in need of care, most especially during periods of history when (violent) conflict and/or pernicious social forces have made the public realm unfit for human habitation. When the public realm of the political is largely bereft of a kind of unifying “common sense” (sense that it is common to all), civic friendship, and—significantly for Arendt—any notable sense of amor mundi (or “love of the world”), there is a need to think anew about what it means to act caringly for the sake of the “world”: for the “common home” shared by all who come to inhabit this “space for politics.” In terms of conceptualizing care as an act that sustains and enhances humankind’s “common home,” then, it is to Arendt and her theory of the political that I turn in order to orient us toward a world-centric theory of public care. More specifically, I reconsider the acts of forgiving and cosmopolitan theory throughout this book in terms of Arendt’s understanding of the human condition, in particular her theorization of political “action” and the notion of “care” which accompanies it. This, paired with a reconfigured, complementary form of cosmopolitan hospitality, derived from Derrida’s work, paves the way for my own theory of cosmopolitanism, one which is noninstrumental, worldly, and ultimately cares for the political experience of freedom.
Derrida engages only infrequently with Arendt’s body of thought, drawing upon her work in a 1993 essay entitled “History of the Lie: Prolegomena,”11 as well as in his own reflections on cosmopolitanism and forgiveness.12 Arendt, in turn, does not discuss Derrida’s work at all. This is unsurprising given that he was at the beginning of his academic career, and largely unconcerned with matters of politics in the latter years of Arendt’s life. This being said, the limited academic exchange between Derrida and Arendt pales into insignificance when taking into consideration the possibilities presented to scholars by a concomitant examination of their respective reflections on the Western canon of philosophic and political thought. There are many reasons to read these two thinkers together, not least because they—as Samir Haddad has pointed out—“share much in their personal and intellectual biographies [. . .] and both constantly worked through an intense engagement with the philosophical tradition [. . .] always referring back to traditional texts with a view to challenging and transforming received interpretations.”13 Not unlike Haddad, as well as numerous other scholars who have placed these two prominent, twentieth-century European thinkers in dialogue with one another,14 I engage with the work of both Arendt and Derrida because I believe that in doing so, new conceptual pathways for thinking about “the political” are revealed. Although I will not be comparing and contrasting their work, nor will I be placing them in conversation with one another, so to speak, I will instead be reading them alongside one another as a means of reconsidering cosmopolitanism and forgiveness. More specifically, I contend that new understandings of what it means to care for the public realm are unearthed by using Arendt’s body of thought to supplement that of Derrida’s work.
In a conceptual maneuver unique to this book, I provide an Arendtian-inspired response to the paradoxes that can be identified through a Derridean deconstruction of the notions of cosmopolitanism and forgiveness, in order to understand more fully how liberal, democratic communities might go about caring for the world in times of extreme polarization, alienation, and/or (violent) conflict. I use Arendt and Derrida’s work to do exactly as Haddad suggests: to challenge and transform their respective interpretations of the political tradition as a means of arriving at a world-centric theory of public care. Recalibrating Arendt’s understanding of the human condition, as well as building upon a Derrida’s work on the notions of forgiveness and cosmopolitan hospitality, I present a theory of a “caring forgiveness” and a “caring cosmopolitanism.” A caring forgiveness and a caring cosmopolitanism are world-centric theories of political action that provide an alternative means by which to consider how the act of forgiving and of welcoming the (unknown) Other’s voice are closely interrelated forms of political practice. Much theorizing has been done on both forgiveness and cosmopolitanism, but little research in the field of political theory, broadly defined, treats these two ideas together, least of all from the perspective of “care.”15 Here, I do so using Arendt’s notion of “care for the world” as a means of demonstrating how the faculty of forgiving and practices of cosmopolitan hospitality are two interrelated forms of political action that ultimately care for the powerful experience of human freedom: the power to begin new courses of political action with a plurality of other people in the world.
When deconstructed from a Derridean perspective, the paradoxical conceptual logic inherent to the notions of forgiveness and cosmopolitanism are exposed in such a manner that the ethico-political (im)possibilities of putting into practice each of these two ideas can be examined directly. A deconstructive approach, which Simon Critchley and Richard Kearney describe as a type of “conceptual genealogy”16 in their joint preface to Derrida’s On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (2001), uncovers the concealed, aporetic underpinnings of the logic of forgiving and welcoming the (unknown) Other. Finding that the possibility of practicing forgiveness and cosmopolitanism is rooted in the impossibility of experiencing each of these two ideas in “pure,” unconditional terms,17 Derrida highlights that humankind’s ability to forgive and act hospitably toward strangers is fundamentally a matter of thinking, as well as acting, at and between the boundaries of human (im)possibility. In an effort to “re-world” these two notions, or to theorize them in terms of what Ella Myers describes as a “worldly ethics,”18 I investigate the conceptual dynamics revealed by a Derridean deconstruction through Arendt’s conceptualization of the human condition and her understanding of the “world.” I therefore use her distinctive understanding of “the political” to theorize a worldly, caring theory of democratic praxis. This is not to say that Arendt’s body of thought allows scholars of global politics to transcend entirely the aporetic impasses identified by Derrida’s work, but that an Arendtian-inspired response to the paradoxes associated with a Derridean deconstruction of forgiveness and cosmopolitanism allows these two notions to be reconceptualized as worldly, political forms of public care. Accordingly, in this book, I investigate the preternatural nature of Derrida’s conceptualization of forgiveness and cosmopolitanism, doing so in order to frame my own examination of these ideas as two thoroughly human forms of public, political action that “care for the world.”
1. “Nobody Cares Any Longer What the World Looks Like”
A Kansas-based, reformed Calvinist church, one which was founded by Fred Phelps—Phelps-Roper’s grandfather—in 1955, the WBC first gained international notoriety for its extreme religious fundamentalism and far-right, political activism in the early 1990s.19 Making manifest their “hyper-Calvinist” beliefs through their distinctive, prejudicial brand of public ministry,20 members of the WBC have—since Fred Phelps first began speaking out against homosexuality in 1991—directed the full force of their evangelical energies on what Phelps-Roper’s mother, Shirley Phelps, once described as the “militant sodomite agenda.”21 According to Rebecca Barrett-Fox, whose book—God Hates: Westboro Baptist Church, American Nationalism, and the Religious Right (2016)—places the WBC’s message within the broader context of the religious far-right in the United States, this church not only preaches that “God hates the nonelect,” and thus that the “message of salvation should not be offered to the nonelect,”22 but also that God is “punishing America for its tolerance of homosexuality.”23 It is in terms of this extreme system of beliefs that the WBC understands life in America: their vociferous attacks on members of the LGBTQ community—as well as against Jews, Muslims, other Christian denominations, American soldiers, and politicians—stemming from their contemptuous approach to the so-called nonelect. The WBC congregation regularly pickets the funerals of soldiers killed in combat, as well as those of gay men who have died from AIDS, using explicit, colorful protest signs which have in the past included statements such as: “Thank God for Dead Soldiers”; “Fags Doom Nations”; “9–11 Gift from God”; “Your Rabbi is a Whore”; and “God Hates the World.” Such protests and proclamations are a part of the WBC’s daily operations, and Phelps-Roper describes how—at five years old—she “joined” her “family on the picket line for the first time,”