The Catachronism of Climate Change

This essay analyzes how climate change criticism revises nuclear criticism. While nuclear criticism is deployed to ward off nuclear apocalypticism, climate change criticism comes into being at a moment when scientists interpret past and present actions as leading to an irreversible outcome. The concept of the Anthropocene shifts criticism’s focus from being a social science of interactive life to becoming a natural science of species death. As a form of catachronism, the Anthropocene reimagines the history of the past and the present by reference to an unrealized future proclaimed as inevitable. A post-Kantian conflict of the faculties is under way, including a philosophical shift from nuclear texts to Anthropocene objects. This essay declares that the shift from texts to objects and from interactionism to objectivism is solipsistic and unproductive. Instead of obsessing about objects, climate change criticism can delineate the forms of agency that might exist even after apocalypse.