Thomas KEATING, Linköping University, Sweden
Anna STORM, Linköping University, Sweden
The relationship between time, temporality, and nuclear matter has gained renewed attention with the rise of ‘nuclearity’ as a key leitmotif for thinking about the categorization of objects, events, and material things as “nuclear”. What this conceptual attention to nuclearity has produced is a renewed interest in how the varied materialities of human and non-human bodies are implicated within wider processes and logics of nuclear politics (Hecht, 2014). However, within this conversation less has been said about how the concepts of time and temporality inform the political categorization of places and things as nuclear or not. Drawing on field our collaborative research with the Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Company (SKB), we examine the concepts of time and temporality through our project’s primary research question: How to communicate memory of nuclear waste repositories 100,000 years into the future? Following reconceptualizations of time developed in continental philosophies – including Henri Bergson’s duration, Gilles Deleuze’s crystalline time, and Bernard Stiegler’s notion of time as a form of unthought exteriority modified by technics – we respond to this question by suggesting how the concepts of time and temporality might inform social science engagements with nuclearity. By way of conclusion, we argue that there is a question of time running through Bergson, Deleuze and Stiegler that is significant for nuclear geographies and social sciences because it can think the future of post-nuclear landscapes openly and speculatively, without founding these thoughts on the evaluations and calculative logics of the human subject.
Mots clés : Memory|Temporality|Deleuze|Landscape|Affect
A103746TK