Kierkegaard and Climate Catastrophe Learning to Live on a Damaged Planet

Søren Kierkegaard's work is teeming with images of earthquakes, floods, storms, volcanic eruptions, wildfires, burned down cities, and apocalyptic events that 'let the heavens fall and the stars change their places in the overturning of everything'. These disaster images are not just rhetorical packaging of the philosophical and theological content of his works. Rather, disasters play an important but largely understudied role in Kierkegaard's analysis of human existence. Kierkegaard and Climate Catastrophe focuses on prophetic noir in Kierkegaard's work: the sombre mood that is evoked when the shadow of future disaster falls upon the present. Isak Winkel Holm's core contention is that the prophetic noir in Kierkegaard, modelled after the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible, contributes to making his works urgently relevant today. From the vantage point of the contemporary world threatened by rapidly evolving climate catastrophes, Kierkegaard's analysis of human existence emerges in a more sombre light, dimmed by the future disaster: to exist, in the emphatic sense Kierkegaard gave to that word, is to live a meaningful human life even if things are darkened by the coming calamity. Thus, a thorough analysis of the prophetic noir in Kierkegaard offers an existential perspective on living in a world threatened by environmental devastation.

Isak Holm, University of Copenhagen

Isak Winkel Holm is Professor of Comparative Literature at University of Copenhagen. Author of Tanken i billedet. Søren Kierkegaards poetik (Thinking in Images: The Poetics of Søren Kierkegaard, Gyldendal 1998), Stormløb mod grænsen: det politiske hos Franz Kafka (Assault on the Border: the Political in Franz Kafka, Gyldendal 2015), and Kafka's Stereoscopes: the Political Function of a Literary Style (Bloomsbury 2020). He has published scholarly articles on Rousseau, Schlegel, Kleist, Hegel, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Musil, Proust, Kundera, DeLillo, Sebald, McCarthy, and zombie movies, and has translated works by Franz Kafka and Friedrich Nietzsche into Danish.

Introduction: With Sorrow Before Him
1. Science Presupposes Mood: Thought and Mood According to Kierkegaard
2. Not Just a Future Language: Prophetic Noir in the Hebrew Bible
3. This Moment is Life and Death: Prophetic Noir in Fear and Trembling
4. A New Infallible Interpretive Law: The Journal Entry on the Great Earthquake
5. He Does Not Prophesy: The Destruction of Jerusalem in 'Ultimatum'
6. Stirring Up Life from its Deepest Foundations: Horror and Patience in the Edifying Discourses
7. Possibility's Course in Calamity: Noir Anxiety in The Concept of Anxiety
Conclusion: It Will Be a Frightful Night