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Crisis, Dying, Apocalypse: Subjectivity, Progress, and Ecology in the Light...
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Crisis, Dying, Apocalypse: Subjectivity, Progress, and Ecology in the Light of the Anthropocene

A special issue of Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 December 2021) | Viewed by 19141

Special Issue Editors

Prof. Carin Franzén

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Guest Editor
Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University, Stockholm SE-106 91, Sweden
Interests: early modern and contemporary European literature; history of subjectivity; environmental humanities; psychoanalytic criticism; gender studies and discourse theory
Prof. Sven Anders Johansson

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Mid Sweden University, SE-851 70 Sundsvall, Sweden
Interests: theories of subjectivity and subjectivation; critique and critical theory; environmental humanities; Theodor W Adorno; Gilles Deleuze; love; cynicism; autofiction; notions of evil
Prof. Jesper Olsson

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Culture and Society, Linköping University, SE-581 83 Linköping, Sweden
Interests: the relationship between literature, art, and media—from phonographs to digital networks—and approaches to media as ecologies and infrastructures in culture, society, and everyday life

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

If it wasn’t clear before, it is certainly evident today that the future of humankind is conditional. “Progress” has long been a contested term, but it has now become firmly associated with the road to devastation for humankind and many other species. Consequently, contemporary alarmism over global warming is certainly justified and called for, and yet there is something strange within such reactions. Didn’t we know, way back, that the technological development and the economic growth were unsustainable? Has it not been clear all along that civilisation as we know it will one day end? Or did we actually believe that all of this—piano sonatas, oil rigs, smartphones—would just continue forever?

It has been pointed out again and again lately that “apocalypse” means revelation. What is revealed then, is perhaps above all a tacit assumption of progress and eternal life. More precisely, there seems to have been a notion of the exceptionality of Western culture, a culture in which death has become almost an anomaly, where progress has made itself eternal.

 The question is whether we have now reached the end of that illusion, the end of The End of History so to speak. Does climate change, and the pandemic, bring about a new understanding of death and “the end”? Or is it not new at all—after all, isn’t literary history full of strange cases of dying and of death as intertwined with life?

If this is a bleak picture, it may also be the case that climate change and the pandemic have brought about the possibility of rethinking some of the premises of the development that has brought us here. Is it perhaps possible to reread literary history to find paths not taken?

This Special Issue will be wide-ranging and open when it comes to historical boundaries and theoretical preferences. The common aspect is the ambition to uncover alternatives to the rationality, subjectivity, activity, and modernity that we are all products of, but that nonetheless are not natural, but rather products of history. We imagine a Special Issue consisting of a number of empirically well-informed readings, combined with theoretical discussions relating to the Anthropocene. Please feel free to contact us with any questions regarding this Special Issue.

Prof. Carin Franzén
Prof. Sven Anders Johansson
Prof. Jesper Olsson
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Humanities is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • environmental humanities
  • aesthetics
  • Anthropocene
  • history
  • subjectivity
  • general ecology
  • progress
  • the end.

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Published Papers (7 papers)

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Research

10 pages, 246 KiB  
Article
Stranger Things, Plant Life, and Posthuman Endgames: Reading Beckett with Others
by Jesper Olsson
Humanities 2022, 11(2), 32; https://doi.org/10.3390/h11020032 - 25 Feb 2022
Viewed by 2905
Abstract
This essay reads work by Samuel Beckett, especially his prose, with a focus on vegetal ontology and plant life, soil, mud, and dirt. By juxtaposing Beckett with recent fiction, e.g., the Netflix series Stranger Things, contemporary plant theory, and the general ecology [...] Read more.
This essay reads work by Samuel Beckett, especially his prose, with a focus on vegetal ontology and plant life, soil, mud, and dirt. By juxtaposing Beckett with recent fiction, e.g., the Netflix series Stranger Things, contemporary plant theory, and the general ecology of Erich Hörl, posthuman entanglements and relations are discussed as part of an ontological infrastructure in the texts, which can also be linked to Beckett’s interest in prosthetics and technical media. It is suggested that an approach of this kind might offer new perspectives on the dispersed subjectivity in Beckett’s texts. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Crisis, Dying, Apocalypse: Subjectivity, Progress, and Ecology in the Light of the Anthropocene)
14 pages, 255 KiB  
Article
A World with Many Ends: Eschatology and Perspectivism
by Mårten Björk
Humanities 2022, 11(2), 31; https://doi.org/10.3390/h11020031 - 24 Feb 2022
Viewed by 2387
Abstract
In this article, the relation between crisis, dying, and apocalypse is examined from the vantage point of Franz Rosenzweig’s philosophy of revelation. Following Rosenzweig’s suggestion that truth—for finite and temporal beings like us—can only be found in time, the article suggests that there [...] Read more.
In this article, the relation between crisis, dying, and apocalypse is examined from the vantage point of Franz Rosenzweig’s philosophy of revelation. Following Rosenzweig’s suggestion that truth—for finite and temporal beings like us—can only be found in time, the article suggests that there exists an intrinsic relation between truth and death. Truth is not only or even primarily logical or mathematical truth according to Rosenzweig. Truth is the reality of our finite lives and implies an eschatological understanding of death as that which gives life unity by eternalising it as that which it forever was in the past. Life, Rosenzweig argues, is polytheistic by entailing manifold perspectives and possibilities, while death is monotheistic by endowing living beings with the unity and completion they lack in life. All death, even the most horrid death, is, if not a completion, at least an end, which gives the living the possibility to judge and verify the meaning of the past once and for all. Yet, if we believe Rosenzweig, the dead are not gone in the past but rather the eternal ground that makes present and future time possible. The dead, by literally being the past, reveal that all time exists after itself, as something that already was, and that the world is nothing but a world with many ends by dying away into the “life outside life” that Rosenzweig called God. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Crisis, Dying, Apocalypse: Subjectivity, Progress, and Ecology in the Light of the Anthropocene)
11 pages, 267 KiB  
Article
Reading Loops with Boccaccio, Freud and Morton
by Carin Franzén
Humanities 2022, 11(1), 30; https://doi.org/10.3390/h11010030 - 18 Feb 2022
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2496
Abstract
This article assesses the notion of ecological awareness through a re-reading of Giovanni Boccaccio’s classic Decameron, together with Sigmund Freud and Timothy Morton. The purpose is not primarily to trace antecedents to modern and late modern thought, but rather to follow a [...] Read more.
This article assesses the notion of ecological awareness through a re-reading of Giovanni Boccaccio’s classic Decameron, together with Sigmund Freud and Timothy Morton. The purpose is not primarily to trace antecedents to modern and late modern thought, but rather to follow a loop that in different ways is tangible in their works and links them together despite their temporal and thematic differences. If Freud and Morton possess heuristic value for a re-reading of Boccaccio, his way of articulating an earlier and freethinking vein in the humanist tradition may prompt us to see not only what an ecological thought may be, but also that it has always been there as an unconscious awareness. We suggest that such a loop can function as a liberating deviation from a linear idea of living at the end of times. In this article, we also follow this temporal and thematic loop as a tension between disruptiveness and interconnectedness that Freud metaphorically and mythologically describes as a battle between the two giants Thanatos and Eros. From Morton’s ecological perspective, everything’s interconnectedness (or Eros in Freud’s mythological description) is precisely what has been denied or repressed in the anthropocentric strive to master the world. What is interesting in this regard is that Boccaccio, by taking a specific disastrous event—the plague—as his starting point, also makes Thanatos and Eros the themes that interconnect his stories into a weird loop. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Crisis, Dying, Apocalypse: Subjectivity, Progress, and Ecology in the Light of the Anthropocene)
13 pages, 278 KiB  
Article
Narrating the End of the World: The Pandemic, the Climate and The Death of Virgil
by Sven Anders Johansson
Humanities 2022, 11(1), 21; https://doi.org/10.3390/h11010021 - 21 Jan 2022
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 3112
Abstract
There is a widespread narrative today that, due to climate change, we are living in the end of times. What does this apocalyptic narrative tell us about our relation to death? A peculiarity with the climate discourse is that “we”, i.e., mankind, are [...] Read more.
There is a widespread narrative today that, due to climate change, we are living in the end of times. What does this apocalyptic narrative tell us about our relation to death? A peculiarity with the climate discourse is that “we”, i.e., mankind, are given a position that is both external and internal to the problems described. On the one hand, there is an all-encompassing apocalyptic mood, on the other hand, death appears as a scandal, something we had abolished. In order to capture this peculiarity, the article adopts the narratological concept of the “focalizer”. After comparing the way climate change is addressed by the philosophers Martin Hägglund and Roy Scranton, respectively, the article turns to Hermann Broch’s novel The Death of Virgil (1945). Here, another perspective on dying and the end of civilization may be found. In that way, Broch’s novel provides a much needed perspective on today’s apocalyptic narratives. With Broch, one may argue that the end of the world takes place all the time. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Crisis, Dying, Apocalypse: Subjectivity, Progress, and Ecology in the Light of the Anthropocene)
12 pages, 252 KiB  
Article
Futural Dispatches on Responsibility for the Earth, or, ‘What on Earth Is Ethical Responsibility?’
by Dave Boothroyd
Humanities 2022, 11(1), 18; https://doi.org/10.3390/h11010018 - 17 Jan 2022
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2165
Abstract
This article explores the question of the limits of ethical responsibility in the context of the contemporary ecological crisis. Drawing centrally on a selection of writings by Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas and, in the second half of the article especially, Timothy Morton, it [...] Read more.
This article explores the question of the limits of ethical responsibility in the context of the contemporary ecological crisis. Drawing centrally on a selection of writings by Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas and, in the second half of the article especially, Timothy Morton, it attempts to show how the conceptualization of the Earth/environment/biosphere (tropes for the ‘ecological whole’) as an object of ethical concern is problematic and exacerbated in the context of the posthumanist critique of anthropocentrism. If a generalized anthropization of the planet represents the ‘ethical failure’ of the Earth by ‘the human’—the material mark of which is the geo-physical terraforming associated with anthropocene—who or what, might be anticipated to be able to bear, or to live-up to, the ethical responsibility for its continued survival? The article critically brings elements of the philosophy of these thinkers into conjunction to discuss how the future of life/death might be properly considered an ethical matter at all, or alternatively, as the ‘end’ of ethical responsibility. Whilst Morton appears to recognize the potential of deconstructive thinking and Levinasian ethics for ecological thought, it is argued here that his reading of these is at odds with the object-oriented ontological thinking he more stridently identifies with. This messy collision in Morton’s ecological theory is used here as a springboard to explain how a strategic reprise of a certain humanism—or theoretical human exceptionalism—might be key to appreciating how humans taking responsibility for the current ecological crisis is the condition of a futural ethical openness to the non-human. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Crisis, Dying, Apocalypse: Subjectivity, Progress, and Ecology in the Light of the Anthropocene)
10 pages, 221 KiB  
Article
Small Revelations, … Maybe Not Even with an Apocalyptic Tone
by Anders E. Johansson
Humanities 2021, 10(4), 128; https://doi.org/10.3390/h10040128 - 16 Dec 2021
Viewed by 1939
Abstract
This article tries to be funny in a very serious way, following Virginia Woolf’s call in Three Guineas that, in the face of man-made disasters, we may have to make fools of ourselves in relation to common sense. Apocalypses, such as the Anthropocene, [...] Read more.
This article tries to be funny in a very serious way, following Virginia Woolf’s call in Three Guineas that, in the face of man-made disasters, we may have to make fools of ourselves in relation to common sense. Apocalypses, such as the Anthropocene, climate change, and mass extinction require—like the Second World War that Woolf refused to simplify—a tentative search for knowledge, not controlling and predictable methods in the search for a solution. The article is based on how Jacques Derrida’s discussion with Immanuel Kant regarding how truth should sound before the apocalypse over the years has increasingly come to describe contemporary doxa, within which there is only room for mystagogues, who inaugurate followers in the “real truth” behind “fake news”, or scientisticists, who believe that facts and truth are the same thing. When Derrida shows how these two positions depend on each other, sharing the modern belief that knowledge is associated with development, boundaries and control, he also shows how this narrows knowledge down to the predictable, and, thus, makes it complicit with the mistaken efforts of control responsible for today’s challenges. Against this background, the article analyzes works by the artist, Eva Löfdahl, and links them with questions concerning connections between truth, knowledge, art, and science. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Crisis, Dying, Apocalypse: Subjectivity, Progress, and Ecology in the Light of the Anthropocene)
9 pages, 225 KiB  
Article
Must the Apocalypse Disappoint? Philosophers in the Midst of Climate Change and Before
by Alexander García Düttmann
Humanities 2021, 10(4), 127; https://doi.org/10.3390/h10040127 - 13 Dec 2021
Viewed by 2576
Abstract
Is self-preservation the only question humanity faces when confronted with self-induced annihilation? Must humanity not also ask whether there are different ways of extinguishing itself? Whether an extinction that a few impose on the many should not be distinguished from an extinction that [...] Read more.
Is self-preservation the only question humanity faces when confronted with self-induced annihilation? Must humanity not also ask whether there are different ways of extinguishing itself? Whether an extinction that a few impose on the many should not be distinguished from an extinction that results from a collective decision? Is there a self-extinction of humanity that can testify to its unity and autonomy rather than to its dividedness? Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Crisis, Dying, Apocalypse: Subjectivity, Progress, and Ecology in the Light of the Anthropocene)
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