If Aristotle understood virtue (aretē) to refer to the realization of a potential capacity or telos, then how might we understand the world to reach its virtuous potential? What might it mean to view our own global present as not an apex but as a passing stage within a broader process of worlding? Understanding the world as a live entity that perpetually worlds its way into new actualizations -- manifesting the dynamic capacities, potential, and striving of “virtue” -- this chapter turns to Shakespeare as a source for alternative models of world that awaken us to its inherent potentiality. For example, in As You Like It, the condition of exile unlocks a paradigm of seeing otherwise -- and often optimistically -- that runs throughout the play, enabling characters to form new bonds that serve as the basis for individual and communal flourishing. I examine the extent to which the play’s new community of relationships makes a place for nonhuman animals as well as for the pessimism and self-exile of Jaques. Such models enable us to not only see around and beyond the realities of our globalized world but also to perceive alternative formulations of world as already present and alive in the world we live in.

“Figuring: Margaret Cavendish’s Critique of Imagining and Worlding,” undertakes a case study of Cavendish’s foray into a favored intellectual strategy of modernity: to imagine a world (and therefore a politics) that follows the laws of the natural world as discovered by science. The worldview of liberalism is grounded in ideas of diversity and tolerance, the possibility of an ever-expanding, cosmopolitan world.i This is the proto-liberal view that Cavendish’s proto-conservatism, vitalism, and theory of the literary imagination finds untenable. Cavendish’s conservatism is manifested explicitly in the representations of sovereign violence that seem necessary to protect worlds and implicitly in the significance of a method of “figuration” that Cavendish theorizes—and practices—as the foundation of form in the natural world, the social world, and the literary imagination. Such figuration cannot escape the violent reality of secular nationalism inherent in the notion of “worlds.”

This chapter articulates what it calls a ‘planetary poetics’. To set the stage for his presentation, Moraru underscores that not only are ‘globe’ and ‘planet’ hardly equivalent, but they are not givens either. Rather, he argues, ‘globe’ and ‘planet’ are products, something done to the world, made in and out of it. World-making and remaking forms, they are outcomes of worlding, that is, of highly complex, interrelated changes leading to intensified and vastly transformative interactions of the world’s various parts economically, culturally and otherwise, much though the same world’s animate and inanimate systems, at whose expense socio-economic growth and integration have been de facto unfolding, have been concomitantly coming under unprecedented threat or even disintegrating. Where a certain poverty of the critical imagination limits standard takes on the late global era to self-congratulatory ‘uncovering’ of the world-as-globe realities, Moraru’s planetary approach enriches this conventional critical vista by recovering a more nuanced, present-grounded yet future-oriented picture. A record of world-making or world-poiesis, this picture lends itself to a reading whose job is a reverse engineering of sort of planetary poetics by attending to the worldings that have led to the world geocultural aggregate as we know it.