The ecological crisis that the techno-scientific transformation of the earth has generated is about to unsettle the ground upon which humans build and consolidate their modes of dwelling. This forces us to be aware of something outside human manipulation, which is to say, the planetary dimension. Confrontation with the planetary dimension urges us to formulate new ways of thinking about the world that we inhabit. The increasing prevalence of natural catastrophes stirs the fundamental conditions upon which the existence of humans depends. At this moment, we are forced to admit that we cannot be free of the inertia of material reality. This paper argues that what is required is to view the human condition in contradictory double registers. While humans inhabit the human world as artifacts, they become part of the vastness of the planetary dimension in which humans are entangled with other life forms. Thus, we can pay attention to the reality that the planetary dimension that subtends the human mode of existence becomes unstable and extends beyond human comprehension. Adding to that, inasmuch as it is revealed through the fractures of the human artificial world at the moment of the disaster, it has to do with the sense of fragility that is intrinsic to the human condition.

Apocalyptic spaces are heterotopic thinking-spaces which offer us the possibility to re-imagine planetary futures along with an imperative to re-think alternative configurations of being human. Catastrophic encounters tend to subvert the fixed designations of the human and the planetary, thereby becoming a crucial spatio-temporal opening that resist the constant reinforcement of the dynamics of conformity. In the wake of re-thinking new planetary dimensionalities, catastrophic encounters, despite of their excruciating problematics, are events of alterity occurring as sites of difference, in the Deleuzian sense, and différance, in Derrida’s sense, that initiate a radical (un)becoming of the human, producing new environments, new relations and new subjectivities. Thinking through the concept of planetarity and the Stieglerian pharmakon, this stream seeks to explore apocalyptic spaces as open and possibility spaces, creating new models of co-existence, reinvent models of care – not merely as emancipation but also in praxis. Through our discussions, we shall attempt to recognise apocalyptic spaces as an open portal of living knowledge – a pharmacological and organological aperture that thwarts epistemic uniformity and neo-expansionist representations of globality and totality, and encounter collective inhabitations and response-ability by re-imagining the planetary and by reworking the praxis of being human. As an assemblage of indeterminacy harbouring, what Spivak said, an “inexhaustible diversity of epistemes”, we shall try to locate the idea of apocalypse in the diverse works of literature, art and architecture and discuss how catastrophic events shapes and conditions the possibility and impossibility of existence by changing our collective and individual percepts, affects and experiences. In a world riven by accelerated exosomatisation inevitably leading to what Han Byung-Chul appropriately called a burnt-out syndrome, we intend to encounter the apocalypse as a caesura – of historical discontinuity; a break from conformity; a necessary breathing rift in a compressed world from which we bleed together, blend together – a space for expunction and reassembling. Apocalyptic spaces eschew bifurcations and embeddedness and is characterised by a conceptual openness to multiplicities, collectivities, transversalities and haecceities. In other words, it is a metamorphosis machine that produces new lines of flight and new permutations of becoming. It is, what Deleuze and Guattari call, a fibroproliferative unground – a processual exercise of molecular becoming and becoming-other. In this Deleuzo-Guattarian vein and through our discussions, we shall challenge the conventional mode of apocalyptic thinking, as a demarcation problem, that ontologises a nihilistic end-of-the-world thought, without questioning its socio-political agenda. Our idea is to liberate the apocalypse from the topographical ensnarement of our constructed mapping and fractalise apocalyptic thinking – identifying the apocalypse as a fractal-scape characterised by an affirmative schizoid plurality of thought administering a radical reshaping of planetary futures.

"In chapter nine, Marcus Quent makes an important connection between the abstractness of the idea of the good in classical German philosophy and the contemporary reflection on the total annihilation of the world by the atomic bomb. He points out that when we think about the good, we adopt a perspective of the end. In the present, however, action is no longer regarded as a potential articulation or realization of the good, but rather as a means of preventing an end: an ultimate catastrophe that can no longer be integrated into the perspective of the good. This reveals the problematic character of the relation between the good, the perspective of the end, and the operation of negation in our contemporary world. The chapter examines this relation by focusing on the two event horizons of a nuclear threat and climate change with their different temporalities. Drawing on Maurice Blanchot's intriguing critique of Karl Jaspers's book on the atomic bomb, it elaborates how the idea of humanity – as a self-generating whole and an absolute good – is at the heart of this problematic relation. Finally, the chapter questions the status of the idea of humanity in the discourse on the ecological transformation of our times."

This paper aims to explore the philosophical concepts of apocalyptic thinking and catastrophic thinking—concepts which are fairly new in the academic realm, and very much relevant to our epoch known as the Anthropocene— by first breaking down the nature of the words themselves, and then exploring these ideas using the few academic writings available on the topic, from the likes of Brad Evans and Julian Reid, along with Jacques Derrida. The text will then proceed to relate these modes of thought in the wider context of our world from different perspectives, relating them to notions learnt from other readings; notions of religion, hope, rhetoric; academia, etc. Through this, it is hoped that this paper will give the reader a basic understanding of catastrophic and apocalyptic thinking, and their relevance to our time, for they not only relate to our time but address matters that transcend time. Thus, helping the reader to view our epoch from a wider perspective that understands the complex, multi-layered nature of time, justice, truth, and other concepts, and hopefully understand the anthropocentric nature of our current thought processes and why they need to change. Keywords: Apocalyptic thinking; catastrophic thinking; Brad Evans; Julian Reid; resilient life; Derrida; philosophy; Anthropocene; epoch; truth; justice; the black eyed peas.

The physical threats posed by the environmental crises of the Anthropocene are matched by an equally devastating epistemological challenge: the epoch that signifies human dominance over ecosystems on a planetary scale is also marked by the utter failure to 'manage' the crisis, let alone the planet. The world, as Timothy Morton claims, has thus already ended. That is, 'world' as a notion of something that can be grasped and controlled in its entirety – both physically and epistemologically – is no longer a valid concept for what we are dealing with. How, then, to describe the non-world we live in? How to imagine the future? By analyzing Dietmar Dath's novel The Abolition of Species and comparing it to Morton's Hyperobjects, this essay explores the epistemological challenge posed by the 'End of the World.' Lingering on the borderline between academic and creative writing, both texts explore an emerging style of writing and thinking appropriate to the Anthropocene.

The human species has danced with the earth – its many species and systems – since our inception on the planet. How we view this relationship is as complicated as the interwoven network of synapses in our minds. It is through the unique expression of language that we give life and voice to this relationship. This paper delves into the meaning behind the language we use as a means of either connecting or separating our species to the planet we call home.

This contribution focuses on one member in particular of the anthropocenic triad Earth-technology-humankind, namely the current form of human subjectivity that characterizes humankind in the Anthropocene. Because knowledge, desire and behavior are always embedded in a particular form of subjectivity, it makes sense to look at the current subjective structure that embeds knowledge, desire and behavior. We want to move beyond the common psychological explanations that subjects are unable to correctly assess the consequences of their current technological lifestyle or unable to change their lifestyle because well-intended behavior is modified by factors such as laziness, lack of knowledge, seduction by convenience, etc. Instead, we will argue from a philosophical point of view that transcendental illusions play a central role in a contemporary account of subjectivity. Consumerism is considered as a means of not becoming a subject and framed in a profound ambivalence at the heart of our acting (consuming) against better knowledge. We appeal to collective transcendental conditions of subjectivity in the Anthropocene in terms of illusions without owners-a term borrowed from Robert Pfaller's work on interpassivity. Central in our account is the idea that illusions without owners are the conditions of possibility for the disconnection between knowledge and behavior-the characteristic par excellence of the Anthropocene.

My main thesis is that our existential sense of reality is conditioned by a certain way of fabricating our world. It is how we perceive and understand our worldly reality that we inhabit. We immerse ourselves inside of the artificial world that is physically fabricated by various human activities.2 While it has been assumed that the world solely exists as the human life world, separated from the surrounding natural world, the planetary crisis of climate change, or global warming, makes us aware of the earthly world, apart from human beings, going beyond the human presence. The sense of the existence of the contemporary human is thus conditioned by the contradictory registers of the world.

My presentation today is polarized in similar fashion to the opposition the conference has set out between nihilism and hope. The first pole is represented by the work of Eugene Thacker and his idea of Cosmic Pessimism, which names a philosophy of disenchantment and horror. The second is the more optimistic and ecological view of phenomenologist David Abram, who's work calls for a cosmology that puts the earth back at the centre of our view of the universe through an attention to the structure of perception itself. I present my work today as more of an exploration than an argument, so please think of it as a work in progress. I am very interested to hear feedback on the direction of my thought. I will proceed first by looking at what is at stake in Thacker's understanding of Cosmic Pessimism, then contrast this to the earth-centric cosmology of Abram, and finally attempt to use the tension between these two thinkers to ask some questions about new possibilities for ecological thinking. In his book In The Dust of This Planet, Thacker writes: The view of Cosmic Pessimism is a strange mysticism of the world-without-us, a hermeticism of the abyss, a noumenal occultism. It is the difficult thought of the world as absolutely unhuman, and indifferent to the hopes, desires, and struggles of human individuals and groups. Its limit-thought is the idea of absolute nothingness, unconsciously represented in the many popular media images of nuclear war, natural disasters, global pandemics, and the cataclysmic effects of climate change… Beyond these spectres there is the impossible thought of extinction, with not even a single human being to think the absence of all beings, with no thought to think the negation of all thought. (17) For Thacker this kind of pessimism has its origins in thinkers like Schopenhauer and Cioran, but is never fully articulated by either. It doubts the most basic premises of philosophy: the principle of sufficient reason, the dichotomy between self and world, that there is any order or harmony to the cosmos, and that even if there is such an order we can perhaps only have something like a negative awareness of it (In the Dust of This Planet 18). Cosmic Pessimism signifies a dark