The environmental state between pre-emption and inoperosity

As a politics of time, pre-emption establishes a ‘messianic’ relationship between past, present, and future, whereby an indeterminate but certain eschatological event is posited and indefinitely postponed. This gives reality plasticity while obstructing actual change. Pre-emption plays a growing role in environmental politics, building on two types of eschatology, catastrophic or regenerative, and two types of forces preventing its actualization, technological or natural, relying in all cases on state power. To challenge the logic of pre-emption, which overturns the traditional role of apocalypticism as radical contestation of the socio-ecological order, I consider ‘inoperosity’, which does not mean passivity, or political resignation, but a type of action that refrains from instrumentalizing the world toward relentless achievement and growth. As a concept, inoperosity may help us study emergent social mobilizations and orient the revision of core institutions, such as science, for the realization of which the environmental state is crucial.