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      In the final chapter of this book’s effort to read Arendt and Derrida’s work together for the purpose of constructing a world-centric theory of public care, I use these two thinkers’ respective understandings of temporality to reconsider the paradoxicality of humankind’s being-ness in time and to theorize the type of temporal orientation needed to negotiate the ever-transitory, never fully present moment of the “now.” Although time and temporality may—on first glance—seem an odd topic on which to conclude a book about the notions of forgiveness and cosmopolitanism, it is my belief that that no investigation into these two forms of practice is more important. It is humankind’s being-ness in time that conditions human existence entirely and—ultimately—constrains people’s ability to act politically in the world. As a part of this book’s attempt to rethink the boundaries of the political in terms of a “caring forgiveness” and “caring cosmopolitanism,” then, its fourth chapter uses Arendt and Derrida’s unique understandings of human temporality to rethink the (n)ever-present confrontation occurring in the ever-fleeting moment of the “now,” where the forces of past and future play perpetually on all people as they attempt to “negotiate” (Derrida) the boundaries of their existence in both time and space.

      NOTES

      1. Megan Phelps-Roper, “I Grew Up in the Westboro Baptist Church. Here’s Why I Left,” TED Talks, 2017, https://www.ted.com.

      2. “Westboro Baptist Church,” Extremist Files Database (Southern Poverty Law Center, 2018). https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/westboro-baptist-church.

      3. Phelps-Roper, “I Grew Up in the Westboro Baptist Church. Here’s Why I Left.”

      4. Though the nature and notion of “the political” has long been debated by scholars of the philosophy and politics, most especially by those working in the Anglophone world, I invoke this idea throughout this book specifically in reference to Arendt’s theory of the political. As is subsequently shown, by “the political,” I mean the worldly realm of public “action,” or the “space for politics” where freedom can be experienced and power can be (re)engendered between a plurality of persons and peoples in the mode of human togetherness. For readers interested in the concept of “the political,” I recommend James Wiley’s recent book, Politics and the Concept of the Political: The Political Imagination (New York: Routledge, 2016).

      5. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 254; Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1968), 14.

      6. Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture: Its Social and Its Political Significance,” in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 214.

      7. Siobhan Kattago, “Hannah Arendt on the World,” in Hannah Arendt: Key Concepts, ed. Patrick Hayden (Durham, UK: Acumen Publishing, 2014), 52–65.

      8. Arendt, The Human Condition, 52.

      9. Hannah Arendt, “On the Nature of Totalitarianism: An Essay in Understanding,” in Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1994), 358.

      10. Hannah Arendt, “‘What Remains? The Language Remains’: A Conversation with Günter Gaus,” in Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1994), 17.

      11. See: Jacques Derrida, Without Alibi, ed. and trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 28–70. “History of the Lie” was originally a lecture given by Derrida in 1993, as part of a lecture series at The New School of Social Research. The particular lecture series was devoted to Arendt’s thinking about “the political.”

      12. See, in particular: Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, eds. Simon Critchley and Richard Kearney, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (London: Routledge, 2001); Jacques Derrida, “To Forgive: The Unforgivable and the Imprescriptable,” in Questioning God, eds. John D. Caputo, Mark Dooley, and Michael J. Scanlon (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001), 21–51.

      13. Samir Haddad, “Arendt, Derrida, and the Inheritance of Forgiveness,” Philosophy Today 51, no. 4 (2007): 416.

      14. For example, see: Bonnie Honig, “Declarations of Independence: Arendt and Derrida on the Problem of Founding a Republic,” The American Political Science Review 85, no. 1 (1991): 97–113; Marguerite La Caze, Wonder and Generosity: Their Role in Ethics and Politics (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2013); Marguerite La Caze, “It’s Easier to Lie If You Believe It Yourself: Derrida, Arendt, and the Modern Lie,” Law, Culture and the Humanities 13, no. 2 (2017): 193–210; James R. Martel, “Can There Be Politics Without Sovereignty? Arendt, Derrida and the Question of Sovereign Inevitability,” Law, Culture and the Humanities 6, no. 2 (2010): 153–66; Cláudia Perrone-Moisés, “Forgiveness and Crimes against Humanity: A Dialogue between Hannah Arendt and Jacques Derrida,” HannahArendt.Net: Journal for Political Thinking 2, no. 1 (2006); Andrew Schaap, “The Proto-Politics of Reconciliation: Lefort and the Aporia of Forgiveness in Arendt and Derrida,” Australian Journal of Political Science 41, no. 4 (2006): 615–30.

      15. A notable exception to this claim can be found in the work of Siobhan Kattago. Underlining the political pertinence of an Arendtian notion of “care for the world” to practices of forgiveness and cosmopolitanism, Kattago gestures toward the line of thought that I have pursued throughout this book. In passing, she highlights how “Arendt’s use of the phrase amor mundi, or ‘love of the world,’ includes care, concern, and responsibility” and that it “shares much with Kant’s cosmopolitanism and sense of hospitality in Perpetual Peace,” offering a “political reading of the Christian precept of love of one’s neighbor writ large.” [Siobhan Kattago, “Why the World Matters: Hannah Arendt’s Philosophy of New Beginnings,” The European Legacy 18, no. 2 (2013): 175; Kattago, “Hannah Arendt on the World.”]

      16. Simon Critchley and Richard Kearney, “Preface,” in On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, eds. Simon Critchley and Richard Kearney, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (London: Routledge, 2001), viii.

      17. Ernesto Verdeja, Unchopping a Tree: Reconciliation in the Aftermath of Political Violence (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009), 24.

      18. Ella Myers, Worldly Ethics: Democratic Politics and Care for the World (London: Duke University Press, 2013). I return to Myers’s work in chapter three, as part of my theorization of a “caring cosmopolitanism.”

      19. The Westboro Baptist Church is a “TULIP” Baptist Church. The acronym TULIP stands for “Total Depravity; Unconditional Election; Limited Atonement; Irresistible Grace; Perseverance of the Saints.” [Megan Phelps-Roper, Unfollow: A Journey from Hatred to Hope, Leaving the Westboro Baptist Church (London: Riverrun, 2019), 42.]

      20. Rebecca Barrett-Fox, God Hates: Westboro Baptist Church, American Nationalism, and the Religious Right (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2016), 50. As Barrett-Fox notes, the WBC’s hyperbolic doctrines have notable and direct associations with the ideas espoused by British theologian, John Gill (1697–1771).

      21. “Westboro Baptist Church,” ADL Report, https://www.adl.org/resources/profiles/westboro-baptist-church.

      22. Barrett-Fox, God Hates, 197, n. 20.

      23. Ibid., 5.

      24. Phelps-Roper, “I Grew up in the Westboro Baptist Church. Here’s Why I Left.”

      25. This reference is to 1 John 2:15-17, from the 1611 King James Bible: “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.” Though the WBC maintains that the King James Bible is the only legitimate book of scripture, the references to biblical texts found

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