Cli-fi and the Uncanny

How will anthropogenic climate change transform the future worlds of human existence? This question is the banal, very anthropocentric, but not the less central departure point of several contemporary climate fictions. In these fictions we find characters, whose being-in-the-world is radically altered by manifestations of climate change appearing inside their sensual horizons. The paper will focus on how two of the most common worlds appearing in contemporary climate fiction, the world of the collapse (social disintegration due to global warming) and the judgment (nature punishing humanity due to global warming), form a new affective setting for human existence. Thus, we in both the worlds of the collapse and the judgment find characters, who experience their climate changed surroundings as eerie, though, in different ways. The article seeks to interpret the eeriness attached to respectively the worlds of the collapse and the worlds of the judgment by following two different paths. The first path – seeking to describe the eeriness attached to the worlds of the breakdown – ¬begins with Heidegger’s description of the uncanny unhomely (das Unheimliche) as a mood or stimmung in Being and Time (1927) and continues into the works of the two critical Heidegger-readers Hermann Schmitz and Reinhart Koselleck. The second path – seeking to describe the eeriness attached to the worlds of the judgment – begins with Freud’s description of the uncanny unhomely as a feeling provoke by an animated object in “Das Unheimliche” (1919) and continues into the works of Michel Serres and Bruno Latour.