Year: 2024
Type: preprint
Abstract: This paper proposes a dialectical engagement between Karl Marx’s reflections on alienation, real abstraction, and proletarianization, and Simone Weil’s theology of decreation, to develop a sociologically grounded concept of kenotic solidarity as an ethico-political response to on-going systemic collapse. Departing from utopian/dystopian paradigms that often frame post-apocalyptic thought, this thesis asserts that apocalypse is not an imagined future but a lived present – marked by ecological devastation, social fragmentation, and the disintegration of institutional meaning. In such a context, the task is not to rescue a dying order, but to sustain human community under radical precarity without reproducing the kakistocratic structures that caused its collapse. By reinterpreting Marx through Weil’s political theology – and Weil through Marx’s historical materialism – the paper offers a non-deterministic, praxis-oriented vision of post-apocalyptic survival rooted in love, attention, and shared vulnerability. Kenotic solidarity is presented not as an abstract spiritual ideal, but as a concrete political practice: a dialectical ethics of mutual aid and reciprocal loss that holds space for a flourishing web-of-life, even under seemingly impossible conditions. In this light, kenotic solidarity emerges as a material counter-power: a deliberate inhabitation of brokenness that refuses both bourgeois autonomy and reactionary nihilism.
Author: van Loon, Joost
Institution: Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt
Language: English
Topic: Marxism and Critical Theory
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225323217