DFG-Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe "Zukünfte der Nachhaltigkeit"
Beschreibung:
On November 5, as U.S. votes were still being counted and Trump was losing key states while declaring his victory, Judith Butler noted: “The tyrant spiraling down calls for an end to testing, to counting, to science and even to electoral law, to all those inconvenient methods of verifying what is and is not true in order to spin his truth one more time. If he has to lose, he will try to take democracy down with him.” A week later, on November 13, when the tyrant spoke out publicly for the first time after the election was called for Joe Biden, he uttered a sentence that journalists came to interpret as the first sign toward admitting that he might not reign after January 2021: “Whatever happens in the future—who knows which administration it will be, I guess time will tell” (Trump). When the American people had spoken, he wanted the future “to tell”; when the end of his presidency had been declared officially, he created an air of uncertainty and chaos. I want to read the nervous public statements from the last weeks of the Trump presidency as dimensions of an apocalyptic maneuver—both by Trump himself and his supporters—of denying, divining, awakening to, or longing for “the end.” I contrast this maneuver with an apocalyptic sentiment of a very different ethical and affective investment—namely, the concern with societal collapse or even the extinction of humanity through climate catastrophe.