Irreverent Pessimism (A Planetary Life Without Appeal)

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 extorted 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 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.