This paper is written in response to the planetary times in which we live, marked as they are by the interwoven realities of political polarisation and environmental degradation. Looking to Hannah Arendt’s political writings for a response to this reality, in this paper I challenge the predominance of natality as a revolutionary concept and turn instead to Arendt’s discussion of love. After an initial rereading of the temporality of love at work in her concept of amor mundi, the paper develops (...) the idea of “amor terra,” or love for the pre-political and planetary constitution of politics. Taking seriously Arendt’s claim that what is required in times of crisis is a renewed conception of human dignity, I offer amor terra in precisely these terms. Developed in dialogue with Arendt’s writings on the earthly condition of responsibility, politics, and care, I ultimately argue that what amor terra offers is a renewed setting from which the integrity of the political can be reimagined. (shrink)

In an age of apparent disrepair as the climate crisis takes hold and neoliberalism fails to liberate, as the cost of living rises and rights are retracted, the need for a reparative turn is overdue. But what is repair? If repair is contained in moments of total breakdown, then the reparative acts of care that sustain the world are denied. Countering these forces and the urgency prescribed by the crisis of disrepair and in what too often appears as the proprietary (...) epistemology of repair, in this paper I offer an account of ‘repairability’. Structured in relation to the reparative gaze of feminist theory and poetic thinking, repairability assumes a material trace, I contend, through the vernacular archive of Cuban artist-ethnographer Ernesto Oroza. Oroza’s work offers a compelling case study through which to think the possibility of repair as an act of worldly becoming. (shrink)

The aim of this article is straightforward: to present two clarifications of Hannah- Arendt’s seasoned political concept of natality and to conclude by positioning this new account of natality within the context of the climate crisis. In many ways, this concluding section, where natality is read as a form of historical emancipation, hinges on the degree to which I succeed in reframing existing conversations around natality. In the first instance I submit an ‘earthly reading’ of natality before turning to discuss (...) the historical implications of this ‘re-earthed’ natality as enacting a form of weak messianism akin to that of Walter Benjamin. Rethinking natality in this way, I present an account of Arendt’s work as always already inclined towards the issues brought to light in the climate crisis. And so, while the forms of emancipation and redemption that I locate in natality may already be commonly read in natal actions, which break spontaneously into the world and recall the originality of appearance, I nevertheless contend that its political implications reach new grounds with the revisions that I offer in the body of my article. By way of conclusion, I join critical Anthropocene theorists in contending with the ‘slow violence’, ‘willed racial blindness’ and ‘crises of the imagination’ that the climate crisis elicits. This is the setting that sits behind my intervention into natality and, in turn, it is this setting that I suggest can be illuminated through the weak messianism of a ‘re-earthed’ natality. Arguing for Arendt’s latent consideration of the earth, I hope to expose the ruined fragments of the past that shape the present crisis and gesture towards their radical redemption. If I succeed in showing that natality can be used as a resource to rethink both the prehistory and the present of the climate crisis then I will have achieved a reorientation in thinking about Arendt’s politics. Which is merely to say that I will have revealed concerns for the earth as intrinsic to natal actions and, in turn, their appearance as messianic disruptions on the earth. Prompted by the need to think critically about the historical appearance of the climate crisis whilst retaining, at the same time, the injunction to think expansively about future action – that is, as not determined exclusively by the violence of the climate crisis – this article defends a reconsideration of natality as a form of critical historical intervention. Formulating this reconstruction is then ‘operationalised’ in the concluding section where I invoke its revolutionary force in remapping the history of the climate crisis. (shrink)

In this article I take up the image of inclination developed by Adriana Cavarero in her book, Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude as a mode of developing an account of history informed by an ontology of heterogeneous ethics. Clarifying the potential of inclination contra the Kantian figure of “uprightness,” the principle task of this article is to reimagine the implications of inclination with regard to Walter Benjamin’s theses on history. Ultimately, I show that by pushing at the relationality inherent to (...) an inclined ontology of the self a meaningful exchange can be generated between plural historical temporalities, a move that reveals the inclined figure’s potential to redeem narratives of the historically dispossessed. (shrink)