A threat that goes beyond all scale is ambiguous in the affectual extremes it entails. On the one hand, it has tremendous potential to mobilize us, to stir us up – as when nothing remains safe and everything is at stake, we must act immediately. On the other hand, precisely by exceeding all scale, it tends to sedate or even paralyze us, leaving us motionless. Since in the face of such a threat, we not only feel incapable of averting it, but also of simply rendering it intelligible; conceiving it seems impossible. Thus, the excessiveness of a threat may have a fatal trivializing effect, as Günther Anders already pointed out in the face of the atomic bomb in the 1950s: it exceeds the “performance limits” [Leistungsgrenzen] of human faculties, revealing a “gap” [Gefälle] between them, as the faculties of imagination and cognition are in discordance with the faculty of production.Günther Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen: Band 1 – Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution, Munich: C. H. Beck, 2018, 296. Hence, Anders seems to suggest that a threat can engender its own disguise, causing a specific “blindness” in those affected by it. We could follow him here and claim that a threat beyond all scale always seems to be, as it were, above and below the threshold of our faculties; it is “supraliminal” and “subliminal” at the same time. Thus, it seems as if one can only relate to it through exaggeration or understatement, but never deal with it appropriately, that is, with a so-called accurate sense of proportion. To put it differently, a threat beyond all scale, boundless or immoderate in its scope, challenges our faculty of understanding, which inevitably must normalize it to make it rationally accessible at all.
However, this not only causes an epistemological predicament but, above all, entails a challenge for the social sphere of action. Political action that proceeds from a threat beyond all scale, relating itself to the immeasurable, tends to thereby turn itself into something measureless. As a glance at our day-to-day politics reveals, measureless political action permanently oscillates between hyper-politicization and de-politicization. It is concerned with an exceptional threat that introduces a state of exception. But simultaneously, guided by understanding, it tends to re-integrate and normalize the exceptional – and, even further, as some would argue, to normalize the state of exception itself. Therefore, politics related to a threat that goes beyond all scale always resides on the border of the dissolution of politics. Hence, we might then ask: Are we compelled to apply the right scale for politics again, to define its just measure, so to speak, beyond the immoderateness of the threat? Or are we, instead, in need of a new grounding of politics, a politics that would be beyond understanding’s perspective of scale itself?
The Idea of the Whole – in the Face of its Extinction
The nuclear threat and the ecological transformation, the atomic bomb and climate catastrophe, are the two exemplary, seemingly immeasurable dangers of our historical present. They induce an endangered present that, paradoxically, appears as a period that might never end. Since we are threatened with the potential absolute end, “our” present simultaneously becomes a present without any end. In it, time is threatened to end, but what can never end or disappear in time is the threat itself. Hence, as long as the imminence of the threat has not ended time as such, the present is extending, it is potentially endless – and, thus, precisely losing its status as the present. In that sense, the endangered present implies above all a crisis of historicity and temporality; it not only introduces a new period but alters time itself.
As threats that seemingly exceed all scale, the atomic bomb and the climate catastrophe are often discussed as quasi-apocalyptic events of the (self-)extinction of humanity. Regardless of whether we may find it coherent to conceptualize them as secularized end-time scenarios, and, thus, to think about the “apocalyptic presentism”In his latest study on the genealogy of Western temporalities, Francois Hartog distinguishes “apocalyptic presentism” as part of the pre-modern Christian regime of historicity from the postmodern “contemporary presentism,” which has been evolving since the 1970s. Within “contemporary presentism,” in some sense, apocalyptic scenarios can be reactivated, but this presentism does not, as Hartog argues, imply a fulfilled now; it does not serve as the creation of an intermediate time. Cf. Francois Hartog, Chronos: The West Confronts Time, New York: Columbia University Press, 2022, 205–207. they introduce, both events also differ significantly. While one refers to a punctual incision that is supposed to bring about the absolute end, the other appears as a series of processes that accumulate over a long period of time. And while one can be linked to an initiating action – the phantasmatic image of the pressing of a button – the other appears rather as a disparate sequence of a multiplicity of actions and habits, which can only be identified as a structure by applying technical tools, collecting data, and analyzing it scientifically. But this sharp contrast between both events could be at the same time misleading. After all, the bomb’s punctual incision extends as it refers to a long prehistory of technology as its condition, while the durational unfolding of ecological changes, as we now know, is accompanied by event-like “tipping points” that may bring these changes closer to the bomb’s impact. Processes that extend over decades, centuries, prolonged and gradual changes, can thus acquire an element of suddenness that was previously associated with the advent of the bomb: points of unpredictable tipping that seemingly reveal the whole of our accumulated behaviors and habits.
Despite these differences (and, yet again, the similarities in these differences), two aspects of the immeasurable seem to connect both event horizons more directly. And it comes as no surprise that both aspects, which influenced the theoretical discourse of the nuclear threat, also recur today in discussions related to the ecological challenges of our times as well as theoretical debates about the concept of the “Anthropocene”. The first aspect has to do with a transgression of human history, which is challenged with a temporal event horizon that is characterized as “historically supraliminal.” The second aspect has to do with the idea of a collective subject and the relation to humanity as a whole, which entails the problem of the relation between division and unification.
For now, let us concentrate on the second aspect and, for this task, return to Günther Anders for a moment. According to him, the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945 brought about a change in human nature: a “metaphysical metamorphosis.”Günther Anders, “Die Frist,” [1960], in Die atomare Drohung: Radikale Überlegungen zum atomaren Zeitalter, Munich: C. H. Beck, 1981, 170–221: 177. With that event, he argues, the sentence “All humans are mortal” was replaced by the sentence “Humanity as a whole is killable.”Günther Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, 270. That means, in the new light of the atomic bomb, not only individual members of the species are mortal, but the species itself has become “killable.” With the nuclear threat, humanity thus takes on a finite existence as a species itself. The prospect of a nuclear war thus has a unifying effect – but only negatively. On one hand, as a “killable” species, humanity becomes, in some sense, unified. But on the other, at the same time, humanity, in this negative form, appears only as a potential collective subject, since the threat has not erased social divisions. The crucial point is that, in the face of its potential annihilation, what we could term, with Marx, its realization as a “species being” [Gattungswesen] ultimately remains to be achieved. This explains why Anders rejects any form of generalization that presupposes a collective subjectivity capable of acting – as, for instance, appears in figures of speech such as the “suicide of humanity”. Against this false collective singular, which presupposes humanity as an existent unity, he emphasizes its inner split: its division into perpetrators and victims. Even if the border between these two sides is, as he says, “ambiguous” in the nuclear threat, it remains “inadmissible” to suppress this division.Günther Anders, “Die Frist,” 180.
Regardless of the different temporal structure of both threats, this aspect recurs in the Anthropocene debate: what reappears is both the critical reference to humanity as a whole or as a potential collective agent and, at once, the critique of a presupposed collective subject that proves to be divided or must be differentiated. But this recurrence is not a simple repetition. Far from it, something has fundamentally changed in the relation of the unification and division of this very whole. Ultimately, what has changed is the role of humanity as an ideal element that confronts the threat and transcends reality with its splits and divisions. What is at stake is precisely humanity as an idea.
If we consider some of the prominent philosophical voices present in the 1950s and 1960s that referred to the nuclear threat – Karl Jaspers and Günther Anders, for example, but also Theodor W. Adorno and Maurice Blanchot – one aspect stands out in particular. In their contributions, they considered the realization of humanity’s idea precisely in the face of its potential annihilation. Or, even further, they referred to the potential annihilation of humanity precisely as the possible medium of its realization. Albeit with different emphases, in their conceptualizations the prospect of doom and the prospect of humanity are intertwined. Even more, the prospect of doom is the prospect of humanity’s realization. With the nuclear threat, the whole of humanity is at stake, which itself is not yet realized, but is supposed to become conceivable, achievable, and realizable precisely through this threat. Thus, in some sense, we can claim that the nuclear apocalypse was conceptualized as the apocalypse of reason.
Progress, as Adorno puts it in a lecture from 1962, would first be the creation of a humanity “whose perspective opens up in the face of extinction.”Theodor W. Adorno, “Progress,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, translated by Henry W. Pickford, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998, 143–160: 145. Precisely because historical time has become an ultimate deadline, humanity can, as Blanchot, in a similar manner, formulates it in his essay “The Apocalypse Is Disappointing,” “[be] awakened to the idea of the whole” and “[give] the whole form.”Maurice Blanchot, “The Apocalypse Is Disappointing,” [1964], in Friendship, translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997, 101–108: 107. The nuclear threat thus enables and at the same time demands that reason “awakens” and realizes itself. Here, the argument is: at the very moment when people acquire the technical means for their total annihilation, their whole is presented to them – in a negative form. A closer look at the individual works could unearth in each case that the anticipation of an “awakening” in Blanchot, or, similarly, a “resolution” in Anders, or a “conversion” in Jaspers, is each time an attempt to think of the unification of humanity as the realization of reason via absolute negativity. Hence, the atomic bomb, as the ultimate counter-image of reason, is turned – desperately, some would say – into a wager of thought on its dialectical realization.
Humanity’s Unification and Division
Remarkably, today the climate catastrophe is no longer the stage on which the idea of humanity plays out. On the contrary, it seems that the concept itself has been suspended – or at most, as, for instance, in Dipesh Chakrabarty, retained as some kind of blank space: an empty “negative universal” that is supposed to represent humanity as a species or a “planetary force.” It is explicitly no longer supposed to be a universal emerging from a dialectical movement of history or a crisis of capital.Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 35, No. 2 (Winter 2009), 197–222: 222. Despite the similarities at first glance, this talk of a “negative universal” in Chakrabarty proves to be quite different from the reference to an idea opened by the negative in Blanchot or Adorno – even if their interventions regarding the ideal of dialectic progress might appear similar. Of course, first of all, the problem is that today the climate catastrophe cannot be thought of as an eventful point or punctual incision at which the whole is realized. But the present dismissal of the idea of humanity certainly does not only have to do with a different temporal event horizon. Beyond that, this dismissal is also a consequence of a process that has been unfolding since the 1970s: the process of globalization, which is essentially modernity’s global differentiation involving new forms of critique and resistance to it, that is, global decolonial politics and postcolonial theories.
Thus, in the climate catastrophe, it seems that the “awakening to the idea of the whole” fails to happen not only because the event’s temporality thwarts the “end times” of nuclear reason. Rather, it fails to happen because the orientation towards a unification that generates the totality increasingly appears as an expression of a particular position, which, in its universal reach is above all a particular violence. In some sense, in this context, one can observe a conceptual reversal: in place of a divided humanity whose realized unity is still pending, but was rendered thinkable via its possible annihilation, now instead comes the diagnosis of a preemptively unified humanity whose fragmented being must be unmasked, which reaches beyond the scope of social divisions. Whereas in the face of the nuclear threat, the emphasis on unification and social divisions was stressed to elevate the idea of this unification, in the ecological transformation, conversely, now the divisions are intensified in thinking. They are now inscribed into the concept of human nature itself, ultimately to render its concept obsolete. Confronted with the social divisions that reality itself produces, reference to an ideal part of the universal to invoke a “sublation” then seems untenable. Rather, the thinking of divisions affects and seizes the ideal part itself, in whose name they were supposed to be overcome. Thus, the perspective of the whole, introduced by the idea, is, in some sense, swallowed by the conflict. Instead, an incompatibility is emphasized that is said to have cosmological proportions, and revealing different worlds, as it were. In the “Anthropocene”, the human is thus intellectually unified as a “geological force”, but simultaneously, theories axiomatically posit the impossibility of giving consistency to the human as a collective subject. Crucially, in this context, a certain perspective of the whole seems to be abandoned, even in its negativity and critical potential.
One could say that the intensifications and tensions that the atomic bomb made possible for thinking have in a certain way been fragmented. The dialectical movement, which still held on to the vanishing point of a “sublation of the historical world itself,”Theodor W. Adorno, “Progress,” 147. has been terminated. The problematizations of the universal of humanity have largely stepped out of the critical frame of reference that the concept itself provided. Famously, Adorno formulated the idea of humanity as that which “excludes absolutely nothing”: “If humanity were a totality that no longer held within it any limiting principle, then it would also be free of the coercion that subjects all its members to such a principle and thereby would no longer be a totality: no forced unity.”Ibid., 145. That means humanity would be a totality, finally – and, at the same time, would cease to be one. It is as if, in contrast to this idea, now the perspective that totality is always a mere totality, and unity is always a mere unity, has been generalized. The subjective force of coercion can no longer be distinguished from the idea. Rather, one now seems to look at coercion as the idea’s own essence. Consequently, humanity as a not-yet-existent whole or as a totality to be realized remains without frame and foothold today. It has no time, and no longer any space.
Intellectually and conceptually, the human being of the “Anthropocene” is unified as a “geological force”. In that form, it is simultaneously confronted with questions about its power and responsibility, which call for the differentiation of its intellectual unity. So, at the moment humanity is declared a “geological” or “planetary” force – some kind of a whole, or totality, as it were – some authors remind us that the talk of the anthropos as a collective agent is misleading, given the unequal responsibilities and power relations. As a “planetary” force, humans become, so to speak, a whole, which is now, however, located precisely beyond human history. And again, into this whole, antagonisms are inscribed that call it into question. But what has changed significantly is that this whole, this totality, is now introduced as a force that is withdrawn or revoked from human history. In the nuclear threat, the idea of the whole appeared in the paradigm of a realization of reason precisely on the side of the movement of history. It was thought of as a totality that in the moment of its realization would no longer be a forced unity. Now, against the whole of the “planetary” force that humans have become but which exceeds and overstrains its history, the movement of history appears not as enabling a unification, but as the necessary work of differentiating the intellectual unification, but also as fragmenting the modern cosmology in which the idea of humanity itself appeared.
Beyond Sublime Realization
To come to a provisional conclusion, one could thus state that unification and division have switched sides today – and are being re-inscribed at a different level. Being confronted with this change or turn in our present situation, when facing a threat beyond all scale, arguing for simply re-activating the idea of the realization of reason is impossible, though. In addition to any resistance to globalization, that is, the postcolonial critiques of modern concepts as well as globally decolonial movements, perhaps what we must question today, in a world of fundamental ecological transformation, is, above all, the paradigms of realization and production. Recapitulating the nuclear threat in the 1950s and 1960s, we can conclude that philosophical contributions to the novelty of the atomic bomb ultimately were still entangled within a configuration of a sublime realization. Even those who radicalized negativity, refraining from any form of positivism – not least the positivism effective in Hegelian “sublation” itself –, preserved the idea of creating a collective subject or “global subject” [Gesamtsubjekt] precisely as the auto-production of humanity’s reality. The extinction and creation of humanity, that is, the ultimate catastrophe and the idea’s unifying force, were both mirrored in a sublime form of realization. It is this framework that reveals itself as untenable.
But we must be careful to recognize the scope of its effectiveness. Crucially, this framework can likewise be effective where the idea of humanity is dismissed. The thinking that orients human existence towards a future realization, that thinks the meaning of existence proceeding from a purpose or unity yet to be realized, is also – negatively – still at work in the current anticipation of an impending annihilation that ecological end-times activists seek to avert or prevent. Thus, what we need to rigorously interrogate today is the affinity between the temporal construction of a coming realization of human reason and the temporal construction governed by the notion of an imminent catastrophe.
Is what really “threatens” us not the following? Humanity cannot be constructed, realized, or produced, as the work of human beings; but neither can humanity be destroyed or annihilated in the same mode. Today, in our secularized “end times”, the idea of the potential self-extinction of humanity appears, as it were, as a reflection of its sublime realization or (self-)production. However, the reason that humanity cannot be destroyed is not merely that it is not yet realized, but rather that its existence cannot be thought of as realization or production at all. Consequently, it cannot be thought of as its destruction or (self-)extinction. Let us recall Jean-Luc Nancy here, who argued that being is being-in-common, but “community” as being-in-common assumes precisely “the impossibility of a communitarian being in the form of a subject.”Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, translated by Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney, Minneapolis and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1991, 15. Being cannot realize or fulfill itself as a subject. Thus, in the face of a measureless catastrophe or threat beyond all scale, the present task for thinking is not only to problematize the perspective of scale, which is grounded in understanding. Rather, beyond that, thinking must foreground and revitalize the question of a politics beyond the paradigm of realization and (self-)production – without, in doing so, simply abandoning the critical perspective of the whole. Ultimately, this would be a politics that resides on the border of the dissolution of politics, too. But in a very different way.