Agential Depletion in the Wake of Irreparable Evils: Atmospheric Adhesion, Infinite Demands, and the Theological Pathos of Responsive Ethics

This paper interrogates the moral meanings of enduring historical crises for agents caught in their wake. It begins with Christina Sharpe’s insight that the evil of chattel slavery adheres recalcitrantly to contemporary agents; it continues to affect us and risks depleting our moral capacities. I consider three alternative conceptions of this affective grip of purportedly irreparable evils (Bordieuan habitus, Deleuzian affect, and neo-phenomenological atmospheres) before outlining a constructive account of atmospheric adhesion. This reveals the paradoxical predicament of creatures seized by an infinite demand to repair evils that exceed our capacities to respond adequately. But it also indicates the more primordial, pathic dimension to agency that Bernhard Waldenfels’s “responsive ethics” attempts to articulate. I argue that recent theological formulations of this lived-bodily pathos present a picture of moral agency that remains intact with even a clear-eyed view of the gratuitous threats of agential depletion posed by irreparable evils.