ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a reading of William T. Vollmann’s bracing two-volume work on climate change, Carbon Ideologies (2019), through a Kierkegaardian lens. Specifically, I use some ideas from Søren Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authorship to draw out three kinds of climate guilt present in Vollmann’s text. The first is a straightforwardly ethical guilt: Vollmann feels responsible for contributing to the climate disaster. The second is tragic guilt. Tragic guilt, on Kierkegaard’s view, lies ambiguously somewhere between action and suffering: it “involves the contradiction of being guilt and not being guilt.” Vollmann’s account of the plight of the West Virginian coal miners exemplifies this ambiguous tragic guilt. Finally, Vollmann’s text exhibits what I call “apocalyptic guilt.” This third kind of guilt manifests as an extreme anxiety in the face of the possibility that one’s entire life might be radically mistaken (or in error) in a way that one cannot presently grasp. In conclusion, I suggest that these three kinds of guilt combine in Carbon Ideologies, forming a guilt complex that explains the strangely manic quality of Vollmann’s affective response to the climate disaster.
