Abstract Here we develop the concept of metacrisology – a way of thinking shaped by crisis that examines the nature of crisis itself – by engaging with philosophers in the context of climate change, technological acceleration and symbolic misery. Beginning with a traumatic childhood experience of cosmic finitude, we reconceive crisis not merely as a path toward inevitable disaster but, in Kostas Axelos’s Heraclitean sense, as an improbable imperative that challenges passive acceptance. Drawing on Bernard Stiegler’s interpretation of krisis as a decisive moment, we argue that the metacrisis is fundamentally a crisis of time deprived of care. Yet against survivalist resignation, we advocate a pedagogy of the unexpected ( anelpiston ) that cultivates openness to the unprecedented as such. For this we search for a new experimental language to explain the situation. Byung-chul Han’s critique of Heidegger and his revival of the sublime also informs our discussion of beauty as a temporal suspension that resists the rush of technical time. We critique the fetishisation of wounds, whether symbolic or ecological, that forecloses futures and instead argue for a destructive aesthetics that can generate the untimely catastrophe from which, in Deleuze’s sense, a people-to-come might emerge.
Bradley et al. (Mon,) studied this question.