부산대학교 도서관

Deep Time, Dark Times takes its bearing from Nietzsche’s concern that a surfeit of history can extinguish the passion for life: the past can be a crippling burden, especially when we are reminded of our capacity for cruelty and folly. The looming possibility of devastating climate change extends our sense of the past onto a geological scale – deep time – arousing debilitating passion, especially anger, ressentiment and resignation. What can Nietzsche teach us here? Hume’s sense that reason is but a slave to the passions cautions us against devising newly minted utopian blueprints that fail to address the mood of today. Although climate change can rightly be laid at the feet of industrialization, corporate greed, fossil fuel companies, or the energy footprints of Western consumers, Deep Time challenges us, to begin by re-imagining ourselves as a species, taking on a geological consciousness. This expands Nietzsche’s sense of ‘life’ to include our fellow terrestrials, and gives special weight to his sense of critical history, one that, for example, navigates between conflicting passions. Such a consciousness would be ecological (embracing yet another wound to our sovereignty), and it would acknowledge the advent of the Anthropocene. It takes seriously both our evolutionary heritage, and the shattering of progressive assurances about the future. Deep Time draws on Heidegger’s call for a new attunement, an other beginning, one that connects contemporary anger and frustration with the agency vacuum created by the failure of global democracy. The question of who ‘we’ are, when we imagine emergent forms of agency, or when we consider the constituencies impacted by climate change, is explicitly thematized. Information technology, for all its liabilities, offers new possibilities of group identity-formation, communication and economic transaction that just might make a difference. The implausibility of the kind of change we need must be measured against the true horror that business-as-usual will likely bring. We have to will the impossible to avoid the unthinkable.