Characters curse storms, power blackouts and climate change sceptics in twenty-first century drama as the destructive force of climate change is theatrically represented across comic farce, realist tragedy and dystopian horror. While these theatrical forms differ in their affective and emotional impact, they commonly predict ecological disaster in the future. Disaster is broadly understood as the combination of historical and social determinants interacting with natural hazards and forces over time. Climate change disaster is framed in scenarios that range from humorous to terrifying and with a growing dramatic genre of futuristic climate fiction (cli-fi) about ecological collapse and political dystopia. Twenty-first century dramatisation presents both the absurdity of humanity’s inability to reduce carbon emissions and global warming and the tragedy of predicted disaster on a geological scale in the Anthropocene. At the same time, contemporary performance illuminates turning points in time turning points in time including a different outcome within the present including within the present.

Chapter 8 explores the ways in which mitigation has been politicised. Each of the four aspects of politics, set out in Chapter 3, is revisited to assess degrees and types of climate mitigation politicisation – partly to better understand the politics of acting to mitigate in this current phase and partly to identify important tensions and opportunities that need to be recognised when thinking politically about mitigation.

Across her fiction and non-fiction, Elizabeth Bowen is consistently intrigued by hotels. From the grand Italian Riviera establishment of her debut novel, The Hotel, to the series of dingy ‘back rooms in hotels … with no view’ occupied by Portia Quayne and her mother in The Death of the Heart, many of Bowen’s characters occupy, however briefly, the transitory, impermanent space of the hotel. Although characters move through hotel space, they are never left unmarked by it. Portia’s teacher observes her ‘hotel habits’, which she cannot shake. This chapter explores Bowen’s preoccupation with the space of the hotel in her writing, and demonstrates her acute sense not only of its unique spatiality, but also of the intricacies of hotel temporality. More specifically, I argue that Bowen is a writer who is profoundly sensitive to the relationship between people and the spaces they occupy, and this sensitivity comes to the fore in the hotel phenomenologies of her characters.

The introduction critically examines current understandings of climate mitigation politics and makes a case for thinking politically and proactively about mitigation. This is contrasted with approaches that explicitly seek to draw narrow boundaries around mitigation politics and/or to avoid it. It sets out the overall approach to the book, how it relates to existing research on mitigation politics, and introduces the four ‘phases’ of climate politics that form the historical analysis in the book.

The Conclusion begins by setting the poetic bilingualisms treated in this book alongside the kinds of everyday bilingualism overheard on the streets of any city, from antiquity to the present day, in which two or more cultures meet, clash, and coalesce. There too, inequalities of language status will often be in play; but the inequalities explored here are negotiated in a distinctive way across time, and between ‘older’ and ‘younger’ literary languages or codes. Issues of education and of access to the so-called learned tongues are reviewed; attention is drawn to the sometimes oppressive effect of the word ‘the’ in monolithic master narratives of ‘the’ classical tradition. In retrospect, the book is argued to have been less about achieved classicism than about classicism as process, about a plurality of classical traditions generated anew by every cross-linguistic and transcultural event mobilized by every poet and every reader. Things end with a closural – but also open-ended – catalogue of some of the book’s recurrent questions, preoccupations, themes, and tropes.

This coda takes the form of a sample judgment that rewrites Baron and Others v Claytile (Pty) Limited and Another [2017] to tangibly illustrate the promise of Alter-Native Constitutionalism. Contrasted with the real-life judgment issued by the Constitutional Court, which relied on liberal approaches, the Alter-Native ‘judgment’ gives willing courts the necessary tools to enforce the ‘property’ rights of ‘non-owners’ and thus highlights the opportunities for equitable solutions the Court has missed, including in its real-life judgment. Emphasizing the importance of robustly applying Ubu-Ntu (rather than the insipid ‘ubuntu’ that scholars and the Court have substituted for it) and applying Ntu Constitutionalism’s jurisprudential framework for constitutional and statutory interpretation developed earlier in the book, the opinion demonstrates existing possibilities for recognising shared rights and promoting housing as a relational, spatiotemporal ‘existence’. By reinterpreting constitutional and legislative provisions to respect indigenous onto-epistemological perspectives on land-as-housing, the Alter-Native opinion demonstrates a transformative approach to ‘property law’ that inherently critiques the Constitutional Court’s interpretation of the ‘property’ and ‘housing’ clauses largely to the exclusion of vernacular law. This Alter-Native opinion thus presents a literally embodied argument for the need for broadening restitution, addressing both enduring injustices and future possibilities over multiple generations.

This chapter provides an analysis of the structure of love in Kierkegaard’s thought, which takes its most developed shape in Works of Love. This analysis will help us understand the four key elements of Kierkegaardian love that constitute it in its proper sense. The four elements of love are: repetition, time, commitment, and the good of the other. The overall argument in this chapter is that for Kierkegaard love necessitates a repeated, hence time-oriented, commitment to the good of the other. The object of this commitment is the other and that which is truly their good, which is their “abiding in love.”

This chapter examines Augustine’s discussion of time in Book 11. The contrast between eternity, in which there is no succession or change, and time, which is nothing but succession and change, is a crucial first step. Augustine uses this contrast to distinguish between ordinary utterances and God’s creative Word, the coeternal Son. Time is itself created, so there is no sense in asking what God was doing before he created, though Augustine’s understanding of the relationship between time and eternity raises difficult philosophical questions that Augustine himself does not address, though recent philosophers of religion have done so. Augustine appears to hold that only what is (temporally) present exists. The most contentious issue is whether Augustine holds a subjectivist theory of time, and if so, what exactly that theory is. After canvasing the merits of possible answers to that question, the chapter concludes that the most charitable reading is that Augustine “does not seem to offer an account of what time is but instead ‘merely’ offers an aporetic examination of certain puzzles concerning time and our experience of it.” This construal is "entirely in keeping with his frequently open-ended and exploratory manner of philosophical investigation.”

This chapter examines the intimate world of the family through an intergenerational lens. Education and work outside the home are understood by many women in Malaysia, as elsewhere, to have fundamentally altered the dynamics of conjugality. Variations in individual life courses, availability of resources, education and ethnic or religious backgrounds partly shape trajectories of life and marriage. Exploring continuity and change between generations, we see how marriage encapsulates both possibilities, enabling radical departures from conventional norms under the guise of conformity as well as the replication of past patterns. The binary of ‘arrangement’ versus ‘choice’ constitutes, simultaneously, a reference point and a misleading way to calibrate transformation – as anthropologists have shown for South Asia. Beyond this, marriages mark time, and are a means to tell and reflect upon family histories. Efforts to change the course of events or escape cycles of misfortune may be rare and difficult to achieve. Reflecting on differences and change across generations engages qualities of moral imagination, and is part of making history.

Alexandra Newton discusses the relation between virtue and habit in Kant’s moral philosophy. While commentators frequently claim that Kant rejects Aristotle’s definition of virtue as a type of habit, Newton argues that this overlooks the fact that Kant distinguishes different kinds of habit. While he rejects the idea that virtue is a habit of action or desire, like Aristotle he allows virtue to be a habit of choice (hexis prohairetike), understood as an exercise of practical reason. Carefully distinguishing the different notions of habit Kant delineates thus allows us to see that his conception of virtue is more Aristotelian than commonly assumed. At the same time, Newton notes, there remain important points on which Kant’s conception diverges from Aristotle’s, having to do specifically with the temporal character of virtue

The substantive discussion begun in Chapter 2, particularly on interpretation, is continued in Chapter 3 through the prism of progress. Collective understandings of state violence, including torture, are understood to have changed over time, with what was historically conceived as permissible coming to be condemned as reprehensible. Changing understandings of pain and punishment, it is argued, are sociopolitically contingent, with legal assessments of torture too beholden to this broader context. On this register, the chapter charts the broader contours of the central shifts in prevailing social and scientific views, values and knowledge, as channelled or challenged through judges and taken to constitute torture’s sociality. This has culminated, it is argued, in a script of ‘progress’ driving the anti-torture field.

The entangled relations of humanity’s natural and digital ecosystems are discussed in terms of the risk-uncertainty conundrum. The discussion focuses on global warming from the perspective of the small world of geoengineering, with a particular focus on geothermal energy, marine geoengineering, and the political economy of mitigation and adaptation (section 1). It inquires into the large world of the biosphere, Anthropocene, and uncertainties created by the overlay of human and geological time (section 2). And it scrutinizes the technosphere, consciousness, and language as humanity’s arguably most important cultural technology (section 3).