Resilience for the Anthropocene? Shedding light on the forgotten temporalities shaping post-crisis management in the FrenchSud Ouest

Abstract

Building on a set of semi-structured interviews, focus groups and participant observations conducted in the South West region of France in the aftermath of two windstorms (Martin in 1999 and Klaus in 2009) and the collapse of the natural gas industry, this paper explores how different temporal dynamics and rhythms interact in the shaping of post-crisis responses in the wider context of the Anthropocene. By so doing, it argues that resilience proponents and critics have articulated a wider biopolitics of speed in which accelerated futures and explicated time have both become the focal temporal realms in which it is possible to (re)think and enact political change. Finally, it is argued that resilience is detracting our attention from important enquiries about temporal relations and processes such as rhythms, which have the capacity to transcend classical rationality and axiology for reimagining what it means to be together, in a different human–non-human nexus that is fit for the Anthropocene.