Irreverent Pessimism (A Planetary Life Without Appeal)

Abstract: Perhaps the most disorienting feature of the long socioecological disaster that makes ever-sprawling environmental disasters amplify the effects of ongoing and uneven conditions of poverty, violence, and dispossession, is not its urgency, but its permanence: that there is no foreseeable future in which redemption would prevail. What might it take to refuse the cruel hope for a redemptive future without seeking consolation in the despair that such forlorn hope precipitates? At a time when everyone is exhorted to save the world or be damned, this article explores the irreverent pessimism of what, after Camus, one might call a planetary “life without appeal.” Refusing to be content with what is now deemed proper to the damned of the earth, irreverent pessimism affirms the insubordinate disposition of a life lived in the most radical immanence of a freedom born not of hope, but of the ongoing improvisation of a revolt without future.