2026/05/13 by Martín Savransky · 1 voice
Environmental Science · Social Sciences · Earth and Planetary Sciences · #Climate Change and Geoengineering #Humanities and Social Sciences #Earth Systems and Cosmic Evolution
paper · doi:10.1177/13684310261451405
openalex publication_date 2026/05/13 · openalex created_date 2026/05/14 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/12
Engaging debates in social theory on the transformations of the future today, this article argues that planetary upheavals suffuse the present with a sense of malaise, wherein we seem simultaneously unable to envisage liveable futures and unable to envisage life outside ‘the future’ as such. Paradoxically, nowhere is this more evident than in those strands of climate thinking that prescribe ‘deep adaptation’ to inevitable societal collapse. Whereas critics decry ‘collapsologists’ for shutting the future down, this article shows that in their image of collapse, the future takes the form of a dénouement: an epochal unwinding of society's global predicament in the catastrophic arrival of a new time. The challenge for a social theory of the future amidst permanent planetary instability, however, is to envisage the future's own dénouement – or catastrophe as enduring condition, collapse as a way of life, and the unravelling of futurity as the commanding rhythm of social life.