Just Do It: Pragma, Prehension, and Planetary Politics

Abstract

it is an honor and a surprise to find myself speaking with you this evening. i have not yet taken direct part in this community of discourse that is gathered in the name of AJTP; but i have operated for decades in the same intellectual neighborhood—or at least universe—and have always been entangled in some margin or other of your intellectual projects. Which projects i understand are not one. you are after all a plurality of pluralists; and you perhaps all inhabit some version of the Jamesian pluriverse, which makes a universe only by getting strung along in an impossible excess of entanglements. “Without too much you cannot have enough, of anything. lots of inferior books, lots of bad statues, lots of dull speeches.”2 i hope not to perform the latter. it is of course about the too muchness that i want to speak. “nature is but a name for excess: every point in her opens and runs out into the more . . .”3 but i am considering this more not just in its warm Jamesian inexhaustibility but also in the devastatingly beautiful, vulnerable, and, in some uncertain measure, doomed assemblage that is our planetary life. in the face of climate catastrophe and all the social trauma it implies, life runs into excesses we can hardly bear to think. And it demands of us more than we are likely to deliver—a possibly impossible planetary politics. i use the phrase in a sense close to that of William connolly, whose political theory will figure prominently in this talk. differently from connolly, however, i will couch this planetary politics in terms of a political theology of the earth. At least that is the notion i want to experiment with here, with its double genitive: is the earth just the object or also the subject of a political theology of the earth? We will see that what is called more generally (and usually far from theology as such) political theology has made and is now making explicit inroads into a tradition that we in some sense all share. by that tradition i mean the process thought that claims the lineage of American pragmatism channeled into religion by way of boston and chicago