ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses competing rhetorical and conceptual framings of global warming as a crisis, catastrophe, disaster, or apocalypse in contemporary climate fiction and critical theory, and intervenes by developing an expanded, dialectical notion of slow catastrophe that encompasses ‘social’ as well as ‘natural’ processes. This concept takes inspiration from Walter Benjamin’s and Theodor Adorno’s conceptions of the history of modern capitalist society as ‘one single catastrophe’ or a ‘permanent catastrophe’. With theoretical updating, the framework of slow catastrophe provides a dialectical middle ground between the overly optimistic view of climate crisis as a progressive political opportunity (articulated by Nancy Fraser), and the fatalistic view of climate apocalypse as an apolitical and unending cycle of violence (articulated by Étienne Balibar). A dialectical notion of slow catastrophe holds in view the often invisible, long-term, and structural effects of global warming while also demanding responses to the acute disasters or ‘flashpoints’ to which this enduring condition gives rise. Apocalyptic representations of ongoing climate catastrophe such as Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future can be mobilized to support the imperative of ‘thinking against catastrophe’ advocated by earlier critical theorists, so long as they politicize apocalypse and render it contingent rather than succumb to climate fatalism.
