Our Bare Life: The Care Manifesto, Homo Sacer, and Hannah Arendt on Memory, Spontaneous Community, and Postwar Authoritarianism

Collectively published in 2020 at the peak of the Coronavirus pandemic, The Care Manifesto takes up the monumental challenge of defining what is necessary to establish care as a fundamental aspect of communal life.Neoliberal isolation, divisive identity politics, and the specter of the Holocaust haunt The Care Collective's careful delineation of their project.This essay brings together a collection of scholars and theorists who address issues of "bare life" and how spirituality and spontaneous dialog can be productively mobilized to create more expansive notions of dignified personhood.While each scholar approaches the issue from a unique vantage, together they form a palimpsestic vision through which the deep pessimism of Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism can be reframed.While Giorgio Agamben's notion of "bare life" resonates as a harbinger of genocide, its antithetical parallel offers the opportunity to establish solidarity between communities, and to push back against growing authoritarian trends.