Fernando Domínguez Rubio’s introduction to Fragility constitutes a sweeping philosophical and political meditation on the collapse of modernity’s fantasies of permanence, mastery, and ontological security. Beginning with the striking declaration that “the earth has happened,” Rubio argues that contemporary planetary crises—climate catastrophe, pandemics, infrastructural collapse, ecological exhaustion, and geopolitical instability—have shattered the modern Western belief that science, capitalism, and technological progress could permanently domesticate uncertainty and overcome fragility. Drawing on thinkers such as Husserl, Latour, Haraway, Mbembe, and Serres, the text contends that modernity’s central illusion lay in imagining the world as stable, controllable, and infinitely exploitable, while relegating fragility to an externalised “Nature” supposedly awaiting human management. Yet the Anthropocene reveals precisely the opposite: fragility is not external to human life but its constitutive condition. Rubio therefore proposes a radical reconceptualisation of fragility—not as an intrinsic weakness or ontological defect, but as a relational ecological condition produced through asymmetrical socio-material arrangements. A fragile object, body, institution, or ecosystem is not inherently fragile; it is rendered fragile within particular configurations of power, care, infrastructure, labour, and environmental exposure. This ecological understanding displaces classical binaries between robustness and weakness by demonstrating that solidity itself depends upon immense and continuous practices of maintenance, repair, and care. Rubio names these sustaining activities “mimeographic labours”, encompassing domestic care, infrastructural maintenance, scientific purification, repair work, and reproductive labour—forms of activity historically rendered invisible by modern narratives obsessed with innovation, growth, and production. Crucially, the text refuses both apocalyptic despair and techno-utopian denial. Instead, it advances an “avowal of fragility” as an ethical and political opening through which alternative modes of coexistence may emerge. Fragility becomes not merely a diagnosis of collapse but a productive conceptual space from which to imagine forms of politics grounded in interdependence, accountability, repair, and ecological humility. Ultimately, Rubio’s intervention reframes the contemporary condition not as the end of the world itself, but as the collapse of a historically specific modern narrative about the world—one now exposed as finite, contingent, and fundamentally unsustainable.
