Paroles en l’air: Climate Change and the Science of Fables

Circulating between Rabelais’s frozen words, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault project, Lyotard’s meditation on the death of the sun, frozen embryos bans, and the bioethics of human engineering, this article examines what it means to read and to cultivate an expertise in reading as climate change makes itself present to literary criticism. It is less a plea to make literary criticism policy relevant, and more a memorandum of understanding for what the governance of the future invests in the cultivation of difference in logics of inquiry, and for the moral and social sanction attached to the description of emergent orders of difference.