The “Partial Theodicy” of Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene

Theorists of ecological crisis privilege concepts of ambiguity and partiality as simultaneously truer to material realities andmore politically and ethically promising. Taking Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene concept as a case study, this paper asks if this move successfully avoids theodicy. Though Haraway defines the “time-place” of the Chthulucene in opposition to the salvific logics of theodicy, her celebration of ambiguity emerges from a reading of ecological breakdown as the source of a renewed vision of entanglement. In other words, ecological crisis becomes an opportunity to materialize a reformulated best-case scenario. I argue that Haraway’s attempt to circumvent theodicy recapitulates its errors: naturalizing loss and assigning a silver lining to structural violence. I call this persisting logic of theodicy a “partial theodicy.”