CAPAS RESEARCH PROJECT - Marcus Quent APOCALYPTIC PRESENT(ISM): CONSTRUCTIONS OF TIME
The last four decades have confronted us with both the liberal and the postmodern version of the “end of history.” Today, with climate change, the present seems challenged by an existentially menacing and at once plain version of the end. Said end carries a repetition or return of discourses of the age of nuclear threat. In my philosophical research project, nuclear threat and climate change will be analyzed as two crucial events with specific temporalities within the configuration of the “absolute present.” I am interested in how the status of the so far dominant configurations of the “contemporary” or the “absolute present” change when confronted with apocalyptic temporalities and related to temporal structures of the “Anthropocene.” In doing so, the research project tries to overcome what can be described as a mutual stabilization of catastrophism and presentism in our construction of time: On the one hand, the endless or absolute present produces catastrophic consequences; on the other hand, the impending event of catastrophe retroactively sets the endless time-space of the present absolute. How must we think the construction of time without getting trapped in the political impasse of this mutual stabilization?