This review article reads across David Chandler’s Resilience, Brad Evans and Julian Reid’s Resilient Life and Elizabeth Povinelli’s Economies of Abandonment to explore the possibilities for critical thought on security beyond resilience. Read together, these works suggest that resilience approaches offer a topological form of security that interiorizes the outside’s de-territorializing potential – a movement that might be countered by a radical atmospherics of security that enables socio-ecological difference to persist as difference. At stake is the relation between critique and potentiality: while topological security turns critique into a stabilizing force, atmospheric security refuses the demands for socio-ecological difference to make itself legible as either proper adaptation or improper maladaptation. An atmospherics of security orients politics and ethics around both the durative and anticipatory temporal registers of potentiality.
