Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of "World"

Despite the planetary turn in current literary and cultural discourse and a generalized desire to overcome classical notions of subject, identity, community, and nation in favor of the more expansive vocabulary of earth, species and deep time proposed by environmentalist, ecological, and new comparatist approaches, there is an influential line of theoretical inquiry that calls attention to the persistence and proliferation of forms of pre-modern subjection in our time. My contribution addresses the question of this "other" modernity. Against the background of post-human and, more broadly, non-anthropocentric concerns, I build on Hannah Arendt's masterpiece, The Human Condition, to discuss the force of the pre-modern scene of necessity and to investigate the ways in which it inflects critical discourse today.