Transition or Interregnum? Two Ways of Understanding Politics in the Anthropocene

In our times, talk of ‘transitioning’ to a world without fossil fuels has become pervasive. Despite its prevalence in environmental politics, this article argues that it is counterproductive to envisage the current conjuncture through the prism of a transition. I defend this claim by first outlining three respects in which the transition paradigm falls short: political corruptibility, historical inadequacy and conceptual confusion. Rather than recuperate the meaning of transitioning for progressive purposes, the constructive part of the article then asks which analytical framework should take its place. My proposal is to take inspiration from Antonio Gramsci’s notion of an interregnum to illuminate the distinctive political challenges of the Anthropocene. Gramsci’s conceptual apparatus foregrounds the fundamental openness of the future and thus facilitates a better understanding of various ‘morbid symptoms’, whose proliferation today can only be explained through a theoretical approach that combines attention to both individual well-being and social pathologies.