How does one give voice to the unspeakable, inhuman violence that shapes the present, and what remains of humanity in its wake? Adriana Cavarero offers an answer that roots human speech in embodied vulnerability, in contrast to philosophical emphases on disembodied rationality. In the face of what she calls horrorism, which puts humans in proximity to animality, she calls for resuscitating vocality, and therefore humanity, from loss. This article reads Kafka’s short story “A Report to an Academy” – which structurally (...) resembles a slave narrative and concerns a kidnapped ape who learns to speak – to extend Cavarero’s emphasis on vulnerability while challenging her humanism. In Kafka, modern horror’s locus is not animality but the abstract human, and it projects the unstable distinction between voice and noise onto blackened humans and nonhuman animals. (shrink)

This paper is written in response to the planetary times in which we live, marked as they are by the interwoven realities of political polarisation and environmental degradation. Looking to Hannah Arendt’s political writings for a response to this reality, in this paper I challenge the predominance of natality as a revolutionary concept and turn instead to Arendt’s discussion of love. After an initial rereading of the temporality of love at work in her concept of amor mundi, the paper develops (...) the idea of “amor terra,” or love for the pre-political and planetary constitution of politics. Taking seriously Arendt’s claim that what is required in times of crisis is a renewed conception of human dignity, I offer amor terra in precisely these terms. Developed in dialogue with Arendt’s writings on the earthly condition of responsibility, politics, and care, I ultimately argue that what amor terra offers is a renewed setting from which the integrity of the political can be reimagined. (shrink)