adiar o fim do mundo
différer la fin du monde
Here’s the translation: The thought of Krenak thinker Ailton Krenak (*A vida não é útil*, 2020; title of his book *Ideias para adiar o fim do mundo*, 2019): not to technologically delay an impending catastrophe, but to keep open the possibility of imagining another world. Krenak turns it on its head at once: the end is not ahead of us—it has already happened—for the peoples of the Americas, the world already ended once, with the conquest. “Postponing the end of the world” thus does not mean prolonging the present order, which he rejects, but preventing the end of the capacity to dream of another world. What takes its place among the Krenak is dreaming practiced as an institution.
A proposta de desacelerar nosso uso de recursos naturais pode sugerir a ideia de adiar o fim deste mundo, mas, em alguns lugares, esse fim já aconteceu — ontem, hoje cedo, vai acontecer depois de amanhã.
Here’s the translation, preserving all Markdown, links, italics, and symbols while staying idiomatic:
The phrase is Ailton Krenak’s—not a rare word from his language, but Portuguese: adiar (to defer, to postpone) is common. What reopens it is how he uses it—and first, the demonstrative he slips in: adiar o fim deste mundo, deferring the end of this world. Not the world, but a particular one: the one a single way of life has spread across the planet. Honest provenance: “deferring the end of the world” is a homegrown French calque, flagged as such; the phrase itself is his (it titles his 2019 book).
What it fills is a real gap. Our language files the end of the world under the future—a catastrophe we foresee, fear, try to delay. Krenak shifts it to the past and present: for the peoples of the Americas, this end has already happened. Apocalypse stops being a horizon and becomes a memory, and “deferring” it takes on a new meaning: it’s no longer about buying time against a coming collapse, but about keeping alive the possibility of imagining another world after the one that has already fallen.
In context. Krenak isn’t out to save the present world: that world, all done and dreary, holds no interest for me… I have no wish to defer its end. What he refuses to hasten is the end of the power to dream a just world. For his people, dreaming is a practice that can be understood as a cultural regime: you recount your dreams at dawn, and from there, the day takes shape. It’s this force he pits against the end—dreaming other dreams to be welcomed by this world and able to inhabit it.
Not to be confused. Adiar o fim do mundo ≠ collapsology: the latter studies a possible collapse of industrial civilization, facing it head-on to decide what to do with it—the end remains a future event. Krenak, who has already lived through a fall, has turned it into lived experience and looks toward what begins anew. And it’s a different gesture from the same author’s fruição: savoring life belongs to a life; deferring the end of the world belongs to the scale of worlds and their ends.