Catastrophic Temporalities in the Early Anthropocene: Dialectic, Plurality, Difference

Barrell, Callum Jack Arthur (2026) Catastrophic Temporalities in the Early Anthropocene: Dialectic, Plurality, Difference. History of European Ideas. ISSN 1873-541X (Submitted)

Abstract

This article advances two related lines of enquiry in Caroline Ashcroft’s Catastrophic Technology in Cold War Political Thought (2024). First, it examines the historiographical relationship between catastrophic technology and the environmental history of ideas, thereby contributing to wider debates about intellectual history’s engagement with the ongoing ecological crisis. Second, it explores the idea of negative universal history that surfaces briefly in Ashcroft’s book, and more prominently in scholarship that addresses what I call the peculiar, that is to say negative, universalism of the Anthropocene. The article then traces, and gives context to, this understanding of universalism in the thought of Theodor Adorno (1903-1969), Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), and others. Finally, it examines the controversial repurposing of universal history by the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, whose critics question the extent to which this peculiar, negative universalism can be meaningfully reconciled with a hermeneutics of plurality and difference.

Actions (login required)

Edit Item Edit Item