Marcus Quent traces today’s looming ecocide through philosophical debates sparked by nuclear catastrophe. Drawing on Günther Anders, Quent argues that existential threats – atomic or ecological – exceed comprehension, paralyzing action or fueling extremes. While the nuclear age framed humanity as a fragile “species-being”, climate collapse fractures this unity, exposing global divides. As politics oscillates between hyper-politicized panic and apathetic normalization, Quent concentrates on the underlying frameworks of the exhaustion of dialectical reason. Urging a new political grounding, he calls for strategies that resist dissolving into measureless reactions – reimagining action beyond crisis binaries and the ongoing normalization of ecological catastrophe.

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Alexander García Düttmann argues that a global crisis – nuclear annihilation, ecological collapse – cannot be resolved through reformist negotiation. In the wake of Maurice Blanchot’s essay The Apocalypse is Disappointing, he frames catastrophe as a paradoxical opening: while it signals humanity’s potential self-destruction, it also forces a reckoning with systemic failures, pushing toward revolutionary rupture. Düttmann’s critique pivots on the fraught interplay between pragmatic analysis (which risks complacency) and radical imagination (which risks accelerating doom). By refusing to resolve this tension, Düttmann weaponizes ambiguity – delaying disaster to nurture the frail grounds for collective reinvention, “as if one had nothing to lose, or as if everything had already been lost”.

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