The death of hope? Affirmation in the Anthropocene

This article engages with the imaginary that the great age of hope as critique is finally at an end. For hope's detractors, the Anthropocene is imagined to be a gain in ethical and political possibilities at the price of the eclipse of both the modernist imaginary (with its optimistic telos of universal knowledge and progress) and its romantic critical counterpart of re-enchantment and hope. Hope can have no place in the Anthropocene if re-enchantment is no longer possible and we no longer maintain the belief that the world was ever there, in some way, ‘for us’. It is argued here that, for hope to survive, it is necessary that the world be imagined as one in which it is possible for humans to find a sense of purpose or meaning.