Re-E-Mergence and the Danger of Total Light: Introducing a New Framework for Climate Crisis Communication Through Dave Eggers’ The Circle

Abstract

This article reads Dave Eggers’ The Circle (2013) as a diagnosis of the epistemological logic that governs both the novel’s regime of total transparency and dominant climate crisis communication: the Enlightenment assumption that more light, more visibility, and more data will produce more clarity. Drawing on Timothy Morton’s (2013) concept of hyperobjects, Rob Nixon’s (2011) slow violence, and Adorno and Horkheimer’s (1997) critique of instrumental reason, the article argues that this assumption is constitutively misaligned with the nature of the crisis it claims to illuminate. Against this logic, it introduces Re-E-Mergence, an original framework grounded in Adorno’s (2004) negative dialectics and Didi-Huberman’s (2016) figure of the surviving fireflies, which proposes holding the tension between ‘light and darkness’ open rather than resolving it. Read through Re-E-Mergence, The Circle functions as re-stor(y)ation, or, a speculative form that performs the epistemological shift it proposes.