Between Inevitability and Hindsight: End-Times and the Loss of Agency in the Anthropocene
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Judeo-Christian eschatological time has re-emerged in scholarly and popular discussions of climate apocalypse in the last decades, also in attempts to mobilise action against climate change. I argue that speaking about climate change as the eschatological endpoint in linear time undermines the call for action, understood as the contingent capacity for new beginnings. When the severity of climate change is made sense of by introducing an end to linear Chronos time, the result is a confusion in the direction and contingency of temporal politics, which effectively undermines action through speech. Eschatological, linear time frames the time for action as too narrow: first, by casting the end of time as inevitable, and second, by upsetting the chronology and direction of time as a prerequisite for politics. The conclusion is that climate eschatology is disempowering in Chronos time and that another temporal frame is needed to address climate change politically.
Source: Political Studies
Author: Nanna Lilletvedt Sæten
Institution: University of Cambridge
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Climate action
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,650
OpenAlex ID: W4406536631