“Mind[ing] the Gap” in Time
Megan Phelps-Roper: Beginning Anew in the Abyss beyond the WBC
I would like to express my profound gratitude, for their invaluable help, advice, guidance, and support at various stages of this project, to my colleagues and friends at the University of St Andrews. In particular, I would like to thank Natasha Saunders, Faye Donnelly, Anthony Lang, and Patrick Hayden. To Patrick, I owe a debt that I fear I cannot pay—his generosity of time, patience, and support throughout the entire process of this book’s development cannot be overstated. I would also like to thank Graham Smith, at the University of Leeds, for his support of my work; this book is undoubtedly better as a consequence of his insightful commentary and encouragement. Thanks are also due to Alison Assiter, Evert van der Zweerde, Isobel Cowper-Coles, Frankie Mace, and Scarlet Furness for taking an interest in this book and helping to bring it to fruition at Rowman & Littlefield. The writing of this book would also not have been possible without the loving support of my friends and family. To the Peys clan, the Tates, and the Berrow family, I say thank you and send my love. And finally, I wish to thank my wife, Danielle. She has been a most patient, strong, and inspirational partner throughout every step of this book’s production. Without her, I would be truly lost. Dani, ti yw fy nghariad, fy ngoleuni, yr un sy’n fy nhywys drwy’r dyddiau disgleiriaf a’r nosweithiau tywyllaf.
In February 2017, just weeks after the American Presidential Inauguration brought into office a populist politician with a controversial social media presence, Megan Phelps-Roper stood on a stage in New York City and explained how Twitter allowed her to experience the “power of engaging the Other.”1 In the wake of Donald Trump’s rise to power, an ascent characterized by his unconventional use of Twitter and his reliance upon misinformation disseminated through the internet, Phelps-Roper spoke of how this microblogging service played an instrumental role in her decision to dissociate herself from her family’s fundamentalist organization: the Westboro Baptist Church (WBC). Describing the drawn-out process of leaving the WBC, an extremist organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as “arguably the most obnoxious and rabid hate group in America,”2 Phelps-Roper outlined how her encounters with strangers on Twitter helped her to see the world anew and to recognize the inconsistencies in her family’s idiosyncratic reading of the Bible; the cruelty in their practice of celebrating human tragedy; and the brutality of picketing funerals.3 It was within the public domain of Twitter that Phelps-Roper purports to have had discussions which—despite being heated—were characterized by a sense of curiosity and a spirit of care that gave rise to a form of civic friendship with people whom she once believed to be unclean, evil, and damned. That is, Phelps-Roper and her interlocutors on Twitter wove a worldly web of friendship, so to speak, through the repeated practice of acting caringly toward strangers online, putting into practice what might be described as a form of discursive hospitality: a welcoming of the (unknown) Other’s voice into the public space provided by this social media platform. Moreover, the care shown to Phelps-Roper came in the form of forgiveness, a response to her past actions that not only allowed her to renew her once-hostile relationship with the world, but also to begin acting politically with people who would once have been the target of her vitriolic rebukes when she was a congregant of the WBC.
When contextualized within a broader framing of global affairs in today’s digitally interconnected world, Phelps-Roper’s story draws attention to the public significance of being hospitable to and engaging openly with the Other. Seen in this light, her narrative demonstrates how we might go about caring for the bonds of civic friendship that maintain the worldly realm in which the doing of politics can occur: “the political.”4 We find in Phelps-Roper’s story a distinctive strain of cosmopolitan hospitality and forgiveness, both of which are practices that I contend are forms of public care capable of repairing, maintaining, and enhancing worldly, political relationships. In this book, I take her account as a reference point in the development of a world-centric, caring theory of political action. Phelps-Roper’s experience is remarkable during a period in history when the fragile fabric of the political runs the risk of snapping entirely under the strain imposed upon it by the forces of world-ending alienation. Because Phelps-Roper’s past political experiences effectively represent one extreme on the political spectrum in contemporary, global civil society, given that the WBC’s radically intolerant ideology and belligerent forms of theological-political evangelism situate this group at the far end of the religious right, her narrative provides an opportunity to explore anew the ideas of cosmopolitan hospitality and forgiveness within the context of an example which showcases a form of civic enmity that directly inhibits the doing of democratic politics.
Though I draw upon Phelps-Roper’s experience of political life at the fringes of society, and the story of how she disassociated herself from the WBC, my aim is to offer a political theory of the notions of forgiveness and cosmopolitanism. I focus on these two interrelated ideas—which are connected in terms of an underlying conceptual logic inherent to both—because it is my belief that they are forms of practice that can be enacted for the sake of the worldly realm of politics, whether that be the relational spaces of public action occurring in the phenomenological realm and/or those spheres of human affairs found in cyberspace. It is through cosmopolitanism and acts of forgiveness that we can (re)develop more just, inclusive spaces for the doing of politics in our global age.
In this book, I examine the ideas of cosmopolitanism and forgiveness through the prism of “care,” a term that is used throughout the remainder of this text explicitly in reference to the work of Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) and—specifically—her notion of “care for the world.”5 As a means of rethinking the practices of forgiveness and cosmopolitanism, reframing them as forms of political action that “care for the world,” this book also draws upon the work of Jacques Derrida (1930–2004). In particular, the deconstructive theory for which Derrida is so well known provides a valuable means of revealing the conceptual topography of the aporetic impasses that he contends are concealed within the notions of forgiveness and cosmopolitanism: the very boundaries that simultaneously constrain and constitute the undergirding logic of these two ideas. In today’s digitally interconnected but politically polarized world, it is my belief that such boundaries should be tested and renegotiated precisely because it is through such modes of action that rifts within sociopolitical communities can be overcome and the worldly realm of public, political action can be (re)cultivated. But what are the consequences of rethinking such boundaries in terms of “care”? In what ways does this act of conceptual renegotiation reframe the political and alter the ethico-political landscape? How, then, to map out this terrain? Where Derrida’s work helps us to identify the pitfalls and paradoxes inherent to the practices of forgiveness and cosmopolitanism, Arendt’s corpus supplies the intellectual tools necessary to theorize an approach to the political that emphasizes the worldly significance of maintaining, repairing, and preserving the web of relationships that constitute and condition the public realm.
A twentieth-century thinker whose work is shaped not only by her training in philosophy but also by her lived experience as a Jewish woman exposed to the evils of Nazi totalitarianism, Arendt’s theory of “the political” stands as a testament to
