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The article takes as its starting point Leo Tolstoy’s character Pierre Bezukhov. His passive presence at the battle of Borodino, in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, is contrasted with today’s climate activism, exemplified by the Swedish human ecologist Andreas Malm. In his book How to Blow up a Pipeline, Malm argues that global warming forces scientists and scholars to become activists, and activists to turn to violence. This analysis, the article argues, is based on a simplistic notion of action (”one acts or one does not”) and a strong conviction of being right. If this certitude is problematic, it is also typical of our time. Where, then, does this tendency to simplify the complicated, and replace all uncertainty with sureness, come from? One answer is that activism requires determination, which in its turn presupposes access to the truth. Another explanation lies in the binary operations of the digital media we all rely upon. At the most basic level, these operations exclude all approximation, all nuances, all doubt: the options are one or zero. Against this background, it becomes crucial to defend a research practice that refrains from simplifications. In Sloterdijk, the article finds an argument for interrupting the affective impulses that reach us constantly. From Popper, it fetches an understanding of research as an event. Via Marx’s well-known formulation that philosophers must change the world, not just interpret it, the text then moves to Adorno’s defense of theoretical thinking. The question is, however, whether critical theory has any edge left. Has it not just become a part of the academic apparatus it once reacted against? The article finds an answer in Lyotard, and his idea of a theoretical apathy. This idea reminds a lot of the starting point of the article: Pierre Bezukhov’s comic but clear-sighted passivity on the battlefield. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyses the constitution of subjectivity in Ruben Östlund's film Force Majeure (2014). At the centre of attention stands the male protagonist who is uncapable of reconciling his inner nature with the external expectations. If the film may be understood as a critique of existing middle-class conventions, it also reproduces a highly conventional ideal of the self-identical subject. The article argues that this confusion or irony is an expression of a Cartesian subject - still prevalent in the film - in crisis. A neglected aspect of Descartes' theory is that the autonomy of the subjects presupposes the existence of God. The problem for Östlund's characters is that there is no God. Still, they act as if he, or as if any authority might, legitimize their subjectivity. Thus, the whole existence becomes a series of performances. The idea of an inner nature corresponds with the notion of an outer nature. The latter is certainly very present in Force Majeure, but at the same time this nature is constantly problematized. On an allegorical level, the film may thus be read as a comment on the Anthropocene, a state where we no longer know neither what "nature", nor "culture" is. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a widespread narrative today that, due to climate change, we are living in the end of times. What does this apocalyptic narrative tell us about our relation to death? A peculiarity with the climate discourse is that "we", i.e., mankind, are given a position that is both external and internal to the problems described. On the one hand, there is an all-encompassing apocalyptic mood, on the other hand, death appears as a scandal, something we had abolished. In order to capture this peculiarity, the article adopts the narratological concept of the "focalizer". After comparing the way climate change is addressed by the philosophers Martin Hägglund and Roy Scranton, respectively, the article turns to Hermann Broch's novel The Death of Virgil (1945). Here, another perspective on dying and the end of civilization may be found. In that way, Broch's novel provides a much needed perspective on today's apocalyptic narratives. With Broch, one may argue that the end of the world takes place all the time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]