On Climate Refugees: Biopolitics, Aesthetics, and Critical Climate Change

Us? . . . who is talking about crisis?

Derrida, "Economies of the Crisis"

Among the most provocative theoretical developments in the contemporary humanities is what has recently been called "critical climate change." ¹At once an institutional initiative and a concept-metaphor, this phrase speaks to two overlapping concerns. The first concern is the so-called anthropogenic or man-made crisis of the planetary climate system resulting inadvertently from the residual carbon footprint of two centuries of fossil-fuel capitalism centered in the Global North. Thinkers from Marx to Braudel to Lefebvre have long emphasized the dialectical co-production of socioeconomic practices and nonhuman environmental systems as an essential dimension of any historical analysis worthy of the name. But the advent of what climate scientists have recently begun to call the "anthropocene" involves an epochal transition from humanity understood as a "biological agent" whose activities alter this or that particular environment within the life span of several generations to that of a "geological agent" that destabilizes the taken-for-granted global climatological patterns against which the life in general of both human and nonhuman species has been assumed to occur since time immemorial. However, in both meteorological and tropological terms, "climate" (Greek klima) has always already involved what Eduardo Cadava calls "the tendency of incline or drift away from understanding . . . of what falls from the sky and what falls away from understanding . . . of whatever is incalculable and uncontrollable," the contemporary climate crisis radicalizes this sense of uncertainty. ²Thus, the anthropogenic derangement of planetary geochemistry only radicalizes the originary uncertainty that climate, weather, and atmosphere has always brought to bear on human affairs. This leads to the second concern, namely, a potential reorientation of the "critical climate" of humanities scholarship that would interrogate the anthroposroutinely invoked as the simultaneously self-destructive and self-redeeming protagonist of global warning. Calling for new forms of scholarly inquiry, cultural production, and political engagement that would take account of the radical undecidablity of human and nonhuman history, critical climate change asks: Who or what is the humanity that has recently begun to claim responsibility for the destabilization of climate, weather, and season ( temps)? What are the limits of that humanity, and how has the "time of the human" mutated in light of these destabilizations? ³

The project of critical climate change positions itself as an extension of a certain unfinished heritage of Jacques Derrida, whose oeuvre is marked by a conspicuous silence on problems of ecology and environment. Among the tantalizing exceptions to this silence is his remark in "Economies of the Crisis" (1983) that the very idea of crisis is "the signature of a last symptom, the convulsive effort to save a 'world' that we no longer inhabit: no more oikos, economy, ecology, livable site in which we are 'at home.'" ⁴

For Derrida, discourses of crisis "economize" crisis, implicitly setting up the continuity and predictability of non-crisis as the normal state of life. Derrida's point is not to ignore or dismiss the actuality of ecological crises, but to situate them within a certain continuity of instability, volatility, or incalculability that would displace any ideal of "being at home," for instance, as the proper state of existence of a unified humanity. Derrida asks, "Us? . . . who is talking about crisis? Who is talking the most about it right now? Where? To whom? In what form? In view of what effects and what interests? By playing on what 'representations'? Who are the individuals, which are the interest groups, the countries that hold forth this discourse of the crisis, hold it forth or hold onto it?" ("EC," 71).

Though not specifically engaged with climate change—a scientific diagnosis familiar only to expert bodies and a handful of activists in 1983—Derrida's questions concerning the "us" of the contemporary oikosand its crisis are germane to the recent published volume Climate Refugees. Put together by Argos, a French collective of writers and photographers, Climate Refugeesis composed of a series...