Flesh made earth : incarnational phenomenology and the ontological remaking of climate politics

This thesis foregrounds vulnerability in challenging the dominant imaginaries of climate politics in the Anthropocene. It contends that the global response to ecological crisis remains entrapped within a self-perpetuating regime of crisis management, securitization, and apocalyptic deferral. The metaphor of apocalypse entrenches epistemologies of control and institutionalizes apparatuses of insecurity–security that consolidate risk governance. This governance reduces life to bare survival, obscuring the ontological and ethical stakes of planetary collapse. Against this backdrop, the thesis advances a radically alternative paradigm: a phenomenological and political-theological re-grounding of climate politics through the concept of flesh. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of embodiment and deepened through the theological turn in French phenomenology (Marion, Henry, Falque, Nancy), the project elaborates an affirmative biopolitics centered on embodiment, vulnerability, and intercorporeality. It argues that climate governance cannot be reimagined without confronting the metaphysical commitments that underwrite its logics of mastery, control, and disembodiment. The concept of flesh—understood as the reversible, relational, and affectively saturated tissue of the world—provides the ontological architecture for a biopolitics of exposure, communion, and transfiguration. Through the theological motif of kenosis—the selfemptying mode of incarnational existence—political agency is redefined as givenness: a responsive openness to the fractures and contingency of life that resists the logic of exception and affirms interdependence, finitude, and shared becoming. Empirically, this reframing is illustrated through Afro-Bolivian coffee farmers whose livelihood practices under climate precarity exemplify vernacular forms of creative resourcefulness. Their improvisational responses disclose a politics of flesh already operative at the margins of global capitalism—interdependent, improvisational, and life-affirming. By bridging political ontology, phenomenology, and political theology, the thesis envisions a politics attuned not to crisis but to communion—an affirmative biopolitics of the flesh that reveals life in climate change anew.