Democracy and Planetary Fragility in the Anthropocene: on William Connolly’s Political Ontology

Abstract

As climate change rapidly intensifies, political theory urgently needs to respond to the shock of the Anthropocene and bring nature back to politics. William Connolly’s work is a paradigmatic example of such a theory that actively emphasizes the role nonhuman forces play in the social and political world and the discontinuity this emphasis brings to political theory. Connolly underscores fragile resonances between nature and culture and productively problematizes a human-centric vision of politics. However, while interrogating how contemporary political conjuncture catastrophically increases planetary fragility, he still insists on the continuity of his vision for democratic pluralism that this very conjuncture fundamentally puts in question. Thus, Connolly’s type of post-anthropocentric ontology remains rather inconsistently connected to explicitly political concerns. This article aims to clarify this connection. On the one hand, it shows how his brand of democratic politics that answers to the challenges of the Anthropocene presupposes a heightened degree of political negativism and universalism that used to be excluded from this politics. On the other, it demonstrates how the discontinuities in ontology must be simultaneously thought of as the discontinuities in established political theorizing and to continuously interrogate the very conjuncture that reveals the relevance of these ontological and political discontinuities.