Hope in a time of catastrophe? Resilience and the future in bare life

• The framework of resilience has been claimed to strip bodies of both hope and the promise of the future, reducing life to mere biology, concerned only with its survivability. This article interrogates such claims by critical theory, analysing the definitions of life and time embedded in them. Reading the figure of human nature as it appears in US President Obama's call for a common humanity – united by hope in a world of insurmountable insecurity – this article asks what promises structure liberal subjectivity when security and universalism are seemingly abandoned. Through the lens of Agambian biopolitics, I argue that resilient life is produced not in opposition to hope, but as its embodiment, turning indefinite insecurity into a continuous experience of hope, and hence into a structure of promise. As such, I submit that the hopeful life today has become the barest of all, engendered by the production of a paradoxical temporal indistinction between an open future and the inevitability of catastrophe.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Annan samhällsvetenskap -- Tvärvetenskapliga studier inom samhällsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Other Social Sciences -- Social Sciences Interdisciplinary (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Annan samhällsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Other Social Sciences (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Statsvetenskap -- Globaliseringsstudier (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Political Science -- Globalisation Studies (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

resilience

hope

biopolitics

temporality

US security

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