Stretches of imagination at the end of times: Affective workouts against apocalypse

Abstract

This paper depicts imagination in the horizon of the posthumous condition as a number of “affective workouts” – emotionally demanding exercises of reaching out and relating that require routines, training, staging and a fearless will to connect. The conceptual inspiration comes from Günther Anders’ postwar writings on our blindness in the face of the apocalyptic threat of the nuclear bomb and his propositions of moral stretching exercises to train our imagination. By bringing some of his ideas from the atomic age to our current ecological crisis, this paper allows his end times to speak to ours, and ask: what does it mean to imagine (with) the apocalypse as a way of forestalling it?