World-building and the predicaments of our time

Abstract

Throughout his contributions to an expanding body of scholarship on the work of Hannah Arendt, James Bernauer has maintained that the concept of amor mundi, or love of the world, is foundational in Arendt’s thinking. He sees the centrality of amor mundi stemming from Arendt’s ongoing efforts to respond to and subsequently navigate the crisis in meaning produced by totalitarianism. This essay concurs with Bernauer’s perspective that throughout the course of her life Arendt was concerned with delineating the nature of, analyzing, and responding to the crisis that characterized the post-totalitarian West. At the same time, the essay interprets the effects of the crisis, and therefore how to proceed in its wake, differently. Whereas Bernauer considers amor mundi to be a redemptive project of “recovery” or world-rebuilding, this essay posits that the crisis in meaning denies the possibility of recovery. It therefore approaches amor mundi as a critical, creative, situational, ongoing process simply of world-building. The essay brings its critical version of amor mundi to bear through analyzing the world-threatening events that unfolded in the United States after the 2020 presidential election.