Nuclear Temporalities

Abstract

The invention and unleashing of the first atomic weapons generated a historical rupture in the order of things that irrevocably changed the ways in which humans inhabit the world and experience time. The haunting knowledge of the power of nuclear weapons to potentially annihilate planetary life leaves a profound mark on human temporality and psychic life and creates transgenerational nuclear trauma. One of its effects is a subliminal, if not unconscious haunting from the future that overshadows human temporalities. Apart from this haunting from the future, nuclear temporalities also extend to sites of slow or structural nuclear violence. In my contribution, I will trace the entanglement between nuclear temporalities and nuclear subjectivities, including reflection on scale, deep time, nuclear half-life, temporal necropolitics, and psychic toxicity.