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

Three Problems with the Transition Paradigm

What could be wrong with the transition paradigm, then, given the variegated nature of its underlying social imaginary? In this section, I want to argue that there are three major reasons for why we ought to contemplate abandoning the transition paradigm as both a guide to action and as an analytical framework: a political, a historical and a conceptual one.

First, the language of transitioning in environmental politics has become comprehensively co-opted by elite actors, to such an extreme extent that it is nowadays emptied of all its critical purchase. To grasp this point, a quick look back in history will be instructive. The emergence of the transition paradigm in environmental politics is by now well-established. As Jonathan White (2025: 2–4) has demonstrated, the 1980s were the decade in which the idea of a green transition really took off. From the start, a major motivation was the move away from carbon-based fuels that were deemed at risk of running out. Spurred by fears of ‘peak oil’ and seduced by the promises of an atomic age (Fressoz, 2024: 142–173), the pursuit of sustainable energy was gradually couched in terms of a comprehensive transition. International organizations, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), increasingly employed the term as well, to stress the need for a system-wide change in light of global warming. Importantly, this institutional shift was complemented by a general re-orientation of the green agenda, from enduring efforts to preserve elements of nature through conservation projects to a forward-looking anxiety about the escalating rise in greenhouse gas emissions.

Over the past 40 years, the currency of the transition paradigm has gained in value even further, not least since it was also pushed by social movements insisting on the justice component of any transition process. Although the idea was initially revolutionary, underscoring the essential interdependence of labour and environmental concerns (Stevis, 2023; Wilgosh et al., 2022), today it seems that invoking a ‘transition’ towards new and sustainable energy sources primarily serves as a welcome excuse for not acting immediately and for downplaying the challenges that humankind has to face. In fact, zooming forward to the 21^st Century reveals how much transition talk has by now morphed into a distinctive type of ‘dithering’ (Haraway, 2016: 144–145), of failing to take responsibility, of postponing existential choices.

We can illustrate this fact by revisiting the COP28 meeting in the United Arab Emirates. Up until the very last day, it looked like the 2023 summit would end in ignominy and produce no final declaration. The bone of contention was a dispute around the plea to ‘phase out’ or (less ambitiously) ‘phase down’ fossil fuels in the near future. On this specific point, the COP could not settle, despite scientists and activists unanimously advocating for it (Carrington, 2023). What ultimately facilitated a breakthrough in the negotiations was the following formulation, recommended by almost 200 countries: that worldwide efforts would be undertaken to transition away from gas, oil and coal ‘in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science’ (Morton et al., 2023).

This might at first sound like an audacious statement in favour of renewable energy, but its genesis exposes the corruption of transition talk. The vignette vividly proves that in global diplomacy around climate change, ‘transitioning away’ from fossil fuels has degenerated into the lowest common denominator, rather than a genuinely transformative objective – not a very auspicious outlook, given the vested interests of incumbent elites that will have to be defeated in the years to come (Geels, 2014). ⁵

The negotiations in the United Arab Emirates epitomize a political strategy that Antonio Gramsci – our interlocutor in the following section – portrayed as ‘passive revolution’, or ‘transformism’ (Gramsci, 2011: 257): ‘a strategy of assimilating and domesticating potentially dangerous ideas by adjusting them to the policies of the dominant coalition’ (Cox, 1993: 55). While, just like any social imaginary, the transition paradigm remains internally ambivalent and riven by ongoing contestation, the preponderance of such transformism reveals that its normative core has become so corroded that it is nowadays entirely stripped of its progressive purchase.

Beyond this specific example, a major concern with the politics of the transition paradigm more generally relates to its top-down understanding of social change, as a result of which popular power is consistently sidelined. In accordance with their technocratic and solutionist approaches to the climate emergency, many advocates of a green transition entertain a profoundly ambivalent relationship with the principles and practices of democracy, as Jonathan White remarks:

The thought of an endpoint within touching distance can make weakly democratic methods seem more palatable, on the understanding that they are task-specific and need only be temporary. The idea of a transitional period that is but an interlude between two points of equilibrium invites the willingness to use whatever methods seem able to expedite the process. (White, 2025: 14)

The second problem with the transition paradigm is its resting on a shaky historical record. The hope behind this social imaginary appears forthright: that decarbonization would eventually lead to a world in which fossil fuels are completely replaced by renewable energy sources, such as wind or solar. Historians sometimes follow the same logic of simple replacement when they home in on a singular energy source and related technological advances of a given period, such as coal during the Industrial Revolution, for example. Yet, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz (2024) has contended that this view of an emerging energy system substituting, in a linear fashion, the preceding one is empirically incorrect. ‘Mono-energetic’ explanations like this fail to factor in the stubborn persistence of parallel energy systems, which interfere with novel sources as they slowly rise to full dominance. Wood was not simply ‘replaced’ by coal during the Industrial Revolution but kept on playing an outsized role in the extraction of coal and beyond.

Fressoz’s conclusion is that the very notion of an energy transition needs to be called into question, for it makes it appear as if certain inventions, like the steam engine in the past or wind and solar today, seamlessly managed to steer the shift from one energy system to another. Such technology-focused approaches betray a tendency to overstate the extent to which every epoch can be defined by what is innovative, thereby ignoring the ‘place of technology within wider historical processes’ (Edgerton, 2008: 211). By contrast, a materialist history of ecological transformations must stress the symbiotic intermingling of old and new energy systems. Instead of transitions, we should thus speak of ‘successive additions of new sources of primary energy’ (Bonneuil and Fressoz, 2016: 101; italics in original). ⁶

On this account, the transition paradigm is not only the product of a blinkered historiography, but it also affords elite actors a welcome opportunity to uphold the status quo. By hailing groundbreaking innovations in the pursuit of decarbonization, the energy transition feeds into a ‘real policy of procrastination’ and even amounts to a ‘form of climate denial’ (Fressoz, 2023). According to this perspective, faith in technology to somehow ‘solve’ the climate crisis in an indeterminate future underpins the transition paradigm. Therefore, its social imaginary enters into close contact with the ‘business as usual’-mentality. This conclusion might at first sound counterintuitive, since proposals for an energy transition are usually marketed as profound challenges to the status quo. But Fressoz submits that it is the relentless investment (both financial and affective) in new, groundbreaking technologies that ultimately renders us oblivious to the contentious politics of energy systems and their material foundations. ⁷

The third objection is conceptually grounded and entails the most powerful refutation of the transition paradigm. The notion of a transition implies that we have a reasonably well-defined sense of where we shall arrive once the intermediate phase of structural transformation comes to an end. Transition talk is teleological, presupposing the known existence of an end state towards which we should collectively strive. Ulrich Brand (2014: 249) makes the point that etymologically the meaning of transition in Latin derives from ‘going across’. Any crossing needs a landing spot. Without it, the social imaginary behind the concept of ‘transitioning’ relinquishes its promise of guiding collective action.

However, such confident assumptions about an end state of the current conjuncture are under severe pressure right now. It is one of the most disconcerting aspects of living in a climate-changed world that we are, in fact, incapable of fully anticipating the future of our species’ place on a planet undergoing turmoil. As a consequence, the process of coming to terms with the Anthropocene must remain open-ended, without the facile assurances of a known end state. This anti-teleological stance frustrates the expectation of a straightforward resolution to the multiple obstacles of the Anthropocene. The ostensibly optimistic horizon of decarbonization is simply too generic and vague in this regard, offering too little by way of concrete hope. As Julia Nordblad puts it:

[t]he problem with conceptualizing the Anthropocene in terms of a transition is that it suggests that the main challenge ahead is to trace the itinerary from one predetermined state to another, rather than to think about what kind of futures would be desirable, why, for whom, and how they could be made possible. (Nordblad, 2021: 335)

Since it takes for granted that which cannot be ascertained, namely firm knowledge of where we are actually heading, let alone how long it will take us to get there, the metaphor of ‘transitioning away’ from fossil fuels is misleading on a conceptual level. When the novelist Amitav Ghosh (2016) calls our times an age of ‘great derangement’, it is precisely this generalized disorientation that he alludes to. The issue with transition talk, then, is that it offers false comforts about a desirable future trajectory that must in fact escape the control of political agents.

Concluding this section, it is vital to recall that, despite all these concerns, the transition paradigm remains firmly anchored both in policy circles, the wider public and across academia. How can this be explained? Its entrenchment, it turns out, has at least to some degree to do with the controlling influence of elite actors, to quote Jonathan White once again:

It [the transition paradigm] promises a way to control change so as to make it palatable, predictable and time-bound, and possible to discontinue when it threatens to interfere with other goals. [. . .] Paradigms are embraced because they suit interested actors and are maintained long after observers have questioned their worth. [. . .] The effect is a distorted understanding of the challenge. ‘Transition’ suggests a process whose end is in sight. The ecological project is by contrast open-ended, and one should be wary of concepts that obscure this. (White, 2025: 16)

The Politics of Interregnum

Together, these three criticisms mount a significant challenge to the transition paradigm, by uncovering its political corruptibility, historical inadequacy and conceptual confusion. This naturally raises the question which rival framework might help us make better sense of the status quo. Responding to this question is the chief aim of this section.

An obvious candidate might be the vocabulary of a ‘polycrisis’, which has recently gathered significant traction across a wide range of debates. Edgar Morin and Anne Brigitte Kern (1999: 74), who first came up with this neologism, remark that in a polycrisis there ‘is no single vital problem, but many vital problems, and it is this complex intersolidarity of problems, antagonisms, crises, uncontrolled processes, and the general crisis of the planet that constitutes the number one vital problem’. Michael Albert (2024: 2) elaborates on this definition when he notes that a polycrisis consists of a ‘nexus of reciprocally entwined crises characterized by complex feedback loops, blurred boundaries, cascade effects, and (in many cases) mutual amplification’. ⁸

The term ‘polycrisis’ directs attention to the complexity of the current conjuncture, but it ultimately does not enhance our diagnostic capabilities, apart from more strongly concentrating on the multiple intersecting obstacles we are presently facing, linking together economics, politics, psychology, etc. Despite its sensitivity to the compounding and cascading character of these impediments and its strong emphasis on emergence, the concept is indebted to a problem-solving mind-set that superficially rejects the goal of a ‘single fix’, but still remains wedded to an ideal of ‘progress by way of improvisation, innovation, reform and crisis-management’ (Tooze, 2022). What is more, key promoters of polycrisis thinking tend to magnify the multiplicity of its causes, while underrating the degree to which the current conjuncture can still be explained by the core unifying logics of the capitalist system (Penner, 2023; Wainwright, 2024). ⁹

My proposal in this section is to tease out a more appropriate vocabulary by repurposing Antonio Gramsci’s idea of an ‘interregnum’ instead. Before delving into the details of this idea, a word on how I intend to read Gramsci. Following Stuart Hall’s injunction to ‘‘think’ our problems in a Gramscian way’, rather than ‘use Gramsci [. . .] like an Old Testament prophet’ (Hall, 1990: 161) who possesses all the answers, I shall attempt to investigate the ways in which one of Gramsci’s operative terms might enable us to cast the present moment in a new light. The goal is therefore not to mine Gramsci’s thought for ahistorical, decontextualized truths that could then be applied to grapple with contemporary problems, but to examine whether his conceptual apparatus affords novel perspectives on the specific obstacles of our times. ¹⁰

Space constraints prevent me from exhaustively expanding on Gramsci’s relevance for this debate, so the purpose here is merely to offer a primer for conceiving the Anthropocene as an interregnum period. Even though I will not be able, for example, to scrutinize in detail what it might mean to think conjuncturally about our ecological predicament, the hope remains that looking at the Anthropocene and its distinctive obstacles through the prism of Gramsci’s conceptual apparatus may give the reader an impression of the diagnostic and prescriptive potential that the term ‘interregnum’ harbours. ¹¹

Writing in his Prison Notebooks from 1930, Gramsci remarked that ‘[t]he crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born: in this interregnum, morbid phenomena of the most varied kind come to pass’ (Gramsci, 1992: 32–33). Rather than following the traditional understanding of the term as the temporally limited transfer of power from one legitimate ruler to another, Gramsci re-interpreted ‘interregnum’ to cover any exceptional situation in which a hitherto stable political order has lost its hegemonic grip, but no new system of power yet manages to establish itself.

Even though it is not known whether Gramsci was explicitly drawing on the Republican office of an interrex in Roman law, according to which patricians would be chosen by the Senate to govern for a maximum of 5 days in case both consuls had died (Koptev, 2016), his construal undoubtedly departs from the ancient sources. For the Romans, the interrex was supposed to accommodate a basic constraint of both law and religion, namely that there ‘must be no break in the supreme authority of the state’ (Friezer, 1959: 301). Gramsci saw things differently, since for him an interregnum is always prompted by the disintegration of authority. ¹²

Given that Gramsci refers to the interregnum in just a few places of his vast oeuvre, it will be beneficial to quickly situate the term, both within his own thinking and within the intellectual landscape he was navigating. To begin with the first dimension, key to grasping Gramsci’s claim is the modal verb describing the effect of a hegemonic order’s termination: ‘the new cannot be born’. This phrasing suggests that the establishment of novel power structures cannot be easily enforced or expedited. During an interregnum period, a profound and protracted unravelling of authority occurs such that formerly leading ideologies fall into abeyance and elites as well as the working class start quarrelling among themselves over the best way forward.

Another formulation that Gramsci introduces to analyse the same phenomenon is a ‘static equilibrium’ of opposing forces, in which ‘no class, neither the conservative nor the progressive class, has the strength to win’ (Gramsci, 1992: 242). Both the biological and the architectural metaphor highlight that under certain circumstances extreme polarization creates a stalemate in which an ‘organic crisis’ becomes irresolvable and thus instigates institutional instability (Antonini, 2021: 112). Such a crisis differs from a conjunctural one in vital regards. Whereas the former describes often protracted phases during which the ruling class faces ‘incurable contradictions’ (Gramsci, 1992: 177), the latter captures more local disruptions of the common sense that overall do not imperil the stable edifice of hegemony. Evidently, under certain conditions a conjunctural crisis may trigger the onset of an organic one, but this need not necessarily be the case. Given the textual proximity of these two concepts, it seems compelling to infer that Gramsci employed the terms ‘interregnum’ and ‘organic crisis’ interchangeably (on this point, see Ó Rálaigh, 2025: 4).

Moving to the wider context, it is crucial to realize that Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks ought to be read as responses to the violent disorder of early 20th Century Italy. While the notion of an interregnum was not commonly used in Marxist circles of the time, Gramsci’s reflections on this topic can be deciphered as interventions into the most urgent debates of the day. Concretely, this means that it is the ‘crisis of the liberal order that supplies the immediate backdrop to Gramsci’s thought’ (Martin, 2015: 35). Gramsci sought to illuminate how the downfall of the liberal regime historically unfolded and why it eventually culminated in Mussolini’s brutal oppression of the workers’ movement and the inauguration of a fascist dictatorship in 1922 (Martin, 1998: 12–38).

As a consequence of this orientation towards actual struggles, Gramsci’s rendering of interregnum politics kept in constant dialogue with major theorists of liberalism in Italy, such as most prominently Benedetto Croce, who tried to proffer an idealist justification for the state (on this discussion, see Bellamy, 1990). The historical period in which Gramsci wrote was, in sum, shaped by the deadly conflict between the revolutionary forces of fascism and communism, from the interwar years onwards; a rivalry that Gramsci himself, as a prisoner of the Mussolini regime, ultimately fell victim to (on Gramsci’s life, see Pearmain, 2020).

Despite this very different setting from ours today, there is no reason to conclude we should not redeploy Gramsci’s conceptual apparatus for the purpose of exploring other epochs and their organic crises as well. ¹³ Political economists, students of international relations and critical theorists have already started to draw on the notion of an interregnum to investigate a variety of social phenomena, from the shift to a post-capitalist economic system (Streeck, 2016), to the breakdown of the liberal world order (Babic, 2020) and the ascendancy of left-populist movements (Mouffe, 2018). ¹⁴ Notwithstanding this recent wave of reception, many commentators casually nod at Gramsci without engaging with his ideas in depth. To remedy this shortcoming, Rune Møller Stahl has carefully reconstructed Gramsci’s compressed thoughts on this topic and isolated four elements that together make up an interregnum: ‘(1) absence of a stable consensus, (2) presence of competing economic strategies, (3) institutional continuity but decreased effectiveness of key institutions, and (4) realignment of social forces’ (Stahl, 2019: 343).

This analysis emphasizes the alterations within the political economy of an interregnum period; an interpretive route that many of the contemporary applications of Gramsci’s framework pursue as well. Instead of following in their footsteps, I want to zero in on openness and uncertainty as crucial tenets of an organic crisis. The motivation behind this focus is the direct comparison with the transition paradigm as a diagnostic and prescriptive model for understanding politics in the Anthropocene. My claim in the remainder of this section will be that Gramsci’s approach, with its characteristic sensitivity to the contingent nature of an organic crisis, succeeds in elucidating the present moment in such a manner as to alleviate the political, historical and conceptual inadequacies of the transition paradigm.

Initially, it would appear that there is a parallel between the social imaginary of an energy transition and Gramsci’s notion: they both capture phases between more stable regimes (drawn-out interims), in which the hegemonic order is not undergoing a protracted unravelling. This temporal liminality is a crucial uniting factor, but it also discloses a significant difference between these two approaches to the current conjuncture. The transition paradigm conceives of the in-betweenness of the present moment as an occasion for substituting an ecologically devastating energy system with a more sustainable one. Even though the horizon of decarbonization remains undetermined, it is designed to serve as an inchoate guide to action, ideally turned into reality with the support of innovative technologies that still have to be invented and scaled up in the future. That this goal-driven process is often managed in a top-down and anti-democratic fashion is just one of the reasons why the transition paradigm has become so attractive to elite actors.

By contrast, Gramsci’s conceptualization foregrounds the urgency of coming to terms with the ineradicable openness of an organic crisis. In an interregnum, it is in principle not feasible to anticipate how the game will unfold, who will end up winning and who will end up vanquished. Once the authority behind political projects collapses, social forces seek to realign and build a new hegemonic order – without any prospect of immediate success. The aporetic nature of an interregnum thus highlights that everything in these dangerous times is up for grabs, and existing schemata for understanding and doing politics have forfeited their value. As Donald Sassoon (2021: 1) maintains, the ‘chief characteristic of the interregnum between old and new is uncertainty’. For this reason, an organic crisis often breeds apprehension and dread, of course, but it may also generate surprising occasions for positive change – a point I shall return to below.

Now, what renders the more specific claim about the Anthropocene as an interregnum period plausible? ¹⁵ It is a key intuition behind the controversy around the Anthropocene that it marks the inception of a novel epoch, beyond the Holocene, in which our species has become a geological force in its own right (for an introduction to this intricate debate, see Lewis and Maslin, 2018). So, one relevant sense in which we might wish to speak of an interregnum today is in terms of a historical constellation where the old structures of authority of the Holocene have collapsed, but a new order based on the Anthropocene has not yet managed to establish itself. The recognition of planetary boundaries (Rockström et al.,2009a, 2009b) has brought with it a momentous reckoning: that humanity’s ‘safe operating space’ is under threat right now and might only be salvaged if radical alternatives to the status quo are explored (Brand et al., 2021).

There are material circumstances on a planetary scale – empirically observable biophysical processes, such as the extensive destruction of ecosystems and ever-rising levels of carbon emissions – that make the current conjuncture distinctive relative to prior eras. The human costs of this new epoch are already enormous: toxic pollution, to name but one ramification, is nowadays causing more than 8 million deaths per year (Marcantonio et al., 2021: 2), affecting almost exclusively low- and middle-income countries (Fuller et al., 2022). The impact on non-human nature is greater still, as the biodiversity crisis continuously deepens, initiating what some have started to call a ‘Sixth Mass Extinction’ event (Cowie et al., 2022).

Beyond this Earth System perspective, we can witness a transformation of the emotional circumstances of politics, sparked by the openness and uncertainty of an organic crisis. What the present moment reveals is the often-chaotic interaction between human-induced turbulences on a planetary scale with the local conditions of politics (Schlosberg, 2023). One way in which this manifests itself is through feelings of stuckness, of running into an impasse that leaves no way out. ¹⁶ As Donna Haraway has remarked, we nowadays seem trapped between two equally unappealing positions: between, on one hand, the ‘position that the game is over, it’s too late, there’s no sense trying to make anything any better’, and, on the other hand, a ‘comic faith in technofixes’ (Haraway, 2016: 8). On this view, we have in essence become caught between an excessively pessimistic view of the future (‘doomism’) and a naively hopeful one (‘hopium’). As a consequence, little room for genuine manoeuvre is left. It is this lived experience of stuckness, of not being able to move, that pervades the current conjuncture as one of its constitutive affects. ¹⁷

This take on the Anthropocene enables us to comprehend, then, that the transition paradigm, with its questionable suppositions about the politics, history and conceptualization of a climate-changed world, needs to be discarded in favour of a framework that acknowledges the openness and uncertainty of the present moment. This is where the advantages of Gramsci’s notion of an interregnum surface, as a lens for seeing the current conjuncture that operates both diagnostically (what it is) and prescriptively (how it might be engaged). In the next section, I shall expand more on both these dimensions to further strengthen my argument.

Morbid Symptoms and Social Pathologies

Which lessons can be derived from the observation that during an interregnum period ‘morbid symptoms’ tend to surface and multiply? An additional benefit of Gramsci’s approach, I argue, lies in its acute grasp of those ‘morbid symptoms’ that inevitably manifest during an organic crisis.

Just as the term ‘interregnum’ enjoyed an increased uptake over the past decades, so did the phrase ‘morbid symptoms’ find its way into a range of scientific publications, from a study of capitalist catastrophism and eco-apartheid (Heron, 2024), to an exploration of reactionary ways of thinking about the Anthropocene (Hoggett, 2023: 71–108) and a polemic around global politics today (Sassoon, 2021). Many of these invocations of Gramsci’s phrase are insightful, but they sometimes lack interpretive rigour. The standard reading states that Gramsci gestured at the proliferation of fascism in his times when he alluded to an interregnum’s ‘morbid symptoms’. This is often interpreted as a prescient judgement of our age as well, where right-wing populist parties are starting to tighten their grip on many countries around the world (Worth, 2019). Yet, as Gilbert Achcar has argued, such a reading is somewhat deceptive. In fact, the phrase most likely referred to the emergence of ‘ultraleft symptoms’ (Achcar, 2022: 383), that is, to debates within progressive movements in the 1920s as they sought to grapple with the working class’s as-yet weak capacity to wrestle power from a failing liberal state.

In its contemporary applications the metaphor itself has proven highly productive, not only in the context of phenomena such as reactionary feminism (Sturman, 2024) but also with respect to the climate emergency. Recall that the openness of an interregnum renders existing schemata for understanding and doing politics obsolete. Whereas the social imaginary behind an energy transition seeks to reassure us that a viable path towards decarbonization exists (projected into an unspecified future), the framework of an interregnum foregrounds the uncertainty of the current conjuncture.

Against this backdrop, I would like to pick out one dimension of this general and diffuse sense of disorientation that might be described as a ‘morbid symptom’: denial. There are undoubtedly other developments today that could also be classified as ‘morbid symptoms’, such as, for example, the emergence of ecofascist social movements and far-right environmental parties that criss-cross ideological boundaries in a diagonal fashion (Lubarda, 2020; Moore and Roberts, 2022), but this one strikes me as particularly widespread and impactful.

Climate change denial is a complex phenomenon that has over time taken many different forms, from the ‘denial of global warming, the denial of its anthropogenic sources and the denial of its seriousness’ (Dunlap and McCright, 2010: 240). Over the past 40 years or so, the main promoters of climate change denial have shifted as well. While in the past it was primarily the fossil fuel industry that strategically funded ‘merchants of doubt’ (Oreskes and Conway, 2011), denying the human impact on climate change has in the meantime become a core plank of the conservative policy agenda around the globe (Dunlap and Brulle, 2020). That said, it would be myopic to associate denial exclusively with the extreme right fringes of the political spectrum. Despite incontrovertible scientific evidence around climate change, denial remains deeply ingrained in all of society. One plausible explanation for this fact suggests that the trauma climate change is already inflicting on populations worldwide has morphed into a major driver of social inertia, ‘the interrelated cultural, institutional, and individual processes that inhibit actions to address this pressing issue’ (Brulle and Norgaard, 2019: 887).

All this is abundantly well-documented. What is sometimes less clearly recognized is that climate change denial does not only pertain to the construction and communication of objective knowledge about an Earth system undergoing turbulence but also to a strong sense of disavowal about life in the Anthropocene (on disavowal, see Zupančič, 2024). This stance stems from a psychological resistance to appreciating the actual extent of the ecological crisis. As scholars of environmental emotions have maintained, living in denial produces a constant need, on an everyday basis, not to know about the true reality of climate change (Norgaard, 2011). Crucially, the underlying problem is not simply a ‘knowledge deficit’ that could swiftly be fixed with the help of targeted education measures (Suldovsky, 2017). Rather, the desire to ‘ensure that reality can be seen and not seen at one and the same time’ (Weintrobe, 2013: 38; italics in original) has its origins in an inability to cope with anxiety and grief. ¹⁸

Gramsci’s thinking shows that existing approaches to the affective circumstances of politics could be enhanced by linking denialism directly to the realities of an interregnum period. In other words, denial should be conceived as an upshot of an organic crisis. The distinctive benefit of envisaging denialism as a morbid symptom in Gramsci’s sense is that it traces the roots of psychological states, such as the double seeing characteristic of disavowal, back to the disorientating circumstances of an interregnum period. Being in denial is both individually experienced and socially structured (for the locus classicus, see Zerubavel, 2006). Its causes are intimately related to the specific nature of the present moment, where social forces realign in response to ideological and material pressures (DeLay, 2024). The advantage of a framework assembled around Gramsci’s concept of ‘morbid symptoms’ is therefore that it allows us to identify politics, and not psychological well-being alone, as the central arena wherein rejoinders to denialism need to be forged.

Regarding the prescriptive dimension, it is necessary to begin by highlighting what the interregnum will not manage to deliver, in contrast to the transition paradigm. When we interrogate what type of intellectual and political project could be built on the diagnosis of an interregnum period, a clearheaded acceptance of the term’s limitations seems warranted. In this respect, the transition paradigm is more than just a step ahead. There are entire research programmes across the social and natural sciences dedicated to furthering decarbonization policies, and much of what they spearhead, such as confronting the fossil fuel industry (for an overview, see Rempel and Gupta, 2022), is eminently laudable.

So, if Gramsci’s framework does not lend itself to the elaboration of a straightforward action plan, what other practical implications could it have? To answer this question, we should in principle distinguish between three possible outcomes of an organic crisis, namely ‘the restoration of the old, reconstruction, or transformation’ (Taggart, 2022: 909). While the first two results are essentially reactionary, the final option is more promising, for it permits us to engage with the openness and uncertainty of the present moment in a constructive manner. This is a precarious endeavour, though, fraught with serious risks. In an organic crisis, the normative goalposts of the old order are shifting such that new opportunities for imagining alternatives may finally emerge (Latour, 2018; Savransky, 2022). That is why an interregnum is typically a period where various utopian visions of the future clash over the possible contours of the world to come (Claeys, 2022; Thaler, 2022).

At this point, I want to shortly leave Gramsci behind and turn to other theoretical outlooks that may contribute to the study of ‘morbid symptoms’ during an organic crisis. In particular, thinkers from the first generation of the Frankfurt School, such as Herbert Marcuse (2007) and Erich Fromm (2008), have come up with a useful toolbox to counteract alienating tendencies across society. In their ambition to unify Freudian and Marxian outlooks on both the individual and society, these authors have – despite bitter disagreements over the precise way forward (Rickert, 1986) – shown that ‘morbid symptoms’ cannot be treated unless psychic ills on the subjective level, such as denial in our case, are handled with explicit reference to the wider world of politics (and of capitalism, more specifically, in Marcuse’s and Fromm’s accounts). ¹⁹

This emphasis on the interdependence between the structure of feeling and pervasive ‘social pathologies’ ²⁰ is especially pertinent for understanding an interregnum. Whereas proponents of the transition paradigm insist on the known existence of an end point to the interim period, those who deploy the concept of an interregnum refrain from issuing such guarantees. As should be clear by now, an interregnum marks a time of extreme perils, which has an immediate impact not only on the way people reflect on the future through forecasting, planning and imagining (for a systematic survey, see Andersson, 2018) but also on how they emotionally anticipate the world to come. Gramsci’s use of the phrase ‘morbid symptoms’ indicates that it would be mistaken to treat phenomena like denial as first-order problems. Rather, they are better understood as surface-level expressions of deeper upheavals that inevitably come to the fore during an organic crisis.

One further implication of this diagnosis is a heightened sense of responsibility on the part of those living through the Anthropocene interregnum (for different approaches to this problem, see Andersson, 2024; Krause, 2023). If the transition paradigm has by now turned into a vehicle for shirking existential choices, Gramsci’s concept makes dithering inconceivable, because continuous inaction and indecision would only enable one’s opponents to get the upper hand. Perceiving our climate-changed world through the prism of an interregnum thus dramatically politicizes the options that agents have at their disposal when they engage with the complications of the Anthropocene. This becomes apparent, for example, if we comprehend tipping points not only in terms of biophysical thresholds but also as inherently relational and social (Whyte, 2020). The task of avoiding the breach of planetary boundaries is hence a momentously complex undertaking that will require a wholesale change of focus, away from top-down managerialism towards considerations of justice and equity (Pereira et al., 2025).

In this section, I have shone a light on denial so as to illustrate the descriptive and explanatory force of Gramsci’s framework, its capacity to name the present moment in such a manner as to reveal crucial aspects of it that the transition paradigm tends to eclipse. Obviously, much more would have to be done by way of a proper conjunctural analysis to paint a satisfactory picture of how the actual causes of denialism, and other morbid symptoms, can be linked to the interregnum period I have been diagnosing before. Yet, the basic point I wish to drive home is one of comparative advantage. The transition paradigm, notwithstanding its internal ambivalence, has far too little resources for making sense of the openness of the Anthropocene epoch we are currently living through. As a consequence, it fails to empirically map and practically navigate the affective landscape of an age in which uncertainty prevails.

Re-Visioning the Anthropocene

One of the premises behind this essay has been that debates on climate change always revolve around naming the present, who gets a say in the conversation and with what tangible effects. There is a frequently overlooked politics to designating the current conjuncture one way or another. Part of what it means to be engaged in social inquiry, then, is to critically interrogate how certain concepts are mobilized in the strategic pursuit of specific interests.

In the case of the Anthropocene, this mission could not be more urgent, for we are nowadays on an almost daily basis stunned by techno-optimist celebrations of our species’ ingenuity and skill; celebrations that casually obfuscate the openness of the present moment. In the fantasy realm dreamed up by today’s oligarchic class, under no circumstances must there be any space left for uncertainty, lest the immense perils and (unexpected opportunities) of an organic crisis become apparent. The billionaire Marc Andreessen pronounced this Pollyannish vision with utmost lucidity when he confidently stated: ‘We believe that there is no material problem – whether created by nature or by technology – that cannot be solved with more technology.’ (Andreessen, 2023)

If my analysis so far is sound, we must determine that the transition paradigm is not only compatible with, but instrumental to, this divisive and destructive view of the world. Gramsci’s conceptual apparatus, by contrast, contains a much-needed antidote to such deleterious wishful thinking, for it envisages the current conjuncture as a deeply contested terrain, suspended in time between the comprehensive demise of an old order and the arrested resurgence of a new one. Applied to our topic, the interregnum concept enables us, moreover, to better comprehend the interaction between the biophysical turbulences of the Anthropocene and the changing circumstances of contemporary politics, as a consequence of which morbid symptoms like denialism become manifest.

Let me draw my argument to a close by adding a clarification on the scope of this article. To avoid a misunderstanding, it is fundamental to stress once again that the transition paradigm is neither monolithic nor static. Indeed, many defenders of the idea of a just transition would likely share the worries I have been expressing in this article. Their method, however, usually differs from mine in that they seek to reclaim the underlying notion for the sake of a more progressive agenda. Dimitris Stevis and Romain Felli, for example, accept that the concept is controversial, yet try to deal with its shortcomings by fleshing out a more coherent meaning. Accordingly, they speak of a ‘planetary just transition’ (Stevis and Felli, 2020) to foreground the scale and complexity of the problem.

In a similar vein, Irina Velicu and Stefania Barca seek to radicalize the justice component of the transition paradigm, which in its contemporary form ‘contributes to maintain a postpolitical notion of sustainability as a consensual, techno-managerial type of politics’ (Velicu and Barca, 2020: 264), by stressing the category of equality. Relatedly, Peter Newell calls for a transformative reading of ‘transition’ to highlight the issue of

how to dislodge an incumbent order resting on a tight alignment between a global economy materially dependent upon fossil fuels, global and national political institutions working to protect productive capital tied up in such an economy and deploying discourses of accommodation around green growth and climate-compatible development to deflect and manage threats to the pursuit of these strategies. (Newell, 2019: 41; see also Newell et al., 2021)

Even though I diverge from their viewpoints, I readily accept that there can be great merit in such creative efforts at recuperating key terms of the political debate, not least because they tap into existing schemata of understanding and doing politics and therefore potentially facilitate wider public uptake. The immanent critique of social imaginaries can obviously be very productive. ²¹ Nevertheless, the crux of this article has been that sometimes a comprehensive change of perspective might be required, rather than a careful refining and sharpening of concepts already at our disposal. This is so because we always run the risk of being held captive by certain ways of seeing the world, preventing us from espousing rival frameworks that might yield distinctive benefits (Owen, 2002).

While I hope to have demonstrated that Gramsci’s framework furnishes us with a vocabulary that alleviates the deficiencies of the transition paradigm, I do not claim here that the notion of an interregnum opens up the only promising path for grasping new aspects of the Anthropocene. Beyond the already mentioned ‘polycrisis’, other concepts, like ‘transformation’, with its explicit focus on power and politics, have been introduced to deal with the inherent limitations of the transition paradigm (Brand, 2012; Linnér and Wibeck, 2019; Scoones et al., 2015). It remains to be seen in future research, then, whether these terminological moves are complementary or antithetical to the claims I have advanced in this essay.

Given the transition paradigm’s entrenchment as both ‘analysis and practice’ (White, 2025: 5; italics in original), the prospect of Gramsci’s conceptual apparatus superseding it in the near future appears slim. My more modest ambition has therefore been to persuade those who remain, for whatever reason, wedded to the term ‘transition’ that it might be worthwhile to subject it to critical evaluation and embark on an exercise of what Ludwig Wittgenstein (2009: 224e) called ‘aspect change’: seeing the ecological crisis as an interregnum brings out crucial dimensions of the present moment that the term ‘transition’ does not adequately capture. Not only students of politics and international relations but also environmental activists should therefore consider adopting the interregnum term, especially if they aspire to approach the Anthropocene with the intellectual seriousness and passionate commitment it demands from us.