects of climate crisis and the ontological meaning of politics in an age of constant predictive finitude. In the first half of this chapter then, I disentangle the archist tropes that lay hold to a planetary future after climate crisis. In the second half, I explore the conditions for a revolutionary alternative, recuperating natality as a condition of ‘making future’. The idea of ‘making future’ echoes the revolutionary project of the historian. To this end, it realises the aims expressed in Benjamin’s account of thinking history ‘against the grain’ which later appears in Christina Sharpe’s writings as ‘wake work’.7 The use of the term ‘future’ here refers back to the original ‘weakness’ of Benjamin’s messianic action, the vulnerability of acting within the relational plane of Adriana Cavarero’s inclined ethics, and, perhaps most of all, the unpredictability of Arendtian political action. Like the latter, which is the product of an unknown origin and unidentifiable actor, future resists authority. Instead, it is a predicate of the collective common sense that appears in the shared investment of a community in the future as a site of custodial becoming.8 Moving freely through Arendt’s writings, in this chapter I also want to suggest that the unpredictability of the future can be read through the lens of Arendt’s 132

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‘who/what’ distinction that appears in her discussion of action in The Human Condition. Where the latter refer to ‘qualities, gifts, talents, and shortcomings’ that may be hidden or displayed, but always already known to some degree, ‘who’ a person is can never be told in advance; instead it depends on the sensemaking condition of human plurality.9 If ‘what’ a person is coincides with the reductive ground of their immanent being, ‘who’ they are is a locus of concealment. This who/what duality plays out in the blurred distinction between the emancipatory potential of the future and the instrumentalist straitjacket of the Future. Holding the two together, in the same way that each appear as the who/ what of the political actor, opens up a space in which to think the difficulty with which a person – or a history – is read. While it is ‘what’ a person is that makes them instantly legible – smart, funny, tall, short – it is who they are that discloses them as a person in that properly Arendtian sense of being an instance of natality. Knowing ‘who’ a person is cannot be forced but requires a mode of reciprocal ‘letting be’ and the courage to inquire. Not only does this sense of ‘who’ a person is coincide with the Augustinian formulation that each person is born in order to begin and hence is inherently unknowable from the outset, in Arendt’s writings it also distinguishes each individual as loveable. The complicated terrain in Arendt’s writings that explores this question of love, which is alternately presented as the world-destroying love of a concealed ‘who’ or the possibility of a world-denying passion for ‘what’ a person is, is remedied in this chapter through the language of loving the emergent present that is the future. This turn to the domain of love signals a return to the setting from which the book was written: the unearthly terrain of the climate crisis. It is love that guides a response to the planet insofar as it is love that insists there must be something more than the mere presence of mute planetary violence. Conversely, I want to argue that it is a perverse form of love that is revealed when we submit to the seductive promise of archism that something, some saving truth, will resolve the quandary of the planetary present. This fantastic appeal of archism operates by insisting that what we love can be saved as it is – the hedonistic frenzy of consumer lifestyles and carbon intensive living. Archism lays claim to the language of love when it makes this false promise, yet what it offers is not a loving condition but a paralysing hold over the world. Such a love is not saving and it does not produce the ‘life-giving oasis’ that Arendt attributes to love in essay ‘Introduction into Politics’.10 This notion of archism as a form of love suspends the conditions of recognition, not in order to step towards Benjamin’s revolutionary break but as a way of alienating the community from within, undoing and eventually eliminating the conditions that make it recognisable and loveable. Archism corrodes the conditions for love as a mode of letting the future be. And so, I turn to love in the conclusion to this chapter not because it presents an easy solution to the planetary domination of archism. It does not. I look to love precisely because of its vulnerability to archism. In 133

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as much as wresting history from History presupposes an encounter with violence, so too does the anarchy of love insist upon a confrontation with its own dissembling other. Indeed, even as love appears in Arendt’s work, it is marked by aporetic tension.11 Love is both political and antipolitical. Nevertheless, it is this necessary tension that I reaffirm in my discussion of love, seeing within it the possibility to make the future in a world threatened by the archist threats of planetary violence. Neither a condemnation nor a panacea-like solution then, my approach to love turns on the capacity to see within Arendt’s formulation ‘amor mundi’, a love for the world that maintains the themes of concealment and planetary an-arche that have coordinated this project throughout.12 The Future Moirai Before we can get to love, the archist forms of the Future must be confronted. Drawn from the Greek goddesses of fate – Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos, known together as the Moirai – here they appear as Future-Clotho, FutureLachesis and Future-Atropos. The Moirai are described in Hesiod’s Theogony as giving ‘mortal men evil and good to have’.13 And while they clearly represent the personification of fate, my invocation is not intended to suggest a form of fatalism. Indeed, in the Eumenides the Moirai are described as distributing fate justly.14 Apportioning both good and evil, the Moirai give texture to life and colour its events. The first of the sisters, Clotho, is depicted as the ‘spinner’ of life’s mother thread. In the context of the Future, Future-Clotho stands for the pure continuation of History’s uninterrupted storm. Born in the inaugural violence of the climate crisis, Future-Clotho names the future that is the unchecked continuation of History. She is the runaway ‘Hothouse earth’ towards which earth systems are currently being propelled.15 Read through Benjamin’s reflections on the catastrophe of history and Achille Mbembe’s account of the ‘becoming black of the world’, Future-Clotho is the status-quo. She ‘is not an ever-present possibility but what in each case is given’ and the slow erasure of political hope.16 Uninterrogated, Future-Clotho represents an unearthly place to come in which the emancipatory project of history has failed and the status quo of carbon-intensive living, resource extraction and unchecked capitalism is maintained. The second of the Moirai is Lachesis. Lachesis has the task of assigning each life its thread. Known as the ‘allotter’, Lachesis decides the individual destiny of each person. In the context of the climate crisis, Future-Lachesis refers to the claim made on politics by the forces of planetary and political necessity. Constructed here as the logic of instrumentality, Future-Lachesis exerts a totalising force over the present, transforming politics from its depiction in Arendt’s writing as synonymous with unpredictable freedom sustained in the gathering of a polis to an activity of survival. Structured around the intersecting axes of nature/people and capitalism/non-capitalism, Future-Lachesis reduces political 134

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action to a realm of reactive instrumentality. Although Future-Lachesis can indeed realise the revolutionary politics of something like history, insofar as she can personify the decarbonised action necessary for planetary stability, what she nevertheless makes apparent is the reduction of political action to the demands of the climate crisis. In this precise sense then, she is the expression of brute instrumentality. Though Future-Lachesis recognises that the conditions of the climate crisis are irreversible and political action is marked by an imperative of response in order to survive, she also signifies the loss of natality’s spontaneity. What then appears under Lachesis is not politics per se but an equivalence between urgency and action. The third sister of the Moirai is Atropos, whose task it is to decide how and when each life will end. Here I invoke Future-Atropos as the amorphous image of a planetary future foretold. Most favourably depicted as the already unearthly place of 1.5 degrees of global warming, the limit set by the Paris Climate Agreement, Future-Atropos also names a planet of 2, 3 and 4 degrees of warming.17 Assuming presence in the prophetic models of global warming, Future-Atropos is the insistence that each action in the present can be enfolded into an image of the future. If Future-Lachesis threatens to erode the possibility of natality in the present, it is Future-Atropos who undermines natality as having claim to future unpredictability. In the context of the climate crisis, Future-Atropos represents the claim that every action can be reduced to a calculation. Not only does she embody the foreclosure of planetary unpredictability, Future-Atropos captures the plurality of speculative ideological futures that attempt to disrupt the status quo of current planetary realities. Articulated most thoroughly by Joel Mann and Geoff Wainwright, whose political futures are coordinated around various Lachesis-like configurations of planetary sovereignty/anti-sovereignty and capitalism/communism, Future-Atropos is an unearthly place produced in the messy meeting of planetary instability and political ideology.18 She is archism’s wunderkind. Knowing how each sister recuperates the seductive allure of archism creates the setting in which to imagine another posterity, one that is emancipated from the conditions of destruction without at the same time being in denial of them. Inasmuch as each iteration of the Future attests to an operation of immanent claims to power and omnipotent knowledge, they also establish the conditions that block out the light needed to expose the possibilities of an alternative. And yet, in this act of negation or disavowal of natal potential, they demarcate the fissures through which a light might shine. Setting the stage for darkness, the Future-Moirai dramatize the conditions for a planetary revolution. Together they highlight the complexity of Mbembe’s suggestion that the dominant discourse of the twenty-first century is that of ‘collapsology’, a mood of withdrawal and closure, where old imperialist impulses ‘combine with nostalgia and melancholy’.19 Yet where Mbembe identifies one narrative of a devouring plutocracy 135

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operating at a planetary scale, the Future-Moirai tease out the subtle differences in imaginary that translate the present into future and the once-ascendent into the coming collapse. Future-Clotho In Hesiod’s account, Clotho ‘is she who spins the thread of man’s life’.20 In the context of the climate crisis, she appears as Future-Clotho, where she is similarly positioned before the unfolding of life in the inaugural moments of the Anthropocene. Here, her presence at the origin of the geological era that stages the violence of planetary archism is prophetic. Unlike her sisters, who colour life and give meaning to appearance, Future-Clotho names in advance the direction in which historical progress moves. Her immovable rigidity and expression of History’s logic positions her in parallel with Benjamin’s account of catastrophe: both exist as status quo. And yet, the violence of Benjamin’s catastrophe and Future-Clotho is never merely limited to what or who is already presented as oppressed, rather both assume a centripetal function, forever growing and drawing more and more under their reign. To the degree that Future-Clotho holds the possibility of political life in her hand, she reflects what will emerge as the limits advanced in Achille Mbembe’s account of the ‘becoming black of the world’.21 Mbembe’s depiction of ‘becoming black’ radically extends understandings of the present crisis as catastrophic. Hence, where others such as T J Demos describe the way in which the crisis is underpinned by ‘the uninterrupted, accident-free, normal running of the fossil economy’, Mbembe challenges the very meaning of ‘normal running’ to recognise the way in which this normalisation of planetary violence is an all-encompassing and ever-expanding violence.22 Developed out of his discussion on the history of slavery – the same history that accompanied the violence of History in the establishment of the ‘New World’ order – Mbembe’s argument hinges on the claim that ‘the systematic risks experienced specifically by Black slaves during early capitalism have now become the norm for, or at least the lot of, all of subaltern humanity’.23 Rather than negate the specificity of this violence, Mbembe exposes its present normalisation. And so, when he further clarifies what he sees as once definitive of the term ‘Black’ – that it demarcated a condition of dispossession imposed upon certain individuals – as extrapolated into a general worldly condition, he makes a claim about what it means to inhabit what I am calling the unearthly place of Future-Clotho. This condition of ‘becoming black’ latches onto the agonistic space described in relation to Heidegger’s notion of place in the gathering of the fourfold. This means that what precedes the lived experience of dispossession as a material reality is the slowing down of that gathering that discloses the meaning of reality. Mbembe connects this slowing down to the expression of the forces that deny the possibility for political thinking to interrogate its own 136

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assumptions. What thus emerges in the ‘becoming black’ is the operation of a force that, ‘in its crudest sense, has overtaken the interrogation of meaning, the question of meaning’ in the anarchic place of dwelling.24 Mbembe’s initial depiction of the slave as imprisoned within the ‘dungeon of appearance’ echoes Arendt’s argument that the slave is reduced to their mere physicality.25 Unable to disclose themselves and enter into a plurality in which the natality of each individual becomes meaningful as natality, the mark of the slave is their speechlessness. At a more metaphysical level, the condition of the slave, or what Mbembe calls the ‘becoming Black’, coincides with the historical condition of being present in absence. Unable to appear as political, or as a participant within the broader polis, the slave as human is disavowed. They become superfluous before a narrative that has always already positioned them as such. This ‘always already’ extends the present absence of the slave, meaning that Mbembe urges his reader to understand this exclusive spatialisation in terms of how the slave is dispossessed ‘of the future and of time, the two matrices of the possible’.26 It is this, perhaps more than the general subordination of whole communities to an apolitical status, that strikes at the centre of what it means to live in the wake of Future-Clotho. Robbed of an image of the future as the realm of the unpredictable, Future-Clotho stages an impasse between action and its unpredictable ends, imposing an eternal present that is instead always already past and future. As the immanent and uninterrupted continuation of History, coordinated around the mute continuum of settler-colonialism, Future-Clotho is the realisation of Frederic Jameson’s infamous lament that it’s ‘easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’.27 Perhaps more acutely still, as a planetary imaginary, Future-Clotho signals a crisis of the imagination in thinking the planet beyond the ideological bounds of colonialism and its manifestation in extractivism, capitalism and consumerism. In the plurality of ‘cenes’ that organise the Anthropocene, Future-Clotho recuperates each and establishes herself as the ‘agnotocene’ or the production of ‘zones of ignorance’.28 What is telling about this failure of the imagination, a failure that Arendt describes in terms of a ‘crisis’, is the way in which it reveals a particular current of nihilism. Yet rather than nihilism’s suspension of meaning, Future-Clotho corresponds to the ‘nowhilism’ of seeing meaning only within the exceptional state of a permanent present.29 What this insistent presentism, born of a failure in the critical imagination, produces is described by Amitav Ghosh as a ‘crisis of the imagination’ in which the suspension of thinking stages the entry, not of revolutionary beginning, but of archism. Rather than a revolutionary bid for a speculative future, Future-Clotho suspends the law in order to reaffirm the normative condition of the law. A reincarnation of Schmitt’s original thesis on the role of the political sovereign, Future-Clotho upends the conditions of messianic arrest and recentres the status quo. 137

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Staying with Benjamin’s language of historical messianism, which moves towards a future in which the ‘past has become citable in all its moments’, the collapse of a critical imagination under Future-Clotho coincides with the forfeiting of history and conditions for historical judgment.30 The coincidence of the imagination and judgement hangs on the role played by the future in the present. Relinquished as a space of unknown possibility, judgement on the creation of the future is forsaken. Arendt anticipates this position when she accounts for the fact that ‘a crisis becomes a disaster only when we respond to it with preformed judgments, that is, with prejudices’. She goes on to write that ‘such an attitude not only sharpens the crisis but makes us forfeit the experience of reality and the opportunity for reflection it provides’.31 Without reflection on the coming and going of the world, without, that is, a sense that the world might change, despair becomes the handmaiden of judgement’s decline. This forfeiting of reality encapsulates Future-Clotho’s erasure of freedom as a collective and reciprocally granted attribute of political life. Tracing the historical fault line of colonial desire around which the becoming black of the world unfolds, Mbembe describes the way in which this desire ‘to divide and classify, to create hierarchies and produce difference’ puts into motion modernity’s conditions of difference.32 Here he could be speaking directly to Martel’s description of archism as promising ‘offers of privilege to some few elite and of comforting – but false – compensations for the rest’.33 More emphatically, however, he speaks against the persistence of hybridised forms that lay siege to the conditions of possibility and recentres them within a narrative of linear progression. The continued reduction in Mbembe’s account of appearance to physicality and the invention of race ‘to signify exclusion, brutalization, and degradation’ entrenches the false promises of archism.34 And so, in an apparent evocation of Future-Clotho and archism, Mbembe describes the way in which ‘Black . . . the word has its own weight, its own destiny’.35 That this ‘Blackness’ assumes a normative and archist force is further clarified in his argument that the designation Black yields a name he did not chose, but one that was inherited because of the position he occupies in the world. As he writes, ‘those clothed in the name “black” are well aware of its external provenance’.36 This invocation of the world as placing that name points to the synonymy between archism and the spatial constructs that realise the logic of dispossession, that operate by way of an always originally inscribed exclusion, such that the ‘weighty’ designation ‘Black’ precedes even appearance. As Mbembe develops the spatialisation of Blackness, he writes of the way in which ‘to be Black is to be stuck at the foot of a wall with no doors’.37 It is a similar loss of meaning that clarifies the distinction between History as crisis and Future (or at least Future-Clotho) as disaster. In the former, the potential of redemption persists in the capacity to read history ‘against the grain’; in the latter what is lost is the space from which even the possibility of an-arche begins. 138

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While Mbembe sees a path of resistance against the becoming black of the world in the recognition of human plurality, which he describes as a ‘community of singularities and difference’, Future-Clotho, as both a planetary and an ontological threat, a threat to both the integrity of place and the ‘placed’ condition of politics, consistently challenges this claim.38 In other words, even as the ‘frenzied codification of social life according to norms’ that is the becoming black of the world is challenged, what remains is the literal wreckage of its wake. If politics is a product of the inter esse place that appears in the meeting of Arendt’s earth and world, then simply appealing for the democratisation of appearance will not redeem the earthly condition of the polis. Democratisation and access to the space of politics is no guarantee that a material revolution will occur.39 In the climate crisis, what History and Future-Clotho insist upon is the ineliminable presence of planetary instability: bushfire, drought, ocean acidification, glacier retreat and cyclone. And so, while both History and Future-Clotho can indeed be challenged via appeals to the condition of plurality for politics, these appeals must also be informed by plurality’s being the ‘law of the earth’. It is, in other words, radically insufficient to appeal to difference without recognising the earthly conditions that sustain difference and make it politically robust. Plurality cannot be recuperated as a political condition if what is lost is the meaningful relationality of subjects. At the price of producing leitmotifs of alienation and mass isolation, the earthly condition of plurality must remain in lockstep consideration with what it means to convene collective action. Future-Lachesis offers precisely this seductive narrative, appearing in the politics of ‘individual responsibility’ and neo-liberalised ‘good green citizens’. She names the uncomfortable reality that is concealed by a rhetoric of ‘best possible outcomes’ and ‘better off overalls’. Future-Lachesis Future-Lachesis significantly broadens the conditions imposed by FutureClotho. Although Lachesis remains an exemplary instance of the way in which narratives of planetary apocalypse are imposed on the future, what she also embodies is the forfeiting of spontaneity in the present. With this loss of natality’s spontaneity, what Future-Lachesis embodies is the ontological basis for political action in natality.40 Known as the ‘allotter’ of life’s events, Lachesis determines the content of the mother thread spun by her sister Clotho. Before this thread of life is cut off by Atropos, Lachesis gives texture to its appearance, determining the individual destiny of each thread. In Plato’s Republic the people are described as going before Lachesis, in whose lap ‘lie the lots and patterns’ of each life.41 Responsible for assigning each life its contents, in the context of the climate crisis Future-Lachesis allots a ‘yoke of necessity’, undermining the scope of freedom as she reduces action to a praxis of survival. Limiting action to a domain determined almost exclusively by the planetary 139

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demands of the climate crisis, Future-Lachesis exerts of threshold condition over natality and plurality. Framed as the mythological embodiment of archism, Future-Lachesis puts into relief the implications of living in the wake of History and Future-Clotho. Although not by necessity a destructive figure – at least not insofar as she can aspire towards projects of decarbonisation and a seemingly revolutionary politics – what Future-Lachesis reveals is the limited potential of action under conditions of planetary archism to enact those unpredictable new beginnings so intrinsic to the twofold faculties of natality and plurality. In other words, if the structural forces that maintain the climate crisis are settler-colonialism and its contingent regimes of production, consumption and disposal, then what Future-Lachesis ‘allots’ in the present is the necessary recourse of action to these intersecting axes. And so, while this claim over action is not in and of itself problematic, insofar as action must contend with these forms of systemic violence if judgement is to be executed and another planetary future realised, what becomes problematic is the degree to which she reduces politics to the service of life’s necessities.42 Located between a nihilistic form of fatalism and brute realism, FutureLachesis poses a direct threat to Arendt’s claim that the meaning of politics is freedom. The specific form of violence that unfolds in the context of FutureLachesis is thus one that pertains to the ‘unfreedom’ of life determined purely by necessity. Already such a negation of freedom is seen in Arendt’s interpretation of the slave, the one whose being ‘without speech’ is produced in the moment of their becoming unrecognisable within the polis. Yet where the impossibility of the slave’s entry into the political realm of public life occurs in relation to their being defined by the ‘necessities of life’, Future-Lachesis realises this definition as occurring within the polis itself.43 We are all then slaves in this scenario, not in our failure to be recognised as natality’s political actors but because the polis or what claims to be the institutional form of politics is itself a locus of slavery. Closely connected in this sense to the becoming black of the world, Future-Lachesis conceals slavery within the logic of instrumentalism. The violence of Lachesis is thus felt in the disjunction with which it meets Arendt’s claim that the meaning of politics is freedom.44 In Future-Lachesis there is no freedom or politics, there is only submission to laws of necessity. For Arendt this culminates in something like the law of the desert: life in an alienated world in which the meaning of politics has been divorced from the activity of freedom and the spontaneity of natality.45 Indeed, in such a world the very idea of politics is chimeric, for what is at play in such a desert is the mere act of species survival and no claim to the act of dwelling. Devoid of meaning, life under Future-Lachesis is life determined a priori by the biological demands of seeking stability under conditions of planetary instability. 140

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Evidence of the demands of Lachesis can be seen in the organising binaries around which responses to the climate crisis are currently formed: the alternating axes of nature/people and capitalism/non-capitalism.46 In the context of the so-called ‘conservation debate’ that grapples with the nature/people binary, Bram Büscher and Robert Fletcher identify two recurrent trends. On the one hand, the ‘neoprotectionists’ who argue that ‘separation between people and nature is needed to stave off a collapse of all life-supporting ecosystems’, a separation that is commonly envisaged as the division of the planet into a ‘human half’ and a ‘natural half’.47 On the other hand, ‘new conservationists’ who aim to go beyond nature-people dichotomies argue that ‘instead of pursuing the protection of biodiversity for biodiversity’s sake, a new conservation should seek to enhance those natural systems that benefit the widest number of people, especially the poor’.48 While the first invokes images of Edenic oases amidst human worlds ravaged by violence, the latter effects a realisation of Heidegger’s technological worldview: the earth as exploitable, albeit in the name of an equitably redistributive ‘standing-reserve’.49 Traces of these binaries emerge in what Paul Voice identifies as a disciplinary impasse of the environmental humanities that is ‘stuck in an unproductive opposition between anthropocentric and biocentric views [in which] it seems that either one rejects the anthropocentric thesis of nature as utility [neoprotectionists], or accepts some version of the biocentric thesis and rejects utility as a justifiable approach to nature [new conservation]’.50 This acceleration of a managerial paradigm re-entrenches the logic of Future-Lachesis as the embodiment of instrumental form. In Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright’s parallel inquiry into the status of the future, they present a series of evolving binaries that move between capitalism/ non-capitalism and planetary/anti-planetary sovereignty.51 Anticipating what can now be seen as the differing articulations of Future-Lachesis, Mann and Wainwright weave together political economics with ecological arrangements, reflective of the anti-growth imperative of Lachesis seen in debates over the Green New Deal (GND). Closely connected to the first axis of nature/people by virtue of the inextricable link between economic growth and destruction of the natural world, this second axis incorporates questions regarding decarbonisation and economic degrowth.52 The ambiguity of solutions such as the GND lie in their conflicting application in the service of capitalism’s ‘green transformation’, a technocratic fix that corresponds to the archist promise of eternal growth with an ‘ecological’ frame and the opposing contention that capitalism must be exposed as the violent structure that sustains the crisis.53 Tracing the historical appearance of this conflict, Elisa Iturbe describes the extent to which ‘environmental projects such as those appearing in the work of Buckminster Fuller, the pages of Whole Earth Catalog, or the writings of eco-anarchist Murray Bookchin openly attacked the environmental damage wrought by capitalist society . . . nonetheless championed a carbon fuelled 141

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technoscape that they thought would lead to post-labour abundance’. It is this subsumption of radicality under the logic of planetary archism that ultimately exposes for Iturbe that ‘the underlying conditions of carbon energy were left uninterrogated and undisturbed’ by an entire segment of twentiethcentury environmental theory.54 This suspension of interrogation without the commencement of human history, performed all the same in the name of a revolutionary beginning, brings us back to the original discussion of Schmitt’s ‘state of exception’. Unlike the moment of suspension that stages the entry for Benjamin’s messianic change in history, Schmitt re-entrenches the normative logic of growth, offering a parallel to those underlying conditions that Iturbe names.55 Though distinct in terms of their organising framework, both the conservation debate and the capitalist/non-capitalist argument progress with an instrumentalist framework through which to conceptualise political action. Determined as the fundamental axes around which politics must be coordinated if it is to ensure either the continuation of the capitalist structures in place – a future that would simply perpetuate the mythological violence of History and Future-Clotho – or the mitigation of planetary violence through a reappraisal of the structures that coordinate dwelling, both iterations of Future-Lachesis expose the current state of politics as determined by the logic of necessity. Advocates of the GND make the case that ‘in the twenty-first century, all politics are climate politics’, a declaration that, while radical, also exposes the ineliminable necessity of political instrumentality.56 Yet it is this that is the paradox of climate politics. It must be instrumental to be legitimate and not be instrumental to be political. This paradox returns us to the question of the slave and the life determined by necessity. The Slave of Lachesis For Arendt the slave exists in the context of labour; they are the animal laborans, or the figure for whom life is equivalent to a form of ‘imprisonment in the ever-recurring cycle of the life process’. Unlike the political actor, the animal laborans is ‘forever subject to the necessity of labour and consumption’.57 While the condition of the animal laborans is thus predicated on their being determined by the biological demands of survival, they are, at the same time, representative of the dangers of political life when it succumbs to the urgency of necessity. Necessity then is not only biological. As life under the conditions of the climate crisis makes apparent, necessity is a reality for politics as well. More so than the various necessities of liberal democracies (education, migration or tolerance), the specific necessity engendered by this crisis (granting that education, migration and tolerance might each also assume that categorical form) is inherently existential. To invoke Mbembe once again, the management of political life has today surpassed the Foucauldian notion of biopolitics 142

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and inaugurated the death management of necropolitics. Political life, in the age of the Anthropocene, is the management of staying alive on a planet that bears the scars of worldly decisions. The force of this position complicates the condition of the slave as they appear today. This ambiguous recasting of servitude has implications for the Arendtian polis and the conception of political action, that faculty that Arendt attributes to the human as coextensive with their humanity proper. It is action that confirms the possibility of holding and conferring rights, justice, dignity and promises into an unknowable future. Yet as the future becomes a site of anachronistic knowability and action is reduced to the force of necessity, the integrity of action – and hence of humanity – comes into question. Part of Arendt’s discussion of the animal laborans hinges on the way in which servitude can be imposed on others. Rather than a preliminary state that is overcome through labour, the needs of the animal laborans renew and persist. The body must be fed and clothed, sheltered and nursed again and again. Part of the care that is presumed here informs the function of care that Cavarero develops as the condition of ethical life. Developed through the language of inclination and the geometrical plane of ethics, Cavarero’s entire argument is an inherent critique of the negation of care and the ethical transgression that is the exploitation of those caring encounters that support bodies that lean waywardly towards the nurturing hand. In part a redemption of the industries of care that are disabused of their ethical interventions into the world, Cavarero’s argument also complicates and democratises the animal laborans status. In effect, her argument recuperates the necessity of the animal laborans into the ethical encounter of political actors. Arendt’s argument is not as forthright. Indeed, Arendt writes of the way in which the labour of the animal laborans can be imposed on others while still granting the actor the right to claim their position as a political subject. While their status as ‘post-labour’ is clearly complicated by the fact that this position has been achieved through a form of violence, a more generous reading of Arendt’s position is that equity, in the precise biological or bodily sense of being able to participate, is a necessary condition for political life. We all, in other words, need to be biologically comfortable in order to participate. In this context, to be deprived of either bodily sustenance or of a more ontologically grounded form of recognition are both ways in which forms of servitude intrude into the political sphere. The status of the animal laborans is thus linked both to the labouring systems that sustain the biological body and to a more insidious form of political necessity. This latter reality is best understood in terms of the planetary instrumentality that is now definitive of political discourse. In this second, more ontological conception of the slave, where slavery is produced by the existential threats of the climate crisis, the troubling face of Future-Lachesis appears. 143

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In Arendt’s writings, the attempt to ensure the integrity of the political domain by emphasising conditions for participation that confirm the intrinsic right of all members to equality leaves the private open to the very real threat of violence. What this means is that insofar as the labour of the animal laborans can be overcome and the actor in question still ‘be political’ in the Arendtian sense, the animal laborans is always determined within a condition of violence. In other words, if servitude can be overcome, it becomes a threatening spectre that may at any time be imposed. As she writes, ‘because all human beings are subject to necessity, they are entitled to violence toward others; violence is the pre-political act of liberating oneself from the necessity of life for the freedom of the world’.58 Having established this fixed distinction between the pre-political necessities for freedom and political freedom, Arendt saw the rise of what she called ‘the social’ in which the limited and pre-political demands of the private consumed the properly political pursuits of the polis as the destruction of politics as such. While Arendt’s condemnation of the social as the locus in which private concerns are displaced into the public realm is typically read as an affront to feminist appeals to ‘make the private public’ and hence in tacit complicity with more masculine conceptions of the political, the rise of environmental concerns or responses to the climate crisis reveal the prescience of her threefold reading of the vita activa as comprised of labour, work and action.59 More to the point, as the intrusion of labour takes on not a commercial and consumerist guise but exposes action as implicated in the existential survival of the planetary, the possibility of holding the three apart becomes almost impossible. Indeed, what is brought into consideration by the climate crisis is the ineliminable necessity of thinking the immanent and biological demands of life in the realm of political action. And yet, this demand cannot go on to assume primacy over the integrity of politics as a locus of plurality, novelty and agonism. To do so would make politics only a question of survival and not of beginning. Without beginning in Arendt’s writings, there is no possibility of promises or commitment to intergenerational justice. There is in such a scenario only the benevolent authoritarianism of Future-Lachesis. The ‘Free’ Slave: Benevolent Lachesis Pope Francis’ 2015 ecological encyclical Laudato Si` was, in part, an attempt to expose the link between unfreedom and what has assumed appearance under the name of ‘climate crisis governance’. Responding not simply to the unfreedom of living at the precipice of climate instability, Francis identified an insidious condition of unfreedom that corresponds to the generalisation of Mbembe’s becoming Black of the world and the normalisation of necessity as the condition of politics. In the encyclical’s conclusion, Francis names the obstacles to radical climate action in terms that echo the systemic structures of Benjamin’s mythological violence. 144

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We lack the leadership capable of striking out on new paths and meeting the needs of the present with concern for all and without prejudice towards coming generations. The establishment of a legal framework which can set clear boundaries and ensure the protection of ecosystems has become indispensable; otherwise, the new power structures based on the techno-economic paradigm may overwhelm not only our politics but also freedom and justice.60 Francis’ condemnation of modern politics coincides with the claim that politics is incapable of realising the anarchic force of Benjamin’s revolutionary beginning to recover freedom in plurality. This point becomes clearer via a return to the spatialisation of Arendt’s account of political freedom.61 Returning to the original division between the public polis and the private realm of necessity, for Arendt, to assume space and lay claim to the place of dwelling was to be free. Drawn from the Greek depiction of the private as corresponding to a state of deprivation, Arendt’s account of life lived exclusively in the private domain was one denied fulfilment of those conditions proper to the being of being human. This is so even without acting in relation to the necessities of survival imposed on the slave. Arendt emphasises this point that the life of the hermit or isolated subject is politically equivalent to the slave who was refused entry to the polis and the barbarian who was incapable of establishing a polis.62 The hedonist whose desires destroy the planet and yet who has slaves to guarantee their bodily survival is thus politically impotent: to this extent, they too are enslaved. The tropes of separation or imprisonment that accompany Arendt’s depiction of the slave and the barbarian thus anticipate the alienating effect of Future-Lachesis. Nevertheless, it is worth reiterating that Arendt’s slave is not incapable of political action, they are not ‘without speech’ (aneu logon). They are, instead, deprived ‘of a way of life in which speech and only speech made sense and where the central concern of all citizens was to talk with each other’.63 The impotence of the enslaved hermit who may deprive themselves of speech in order to satiate their desires for immediate, material pleasures is still deprived of speech and hence of political life. Unlike her sister, Future-Clotho, who stands at the forefront of the earth shouting out a prophetic destiny for humanity drawn from the violent origins of the climate crisis and who can be challenged in the revolutionary and messianic acts of the historian, Future-Lachesis cannot be overcome. While it is conceivable to think in terms of ‘a’ destiny told by Clotho, one that is either the continuation of History, principally in terms of the perpetuation of a carbon intensive capitalist economy, or not; Lachesis and the necessity to think in terms of a form of political instrumentality is all encompassing and undeniable. Indeed, if the future is to be redeemed as a locus of action in which the earthly place of dwelling might once again be figured in terms of a concealed depth, the 145

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ineliminable presence of Future-Lachesis must assume an organising function. While the ideological force of Future-Clotho threatens the prevention of those measures necessary for planetary survival, Lachesis, or rather the iteration of Lachesis that assumes a critique of capital as essential, assumes a status akin to that of the pharmakon. Both a poison and a cure, Lachesis denies the present its claim to spontaneous beginning while setting up the condition for something like the future – the open and expansive correlate of history. Whether this recognition of the need for brute realism and political instrumentality now means that action is caught in a means-end equation for the liberation of the future is a pivotal question. What is thus critical to remember in discussing Future-Lachesis and what will remain pertinent as I turn to engage Future-Atropos is that the yoke of instrumentality they affix to the political institution is not necessarily oppressive in the same way that Future-Clotho is. It is distinct. While Clotho coincides with the continued oppression of History, Lachesis and Atropos can and may well reflect the pragmatic response taken by a society that wants to contend with the reality of the climate and redeem the future as a space of potential. Indeed, responding to the climate crisis requires precisely this kind of realism. Beyond the ontological questions of what it means to dwell on an unearthly earth wrecked by archism, there is the very real threat of planetary instability. It is clear that the threat of bushfire, drought, cyclones, sea-level rise and ocean acidification will require that political institutions assume a praxis of Lachesisian political instrumentality. However, these archist forms of Future-Lachesis that insist upon a purely instrumental reality must be held together with the collective action of natality and plurality. Resisting the subsumption of the latter under the seductive ideals of the former is an ongoing and inevitably a difficult task. Yet forgoing that difficulty in the name that ‘some will be better off’ under one particular iteration of Lachesis is to precipitate a move towards what Arendt called the ‘One World’. In this world, a world in which organisation is determined by a conflicting urgency, it remains possible that humanity might conclude that ‘for humanity as a whole it would be better to liquidate certain parts thereof’.64 This is the Lachesis against which the world must be defended. Insofar as the climate crisis raises questions that ‘concern not merely a transformation in politics – more representative proceduralism, for example, or more precautionary environmental policymaking, but a transformation of the political’ conditions like natality and plurality must remain at the forefront of political thought.65 Mbembe invokes a similar argument for a change of the political that incorporates natality and plurality as the conditions of earthly dwelling. Reflecting on the status of democracy in modern politics, he laments both its anthropocentrism, arguing that ‘we must extend [democracy’s] meaning so democracy can include more than just us’, and its limited historicism.66 His appeal for a new ethics that incorporates remembrance not simply as a 146

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praxis of memory but of placed dwelling recentres Arendt’s political setting of the inter esse. In a more recent text, he locates this site of remembrance in the formation of a ‘planetary consciousness’, a repository of thinking that recuperates the agonistic strife of the inter esse and the collective imaginary of common sense.67 Recovering the language of natality, he describes this consciousness as sprung from a renewed encounter with the archives of the world. Imagining a mode of historical engagement that reflects the historical project of history, he describes this planetary consciousness in terms of ‘a radical decentring, premised on the capacity to know together, to generate knowledge together . . . [forcing] us to be born together again’.68 Melding together the planetary condition of crisis and the fragility of something like natality’s messianic power, Mbembe gestures towards a counternarrative to that of Lachesis. And yet, it would be too easy if mere consciousness alone were able to vanquish the archist tropes of Lachesis. Archism lives and breathes the hopes that consciousness enlivens. Indeed, the phantasmal appeal of Lachesis comes to the fore in lockstep with theorisations like Mbembe’s, claiming as it does to realise precisely his aims. It is this claim that signals for the plurality the underlying presence of an archist Lachesis. Where the latter reconfigures hope as a seductive plan, Mbembe’s anarchist promise hangs on the vigilant commitment of those who have not relinquished action to ideology. In this return to a productive precarity, or what Benjamin describes as the weakness of messianism, archism is exposed. Indeed, it demonstrates that it is not the handmaiden to action but the third of Arendt’s human figures: the homo faber. The homo faber exists between labour and action. Preserving the world of things, the homo faber is limited by the necessity of labour and the changing demands of action. The homo faber must reconcile themselves with each, responding to the cyclical ruin of labour’s natural law and, by converse, the law of change and disruption that emanate from the realm of action. Making sense of the conflict of these temporal paradigms, the homo faber excels in worldmaking through worldly comprehension. Yet their desires to hold the world in stasis reflect their own weakness. Indeed, Arendt describes them as the one who may, at the cost of remembering action, ‘conduct himself as lord and master of the whole earth’.69 The homo faber, having relinquished their archival tasks, plays out the logic of Lachesis, conforming to the benevolent will of archism without realising their potential as human: the potential to create history as a site of remembrance.70 The institutionalised format of Lachesis co-opts the revolutionary logic of a planetary anarchism and realises Arendt’s original critique of the revolutionary state: it does not enable ‘the people qua people to make their entrance into political life and to become participators in public affairs’.71 This is the antipolitical failure of Lachesis. Even in its benevolent form, it degrades the political condition of human life.72 Moreover, the domination of homo faber, as Arendt writes, is ‘by definition bound to result . . . only after destroying part 147

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of God-created nature’.73 In other words, Lachesis is a symptom of Clotho and part of the emerging One World state. Much like in Benjamin’s discussion of mythological violence, the homo faber can succumb to a mode of being that is bound in advance to a logic that undermines its productive potential. Holding off this eventuality will become the project of making future. Future-Atropos The third of the Greek Moirai is Atropos, who cuts life’s thread. She is described in John Milton’s poem Lycidas as approaching the living with her ‘abhorred shears [to] slit the thin-spun life’ that binds each soul to the movement of the earth.74 The status Future-Atropos is perhaps best captured by Albert Pope’s remark that ‘today we are living out the future’s past’. Pope goes on to write that while technically speaking this has always been the case, ‘there are moments in history when the present has been overtaken by a future, a future so broadly anticipated that it begins to block out the concerns of the day’.75 It is this blinding force of a future that is so anticipated that its various manifestations, coordinated around those archetypal imaginaries of 1.5, 2, 3, 4 or 5 degrees of warming, that has blocked out the light of the present and left a shadowy state in its wake. Future-Atropos extinguishes the flame of uncertainty that runs throughout claims such as that of social historian Eric Hobsbawm, who claimed, at the close of the twentieth century, that ‘we do not know where we are going’.76 Future-Atropos makes apparent that although the future is clouded insofar as which degree of action, whether that’s adaptation or mitigation, is undertaken remains unknown in the present, an image of the planetary future nevertheless persists in fluid form. Refusing the future its claim to unknowability and unpredictability, Future-Atropos erodes the groundwork of hope in the present. Whether the earth remains within the boundary set by the Paris climate accords of 1.5 degrees of warming or falls radically beyond that point, at each instance is Future-Atropos: a speculative model of sea-level rise, cyclone frequency or drought extremity. Future-Atropos is not only an ecological image. She is, at the same time, theories of post-capitalism, neo-liberalism, cosmopolitanism and ultra-nationalism. She moves between the ecological and the ideological and performs a perfect melding of the nature-culture binary that environmental theorists have been deconstructing for at least the last half century. Mann and Wainwright’s political theories of planetary future capture her amorphous form. Divided between sovereignty and capitalism, Mann and Wainwright identify four iterations of the future. While the first three reflect the corrosive political-economies that recapitulate the instrumental form of Future-Lachesis, they name the final ‘Climate X’. The only future to challenge the instrumental logic of the others, Climate X is both non-capitalist and antisovereign. Mann and Wainwright describe it as the ‘ethically and politically 148

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superior’ alternative.77 Climate X captures the anarchic revolution of Benjamin’s divine violence, coinciding with Guzmán’s account of its actualisation ‘as ideal, as possibility, lying like a shadow just beyond our reach’.78 Indeed, it is the opacity of Climate X that underpins Mann and Wainwright’s project of political hope. They conclude their diagnosis of the planetary future with what can be read as another anarchist call for hope against the straitjacket of instrumentalism’s urgency: Our task is to see the ruins and fragments of our natural-historical moment for what they truly are; not to draw up blueprints of an emancipated world, but to reject Leviathan, Mao, and Behemoth, while affirming other possibilities. What remains? All we have and all we have ever had: X to solve for, a world to win.79 Inasmuch as X recuperates the images of ruin out of which Benjamin recovers the messianic potential of human history, Climate X is also opaque. Its ambiguity demands a vigilance that cannot even be knowingly coordinated to some precise point. X is not on a map to be found. Mbembe describes his own account of an X-like enigma as the anticipation of a potential ‘that has not yet assumed a stable form’. This, he writes, must be ‘the starting point of any future critique whose horizon is to forge a common ground’.80 This future resists concealment and in so doing it stages the conditions that work against it: the difficulty and potential impossibility of ever being found. In a moment of crisis, as urgency becomes a reality, this retreat also invites the reliable iterations of planetary future that archism provides. Future-Atropos is the expression of this promise. What is forfeited with Future-Atropos is the an-arche that is the foundation of politics in the inter esse space of earth-world life today. If the ambiguity of Climate X feels like a naïve attempt to break away from the grip of FutureAtropos, it is not because of the vigilance it demands but because vigilance has already been foregone. This retreat from the demands that hope makes to be guarded by an attentive community begins under Future-Clotho and the becoming black of the world and assumes a more concrete form in Pope’s conjecture that ‘we are living out the future’s past’.81 Rejections of Climate X as insufficient coincide with the surrender of action to the servitude of the animal laborans or to homo faber’s instrumentalisation of politics. Arendt sets the conditions of resistance to the violence of the animal laboran’s slavery and the homo faber’s political alienation in terms drawn from the revolutionary potential of the imagination. In her reflections on judgement, she argues that it is the imagination that enables ‘us to liberate ourselves from [these conditions] and to attain that relative impartiality that is the specific virtue of judgment’.82 Returning to the planetary condition of politics, it is via the imagination and liberation from life’s 149

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necessities that Arendt can be seen to champion a particular kind of planetary hope necessary to stay vigilant to the possibility of Climate X. She writes that ‘this earthly home becomes a world in the proper sense of the word only when the totality of fabricated things is so organised that it can resist the consuming life process of the people dwelling in it, and thus outlast them. Only where such survival is assured do we speak of culture.’83 Resisting the reduction of the imagination to a realm determined exclusively by the artistic profession, Arendt recalls that ‘each time we talk about things that can be experienced only in privacy or intimacy, we bring them out into a sphere where they will assume a kind of reality which, their intensity notwithstanding, they never could have had before’.84 Conceived in these terms, the imagination resounds as one of the modalities through which the earth is drawn into unconcealment and a bid for X is made. Speaking to Arendt’s lament that the absence of imagination coincides with the erosion of dwelling as the ‘doing’ proper to earthly life, Amitav Ghosh reflects on the status of the present, asking if future earth dwellers will consider our present a time of ‘Great Derangement’. Employing Heidegger’s language of concealment, Ghosh asks if those in the future will conclude that ‘ours was a time when most forms of art and literature were drawn into modes of concealment that prevented people from recognising the realities of their plight?’85 Developing a critique of the present as undermined by a limited grasp of the imagination, Ghosh and others highlight the cracks of possibility through which a future irreducible to the violence of the climate crisis might exist.86 What these speculations reveal is that insofar as it remains possible to think the imagination – even in its apparent absence – the possibility of hope exists. It is precisely this possibility, found in the moment of its absence, to which Mann and Wainwright attain in their discussion of Climate X. What is sought – against the predictive vice of Future-Atropos that insists on promises of constant immanence – is something that persists as unknowable. Indeed, it is the quality of being unknown, of being beyond reach and hence of soliciting a call to search, disclose and unconceal, that serves as the productive challenge to Future-Atropos: hence the appeal ‘all we have and all we have ever had: X to solve for, a world to win’.87 Arendt describes precisely such a moment in the epilogue to her essay ‘Introduction into Politics’. Revisiting the provocation, why is there anything at all and not rather nothing, Arendt turns towards plurality, rephrasing the question as ‘why is there anybody at all and not rather nobody?’88 In this move away from the objective quality of the world, or indeed of the earth, Arendt clarifies what is at stake in times of crisis: the failure of a plurality to realise its own potential as plurality. Going further still then, the issue isn’t so much ‘why is there crisis’, but why are we, as a possible plurality, allowing it to persist as crisis? Plurality, if it is the law of earthly dwelling, compels us to realise the potential inscribed in us as plurality to act on earth. 150

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Only such collaboration, grounded in the material and ontological fact of being earth dwellers, could allow the speculative ‘X’ of another planetary posterity to emerge. Another question then: why aren’t we looking? Who is X? If X is the indeterminable condition of another setting, the Futures described here are the pure images of instrumental form. If X resists immanence and draws back into something like Heideggerian concealment, these latter configurations are wholly unconcealed. They are mere quantifiable form. Arendt describes a similar binary when she imagines the potential of love to see ‘who’ a person is, in contrast to ‘what’ they are, the latter their surface level ‘qualities and shortcomings . . . achievements, failings, and transgressions’.89 Love, of course, is a complex matter in Arendt’s writings. Her infamous condemnation of love as ‘antipolitical’ has caused it to be excluded from her political vocabulary, despite the fact that the notion of amor mundi, or love for the world, was clearly a central term in her own imagination. Indeed, not only did she intend to call The Human Condition ‘amor mundi’, she gestured towards the notion throughout her career.90 In The Human Condition she writes that it is ‘out of love for a body politic’ that the subjects of a public realm are ‘more or less willing to share in the burden of jurisdiction, defence, and administration of public affairs’.91 Elsewhere she describes love as a ‘life-giving oasis’ in politics, as underpinning her gratitude for the world, and as establishing the conditions for worldly responsibility.92 Consider then the scenario in which the life-giving function of love is recuperated and the burden of public affairs – climate mitigation, reparations and justice – equitably and realistically shared. In such a scenario, it would not only be love and the administration of public life that would be recovered, but the very viability of living together as a political society. And so, to anticipate where this chapter will move, I want to foreground a stance that Arendt assumes in her final work, The Life of the Mind, which outlines the force of this claim, namely that ‘men do not become just by knowing what is just but by loving justice’.93 This is the position to which we must attain. It is insufficient to merely know that a crisis exists and that it is perpetuated. We need to cultivate a love for planetary justice if an alternative is to realistically advanced. Without succumbing to the urgency of administration, or ‘what’ the world is today, nor blindly following a love that is spurred by an otherworldly investment in ‘who’ a redeemed world could be, a love that brings together ‘who’ and ‘what’ modern society is might offer a narrative of amor mundi sufficient to the age of climate crisis. This love is the pursuit of X. Loving in this way and staying in the moment of arrest between the absolute faith in ‘who’ the future could be or ‘what’ the limits of the present are, amor mundi overcomes the violence of the Future-Moirai and imagines another posterity. This renewed sense 151

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of love approaches the world through an understanding that it could be other than it is without denying what it is. Such a love is anticipated in Arendt’s first reflections on the role of love in politics, explored in her 1929 dissertation Love and Saint Augustine before it reappears in her final work just cited, The Life of the Mind. Returning to these two moments at either end of Arendt’s career, I want to conclude this final diagnostic section on the planetary threat of the Future and Future-Atropos, in terms that emerge through an analysis of the ‘who/what’ distinction, such that love or amor mundi might be reconstructed in the conclusion to this book as a prescient political construct.94 First explored in The Human Condition as a way to give depth to the faculty of action and its connection to speech, Arendt makes a distinction between the ‘what’ dimension of an individual – the objective qualities they either share or don’t with all others – and the specificity of who they are. It is this latter quality, disclosed in speech and enriching the web of relations, that is the means and ends of political action. In the language of concealment, the ‘who’ of a person is brought into unconcealment in the space of appearance that Arendt calls the polis. To return once again to the figure of the slave, ‘who’ the slave is cannot be known. The slave exists as mere ‘what’ – they are muscles and meat, they may ‘do’, but they cannot ‘act’. Refused entry to the imaginative exchange where ‘who’ the slave is might be recognised by another, the web of relations in which slave and oppressor operate becomes hollow. One is denied humanity and the other, by imposing servitude, relinquishes humanity. A similar crisis takes place in the relationship between the present and Future-Atropos. Overwhelmed by the images of a future that insists upon the violence of planetary instability and political necessity, imagining ‘who’ this future earthly place might be is diminished. Hope for X is expunged by the harsh light that if all is not yet known, it is ultimately knowable. The analogous reading of ‘what’ as Future-Atropos and ‘who’ as a more undefined and concealed future seen in Mann and Wainwright’s ‘Climate X’, is not simply a poetic mode of recalling that each moment in time is occupied by a plurality of people and hence a potential richness in ‘who’ dwells on earth at any one time. The point instead is to hold on to the unknowability of ‘who’ the earth might be without ignoring ‘what’ it is today. At the same time, however, there is of course an undeniable poetry at work in the elusive X, one that must be worked through and understood. Though X persists as a productive antagonism that must be sought out, X can also become a mute aestheticisation of hope, a perverse poem of empty form. X can become inoperative when it fails to provoke interrogation. In these terms, engagements with X can be, as Arendt says of love’s preoccupation with ‘who’ a person is, ‘unconcerned to the point of total unworldliness with what the loved person may be’.95 In this scenario, love for a planetary alternative like Climate X is unable to contend with the present form of climate violence, because ‘by reason of its passion, [it] destroys the in-between which relates us to and separates us from others’.96 152

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A love between the world-destroying passion of loving ‘who’ the beloved is and the superficial love of ‘what’ is in the world is required. In Future-Atropos, an account of ‘what’ planetary life in the future will be is encountered. However, insofar as humans persist as natal subjects, Atropos is not all the future will be. Refusing the totality that is Future-Atropos does not mean denying the reality of the climate crisis in either political or scientific terms. On the contrary, for Arendt ‘who’ someone is ‘comes to the fore where people are with others and neither for nor against them – that is, in sheer human togetherness’.97 It is precisely this togetherness that realises the earthly law of human plurality and discloses the inter esse as a meaningful and anarchic locus of politics. Elsewhere, I have described the kind of political momentum that builds in acts held together by this form of togetherness through the language of ‘amor terra’. Where I have suggested amor terra as a productive and planetary alternative to Arendt’s amor mundi, I have done so in dialogue with that idea of Arendt’s that politics has a planetary constitution, namely that ‘politics is based on the fact of human plurality . . .[that] men are a human earthly product’.98 Amor terra, as I have described it, cannot be coerced. It exists as a craving for ‘the unknowable existence of the future’. Amor terra thus ‘encourages us to recognise the planetary as the condition for political life rather than an obstacle to be overcome. In a political age that is determined by the production of ‘shifting baselines’ that determine the thresholds of environmental suffering considered ‘acceptable to’ or perhaps ‘imposable on’ human life, amor terra celebrates mutual humility and shared courage.99 These conditions are not mutable externalities. Courage and humility anchor Arendt’s political principles – yet they are also the antithesis of political certainties. Before Arendt confirms the political force of ‘love itself’ in The Life of the Mind, she anticipates the emergence of Future-Atropos at the end of the 1955 essay ‘Introduction into Politics’ where she discusses the worldlessness of the modern world. In words that anticipate the current climate crisis, she writes that ‘the withering away of everything between us, can also be described as the spread of the desert’.100 The desertification of the inter esse world that Arendt describes is the naturalisation of Future-Clotho. Yet it is when Arendt describes the ontological violence of the desert-world as occurring because ‘we are still human and still intact’, she stresses that the true danger ‘lies in becoming true inhabitants of the desert and feeling at home in it’.101 This latter form is the ontological violence of Future-Atropos. It is precisely this danger of resigning oneself to the prophetic promise of archism that Future-Atropos articulates. Well aware of the dangers such a resignation would bring into being, Arendt suggests a countermeasure in acts of love and friendship, without which we ‘would not know how to breathe’.102 These sections of Arendt’s writings are underdeveloped, yet they point towards the kind of planetary consciousness and imaginative future that the planet now needs. In as much as Arendt’s 153

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reflections on love are marked by an inherent tension between the worldly and unworldly, the political and the antipolitical, they also offer an account of love that opens the space in which to realise the togetherness that is necessary for planetary life. Rather than a reiterative conclusion then, that moves back into the dark web of archist seduction that accompanies engagements on the climate crisis today, in the Conclusion that follows I move towards a notion of love that offers a path towards planetary politics. Indeed, I suggest that such a love flickers in the background of Arendt’s writings and might yet illuminate the darkness of political life in the climate crisis.

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CONCLUSION: AMOR MUNDI IN/OF CRISIS

The theme of love in Arendt’s writing will certainly strike her readers as one marked by forms of contradiction. Indeed, the infamy of her condemnation of love in The Human Condition as ‘perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical human forces’ proceeds and overshadows the number of references she makes to love that conflict with this claim.1 Like natality, love first appears in Arendt’s writings on St Augustine and percolates throughout her writing, appearing in different formats as the basis of politics or what she calls the ‘life-giving oasis’ that sustains political life.2 Yet it also sits behind her work in terms of her investment in love’s selective power to make friends and enrich that space that sustains life. Rather than accept Arendt’s position in The Human Condition of love’s antipolitical force, and even here acceptance would mean overlooking those further occasions in that same text that complicate and even contradict this equation of love and the apolitical, I want to conclude this project by suspending her antipathy to love and reorienting its status in her work. In many ways, Arendt’s first major work, although it wasn’t published until the 1960s, was her dissertation. First written in 1929, the dissertation, Love and Saint Augustine, explored the concept of love as it appeared in the writings of Saint Augustine – these ideas, as I will go on to address them, then reappear in her final work The Life of the Mind: Willing. In the earlier text, her account of love is organised in part through an examination of the appetitus or craving desire of love. To this end, the dissertation initially offers a narrative of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ love: the ‘good’ love of caritas and the ‘bad’ love of cupiditas. While 155

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the ‘goodness’ of caritas appears as the inclination of love towards a future world that is permanent and irreducible to the follies of possession or human mortality, the ‘bad’ love of cupiditas seeks permanence in the immanence of this world. Undermined by the inevitable perishability of the world, cupiditas is limited by the condition of its appetitus, while caritas is unable to see what lies before it. Contrasting each in the dissertation, she writes, ‘cupiditas turns [man] into a denizen of this world . . . caritas makes him live in the absolute future where he will be a denizen of the world-to-come’.3 Of course, it is not a simple opposition between good and bad, here and there. Political life, as we know, can only occur in the battleground of temporalities. In The Life of the Mind these ideas assume an acute form in her description of the present as the meeting ground of ‘an infinite past’ and ‘an infinite future’. Effectively speaking back to her earlier accounts of love as either wholly present or wholly futural and exposing both as apolitical, the final text offers a consideration of love itself.4 In between these two moments in her writing, the price of caritas’ enduring love for an ‘absolute future’ is shown to be the negation of this world’s perishability in the love of The Human Condition, where it is made complicit in the production of the antipolitical ‘desert’ conditions of worldly alienation.5 Where the subject of caritas is seemingly reassured in their investment in eternity and the absolute future, in cupiditas the lover is overwhelmed by a craving desire for immanent possessions. The lover of cupiditas can only ever be thwarted by their own mortality and that of the beloved. Of cupiditas Arendt writes that ‘mortal man, who has been placed into the world . . . and must leave it, instead clings to it and in the process turns the world itself into a vanishing one, that is, one due to vanish with his death’.6 It is this unworldliness that reappears in The Human Condition as the corrosive love of passion, which ‘destroys the in-between which relates us to and separates us from others’.7 In other words, the impossibility of a permanent present exposes the unworldly condition and, ultimately, the antipolitical limitations of cupiditas. And yet, this binding of love to something that cannot exist forever is, at the same time, a necessary mode of confrontation with the world in its present form, something that the transcendent love of caritas, consumed by the image of the absolute future, is unable to realise. Cupiditas thus opens up a paradoxical space that must be transcended by a form of caritas, where love aligns with the individual’s desire ‘to belong to something outside himself’.8 Committed to a world that is yet to become, caritas anticipates the future and its potential emergence. And yet, in waiting for the world to which they will belong, the lover of caritas deprives themselves of this world, the messy and troublesome place that they belong to as part of the unchosen condition of being present here today. Denying reality of the present by another means, the subject of caritas excuses themselves from the necessary labour of sustaining this world for the sake of the one to come. 156

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In her first major exploration of the philosophical concept of love, Arendt arrives at a position that, on the one hand, shows love to be untenable with political life. On the other hand, however, she now knows exactly what is required for love to function as a political predicate. Beholden neither to the immediate present nor to a world that is yet to come, love, if it is to be political, must be custodial. This exact position is articulated by Arendt in the 1954 essay ‘Crisis in Education’. Here she writes: Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to take responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands the chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.9 This love, a love between caritas and cupiditas, gestures towards a possible mode of living against the archist narratives of the various Future-Moirai. Alongside the education essay, Arendt was formulating this account of love elsewhere, providing her reader with a series of moments that, read together, point to its political capacity. Such an account of love is captured clearly in the epilogue to the 1955 essay, ‘Introduction into Politics’, where she writes that ‘the human world is always the product of man’s amor mundi, a human artifice whose potential immortality is always subject to the mortality of those who build it and the natality of whose who come to live in it’.10 What emerges here as an effective joining of caritas and cupiditas, which loves the becoming of this world despite its perishability. More emphatically, however, by the time Arendt begins to explore the conditions of ‘amor mundi’ in the 1958 publication of The Human Condition, perishability has become a more nuanced concern. Recuperating the figure of the lover then, worldly perishability pertains to my being mortal and loving the world despite this. By contrast, the unworldly love of ‘what’ is present in the world relies on a backwards-looking encounter with the world as it was. Refusing to occupy the present as a space of futural becoming, this love recuperates the appetitus of cupiditas. Refracted through the custodial dimension of caritas, which prepares the world for the future, amor mundi now becomes inextricable from a form of responsibility that I assume for the sake of the new, that generation whose arrival I prepare for through a process of love.11 In a letter to Karl Jaspers in 1955 as she was preparing what would become The Human Condition, Arendt revealed her plan to name the book ‘Amor Mundi’. Inevitably, however, like so many other rich Arendtian concepts, the description of amor mundi in the letter to Jaspers as ‘love for the world’ offers 157

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little illumination.12 Moreover, while references to love do appear in passing throughout The Human Condition, the actual notion of amor mundi does not. We are left, once again, in Cavarero’s words, with a ‘somewhat unusual theme at our disposal’.13 While I have suggested that amor mundi is a bringing together of the temporal dimensions of cupiditas and caritas, there are other moments that we can look to in seeking to develop amor mundi to shed further light on its meaning. Mining her work for a clearer sense of what amor mundi might mean, we can turn from the passing remark in the letter to Jaspers – ‘I’ve begun so late, really only in recent years, to truly love the world . . . Out of gratitude, I want to call my book on political theory “Amor Mundi”’ – to the definition of worldly understanding that she offers a year earlier in the essay ‘Understanding and Politics’. Here she writes that understanding is the ‘unending activity by which, in constant change and variation, we come to terms with and reconcile ourselves to reality, that is, try to be at home in the world’.14 Read together, amor mundi takes shape as the worldly reckoning that Arendt set for herself after the war, to confront the world and see within it not the necessity of archist violence but the groundwork of an anarchic beginning or love’s capacity to let the world be.15 It is important to emphasis the spatial construction implicit here in love or amor mundi’s investment in the being or becoming of the world. This affinity between love and place assumes a prominent position in Arendt’s essay, ‘The Crisis of Education’, already cited. The essay’s invocation of responsibility, love and place echoes her earlier appeals to come to terms with the world and create it as a space of dwelling for others. Read together, these framings serve as a critical point of departure in defining amor mundi. Importantly, what distinguishes the account of love at play here, particularly within the context of worldly understanding, is its setting within a framework that speaks back to the role of natality as both the revolutionary spirit and as the condition that sustains the possibility of revolution. In other words, when Arendt describes the ‘chance of undertaking something new’ as preserved by the decision to love, she stages a productive affinity between love and the revolutionary function of interpolating the world anew. In so doing, we are led toward an account of love that is suffused with the anarchic potential of the imagination. The force of this interpretation of love’s connection to the anarchic comes into clearer view by looking to the Augustinian maxim that Arendt carried through all of her writings – amo: vol ut sis, I love: I want you to be. The phrase appears in Arendt’s writing in The Origins of Totalitarianism, where she proposes it as the dialectical inverse of what occurs under the archist and natality-destroying violence of totalitarianism. This mere existence, that is, all that which is mysteriously given to us at birth and which includes the shape of our bodies and the talents of our minds, can be adequately dealt with only by the unpredictable hazards 158

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of friendship and sympathy, or by the great and incalculable grace of love, which says with Augustine, ‘Volo ut sis’ (I want you to be), without being able to give any particular reason for such supreme and unsurpassable affirmation.16 This pure affirmation, when read in the context of amor mundi’s custodial form, can be understood as affirming not the immanent form of ‘you’ but the broader custodial and turn-taking setting that is the planetary present – the placed condition in which ‘you’ appear. In loving the mysteriousness of existence, love operates in the name of an unknowable beginning that is always already rebeginning in the public space of appearance. This is the ‘love for a body politic’ that sustains the open space and earthly law of plurality.17 Insofar as love brings the body politic into being and enables the appearance of the people as a plurality of political actors, it is a direct challenge to the various violent iterations of the Future. Against each promise of archist certainty, amor mundi provides a productive alternative. It reaffirms the an-arche of the earth as loveable in its unknowability. Opacity becomes, in this instance, the site of worldly being. When Arendt thus writes that ‘worldlessness as a political phenomenon is possible only on the assumption that the world will not last’, she describes a state of affairs in which the worldly orientation of amor mundi has been lost.18 To love the earth in this way is not forthcoming. It retreats into opacity itself. And yet, in this retreat into a productive unknowability, love comes to resemble a form of anarchism. In unknowing, it invites knowing. When Arendt then writes in The Human Condition that ‘love of wisdom and love of goodness, if they resolve themselves into the activities of philosophising and doing good works, have in common that they come to an immediate end, cancel themselves, so to speak, whenever it is assumed that man can be wise or be good’, she also highlights a common resistance in love to archist unconcealment.19 This archist drive in love to possess the world in its immanent, unconcealed form brings us back to the perishable project of Augustinian cupiditas. Instead, Arendt wants to orient love towards the opaque an-arche of earthly love. And so, when she writes later on in The Human Condition that ‘love can only become false and perverted when it is used for political purposes such as the change of salvation of the world’ she is pointing to precisely such an archist and ultimately instrumental account of love as loving the totality of unconcealment.20 She continues this line of argumentation in The Life of the Mind where she distinguishes love and desire, noting that unlike desire, love is not extinguished when it reaches its goal but made new again and kept steadfast by the footprint of love itself.21 Love thus recuperates the inclinational orientation of Cavarero’s postural ethics and inclines into the world not as a means towards an end but as the means and end of love in itself. 159

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Resisting the archist promise of bringing the earth into a state of exposed ‘what’ qualities in either the instrumental view of earthly politics or the acceptance of earthly prophecy, is the basis of a revolutionary future. This temporal inflection of love is generated as love is refracted through the anarchic earthliness of political life, which assumes meaning in that interstitial meeting of time and place as the an-arche of the inter esse is renewed. This forward propulsion of love thus becomes an implicit challenge to the nostalgic laments that refuse to acknowledge the presence of the climate crisis. Developing this account of planetary life as oriented towards the future, the love of amor mundi assumes an inherently revolutionary mandate: to take life as the ‘unending activity by which, in constant change and variation, we come to terms with and reconcile ourselves to reality, that is, try to be at home in the world’.22 More to the point, however, is the placed dimension of this activity. Love must approach the world from that position of post-war ‘fear and trembling’ that Arendt describes in the essay ‘Organised Guilt and Universal Responsibility’. This position takes on the language of love in the essay ‘The Crisis in Culture’ written over a decade later in the claim that ‘to dwell . . . indicates an attitude of loving care and stands in sharp contrast to all efforts to subject nature to the dominion of man’.23 Yet the most precise account of love that we can take from Arendt is her articulation in The Life of the Mind that love itself, neither the lover nor the beloved, is the intelligible and transformative dimension of love. She writes in initially circular terms that ‘the lasting “footprint” that the mind has transformed into an intelligible thing would be neither the one who loves nor his beloved but the third element, namely, Love itself, the love with which the lovers love each other’.24 It is this love, simply love, that has the capacity to reaffirm the anarchic in and despite its seemingly unintelligible form as (after Benjamin) ideal and potential. Already anticipating the violence of humans against nature and their claim to domination, the two key threats to the anarchic law of human plurality, this love itself reaffirms a mode of resistance against the violence of archist exposure. Not only is political life a form of planetary love, love is also the source that gives form to politics. In contrast to the violence of desertification, love acts as a ‘life-giving oasis’ that replenishes the world. It is this oasis that challenges the archist naturalisation of something like Mbembe’s becoming black of the world or the vanishing future of the Moirai. At this concluding moment, we would do well to read the projects of Arendt and Mbembe as similarly oriented towards an account of amor mundi, noting that this faculty appears equally in the forms of planetary consciousness that organise each of their writings. Arendt writes in the epilogue to ‘Introduction into Politics’ that What went wrong is politics, our plural existence, and not what we can do and create insofar as we exist in the singular: in the isolation of 160

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the artist, in the solitude of the philosopher, in the inherently worldless relationship between human beings as it exists in love and sometimes in friendship – when one heart reaches out directly to the other, as in friendship, or when the in-between, the world, goes up in flames, as in love. Without the intactness of these oases we would not know how to breathe, and political scientists should know this.25 These ideas reappear half a century later in Mbembe’s epilogue to Critique of Black Reason as the cautionary yet hopeful claim that The world will not survive unless humanity devotes itself to the task of sustaining what can be called the reservoirs of life. The refusal to perish may yet turn us into historical beings and make it possible for the world to be a world. But our vocation to survive depends on making the desire for life the cornerstone of a new way of thinking about politics and culture.26 To dwell in the security of love, a security of incomplete, concealed and anarchist forms, makes possible the world. Or, following Mbembe, love makes possible the realisation of history. It is in this sense that to love is to be at home on earth. If this project began with the aim of thinking the status of the climate crisis and the potential to read within Arendt an environmental politics, it ends by concluding that insofar as Arendt is a thinker of place, she is thinker of love. Arendt’s writing is not simply applicable to this crisis; it was always already implicated in the questions to which this crisis gives rise. At the outset Arendt’s politics are a politics of the earth, her ‘central political category’ of natality is the political ground of earthly anarchy. Her project of maintaining a love for the body politic is an attempt to instil a love for the world – an amor mundi – that will persist in spite of the persistent attempts of archism to conceal that interstitial inter esse place of political life. The imperative that first emerged in The Human Condition, to think what we are doing, re-emerges with even greater clarity today. Today, the injunction is not only to think what we are doing in an age of planetary instability and untenable planetary promises but, insofar as to think is to love, the task is to persist in loving the unknowable place of the human condition.

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Introduction   1. The Australian Royal Commission into what it refers to as the ‘2019–2020 disaster season’ anticipates the various imperatives in response to which this book is written. In the first instance, it notes that ‘natural disasters have changed, and it has become clear to us that the nation’s disaster management arrangements must also change’, while in the second, it stresses that ‘we need to do much more than put out fires’ (Binskin, Bennett and Macintosh, ‘The Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements’, 2020). This is the reality that is confronted in these pages. More to the point, what I understand the Commission’s response to be foregrounding is the need to reinterrogate the ways in which the world – planetary, human, more-than-human – becomes liveable, such that new horizons of possibility might be discerned and new conceptual tools constructed in the pursuit of getting there. For a moving and philosophically informed memoir about the bushfires see Celemajer, Summertime.   2. This is the responsibility that Arendt describes at the end of ‘The Crisis in Education’ essay, 182.   3. I take this image from Arendt’s description of promises in The Human Condition. Here she writes that ‘binding oneself through promises, serves to set up in the ocean of uncertainty, which the future is by definition, islands of security without which not even continuity, let alone durability of any kind, would be possible in the relationships between men’, 237.   4. Borges, ‘On Exactitude in Science’, 325.   5. The image I hold in mind as I write these words is drawn from the epigraph to Rob Nixon’s compelling study of the ‘slow violence’ of the climate crisis. The quote in

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question is taken from a 1991 confidential World Bank memo from the bank’s then president, Lawrence Summers. It captures the violence of planetary thinking as it is conceived today. ‘I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that . . . I’ve always thought that countries in Africa are vastly under polluted; their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles . . . Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the Least Developed Countries?’ (cited in Nixon, Slow Violence, 1).   6. Implicit here is Arendt’s critique of pity as an incentive to political action – see On Revolution, 78–81.   7. Arendtian accounts of climate crisis can be found in a number of compelling essays – see Chapman, ‘The Ways That Nature Matters’; Hamilton, ‘Action, Technology, and the Homogenisation of Place’; Hargis, ‘Hannah Arendt’s Turn to the Self’; Hyvönen, ‘Labour as Action’; Ott, ‘World and Earth’; Voice, ‘Consuming the World’. In addition to these, the Journal for Political Thinking hosted by HannahArendt.net featured a special issue on ‘Natur und Politik’ in 2021 aimed at productively confronting, in dialogue with Arendt, the nature-politics dualism of Western political theory.   8. Here, of course, I think of such bizarre realities as the rapid ascent of Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism following Donald Trump’s 2016 election to the point of needing to be restocked by Amazon. Yet I am also looking to Richard Bernstein’s 2018 book Why Read Arendt Now? and the extent of Arendt scholarship that is now widely available in public and academic formats.   9. My argument here is informed by the critical feminist project of Carole Pateman in relation to the ‘sexual contract’ (‘The Settler Contract’). Pateman’s exposition of the patriarchal practices of systemic subordination that underpin seemingly ‘gender neutral’ contract theories – including, for Pateman, the contractual ideals of freedom and human rights – reveals the various fictions on which these political theories have hitherto been construed. While my argument is not the same, what I am suggesting is the need to take a similarly rigorous, environmental or planetary lens to political theory and recognise the implicit violence of something that might be construed as an ‘environmental contract’ in political theory. In other words, what I am wanting to suspend is the legitimacy of those political theories that depend upon an original negation or even degradation of the planetary conditions that sustain the very possibility of politics. In turn, I want to elevate those considerations of politics as a planetary endeavour. 10. These problems appear respectively in the prologue to The Human Condition (5), the conclusion of ‘What is Authority?’ (141) and in the closing chapter of On Revolution (207–273). 11. Martel, Anarchist Prophets, 1. 12. Martel, Anarchist Prophets, 10. 13. Keany, ‘Peter Dutton overheard’, 2015. 14. Taylor, ‘Press Conference’. On the existential threat posed by sea level rise see: Byravan and Rajan, ‘Sea Level Rise and Climate Change Exiles’; Sachs, ‘Climate Change and Human Rights’; Vaha, ‘Drowning Under’.

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15. Arendt, The Origins, 297–299. 16. Martel, Anarchist Prophets, 53. 17. See ‘Climate Clock’. 18. See Martel, Anarchist Prophets, 41–44. Derrida, ‘Force of Law’. 19. See, Crépon, Murderous Consent; Barber, Modern Architecture and Climate; Iturbe, ‘Architecture and the Death of Carbon Modernity’. 20. Cf. Brown, Undoing the Demos. 21. The point here is not to resist or demonise the redemptive potential of climate engineering but to stress that such change has not sprung from nothingness. There is a moral imperative, in other words, to reflect on how and why the planet was pushed to a state of needing such intervention. 22. Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History’; Iturbe, ‘Architecture and the Death of Carbon Modernity’; Lewis and Maslin, The Human Planet; Mann and Wainwright, Climate Leviathan, Mbembe, Necropolitics; Nixon, Slow Violence. 23. Peg Birmingham is the first to read natality as anarchist, ‘The Anarchic Event of Natality’. 24. This, of course, is also the mark of planetary anarchism’s vulnerability. As Chapter 3 will explore, the earthly ground of anarchism does not confer an unequivocally anarchic politics; rather it sets the conditions to which politics must stay vigilant. See Arendt’s discussion of the archein and prattein entanglement in The Human Condition for a microcosmic example of the way in which the unpredictabl beginning of action mutates into the coercive force of rule and submission (cf. 1998, 188–189). 25. Martel, Anarchist Prophets, 52. 26. Arendt, On Revolution, 205. 27. Birmingham, ‘The Anarchic Event of Natality’, 766. 28. Benjamin, The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, 45. 29. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 479. 30. See, Belle, Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question. 31. Arendt, Thinking without a Bannister, 470. 32. Kohn, ‘Introduction’, x. 33. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 141. 34. Martel, Anarchist Prophets, 52. 35. Lederman, ‘Councils and Revolutions’, 254. 36. Smith, ‘Anarcho-Republicanism?’, 87. 37. Arendt, On Revolution, 205. 38. See Whyte, ‘Indigenous Climate Change Studies’. 39. Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive; see also Vassilacopoulos and Nicolacopoulos, Indigenous Sovereignty. 40. Robaszkiewicz and Weinman, Hannah Arendt and Politics. 41. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 218. 42. Arendt, The Human Condition, 7–8. 43. See Cavarero, Inclinations; Söderbäck, Natality or Birth?; Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt; Birmingham, Hannah Arendt and Human Rights; Honig, ‘Towards an Agonistic Feminism’; Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom.

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44. What I am really countenancing here are positions such as those of Waseem Yaqoob, who made some of the earliest contributions in the field of Arendt and environmentally-inclined readings. Nevertheless, when Yaqoob writes that ‘Arendt only discussed the earth in the alienated sense she claimed it had been given by early modern science: located in universal space and measured or viewed from a perspective outside itself’ (‘The Archimedean Point’, 209). Indeed, what I want to argue is that the earth resists the imposition of Archimedean points hinted at here and recalls the projects of political life and worldly dwelling to its primordiality. 45. Cavarero, Inclinations; Honig, Public Things; Zerilli, A Democratic Theory of Justice. I raised this point in a response to Zerilli’s study of Arendtian judgement in A Democratic Theory of Judgment. She replied in turn by asking the necessary question, ‘how can we recognise the earth as our common ground of judging and worldbuilding, save through practices of judging and worldbuilding’. Taking heed of Zerilli’s question, this book is an initial act of planetary judgement. (Zerilli, ‘Syndicate’.) 46. Kelly Oliver is a notable exception to this trend, reading Arendt’s conception of worldly life in dialogue with the earth (Earth and World). 47. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, xi; ‘Introduction into Politics’, 93; The Human Condition, 1–6, 257– 268; Between Past and Future, 41–63, 260–274; Eichmann in Jerusalem, 279; ‘Thinking’, 19. 48. Arendt, The Human Condition, 7. 49. Arendt, ‘Introduction into Politics’, 99; Between Past and Future, 153; ‘Thinking’, 19. 50. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, xi, emphasis added. 51. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 279. 52. Ibid. 53. Arendt, The Origins, 583. 54. Butler, Parting Ways, 143. 55. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble. 56. Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 2. I am also thinking here of Peter Sloterdijk’s writings on the political implications of air-conditioning in the third volume of his Sphere Trilogy, Schäume (2016). For an insightful reflective essay, see Latour, ‘Aircondition’. 57. Martel, Anarchist Prophets, 13. 58. Klein, The Changes Everything. 59. Allinson et al., The Tragedy of the Worker, 1. 60. Arendt, The Human Condition, 5. 61. Mbembe, ‘How to Develop a Planetary Consciousness’. 62. Haraway, ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene’; Mann and Wainwright, Climate Leviathan. 63. Arendt, Thinking without a Banister. A similar sort of ‘original thinking’ or thinking without a guide is attributed by Reiner Schürmann to Heidegger’s reflections at this same moment in history. Schürmann opens his discussion of Heideggerian thinking in reference to what he describes as Heidegger’s ‘ignorance’, a formulation that he connects to Heidegger’s various discussions of thinking as always moving in relation to something that remains unthought, and hence a site of provocative ignorance. Yet

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when he locates it at this moment of post-war history, he connects the originality of thinking and its implication in ignorance with a historical encounter (Heidegger on Being and Acting, 2). 64. Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 27. 65. Arendt, The Human Condition, 51. 66. Cf. Arendt, ‘Thinking’. 67. Mbembe, ‘How to Develop a Planetary Consciousness’. 68. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 93. 69. Arendt, ‘Interview with Roger Errera’, 497. 70. A similar critique of the political structure that does not permit the appearance of the people as political actors is seen in Arendt’s response to the elitism of the party system. Arendt, On Revolution, 269. 71. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 141. 72. Arendt, The Human Condition, 1–2. 73. Arendt introduced this framework in The Human Condition; however, she also provided a concise summary of her threefold division of action in the paper ‘Labour, Work, Action’. 74. Whiteside, ‘Worldliness and Respect for Nature’. On the rise of the social, see: Luttrell, ‘Alienation and Global Poverty’; Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob; Ring, ‘On Needing Both Marx and Arendt’; Zakin, ‘Crisscrossing Cosmopolitanism’. 75. Hyvönen, ‘Labour as Action’. 76. Ibid., 258. 77. Chapman, ‘The Ways That Nature Matters’; Hamilton, ‘Action, Technology, and the Homogenisation of Place’. 78. Ott, ‘World and Earth’. 79. Voice, ‘Consuming the World’. 80. Hargis, ‘Hannah Arendt’s Turn to the Self’. Though not directly connected to questions of ecology, Linda Zerilli’s work pursues a similar argument, heralding an Arendtian and democratic form of judgement as a remedy to growing alienation and political violence. See Zerilli, A Democratic Theory of Judgment.

Chapter 1   1. Arendt, ‘Introduction: Walter Benjamin 1892–1940’, 46.   2. Benjamin and Vardoulakis, ‘Introduction’, xii.   3. Sedgewick, ‘Introduction: Queerer than Fiction’, 146.   4. Dauenhauer, ‘Does Anarchy Make Political Sense?’, 374.   5. Faye, ‘Nazi Foundations in Heidegger’s Work’, 58.   6. Schürmann, ‘Questioning the Foundation’, 357.   7. Schürmann, ‘Questioning the Foundation’, 359.   8. Schürmann, ‘Questioning the Foundation’, 366.   9. Schrijvers, ‘Anarchist Tendencies’, 419. 10. Schürmann, ‘Questioning the Foundation’, 364. 11. Oliver, Earth and World, 115. 12. In The Human Condition she describes the polis as distinct to the city-state in its physical location. Instead, she suggests that ‘it is the organization of the people as

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it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be’, 198. 13. Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, 152. 14. Mbembe describes the status of the slave in the Atlantic Slave Trade as one ‘Imprisoned in the dungeon of appearance, they came to belong to others who hated them. They were deprived of their own names and their own languages. Their lives and their work were from then on controlled by the others with whom they were condemned to live, and who denied them recognition as cohumans’, Critique of Black Reason, 2. 15. Mbembe, Brutalism, 2. 16. Mbembe, Brutalism, 2. 17. Malpas, Rethinking Dwelling, 6. 18. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 17. 19. Schürmann, ‘Questioning the Foundation’, 366. 20. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 18. 21. Ibid. 22. The essay also includes a threefold critique of the ‘thingliness of the thing.’ Heidegger describes these three modes as the conception of the thing ‘as a bearer of traits, as the unity of a manifold of sensations, [and] as formed matter’ (Poetry, Language, Thought, 30). Though this opening discussion informs his subsequent analysis of the artwork and its relation to earth-world, I leave it unexplored here in order to emphasize other aspects that more closely align with my own discussion. On the status of the thing, see: Magid: “Beyond the Tools of the Trade”; Morin, “Thinking Things.” 23. This argument is further developed by Heidegger in his essay ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, where the extractive logic of modern industry is countered by the appeal to a latent and potentially anarchic saving power. See Andrew Mitchell, The Fourfold (cf. 24–70). 24. It is worth clarifying that although Heidegger’s project is initially limited to those artworks that are ‘earthly’ in material form – he writes about clay jugs, stone temples and paint pigments – what exists as ‘earthly’ is the broader materiality that inscribes itself in the object quality of the artwork. Whether Heidegger’s claims regarding the earth-world tension in the artwork can be read into the digital art object is a question that cannot be pursued within the limits of this book. However, it is worth remembering that even the digital artwork exists in a material world and assumes meaning in its digital ‘materiality’, a question of matter and form that depends upon the larger framework of the earth environ. 25. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 44. 26. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 46. 27. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 47. 28. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 45. 29. Oliver, Earth and World, 126. 30. Ibid. 31. Schürman, Heidegger on Being and Acting, 4. 32. See Arendt’s essay ‘What is Freedom?’ for a discussion of the earthly condition of freedom.

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33. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 53. 34. Ibid. 35. Foltz, Inhabiting the Earth, 14. 36. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 44–45. For an overview of the way in which notions of the Open develop in Heidegger’s writing, see Schatski, ‘Early Heidegger on Being’. 37. Malpas, Heidegger and the Thinking of Place, 46. 38. Oliver, Earth and World, 123. 39. Oliver, Earth and World, 125. 40. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 74. 41. Ibid. 42. Mitchell, The Fourfold, 3. 43. Elden, ‘Heidegger’s Hölderlin and the Importance of Place’, 258 n 4. 44. Ibid. 45. Oliver, Earth and World, 140. 46. Heidegger, Question Concerning Technology, 49. 47. Heidegger’s reflections on the rivers Ister and Rhine in Hölderlin’s poems of the same names in his 1935 lecture course, ‘An Introduction to Metaphysics’, are similar in form to his 1936 reflections on the status of the bridge. He describes the river as that which ‘does not merely grant the place (Ort), in the sense of the mere place (blofien Platzes), that is occupied by humans in their dwelling. The place is intrinsic to the river itself. The river itself dwells’ (GA53, 41; HID 35); see also; Elden, ‘Heidegger’s Hölderlin and the Importance of Place’. 48. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 150. 49. A productive parallel can be discerned in Arendt’s discussion of the table as a metaphor for the gravitational pull that grounds community: ‘To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time’ (Arendt, The Human Condition, 52). 50. Heidegger, ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, 150. 51. Ibid. 52. Honig, Public Things, 6. 53. Young, ‘The Fourfold’, 373. 54. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 151. 55. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 147. 56. Weidler, ‘Heidegger’s Fourfold’, 489. 57. Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’. 58. Young, ‘The Fourfold’, 374. 59. See Arendt, ‘What is Authority?’, 91–141. 60. Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting, 227 (emphasis in the original). 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid. 63. Dungey, ‘The Ethics and Politics of Dwelling’, 237. 64. Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, 89.

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65. Arendt, The Human Condition, 55 (emphasis added). 66. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 147. 67. Krell, “Introduction,” 345. 68. Heidegger, Being and Time, 311. 69. Ingold, ‘Bindings against Boundaries’, 1797. 70. Elden, ‘Heidegger’s Hölderlin and the Importance of Place’, 347. 71. Elden, ‘Heidegger’s Hölderlin and the Importance of Place’, 266. 72. Elden, ‘Heidegger’s Hölderlin and the Importance of Place’, 268. 73. Ibid. 74. Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, 19. 75. Heidegger, Question Concerning Technology: xix. 76. Heidegger, ‘Phenomenology and Theology’, 239. 77. Oliver, Earth and World, 141. 78. Arendt, The Human Condition, 32. 79. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 163. 80. Fóti, ‘Mortals within the Fourfold’, 393. 81. Rose, ‘Dwelling as Marking and Claiming’, 768. 82. See Harman, ‘Dwelling with the Fourfold’. 83. Young, ‘The Fourfold’, 380.

Chapter 2  1. ‘Dann sind wir auf der Erde erwatet worden. Dann is tuns wie jedem Geschlecht, das vor uns war, eine schwache messianische Kraft mitgegeben, an welche die Vergangenheit Anspruch hat,’ Benjamin, ‘Über den Begriff der Geschichte’, 694.  2. Martel, Anarchist Prophets, 1, 10.  3. Agamben, State of Exception, 52.   4. The letter is translated by Samuel Weber in his reflection on Schmitt and Benjamin (‘Taking Exception to Decision’, 5). While the letter was published several years prior to that in Benjamin’s Collected Writings, edited by Rolf Tiedeman and published in 1980, it was left out of Benjamin’s Correspondences collated by Scholem and Adorno and published in 1966.   5. De Wilde, ‘Meeting Opposites’, 379, n.3.  6. Butler, Parting Ways, 77.   7. Kennedy, ‘Carl Schmitt and the Frankfurt School’; Jay, ‘Reconciling the Irreconcilable’; Preuss, ‘The Critique of German Liberalism’. On Benjamin’s renewed application of Schmittian concepts, see Bolz, ‘Charisma und Souveränität’; Heil, Gefährliche Beziehungen; Weber, ‘Taking Exception to Decision’.  8. Assmann, Herrschaft und Heil, 15.   9. De Wilde, ‘Meeting Opposites’, 367. 10. Traces of Kennedy’s article, which sought to identify the shared suspicions between Schmitt and members of the Frankfurt School including Benjamin, can be heard in this conceptual shift from the space of the politics in parliamentary democracy (the locus that Kennedy saw as a common space of critique) to the broader political within public life. 11. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 101.

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12. Kahn, Political Theology, 33. 13. Kahn, Political Theology, 33. 14. Schmitt’s admiration for Hobbes was well known. From the 1930s onwards he wrote extensively on Hobbes, publishing The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: meaning and failure of a political symbol in 1938. For a discussion on the influence of Hobbes, see Jacob Als Thomsen, ‘Carl Schmitt – The Hobbesian of the 20th Century?’ 15. Arendt’s critique of sovereignty as synonymous with freedom is explored in detail in the essay, ‘What Is Freedom?’, and captured in the infamous line ‘if men wish to be free, it is sovereignty they must renounce’; Between Past and Future, 163. 16. Benjamin, Gesammelt Schrifte, 693–4. 17. Kahn, Political Theology, 34. 18. Kahn, Political Theology, 34. 19. Mbembe, Brutalism, xiii. 20. Read, Anarchy and Order, 35. 21. De Wilde, ‘Meeting Opposites’, 365. 22. De Wilde, ‘Meeting Opposites’, 366. 23. De Wilde, ‘Meeting Opposites’, 365. 24. Martel, Anarchist Prophets, 53. 25. On the distance between Benjamin and Schmitt, see Butler, Parting Ways; De Wilde, ‘Meeting Opposites’; Weber, ‘Taking Exception to Decision’. 26. Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, 390. 27. Richter, Inheriting Walter Benjamin, 40. 28. Vatter, Divine Democracy. On the general resurgence of political theology at this time see Gordon, Weimar Thought: A Contested Legacy; Hammill and Lupton, Political Theology and Early Modernity; Kaplan and Koshar, The Weimar Moment; Stroup, ‘Political Theology and Secularization Theory in Germany’. 29. This translation, now standard, is provided by Eiland and McLaughlin; see Benjamin, The Arcades Project: 471. Richter also calls our attention to the earlier Hafrey and Sieburth translation (Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, 61): My thinking relates to theology the way a blotter does to ink. It is soaked through with it. If one were to go by the blotter, though, nothing of what has been written would remain. 30. Vardoulakis, ‘Stasis: Beyond Political Theology?’, 125. 31. Jonas, ‘The Concept of God after Auschwitz’, 3. 32. Rose, Judaism and Modernity, 178. 33. Allinson et al, The Tragedy of the Worker, 90. 34. Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism; see also Eddon, ‘Arendt, Scholem, Benjamin’; Mosès, The Angel of History. 35. Scholem, ‘Rosenzweig and The Star of Redemption’, 26. 36. Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism, 3, 19. 37. In essence, this is the argument of Miguel Vatter’s 2021 book Living Law. On the book’s opening page, he outlines its general thesis that Jewish political theology is

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republican because, to quote, ‘it pivots on the idea that democracy is a function of a people’s fidelity to a prophetic higher law’ and anarchic because, to quote again, ‘this divine law is saturated with the messianic aim to put an end to relations of domination between peoples’ (Living Law, 1). The higher law that he describes here is reimagined by entities like the Salvage Collective as ‘human history’ itself. The suspension of a form of barbarism that they see in the existence of domination thus becomes the site of theology’s exception and transgression. 38. Richter, Inheriting Walter Benjamin, 42. Arendt presents a similar discussion of religare in ‘What is Authority?’ (Between Past and Future, 126). 39. Richter, Inheriting Walter Benjamin, 49–50. 40. Benjamin, The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, 45. 41. Arendt, The Human Condition, 185. 42. Arendt, ‘Understanding and Politics’, 308. 43. Jonas, ‘The Concept of God after Auschwitz’. 44. Arendt, ‘Willing’, 109–110. 45. Arendt, ‘Thinking’, 88. 46. Richter, Inheriting Walter Benjamin, 57. 47. Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, 390. 48. Martle, Anarchist Prophets, 53. 49. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 10. 50. Afterlives of history is a notion that Benjamin reflects on in his writing on translation, yet here I am borrowing more specifically from Saidiya Hartman’s use of the term (cf. Lose your Mother). 51. Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, 391. 52. Eddon, ‘Arendt, Scholem, Benjamin’, 263. 53. Kaufman, ‘Beyond Use, within Reason’, 172. 54. Cf. Moore, Anthropocene or Capitalocene? 55. Jacobson, Metaphysics of the Profane. On the history of the Messiah see: Neusner, Judaism and Christianity in the Age of Constantine, 59–80. 56. For further discussions of this intellectual partnership, particularly in the context of messianic thought, see: Mosès, The Angel of History; Styfals, No Spiritual Investment in the World; Taubes, ‘Walter Benjamin – A Modern Marcionite?’. 57. Jacobson, Metaphysics of the Profane, fn 16, 239. 58. Arendt, The Human Condition, 179–180; Martel, Anarchist Prophets. 59. Löwy, Fire Alarm, 33. 60. Benjamin, Illuminations, 246. 61. Svenungsson, Divining History, 154. It is worth noting that Svenungsson’s reflections on messianism draw not from Benjamin and Scholem but Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek and Giorgio Agamben, a diversion from the seemingly more classical Jewish writers highlights the extent to which political theology has been incorporated into seemingly more secular texts. 62. Sharpe, In the Wake; Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes. 63. Avoiding this instrumentalisation of oppression and victimhood will be central to the concluding section of Chapter 5, in which I seek to join others in decolonising the Anthropocene without simultaneously co-opting narratives of oppression ‘for the sake’ of historical or political emancipation.

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64. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 460. 65. Ibid. 66. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 470. 67. Arendt, The Human Condition, 9. 68. Benjamin, ‘Theologico-Political Fragment’, 305. 69. See Löwy, Fire Alarm, 66 for a brief discussion of Benjamin’s word choice. 70. Martel, Anarchist Prophets, 129. 71. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 460. Arendt’s essay ‘Understanding and Politics’ advances a similar claim, positioning understanding as the ‘unending activity by which, in constant change and variation, we come to terms with and reconcile ourselves to reality’, finally attaining a sense of home-being in the temporality of one’s life (Arendt, ‘Understanding and Politics’, 308). 72. Hartman, Lose your Mother. 73. Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, 395. 74. While this is the central account of history that she gives in Between Past and Future, it also appears in the epigraph from Karl Jaspers that she includes in The Origins of Totalitarianism – ‘Weder dem Vergangen aheimfallen noch dem Zukünftigen. Es kommt darauf an, ganz gegenwärtig zu sein’ (To fall victim neither to the past or the future. It’s all about being in the present). 75. Beasley-Murray, Mikhail Bakhtin and Walter Benjamin, 133. 76. See in particular Walter D Mignolo’s foreword to Constructing the Pluriverse. 77. Ibid. 78. Styfals, No Spiritual Investment in the World, 150. 79. Allinson et al, The Tragedy of the Worker, 79.

Chapter 3  1. Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?  2. Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 2.   3. Allinson et al, The Tragedy of the Worker.   4. Rob Nixon refers to this process as the ‘slow attritional violence’ of the climate crisis, Slow Violence.  5. Butler, The Force of Non-Violence, 2.   6. These problems appear respectively in the prologue to The Human Condition, the conclusion of ‘What Is Authority?’ and in the closing chapter of On Revolution.  7. Arendt, On Revolution, 265. Brian Smith describes Arendt’s dismissal of anarchism as casual and ‘often times unfair’. Moreover, he highlights the central paradox of her account of anarchism, namely ‘given her sympathy for anarchist politics, it is not immediately clear why she took the positions that she did’ (‘Anarcho-Republicanism?’, 89).   8. Martel, ‘The Ambivalent Anarchism of Hannah Arendt’.   9. ‘Real political action comes out as a group. And you join that group or you don’t. And whatever you do on your own you are really not an actor – you are an anarchist.’ (Arendt, ‘On Hannah Arendt’.) Martel’s study of anarchism through an Arendtian lens interrogates the status of the individual anarchist project in a way that effectively challenges Arendt’s offhand remarks about the anarchist as a lone

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figure. Recovering what is, in effect, an account of the subject that speaks back to Cavarero’s interweaving of interdependence, natality and action, Martel describes the individual anarchist as required by and themselves requiring a community. His description of the anarchist as holding ‘collective sight for a community at a time when it fails to realise the way that it is itself continually engaged in such a form of vision’ is conditioned by the fact that the anarchist could not ‘form that vision by or for themselves’ (Anarchist Prophets, 15). What his claim points to here is the constitutive relationality of the individual, who is always already in relation with the community. 10. On a productive account of Arendtian anarchism see Lederman, ‘Councils and Revolutions’; Martel, ‘The Ambivalent Anarchism of Hannah Arendt’; Muldoon, ‘The Origins of Hannah Arendt’s Council System’; Smith, ‘Anarcho-Republicanism?’. 11. Arendt, On Revolution, 205. 12. Smith, “Anarcho-Republicanism?” 87. Her later critiques of anarchism turn on what she saw as the inclusion of violence within anarchist traditions. Violence, on Arendt’s terms, can never act as the foundation of politics because violence is mute, it does not open possibilities, but forecloses the revolutionary quality inherent to natality, the ontological foundation of all politics. The incorporation of violence into anarchism thus denied in advance any possibility of its claim to political legitimacy. 13. Arendt, The Human Condition, 7. 14. Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 181. 15. Arendt, The Human Condition, 237. 16. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 6. 17. Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, 148. 18. Lederman, ‘Councils and Revolutions’, 254. 19. Lang, ‘Governance and Political Action’; Wenman, Agonistic Democracy; Tchir, Hannah Arendt’s Theory of Political Action; Temin, ‘Nothing Much Had Happened’. 20. In opposition to the party system, councils also challenged what she considered their organisation in terms of the formula ‘government of the people by an élite spring from the people’. Her critique of the professionalisation of politics in the party system, which could only reflect that elite class that produced politicians, was that it failed to enable ‘the people qua people to make their entrance into political life and to become participators in public affairs’ (On Revolution, 269). This failure coincides with the loss of the revolutionary spirit, which cannot be found in the exclusivity that now organises admission to political life. 21. Lederman, ‘Councils and Revolutions’, 249; Read, Anarchy and Order, 3. 22. Disch, ‘How Could Hannah Arendt Glorify the American Revolution and Revile the French?’, 350. 23. Frank, Constituent Moments, 42. 24. Çubukçu, ‘Of Rebels and Disobedients’, 42. 25. Temin, ‘Nothing Much Had Happened’, 526. Reference to Arendt, On Revolution, 168. 26. Temin, ‘Nothing Much Had Happened’, 525. See also Pateman, ‘The Settler Contract’. 27. Owens, ‘Racism in the Theory Canon’, 407.

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28. Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, 388. Temin offers a compelling account of the emergence of the ‘boomerang effect’ in Arendt’s writing. He connects it to Arendt’s interpretation of Edmund Burke and JA Hobson, who both argued that the exercise of authoritarian power in imperial outposts would lead to the corruption of ‘home’ politics (cf. Temin, ‘Nothing Much Had Happened’.). Their arguments reappear in Arendt’s writings on imperialism in The Origins of Totalitarianism, where they assume an anti-imperialist dimension in consideration of the ‘outpost’. On the creation of a permanent overseas administration, she writes of the possibility that it would ‘imperialize the whole nation . . . to combine domestic and foreign policy in such a way as to organize the nation for the looting of foreign territories and the permanent degradation of alien peoples’ (Arendt, The Origins, 155). 29. Temin, ‘Nothing Much Had Happened’, 519. 30. There is an argument that this is already occurring in the acceptance of ‘green growth’, the belief that systems of economic growth can be maintained in sustainable ways that do not degrade the conditions of planetary life. 31. See Grusin, Anthropocene Feminism; Mies and Shiva, Ecofeminisms. 32. At COP27 in 2022 the question of reparations and climate justice was central, leading to the establishment of a Loss and Damage fund that will provide financial assistance to vulnerable countries in adapting to the consequences arising from climate change. 33. For an overview of those instances where Mackellar’s poem was deployed by climate sceptics, see ABC Media Watch, ‘Droughts and Flooding Rain’. https://www. abc.net.au/mediawatch/episodes/poem/101735300 34. Though national temperature records only began in 1910, two years after Mackellar’s poem, they reveal in 2022 that the country has warmed on average by 1.47 ± 0.24 °C, see CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology, ‘State of the Climate 2022’. 35. Dickman, ‘Ecological consequences of Australia’s “Black Summer” bushfires’. 36. Pyne, The Pyrocene. The disruption of land care practices and forms of custodianship that reflect the needs of specific environments can be understood through what Alfred Crosby calls ‘ecological imperialism’, which names the particular violence posed to epistemologies of land (Ecological Imperialism). Indeed, the suspension of these land care practices and imposition of land tactics, organised principally in relation to property and an approach to nature as cheap and extractable, can be read in terms of Schmittian sovereignty. Where the latter coincides with the suspension of the law, in order to reaffirm a particular norm, in the context of land care, it exists as the negation of traditional land knowledge and the sovereign imposition of what are primarily colonial land management tactics. 37. The war in Ukraine is the most recent and clearest example of a war fought in these terms. The stronghold of Russia on European gas supply as well the manipulation of cold weather as a weapon are just two moments in a long history of war’s exercise in relation to weather generally and planetary resources more specifically. 38. Although not in office at the time of writing, President Trump’s remarks on US withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords on the grounds that ‘I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris’ speaks to this sense of planetary responsibility

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(Gambino, ‘Pittsburgh Fires Back at Trump’). It reappears in the conspiracy theories that climate change is a ‘Chinese hoax’ or the result of reckless, leftist governance. Every time that responsibility, in that precise sense of Donna Haraway’s response-ability, is denied or subverted, the phantasmal structure of planetary archism asserts itself. 39. Moore, Anthropocene or Capitalocene?; Allinson, J et al, The Tragedy of the Worker. 40. Cf. Benjamin, ‘Capitalism as Religion’; Nixon, Slow Violence. The neo-liberal mentality that sits behind this particular branch of social Darwinism is seen in the ‘futurist’ remarks of politicians who invoke ‘your’ power to protect ‘your’ family. It exists in a seemingly benign form in the power of individual responsibility and the notion of ‘your’ carbon footprint and, at a greater extreme, in the extra-planetary techno-optimism of figures like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. 41. Owens, ‘Racism in the Theory Canon’, 423. 42. Arendt, The Origins, 187, n.4. 43. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 140; The Origins, 191. 44. Davis, ‘The Right to Have Rights’, 43. 45. See Temin, ‘Nothing Much Had Happened’. 46. Söderbäck, ‘Natality or Birth?’, 274; Kiess, Hannah Arendt and Theology, 40. 47. Vatter, ‘Natality and Biopolitics in Hannah Arendt’, 138. 48. Honkasalo, Sisterhood, Natality, Queer, 77. Feminist Arendt scholarship has countered the image of Arendt as disinterested in questions of women’s liberation and feminist thought. Kathleen Jones has written compellingly on the role of Arendt’s political thought in relation to intersectional theory, suggesting that Arendt transgresses boundaries that typically demarcate classic conceptions of feminism and opens up a new mode of thinking about the relationality of feminist politics (Jones, ‘Queer(y)ing Hannah Arendt’). 49. Arendt argued that it was from this position that would we be able to ‘think what we are doing’ (The Human Condition, 5). Part of this methodological program informs the an-arche of Arendt’s mode of writing and thinking. She resisted historical normativity, insisting on the reality of the political as the setting in which to think politics. 50. References to natality were only inserted into the text as revisions that Arendt made in anticipation for its publication. In its original format, written in 1929, Arendt makes references only to ‘the fact that we have entered the world through birth’ (Love and Saint Augustine, 51). See Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark’s interpretative essay that accompanies the dissertation for commentary on these revisions, (‘Rediscovering Hannah Arendt’, 146–7). 51. Arendt, The Origins, 611. 52. Relatively little has been written of the messianic dimension of natality. Yet the sense in which Benjamin and a broader secular tradition’s concern for weak or human messianism percolates throughout these remarks on natality’s ‘new world’ seems clear. On the theological dimensions of natality, see Biss, ‘Arendt and the Theological Significance of Natality’; Jantzen, Becoming Divine; Kiess, Hannah Arendt and Theology; Young ah-Gottlieb, Regions of Sorrow.

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53. Arendt, The Origins, 479. 54. Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, 184–5. 55. Arendt, The Human Condition, 9. 56. Arendt, The Human Condition, 247. 57. Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, 391. 58. Arendt, The Human Condition, 176. 59. Arendt, The Human Condition; Arendt, ‘Thinking’, 19. 60. Arendt, On Revolution, 205. 61. Birmingham, ‘The An-archic Event of Natality’, 766. 62. This intersection of the earth and memory appears in Arendt’s discussion at the close of The Human Condition where she writes fearfully of the establishment of an Archimedean point on earth, one that effectively obliterates those earthly conditions that she has outlined as the premise of political life (257–268.) 63. Arendt, ‘Introduction into Politics’, 93. 64. See Cavarero, Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude. For further feminist considerations of birth that build on Arendt see Diprose and Ziarek, Arendt, Natality and Biopolitics; Durst, ‘Birth and Natality in Hannah Arendt’ and Guenther, ‘BeingFrom-Others: Reading Heidegger after Cavarero’. 65. Klein, This Changes Everything. A similar appeal for change is heard in climate geographers Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright’s contention that the climate crisis raises concern aside from the transformation in politics (citing more representative proceduralism or more precautionary environmental policymaking), but ‘a transformation of the political’ (Mann and Wainwright, Climate Leviathan: 28). 66. See Beiner, ‘Action, Natality and Citizenship’; Biss, ‘Arendt and the Theological Significance of Natality’; Bowen-Moore, Hannah Arendt’s Philosophy of Natality; Brunkhorst, Hannah Arendt; Dietz, ‘Feminist Receptions of Hannah Arendt’. 67. Guenther, ‘Being-From-Others: Reading Heidegger after Cavarero’, 99. 68. Cavarero, Inclinations, 25–33. 69. Though not always read in terms of its original coincidence with human birth, natality has been deployed as a political concept relating to a broad range of topics, illustrative of its richness. On natality and rights, see Beiner, ‘Action, Natality and Citizenship’; Birmingham, Hannah Arendt and Human Rights; ‘The Anarchic Event of Natality’; Parekh, ‘A Meaningful Place in the World’. On natality and feminism, see Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt; Honig, ‘Towards an Agonistic Feminism’; Jantzen, Becoming Divine; Willard, ‘Birth as Labour and Natality’. On natality and subjecthood, see Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself; Cavarero, Relating Narratives; Kristeva, Hannah Arendt. On natality and action, see Kampowski, Arendt, Augustine, and the New Beginning; Schott, ‘Natality and Destruction’. 70. Judith Butler describes the ethical project at the heart of Cavarero’s writings as hinging on the claim that ‘we are beings who are, of necessity, exposed to one another, and that our political situation consists in part in learning how best to handle this constant and necessary exposure . . . In her view, I am not, as it were, an interior subject, closed upon myself, solipsistic, posing questions of myself alone.

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I exist in an important sense for you, and by virtue of you’ (Butler, ‘Giving an Account of Oneself’, 24). 71. Cavarero, ‘A Child Has Been Born unto Us’, 17. 72. The emphasis on a geometrical language calls to mind Arendt’s own use of geometrical drawings in The Life of the Mind as a way of expressing the orientation of action into the world. 73. ‘Although everybody started his life by inserting himself into the human world through action and speech, nobody is the author or producer of his own life story. In other words, the stories, the results of action and speech, reveal an agent, but this agent is not an author or producer. Somebody began it and is its subject in the twofold sense of the word, namely, its actor and sufferer, but nobody is its author’ (Arendt, The Human Condition, 184). 74. See Cavarero, For More than One Voice. 75. Birmingham, Hannah Arendt and Human Rights, 31. 76. Cavarero, Inclinations, 13; Guenther, ‘Being-From-Others’. 77. Cavarero, Inclinations, 108. 78. Arendt, ‘The Crisis in Education’, 182. 79. In the prologue to The Human Condition, Arendt stages an opposition between the ‘earthly time’ of mortals and the time of Sputnik, which feigned a divine power and removed itself from the conditions of earth-bound history. This act of removal from earth history signalled a possible end to an earthly condition to history and hence to the earthbound conditions of natality and plurality. For an extended discussion on Sputnik and Arendt’s engagement with the space question, see Oliver, Earth and World, 96–101; Yaqoob, ‘The Archimedean Point’. 80. Arendt, The Human Condition, 9. 81. Butler, ‘Precarious Life, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Cohabitation’,. 143; Birmingham, Hannah Arendt and Human Rights, 59. 82. Perpich, ‘Subjectivity and Sexual Difference’, 407. 83. Arendt, ‘Thinking’, 19. 84. Ibid, 248–257. 85. Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, 390 and Arendt, The Human Condition, 7. Here I would stress that we turn from the popular definition of plurality taken from page 8 of The Human Condition (‘Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live’) to that on page 7, which centres the earthliness of plurality, which is described here as ‘the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world’. This point reappears throughout her writing, and I would draw consideration to one such moment: in Arendt’s Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, she writes: ‘Men = earthbound creatures, living in communities, endowed with common sense, sensus communis, a community sense; not autonomous, needing each other’s company even for thinking . . .’ (Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy). 86. Arendt, ‘The Crisis in Education’, 193. 87. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 11. 88. Arendt, ‘Understanding and Politics’, 308.

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  89. This figure of ‘uprightness’ is described by Cavarero in relation to Kant. Much of her critique is set in relation to his minor work, ‘Conjectures on the Beginnings of Human History’, which begins with the claim that human history must, ‘if we are not to indulge in wild conjectures . . ., begin with something which human reason cannot deduce from prior natural causes – that is, with the existence of human beings’. He goes on to develop this position by qualifying that this conjectural human at the beginning of history ‘must also be fully developed [and] have no mother to support them’ (Kant, Political Writings, 222). For Cavarero, of course, this disqualification of maternal care undermines the very possibility of history, which she argues is a product of care and interdependence.  90. Martel, Anarchist Prophets, 53.   91. Arendt argued that it was from this position that would we be able to ‘think what we are doing’ (The Human Condition, 5). Part of this methodological program informs the an-arche of Arendt’s mode of writing and thinking. She resisted historical normativity, insisting on the reality of the political as the setting in which to think politics.  92. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 278; Arendt, The Origins, 611.  93. Arendt, The Human Condition, 176; Arendt, Denktagebuch,1950 bis 1973, 66.  94. Arendt, The Origins, 297. See Mbembe, ‘How to Develop a Planetary Consciousness’. The proximity between the emancipatory productivity of Mbembe’s planetary consciousness and the archic structure of his earlier discussion of ‘planeterisation of the world’ corresponds to the parasitic relation between arche and an-arche. See Mbembe, Necropolitics.  95. Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 132.   96. These problems appear respectively in the section ‘world alienation’ at the end of The Human Condition (248–257), the conclusion of ‘What is Authority?’ and in the closing chapter of On Revolution.   97. Kohn, ‘Introduction’, x.  98. Arendt, Thinking without a Bannister, 470.  99. Arendt, The Origins, 191. 100. Arendt, The Origins, 440. In the book’s section on Imperialism, Arendt describes ‘native savages’ as ‘living without the future of a purpose and the past of an accomplishment’ (cf. 190). While at times she references their humanity and the relative inhumanity of European colonists who saw themselves as able to condemn these people to a condition of superfluousness, these remarks can hardly be said to counter the rest. 101. Temin, ‘Nothing Much Had Happened’, 529. Patricia Owens’ article highlights the complexity of Arendt’s account of the Boers in South Africa, showing that while Arendt was highly critical of European violence, this critique still hinged upon an underlying racism towards the indigenous population (Owens, ‘Racism in the Theory Canon’, 411–414). 102. Arendt, The Origins, 299. 103. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 11. 104. Arendt, The Origins, 300. 105. Arendt, The Origins, xi.

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106. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 218. 107. Harrison, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, 9. 108. Arendt, The Human Condition, 198. 109. Lewis and Maslin, ‘Defining the Anthropocene’, 175. 110. This image of thinking in the presence of history appears throughout her writings. In the preface to Between Past and Future she describes the effect of thinking and reality parting company as leading to a set of circumstances in which ‘reality has become opaque for the light of thought, and thought, no longer bound to incident as the circle remains bound to its focus, is liable either to become altogether meaningless or to rehash old verities which have lost all concrete significance’ (6). A similar argument is found in her critique of thoughtlessness and the loss of opinion as the expression of independent thought in On Revolution, 210–221. 111. Davis, ‘The Right to Have Rights’. 112. Birmingham is the first to argue for the connection between the an-arche of natality and the right to have rights (Hannah Arendt and Human Rights). 113. Cf. Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive. 114. Davis, ‘The Right to Have Rights’, 55. 115. Cf. Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto. 116. Moodie, ‘Capitalising on Success’, 113. 117. Tuck and Yang, ‘Decolonisation is not a Metaphor’. 118. Moodie, ‘Capitalising on Success’, 113. 119. Cf. Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution. 120. For the most comprehensive engagement with this question, see Belle, Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question. 121. Martel, Anarchist Prophets, 125–126.

Chapter 4   1. See Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 104–117.   2. It is clear that Arendt had a complex relationship with colonialism. She was aware of the violence that preceded colonialism and she was critical of the authoritarian practices upon which much contemporary colonialism depended. However, the specific violence of settler-colonialism, in which the metropole does not figure, and the imperial outpost becomes itself the alienating metropole for the indigenous population, is insufficiently dealt with in her writing. For further discussions of Arendt’s relationship to colonialism, particularly where settler-colonialism coincided with the ‘foundation’ of the modern state, see Correm, ‘Race, Guilt, and Political Responsibility’; Lederman, ‘Councils and Revolution’; Temin, ‘Nothing Much Had Happened’.   3. Owens, ‘Racism in the Theory Canon’, 423.   4. These projects relate respectively to Hartman, Lose Your Mother; Sharpe, In the Wake; Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes.  5. Arendt, The Origins, 297; Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, 184–185.  6. Martel, Anarchist Prophets, 53. This same formulation of history/History appears in Stuart Halls’ reflections on creolising thought in his autobiography, Familiar Stranger. Anticipating the motif of a ‘present absence’ that is central to the construction of

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History’s oppressed, he writes that ‘as a colonised subject, I was inserted into history (or in this case, History) by negation, backwards and upside down – like all Caribbean peoples, dispossessed and disinherited from a past which was never properly ours’, 61.   7. The use of ‘opacity’ here has a clear reference to Edouard Glissant’s use of the term (Poetics of Relation). As I am using it here, it also points to Heidegger’s use of concealment as a quality of living on the anarchic earth. Opacity appears in Martel’s discussion of anarchism as the way that truth withholds itself (Anarchist Prophets, 133).  8. Arendt, The Origins, 297.   9. Curley, ‘Beyond Environmentalism’. 10. For a discussion of the Tiny House Warriors see Kinder, ‘Solar Infrastructure’ and Kimberley Skye Richards, ‘Tiny Houses’. 11. See Crosby, Ecological Imperialism. 12. Butler, The Force of Non-Violence, 2. 13. Arendt, The Human Condition, 184. 14. Pateman, ‘The Settler Contract’. 15. Carbonell et al have edited a moving collection on the imperative of care in infrastructure, countering the dominance of the creative moment as a determining the ongoing quality and conditions of the living environment, cf. Infrastructural Love. 16. Nixon, Slow Violence, 2 17. Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 2. 18. Nixon, Slow Violence, 2. 19. On testimonial and epistemic injustice see Fricker, Epistemic Injustice. 20. Allinson, et al, The Tragedy of the Worker. 21. Moore, ‘The Capitalocene, Part I’, 596. 22. The neologism ‘plantationocene’ is central to the articulation of this intersection; see Mitman, ‘Reflections on the Plantationocene’. 23. The force of this logic is seen in the Iturbe’s discussion of the ‘carbon logic’ (‘Architecture and the Death of Carbon Modernity’) and in Andreas Malm’s varying critiques of fossil capital (cf. ‘The Origins of Fossil Capital’ and Fossil Capital; Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency). On the colonial history of the climate crisis see Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History’; Davis and Todd, ‘On the Importance of a Date’; Whyte, ‘Indigenous Climate Change Studies’. 24. I take the formulation ‘praxis of domination’ from Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks. 25. Refusing historical impartiality, what is enacted on these days, and indeed in all instances when the truth of history’s violence is denied, is a new form of violence that enforces silence over those who may continue to appear ‘in place’ but cannot appear in either memory or the formation of history. 26. Moore, ‘The Capitalocene, Part I’, 595. 27. Oreskes, ‘The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change’, 93. 28. Hyvönen, ‘Labour as Action’, 241. 29. The difficulty of reconciling growth and the extent of decarbonisation necessary to limit planetary violence associated with climate change is increasingly being recognised. See Jason Hickel and Giorgos Kallis, ‘Is Green Growth Possible?’ I explore this question in Chapter 5 in relation to the seductive promises of archism. 30. Crutzen and Stoermer, ‘The “Anthropocene”’, 17.

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31. Ibid. 32. Schlosser, Herodotus in the Anthropocene, 3. For an overview of atmospheric carbon levels at the time of colonisation in 1492 and the geological ramifications, see Dull et al, ‘The Columbian Encounter’; Lewis and Maslin, ‘Defining the Anthropocene’; Nevle and Bird, ‘Effects of syn-pandemic fire reduction’; Nevle, Bird, Ruddiman and Dull, ‘Neotropical human-landscape interactions’. For decolonial interpretations of the Anthropocene as it pertains to this particular dating, see Baldwin and Erickson, ‘Introduction: Whiteness, Coloniality, and the Anthropocene’; Davis and Todd, ‘On the Importance of a Date’; Lewis and Maslin, ‘Defining the Anthropocene’. 33. See T. Toivanen et al, ‘The Many Anthropocenes’. 34. Mentz, ‘The Neologismcene’, 64. 35. See Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History’; Haraway, ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene’; Malm and Hornborg, ‘The Geology of Mankind?’. 36. Lewis and Maslin, ‘Defining the Anthropocene’; The Human Planet. 37. Lewis and Maslin, ‘Defining the Anthropocene’, 173. 38. Lewis and Maslin, ‘Defining the Anthropocene’, 177. 39. Arendt, The Human Condition, 3; Lewis and Maslin, ‘Defining the Anthropocene’, 171. 40. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 592. In particular here, I am thinking of the ‘cultic’ structure Benjamin attributes to capital and its correspondence to the cultic function of settler-colonial ideology; see Benjamin, ‘Earthly Births’. 41. Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, 392. 42. Lewis and Maslin, ‘Defining the Anthropocene’, 175. 43. Mbembe, Necropolitics, 9. 44. Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History’. 45. Maslin and Lewis, ‘Defining the Anthropocene’, 174. 46. Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’; Mbembe, ‘How to Develop a Planetary Consciousness’. 47. Mbembe, ‘How to Develop a Planetary Consciousness’. 48. See Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, 249, see also Tomba, ‘Justice and Divine Violence’ for a discussion of the intersection of divine violence and justice. 49. Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, 249. 50. Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, 242. 51. Lloyd, ‘Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception’, 69. For a similar discussion see Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos on the ‘being of the occupier’ in Indigenous Sovereignty. 52. Arendt, ‘Thinking’, 19. 53. Arendt, The Human Condition, 8. 54. Sharpe, In the Wake, 21. 55. Benjamin, ‘On Jewish Being’, 161. 56. Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes, 9. 57. Hage, Is Racism an Environmental Threat?; Nancy Tuana, ‘Climate Apartheid’. 58. Hage, Is Racism an Environmental Threat?, ix. 59. Valdez, ‘Reconceiving Immigration Politics’, 101. 60. Walter D Mignolo, ‘Foreword’, xiii. 61. Arendt, The Human Condition, 198.

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62. Ibid. 63. Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes, 13–14. 64. Arendt, The Human Condition, 9. 65. Arendt, The Human Condition, 182–183. 66. Arendt, The Human Condition, 176. 67. Arendt, The Human Condition, 27. 68. Benjamin, ‘The Sounds of the Slave’. 69. Benjamin, ‘The Sounds of the Slave’, 238. 70. Benjamin, ‘The Sounds of the Slave’, 241. 71. Mignolo, ‘Foreword’, xv. 72. Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 2. 73. Mbembe, Out of the Dark Night, 19. 74. Mbembe, Brutalism, 19. 75. Lloyd, ‘Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception’, 69. For a similar discussion see Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos on the ‘being of the occupier’ in Indigenous Sovereignty. 76. Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, 242. 77. Agamben, Homo Sacer. 78. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 12. 79. Hall, Familiar Stranger, 172. 80. Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes. 81. Arendt, ‘Civil Disobedience’, 90. 82. Çubukçu, ‘Of Rebels and Disobedients’, 42. 83. For a critical review of Arendt and race, see: Belle, Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question and Weinman, ‘Thinking with and against Arendt about Race, Racism, and Anti-Racism’, 2022. 84. King Jr, Why We Can’t Wait, 33. Of course, the United States is not the only nation whose foundation was premised on the attempt to ‘wipe out its indigenous population’. On the genealogy of the US police service and its relationship to slavery and indigeneity, see Bass, ‘Policing Space, Policing Race’; Vitale, The End of Policing. 85. Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 13. 86. Lloyd, ‘Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception’, 69. 87. Baldwin, No Name in the Street, 85. 88. Whyte, ‘Our Ancestors’ Dystopia Now’, 8. 89. Davis and Todd, ‘On the Importance of a Date’, 771. 90. Lloyd, ‘Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception’, 61. 91. Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, 242. 92. Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, 242. 93. Arendt discusses world alienation in the latter half of The Human Condition (248–266), references to the experience of being uprooted appear throughout her writings on the topics of loneliness, politics and refugees. Heidegger’s discussion of homelessness is similarly woven throughout his writing. It appears firstly in the context of Dasein in Being and Time as a way of describing the anxiety or inescapable existential condition of life (Being and Time, 188–189). It attains to a singular clarity in discussions of the inauthenticity of dwelling in his post-war writings; see Poetry, Language, Thought, 158–159.

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 94. Arendt, The Human Condition, 2, 199.  95. Sharpe, In the Wake, 12.  96. Sharpe, In the Wake, 28.  97. Nixon, Slow Violence, 2.  98. The intersection of human rights and climate change is well-documented, for an overview see for example: Atapattu, Human Rights Approaches to Climate Change; Humphreys, Human Rights and Climate Change. For a more precise discussion on rights and sea-level rise, see Byravan and Rajan, ‘Sea Level Rise and Climate Change Exiles’; Sachs, ‘Climate Change and Human Rights’; Vaha, ‘Drowning under: Small Island States and the Right to Exist’.   99. Hyvönen, ‘Labour as Action’, 257. 100. Hyvönen, ‘Labour as Action’, 260. 101. Hyvönen, ‘Labour as Action’, 259. 102. Arendt, The Human Condition, 8, 182–183. 103. Luisetti, ‘Pluriversalism and the Ecological Regime of Accumulation’, 150. 104. Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, 390. 105. Arendt, ‘On Violence’. The image of the slave who is denied speech is a good point of reference here in understanding how violence operates by way of a mute or silencing force. 106. Guzmán, ‘Benjamin’s Divine Violence’, 50. 107. Guzmán, ‘Benjamin’s Divine Violence’, 51. 108. Estes, Our History Is the Future, 14–15, emphasis added. 109. Davis and Todd, ‘On the Importance of a Date’, 775. 110. Here I am thinking, of course, of Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick’s pioneering work in reparative reading. Sedgewick first introduced the idea of reparative reading in a short introductory essay in 1996. The essay was revised and published the following year, developing from its 1996 four-page format to the thirty-seven-page-long essay in Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction (1997). Yet its most famous and commonly cited iteration is the 2003 essay from edited volume Touching Feeling. It is from this latter version that I orient much of my thinking in reading and writing in an age of planetary disrepair. For a discussion of the development of reparative reading throughout her writing, see Wiegman, ‘The Times We’re In’. 111. Guzmán, ‘Benjamin’s Divine Violence’, 51. 112. Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, 252. 113. Tomba, ‘Justice and Divine Violence’. 114. Tomba, ‘Justice and Divine Violence’, 579. 115. Guzmán, ‘Benjamin’s Divine Violence’, 53. 116. On the belatedness of natality, see Levinson, ‘Teaching In the Midst of Belatedness’; O’Byrne, Natality and Finitude. 117. Guzmán, ‘Benjamin’s Divine Violence’, 58. 118. Martel, Anarchist Prophets. 119. Hartman, Wayward Lives, xiii.

Chapter 5   1. Johnson, ‘Reification of Nature’, 327.   2. See https://climateclock.world/story

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  3. For a discussion of these effects, see Steffen et al, ‘Trajectories of the Earth System’.   4. Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, 395.   5. Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, 242.   6. Guzmán, ‘Benjamin’s Divine Violence’, 58.   7. Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, 392; Sharpe, In the Wake.  8. Arendt, The Human Condition, 184.  9. Arendt, The Human Condition, 179. 10. Arendt, ‘Introduction into Politics’, 202. 11. Shin Chiba is the first to describe Arendt’s notion of ‘love’ as an aporia (1995). A similar diagnosis intrudes on the readings of many others. Cf. Fletcher, 1996. On those exploring the role of love in Arendt’s writing, see Barthold, ‘Towards an Ethics of Love’,” 2000; Martel, ‘Amo: vol ut sis’, 2008; Tamboukou, ‘Love, Narratives, Politics’, 2013; Tatman, ‘Arendt and Augustine’, 2013. 12. This emphasis on love as a mode of worldly encounter distinguishes it from the more ‘object-oriented’ accounts of love seen in the work of Bruno Latour (1996; 2012). For similar projects in something like ‘planetary love’ see Hägglund, This Life, 2019; Hardt, ‘For Love or Money’, 2011. 13. Hesiod, Theogony, 30. 14. Aeschylus, The Eumenides, 965. 15. See Steffen et al, ‘Trajectories’. 16. Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, 184–185. 17. See IPCC 2018, Summary for Policymakers; Savaresi, ‘The Paris Agreement’. On overstepping the limits of the Paris Agreement, see Held and Roger, ‘Introduction’; Ivanova, ‘Good COP, Bad COP’; Mahapatra and Ratha, ‘Paris Climate Accord’. On the reorientation the Agreement poses to politics, see Dubash, ‘Revisiting Climate Ambition’; Falkner, ‘The Paris Agreement’. 18. Mann and Wainwright, Climate Leviathan. 19. Mbembe, Brutalism, 1. 20. Hesiod, Theogony, 207. 21. Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason. 22. Demos, Against the Anthropocene, 37. 23. Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 4. 24. Mbembe, ‘How to Develop a Planetary Consciousness’. 25. Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 2. 26. Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 5–6. 27. Jameson, The Seeds of Time, xii. 28. Bonneuil and Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene, 198. 29. Allinson et al, The Tragedy. Matthias Fritsch writes compellingly against the stronghold of political ‘presentism’ from a Derridean perspective, see Fritsch, ‘Democracy, Climate Change, and Environmental Justice’. 30. Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, 390. 31. Arendt, ‘Introduction into Politics’, 171. 32. Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 6. 33. Martel, Anarchist Prophets, 53. 34. Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 6.

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35. Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 151. 36. Ibid. 37. Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 152. 38. Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 158. 39. In a review essay for the London Review of Books, Geoff Mann stages these problems of faith in degrowth politics and democratisation as coextensive; see Mann, ‘Reversing the Freight Train’. 40. Arendt, The Human Condition, 247. 41. Plato, Republic, 10.617. 42. Arendt uses this description of ‘serving only life’s necessities’ to describe the life proper to the slave; see Arendt, The Human Condition, 314. 43. Arendt, The Human Condition, 37. 44. Arendt, ‘Introduction into Politics’, 108. 45. Arendt, ‘Introduction into Politics’, 190. 46. Büscher and Fletcher, The Conservation Revolution and Mann and Wainwright, Climate Leviathan. 47. For an overview of this debate see Büscher and Fletcher, The Conservation Revolution; Brockington et al, Nature Unbound. Sharachchandra Lele goes on to point out that ‘Unsurprisingly, the “half” of the earth to be put under “protection” happens to be largely in the Global South’, an equivalence that denies its human history (‘Environment and Well-Being’, 51). See also: Büscher et al, ‘Half-Earth or Whole Earth?’; Wilson, Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life; Wuerthner et al, Protecting the Wild. 48. Kareiva et al, ‘Conservation in the Anthropocene’. See also Lorimer, Wildlife in the Anthropocene; Mansfield et al, ‘Environmental Politics after Nature’. 49. Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology. Elements of Heidegger’s argument regarding the management of nature reappear in the context of conservationism; see Marris, Rambunctious Garden. 50. Voice, ‘Consuming the World’, 182. See also Iturbe, ‘Architecture and the Death of Carbon Modernity’. 51. Mann and Wainwright, Climate Leviathan, 29. 52. See Barbier, A Global Green New Deal; Pettifor, The Case for a Green New Deal; Schwartzman, ‘Green New Deal: An Ecosocialist Perspective’. 53. For some like economist Robert Pollin, continued economic growth is central to environmental strategy; see Pollin, ‘De-Growth vs a Green New Deal’. 54. Iturbe, ‘Architecture and the Death of Carbon Modernity’, 19. 55. Ibid. 56. Aronoff et al, A Planet to Win, 3. 57. Arendt, The Human Condition, 236. 58. Arendt, The Human Condition, 31. Entitlement to this violence, like the authoritarian practice of violence in the colonial outpost, can always ‘boomerang’ back onto the violent actor. And so, though Arendt sets the objects of necessity in a language of violence, the effect of this violence reflects back out into the public sphere. When she describes the ‘harsh light’ of the public as exposing the conditions of the private, she can be read as challenging in advance the normalisation of a domestic form of

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violence that legitimises domination in the name of meeting life’s biological necessities (cf. Arendt, The Human Condition, 51). 59. See Dietz, Turning Operations; Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob; Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom. Arendt does actually engage questions of domestic labour consonant with the feminist claim that the personal is political in a short book review, ‘On the Emancipation of Women’. 60. Francis, Encyclical letter Laudato si’, 53. 61. Arendt, ‘Introduction into Politics’, 119. 62. See Arendt, The Human Condition, 38–49. 63. Arendt, The Human Condition, 27. 64. Arendt, The Origins, 391. 65. Mann and Wainwright, Climate Leviathan, 28. A similar shift in the status of science is also apparent in the age of the climate crisis; see Turnhout, ‘The Politics of Environmental Knowledge’. 66. Goldberg, ‘The Reason of Unreason’, 217. 67. Mbembe, ‘How to Develop a Planetary Consciousness’. 68. Ibid. 69. Arendt, The Human Condition, 139. 70. Arendt, The Human Condition, 176. 71. Arendt, On Revolution, 269. 72. On the ‘good intentions’ that lead to the Hothouse earth see Schröder and Storm, ‘Economic Growth and Carbon Emissions’. 73. Ibid. 74. Milton, The Lycidas, 63. 75. Pope, ‘Accelerated Obsolescence’, 145. 76. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, 585. 77. Mann and Wainwright, Climate Leviathan, 30. 78. Guzmán, ‘Benjamin’s Divine Violence’, 58. 79. Mann and Wainwright, Climate Leviathan, 197. 80. Mbembe, Brutalism, 8. 81. Ghosh, The Great Derangement; Klein, ‘Foreword’. These ideas of a gradual erasure of the imagination are captured in the notion of the ‘agnotocene’. Introduced by Bonneuil and Fressoz, the agnotocene refers to the ideological production of ‘zones of ignorance’ in which the imagination is vanquished (The Shock, 198). 82. Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 73. 83. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 206. 84. Arendt, The Human Condition, 50. 85. Ghosh, The Great Derangement, 11. 86. This space of speculative fiction and thinking the future otherwise operates across the arts; see Demos, Against the Anthropocene; Ghosh, The Great Derangement; Streeby, Imagining the Future; Varoufakis, Another Now. 87. Mann and Wainwright, Climate Leviathan, 197. 88. Arendt, ‘Introduction into Politics’, 204, emphasis added. 89. See Arendt, The Human Condition, 242. Cf. Arendt, The Human Condition; 179–187.

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  90. Arendt first made this point in a 1955 letter to her friend Karl Jaspers: ‘I’ve begun so late, really only in recent years, to truly love the world . . . Out of gratitude, I want to call my book on political theory “Amor Mundi”’, Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Correspondence 1926–1969, 264.  91. Arendt, The Human Condition, 41.   92. Arendt, ‘Introduction into Politics’, 202; Love and Saint Augustine, 264; Between Past and Future, 193.   93. Arendt, ‘Willing’, 104.   94. See Arendt, The Human Condition, 179–187.  95. Arendt, The Human Condition, 242.  96. Ibid.  97. Arendt, The Human Condition, 180.   98. Arendt, ‘Introduction into Politics’, 93.   99. Benjamin, ‘Amor Terra’, 75. 100. Arendt, ‘Introduction into Politics’, 201. 101. Ibid. 102. Arendt, ‘Introduction into Politics’, 202.

Conclusion  1. Arendt, The Human Condition, 242.   2. Arendt, ‘Introduction into Politics’, 202.  3. Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, 19.   4. Arendt, ‘Thinking’, 209.   5. The image of worldly desertification appears principally in the final chapter of The Human Condition. Recent interventions regarding this area of Arendt’s work build on themes of alienation and estrangement, effectively anticipating the current intervention regarding the custodial project of planetary care in amor mundi, cf. Belcher and Schmidt, ‘Being Earthbound’, Kohn, ‘Hannah Arendt’.  6. Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, 17.  7. Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, 242.  8. Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, 18.   9. Arendt, ‘Crisis in Education’, 193. 10. Arendt, ‘Introduction into Politics’, 202. 11. Arendt, ‘Crisis in Education’, 193. 12. Arendt and Jaspers, Correspondence, 264. 13. Cavarero, ‘A Child Has Been Born’, 17. 14. Arendt, ‘Understanding and Politics’, 308; ibid. 15. In The Origins of Totalitarianism this appears as the setting of a new law of human dignity. 16. Arendt, The Origins, 301. 17. Arendt, The Human Condition, 41. 18. Arendt, The Human Condition, 54. 19. Arendt, The Human Condition, 75. 20. Arendt, The Human Condition, 52. 21. Arendt, ‘Willing’, 102–104.

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22. Arendt, ‘Understanding and Politics’, 308. 23. Arendt, ‘The Crisis in Culture’, 208. 24. Arendt, ‘Willing’, 103. 25. Arendt, ‘Introduction into Politics’, 202. 26. Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 181.

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Index

Adorno, Theodor, 51 Agamben, Giorgio, 117 an-archism Benjamin’s an-arche of history, 71, 86, 91 Benjamin’s politics of an-arche, 48, 50–1, 58, 68, 71 definition, 50 Heidegger’s an-arche of earth-world relations, 29–33, 34–5 Heidegger’s an-arche of place, 25, 26–7, 34, 36, 37, 41, 47, 71 Heidegger’s planetary an-arche of the fourfold, 37, 43, 49 natality and an-arche of place, 90–3 natality’s planetary an-arche, 6, 86–7, 89–90, 102, 114 planetary an-archism, 10, 13, 14–15 anarchism archism and, 74, 79–81, 103 Arendt’s concept of, 7, 22 Arendt’s critique of, 7–8, 74–5, 76 Arendt’s theory of anarchic beginning, 75, 76 and authority, 17

Heidegger’s politics of anarchy, 23–4, 25–7, 29 of natality, 6–7, 22–3, 33, 114 and political plurality, 11, 12–13, 16, 17, 75–6 response-ability of, 101–2 see also planetary anarchism Anthropocene decolonisation of, 125–6 as History, 106–7 and Orbis theory, 107, 108 racialised and colonialist character of the climate crisis, 111–14, 117–18, 119–20, 122–3, 130, 132 see also climate crisis archism anarchism and, 74, 79–81, 102, 103 and the climate crisis, 3–5, 14–15, 73 the climate crisis’s archist Future, 131, 132, 135–6 definition, 3, 50 of History, 104–5, 106, 120 narratives of personal responsibility, 5, 15 planetary archism, 5–6, 50 and planetary politics, 3–5

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of political theology, 53, 56 seductive quality, 4, 5 violence of, 112 Arendt, Hannah account of planetary politics, 3, 10–12, 16, 18, 24, 49, 74 account of thinking, 63–4 amor mundi notion, 134, 151–2, 153, 157–61 anarchic natality, 83–7 concept of natality, 6–7, 83–5 crisis of the imagination, 137, 138 critique of anarchism, 7–8, 74–5, 76 critique of planetary totalitarianism, 13–14, 15 formulation of a post-totalitarian world, 15–17 the groundwork of freedom, 45, 54 Heidegger’s influence on, 23, 24, 42, 49 the homo faber, 147–8, 149 labour, work and action of the human condition, 18–19 natality and the principle of revolutionary beginnings, 3, 8, 17–18, 76, 78, 83, 84 omission of settler-colonialism, 78, 79, 82–3, 93–4, 97, 102, 119 on ‘One World’ narratives, 4, 17, 94, 103, 104, 110, 113 personal politics, 8–9, 93 plurality as the law of the earth, 41–2, 91 political unending beginnings, 22–3 politics of archism, 92–4 politics of plurality, 8, 11, 12–13, 16, 17, 18, 33, 34, 50, 61, 62 principle of revolutionary beginnings, 3, 17–18, 76, 78, 83, 84 reformulation of authority, 8–9, 16–18 revolutionary politics, 25, 49, 62 theories of planetary life, 2–3, 10, 12–14 theory of anarchic beginning, 75–6 who/what duality, 132–3, 151, 152–3 writings on St Augustine, 21, 84–5, 133, 152, 155–6, 158–9 St Augustine, 21, 84–5, 133, 152, 155–6, 158–9

Bendersky, Joseph, 51–2 Benjamin, Andrew, 112 Benjamin, Walter account of catastrophe, 85, 134, 136 anarchic revolution, 48, 53–4, 55–6, 57, 59, 65–6 angel of history, 108–9, 123 an-arche of history, 71, 86, 91 arche of political theology, 50, 53, 55, 61–2 and Carl Schmitt’s political theology, 51–6 constellational thought, 32, 61 ‘Critique of Violence’, 102, 122 discussion of the ‘origin’, 6, 62–3 divine violence, 124–7, 131–2, 149 dwelling and historical revolution, 49 the earthly human collective, 50, 53, 54–5, 91, 92 history as a site of emancipation, 65–6, 69–70 Jewish theology, 57–62 material historiography, 22–3, 48, 68, 70–1, 101 the messianic’s disruptive potential, 67–8, 70, 71 mythological violence, 110–11, 144 organising force of violence, 121–2 planetary messianism, 66–8 political theology, 48–50 politics of an-arche, 48, 50–1, 58, 68, 71 recognition of the oppressed, 108–9, 114 religion-theology distinction, 58, 60–1, 66 tradition of the oppressed, 65–6, 67–8, 71, 102, 103 weak messianism, 49, 51, 57, 60, 65–6, 67, 69, 103, 132, 147 weak messianism’s affinity with natality, 49, 51, 80, 84, 85 Birmingham, Peg, 6, 86, 89–90 Borges, Jorge Luis, 2 Butler, Judith, 14, 53, 73, 89, 104

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Cavarero, Adriana, 80, 84, 87–90, 91, 114, 132, 143, 159 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 5, 109 Climate Clock, the, 4, 131 climate crisis the Anthropocene as History, 106–7 and the archist Future, 131, 132, 135–6 Australian Black Summer bushfires, 1, 82, 102 climate crisis History, 112–13 Future-Atropos as planetary future foretold, 135, 146, 148–51, 152, 153 Future-Clotho as the unchecked Future, 134, 136–9, 145–6, 153 Future-Lachesis as the logic of instrumentality, 134–5, 139–46 narratives of responsibility, 5, 15, 82 the new reality of extreme weather, 81–2 organising binaries for responses to, 141–2 planetary archism applied to, 3–5, 73, 82, 111–14 racialised and colonialist character of, 111–14, 117–18, 119–20, 122–3, 130, 132 violence of, 73, 81, 82, 102–3 see also Anthropocene climate denialism, 81 Climate X concept, 148–9, 150, 151, 152 colonialism Arendt’s omission of settlercolonialism, 78, 79, 82–3, 93–4, 97, 102, 119 critical decolonialism of the Orbis Hypothesis, 108 decolonisation of the Anthropocene, 125–6 History of planetary colonialism, 104, 106, 108–11, 115–16 Mbembe’s ‘becoming black’ concept, 138–9, 144 pollution as a form of, 112

racialised and colonialist character of the climate crisis, 111–14, 117–18, 119–20, 122–3, 130, 132 spatiality of settler-colonialism, 121 terra nullius ideology, 79, 93–4, 99–100, 104, 114–15 Crutzen, Paul, 106–7, 108 Dauenhauer, Bernard P., 24–5 Davis, Benjamin P, 97–8 Derrida, Jacques, 4 Disch, Lisa, 77, 78 Dutton, Peter, 3–4 Eichmann, Adolf, 10–12, 13–14, 17 Elden, Stuart, 36, 43, 44 Foltz, Bruce V, 34 Fóti, Veronique, 45 Francis, Pope, 144–5 Frank, Jason, 77, 78 Future amor mundi as the alternative to the Future-Moirai, 151–2, 159–61 the climate crisis’s archist Future, 131, 132, 135–6 Future- Lachesis, 134–5, 139–46 Future-Atropos, 134, 135, 146, 148–51, 152, 153 Future-Clotho, 134, 136–9, 145–6, 153 Future-future construct, 130–1, 133 History-Future construct, 134 future amor mundi as a revolutionary future, 160–1 of caritas’ enduring love, 156 and the Climate X concept, 148–9, 150, 151, 152–3 creation of the space for, 130–1 Future-future construct, 130–1, 133 natality as making future, 132, 148 the prophetic future for the climate crisis, 131 unpredictability of, 132–3

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Ghosh, Amitav, 150 Guzmán, Luiz, 125, 126–8 Haraway, Donna, 14, 15, 101, 129 Hartman, Saidiya, 70 Heidegger, Martin affinity between Arendt’s earthly immortality, 42 an-arche of earth-world relations, 29–33, 34–5 an-arche of place, 25, 26–7, 34, 36, 37, 41, 47, 71 ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, 25, 37, 38, 43 dwelling within the fourfold, 37, 40–3, 44, 45–6, 49, 90, 136 earthly concealment-unconcealment, 30–1, 33–5, 37, 43, 46–7, 63, 71, 101, 149 earth-world relationship, 28–9, 30–2, 37 epistemology of anarchic becoming, 29–30 the fourfold (das Geviert), 36–8, 40–1 the history of the earth-world opening, 35–6 influence on Arendt’s thought, 23, 24, 49 iterations of Being, 24–5, 26–7, 28–9, 33–4, 36–7 the oneness of the four, 39–41, 42, 46–7 the ‘Open’, 28–9, 31, 33, 34–6, 86–7 ‘On the Origin of the Work of Art’, 25, 29–32, 33, 34, 35, 37 place-history-plurality image of the bridge, 37–8 the planetary an-arche of the fourfold, 37, 43, 49 poetic dwelling, 43–5 politics of anarchy, 23–4, 25–7, 29 the role of the divinities, 38–42 the thrown condition, 26–7, 30, 41, 49 History and the Anthropocene, 106–7 archism of, 104–5, 106, 120 climate crisis History, 112–13, 130

Future-Clotho and the oppression of, 134, 136–9, 153 History-Future construct, 130–1, 134 History-history distinction, 103–6, 130 systemic violence of, 104–6 violence of planetary colonialism, 104, 106, 108–11, 115–16 history the afterlife of history, 70–1 Benjamin’s an-arche of history, 71, 86, 91 Benjamin’s material historiography, 22–3, 48, 68, 70–1, 101 disruptive messianic potential, 67–8, 70, 71 as the divine project of Jewish theology, 58–9 divine violence’s revolutionary potential, 124–9, 131–2, 149 historical function of action, 91–2 History-history distinction, 103–6, 130 and the materiality of place, 124 and messianic beginning, 103 natality and planetary history, 35–6, 115, 130 revolutionary project of, 107, 109, 110, 123–4, 130 as a site of emancipation, 65–6, 69–70 and the space for the future, 130–1 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 37, 44, 45 Hyvönen, Ari-Elmeri, 18–19, 123 Iturbe, Elisa, 5, 141–2 Johnson, Harriet, 130 Jonas, Hans, 58–9, 63 Kahn, Paul, 53, 54–5 King Jr, Martin Luther, 119 Lederman, Shmuel, 77 Lewis, Simon, 5, 107, 108, 109 Liboiron, Max, 112 Lloyd, David, 110–11, 120, 121

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love amor mundi as the alternative to the Future-Moirai, 151–2, 159–61 as antipolitical, 151, 155–6, 157 archism as a form of, 133–4 Arendt’s amor mundi notion, 134, 151–2, 153, 157–61 Arendt’s writings on St Augustine, 21, 133, 152, 155–6, 158–9 as both political and antipolitical, 134, 157–9 of cupiditas and caritas, 155–6, 157 spatiality of, 158–9 and the who/what duality, 132–3, 151, 152–3 Lovitt, William, 44–5 Luxembourg, Rosa, 99 Mackellar, Dorothea, 81 Malpas, Jeff, 28, 34, 35, 36 Mann, Geoff, 5, 15, 135, 141, 148–9, 150 Martel, James archism, 3, 4, 5, 43, 50, 58, 69, 74, 92, 99 and Arendt’s notion of natality, 6, 9, 50 desert-creating effect of archism, 14–15 and the power of anarchism, 6, 8, 43, 50, 56, 64, 66–7, 74 Maslin, Mark, 5, 107, 108, 109 Mbembe, Achille anarchic dimension of authority, 17 the biosphere, 28 collapsology discourse, 135–6 on democracy, 146–7 depiction of ‘becoming black’, 134, 136–7, 138–9, 144 lives condemned to live, 73, 105 love’s potential for hope, 161 necropolitics, 142–3 normalisation of archic sites, 14, 55, 110 planetary consciousness, 5, 15, 16, 17, 120, 122, 147 planetary violence, 109, 110, 117 X-like enigma, 149

Mentz, Stephen, 107 Mignolo, Walter D., 114, 116–17 the Moirai amor mundi as the alternative to, 151–2, 153, 159–61 Future- Lachesis, 134–5, 139–46 Future-Atropos, 134, 135, 146, 148–51, 152, 153 Future-Clotho, 134, 136–9, 145–6 the Future-Moirai, 132, 135–6 Moore, Jason, 105, 106 Morrison, Scott, 4 natality as action as beginning, 8, 11, 12, 16, 18, 22, 87, 100, 114 affinity with Benjamin’s weak messianism, 49, 51, 80, 84, 85 anarchism of, 6–7, 9, 22–3, 33, 50, 114 an-arche of place, 90–3 Arendt’s anarchic natality, 83–7 Arendt’s concept of, 6–7, 83–5 Arendt’s principle of revolutionary beginnings, 3, 8, 17–18, 76, 78, 80, 83, 84 Augustinian beginning, 84, 85, 133 the event of birth, 85–6 feminist relational ethics of natality, 80, 84, 87–90, 92, 114, 132, 143, 159 as the fundamental basis of (planetary) action, 50, 124 History’s attack on, 104, 105 the inter esse of political life, 11, 86, 87, 115, 132, 139, 147, 149 as making future, 132, 148 messianic potential, 63, 68 planetary an-arche of, 6, 86–7, 89–90, 102, 114 and planetary history, 35–6, 115 as political unending beginning, 22–3 and the state of exception, 62 Nixon, Rob, 5, 104–5 Oliver, Kelly, 27, 32–3, 35, 37, 45 Orbis theory, 107, 108 Owens, Patricia, 79, 82–3, 102

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planetary anarchism an-arche of earth, 96–9 earthly cohabitation, 14, 96 earth-world intersection, 10, 13, 31, 132 the inter esse place, 12, 96–7, 132 notion, 9–10, 13 politics of, 3, 10–12, 16, 18, 24, 49, 74 politics of plurality, 11, 12–13, 16, 17, 75–6 plurality Arendt’s politics of plurality, 8, 11, 12–13, 16, 17, 18, 33, 34, 50, 61, 62 earthliness of, 115, 117, 150–1 and the exclusion of the slave, 116 the inter esse place, 30, 31, 32, 35 planetary anarchism, 11, 12–13, 16, 17, 75–6 plurality as the law of the earth, 41–2, 91 revolutionary ‘we’ for a time of crisis, 123–4 violence of colonialism’s History, 115–16 political theology archism of, 53, 56 of Benjamin, 48–50 Benjamin’s anarchic revolution, 53–4, 55–6, 57, 59, 65–6 Benjamin’s Jewish theology, 57–62 the collective condition of, 50, 53, 54–5 and the political, 52–3 politics of religious divinity, 58–60 politics of theology, 59–60 Schmitt’s archist sovereignty, 53–5, 56, 57, 58, 61, 67, 68–9, 70, 137 and the state of exception, 53–4, 56, 62, 142 study as theological work, 61 see also theology revolutionary politics of the American Revolution, 76–8, 83, 102, 119

archism’s infiltration of anarchism, 79–81, 102 Arendt’s omission of settlercolonialism, 78, 79, 82–3, 93–4, 97, 102, 119 Arendt’s politics of archism, 92–4 Arendt’s principle of revolutionary beginnings, 3, 17–18, 76, 78, 83, 84 Benjamin’s anarchic revolution, 53–4, 55–6, 57, 59, 65–6 of divine violence, 124–9, 131–2, 149 the existence of hope, 117, 120, 149–50 Future-Lachesis as the logic of instrumentality, 134–5, 139–46 of history, 107, 109, 110, 123–4, 130 history as a space of becoming, 85, 86–7, 103 History’s annulment of, 105–6 the ideological terra nullius archism, 79, 93–4, 99–100 land-based condition of politics, 97–8 and natality, 3, 8, 17–18, 76, 78, 80, 83, 84 participatory council system, 76–7, 78, 79, 118–19 planetary anarchism, 94–5 politics of archism, 94–5 as re-emergence, 116–17 Richter, Gerhard, 57, 60–2, 64 Rose, Gillian, 59 Rose, Mitch, 46 Salvage Collective, 15, 51, 59, 60, 69, 71–2, 73, 91, 102, 105 Schmitt, Carl arche of political theology, 53, 55 archist sovereignty, 56, 57, 58, 61, 67, 68–9, 70 Benjamin’s relation with, 51–3 sovereign political theology, 53–5, 56, 57, 58, 61, 67, 68–9, 70, 137 Scholem, Gershom, 51, 59–60, 66 Schrijvers, Joeri, 26

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Schürmann, Reiner, 24–5, 29, 33, 40–1, 44, 45 Sharpe, Christina, 68, 111, 123, 132 slavery within Future-Lachesis’s logic of instrumentalism, 140 Mbembe’s ‘becoming black’ concept, 136–7, 138–9, 144 normalisation of the violence of, 136 the slave as ‘without speech’, 116, 140, 145 slaves as the animal laborans, 142–4, 149 violence and the condition of slavery, 111–12, 116 who/what duality, 152 Stoermer, Eugene, 106–7, 108 Styfals, Willem, 71 Temin, David Myer, 79, 94 theology the becoming God, 63 divinity as history, 58–9 the messianic figure, 59, 66 religion-theology distinction, 58, 60–1, 66 see also political theology

Vatter, Miguel, 58, 83 violence of the American Revolution, 119–20 of the Anthropocene, 109 of archism, 112 and the condition of slavery, 111–12, 116 divine violence, 124–9, 131–2 figure of the homo sacer, 117–18 History’s systemic violence, 104–6 mythological violence, 110–11, 144 organising force of violence, 121–2 of planetary colonialism’s History, 104, 106, 108–11, 115–16 racialised and colonialist character of the climate crisis, 111–14, 117–18, 119–20, 122–3, 130, 132 slow violence, 104–5 Wainwright, Joel, 5, 15, 135, 141, 148–9, 150 Whyte, Kyle, 121 Wielder, Markus, 39–40 Wilde, Marc de, 51–2, 53, 56 Young, Julian, 38, 39–40, 41, 46–7 Yusoff, Kathryn, 68, 112–13, 114–15, 118

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