The Fear We Feel Everyday

Abstract

In the recent wave of climate change activism, affects and time are everywhere. Most recent works have focused either on time and temporality or on affects and emotions, leaving the intersection between time and affectivity underexplored. This author argues that focusing on affects and emotions is crucial to understand the political implications of the temporal landscapes drawn by climate activists in a way that complements existing debates on politicization versus depoliticization. To document the political labor performed by affects and emotions, the article discusses three aspects of the affective temporalities mobilized by Fridays for Future and Youth for Climate activists: the political potential of affective tipping points which trigger moments that “draw a line” and bring together the temporalities of mobilization and geological change; the politicizing effect of painful emotions, such as anticipatory nostalgia and grief, which challenge the “modern arrow of time”; and the constitutive power of these emotions in the construction of a terrestrial affective identity.