On the Philosophy of Trembling: Negen-u-topia, Sun Death, Ecosophy

This article offers several utopian/dystopian thought experiments to explore the sheer dread in thinking otherwise than the contemporary unworld as it is. It attempts this through a consideration of the horror of a world without a sun. It demonstrates this incapacity of thought to think beyond the utopos of the unworld as it is with reference to the 2017 BBC drama Hard Sun. It contrasts this essentially failed science fiction with the satirical optimism of Gabriel Tarde’s Underground Man, published in 1905, in which a postapocalypse sunless utopia is envisaged under the Earth. Shaping and guiding my analysis are the different philosophical senses of utopia found in Félix Guattari’s and Édouard Glissant’s work and the way they function to destabilize apocalyptic thought.