A Space for Justice

Messianic Time in the Graphs of Climate Change

Dados Bibliográficos

ID4861297
AutoresElizabeth Callaway (0000-0001-7815-4534, University of California, Santa Barbara, autor correspondente)
Ano2014
Volume5
Fascículo1
Páginas13-33
Data de publicação2014-05-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoEnvironmental Humanities (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 2201-1919 • E-ISSN: 2201-1919
EditoraDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/22011919-3615397
OpenAlexW2182266614
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas4
Referências citadas14

This article turns toward scientific literature to consider the basic strategies used in presenting the temporality of climate change. While the majority of literary criticism argues that the experience of climate change is either apocalyptic or banal, the scientific graphs of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change organize time in a way aligned with Giorgio Agamben's concept of messianic time. Like Agamben's messianic time, the figures of the IPCC depict a disjointed present. Every figure is either a reconstruction of past climate or a projection of future climate-never a reconstruction the past that moves through the present and projects the future. Crucially, it is this disjuncture at the present moment that perhaps leaves a space open for justice-a justice that reveals itself in a series of figures that exhibit an underlying ethical relationship to the past and future. As a literary analysis, this paper brings out new aspects of scientific figures. Instead of focusing on the data these graphs communicate, it reveals how formal choices in presentation affect meaning and how scientific figures structure, articulate, and inform our experience of time

Aesthetics · Art · Climate change · Criticism · Economic Justice · Epistemology · Linguistics · Literature · Meaning (existential · Political science · Sociology · Temporality · Tian · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Law · Philosophy · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Geology