CAPAS RESEARCH PROJECT - Christine Hentschel Self-Portraits at the Edge: Devices for Studying Apocalyptic Imaginations in the Anthropocene
In her project “Self-Portraits at the Edge: Devices for Studying Apocalyptic Imaginations in the Anthropocene”, Christine is building a transdisciplinary inventory of critical devices for reading apocalyptic imaginations and the collectivities that engage with them. She conceptualizes apocalyptic imaginations as “affective workout[s]” (Katy Waldman) – emotionally exhausting, but also adrenalin infused exercises concerned with the end, in which horror and desire, apathy and activism, cruel optimism and pessimistic humanism are interwoven in often surprising and troubling ways. Building on her experience with affective, narrative, ethnographic, spatial, and discursive methodologies, she is developing a range of devices, understood as conceptual sensitivities, for reading apocalyptic imaginations in the context of ecological devastation. By helping us decipher the doomed future that we narrate, these devices are meant to engage apocalyptic framings as a critical reading of our present. The critical endeavor is ultimately to explore how “apocalyptic passions” – in the sense that Günther Anders proclaimed them in the face of the atomic threat in the 1950s – can be emancipatory devices for facing ecological ruination in the Anthropocene.