Stormy Weather

William E. Connolly is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins, where he teaches political theory. His books include Resounding Events (Fordham, 2022); Climate Machines, Fascist Drives, and Truth (Duke, 2020); Aspirational Fascism (Minnesota, 2017); Facing the Planetary (Duke, 2017); Capitalism and Christianity, American Style (Duke, 2008); Why I Am Not a Secularist (Minnesota, 1999); The Ethos of Pluralization (Minnesota, 1995); and The Terms of Political Discourse (Princeton, 1983; 3rd ed., 1993). In a poll of American political theorists published in 2010, he was named the fourth most influential political theorist in America over the last twenty years, after Rawls, Habermas, and Foucault.

Introduction: Lived Cosmologies and Climate Wreckage 1 1 Hesiod, Ovid, and a Turbulent Cosmos 18 First Coda: Jocasta, James Baldwin, and Tragic Possibility 45 2 Augustine and the First Conquest of Pagans 58 Second Coda: Catherine Keller and Diverse Christianities 89 3 Todorov, the Second Conquest, and Aztec Cosmology 99 Third Coda: Tocqueville and White Settler Society 124 4 Descartes, Kant, and Amazonian Perspectivism 135 Fourth Coda: Nietzsche and the History of an Error 165 5 Amitav Ghosh, Michel Serres, and the Time of Climate Wreckage 178 Acknowledgments 211 Notes 215 Bibliography 241 Index 251

Stormy Weather maps the connections between the civilizational project and its effects on the conditions of existence of life on earth. This project has failed spectacularly, and one of the symptoms of this failure is our difficulty in recognizing it, as evidenced by climate denialism and its more treacherous variant, climate casualism. Connolly examines the cosmological origins of this fateful existential blockage in some key figures in our cultural imaginary, while also looking to the side, to the extra-modern, non-Western cosmological traditions they have erased or marginalized. Stormy Weather profoundly shows how time is not teleologically oriented toward the liberation of humanity from its earthly shackles, but rather a multiplicity made up of different series and rhythms, different temporalities relating to different regions of reality and modes of existence, which are now entering catastrophe. The confrontation of the Western lived metaphysics of time with pre-Christian and extra-Western cosmologies points to alternatives that--we can't afford not to think so--allow us to live the future differently.---Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, author of Cannibal Metaphysics