This article assesses the contribution of a long tradition of critical inquiry to understanding how ‘felt contact’ with the world, in this instance a heating planet and its detrimental impacts, provokes ‘thinking beyond’ its limits to take account of the cosmopolitan potentials created by new planetary conditions. In particular, it examines the contributions of Hegel, Marx, Adorno and more recently Rosa to a critical theory of subjective resonance and reflective learning from encounters with damaged life. It notes the significance of (...) these experiences to new initiatives aimed at forcing constructs of justice to turn more imaginatively towards the implications of embodied contact with climate adversity, and to addressing deepening contradictions between ideals of justices and lived struggles to protect nature and thought’s freedom from domination. (shrink)

Storm surges, flooding, heatwaves, and prolonged drought, as ever more regular features of life under deteriorating climate conditions, are unmistakably violent. Their effects on the lives of vulnerable human populations and ecosystems across the world are widely known to be devastating. Yet a legal order that denies the victims of such ecological persecution safe haven, no matter how great its use of force (e.g., detention, arrest, forced return) cannot, by definition, be violent. The power of law, used to protect states’ (...) rights to exclude from their jurisdictions growing numbers displaced involuntarily by global climate harms, in being a source of ‘legitimate right’, is never the same as violence. This article challenges the ongoing validity of this assumption. It points to some of the ways in which legal instruments are used today to deny those displaced by climatic conditions sufficient normative status to guarantee their safety. What is needed instead is a new critical normative understanding of the evolving relationship between climate change, violence, justice, and law, one that re-assesses the democratic justificatory grounds for the current positions of non-responsibility for the climate displaced whilst re-affirming such people’s legal and political status as equal co-members of the politically constituted international community of humanity. (shrink)