Queering Amor mundi: Love, Loss, and Democratic Politics

Abstract

This article approaches Hannah Arendt's concept of amor mundi, or love of the world, through Jean Genet's queer desire, as expressed in his auto-biographical novel, Funeral Rites: J'encule le monde! To develop this interpretation of Arendt's political theory, I read Funeral Rites as Genet's literal work of mourning his beloved, a communist résistant, that traces a process of coming again to love the world in the wake of its impoverishment. In the process, I queer the desire of amor mundi as impersonal, ambivalent, and aroused to resistance for the sake of worldly plurality. Thus queered, Arendtian amor mundi sheds new light on the transformation of privative grief into political grievance exemplified by the radical democratic interventions of Black Lives Matter.