Violence, Nonviolence, and the Utopian Structure of Environmental Democracy

Abstract The current era of environmental crises and their seeming intractability, particularly in the context of an entrenched capitalist order, has given rise to a deep-felt pessimism about the possibility of meaningful change. Despite this pessimism, a utopian impulse can still be imagined within the very terms of that pessimism. Drawing from the work of Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler, an analysis of the iterated violence that constitutes the political status quo points to an always available opening in which the utopian impulse for an environmental democracy can be imagined and problematized. That utopian moment points toward the substantive content of such an environmental democracy even as it enjoins an ongoing critique of such a utopian aspiration, underwriting a reflexive, critical ethos premised on a noninstrumental relationship to both the human and nonhuman others diminished by the progress-centric spirit of our time.