ABSTRACT
“In a multidirectional temporality, “deep time” moves backward into the past but also leaps forward toward a planetary future. Given the global climate change crisis, it is perhaps no surprise that words like “planetary” and “ecology” have begun to proliferate in the texts of those who speak of World Literature. Contemporary academic discourse resounds with echoes of this planetary crisis. The division of Global North and South works to the advantage of the Global North even in apocalyptic times. Pressing on the icons and rubrics on the computer screen, the Archive grants access to the intellectual-mediatic commons in the form of a vast repository of everything that has been written and filmed, which he probes for clues as to how the planet earth and its people somehow managed to commit collective suicide. The vignettes flesh out the portrayal of the endgame of the instrumentalization of the planet’s resources exposed decades earlier in Adorno-Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment.
