Deep Time, Dark Times

Abstract

Deep Time, Dark Times takes its bearing from Nietzsche’s concern that a surfeit of history can extinguish the passion for life, especially when we are reminded of our capacity for cruelty and folly. The prospect of devastating climate change extends our sense of the past onto a geological scale, arousing debilitating passion, especially anger, ressentiment and resignation. What can Nietzsche teach us here? Hume’s sense that reason is but a slave to the passions cautions us against new utopian blueprints that fail to address the mood of today. Although climate change can rightly be laid at the feet of industrialization, corporate greed, fossil fuel companies … Deep Time challenges us to re-imagine ourselves as a species, through a geological consciousness. This expands Nietzsche’s sense of “life” to include our fellow terrestrials, and accentuates his sense of critical history, navigating between conflicting passions. Such a consciousness would be ecological (embracing yet another wound to our sovereignty), and it would acknowledge the advent of the Anthropocene. Deep Time draws on Heidegger’s call for a new attunement, one that connects contemporary anger and frustration with the agency vacuum created by the failure of global democracy. The question of who “we” are, when we imagine emergent forms of agency, or when we consider the constituencies impacted by climate change, is explicitly thematized. Information technology, for all its liabilities, offers new possibilities of group identity-formation, communication, and economic transaction that just might make a difference. We have to will the impossible to avoid the unthinkable.