The Battlefield of the Anthropocene

Azimuth 9/2017 | The Battlefield of the Anthropocene. Limits, Responsibilities and the Duty of Flight

Edited by Sara Baranzoni – Paolo Vignola
ISBN: 978­88­9359­011­2
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In the year 2000, Paul Crutzen made the explosive proposal that the name Anthropocene be adopted to describe a new geological era whose specific characteristic is the centrality of humankind as a factor in geophysical systems. The term immediately implied a question not just of beginnings but of endings: the advent of something that would also be an encounter with limits, in the first place ecological, but also economic, political, technological and conceptual. Nevertheless, what seems to have no limits, is the life of this very term: it has disseminated and gathered ground well beyond the scientific fields to which it is most immediately relevant. What has been called the Anthropocene and recognized as an event might thus be conceived as a multiplicity of events, a dispersal each moment of which breaks with one or another of the traditional dichotomies and hierarchies of what Heidegger called metaphysics (Nature/Culture, human/non-human, Anthropocentrism, Ethnocentrism). But might it not be seen also as a dehiscence within the very field of theoretical thought itself, and hence as a kind of pure Event, in a Deleuzian sense: as a shock that would be a kind of chronological suspension of the possibility of events? Conscious of the Anthropocenic limits, the duty of flight calls for a decolonization of thought (Viveiros de Castro) from old and new hierarchies, a decolonization based on a general ecology. Such a decolonization would thus need to be involved in the elaboration of another image of thought, aimed towards a new kind of relationship between technology, environment and social ties, so as to make possible the creation of a future in which one can believe.


Contents:

  • Javier Collado Ruano, Learning to Co-evolve in the Anthropocene: Philosophical Considerations from Nature
  • Anaïs Nony, From Dividual Power to the Ethics of Renewal in the Anthropocene
  • Sara Baranzoni, Anthropocenic Times. Stratigraphy of a Passage
  • Federico Luisetti, Decolonizing Gaia or, Why the Savages Shall Fear Bruno Latour’s Political Animism
  • Jason W. Moore, Anthropocenes & the Capitalocene Alternative
  • Paolo Vignola, Notes for a Minor Anthropocene
  • Tom Cohen, Make Anthropos Great Again! Notes on the Trumpocene
  • Gerald Moore, Phenomenotechnics and Disavowal. Climate Change and the Politics of Deferred Experience
  • Daniel Ross, Protentional Finitude and Infinitude in the Anthropocene
  • Bernard Stiegler, À propos du mal-être